‘She put up her arms,’ said Dunkley-Brown, ‘but she was out in the road by then.’
‘Lunacy,’ said his wife.
He added, ‘Anyone would raise an arm if a car was bearing down on them.’
‘We weren’t speeding,’ said she.
‘It’s dark along that stretch,’ said he.
‘So you slammed on the brakes,’ said Diamond.
‘And tried to avoid her,’ said the husband. ‘We skidded a bit to the right. By the time we hit her, the car was virtually at a standstill. It nudged her off balance and I suppose she took a bump on the head.’ He made it sound like an incident in a bouncy-castle.
‘She was unconscious,’ Diamond reminded him.
‘Yes, so we did our best to revive her at the side of the road, and when it was obvious that we weren’t going to be successful, we lifted her into the car-’
‘The back seat?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lying across the seat?’
‘Propped up against one corner really.’
Diamond sat forward, interested. ‘Which side was her head? The nearside?’
‘The left, yes. After that we drove her to the Hinton Clinic. She was very soon taken in, I understand.’
‘But you’d already pissed off out of it.’
‘That’s offensive,’ said Pippa.
‘Pippa phoned a day or so later to enquire about her,’ Dunkley-Brown was anxious to stress. ‘The people at the hospital said she was so much better that she’d been discharged. We assumed she’d made a full recovery.’
‘Very reassuring.’
‘We didn’t know about her loss of memory.’
Diamond finished his beer. ‘We’d like to look at your car. Is it back at the house?’
The colour drained from Dunkley-Brown’s face. ‘But you said you weren’t here to inquire into the accident.’
‘As a traffic offence, it doesn’t concern me, sir. As an incident involving a missing person, it does. Do you see the tall man at the bar drinking fruit juice? He’s trained to look for evidence. He can back up your story by examining the car.’
‘But we’ve been perfectly frank.’
‘No problem, then. Shall we go?’
‘Do you use it much, Mr Dunkley-Brown?’ Diamond asked after the Bentley had been backed out of the garage for inspection.
‘Not a great deal these days. If we go to the pub, we tend to walk. It’s exercise, which is good at our age, and we can enjoy a couple of drinks without being breathalysed.’
‘Shopping?’
‘We do use the car for that, but it’s only a trip to the local supermarket.’
‘We’ll join you presently, then,’ Diamond said. ‘DI Hargreaves wouldn’t mind a coffee if your wife would oblige.’ When Dunkley-Brown was out of earshot he told the SOCO. ‘If nothing else, find me some long, dark hairs on the nearside of the back seat and you’re on for a double Scotch.’
When Jim Marsh came in to report that he’d finished his examination of the car, he didn’t have the look of a man who has just earned a double Scotch.
‘No joy?’ said Diamond.
‘It’s been vacuumed inside,’ said the SOCO, ‘and very thoroughly.’
Diamond turned to look at Dunkley-Brown. ‘Is that a fact?’
A shrug and a smile. ‘There’s no law against Hoovering one’s car, is there?’
‘I know why you did it.’
‘You may well be right, Mr Diamond. We’d have been fools to have left any evidence of the girl there.’
‘May we see your Hoover?’
‘Certainly, only at the risk of upsetting you I’d better admit that we emptied the dust-bag right away. It was collected by the dustmen the same week.’
Diamond was not at his best during the drive back to Bath. Not a word was said about the abortive search of the Bentley’s interior. Nothing much at all was said. Each of them knew how essential it was to find a sample of Rose’s hair. Diamond’s far-from-convincing theory linking her to Gladstone’s murder could only be taken seriously if the hairs found at the farmhouse were proved to be hers. The idea behind the trip to Westbury had been an inspiration, but unhappily inspirations sometimes come to nothing.
He rallied his spirits for the press conference, held in a briefing room downstairs at Manvers Street. He needed to be sharp. His purpose in talking to the media was simply to step up the hunt for Rose. He didn’t intend to link her disappearance to any other crime. However, he was meeting a pack of journalists, and the modern generation of hacks were all too quick to make connections. Their first reaction would be that the head of the murder squad wouldn’t waste time on a missing woman unless he expected her to be found dead. From there, it was a short step to questioning him about other recent deaths: Daniel Gladstone and possibly Hildegarde Henkel. These same press people had reported the finding of the bodies. It was all too fresh in their memories.
He handled the session adeptly, keeping Rose steadily in the frame. It was obvious from the questions that Social Services would be in for some stick. They were used to being in the front line. Poor buggers, they came in for more criticism than any other organisation.
He was about to wrap up when the inevitable question came, from a young, angelic-featured woman with a ring through her right nostril. Nothing made him feel the generation-gap more than this craze for body piercing. ‘Would you comment on the possible connection with the death of the German woman, Hildegarde Henkel, at the Royal Crescent?’
He was ready. ‘I’d rather not. That case is being handled by another officer.’
‘Who is that, please?’
‘DCI Wigfull.’
‘But you were seen up at the Crescent at the weekend. You made more than one visit.’
‘That’s correct. I’m now on another case. If that’s all, ladies and gentlemen…’
She was persistent. ‘It may be another case, Mr Diamond, but you must have taken note that the missing woman Rose was staying in Harmer House at the same time as Ms Henkel.’
‘Yes.’
‘There were only three women staying in the hostel,’ she said evenly, watching for his reaction, ‘and one of them is missing and one is dead.’
‘I wouldn’t read too much into that if I were you. Harmer House is used as a temporary refuge for people in the care of Social Services. Some of them are sure to be unstable, or otherwise at risk.’
She had thought this through. ‘There was a superficial similarity between Rose and Hildegarde Henkel. Dark, short hair. Slim. Aged in their twenties. Is it true that there was speculation at the weekend that the body at the Royal Crescent was that of Rose?’
‘If there was,’ answered Diamond evenly, ‘it was unfounded. I don’t really see what you’re driving at.’
‘I thought it was obvious. You’ve made no announcement about the cause of Ms Henkel’s death.’
‘She fell off the roof.’ The slick answer tripped off his tongue, but even as he spoke it, he knew he shouldn’t have. Several voices chorused with questions.
‘I’m answering the lady,’ he said, and provoked some good-natured abuse from her professional colleagues.
She was not thrown in the least. ‘The fall is not in doubt, Mr Diamond. The question is whether she fell by accident or by design, and when I say by design I mean by her design or someone else’s. In other words, suicide or murder.’
He gave a shrug. ‘That’s for a coroner’s jury to decide.’
‘Come on,’ she chided him. ‘That’s a cop-out, if ever I heard one.’
