Upon A Dark Night

‘What about the hairs, Jim?’

‘Hairs?’

‘The tests you were doing.’

‘Tests, yes. I told you I found how many specimens of hair?’’ Seventeen.’

‘Seventeen. Eleven from the owner of the car.’’ Imogen Starr.’

‘That left…’

‘Six.’

‘Six, and when we analysed them, they came from three subjects. You’re going to be pissed off, Mr Diamond. None of them matched the two hairs we found in the farmhouse.’

He couldn’t believe it. ‘You drew a complete blank?’

‘It doesn’t prove a thing either way. She could have sat in the car without losing a hair.’

‘What do I do now?’

‘Find the lady, I reckon.’

‘Oh, cheers!’

‘We still have the two hairs from the scene,’ Marsh reminded him. ‘That’s the good thing about NAA. We don’t destroy the evidence in the test. Those hairs will be useful at the trial.’

‘What trial?’

After he’d slammed the phone down, he realised he had not actually thanked Marsh and his team for working overtime. For once he remembered his manners, pressed the redial button and rectified that. Marsh listened and said, ‘Mr Diamond.’

‘Yes?’

‘Would you get off my phone now?’

He gave the disappointing news to the others in the incident room, and then added, ‘It’s not all gloom and doom. With the Met’s help, we’ve confirmed that Christine Gladstone, alias Rose Black, the victim’s daughter, has been missing from home since the end of September. I’m off to London shortly to search her flat. Meantime, Keith will take over here. Since we went public yesterday, a number of possible sightings have come in.’

Halliwell summed up the paltry results. Seven reported sightings and two offers of help from psychics. The missing woman had apparently shopped in Waitrose and Waterstone’s, cycled down Widcombe Hill, eaten an apricot slice in Scoffs, appeared at a bedroom window in Lower Weston, studied Spanish in Trowbridge and walked two Afghan hounds on Lansdown. One of the psychics thought she was dead, buried on the beach at Weston-super-Mare, and the other had a vision of her with a tall, dark man in a balloon. All of it, however unlikely, was being processed into the filing system, and would need to be followed up.

The squad heard the results in silence. Appeals for help from the public had predictable results. You had to hope something of substance would appear. As yet, it had not.

‘Do we go national now?’ Halliwell asked.

‘No. We knock on doors in Tormarton,’ said Diamond.

‘House-to-house?’

‘Someone up there knows about the digging, if nothing else. There were seven large holes, for God’s sake, and they didn’t have a JCB. It took days. They were tidy. They filled in after. Covered over any footprints. Get a doorstepping team together, Keith, and draw up some questions that we can agree.’

‘Is it worth targeting the metal-detector people, the guys who spend their weekends looking for treasure?’

He snapped his fingers. ‘Of course it is. Good. Send someone to Gary Paternoster, the lad who runs the shop in Walcot Street, the Treasure House, and get a list of his customers, plus any clubs that function locally. Julie and I are off to London shortly to…’ He looked around the room. ‘Where the hell is Julie?’

‘Hasn’t been in yet,’ said Halliwell.

‘Any message?’

Halliwell shook his head.

‘What time is it?’ Diamond asked. ‘She would have called in by now if she’s ill.’

Shortly after nine that morning, William Allardyce came out of the house in the Royal Crescent and looked for the blue BMW. It was not in its usual place. Then his attention was caught by a fat man dressed in eccentric clothes and behaving oddly and he was reminded of the filming of Pickwick. All the residents had been paid to park elsewhere the previous night. His BMW was in the Circus.

Annoyed with himself, he set off at a canter along Brock Street. He didn’t like being late for appointments and he hadn’t allowed for the extra ten minutes this would add to his short journey. He was due to meet an important client at the Bath Spa Hotel.

When he reached his car it was already 9.15. He unlocked and got in. The moment he sat down he realised something was wrong, a crunch, a solid sensation when the springs took his weight. He got out. As he feared, he had a flat, one of the rear tyres. He kicked it and the casing gaped. This wasn’t a simple puncture. Some vandal had slashed it. So far as he could see, other cars nearby had not been damaged. His was singled out.

There was no time to change the tyre and he was without his mobile phone. The nearest taxi rank was at the bottom of Milsom Street. He decided to return home and phone the hotel to say the earliest he could manage was 9.45. And while he was waiting for a taxi he would also phone the police.

Julie’s non-arrival at the incident room was the result of a night without much sleep. Late last evening, Jim Marsh had called her at home to report the disappointing result of the hair analysis. People who knew Diamond’s volatile moods tended to take the soft option and give Julie the bad news and ask her to relay it to him. She had decided to save it for the morning. About 1.30am, her brain churning over the day’s events for the umpteenth time, still fretting at the lack of progress, she reached for the light-switch and sat up to read, hoping some science fiction would engage her mind more than hair samples that didn’t match. Charlie was away, on duty in Norfolk. She opened Dune, a book she was re-reading and enjoying even more the second time. Soon the chill in the room got uncomfortable. She reached for a drawer and took out a thick cardigan and wrapped it around her shoulders. As she brought the sleeves across her chest she happened to notice a hair attached to the ribbing. Automatically she picked it off and dropped it over the edge of the bed. She carried on reading. Some minutes passed before this unthinking action was replayed in her mind. Then an idea came to her that kept her from sleeping for another two hours.

In the morning it still seemed worth following up. She hoped she could deal with it before Peter Diamond got into work. By nine she was at the Social Services office, just along the street from the nick. Unluckily, Imogen Starr had also had a disturbed night and didn’t turn up until almost nine-thirty.

Julie told her that the hair samples from the car had proved negative. ‘We’re still hoping to find one of Rose’s, and I had a thought last night. When you brought her back from the hospital what was she wearing?’

‘Her own things,’ said Imogen.

‘The clothes she was found in?’

‘They were stained and torn, but they were all she had.’

‘So did you fit her out with fresh clothes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where from?’

‘From our stock. Here. We keep some basic clothes for emergency use. I brought her in before we went to Harmer House and we found a shirt and some jeans. They weren’t new, but they were clean and in better condition than the ones she had.’

Tensely Julie asked, ‘And what happened to the old clothes?’

‘They were really no use to her.’

‘Did she take them with her?’

‘No, she discarded them. There was nothing left in the pockets, if that’s what you were thinking.’

‘What happened to them?’

Imogen lifted her shoulders in a dismissive way. ‘I suppose they were thrown out with the rubbish. Well, the shirt was, for sure. We may have kept the jeans. They were hanging open at the knee, but that’s fashionable, isn’t it? We don’t like to throw anything out that might come in useful.’

‘Where would they be if you kept them?’

‘The storeroom.’