The Vault

by Peter Lovesey

  "Half of these must have gone out of business by now."His finger moved up the page. "Why so many here?"

  "That would have been prior to the opening of the extension. Much of the temple precinct was uncovered then."

  "In nineteen-eighty-two to three?"

  "And for quite a bit before. What you're looking at now is a record of the construction work, not the excavation. We opened to the public at Easter, 1983. Substantial electrical and building work had to be carried out in the weeks before."

  "Making it accessible?"

  "Yes. And safe. Proper walkways and so forth."

  "You can see the way my mind is working. The vault where the bones were found is on the same side."

  He took the lists back to Manvers Street and gave Halliwell the task of calling contractors to extract lists of their workforces.

  "Just as long as you don't expect a miracle, sir," Halliwell said. "At this distance in time…"

  "I know, Keith, it's a pain and I'm a slave-driver."

  "You're assuming that whoever buried the hand in the vault was a builder?"

  "I can't think of anyone else with a reason for doing cement work down there."

  "So do you think the victim was working on the site as well?"

  "We'll see what we uncover."

  "Have they found anything else?"

  "Not yet."

  Halliwell screwed up his face. "Wasn't the hand attached to the rest of the body?"

  "Apparently not."

  A CALL from the front desk. "Sir, someone wants to speak to you about the Roman Bath inquiry."

  "To me personally?"

  "Yes."

  "Who is he?"

  "She. She, em, says you may remember her. A Miss Smith."

  Amusement in the voice is easy to detect on the phone. "Are you having me on?"

  "Ingeborg Smith."

  "Ah." An image snapped into place. A crowded room. Microphones heaped in front of him like horse-droppings. The press conference he'd called last autumn at a difficult stage in the Bloodhounds inquiry. And this pale-faced young woman with a stud in her nose-or was it a ring?-hitting him with a volley of penetrating questions.

  "I do remember now," he told them downstairs. "She's press. A freelance." His first instinct was to duck this. Then he remembered the tenacious way Ingeborg Smith had questioned him in front of the press corps, just this side of civility. It might not be wise to give her the elbow.

  He- saw her in an interview room downstairs. "I hope you have something amazing to impart, Miss Smith," he remarked as he walked in. "It's a busy old week."

  "I'm glad to hear it," she said. The nose decoration was a silver ring through the right nostril. Since the last time another had been added on the same side and there was also a gleam from under the fine, blond hair over the left ear. "What was the motto of the Pinkerton detectives? We Never Sleep."

  Her features are up to fashion model standard, he found himself thinking. Maybe she thinks some minor mutilation makes her more approachable. "We Never Sleep. Try telling that to the Police Federation."

  "What's their motto, then?"

  "I wouldn't know."

  She laughed.

  "No," he started to explain. "That's not their motto, it's…" Then he gave up. "What exactly are you doing here?"

  "Getting a story, I hope. Is this true about the hand in the cellar?"

  "Where did you hear that?" he parried.

  "I was tipped off by one of the guides at the Roman Baths. You kicked them out of their staffroom, I was told, and large policemen are in there sieving loads of earth and mortar for human remains."

  "So what's your angle on this? Staff in Revolt over Police Dig?'

  "Come off it, Mr Diamond. That's no story."

  "Police in Revolt over Police Dig?"

  A wide smile. She felt in her handbag and handed across a business card. "I work with the nationals when a story of potential interest comes up."

  He was wary. "It's at a very early stage. I can't give you anything you don't already know."

  "No information on the victim?"

  "What victim?"

  "Oh, come on, Superintendent, the owner of the hand. It was buried less than twenty years ago, they're saying."

  "That's yet to be established."

  "I am the first to approach you, aren't I?"

  "The first of the press, yes."

  "Don't you think I deserve an exclusive?"

  He said, "My dear Miss Smith-•"

  "Ingeborg will do."

  "I doubt if there's much in this for you."

  "There's the rest of the body, presumably. Do you think it's in the cellar?"

  "I'm keeping an open mind. And it's a vault."

  "Your mind is a vault?"

  He smiled. "At this stage, yes. Just a large, empty vault."

  "No theories, then?"

  He lifted a palm to indicate that the point had been made already.

  She moved on. "Let's try something else. Where's that female detective inspector you work with?"

  "Julie Hargreaves? Transferred to Headquarters."

  "Oh? At whose request?"

  He felt the blood rise. "That's off limits, Ingeborg. We don't discuss personnel with the press."

  She held out her slim hands in appeal. "Fine, I won't press it. I admired her style, the way she did her job."

  "We all did."

  "You must have chosen her as your deputy. Do you think a woman brings something extra to a crime squad?"

  He pushed his chair back, prior to leaving. "I don't have time to chat."

  She smiled. "Worth a try. Some time, I'd like to write a profile of you."

  "Whatever for? I'm not a story of-what was it?-potential interest."

  She ran her eyes over his substantial form. "If I pulled a few strings, I could interest a features editor in you."

  "That's really made my day."

  "I'll tell you one thing for sure. You're going to be sorry you dropped Julie from your team."

  He didn't rise to the bait. The truth of it was that Julie had left at her own request. The strain of working with him, defending him, interpreting his moods, smoothing ruffled feathers, had finally got to Julie. And those who knew him best said that she had made his job too easy. Confrontation was his fix.

  But he must have learned something from Julie, because he let Ingeborg Smith leave without a blasting. Even after she reminded him to pick up the business card he had left on the table.

  SOME GENIUS from the forensic lab at Chepstow phoned him later. In the process of removing a substantial chunk of concrete adhering to the hand found in the vault, they had discovered the bones of a second thumb and two fingers. It seemed that two hands had been buried together.

  "It makes sense," Diamond said. "If you go to the trouble of digging a hole you might as well use it for both."

  "Assuming they both came from the same victim," the Chepstow man threw in casually.

  "They did, didn't they? This is a left hand and a right?"

  "It would appear so."

  "Can't you fellows ever say a straight yes or no?"

  "If we did, and we made a mistake, you'd be one of the first to complain, Mr Diamond."

  "That's for sure, squire. All I want to know is are we talking about a pair of hands?"

  "That I couldn't say with certainty."

  "They're about the same size? Could you say that with certainty?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Thank Christ for that. So there isn't any reason to think they're from different people?"

  "Realistically, it's unlikely, but-"

  "Don't complicate things. My life is hard enough."

  LATE THE same afternoon, twenty minutes before the diggers in the vault were due to down tools, one of them working close to the external wall called for the sergeant who was supervising. At a depth of half a metre his brush had revealed a brownish domed shape that looked awfully like a human skull.

  The sergeant ordered an ea
rly finish, and put a call through to Diamond.

  NEXT MORNING, the vault was transformed into something like a Star Trek set: machinery, extra lights and SOCOs padding about in their overshoes and white paper zipper overalls. From the doorway Diamond registered an appearance and then slipped upstairs for a Pump Room breakfast.

  Certainly it was a skull, he learned when he returned. They allowed him close enough to see it in situ, with most of the surrounding soil brushed away. It lay upwards, resting on the jaw, not quite so sinister as a clean skull may look, because the cavities for eyes and nose were blocked with earth. In this state it would be lifted by a pathologist and taken for examination. Any organic matter preserved inside the cranium could well provide DNA material.

  "Any immediate clues?" he asked the senior man.

  "Well, she was probably under thirty, by the state of her teeth."

  "She?"

  "See the ridges around the eye sockets? They're not so prominent as they would be in a male. And the nasal junction here is less developed."

  "I wasn't expecting a female," Diamond said as if he doubted the opinion. "The hand was quite large."

  "Some women's hands are big. You can't tell the sex from hand bones."

  "Is Jim Middleton on his way?"

  "He's doing post mortems this morning. He promised to be here by two."

  Muttering, Diamond returned upstairs. In the staffroom he paused to speak to the two young constables working with a sieve over a wheelbarrow. A huge heap of earth and rubble lay on a tarpaulin. "Is this load sorted?"

  "No, sir," said the spokesman. "That's waiting."

  "What happens to the stuff you've sieved?"

  "We wheel it across the way. There's another room."

  "And have you found anything?"

  "Some bits that could be finger-bones, or toes, or nothing at all."

  "Do you want a break?"

  "Sir?"

  "I said do you want a break? Take ten, no more. I'll see if I have better luck than you."

  Wide-eyed at this eccentric behaviour from the top man, they hesitated. But when he picked up the spade, half-filled the sieve and started shaking it over the barrow, they left him to it.

  The gesture was not wholly altruistic. Diamond had a reputation for treating his staff without much consideration. The news that the old slave-driver-or whatever they currently called him-had taken his turn at the digging would spread around Manvers Street like word of a pay rise.

  And a mindless task like this was an aid to concentration. He needed to reassess. If the victim was a woman, it seemed unlikely she had died as a result of a brawl among labourers. Women are employed on building sites, and were in the early nineteen-eighties, but the female brickie would have been a novelty. Her absence would have been noticed. What other reason would a woman have for being in the vault? he asked himself. Maybe she had been one of the archaeologists.

  He preferred that, a scenario in which one of the builders lusts after a student in tight jeans jigging her bottom as she scrapes at the floor of the temple precinct. From most men, she would get looks, or remarks. But there is always the oddball, the psycho who believes she is put there to provoke him.

  Either she willingly goes with him. Or she is tricked into going. Or forced. In the vault, he turns violent. Whatever goes on there-an argument, a rape, a fight-it ends with her death. He dismembers the corpse in the belief that it will make detection more difficult. He buries the parts in concrete.

  This presupposes that no one interrupts. Well, the vault was used by the builders for storage. Maybe sand and cement had to be collected from time to time, but there would be intervals when no one was about. A body could be covered with a tarpaulin and left in a dark corner until the killer had an opportunity to dispose of it, perhaps at night, when everyone else had left.

  The theory also requires that when the girl goes missing, no one raises the alarm. Archaeology is often carried out by student volunteers. And as anyone knows, students are not the most reliable people around. One young woman fails to turn up one morning and nobody thinks much of it. Not everyone likes squatting in a trench scraping at the soil by the hour and finding nothing.

  So was there a young student who went missing in the early nineteen-eighties?

  Scores, probably.

  "No luck, sir?"

  He looked up from the sieve. The ten minutes had passed and the constables were back.

  "You're the ones who got lucky. I filled another barrow for you."

  six

  DEATH AND THE MONSTER.

  The thing had started without the passion that came later. It grew in his brain by stealth, fitting into his life as no more than an idle thought here, a possiblity there. He could not trace its origin; the monster is so all-pervading that every child has heard of it. It seeped into his consciousness and was reinforced by the images everyone grows up with and has nightmares about.

  "My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded and soon became so ardent and eager that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning whilst I was yet engaged in my laboratory."

  Only now did he accept that he was a willing slave to Frankenstein and his monster.

  seven

  DIAMOND WAS IRRITATED BY Halliwell's talk of brickies, chippies and sparks, as if one morning on the phone had turned him into a master mason. "Let's see these names."

  "The brickies?"

  "All of them." He ran a glance over the top sheet. "What use is 'Taff to anybody?"

  "Welshman, sir."

  "That narrows it down to about a million."

  "These are only my rough notes. I jotted everything down. Any scrap of information might jog someone else's memory."

  " 'QPR supporter.'?"

  "Football."

  "I didn't think it was underwear. There's no need to grind your teeth, matey. I'm just as brassed off as you are. We're going to have to do the rounds of the builders' yards asking questions."

  "When you say 'we'…"

  "I know, Keith. You're going to ask me where the manpower is coming from. I'll pull a few strings. It's a job for Uniforms."

  "It isn't easy tracing workmen, sir. There's so much sub-contracting. A brickie and a sparks may work side by side and belong to different firms."

  "I don't care who employed them. These herberts all know each other."

  "Yes, but after twenty years-"

  "Don't exaggerate, Keith. It's more like fifteen." He grinned and softened enough to explain his theory about the victim. If she had been a student volunteer helping with the dig, her name might be on some list kept by the people in charge.

  Halliwell threw in casually, "The Bath Archaeological Trust."

  "Come again."

  "The people in charge."

  "Go to it, then."

  AT TWO, he phoned the Roman Baths and asked if the pathologist, Jim Middleton, had arrived yet. He had not.

  "So is all work in the vault suspended?"

  The senior SOCO confirmed that it was.

  "The skull still waiting to be lifted?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Leave it with me," he said with menace. "Just because this skull has been buried since 1983, that idle bastard thinks he can take all day over his lunch."

  He called the Royal United Hospital. It turned out that Middleton was having trouble with his car and had taken it into the garage for repairs.

  He slammed down the phone. Immediately it rang. He snatched it up. "Jim?"

  "No." A woman's voice. "No. This is Ingeborg Smith."

  He emitted a sound combining a groan and a growl. "Look, I'm waiting for a call."

  "Would that be from the pathologist?"

  He was caught off guard. "What do you know about that?"

  She said in a calm tone that only added to his stress, "I'm at the Roman Baths. I know Dr Middleton is supposed to be here, and isn't. This skull they uncovered last night is female. Do you have any idea who she might be,
Mr Diamond?"

  He had to draw in a long breath to control himself. "Did somebody let you into that bloody vault?"

  Ingeborg said coolly, "I told you I was interested in this case, and I have an idea on the subject."

  "If you know anything at all pertaining to this investigation, Miss Smith," he said with heavy formality, "you'd better tell me now."

  "An idea, I said."

  "Just a theory, then?"

  "You don't have to sound so disparaging. It could save you a lot of time. Can we meet? Are you coming over here?"

  "I'm far too busy-"

  She butted in with, "I could give you the name of a postgraduate in ancient history who got a job as a guide at the Roman Baths in 1982 and disappeared the following year."

  "A woman?"

  "Of course."

  "How do you know this?"

  "Like your people in the vault, I've been digging."

  "What's the name?"

  "I'd rather not say down the phone."

  "Don't piss me about, Ingeborg."

  "I mean it. This is sensitive information."

  She was going to get her interview now. Tamely, he offered to see her at the Baths in half an hour.

  JOE DOUGAN and his long-suffering wife Donna stood just inside the swing doors at the Pump Room entrance having a difference of opinion.

  "But I don't need the rest room," Donna repeated.

  "We established that a moment ago," Joe ground on in his professorial style. "All I'm asking is that you step inside there and look around. It's not a place I can go myself."

  "You can go to the men's room."

  "Donna, I don't need the men's room."

  A moment's silence underlined the lack of contact between their imaginations.

  Donna knew she would cave in. She always did. "It's easy for you to say 'look around'. I'm going to get some strange looks."

  "Yes, but would you do this for me?"

  She said with deliberate obtuseness, "What am I supposed to look at? I've seen a ladies' rest room before now. There isn't anything to interest me in places like that."

  "So you will go in?"

  "What makes this ladies' room so special? What do you want to know about the place?"

  "Just tell me if everything is on this level, or if you have to go downstairs. If it is in the basement, examine the walls."