The Summons (9 page)

“Then enter a young Swedish lady with a phrase book in her hand and a juicy expose in prospect.”

Julie smoothly slotted Britt Strand into her narrative. “She signed on for part-time English language classes claiming to be an au pair. Mountjoy enrolled her.”

“He was only too pleased,” Diamond cut in again. “After all, he needed a core of genuine students. Everything I learned about Britt suggested that she was highly intelligent and very professional. For a foreign girl to be working as a freelance in Bath and supplying the international press with major stories is impressive.”

“They don’t have to work out of London these days. The technology makes it so easy.” Julie’s eyes scanned the sheet in front of her. “She had her contacts in the right places.
Paris
Match, Oggi, Stern.”

“Plenty of contacts here, too. And I doubt if most of them knew they were being used. She was a charmer, able to mix easily with all sorts. You’ve got it there in the statements. To one boyfriend she was a rock chick in leather and net tights; another guy took her for one of the Badminton set, squeezing in dates between three-day events and point-to-points; and to her college friends she was the hard-up au pair fitting in her studies with doing the chores for a mythical English family.”

Julie ventured a comment in support of the dead woman. “We all show different sides of ourselves to the sets of people we mix with.”

Diamond wasn’t having it. “Britt Strand was doing much more than that. This was deception, professional deception, and that’s dangerous. Fatal, in her case.”

“Maybe.”

He said sharply, “Do you have another explanation?”

“Wouldn’t you expect it from a fresh mind?”

He glared at her briefly, recognized his own phrase and softened his expression. “Sorry. You’re telling the story. Don’t let me interrupt,” he said, as if it would make any difference.

Julie picked up the thread again. “She succeeded in convincing everybody she was a foreigner having trouble with her vocabulary.”

“When in fact she was as fluent as you or me,” said he, failing to see any irony in regard to Julie’s frustrated attempts to be fluent.

Doggedly she went on, “The staff believed her and so did the other students. But secretly she was getting the evidence she wanted for her story. She made a friend of the secretary, so she was able to be seen in the office without creating suspicion. We know she photocopied masses of documents because they were found after her death in the locked filing cabinet in her flat. She also chatted up Mountjoy, strung him along and let him think she fancied him—when all she wanted was to soften him up and get incriminating statements.”

As a recapitulation of events Diamond had immersed himself in at the time, all this couldn’t be faulted—but he didn’t hand out bouquets. He said brusquely, “Let’s get to the evening of the murder.”

“Well, he invited her out for a meal.”

“The first time they’d been out together.”

“Yes. They went to the French restaurant, Le Beaujolais.”

“The one in Chapel Row with thousands of drawn corks heaped against the window. I passed it this afternoon.”

Julie waited a moment, just long enough to let him know that she was capable of doing this unaided. “According to the waiter’s statement, they got along well with each other. No arguments. Mountjoy paid the bill and off they went at about nine-thirty. He escorted her back to her flat in Larkhall. She invited him in for coffee. She had the top-floor flat in a three-story house in a residential street. The people downstairs were away in Tenerife, so they had the place to themselves. There’s no question that Mountjoy went in, because fingerprints and matching hairs were found, and he didn’t deny it anyway. He claimed he left after the coffee. She’d asked him some pointed questions about the way he ran his language school and he was in no mood to stay.”

“And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”

“Do you want me to carry on?” Julie asked without altering her equable tone.

“Yes.” He slid his hands under his thighs as if sitting on them would discipline him. “Finish the story.”

“Two days later, the Billingtons, the people downstairs, returned from their holiday and found milk uncollected on the doorstep and mail for Britt on the doormat. There was no message. They were worried. They couldn’t sleep for worrying. Late that night they checked her flat and found her body on the bed, dressed in blue pajamas. Fourteen stab wounds. And those roses that gave the press their headlines.”

“Ah, the roses.”

He recalled the image sharply, thin crimson blooms of the sort imported by florists. At least six flower heads in bud had been forced into the blond woman’s gaping mouth, tips outwards, their rich color contrasting with the pallor of the lips and cheeks. The other half-dozen had been scattered across her corpse. A dozen red roses. The memory was so vivid that in spite of his intention to lay off, Diamond once more picked up the narrative from Julie. “The flowers must have been in the room already. We found the cut stems on the floor. But no card and no wrapping paper. She wasn’t carrying roses when she and Mount joy arrived at the restaurant. We checked every florist in Bath and Bristol. Something over twenty bunches of a dozen red roses were bought that day or the previous one. You wouldn’t think there were that many romantics about.”

“Red roses are also a way of saying sorry,” Julie informed him.

He didn’t seem to think it was relevant. “About half the bunches bought were delivered by the florists, but none to Larkhall. The best explanation is that Mount joy had them with him when he picked her up at the house. Where he bought them, we don’t know.”

Julie asked the salient question, “What was the point of putting them in her mouth?”

He shook his head. “It would take a shrink to answer that. Presumably all those stab thrusts didn’t satisfy him. He had to add a final touch.”

“Red roses have such a strong symbolism,” Julie mused. “It’s the kind of thing a rejected lover might do.”

“Pure frustration, then, after she invited him in at the end of the evening and then refused to come across.”

“But that wasn’t the motive the prosecution went for.”

“Not the prime motive,” he was forced to concede, “but look at it from Mountjoy’s point of view. He’s had the come-on from this attractive student. He buys her roses and takes her out for a meal. They go back to her place and instead of what he’s expecting, she gives him the third degree about his dodgy enrollment system. He gets angry, turns violent and murders her. Catching sight of the red roses he so naively bought, he rips them off the stems and stuffs them into her mouth.”

Julie pondered this scenario. “I suppose it has to be something like that, but you’d think all that stabbing would be enough.”

“Who can say how much is enough? John Mountjoy isn’t noted for self-restraint.”

She picked the pathologist’s report from the stack of papers in front of her. This had given Julie her images of the killing. It ran to fifteen pages of detail accompanied by diagrams and photographs: a preamble listing information about the identification of the body by Winston Billington, the date and place of the postmortem and the identities of those present; a long account of the external examination; the internal examination; followed by the conclusions as to the cause of death. If Julie were asked by Diamond, she would have to admit to having skimmed through much of it. She didn’t possess the anatomical knowledge or the clinical calm to study it fully. The wounds were described minutely, mapped and measured. Some, the report made clear, were shallow; to state that the victim had been stabbed fourteen times was true, but misleading to anyone unfamiliar with this type of attack. Three only had penetrated to any depth; the others had met resistance or been warded off in the struggle, for it was clear that Britt Strand had tried to fight off her attacker. There had been defensive wounds on the fingers of both hands and on the left wrist. No indications had been found of sexual violence. The attack was categorized as fairly typical of stabbings, the cause of death being a wound of the aorta, or principal artery of the body. It had been produced by a pointed, sharp-edged instrument several inches in length.

A photograph taken from above, before the autopsy, showed the concentration of wounds above and around the left breast. The murderer’s intention could not be doubted. One thrust had left an ugly cut in the neck, but the face was unmarked, still beautiful, even with the mouth agape, forced open by the rosebuds crammed into the cavity.

Julie looked down at her hands and found she was pressing back the skin from her fingernails. “I’m not going to find it easy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Working on this. He doesn’t invite sympathy.”

“He’s a shit.”

After an awkward silence she said, “Then why are we doing it? To save Samantha’s life?”

“No.”

The answer baffled her.

Diamond got up and walked to the one small window they had in the storeroom. Down in Manvers Street people had their umbrellas up. “The way I see it, the man is guilty of murder. I’m ninety-nine percent certain. This time yesterday I would have said a hundred percent. A chink of doubt has opened up because of the choice he has made. He could have got clean away, or at least tried. Instead he stakes everything on getting me to admit I was wrong.” He turned to face Julie. “It may be calculated to shake my confidence.”

“Get you to look for a loophole?”

“Exactly. He’s guilty and he still gets me to find him an out. Nothing is ever totally certain in this business. Sow a seed of doubt and you might end up believing Crippen was innocent. Or Christie.”

“Could you fall for that trick?” she said.

His eyes held hers for a moment, moved away and then came back to her. “I don’t know. I hope not.”

“But you still think the case is worth another look?”

“The top brass would be delighted if we sat on our backsides playing dominoes all day. I’d rather spend my time and yours exploring that one percent of uncertainty. I can’t say it will make a jot of difference to Samantha; her best chance lies with Warrilow and his search parties. It’s a trivial pursuit, an intellectual puzzle. If we choose to play, we might as well play seriously. Agreed?”

Julie digested this and finally said, “Agreed.”

In a few minutes he had confided as much in this young woman as anyone he had worked with, but then he had never been asked to work in virtual isolation with so little support from the top, or for so unpromising an outcome. The room itself, their cramped, unforgiving space, was conducive to soul-baring.

“Okay. Just in theory let’s see if it’s possible to put anyone else in the frame,” he said. “Suppose Britt really was alive when Mountjoy left the house that night and someone other than him came in and killed her.”

“Someone she let in herself,” contributed Julie. “There was no evidence of a break-in.”

He nodded. “The murder was done some time before midnight or in the small hours. The pathologist as usual can’t give us an accurate time of death. So we’re looking at someone she trusted enough to admit some time after Mountjoy left. When was that?”

“About ten-thirty.”

“She was already dressed in pajamas—or changed into them while the killer was with her. You mentioned boyfriends. What did we get on her love life?”

“Those two men you mentioned were interviewed. Neither was dating her at the time of the murder.”

“They’d say that, wouldn’t they?”

“Her diary said it. She last saw the horsey type on October the eighth, at his riding-school—but I gather it was purely the riding she went for.”

“The horse riding?”

She didn’t dignify his attempt at bawdiness with a smile.

He picked up the thread again. “And the murder was . . . ?”

“October the eighteenth.”

“What about the rock musician?”

“Jake Pinkerton? He isn’t mentioned at all. You’d need her 1988 diary for him.”

“It wasn’t a personal diary, if I remember, just a record of engagements.”

“Yes. Do you want to see it?” Julie delved into the box file and handed across a laminated book with a Matisse reproduction on the cover.

He said as he opened it, “The point I was making is that she would make a note of dates with boyfriends in here.”

“She did.”

“And it’s tempting to assume that those were the only times she saw them. Do you see what I’m getting at? If she met someone at a party or in the street, she wouldn’t write their names in here.” He turned to October. He remembered seeing the entry for the day of the murder, John Mountjoy’s name and the time 7:30 inscribed in confident rounded letters in blue-green ink. Not the last entry in the diary, for there were engagements noted into December, but it was still salutary to see the name written there, on the fatal day. At the trial the sheer volume of paper evidence—including this diary entry— had made an impact—all those photocopied documents from the college files, each in its transparent folder.

He flicked back a few pages and found the name Marcus occurring regularly in August. Marcus Martin, the horse rider. “I interviewed this thoroughbred myself. Well connected, lives in style in a manor house the other side of Frome.”

“Your notes are here on file. He said they drifted apart.”

“When I saw him he didn’t strike me as a crime-of-passion man. He wasn’t suffering pangs of jealousy. There was another young woman in the house cooking him pancakes.”

“Crepes,
I expect.”

Diamond shot her a surprised look. Her pronunciation had thrown him. “Don’t know. Wasn’t offered any.” He couldn’t fathom why Julie was so quick to condemn another woman’s cooking. “The point is that Marcus was well-adjusted.”

“And with an alibi for the night of the murder.”

“For what it was worth.”

“Didn’t you believe it?”

“Your comment just now summed it up. The alibi was supplied by the pancake maker. He spent the night at her flat, she claimed.”

As if that were settled, he started turning the pages of the diary again.

Julie anticipated him. “The other boyfriend was the rock musician, Jake Pinkerton.”