Free The Summons by Peter Lovesey Page A

results. He knows Mountjoy. He sent him down. He’s our best hope in this emergency. I’m willing to back him one hundred percent.”
    “Without surveillance?” said Diamond.
    “Yes.”
    “No bugs?”
    “No bugs.”
    Warrilow stated piously, “I should like my dissent placed on record.”
    “So be it,” said Farr-Jones without looking at him. “Are you ready to leave at once, Mr. Diamond?”
    Decision time. He’d talked some sense into the police. Now was he ready to take on Mountjoy?
    “If someone will call a taxi. I’m sorry about the car you had ready, John. What is it, by the way?”
    Wigfull frowned. “The make? A Vauxhall Cavalier.”
    Diamond grinned.
    “What’s funny?” asked Farr-Jones.
    “The idea of taking a Cavaliet up to Lansdown. Didn’t they lose the Civil War?”

    A long-serving Abbey Radio cab rattled up Broad Street in a slow stream of traffic past familiar landmarks like the Moon and Sixpence and the Postal Museum, with Peter Diamond beside the driver spotting the changes. The disfiguring grime on the stonework of St. Michael’s had been removed, leaving an unexpectedly handsome church. Rossiter’s, where Steph had always bought her greeting cards, remained, but the little cafe two doors up, where students used to congregate, renowned for its cheap, wholesome vegetable soup, had gone. Somehow the Bath Book Exchange had survived the recession, still displaying secondhand books with alluringly handwritten descriptions of their contents; he’d once found a fine copy of Fabian of the Yard there, a volume he treasured. If the city shops had changed, how much more had detective work, and not for the better in Diamond’s opinion; these days it was all bureaucrats and boffins. Strange, then, that this morning the central nick, that barracklike block in Manvers Street, had felt like his second home.
    It was as well that Farr-Jones and the others hadn’t been privy to his thoughts. He didn’t want them getting the idea he missed the action. Far better if they imagined he had found his true vocation retrieving supermarket trolleys from car parks.
    The danger in this one-man mission was real. Mountjoy could draw a gun and kill him. But as Diamond’s pulse quickened and his skin prickled in anticipation he knew that the razor’s edge was what he had craved for the last two years.
    “Where do you want to be dropped?” the taxi driver asked. They’d motored out of the city and the buildings were separated by stretches of open land. The enfenced Ministry of Defense buildings came up on the right and Beckford’s Tower on the left.
    “Slow down a bit, would you? It’s only a quarter of a mile past the racecourse,” Diamond said, thinking as the countryside opened out that Mount joy had chosen well. Any police vehicles here would be conspicuous for miles.
    They started to acquire a tail of vehicles. Except on race days drivers expected to travel fast along this stretch toward the M4, but overtaking was difficult. Some speed merchant behind was repeatedly flashing his headlights.
    “There’s a sign ahead, if you’d take it more slowly.”
    “If I go any slower, mate, you can walk in front with a red flag.”
    It pointed the route of the Cotswold Way. “There’s a space on the right. Can you pull in over there?” Diamond had caught a tantalizing glimpse of a stone structure not more than two hundred meters from the road.
    Of course it was on the opposite side and of course they were compelled to stop for up to a minute to wait for a gap in the oncoming traffic. The procession behind them grew and when the taxi ultimately reached the sanctuary of the small space by the sign for the Cotswold Way a parade of angry faces glared at them from car windows. If anything untoward happened in the next few minutes, there would be no lack of witnesses claiming to have been the last to see Peter Diamond alive.
    Ignoring them all, he settled the fare and eyed the stile he would need to climb over to