The House Sitter

garden. Reluctant to be dislodged from this place of safety, Georgina’s pet had let Diamond know with a couple of swift, efficient paw movements, almost causing him to tip backwards. Only with the greatest difficulty had he brought the terrified cat down the ladder. All of this had been observed from the front room window by Raffles with an expression of supreme contempt.

The exhausted man sank immediately into a deep sleep, blanking out everything. So when Ingeborg phoned him from Bennett Street twenty minutes later, he slept through the sound. After an hour the phone beeped again, this time with more success, because he happened to be turning over. He groaned, swore and reached for it.

“Guv, are you there?”

All he could manage was another groan.

“Guv? This is Keith Halliwell. It’s an emergency.”

“Mm?”

“We just heard from one of the lads on watch in Bennett Street.”

Bennett Street. Bennett Street, Bennett Street. The conscious mind groped for a connection. He forced himself to pay attention.

“Ingeborg put in a routine call about ten thirty to make sure Anna Walpurgis was all right and got no answer. She tried several more times. Nothing. She tried calling you as well, and you didn’t answer. In the end she acted on her own and used the key to let herself in.”

“Oh, Christ.” He was fully awake.

“And now we can’t raise her, either.”

He felt as if the floor caved in and he dropped a hundred levels. “Tell them to go in after her-all of them. I’m coming at once. Get everyone there you can. This is it, Keith!”

Recharged and ready to go, he threw on some clothes, dashed out to the car and drove to Bennett Street at a speed he would normally condemn as suicidal.

Two response vehicles had got there before him. Halliwell was also there, ashen-faced, standing in the open doorway.

“Well?”

“Come and look at this, guv.”

In the hallway of Georgina’s house someone had used a red marker pen to write on the wall in large letters:

The game is done! I’ve won, I’ve won!

Diamond stood blankly before it, shaking his head. He felt a throbbing sensation in his legs. Not the shakes. Not now. He didn’t want to get the shakes.

He knew the line, and he was certain who’d written it. There was a scene in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when Death was dicing with Life-in-Death for the ship’s crew and everyone except the Mariner himself dropped dead.

Halliwell said, “We’ve been right through the building. There’s no one in there, guv.”

“There won’t be.” Still staring at the wall, Diamond crossed his arms over his chest to control his hands. They were starting to shake. “What’s written here is the truth. He’s beaten us. I don’t know how, but he’s done it. He’s got to Anna, and he’s got Ingeborg as well.”

One of the team on duty said in his own defence, “We’ve had round-the-clock surveillance, sir. No one went in except DC Smith.”

“You saw no one go in,” Diamond said without even turning his head to look at the speaker.

“But the place is empty. He got out as well, with the two women. It’s a bloody impossibility.”

“Shut up, will you?” He looked to his right. “Keith.”

“Guv?”

“The roof. These are terraced houses. The roof is the only way I can think of.”

Together they ran upstairs, up two storeys to the attic, a surprisingly spacious room with surprising contents- the secret Anna had wanted to impart to Diamond. Eccentric, weird even, but harmless and of small consequence now. Georgina’s attic was occupied by a family of people-sized teddy bears dressed in knitted garments and seated around a table laid for tea with real cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits. “Try the window,” Diamond said, blotting out the rest of the scene.

It was a small double-sash, and Halliwell made an effort to shift it, but with no success. “I don’t think this has been opened, guv.”

Diamond had a go, and felt the resistance. The thing wouldn’t budge a fraction.

“Look, it’s been painted over at some time,” Halliwell said, pointing to where the bottom rail of the window met the sill. An unbroken coat of paint connected them. “He didn’t go this way.”

“Bloody hell. How did he do it, then? The back of the house?”

“I don’t think so. Every door and window is still locked from the inside. She had locks on all the ground floor windows and fingerbolts on the door.”

Diamond pressed his hands to his forehead and shut his eyes, desperate to make the mental leap that was wanted. It wasn’t for want of trying that he didn’t succeed. But there was another way to approach this problem, and he had the vision to recognise it. All he’d done so far in this emergency was what the Mariner would have predicted, reacting to events by trying to understand them, charging up the stairs in the hope of finding which way the Mariner had escaped with the two women. Truly there wasn’t time for that. Ingeborg and Anna had been missing for an hour already. Not much could be gained from discovering how it had been done.

He said to Halliwell, “Where has he taken them? That’s the priority. That’s what we’ve got to work out.”

Halliwell didn’t say a word. The answer was beyond him.

Beyond Diamond, too, it seemed. He shook his head and sighed heavily. After a long interval, he started to talk, more to himself than Halliwell. “This man has a sense of the dramatic. He went to all the trouble and risk of leaving Porter’s body on the eighteenth hole of a golf course-just for the effect. The act of murder wasn’t enough. It had to be done in the most symbolic way. He’ll have worked out something for Anna, some place of disposal that he considers fitting. But where?”

Where? His body strained to do something, to race off in some direction with sirens blaring and stop the killing. But until his brain supplied the answer, any action would be futile. While he floundered like this, apparently indecisive but actually groping for the truth, two lives were on the line, for nothing was more certain than that the Mariner would kill again.

Georgina’s giant teddies, immobile in their chairs, reinforced the inertia in his brain. He couldn’t stay in the room any longer. “No use standing here,” he told Halliwell. He led the way downstairs, still trying to animate his tired, shocked brain. But the physical action of moving about the house was no help. It solved nothing. Down on ground level again, he was still without an explanation or a plan.

Forcing himself to face the worst outcome, he tried once again to work out the Mariner’s strategy. In all probability, he’d have killed Ingeborg first. Inge, poor kid, was extraneous to the plot. She’d walked into the crossfire because of inexperience and blind courage and the stupid overconfidence of her boss. I should never have left her in charge, he told himself. I could have stopped her if I hadn’t slept through the call they say she made to me. God knows I’ve made mistakes before, but this is the worst ever.

And I failed Anna, the Mariner’s target, the last name on the death list, that free spirit, railing against all the constrictions in her witty, boisterous way, yet actually resting her trust in me. Arrogantly, I assumed I could protect her. How wrong we both were!

Self-recrimination wasn’t going to help.

Instead, he forced his thinking back to the Mariner and his embittered plot. He visualised the execution of Anna, first tied up, or drugged senseless, then despatched, almost certainly by a crossbow bolt to the head. The body would be driven to whichever location the Mariner had selected as appropriate.

The game is done! I’ve won, I’ve won!

Think ahead, he urged himself. It’s the only chance I’ve got now. I have to out-think him, anticipate him for once. He’s already picked the place where her body will be discovered, somewhere fitting, or symbolic, like that eighteenth hole. He wants the world to know how clever he is. Where is it?

Somewhere appropriate to Anna. Her pop music career? Some place that links with a song title. Or her name?