Free The House Sitter by Peter Lovesey Page B

Presumably she lives or works there if they reported her missing.”
    “Are you sure?” the young-sounding sergeant in Bath queried. “She only went onto Missing Persons yesterday.”
    “Would I call you if I didn’t think this was a good match?” Stella said.
    “It’s so quick, though.”
    “Not for us. We’ve had a body on our hands for twelve days. Can you send someone to look at it?”
    “The next of kin, you mean? You’ll have to be patient with me. I’m not fully up with it.”
    “Why not? It’s been on national television. Didn’t I tell you she was murdered?”
    “Yikes—you didn’t.”
    “So you’d better get up with it fast. Are you CID?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Why don’t you get hold of someone who is and ask him to call me in the next ten minutes? I’m DS Gregson, at the incident room, Bognor police station.”
    The name of Bognor never fails to kindle a smile. There is a story told of that staid old monarch, George V, that it was his favourite seaside place, and on his deathbed he was offered the incentive that if he got better he might care to visit Bognor, whereupon he uttered his last words, “Bugger Bognor”—and expired. According to his biographer, they were not his last words at all. He spoke them in happier circumstances when told that thanks to his patronage Bognor was about to be accorded special status as Bognor Regis. It’s still worthy of a smile.
    “ Bognor ?” Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond repeated.
    “But the body was found at Wightview Sands,” the sergeant who had taken the call informed him, then, listening to his own words and thinking how daft these places sounded, wished himself anywhere but in Diamond’s office.
    However, Diamond said without a trace of side, “I know Wightview Sands. Big stretch of sand and a bloody long line of beach huts. And this is murder, you say?”
    “They say, sir.”
    “A Bath woman?”
    “Emma Tysoe. A profiler.”
    “A what?”
    “Psychological offender profiler. She helps out in murder enquiries.”
    “She’s never helped me.”
    The sergeant was tempted to say Perhaps you didn’t ask. Wisely, he kept it to himself. “All I know is that she was reported missing by the university. She often goes away on cases connected with her work, but she always keeps in touch with the department. This time she didn’t get in touch. After some days, they got concerned.”
    “Where does she live?”
    “A flat in Great Pulteney Street.”
    “Posh address. There must be money in profiling, sergeant.”
    “It’s only a basement flat, sir.”
    “Garden apartment,” Diamond said in the tone of an upmarket estate agent. “No such thing as a basement flat in Great Pulteney Street. Why haven’t I heard of this woman before?”
    The sergeant sidestepped that one.
    “How was she topped?” Diamond asked.
    “Strangled. It’s been in the papers.”
    “It’ll be all over them when they know what she did for a living. Strangled on a beach?”
    “On a Sunday afternoon when everyone was down there.”
    “Odd.”
    “They don’t have any witnesses either.”
    “People are holding back, you mean? Someone must have seen it. This is weird. You’ve got me all of a quiver, sergeant.”
    He sent a couple of young detectives to Great Pulteney Street to seal the missing woman’s flat and talk to the neighbours. One of them was DC Ingeborg Smith, the sometime newshound, bright, blonde and eager to impress, recently enlisted to the CID after serving her two years in uniform. He asked Keith Halliwell, his trusty DI, to go up to the university and establish that Emma Tysoe was known to the Psychology Department.
    Then he collected a coffee from the machine—with a steady hand for a man who was all of a quiver—and passed a thoughtful twenty minutes pondering why a profiler should have been strangled on a public beach on a Sunday afternoon. Finally he called Bognor and spoke to Stella Gregson. Inquiries into the background and