The Summons (17 page)

A woman—not Shirl—stepped out of an ancient double-decker bus and Diamond asked if G.B. was about.

She must have been about thirty, with a weathered, intelligent face and cropped hair. She said as her gaze moved from one to the other, assessing their potential for trouble, “Who wants him?”

“I’m Peter Diamond. This is Julie Hargreaves. Friends of Shirl.” Which was overstating it, but worth trying.

“Shirl?”

“Shirl. You must know Shirl. Only we’d like to meet G.B.”

The exchange was interrupted by a sudden shout of, “No! Don’t touch me, you bastard! Get away!” from the interior of a large black van close by. A piercing scream followed. A door in the side of the van was flung open and a young woman in just a T-shirt and knickers fell out, picked herself up and ran sobbing across the clearing to a caravan. In the doorway of the van she had left stood a man holding a broad leather belt. He slammed the door shut.

“Was that him?” Diamond enquired.

“G.B.?” Their informant looked more surprised by the question than the incident. “No. Follow me.” She took them around the side of the bus and back into the wood again, or so it appeared until a short path brought them to another clearing where a large, sleek camper van was parked in isolation, a stately home on wheels, not more than two years old according to its number plate. It had a TV dish attached to the side.

“Wait.” The woman rapped on the door with her knuckles.

It was Shirl who opened it. She looked beyond the woman, sighted Diamond and Julie and put her hand to her throat. She turned and said something inaudible inside the van. A few words were spoken and then she stepped down and said with a resentful note, “You’re to go in.” She, it seemed, had been ordered to leave.

G.B. civilly got up to greet his visitors when they entered. He wasn’t built for life in a van; he had to dip his head, although Diamond, no midget, could stand upright with ease. Neither did the accent sound right for the traveling life. It was more Radley than Romany. “Do find yourselves somewhere to sit down. You want some background on that Swedish woman who was murdered in Bath, I gather.”

This was the assurance G.B. needed, apparently. No mention of other matters. He’d wanted to agree on the agenda first.

Diamond gave a nod. “Shirl did a fine job for you. She could have a future in the CID if she wanted.”

“Not if she steps out of line. I didn’t send her to you.”

“She acted independently?”

“Women,” said G.B.

No question: he had altered. Whereas his head had been shaven in the photo Diamond possessed, he now sported a crisp haircut that would not have looked out of place in a Martini commercial. His black sweater, jeans and designer trainers were straight out of GQ: the new-look G.B. was a dapper figure with a disarming smile. All the menace of dress and demeanor had been discarded, except the one feature he could not alter, the “lazy” left eye that Prue Shorter’s camera had caught. Recalling the photograph, and Marcus Martin’s account of the greatcoated crusty who had created a sideshow at the window of the Canary cafe, this was a transformation to rank with the emergence of a butterfly.

The van, too, was luxuriously fitted, the curtains, cushions and seat coverings in a matching fabric that could have come from Liberty’s. G.B. had gone upmarket, but why? Diamond’s quick assessment was that this was probably a drug pusher in the process of distancing himself from the mugs who used the stuff. It was a familiar scenario. The pusher first identifies his market by mingling with the potential buyers, dressing as they do. In time he gets rich and gives up that pretense. The crusties depended on G.B. now. If he’d come dressed in a bowler hat and pinstripes they’d still buy from him.

“G.B.—are those your initials?” Diamond asked when he had lowered himself onto a bench with as much dignity as a fat man could. He was civil in his manner to G.B. The drugs connection, if any, was someone else’s concern.

G.B. answered, “No, it’s just a nickname for a patriotic fellow who used to keep a bulldog with a Union Jack coat. Tea or coffee?”

They hadn’t expected the offer, but it seemed to go with the new image. “Tea for me.”

“Me, too,” said Julie.

“So what’s your real name?”

“G.B. I answer to G.B.,” he said smoothly. “I’ve been called worse things in my time, so I settled for that.”

Diamond moved on to more urgent business. “We didn’t meet at the time of the Britt Strand murder.”

“No reason to,” G.B. said with his back turned, attending to the kettle.

“Except that you apparently met Miss Strand in the weeks leading up to her death and we tried to interview everyone.”

“Yes, I met her,” G.B. admitted, turning to face them, “but so did hundreds of other people, I reckon. When you think about all the contacts Britt must have made in the course of a week—”

“It was our job to trace them,” Diamond said to cut him off. “We missed you the first time around.”

G.B. gave a smile of sympathy. “It must be deeply frustrating. You’ll never trace everyone, particularly after so long.”

“We’ll do our best.”

“Memories go slack.”

“We’ll prod them, then.”

“The best of luck.”

Diamond thought as he listened that G.B. was trying a mite too hard to present himself as the genial, laid-back host. It was more than likely that drugs were hidden somewhere in the caravan, which could account for his behavior, but there was always the chance it was prompted by something more relevant to the present investigation. “Would you care to tell us how you came to meet Britt Strand?”

He said without hesitation, “She came looking for me. This was the summer before she died. I heard that this blond woman was chatting up the crusties outside the pump room, asking about me. I was damned sure it was some spy from the social security office, so I kept a low profile. But eventually she nailed me. I was living in a squat in Trim Street at the time and she waited on the corner and stepped out as I was going past. I remember being extremely abusive, but she wouldn’t back off.”

“Did she say what she wanted?”

“Right off. She told me she was a journalist researching a story about Trim Street. Flashed her press card. It didn’t open doors with me, I can tell you. I didn’t want to be written up in the tabloids.”

“But she wasn’t from the tabloids.”

“Would you believe anything a press reporter told you?” G.B. said as he tossed teabags into three mugs. “She insisted it wasn’t me personally, it was the squat that interested her and that made me even more suspicious. When you’re living in a squat, you need publicity like Custer needed more Indians. I told her exactly that and she offered me fifty quid for an exclusive, with pictures of the squat and no names to be published. She said the story wouldn’t appear for six months and then only in upmarket magazines selling abroad. I was mystified, I can tell you. Why the hell should someone in France or America want to read about a bunch of crusties squatting in Bath?”

Diamond dearly wanted to know. “Did you ask?”

“Actually, no.”

“You didn’t want to talk yourself out of fifty pounds?”

G.B. grinned. “It was enough to keep me sweet. This lady was loaded. Smart clothes, much too snazzy for the social worker I’d first thought was on to me. When she handed me a tenner just to set up another meeting, I didn’t
give
it back.”

“You got into negotiations?”

“I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that. We met a couple of times in Victoria Park.”

“But by arrangement?”

“Naturally.”

“Why in the park? Why not in Abbey Churchyard where you people congregate?”

He said with a sly grin, “The park was more private, wasn’t it?”

“You didn’t want your fellow squatters to know you were doing a deal?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you meant it.”

The kettle had suddenly become altogether more interesting to G.B. than his visitors.

Diamond kept the momentum up. “This was during the summer of 1990?”

“September or thereabouts,” G.B. answered without looking up. “The weather was still okay. We sat on the grass and talked.”

“Britt sat down with you? Did she fancy a bit of rough?”

A blank stare. Even Diamond decided on consideration that it was a tactless remark.

Partly to soften it, he turned to Julie and said, “I hope you’re not a feminist.” Then he told G.B., “Let’s face it, she was extremely attractive and she wanted a favor from you. You’re telling me that all you two did was sit down together in Victoria Park and talked? You just said the park was private.”

“Compared to the Abbey Churchyard it is. Are you trying to pin something on me, Mr. Diamond? Britt and I were not lovers. Okay, we got into a clinch once or twice and yes, I fancied her, but Victoria Park isn’t
that
private.”

“I didn’t know you were bashful.”

“It takes two.”

“She
was bashful?”

“She was class.”

Diamond said after a pause, “So the upshot was that Britt had her way, but you didn’t?”

He laughed. “You mean she screwed me? Yes, that sums it up. She got the deal she wanted.”

“I wouldn’t say she screwed you if you got the fifty pounds.”

“I earned every penny. I had to talk my Trim Street mates into posing for poncy photographs. That wasn’t easy. They all had a share of the fee,” G.B. was quick to add.

“So what happened?”

“She turned up one evening with her fat photographer and took masses of pictures.”

“We’ve seen some of them,” said Diamond.

“That’s more than I have. She dropped me like a stone after the photo session. Black or white?”

After the tea was poured and handed out, Diamond picked up the thread again. “Did I
get
the impression that you wished you’d seen her again?”

“Britt Strand was a prick-teaser,” G.B. said in a nonchalant way. “She fooled me and I reckon she fooled plenty of others in her time.”

“Did you try to see her again?” Diamond pressed, increasingly convinced that there was more to come. For all his efforts to play it down, G.B.’s vanity had been badly injured by Britt Strand.

G.B. took time over his response. Finally he said, “Yes, a couple of times I tried. I found out where she lived, in Larkhall. Looked her up in the phone book. Journalists have to have phones, don’t they? I tried calling the number a couple of times and all I got was an answerphone.”

“Did you leave a message?”

“No. I wanted to speak to her in person.”

“Because you were angry?”

“No, because I’m an idiot. I still thought she fancied me. It was only after she was dead that all that stuff came out about the blokes she’d strung along—the pop music man and the show jumper and that poor sod Mountjoy.”

For the moment, Diamond resisted the urge to ask about Mountjoy. “You couldn’t reach her on the phone, so what did you do about it?”

“I went to the house a couple of times and she wasn’t in, or wasn’t answering. Nobody was answering.”

“When exactly was this?”

He gave a shrug. “Can
you
remember things from four years back?”

“The photo session in Trim Street was ten days before she died,” Diamond prompted him, “and you say you went to the house a couple of times after that. By day?”

“Twice. And once at night.”

“At
night?”

He sighed as if it was all too tedious to relate. “One evening one of the crusties from the squat was in Queen Square with a couple of mates and a bottle of cider. They happened to spot Britt with some man going into that French restaurant, the Beaujolais. Thought it was a great joke, knowing I fancied my chances with her, and came back to the squat to give me a hard time.”

Julie started to say, “This must have been—” before Diamond silenced her with a look.

G.B. completed the statement for her: “... the night she was topped. Right. Mountjoy was her date.”

“How do you know it was Mountjoy?” Diamond asked.

“I haven’t finished, have I? As I explained, back at the squat those guys really took the piss, saying the bloke she was with was a middle-aged wimp and stuff like that. I walked out after a bit, said I was taking the dog for a walk, and you know where I went, of course. The restaurant is only a short walk from Trim Street. I wanted to see if it was true. I was in a foul mood and ready to make a scene, so I marched straight into the place with my dog and looked around, but she wasn’t in there. This was getting on in the evening, I suppose. A couple of hours or more had passed since my so-called mates had seen the couple going in. I could see some of the tables had been cleared. I felt cheated. I wanted to know for sure if she’d started up with someone else. So I hoofed it up to Larkhall, where she lived. Just to satisfy myself, okay?”

“Okay,” said Diamond. “What happened?”

“It’s about a mile to walk there and I calmed down a lot, but I was still too curious to give up. I got to the street.”

“What time?”

“No idea. I didn’t carry a watch in those days.”

“Before midnight?”

“More like eleven. There was a light on upstairs, but I couldn’t be sure
it
was Britt’s flat. All I had was the house number. I sat on a wall across the street and watched. After a bit, the light went on downstairs and the front door opened and a bloke came out. I’m certain it was Mountjoy. I’ve seen his picture in the papers.”

If true, this really was sensational and Diamond didn’t conceal the excitement he felt. “Did anyone come to the door with him?”

“She was there, yes. I had a clear view.”

“You mean
Britt?”

“Who else?”

“You’re sure of this?”

“Hundred percent.”

“How was she dressed?”

“In a skirt and blouse buttoned to the neck—and if that surprises you, it’s nothing to the surprise I had. What’s more, there was no embrace, nothing. Not even a few civil words. She shut the door fast, before he was through the gate. He didn’t look back, either. Marched off up the street. That was the end of it. He didn’t kill her. You banged up an innocent man, Mr. Diamond.”

“And you withheld vital information from the police,” Diamond retorted, which was an agile reaction considering the force of what had just been said. “Why didn’t you come forward?”