“Was that when you noticed the dead woman?”
Smith nodded. “Haley drew our attention first. But we weren’t the only people who noticed she wasn’t moving. Some lads not far from us were having a good laugh about it, thinking she was asleep, I suppose, and about to get a drenching. Olga asked me to look and I went over and realised she was dead. Christ, that was a shock. I ran up to the lifeguard-”
“One lifeguard?” Hen queried.
“Only one at this point. Most people had left the beach because the tide had come right in and it was the end of the afternoon anyway. The whole place was closing down. He was the Aussie. He came quickly enough. Asked those lads for some help to get her up the beach. A couple of them volunteered. And that’s all there is.” He let out a long breath as if he’d been living through the crisis again.
“These lads, as you call them,” Diamond said. “What age would they have been?”
“Late teens or early twenties.”
“You’d noticed them earlier?”
“Right at the start. They were on the beach when we arrived. I can recall saying to Olga that we wouldn’t sit too close to them. They had their cans of lager with them. But as it turned out, they weren’t rowdy or anything.”
“How many?”
“Four or five. I’m not sure.”
“None of them came forward when we asked for witnesses.”
“That’s the young generation for you.”
“Neither did you.”
Smith gave an uneasy smile.
Hen asked, “Did you notice anyone else sitting close enough to have seen what was happening?”
“There were three girls on sunloungers right next to us.”
“The topless ones?”
“No, these were just schoolkids, about fifteen, doing some serious sunbathing, but they’d packed up and gone by the time the body was found. The topless women were some way over to our left, about thirty yards off. You can forget them.”
“You obviously haven’t,” Hen murmured.
“There was a French family on our right,” Smith went on. “Mother, father and three small kids. I’m pretty certain they’d left as well.”
“That’s one reason why people haven’t come forward,” Diamond commented. “They’d left the beach before the body was found, so didn’t have the faintest idea they’d been sitting a few yards away from it.”
Hen asked, “Did any of these people you’ve mentioned speak to the woman at any time during the day?”
“Apart from the bloke in the black T-shirt? Nobody I noticed.”
“Did she leave the beach at any stage?”
“No-unless it was while we were swimming.”
Diamond came in again. “And after you helped carry the body up to the hut, you collected your things and left?”
“Right. We had to move anyway, because of the tide.”
Diamond glanced towards Hen. They’d covered everything except the real reason for Smith’s avoidance of the police. He was a deeply worried man, almost certainly into something criminal for the first time in his life. But as a killer so cool that he’d strangled a woman within yards of his own wife and child, Michael Smith just didn’t cut it.
12
Diamond’s voicemail had been building up while he was in Sussex. He was not bothered. Much of it could be ignored now. And being out of the office has other advantages. He’d missed a meeting called by Georgina Dallymore, the Assistant Chief Constable, to discuss some desks and chairs that had mysteriously been dumped in the executive toilet upstairs. “Couldn’t have helped, anyway,” he said, as he called her to give his apologies.
Georgina said, “Would you have any use for some extra desks?”
“Not really, ma’am.”
“I had to have them moved, and now they’re cluttering the corridor. I’m worried about fire regulations.”
If that’s all you have to worry about, he thought, it’s not a bad old life on the top floor. “Someone will have a use for them, ma’am.”
“I hope so. I’m going on holiday next week. When I come back, I don’t want to find them still there.”
His interest quickened. Georgina off the premises was good news. “Anywhere nice?”
“A Nile cruise.”
“Sounds wonderful. How long?”
“Ten days.”
He made a mental note.
Back to the voicemail. The one message that stood out was from Clive: “Mr D, I’ve got a result. Any time you want to go through those files, we’re ready to roll.”
Clive’s hours of work spoke of long nights on the Internet. He never came in until after eleven. Today, it was twenty minutes after, and he looked spent before he’d started. Eventually the two got together with black coffees and doughnuts in a small office in the basement. While the computer was booting up, Diamond told the young man he’d done well. “I just hope this is worth all the hours you put in.”
“It will be.”
“Hot stuff?”
Clive grinned. “I haven’t looked at all of it, but hot’s the word, from what I saw.” He took something not much bigger than a cigarette lighter from his shirt pocket and attached it to a lead at the back of the computer tower.
“What’s that?”
“A USB-portable storage device. I had to work on this at home, you see.”
“And that’s all there is?” Diamond couldn’t disguise his disappointment.
“Mr D, this little item is a hard drive. Five hundred and twelve megabytes. You could put the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare on this and still have space.”
“So how much is there in reality?”
“Enough to keep you busy for the rest of the morning,” Clive told him as he worked the keys.
He explained that there had been three encrypted files on Emma Tysoe’s hard disk, each allotted a number that he thought represented the date it was created. 1706 was the seventeenth of June. The next was the twenty-second. The last was the twenty-fifth.
“Two days before she was murdered,” Diamond said to show he wasn’t completely adrift. “And we can now read it straight off the screen? Let’s go. It starts on the seventeenth, you said?”
Clive had better ways of spending the rest of the morning than sitting beside Peter Diamond. He gave him a quick lesson with the mouse, showed him how to access the files and left him to it.
Magic.
The first lines of text were on the screen, and suddenly Diamond was right where he wanted to be, inside the mind of the murdered woman, getting that precious insight he’d been denied up to now. So direct was the contact, so vivid, it was almost too intimate to take in a sustained read.
Had this 8.30 a.m. call about another profiling job. Just when I was starting to coast, and think of holidays. Bramshill insists no one else but me will do, and won’t give me any details except an address in Sussex. All very cloak and dagger. Just to cover my rear end, I’m going to keep this personal record of what happens and encrypt
