“You thought you’d been pipped?”
“Let’s face it. I was. Nobody likes rejection.”
“Then what happened?”
“A phone call. Mary and the casting director took me and my agent to lunch. They didn’t want the public to know I was only the second choice, but someone leaked it to the Mirror. Trixie had reporters badgering her for the inside story, but it didn’t make headlines because the show was only a script at that stage. Any sniff of a story now and it’s everywhere.”
“Have you spoken to Trixie since?”
She frowned as if the thought hadn’t occurred before now. “Do you think I should have done? That’s got me worried. I thought she wanted to put the whole thing behind her.”
“You’re probably right.” He’d got as much from the jinx story as he was likely to, so he switched to the most recent event. “I heard you did some filming at Charmy Down airfield.”
“I did.”
“Where Jake Nicol was last seen.”
Her look changed abruptly. With ice, she said, “You’d better not be suggesting I had anything to do with him disappearing.” For the first time in the interview they got a glimpse of the imperious Sabine.
“Did I say that?” Diamond said, up for the challenge he’d been expecting from the start.
“I was there like all the others to shoot the scenes in the old control tower.”
“You took the motorhome with you?”
“That’s what I use it for, location work.”
“Quite something, driving this monster on our local roads.”
“You’d better ask Chen about that.”
“She parked up there beside the other vehicles?”
“You have to. It’s the designated area. They don’t want the transport getting in shot. After a couple of wet nights we were in a sea of mud. I insisted they put boards down for me to walk over.”
He’d come to the question that interested him most. “When did you leave? At the first opportunity, I should think.”
She hesitated, as if she, too, knew how much her answer mattered. “The first opportunity, as you put it, wasn’t until late. I was in all the scenes, right to the end, when the light was going.”
“Then what? Did you change your costume, clean off the makeup?”
“I do that in here. If I remember right, I asked Chen to fix me a drink and a sandwich.”
“While the others were clearing up outside? Did you watch?”
“I wasn’t interested in what was going on out there. I remember checking my phone and watching some TV.”
“I’m asking because Jake Nicol must have been out there picking up bits of equipment and loading one of the vans. We believe at some point he may have been attacked.”
She blinked several times. “Really?”
“If you witnessed anything, it could be important.”
“I already told you I don’t know Jake Nicol from Adam.”
“It sounds as if you were one of the last to leave.” She gave an angry sigh. The arrogance Greg Deans had talked about was all too evident now. “What are you getting at?”
“Was it dark when you finally drove off?”
“Chen drove off. I was resting. You have no idea how tiring it is to go through a day’s filming.”
“We’d better speak to Chen.”
She shrugged. “Good luck with that. You’ll need it.”
The charm of the earlier exchanges had vanished as soon as Nicol had been mentioned. She called Chen to show them out and Diamond took the opportunity to ask the stone-faced minder whether she had witnessed anything on the last evening at Charmy Down.
He got a one-word answer.
He got the same answer to each of his other questions. Chen was as chatty as a Buckingham Palace sentry.
The only “yes” was when Diamond said, “Perhaps you’ll show us out, then.”
In the Ka, he said to Ingeborg, “Sabine was a sight more pleasant than Greg Deans led me to expect.”
“She’s an actor, guv.”
“You don’t think it was genuine?”
“Chen was more sincere than she was.”
“I must be a soft touch.”
She said nothing.
In his head, he replayed the key moments of the interview. “The charm cooled off after I mentioned Jake Nicol, I admit.”
“She couldn’t get rid of us quickly enough.”
Ingeborg’s judgements on other women were usually reliable. Sabine couldn’t be dismissed as innocent. Two of the classic murder trinity — means and opportunity — weren’t difficult to pin on her. The motive was the elusive one. She’d made sure she was fireproof by insisting she had liked Dave Tudor enough to want to go out with him. As for Jake, she didn’t know the man, scarcely noticed him. But could she be believed?
He’d asked Inge to drive them back to CID headquarters at Concorde House and they were heading west on the A420 across the valley of the River Boyd, a prettier route than the motorway. They passed through a village called Wick. “I came here once with Steph,” he said in a rare moment of nostalgia. “Wick Gorge is quite a beauty spot.”
“I know it,” Ingeborg said. “I covered a story about Jane Austen in my days as a hack. She mentioned the gorge in Northanger Abbey.”
They drove on.
“Speaking of your journalist knowhow,” he said, “I was banking on you to unlock one of the big mysteries in this jinx business.”
“The whistleblower? I haven’t given up,” she told him. “I asked an old friend who subs for the Post and she said they don’t even know themselves who it is. The story was phoned in anonymously. Someone on their switchboard made a few notes and that was all.”
“Wouldn’t they need to know their source before they broke the story?”
“Not really. Most of it was public knowledge, but no one had joined the dots. It was only when they started checking that they realised how much had gone wrong with Swift. Some of the incidents had been reported in their own pages.”
“The jinx idea would appeal to any journalist.”
“You’re right about that, guv.”
“I thought they were protecting someone. The Post don’t need to know who the source was, but we do.”
“I don’t think they can tell us any more than they have. The stuff they know is all in print.”
“There’s something useful they can tell us.”
“What’s that?”
“Was the caller a man or a woman?”
7
“Is this your doing?”
“Indirectly, ma’am,” Peter Diamond answered in a contrite tone. He was now at an upstairs window of Concorde House, the police building in Emersons Green. At his shoulder was his boss, Georgina Dallymore, the Assistant Chief Constable, along with most of his team. A strange scene was unfolding in the yard below. A tall, disreputable-looking, white-bearded man had emerged from a small police van. He waited for the driver to open the rear doors. Between them, they unloaded various items, an old-fashioned pram, a bedroll and a rucksack. Then a dog the size of a Shetland pony put its head out, took a long look at the yard, and jumped down.
Georgina gasped and said, “Oh my sainted aunt!”
Some of the others used more colourful language.
Georgina was outraged. “Does he think he’s coming in with that enormous animal and all his paraphernalia? He looks like a vagrant. We could get infested with fleas and heaven only knows what else. Peter, I hold you responsible for this.”
“We believe he can assist with an ongoing inquiry, ma’am. I didn’t know he was bringing everything but the kitchen sink.”