Diamond pressed on. “You’re going to tell me a man was convicted, and I should know, because I was in charge. Peter Diamond. I don’t think we met.”
“The guy is on the run,” said Pinkerton. “It’s been in all the papers.”
“Confidentially, Mr. Pinkerton, we believe he’s somewhere in this area.” Diamond’s eyes slid sideways, as if he expected Mountjoy to come around the corner of the cottage carrying a sledgehammer. “Mind if I come in?”
The interior was straight out of Homes amp; Gardens, furnished with fine antique pieces that must have taken some finding, and some funds. Three framed gold discs were displayed in an alcove. Where were the cigarette burns and the wine stains, Diamond thought, the signs of head-banging and wild parties?
Pinkerton showed him to a white leather chesterfield and faced him from an adjacent window seat.
He said, “Let me absorb this fully. You’re reopening the Britt Strand case-is that why you’re here?”
“I wouldn’t put it in those terms. This is routine, in case Mount joy attempts to contact anyone. He claims he was unjustly convicted.”
“Who doesn’t these days?”
“I don’t want you to think there’s any reason for panic,” Diamond said, regardless that Pinkerton was totally self-composed. “Do you know Mountjoy?”
“Never met him.”
“But you were a close friend of the victim?”
Although Pinkerton didn’t quite deny this, his tone made clear that he would have liked to. “Britt and I had something going at one time. It was over by the time she was killed. That was a couple of years later.”
“You’d stopped seeing her altogether?”
“We each found other people, but we kept in touch. I liked her.”
“But there had been an affair between you?”
Pinkerton thought about his answer. His whole manner was dismissive. “If you want to call it that.”
“When?”
“Around 1987, through ‘88.’
“What was she like?” Diamond rephrased it more tastefully. “I mean, what sort of person was she?”
“Britt? She was smart.”
“Fashionwise?”
“Headwise as well. She knew what she wanted and how to get it. She was an ace reporter, wasn’t she? I only ever saw one thing she wrote, and that was about me, miles better than most of the stuff that gets written.”
“Where did you meet?”
“Conkwell.”
Puzzling. Pinkerton had named a hamlet deep in the Limpley Stoke Valley, southeast of Bath. “Were you performing there?”
“Give me a break.”
“I thought perhaps there was a pub.”
Pinkerton said evenly, “I don’t perform anymore and I never performed in pubs. I’m a producer.”
“You manage other musicians?”
“The hell I do. I’m a producer.” Diamond had hit a raw nerve.
“Pardon my ignorance. What’s the difference?”
“I own some land at Conkwell. A big slice of the wood, if you really want to know. I built a studio there. It’s…” He paused “.. . rather famous in the music business. Bands come from all over and I create unique sounds for them.”
“I see. And Britt came to Conkwell to see the studio with a view to writing about it.”
“You got it.”
“And one thing led to another…” said Diamond casually, as if his own life had been filled with erotic experiences with pretty Swedish journalists.
“Yep.”
“But it didn’t last?”
“It didn’t last.”
“Would you like to tell me about her?”
Pinkerton looked at his watch. “She was very together. She could get enough bread for a single story to keep her living in style for months while she worked out the next story line. It wasn’t just finding the material that she was so good at. She was always after the angle. Once she went through a news mag pointing out all the good stories and the great items they might have been, given the right slant. Blew my mind.” He talked with more admiration than warmth, and it occurred to Diamond that this was one well-organized person praising another’s capacity to work the system. Whatever Pinkerton did at his studio in Conkwell Woods, he wasn’t a raver; he was making intelligent use of his know-how.
“Did she ever mention the college?”
“I didn’t even know she joined a college. We’d cooled off yonks before all that.”
“Parted, you mean?”
Pinkerton looked unhappy with this interpretation. “Cooled off, I said. We were grown-ups. We stayed friends. Why do you want to know all this?”
“I’m trying to see it from Mountjoy’s point of view,” Diamond said, at full stretch to make it plausible. “If he’s in the area, either it’s to settle old scores or find something out. He’s got to be taken seriously.”
“He won’t trouble me. Why should he trouble me?”
Diamond didn’t venture a reply. “I’d like to get a fuller picture of Britt Strand. What else do you remember about her?”
Pinkerton slid his eyes upward, as if an image of Britt were painted on the ceiling. “The presentation mainly. She was immaculate, blond, a real blonde, with sensational skin. Good smile. Most probably had her teeth fixed along the way. In her business you have to be confident. She oozed it, sex and confidence. She was a great lay. Typically Swedish with no inhibitions. Fancy a livener?” he said, drawing a line under that phase of the conversation.
Diamond shook his head.
“Britt liked her whiskey straight,” Pinkerton added. “She could put them away.”
“I thought she was TT.”
“She was a journalist.” Apparently that spoke for itself. “Booze is bloody expensive in Sweden. They go wild when they come over here. Now you mention it, she did ask for a tonic with lemon and ice last time we met. One hangover too many, I guess.”
“Perhaps she used alcohol to put her in the mood.”
“And drank tonic water to batten the hatches? Maybe.”
“Was she romantic?”
“What do you mean?”
“Speaking of putting her in the mood.”
“Romantic?” He still treated the word as foreign.
“Well?”
“Basically, no. She didn’t go in for violins and roses. Ah.” He stopped and said, “I see what you’re getting at. Roses. No, I never gave her any. Red roses played no part in our relationship. I can’t believe anyone who knew her would think she liked that crap.”
“This relationship…”
“We didn’t live together.”
“Did she come here?”
“Was it her place or mine, you mean? Always mine. Here or the studio. You’re wasting your time with me.”
How often had Diamond heard that piece of advice from a suspect who wanted him off his back. For the present he was disinclined to take it. “But you can tell me all about Britt.”
Pinkerton got up and went to a rosewood desk that opened into a drinks cabinet. He held out an empty wine glass. “Sure you won’t?” He poured himself a brandy. “What can I tell you that I haven’t already?”
“Did she mention any fears?”
“About what?”
“Other men pestering her. She was stunning to look at, you said yourself.”
“Britt could handle that.”
“She didn’t handle someone with a knife and a bunch of roses.”
There was a silence that seemed not to trouble Pinkerton.
Diamond said, “Would you mind telling me why the… arrangement between you and Britt cooled, as you put it?”
“No reason,” said Pinkerton.
“Come on. You slept with her. This terrific blonde who put so much into the sex. Did she dump you? Is that the expression?” Maybe he would get somewhere by goading Pinkerton.
But the self-composure was impenetrable. “We dumped each other, if you want to put it that way. No fights. No big scenes. Nothing said, even. We just stopped screwing. If you find that hard to believe, Mr. Diamond, I can’t help you.”
“It didn’t cross your mind at any stage that she might want to write something uncomplimentary about your past?”
Pinkerton’s brown eyes regarded Diamond steadily. “My past? A few teenage trips on resin-assisted cigarettes don’t amount to hard news by today’s standards. She wrote a profile that she cleared with me first. She sold it to several magazines. All about my state-of-the-art studio in the wilds of Wiltshire, in a wood where nightingales sing. No dirt, on me or anyone who works with me. The piece didn’t need it. I have no other secrets, Mr. Diamond. I don’t date any of the royal family and I can’t predict Derby winners. Satisfied?”