defence can think up?'
'I'm talking facts, John. Geraldine Jackman was snorting coke. Go to the house. You'll find packets of cocaine hidden in bags of flour in the kitchen.'
Wigfull moved away from the bed, out of Diamond's limited range of vision. 'The post-mortem samples were negative for drugs. If you cast your mind back, Dr Merlin ordered a full screening test for drugs and alcohol. Chepstow found nothing.'
'This is something you should check with Merlin,' Diamond advised. 'It doesn't mean she hadn't used cocaine. Unlike cannabis, it doesn't hang about in the body for long. A few days at the most. If she hadn't snorted the stuff in the few days prior to her death, it's unlikely that traces would have shown up in the samples.'
'Even if what you're saying is true, it's a side issue,' Wigfull insisted. 'Nobody's suggesting Gerry Jackman was nice to know. That's no part of the prosecution case. All right, you tell me she was a junkie. I'll see that it's investigated, but the fact remains that Dana Didrikson killed her. The evidence is unassailable.'
'When is the trial?'
'In just over a week.'
'A week?'
'You've been here ten days. Take it easy. They bring the papers round. You won't miss a thing.'
Later that morning, he met the surgeon who had pieced together his splintered skull. The operation, he learned, had been a five-hour job, and no one had been able to predict with confidence that he would come out of the coma, let alone come out of it with his brain unimpaired. The contraption clamped around his head was essential to his recovery. In twenty-four hours it would be replaced by something that permitted more movement. As for other injuries, two of his ribs had cracked, and there were superficial abrasions, but there was no reason why he shouldn't be on his feet in a week.
'On my feet and out of here?' Diamond asked.
'On your feet and as far as the toilet, Mr Diamond. As a ward sister once remarked to me, bedpans are nobody's cup of tea.'
At least he had an opportunity to think. The matter that exercised him most was Andy Coventry's behaviour. He would dearly have liked to question the man, only it wasn't possible, now or later. John Wigfull must have taken a statement already, but John Wigfull was blinkered.
The ferocity of the attack had been out of all proportion. Coventry could easily have killed him. Was a crack over the head with a spade a reasonable response to being caught with a couple of kilos of cocaine? People can panic, certainly. The chances were that Coventry wasn't a big wheel in the drugs trade, not an importer or a trafficker, just a pusher, probably with no form at all. Those are the people who are liable to strike back when threatened. The real professionals weigh the consequences.
However, there was a more persuasive scenario. Andy Coventry had clearly been Geraldine Jackman's supplier. He'd kept her in cocaine and systematically emptied her bank account. Fine, until her funds ran out. She had been heavily overdrawn at the bank. He must have watched her become increasingly desperate, knowing that ultimately there would be no point in offering the stuff to someone who couldn't pay. Maybe he'd told her the arrangement was at an end. Then – the scenario ran – Geraldine had got in touch again. She'd offered something of value in exchange for drugs. Coventry had gone to the house, and she had shown him the Jane Austen letters she had pilfered from her husband.
Coventry must have been unimpressed. He would have foreseen the problems in turning the letters into cash. The discussion had turned ugly. Gerry, in one of her towering rages, had threatened to expose him as a pusher, and the hell with the consequences for herself, because without cocaine her life was closing down anyway. Andy Coventry, driven desperate, had silenced her for ever.
Through the months since then, the man must have lived in dread of the truth emerging. When he became aware in the Baths that someone had been watching him stow away drugs, he had panicked. He had killed once to stop someone blowing the whistle on his dealing, so why not a second time?
Towards the end of the week Gregory Jackman came to the hospital on a visit. Hollow-eyed and drooping at the shoulders, he looked ten years older than when Diamond had seen him last. 'The drug story has broken,' he explained. 'They came to the house – Chief Inspector Wigfull and some people from the drugs squad – and I showed them the bags of flour. Today it's all over the tabloids. Drugs Find in Profs House. Dead Woman's Cocaine Habit. The top brass in the university don't like it one bit. I've been told to take a year's sabbatical directly the trial is over.
'Told? Do they have the right?'
'Asked, then. They're being as decent as they can. I'll get a year's salary, but the understanding is that I'll go to America on a research fellowship, and while I'm there I'll apply for other posts.'
'Welcome to the club,' said Diamond.
'What?'
'It's the old heave-ho. Will you go?'
'Try and stop me.'
'Can it really be as quick as you say?'
'Thanks to the wonders of fax, yes. The only thing to be settled is the day I fly out. I've been called as a witness, naturally.'
'Presumably a prosecution witness.'
'Yes. It's a warrant. I've talked to Dana's lawyers. I don't seem to have a choice in the matter. It's the way they want to play it, apparently.'
Diamond explained the strategy. 'These days the forensic evidence is often so cut and dried that you don't call defence experts to challenge it. If the defence calls no witnesses except Dana, they'll have the right to make the final speech to the jury before the judge sums up.'
Jackman said bleakly, 'I just hope they've talked to Dana about this. God knows what she's going to make of me appearing for the prosecution.'
'She still intends to plead not guilty, does she?'
Jackman tilted his head, surprised by the question. 'Certainly. Is there any reason why she shouldn't?'
'I don't know. Wigfull was here a day or two ago, looking as smug as a winning jockey. He's sure they'll convict.'
'So I gathered.'
'Nothing has altered, then?'
Jackman said gloomily, 'It looks as hopeless as ever. I thought perhaps what happened to you would help the defence by pointing to Andy Coventry as an alternative suspect.'
'Well, doesn't it?'
He shook his head. 'Her lawyers don't want to go down that road.'
'Why not, for God's sake?'
'They say it doesn't address the crucial points that the prosecution will raise – the fact that Dana admits she was at the house on the morning of the murder, and the evidence that her car was used to transport the body to Chew Valley Lake. That forensic report is dynamite. She has no answer to it. And that leaves out all the circumstantial stuff about motive. A good prosecutor will have her on toast.'
Privately, Diamond had to admit that the lawyers were right.
By Friday he felt sufficiently recovered to phone Siddons the solicitor and ask whether the defence team were fully aware of Andy Coventry's involvement in the case.
'Absolutely,' Siddons assured him. 'The drugs bring another dimension to it. Mrs Jackman's outbursts obviously had their origin in her cocaine habit.'
'Yes, but have you considered the possibility that Coventry killed her?' He outlined his theory.
From the tone of Siddons' responses – the polite, yet qualified murmurs that came down the phone each time Diamond paused – it was clear that the solicitor wasn't exactly turning cartwheels of joy at the other end. He thanked Diamond mildly for his interest and said, 'Unfortunately for us, your theory isn't tenable. Coventry was questioned by the police about his movements at the time of the murder, and he was three hundred miles away, in Newcastle. For the entire week. They checked it. He was lecturing to an Open University course at Hadrian's Wall. It's a cast-iron alibi. Infuriating, isn't it?'
