‘No sense of proportion.’
‘You could put it that way. Whatever it was, I can see how it may have got him into trouble.’
‘You’re not suggesting Conybeare shot Rigden?’
‘No. Like you, I’ve racked my brains for a reason why such a well-regarded bloke was murdered. Thanks to the vicar I now know there was a different side to him. Call it obstinate, or bloody-minded, he gave no ground when he felt the issue mattered.’
‘I can see that, but I can’t see how it helps unless the killer was an evangelist or a magician.’
He nodded. ‘I agree it’s not much to go on.’
A nurse came by and said to Diamond, ‘Don’t overtax her. She’s supposed to be resting her brain.’
He waited until the nurse was halfway up the ward and said, ‘One more question, then. Did you interview each of the people Rigden worked for?’
‘Every one,’ Hen said. ‘No conjurers and no clergymen, I’m afraid.’
‘How many?’
‘That’s two.’
He frowned. She’d lost him. ‘Two employers?’
‘Two questions. You said you would only ask one more. From memory, he worked in seven different gardens.’ Hen’s power of recall seemed to be unaffected by the injury.
‘So which was the last he worked in?’
‘It belonged to Mrs Shah, an Asian lady who has since died.’
‘Of natural causes, I hope.’
‘She was almost a hundred, poor old duck. She lived some miles from his place.’
‘Alone?’
‘That generation are very independent. According to Joe’s Filofax, he was due there the day he was murdered, the Monday.’
‘And did he come? Did the old lady confirm it?’
‘No chance. She hadn’t the foggiest. She never left the house. She relied on the phone and direct debits for all her needs. Joe would turn up and do the work, whatever he decided needed doing, and never see her.’
‘You must have checked the garden.’
‘I’m not a total beginner, Pete.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Big enough to be called an estate in my opinion. There’s a wild section, an orchard, several lawns. We searched for evidence of the shooting and found nothing. Dragged the pond. The job took several days.’
‘Did you find where he’d been working?’
‘Even that was uncertain. The lawns weren’t cut recently and the mower was in the garden shed along with a load of other equipment and the old padded jacket he used when the weather was cold.’
‘He could have been weeding or pruning. This was September and gardens are still growing at that time of year.’
‘I’m aware of that, ducky. If you take a trip there, you’ll see what I mean, but don’t expect to find anything.’
A young woman doctor came by and checked Hen’s condition. ‘She should be all right to travel now,’ she told Diamond. ‘Did you bring her day clothes?’
‘Er... no.’
‘She’s in a hospital gown. She can’t leave like that.’
‘I came in a pink-striped nightie,’ Hen said.
‘They’ll bring it presently,’ the doctor said and turned to Diamond again. ‘You can help her on with it.’
‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘She might not welcome that.’
Hen said softly, ‘Coward.’
From the doctor he got a look that said he was no gentleman and might well have been responsible for Hen’s injury.
When the nightdress arrived and the curtains around the bed were being drawn, Diamond muttered something about calling a taxi and quit the ward at speed.
When he eventually got back to the hotel, it was after seven. He hadn’t been in his room two minutes before the phone rang.
‘There you are at last,’ Georgina said in a voice drained of all tolerance. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you on your mobile all afternoon. Was it switched off?’
He could so easily have said he’d been on hospital premises and was keeping to their rules about phones, but he didn’t want Georgina knowing of Hen’s misadventure and putting the worst possible construction on it.
‘Funny. I’ll check.’ He let a few seconds pass before saying, ‘Ah, you’re quite right. It was switched off. Sometimes I wonder if there are gremlins in this damn thing. You didn’t need me urgently, I hope?’
‘Fat use if I had,’ she said. ‘Come to my room and tell me what you learned from the Reverend Conybeare. And I want to know what else you’ve been up to. You can’t have spent all day at his cottage.’
‘Can you give me twenty minutes? I was about to take a shower.’ Enough time, he hoped, to dream up some story that would satisfy her.
After giving a detailed account of the Conybeare interview, he made a firm attempt to switch roles and invite Georgina to summarise her day. She was having none of it.
‘You haven’t told me where you were all afternoon.’
He’d told a few untruths in his time, but experience had taught him to stay as close to the facts as possible without actually revealing all. ‘Not much to do in Slindon,’ he said. ‘I came back here and told the driver he wouldn’t be needed again. I thought about joining you at the nick and then decided against it. You don’t need me hanging on your coattails. So I went out again. Fresh air and exercise to get the brain working. We haven’t had a case conference since we got here, so I held my own, so to speak, reviewing what we’ve done and discovered.’
She said with suspicion, ‘Where was this — in some pub?’
‘No, no. I needed a clear head. Do you know Spitalfields Lane?’ He was confident she didn’t. ‘That’s where I ended up, if you want to know.’
‘And did you come to any startling conclusion?’
‘Startling? No.’
‘But you thought of something important?’
‘Maybe.’ Anything to steer Georgina away from how he’d passed the afternoon. ‘I was thinking of Danny Singleton and his story about the stolen BMW. Let’s suppose it really happened just as he described: the car arriving outside the pub where he was and by good luck being the make his gizmo would unlock. I was asking myself why the car containing the body was parked in that particular spot in Littlehampton. The person wearing the hooded jacket got out and walked away across the bridge, right?’
‘That’s Danny’s story — which has to be taken with more than a pinch of salt.’
‘Let’s go with it for a moment. The hoodie wouldn’t run the risk of leaving the car there and later returning. He’d leave it there because—’
‘She would leave it there,’ Georgina said. ‘We’re thinking Joss was the hoodie because her DNA was found in the car.’
‘OK. Joss would leave it there because those were her instructions. There was an arrangement. After dark the body would be removed from the car by whoever it is who has been disposing of these missing persons. That was the plan. But Danny messed it up by stealing the car and driving off, unaware of what was in the boot.’
Georgina leaned forward. ‘Peter, this is clever. I think you’re on to something. I hadn’t linked this case to the missing persons.’
‘And if I’m right, we now have an insight into the method used.’
‘How is that?’
‘The location. The bodies are brought to this quiet spot by the river—’
‘And dropped off the bridge?’
He was about to say, ‘Nothing so crude,’ and he stopped himself. ‘It has to be smarter than that. My guess is that they’re transferred to a boat and taken out to sea, probably weighted down and dropped overboard somewhere in coastal waters. The disposer — if we call him that — would make damn sure they’d stay submerged.’