“Full-scale alert, but it could have happened four hours ago. The last check-in we logged was at noon.”
“Who are these Special Branch guys?”
“Good men, I’ve been told, one with ARV experience, the other a dog handler. Both of them Sergeant rank. They’re not wet behind the ears.”
“And the building has been searched?”
“From top to bottom.”
They returned downstairs. In the kitchen, Barneston seemed to be getting a grip again. “Was anything useful in those files?”
“Depends where you’re coming from,” Diamond told him.
“Explain.”
“We’ve learned a lot more about our murder victim and the job she was on.”
“Do you think the Mariner strangled her?”
Diamond didn’t answer directly. Why confide in a man who had just treated them like plods? “He’s capable of it. He doesn’t lack anything in daring.”
“Because he feared she would finger him?”
“She was the top profiler.”
“Does she say anything in these files that will help me right now?” Barneston asked. “Did she put together a profile I can use?”
“How do I know what’s going to be helpful to you?” Diamond told him testily. “Read it yourself. Is there a computer here?”
“Upstairs.” The man looked as if he would sink back into his lethargic gloom, and then he changed his mind. “OK. There’s sod all happening, so I might as well make use of the time. Where’s the disk?”
Diamond took the tiny USB drive from his inside pocket and handed it across.
“This is it?”
“All of it.”
“Do you want to stick around in the meantime?”
Diamond didn’t need to ask Hen.“We’re as keen as you are to find out what’s been going on.”
They remained downstairs, leaving Barneston to read Emma’s files in private. The officers in the kitchen said there was no progress yet in the hunt for the Range Rover. The Sussex police helicopter had been called into use and every car within a thirty mile radius was on alert.
It can be frustrating standing about, waiting for news. Hen went outside for a smoke. Diamond got on the mobile to Ingeborg and asked how the hunt for Ken was progressing.
Even Ingeborg seemed to be lacking in zest this afternoon. “Still trying, guv. I went through those credit card receipts.”
“No joy?”
“No Kens, anyway. Do you think he could have paid cash?”
“It’s possible, I suppose. You’d be better off asking Popjoy’s, not me. Have you talked to the neighbours?”
“The thing is,” she said, on a note that immediately told him this, too, had not helped, “she had her own entrance, living, as she did, in the basement flat. The people upstairs didn’t see very much of her and they don’t have any memory of seeing her with anyone.”
“What about the people across the street?”
“You know how wide Great Pulteney Street is. They’d need binoculars. I’ve been across and asked, but no, it’s another world.”
“You’re going to have to track down everyone who dined at Popjoy’s the evening they were there, and see how much they remember about the other guests. A description would be a start, even if we don’t have his name. You’ve talked to the waiters, I hope? Did you ask them about that overgenerous tip she mentions? Surely one of the staff pocketed that and remembers where it came from.”
“I’ll get onto that,” she promised. Apparently she’d been talking to the management, not the waiters.
He joined Hen outside. The area near the kitchen door had an overgrown look. This safe house had once been someone’s home, and there were the remnants of a vegetable patch and an apple orchard, but garden maintenance wasn’t high priority in Special Branch. Across a stretch of meadow that had once been a lawn, a line of officers searched the undergrowth near the fence. Somewhere overhead the helicopter buzzed.
“Are you all right for time?” he asked Hen.
“I’m seeing this through if it takes till midnight, matey.”
“He could be clean away.”
“With three hostages? I doubt it. What’s his game, Peter?”
He gave a shrug and shook his head. “Whatever it is, I’m certain it’s just as he planned it.”
“That message upstairs doesn’t give any grounds for hope.”
“No.”
“He brought it with him like a calling card, the bastard. It’s bloody arrogance. I mean, we don’t need telling he was here.”
He smiled faintly. “Don’t we? Didn’t I hear you suggesting to Jimmy Barneston that Porter might have got pissed off with the place and made a break for it?”
She gave him a sharp look. “At that stage I couldn’t believe anyone was capable of penetrating the security. Now we know.”
She finished her smoke and they returned to the kitchen. One look at the others told them no news had come through. Diamond picked someone’s
There was still nothing to report to Barneston when he came downstairs and found them in the garden again. He had the look of a man in deep shock, thoughts whirling in his brain. He made a visible effort to focus on the immediate problem. “He’ll be clean away by now.”
“It doesn’t look good,” Diamond agreed.
A short, nervy sigh. “It bears out what she wrote in the files- he knows he can outwit the police.”
“She didn’t put it quite like that, if I remember,” Hen said. “It was something like ‘has an exalted belief he can outwit us’. There’s a difference. He’ll get overconfident.”
“Breaking into this place will have done his confidence a power of good,” Barneston said gloomily. “Mine is at rock bottom.”
“Shouldn’t be,” she said. “Come on, Jim lad, some of that stuff in the files was a massive boost to your self- esteem. A clever and attractive woman slavering over you-what more does a guy want?”
He didn’t answer.
Diamond took a more head-on approach. “We need to know if she spent the night with you, the last night of her life.”
Barneston confirmed it with a nod.
“At your house again?”
“What do you mean-‘again’? It was only the second time.”
Diamond had never scored points for sensitivity. “So she did what she planned, came to Horsham with a list of questions for Anna Walpurgis?”
“Yup.”
“For
“That’s correct. Things are pretty fraught with Walpurgis. I didn’t want to panic her. Emma came to my house and we went out for a meal and spent the night together.”
“Did she say anything to you about this man Ken she mentions in the files?”
“Not directly.”
“But…?”
“She told me she’d been in another relationship that was finished. She didn’t give a name.”
Hen said, “Jimmy, you’ll appreciate that he’s under suspicion of murdering her. Can you remember anything she said about him that will help us to identify him?”
“No.”
“Did you get any impression of his age, or whether he lived near her, or what kind of job he did?”
