“Police, stand back!”
Dodged past two uniforms, slammed one door shut, jerked another fully open, got in, started up and powered away.
She’d sacrificed some precious distance to the suspect, but she had a plan, outrageous, dangerous, and the best she could do in the situation. She would stop all movement of traffic.
A short distance along the narrow two-way road leading to the car parks, she glanced in her mirror, decided it had to be now, jerked the steering wheel right, slammed the brakes and swung the Ka across the centre of the road and squared up broadside on, blocking all progress either way.
Immediately, brakes screeched, horns were sounded, windows wound down and no doubt the air was blue with curses at the crazy woman who was in the act of abandoning her vehicle in the worst possible place. Ingeborg couldn’t hear for the din of the horns.
She waved-a gesture that might mean anything-but seemed to be saying all was fine and dandy, whatever the inconvenience. Then she marched up the centre of the road along the line of cars backing up and stared into each vehicle, oblivious of what they were shouting at her.
She was fired up, concentrating on the task of finding the redheaded driver, who should by now have moved out of the car park and been caught in the tailback, unable to move.
Unfortunately, the trap was full of innocent victims: wide-eyed old ladies, bald-headed men, a couple of turbans, two eyes peering from a burka, a mother with three screaming kids in the back, middle-aged blondes, distracted brunettes, a nun, a doctor in an emergency car, a good cross-section of the population. Any minute someone was going to jump out and grab her.
She reached a point that she calculated was too far along the line. The redhead ought to be in the thick of the hold-up if she hadn’t found some other way out, or was still in the car park, boxing clever.
Frustrated, Ingeborg turned and retraced her steps along the verge on the other side of the cars. She’d take a close look at everyone in the front passenger seats. She thought she’d checked them all.
Ten or twelve cars along the line, she got lucky. She happened to look down at an empty seat in a Fiat just as the driver’s hand snaked across and snatched something away.
A flash of copper that shimmered with the movement.
A red wig.
Ingeborg reached for the door handle just as the driver exited on the other side and made her escape bid.
Definitely the woman in the black trouser suit and flat shoes, but now without glasses and with her own hair exposed as short and brown with blonde streaks. She was bolting across a patch of lawn towards the hospital building.
Ingeborg started after her and knew at once she had the speed to catch her.
Maybe thirty yards on, she launched herself into the tackle that ended the chase. The woman buckled at the waist. They both hit the grass and Ingeborg made sure she was on top, cushioned from the fall. She grabbed a wrist and secured an arm-lock.
“You’re nicked, Jessie-or is it Elspeth Blake?”
In the private room in Bradford Ward, a team of doctors were trying to resuscitate Pellegrini using a defibrillator, watched by Peter Diamond and Keith Halliwell.
The only positive thing anyone could have said was that he was in the right place. The medics knew what to do, they had the record of his natural heart rhythm and they understood how fragile he was.
To Diamond’s eye, this was a scene out of numberless TV hospital dramas. Any moment the senior doctor would remove the paddles, turn to his colleagues and shake his head.
It would be a terrible anti-climax, a cruel outcome for all the doctors and nurses who had spent days helping their patient out of the coma.
But it wasn’t played that way. Presently there was nodding between the team. They’d detected a response.
“Let’s get out of their way,” Diamond said to Halliwell. “They’ll want to move him back into Critical Care.”
27
Diamond had asked Ingeborg to join him in the interview room at Keynsham. She’d proved yet again what a vital member of the team she was. Making the arrest had been a challenge enough, aside from dealing with the angry drivers on the hospital road. She’d succeeded by force of character, making the arrest without handcuffs, hailing the security men and getting them to remove the Ka as well as Jessie’s Fiat 500 and restore the flow of traffic.
As for the woman known to them as Jessie, she’d already made clear she knew her rights. She wanted legal representation-her own, and not one of the duty solicitors. Diamond had informed her-and she appeared to know already-that as an officer of superintendent rank he had the power under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to question her for up to thirty-six hours about a serious arrestable offence.
The good thing was that she was vocal in asserting her rights. She hadn’t yet retreated behind the dreaded “no comment.”
So it began with her alone across the table, composed and still managing to look attractive, for all that had happened, her mouth playful, ready to take any shape she desired from disapproving to amused to amoral. At their only previous meeting, when she was posing as a do-gooder, her expression had promised rather more than he would have expected from a lady of the church.
After the formalities were gone through, Diamond asked the sort of question that would have made “no comment” ridiculous.
“Tea or coffee?”
“Coffee. Black, no sugar.”
The officer by the door went out to fetch some.
“Were you bruised by the fall?”
A shake of the head.
“We met briefly at Mr. Pellegrini’s house,” he said. “You in your red wig as Elspeth Blake from the church. I was drooling over the homemade quiche, remember? Tell me I’m not mistaken and you baked it yourself.”
“I’m a Cordon Bleu cook,” she said.
Promising. He’d already decided to play to her ego. “Multi-talented, then. I haven’t heard a single complaint about your housekeeping. Your talent for getting the confidence of lonely old men goes back a long way, doesn’t it?”
Too obvious a question. She shrugged and said nothing.
“I’ll cut to the chase,” he said. “I’ve read your diary. I call it a diary, anyway. You call it notes. Classy, intelligent writing, I must say, even though you take some side swipes at the police. And you were right about us. We didn’t have a clue for a long time. Pellegrini was on to you before I was. Clever old guy, he was your nemesis. I can understand why you did what you did today. Can’t condone it, of course, but I see why it happened.”
He paused as the tray of coffee was brought in. China mugs for Ingeborg and himself as well as the suspect.
And digestive biscuits. Maybe Keynsham wasn’t a total write-off.
When he resumed, he said, “You probably want to know how we got hold of the diary. That was thanks mainly to Pellegrini, as you suspected, and it all goes back to the little incident at Cavendish Crescent after Max’s funeral when he tipped coffee over your purple skirt. He’d make a good detective, would Pellegrini. You were in your Jessie persona then and he had suspicions you were stealing choice items of jewellery from the house, pieces that had once belonged to Olga Filiput. Poor old Max had just about despaired of keeping track of them. Pellegrini’s plan was to get hold of your handbag and see if you’d nicked another necklace. We both know you hadn’t. You’re too smart to take a risk like that. Instead there was something else in the bag.”
She said in a resigned tone of voice, “The flash drive.”
He nodded. “It was a Eureka moment when I worked out that this was what he must have found. Made sense for you, storing your wit and wisdom on a memory stick no bigger than a lipstick and keeping it with you at all times, encrypted as an extra precaution, even if no one else knew of its existence. Unfortunately for you, Pellegrini took his opportunity. He didn’t know at the time that the little memory stick contained better evidence of your crimes than a sack full of stolen jewellery and he never did find out. He downloaded the contents to his laptop at home and hit an immediate problem. The bloody thing was gobbledegook, so he never got to read it.”