the Met to check and I’m waiting for a call.’
‘We’ll all be waiting,’ said Diamond, rubbing his hands. ‘God, yes. How old would this young woman be now?’
‘We have the date of her baptism as February, 1970, so assuming she was baptised soon after birth she’s about twenty-seven.’
‘Near enough for me.’
No one else spoke. Each of them had made the connection. If it emerged that Christine Gladstone had been missing from home for the past four weeks, then it was a fair bet that she was the young woman known to them as Rose. And Diamond’s insistence that Rose was the principal suspect suddenly looked reasonable.
Twenty-seven
‘Pete!’
Diamond drew back, shocked by the panic in his wife’s voice. A steel kitchen knife was in his hand.
Stephanie Diamond moved fast to the electric point and switched it off.
‘You damned near electrocuted yourself, you great ninny. What were you thinking of?’
Thinking of using the knife to prise out the piece of toast stuck in the toaster and starting to smoke? Or not thinking?
With her slim fingers Steph picked out the charred remains and tossed them into the sink. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll cut you a fresh piece. You’ve never been able to cut bread evenly.’
He said, ‘If we used a cut loaf…’
‘You know why we don’t,’ she said, trimming off the overhang he had left on the loaf. ‘What’s the matter with you? I nearly had a corpse of my own to deal with.’
‘Thinking of other things.’
She cut an even slice and dropped it into the toaster and switched on again. She didn’t ask any more. If he wanted to tell her, he would. ‘Other things’ probably meant the details of his work that Steph preferred not to know. On the whole she was happier being given gossipy news of the Manvers Street staff: Wigfull, the ambitious one Peter called ‘Mr Clean’, making it sound like a term of abuse; or ‘Winking, Blinking and Nod’, the three Assistant Chief Constables; and Julie Hargreaves, the plucky young inspector who smoothed the way, dealt with the murmurings in the ranks and made it possible for her brilliant, but testy and brutally honest boss to function at all.
‘I’m sleeping better, Steph.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that.’
‘I reckon the tension isn’t hyper any more. Things are humming nicely again.’
‘You’re doing an honest day’s work?’
‘Tell me this, if it doesn’t ruin your breakfast. Why would a woman murder her father of seventy-one who she hasn’t seen since she was a small child?’
Ruin breakfast? Lunch as well, she thought. But he seemed to need her advice. ‘This is the one whose picture is in the local paper?’
He nodded.
‘Insanity?’
His eyebrows popped up. ‘That’s a theory no one has mentioned up to now.’
‘She looks confused.’
‘She is. She lost her memory, allegedly. But people who met her say she’s rational.’
‘And you think she shot that old man at Tormarton?’
Now he looked at her in awe. She’d just made a connection it had taken him days to arrive at. ‘Crosswords getting too easy, are they? You’re having to read the rest of the paper?’
She smiled faintly.
‘You’re spot on,’ he said. ‘She’s the daughter and she was found wandering a mile or so from the scene on the day of the murder. Today I expect to get the proof that she was present in the farmhouse. I’m still uncertain as to her motive. What does it take for a woman to tie her father to a chair and fire a shotgun at his head?’
‘Did he abuse her as a child?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘That’s something you might consider,’ Steph said. ‘Anger surfacing after many years.’
‘She’s supposed to have lost her memory.’
‘That could be due to repression. She blocks it all out after killing him. She wants to cleanse herself. The mind can act as a censor. Is it a possibility here?’
‘Could be. The mother left him only a few years after they married.’
Steph spread her hands. ‘If the mother found out…’
‘But then she sent him a Christmas card with a photo of herself and the child. “I thought you would like this picture of your family. God’s blessings to us all at this time.” Would an angry mother do that?’
She thought for a moment and said, ‘I doubt it. Maybe she never knew of the abuse.’
He tried his own pet theory on Steph. ‘This woman, the mother. She died in January of leukemia. This is speculation, but I wonder if Rose, the daughter, sorting through her mother’s things as she would, being next of kin, found something, a letter, say, or a diary, that revealed some family secret.’
‘Such as?’
‘Cruelty to her mother is the best bet. A history of violence or meanness that outraged her when she discovered it. She’d watched her mother die prematurely, at forty-nine. Now she discovered things that made her angry enough to find the old man and kill him.’
‘You could be onto something there.’
‘You really think so?’
‘But you’re not going to know the answer until you find her.’
‘True.’
‘Instead of trying to work out why she killed him, isn’t it better to focus on finding her?’
‘You mean she’ll roll over and tell all? I guess you’re right, as ever.’
He spread marmalade on his beautifully even piece of toast and left for work soon after.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed overnight that Christine Gladstone had not used her flat in Gowan Avenue, Fulham, since at least the last week in September. They had found a heap of unopened mail waiting for her. Her landlord knew nothing about her absence because she paid her rent by banker’s order. The people in the other flat thought she was on a foreign holiday.
Diamond handed the fax back to Halliwell. ‘We’re closing in, Keith. I’ll get up to London today and look at the flat. Julie can drive me. You’re in charge here, at the cutting edge.’
Halliwell grinned. ‘Expecting results from our press conference?’
Diamond was determined to be upbeat. ‘I said we’re closing in, Keith. It’s all coming together. For example, I’m about to get the latest from Jim Marsh.’
But Jim Marsh, the pathologist, wasn’t about. He wasn’t at the lab, either.
Undaunted, Diamond asked the exchange to get his home number.
‘Who’zzz zizzz?’ The voice of a man on Temazepam. Or gin.
‘Shouldn’t you be in work like the rest of us? I’m sitting here like a buddha waiting for results from you.’
‘Gave them to Ju – Ju-’
‘Julie?’
‘Couldn’t get hold of you last night. Called her at home.’
‘She isn’t in yet. Have we come up trumps?’
Marsh was becoming more coherent, and he didn’t sound like a man with a winning hand. ‘Worked until bloody late. Three of us.’
‘And?’
‘I took a sleeper when I got home. If I work late I can’t get off to sleep.’ He was off on a tangent.
