The House Sitter (8 page)

“Are we talking fashion here?”

“Absolutely. For an academic, she was a neat dresser. She knew what was out there and made sure she wore it.”

“The latest, you mean?”

“No. The best. The top designer labels.”

“That must have used up most of her salary.”

“Emma wasn’t short of money. I think her parents died a few years ago and left her comfortably off.”

“Did she have a lifestyle to go with it?”

“Depends what you mean. She was living at a good address in Great Pulteney Street. Drove a dream of a sports car that must have cost a bomb. But she wasn’t one for partying or clubbing. I think she just loved the feeling that she was class. Shoes, hair, make-up, the works. Not showy. Elegant.”

“To attract?”

“I don’t think attraction was in her scheme of things. Obviously men were interested, but she didn’t encourage them. Certainly not in the workplace, anyway.”

“She preferred women?”

A shake of the head. “If she did, I never got a hint of it. No, she had her own agenda to look a million dollars and that was it.” Helen Sparks laughed heartily. “You’ve seen the rest of this lot. She was in a minority of one.”

“Two, I would think.”

She accepted the compliment with a shrug and a wry smile.

“Where was she from?”

“Liverpool, originally, but I don’t think she had anyone left up there. Most of her travelling was to help the police.”

“So she talked about the work she did, the profiling?”

“Once or twice when she got back from a case she mentioned what it was about. There were some rapes in a Welsh town, and she put together a profile of the man that definitely helped them to make an arrest. She also helped with a horrid case in Yorkshire, of someone maiming farm animals. She said it became fairly obvious which village the man came from. They caught him in the act.”

“What about the case she was involved in this time? Did she say anything at all?”

Dr Sparks leaned back, frowning, trying to remember. “One Thursday, she said she wouldn’t be in for a few days, and if I had to cover for her, would I arrange to show the final year students a film we have of juvenile offenders talking about their attitude to crime. I think I asked her where she was going this time and she said she wasn’t allowed to speak about it. I said, ‘Big time, then?’ and she said, ‘Huge, if it’s true.’ ”

“‘
Huge
.’ She said that?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“‘
If it’s true
.’ I wonder what she meant by that.”

“I’ve no idea.”

“And that was all?”

“Yes, apart from some messages for students about assignments.”

“How was she when she told you this? Calm?”

“Yes, and kind of thoughtful, as if her mind was already on the job she had to do.”

“Is there anyone else she might have spoken to?”

“Professor Chromik, I suppose.”

“He says she didn’t tell him anything,” Diamond said. He hesitated before asking, “Is it just me, or does he treat everyone as if they crawled out from under a stone?”

She smiled faintly. “It isn’t just you.”

“Did Emma have enemies?”

“In the department? Not really. You couldn’t dislike her.”

“Students?”

She drew back, surprised by the suggestion.

He said, “She graded them, presumably. Her marking might affect the class of degree they got, right?”

“It’s not so simple as that. They’re being assessed all the time by different people.”

“But one of them could hold a grudge against a member of staff if he felt he was being consistently undervalued?”

“Theoretically, but I don’t think they’d resort to murder.”

Diamond disagreed, and explained why. “Some students buckle under the pressure. Look at the suicide rate in universities.”

“That’s another matter,” Helen Sparks said sharply. “I wouldn’t accept a link with murder, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“But if someone felt their problems were inflicted by one of the staff, the anger might be focused there, instead of internally.”

“Ho-hum.”

“What do you mean—ho-hum?”

“These are just assertions,” she said. “You don’t have any data base to support them.”

“There won’t be data. Murder is an extreme act.”

“That’s no reason to be suspicious of students.”

“Helen, I have to be suspicious of everyone.”

He asked her to introduce him to more of her colleagues, and he met three others on the staff. All professed to having been on good terms with the saintly Emma. It was obvious no one would admit to being on
bad
terms with her. Maybe he should have delayed the questions until they’d all had a few more drinks.

He left the party disappointed, feeling he’d not learned much from the stroppy professor and his uncritical staff.

“Maybe someone is knocking off members of MI6,” Leaman said, not entirely joking.

“Or the royals—and no one is being told,” Ingeborg said.

“The corgis?” Halliwell said.

“Had your fun?” Diamond said with a sniff. “Anyone got any more suggestions? Whatever she was asked to do, we need to find out. As I understand it, profilers work with serial cases. There can’t be that many under investigation. I want you to start ferreting, Keith.”

“Using HOLMES?”

Diamond gave him a glare.

“The computer, guv.”

“Fine. By all means.” In time, he’d remembered HOLMES was one of those acronyms he found so hard to take seriously: Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. In theory it collated information on similar serious crimes. Diamond’s objection to HOLMES was that as soon as the computer came up with cases in different authorities, someone of Assistant Chief Constable rank was appointed to coordinate the efforts of the various SIOs. One more infliction. “But ask around as well. Down in Bognor they claim there aren’t any serial crimes under investigation.”

“If it’s hush-hush . . .”

“Exactly.”

“Are they up to this—the Bognor lot?” Halliwell asked.

“I think so. Hen Mallin, the SIO, has a grasp of what’s going on, and there’s a bright young woman DS helping her. They’re having trouble finding genuine witnesses. That’s the main problem.”

“From a crowded beach?” Ingeborg said in surprise.

“They put out a TV appeal and had plenty of uptake, but not one was any use. The only person they can definitely link to the case is the fellow who found the body, and he’s done the disappearing act.”

“He has to be a suspect, then.”

“He is. Said his name was Smith.”

“That’s suspicious in itself,” Leaman said.

Ingeborg’s big eyes flashed fiercely. “Thank you for that.”

Diamond said, “Bognor police won’t make much headway unless we turn up something definite on Emma Tysoe. I didn’t get much from her workmates.”

“Colleagues,” Ingeborg murmured.

“You went to the home address?”

“Great Pulteney Street. There’s a big pile of mail I brought back, most of it junk, of course. A couple of holiday postcards. A short letter from her sister in South Africa saying the husband went into hospital. Various bills.”

“Bank statements?”

“Yes. She has a current account with about fifteen hundred in credit, and two hundred grand on deposit.”

“A lady of means. Did you get into the flat?”

She nodded. “Eventually. She has one of those code-operated locks on her front door. It’s the garden flat, amazingly tidy. Living room, bedroom, study and bathroom. The main room is tastefully furnished in pale blue and yellow.”

“We don’t need the colour schemes,” Diamond said. “Did you find anything that would tell us what she was up to in recent weeks? Diary, calendar, phone pad?”

“We looked, of course. I got the impression she’s organised. There’s not much lying around.”

“In other words, you didn’t find anything.”

He was confident Ingeborg had made a thorough search.

She said, “There’s an answerphone and I brought back the cassette. I’ve listened to it twice over, and I really believe there’s nothing of interest on it.”

“Address book?”

“She must have taken it with her.”

“Computer, then?”

“There’s one in the office, and she had a laptop as well, because we found the user’s guide. I didn’t attempt to look at the computer. I arranged for Clive to collect it.”

Clive was the whizzkid who handled all computer queries at the Bath nick. He would go through the files and extract anything of importance. Presumably Emma had written reports on previous cases. With luck, there might be e-mail correspondence about the new investigation.

“Is that it, then?” he asked Ingeborg.

“She drives a sports car, dark green.”

“Registration? Make? Have you checked with the PNC?”

The colour came to Ingeborg’s cheeks. “Bognor are onto it. They expect to trace it down there.”

“I don’t mind who checks so long as we’re informed. What else have you got?”

“She spends a lot on clothes. And she must be interested in golf. There was a photo of some golfer next to the computer, and it was inscribed to her. Do you play golf, guv?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you mob. It’s the high-flyers’ game, isn’t it? I’d be wearing white gloves and taking the salute at Hendon.”

He summed up by handing out duties. Ingeborg was to get onto Clive for a speedy report on the contents of the computer. She would also make contact with the sister in South Africa. Leaman would set up a mini-incident room. Halliwell would see what HOLMES could deliver on serial crimes in the coastal counties of Sussex and Hampshire.

Diamond himself would get onto the man at Bramshill who kept the list of profilers. Someone at the top knew what Emma Tysoe had been up to.

8

After reporting to an armed officer at the battlemented gatehouse, he was told to drive up to the house. Facing him at the end of the long, straight avenue was a building that made the word “house” seem inadequate, for this was one of the stately homes of England, a Jacobean mansion with a south front that in its time had drawn gasps of awe from hardened policemen of all ranks. The brick facade rose three storeys, dominated by a huge semi-circular oriel window, mullioned and double-transomed, above a triple-bayed loggia. At each side were three tiers of pilasters. Vast side wings, also triple-bayed, projected on either end.

Mindful of his parking error at the golf club, he picked a bay well away from the main entrance and walked back, pausing only to buff his toecaps on the backs of his trousers. His appointment was with a civilian whose name on the phone had sounded like Hidden Camera. It turned out to be Haydn Cameron. But cameras hidden and visible are at Bramshill in plenty. This academy for top policemen is more secure than the average prison. Someone had watched him polish his shoes.

Inside, he gave his name and was directed to the National Crime Faculty. It sounds like a college for crooks, he thought. What names these desk detectives dream up. He stepped through the Great Hall, panelled from floor to ceiling, into a waiting area where, if he felt so inclined, he could leaf through the latest
Police
Review
, or
The Times
. Nothing so subversive as the
Guardian.

His spirits improved when a bright-eyed young woman with flame-coloured hair came in, asked him his name and invited him upstairs, that is, up the exquisitely carved stairs. On the way she told him that the staircase had been built in the reign of Charles II, adding with a bit of a giggle that it didn’t belong to Bramshill. It had been plundered from some other mansion during the nineteenth century. He smiled at that. She was doing her best to put him at ease, and a pleasing thought crossed his mind. “Your name isn’t Heidi, by any chance?”

She looked puzzled and shook her head.

“I thought I might have misheard it,” he said. “Heidi Cameron?”

“Sorry. No.”

“Or is Haydn one of these unisex names?”

She was highly amused. “Now I know what you’re on about, and you’ve got to be joking. I’m not going to interview you. I’m just the gofer here.”

Wishful thinking. He was shown into the office of an overweight, middle-aged man with a black eye-patch and hair tinted boot-polish brown. The charming gofer went. And closed the door on them.

“What’s it like out there?” the real Haydn Cameron asked, as if he never left the office.

“Not so bad,” Diamond answered.

“Good journey?”

He tried an ice-breaker. “The last part was the best.”

“Oh?”

“Following the young lady upstairs.”

It hadn’t broken the ice here. “I don’t have a great deal of time, superintendent.” Cameron spoke Diamond’s rank as if it was an insult. Probably was, in this place.

“Let’s get to it, then.”

He got a sharp look for that. What did the man expect? Yes, sir, no, sir? He was just a civilian.

“We run regular courses on how to conduct murder enquiries for SIOs such as yourself. According to my records you haven’t attended one.”

The old blood pressure rose several notches and this wasn’t a good moment to have a coronary. Calm down and speak to the pompous prat in his own language, he told himself. “No, I haven’t found a window of opportunity yet.”

That was met with a glare. “All the courses are oversubscribed,” Cameron said with pride.

“That could be why you haven’t seen me, then.”

“You could go on the waiting list.”

There was a dangerous lack of contact here. Diamond tried not to curl his lip. “The list that interests me is the approved list of offender profilers.”

“Oh?”

“I was told you deal with it. Each request for assistance goes through your office.”

Everyone in the police knew why the list was centrally controlled. After psychological offender profiling burst into the headlines in January 1988 following the conviction of John Duffy, the serial rapist and killer, forces up and down the country had turned to psychologists for help in tracking down serial offenders. Not all of the so-called experts were up to the challenge. A top-level decision had been made to oversee the use of profilers.

Personally, Diamond had never consulted a profiler. This wasn’t from any prejudice, but simply because the cases he’d investigated weren’t serial crimes in the usual sense of the term.

“But I understood from your call,” Cameron said, “that this isn’t a routine request.”

“Right,” Diamond responded. “It’s about the murder of one of the profilers on your list, Dr Emma Tysoe.”

“Which is why I made an exception and agreed to meet you. We’re not unaware of the case.”

“Did you meet her personally?”

“Yes, several times,” Cameron said. “Everyone we approve has been vetted.” He glanced at his notes. “Dr Tysoe has been on the list since February nineteen ninety-nine. She worked on five inquiries.”

“I heard she was good at it.”

“Exceptionally good.”

“Do you mind telling me how it works? When an SIO asks you to recommend someone, do you look at your list and choose a name?”

“It isn’t just a matter of seeing who is available,” Cameron said acidly. “The matching of the profiler to the case is far from simple. All kinds of criteria come into play.”

“Such as where they live?”

Not a good suggestion. Diamond got a basilisk stare from the seeing eye. “That’s of trifling importance. You really ought to do the course.”

This was not a comfortable interview. “You mentioned all kinds of criteria,” Diamond prompted him.

Cameron braced himself with a wriggle of the shoulders and a tilt of the chin and started again. “The term psychological offender profiler is a useful label, but I have to point out that it includes several different types of expert. There are currently twenty-six on my list—twenty-five, now, unfortunately—and if you asked each of them to provide a job description you’d get twenty-five different answers. Some stress the statistical element and others the clinical. There are those who like to be detached about the whole business and those who involve themselves closely with the police team. Those who use strict scientific methodology and those who are more intuitive.”

“How did you class Emma Tysoe?”

“She was one of the latter.”

“Intuitive?”

Cameron sighed and rolled the eye. “I thought you’d jump on that word. It gives the impression of guesswork.”

“I didn’t take it that way.”

A better response, it seemed. A note of conciliation, if not approval, crept into the conversation. “All right. She was a psychologist, as you know, not a psychiatrist, not medically trained. Her approach was more theoretical than hands-on. But it was based on a remarkable understanding of the criminal mind. I’ve heard from officers who worked with her that she somehow immersed herself in the thinking of the offender and predicted what would happen next, and very often where, and when.”

“That’s the intuitive part?”

“Yes, but only as a result of minute observation of all the data from the previous crimes. To give you an example, she assisted on a case of serial rape in North Wales. The attacks were spread over a long period, about six or seven years, and the local force were getting nowhere. Emma Tysoe was brought in, read the statements, visited the scenes, spoke to all of the victims, including several who were stalked but not attacked. By analysing the data—and interpreting the behaviour of the rapist— she decided he had spent most of his youth in custody or institutions and lived with someone of his own sex who dominated him—his elder brother, as it turned out. She said because of the way he picked his victims it was clear he was actually in awe of women. He would spend weeks or months stalking them, but not in a threatening way, and only rarely choosing to attack them.”

“More like a Peeping Tom?”

“Not at all.”

Another wrong note.

“He was on the lookout for certain women who appeared even more submissive than he was. Dr Tysoe produced her findings, estimated the perpetrator’s age, intelligence and the type of work he would do, and it led them to a man they’d disregarded much earlier, a farm worker. Broken home, fostering, youth custody, just as she’d said. On his release he’d ended up living with the bullying brother. He confessed straight away. That’s only one example.”

“So Emma got to be one of your star performers.”

The staring eye told Diamond he still hadn’t clicked with this mandarin. “Please. This isn’t show business. Her name came up more frequently after that. Word travels from one authority to another.”

“Do you, personally, deal with all the requests?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Her latest assignment?”

“That’s confidential, also.”

He couldn’t take much more of this evasion. “I’m investigating a murder, Mr Cameron. I’m entitled to some answers.”

“Correction. Bognor Police are handling the investigation, not you. Chief Inspector Mallin is the SIO.” Cameron was well briefed.

“But the victim lived on my patch. In that sense it’s a joint enquiry.”

“Does she know you’re here?”

“Hen Mallin? She will, if I manage to chip out any information at all.”

“In other words, you’re doing this off your own bat,” Cameron said. “That’s the way you work, I’m told. Bull at a gate.”

Better a bull at a gate than a dog in a manger, Diamond thought, and wisely kept it to himself. Instead, he said with so much tact it was painful, “You obviously have a high regard for Dr Tysoe’s work as a profiler. Why not help us find her murderer?”

“By passing on classified information?”

“Sensitive, is it?”

“We run this service on the need to know principle. Our judgement is that you don’t need to know.”

Great, he thought. More malpractice and corruption is perpetrated under the banner of the need to know principle than in the mafia. “So I’ve come all this way for nothing.”

Cameron didn’t answer. He looked at the ceiling with the air of a bored host waiting for the last guest to leave.

“If Hen Mallin came, would you do business with her?”

“We don’t ‘do business’.”

“Would you tell her any more than you’ve told me?”

“No—for the same reason.”

All this stonewalling had incensed Diamond. He couldn’t pull his punches any longer. “In the real world, Mr Cameron, I’d have you for obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty.”

“I’m sure you’d try, superintendent.”

“She was one of your experts. Don’t you give a toss what happened to her?”

That touched a raw nerve. “Of course we care, damn it! There’s no evidence of a link between her murder and the case she was advising on.”

“The evidence isn’t there because it hasn’t been investigated.”

“The incidents are unrelated.”

“How can you be so sure? She was strangled for no apparent reason.”

“Have you enquired into her personal life?” Cameron asked in an unsubtle shifting of the ground.

“There isn’t much to speak of.”

“Her work, then? The university?”

“We’re looking at it, of course. The problem is that we have this black hole—the last ten days of her life when we don’t know what she was doing, who she was meeting, where she was based, even. Her body turns up on a beach in Sussex. That’s it. How can we conduct a murder enquiry without knowing any of these things?”

Cameron didn’t move a muscle.

“You might as well tell me,” Diamond persisted. “You’ve obviously been looking at my personal file, so you’ll know I’m a stubborn cuss.”

“Anyone can see that.”

“Well, then?”

Cameron shook his head and sighed.

Sensing a small advantage, Diamond weighed in with another attempt. “If I don’t get answers from you today, I’ll start rooting for them.”

No response.

“It’s my job.”

And no response to that, either.

“How else can I find the truth? I’ll beetle away until I get there. It could be far more damaging than finding out from you today.”

He seemed to have made some impact at last, because Cameron said, “Sit there, will you? I have to speak to someone.” He got up and left the room.

Trying not to be over-encouraged, Diamond amused himself swaying back in the chair, looking for the gleam of a camera lens in the panelled walls. He was sure this interview would be kept for training purposes. How to deal with dickheads from the sticks.

Five minutes at least passed before Cameron returned and invited Diamond to go with him. He was out of that chair like a game-show volunteer. They entered the south-east wing, the business end of the house, by way of a magnificent drawing room with a marble chimneypiece and tapestries of classical scenes, and so into the library, a place of quite different proportions, which in the heyday of the house must have been the Long Gallery where the inmates and their guests promenaded. He was taken through a recessed, almost hidden door into a low-ceilinged office where a small man with a shock of white hair stood looking at a computer screen. Whatever was on the screen was more gripping than his visitors, because he didn’t give them a glance.

Cameron stated Diamond’s rank and name without any attempt at a two-way introduction. The need to know principle in action again. Obviously this was someone pretty high in the Bramshill pecking order. Diamond privately dubbed him the Big White Chief.

Closing the door after him, Cameron left the room, which was a relief.