Not easy to answer without giving more away than he planned to tell her.
“I’m piecing together the last months of his life.”
His answer seemed to satisfy her. “It came as a shock, but you can’t prepare for anything like that.” She shook her head, remembering. “I turned up at the house as usual and rang. Sometimes he wasn’t up in the mornings, but there was a key I knew about so I let myself in. He wasn’t downstairs, so I made a start on clearing up the kitchen. I say that, but it wasn’t a mess. He generally left it tidy before going to bed. After twenty minutes or so, he still hadn’t appeared, so I made him a coffee and took it up to the bedroom. The door was closed. I knocked, spoke his name, got no response, opened the door a little and saw there was no movement from the bed. He was face up, eyes closed, mouth gaping and it was obvious he wasn’t breathing. I called Dr. Mukherjee and she was there inside ten minutes. She was very good, understood I was shaken and sent me to make a fresh cup of tea.” She paused and her eyes were moist with the memory-or good acting. “We agreed he’d found the best way to go, at home, in his own bed.”
“You said there was a key you knew about. What did you mean by that?”
“His back-up key. He used to worry about locking himself out, so he kept a spare near the front door behind a drainpipe.”
“Not the best security.”
“You can’t tell ninety-year-olds how to run their lives. You can try, but they won’t listen. Everything in that house was done as it had been all his life, right down to the loose tea that was the bane of my life. He had something against teabags. He collected all his tea leaves and dried them off and I was supposed to crush them to powder and sprinkle them over the carpets and wait ten minutes before I did the vacuuming. Have you ever heard of that?”
Diamond shook his head. “It must be a generational thing. I may look old to you, but I’m not ninety. What was the point?”
“He reckoned they absorb odours, so they freshen the carpets in some way. Grass works just as well, he said.”
“Do you mean grass as in lawns, or cannabis?”
She rolled her eyes in scorn. “Grass clippings from a mower. He was spaced out enough, without smoking pot.”
“It might work.”
“But we always had plenty of tea leaves, so we never tried grass. Have we finished? I’ve got loads to do here and I want to get home some time.”
I see in the paper that some committee or other has been looking into the problems of old men living alone. They’re giving cause for concern. In the next fifteen years the numbers are due to rise by 65 percent. They’re not as good as women at managing. When an old man is widowed, he can’t adapt. His social life shrinks and he deteriorates mentally and physically and he’s unlikely to seek help, poor old soul. The way I see it, I’m performing a service, saving them from misery and the state from a lot of extra expense. Do enough, and I might even make the honours list.
11
“If I wanted to copy the entire contents of someone’s computer, is there a simple way to do it?” Diamond asked Ingeborg.
“Hacking, you mean?”
“Not really. That sounds tricky. I said a simple way. They make it look easy in spy films.”
“That’s different. They’re after one file usually, or one document. They go to the actual computer and use some kind of USB device.”
“A memory stick?”
“Exactly, but if you wanted to copy everything you’d need more capacity, an external hard drive.”
“Is that huge?”
She shook her head. “About the size of my iPhone. It comes with a USB cable. You slot that into the port and you’re in business.”
“That’s what I’m interested in doing.”
“I can show you if you like,” she said. “It won’t take long.” They were in his office with his computer between them on the desk. He’d returned there after his encounter with Mrs. Stratford, the cleaner. It was already after six.
“I doubt if showing it to me will make much difference.”
“But it’s a breeze.” She didn’t add, “Even you could do it,” but she didn’t need to. His problems with technology were legendary.
“What I’d really like is for you to come with me and make sure it’s done the right way.”
“Come where, guv?”
“Henrietta Road.”
“Pellegrini’s place?” Her eyebrows took flight like game birds. “Wow. You really are into spying.”
“I should have thought of it when I was there before. Those printed pages about murder must have come from his computer. I want to check.”
“A spot of breaking and entering?”
“It won’t be a break-in. I can let us in.”
“By going back to that sister at the hospital and asking to borrow Pellegrini’s keys again? Will she play ball?”
“No need.” He dipped into his pocket and held up a shiny new key. “I thought I might need to go back, so I did the old trick of making a wax impression, except I used BluTack.”
Ingeborg laughed. “James Bond has nothing on you.”
They went in his car, stopping off at Weston Lock industrial estate to buy an external hard drive. He saw that Ingeborg had not exaggerated when she said it was no larger than an iPhone.
“You’ll be seeing the workshop for yourself,” he said to her as they headed over Pulteney Bridge and turned left at the Laura Place fountain. “It says a lot about the man.”
“Let’s hope nobody sees us. You said it’s in front of the house?”
“Coming up shortly. Relax, Inge. We’re on the side of law and order. We can do stuff like this.”
She didn’t answer, but the set of her mouth showed she wasn’t persuaded.
“In pursuit of the truth,” he added.
“Oh yeah?”
Diamond gave up trying. Ingeborg was right, of course. At best this was an unsanctioned undercover operation and at worst a shameful invasion of someone else’s home.
They parked on the drive of Pellegrini’s large villa-style house, in a position sheltered from the busy road. Before getting out, he told Ingeborg, “For the record, you were never here. If anyone discovers my part in this, I did it alone.”
“Copied the hard drive?”
“All my own work. Nobody thinks I’m that clueless… do they?”
She didn’t comment.
He opened the boot of his car and took out the skein of cream-coloured silk that was the coiled Fortuny dress. After Paloma had unwound it and gone into ecstasies she had reluctantly twisted it back into its compact shape for him and he’d been driving about with it since.
At the workshop door, they hesitated when Ingeborg pointed to the notice about the response alarm. Diamond showed her where the bell was, above their heads. It hadn’t been tripped the first time he’d let himself in, so he had to assume they’d be all right with a key that fitted. He took a deep breath, inserted and turned it.
The door opened and no bells went off.
Inside, he took a torch from his pocket and showed her the locomotive name-plate above the door.
The model railway track.
And the three cremation urns.
He stood on a chair and returned the coiled gown to the urn it had come from.
“I’d better start work,” Ingeborg said and sat at the computer. “You want everything that’s on here?”
“Please.” He shone the torch beam at the keyboard.
She brought up a page that meant nothing to Diamond. “It has a hundred gigabytes of memory, of which only a small percentage has been used.”
“Do we need to know that?”
“It tells us what we’re dealing with.”
“Plug in the thing, Inge, and let’s get started.”
He tried to interest himself in what she was doing, but it was all a mystery to him. He just wanted the job done and to be out of there.
Clumsy as usual, he rested his arm on the stack of magazines and sent half of them skittering across the floor.