‘The magic mushrooms? You’ve been next door, the same as we have. They’re taking over.’
Ferdie said to his son, ‘What does he mean?’
‘You haven’t been in there lately, Dad. There are more than there used to be.’
‘Growing wild,’ Diamond said, ‘in the garden a certain Joe Rigden once had in his care.’
‘Why do you say that?’ Tom said.
‘Because Rigden objected to them and was shot dead.’
Tom couldn’t have looked more bemused if Diamond had spoken in Serbo-Croat.
Now Ferdie joined in, his voice more regretful than angry. ‘If it hadn’t been for the bloody man interfering, complaining, threatening to expose me to the drugs squad, he would be alive today and—’
‘And so would your two other victims, Joss Green and Mel Mason.’
Stopped in full flow, Ferdie put his hand to his throat. ‘That’s an extraordinary claim.’
‘Not really. Their bodies were recovered this afternoon.’
Tom switched his disbelieving stare from Diamond to Ferdie.
‘He’s bluffing,’ Ferdie said. ‘Ignore it, son.’
‘I saw them today,’ Diamond said, ‘out at the wreck where Davy hid them.’
Tom swung round to face his father. ‘Davy? Does he mean our Davy? The model?’
It was already obvious that Tom was only on the fringe of the major crimes committed here. He knew about the mushrooms, but little else. The main man was Ferdie — the ever-obliging, self-effacing Ferdie.
‘I can’t take this in,’ Tom said. ‘Davy hides bodies at sea?’
Diamond said, ‘On an industrial scale. But he won’t any longer. Davy is dead of an overdose. We found him on his yacht at the marina.’
Father and son were lost for words.
After the news had sunk in, Diamond said to Ferdie, ‘Let’s have the truth about Rigden in 2007. You eliminated him because he threatened to expose you.’
‘I had a profitable business.’
‘Still have, by the look of it. How did you get into it?’
Ferdie glanced at his confused and troubled son as if to check whether he objected to the story coming out. Tom was in no state to decide.
‘I used to cultivate orchids here and did quite well, but I couldn’t see the business expanding,’ Ferdie said. ‘Then as a sideline I experimented with a few of the so-called magic shrooms. This was before liberty caps were demonised by the Home Office. They’re a challenge to grow, but I persevered and found a way to do it and made it profitable. By degrees, I phased out the orchids. The growing requirements are not all that different. I already had these growing rooms in a secure place behind high walls.’
‘It took over completely?’
‘I’m the main supplier in the south of England. No one else would take the risk after liberties were made class A drugs. When Rigden came calling one afternoon he told me straight that he was going to report me. He was one of those bloody-minded, holier-than-thou people you couldn’t argue with. I would have been banged up for fourteen years, minimum. Maybe life. Really. They can give you life for doing this commercially.’
‘You shot him.’
‘You know I did.’
‘And arranged to have his body disposed of.’
‘Yes. By then I had contacts who knew about such things.’
Ferdie seemed resigned to the truth coming out, but Tom had put his hands to his face and covered his eyes.
‘And the plan backfired,’ Diamond said.
‘Thanks to bloody Davy. His method was supposed to be foolproof. He wanted big money up front, but those in the know spoke well of him, so I approached him.’
‘And you wish you never had.’
‘His system was too elaborate. I had to provide a driver and a stolen car. The driver wasn’t to know what she was transporting.’
‘This was Joss?’
‘Yes, she was only eighteen at the time, but bright and up for anything. I knew her through the dealing she did in shrooms. She did what I asked, stole the BMW and brought it here. I loaded the body into the boot, just as Davy had insisted, making sure Joss didn’t know what she was carrying. She drove to Littlehampton and left the car where Davy wanted it. Then the plan went belly up. Some idiot nicked the car before Davy got to it and was stopped and arrested and ended up doing time.’
‘A life sentence.’
‘His own stupid fault.’
‘You were content to let him rot in jail.’
‘Him or me, wasn’t it?’
The callous comment ignored the horror Ferdie had expressed a minute before at the prospect of doing a life sentence himself. Empathy is a state of mind unknown to killers.
‘And for a time,’ Diamond said, ‘your crisis blew over. You thought you’d got away with it. Seven years passed before you heard any more. Out of the blue came the news that a senior detective was suspended for failing to follow up a DNA match linking her niece to a car theft and murder in 2007. The niece was Joss, your driver. I don’t know if she came to see you of her own volition or if you got in touch and asked her to come. Either way, she was now linked to a murder, and so were you. Joss was a threat to your freedom. She knew too much and had to be silenced.’
‘She was unstable,’ Ferdie said. ‘All druggies are. Sooner or later she would have shopped me.’
Listening to this, Hen observed a brave silence. She must have been desperate to wade in on behalf of Joss, but she left Diamond to deal with Ferdie as he had asked.
‘How did you do it?’
‘She came here, as you said, and she was in a state, swinging from blame to panic. I could see there was only one way to deal with her. She and I were alone here at the time. Tom was teaching and Manny had the morning off. I shot her on the driveway after she left the house.’
A shudder ran through Hen and she shut her eyes, but managed to maintain her stoic silence.
‘And you handed the body over to Davy.’
‘Not directly. He always safeguarded himself by collecting them from a neutral vehicle. And this time the system worked — or seemed to.’
Diamond paused for a few seconds out of respect for Hen’s feelings. Then he said, ‘And now we need to know what could possibly have possessed you to shoot an innocent schoolgirl.’
Ferdie sighed and shook his head. ‘That was deeply unfortunate. There was a party here. Tom holds them regularly for his artist friends. It’s been going on for years. I help with the drinks. But something went terribly wrong.’
Tom looked up and said, ‘Ella gatecrashed.’
‘One of his students,’ Ferdie said. ‘She was texting her friends, showing off, I suppose. Only later did I realise the havoc she caused. She was soon spaced out on Ecstasy. She’d brought some with her. Full credit to Tom, he hooked her out of the studio fast and settled her in the house.’
‘By then she was too far gone to take home,’ Tom said. From his stunned appearance he might have been on a drug trip himself while listening his father’s revelations.
‘The party didn’t go on all that late,’ Ferdie said. ‘I always clear the drinks after, so I stayed on in the studio for a bit, then turned out the lights and was making my way back to the house when I spotted someone riding a motor scooter across the lawn straight towards the walled garden and my growing rooms. My immediate concern was that one of the party guests meant to break in and see what was there and maybe help themselves. I was angry. It was abuse of hospitality. More alarming than that, it was a breach of security. I’d killed two people to keep my business a secret. It could all unravel if they managed to get in there and saw my crop. I fetched my gun from the cabinet where I keep it. All these thoughts were rushing through my head as I went in pursuit.’
‘It didn’t cross your mind that there might be another explanation?’