Her mouth tightened. “Leave him out of this.”
The look that came with those five words said everything Diamond needed to know. This was not a happy family.
“Ah,” he said. “I wondered. He has no part in what you did, right? You’re getting back at him as well as the show?”
“I said lay off.”
“It’s not a crime to talk to the press as long as what you tell them is true. You’re the whistleblower who told the Post about the jinx, aren’t you?”
She thought about her response for a couple of seconds and said, “You make me feel like the class sneak.”
It was as good as a yes. He felt the surge of elation that comes with a breakthrough. “Why did you do it?”
“For devilment.”
The response rang true. He waited for her to expand on it.
“I’m stuck here, day in, day out and that lot are still milking Mary’s success two years after she died.”
“You’re jealous of them?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“And it’s a way of getting back at Fergus?”
A faint smile.
“You heard about the things that were going wrong and you guessed the local press would run the story? I hope you got paid.”
She shook her head. “They don’t know who I am. I called them on an old mobile we’ve never used.”
“Suggesting the show is jinxed?”
The smile returned and was wider.
“Did you use the word ‘jinx’?”
A nod. “I wanted them to know what I was on about.”
“All they had to do was check your facts and see how they hung together.”
“Right.”
“And did you make a second call saying it was now a police investigation?”
“Yes.”
“You heard that from Fergus?”
“Everyone knows.”
“Everyone who works on the show, I grant you. Has it made you feel better, getting it out to the world?”
She picked her word with care. “Marginally.”
“Does Fergus know you’re the source?”
A gasp. “God, no. Does he have to?”
He didn’t answer that.
Back in Jean Sharp’s car, he thanked her for covering for him by getting Candida’s attention at a critical moment. “I would have been caught with the letters in my hand.”
“You’d have thought of something to say, guv.”
“I don’t know what.”
She started up and drove out of the car park. “Anyway, recognising his name on the envelope was a game-changer.”
“Bit of luck, if I’m honest,” he said, not really meaning it. Privately, he thought his sleuthing had been worthy of Sherlock Holmes.
“You made your luck by getting up to look at the things on the shelf,” she said.
“Nosiness.”
“Professionalism.”
He laughed. “If ever I need a reference, I know who to ask. And I also want to thank you for chipping in with your questions about Mary Wroxeter. Nicely timed.”
“It seemed like a pause in the questioning.”
“I lost concentration, thrown by something she said.”
Sharp seemed worried about losing concentration herself, unready for this debrief while she was driving.
“What did you think of her answers?” he pressed her.
“They rang true, I thought.”
“You don’t think she had any part in Dave Tudor’s disappearance?”
She frowned, but whether this was in disbelief or irritation wasn’t clear. “Do you?”
“She’s the only person we’ve met with an obvious motive for doing away with him.”
Sharp’s eyes stood out as if she’d seen a charging rhino on the road ahead. “Killing him, you mean? Candida?”
“She has to be a suspect. She took over his job. She gave the impression she was shoehorned into it, but she knew Mary would turn to her if Tudor left. It was a big step-up in her career and she idolised Mary.”
“Now you explain, I can see it.”
“Watch your speed. It’s supposed to be thirty along here, not thirty-two.”
Her hands opened and then closed on the steering wheel.
“If she did murder him,” Diamond went on, “it raises other questions.”
“Like how she did it?”
“That’s not so important at this stage.”
“What she did with the body, then?”
“She told us she had a car. She could have driven it to the marina after dark. I was looking before we came away and there are possibilities. You could submerge a body there out of sight under a jetty. Even if it surfaced you wouldn’t see it.”
“Is it worth making a search?”
“We’d need more evidence. She may provide it if she thinks we’re on her case.”
Sharp drove in silence for a while, but she must have been thinking about what he’d said. “If you’re right, she was incredibly cool under questioning.”
“Yes,” he said. “When she told us Tudor’s flat was like the Mary Celeste, she didn’t help her own cause. She could easily have said it looked as if he’d packed his things and cleared off.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“She’s a class act if she’s a killer. And if she’s that good, she could have murdered Mary as well.”
The steering wobbled.
He tensed. “Don’t do that.”
“Sorry, guv. You keep surprising me.”
“We can pull over if you want.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Didn’t the possibility of murder cross your mind when she admitted she was the last person to see Mary alive? She was almost challenging us to put her in the frame.”
“I missed that entirely. Why would she do that?”
“Because someone else was sure to mention it when we interviewed the others. I can see a cyclist up ahead. Give him a wide berth.”
Sharp was tight-lipped until they had passed the cyclist.
“I can’t think why she would want to murder Mary. She had nothing but praise for her.”
“The same goes for everyone in the show as far as I can tell. It’s our job to question anything that can’t be proved. We’ve only got Candida’s word that she didn’t go inside the house with Mary.”
“And do what? Encourage Mary to drink herself to death?”
“An alcoholic doesn’t need encouragement. We know the blood alcohol count was lethal. What was the phrase the pathologist used?”
“About being on a real bender?”
“Right. Why did she drink so much that particular night? Was Candida egging her on?”
“That’s theoretically possible, I suppose.” She used the words grudgingly, out of respect. It was clear that Diamond’s latest outrageous theory was way ahead of anything she was willing to believe.
“She’d just told Mary she was pregnant,” he said. “What’s an alcoholic’s response going to be — ‘I’ll drink to that’?”
Sharp didn’t respond for a while.
They reached the turn at Keynsham before either of them spoke again, and it was Diamond. “You want to know why she did it?”
“Try me, guv.”
“She’s an angry woman, stuck at home. She couldn’t hack it when she saw her old boss working happily with other people.”
“That’s a new one,” Sharp said without enthusiasm. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
15
Even Peter Diamond would admit that Mary Wroxeter as a murder victim was a speculative theory. Clearly Jean Sharp wasn’t persuaded. He didn’t mind much. This was work in progress. It might come to nothing, but the possibility had to be explored.
The chilling new scenario was that three people from the show had been murdered. All his experience told him that if this was true, the killings must be linked. In serial murders, the first is the big one. The perpetrator crosses the red line and becomes a killer. When he or she has done the deed once, they feel less constrained about doing it again when new pressures come into play. The motive could be a matter of covering up for the first. Somebody became suspicious or saw something and had to be silenced. Was that how Mary Wroxeter sealed her fate?