The Vault

by Peter Lovesey

  The word was not in Diamond's vocabulary. "I've got Chief Inspector Wigfull on the antiques case," he said at once.

  "In theory, yes, but you're breathing down his neck. I understand you've been with him almost all day, at the Royal Crescent, at Walcot Street."

  "It's my job," he pointed out. "I'm the murder man here."

  "Yes, and Mr Wigfull ran the show when you were otherwise employed." Georgina was revealing a grasp of events that happened long before her arrival in Bath. "This new case is well within his capacity. Let him run it his way. Keep an overview, by all means. But concentrate your efforts on the Frankenstein business. That's the number one investigation. Do you understand?"

  "Has Wigfull complained?"

  She said, "Just do it, Mr Diamond. You're too easily provoked for a man of your rank. You won't go any higher in the police until you learn about priorities."

  AT ABOUT six the same evening in the Royal Crescent Hotel, someone was at the door of Joe Dougan's suite, disturbing his deep, delayed sleep. Joe's tired brain registered dimly that the knocking had been going on for some time. Groaning, he rolled off the bed and groped his way forward, practically falling over the little white balustrade that acted as a room divider. Still dressed only in boxer shorts, he opened the door to find one of the detectives who had called earlier, the one with the large moustache. This time Chief Inspector Wigfull was accompanied by two younger men in plain clothes.

  "Have you found her?" Joe asked, eyes dilating like oil slicks.

  "Not yet," said Wigfull. "With your permission, we'd like to search these rooms, sir."

  He kept a firm hold on the door. "What for?"

  Mary Shelley's writing box was the true answer to that one, but Wigfull didn't give it. He answered obliquely, "You want us to spare no efforts in finding your wife?"

  "For the love of Mike, she isn't here," said Joe, still barring the way. There was no mistaking this detective's hostility.

  "We know that."

  "You already made a search."

  "The officers who were here before weren't trained in CID work."

  "What's that in plain English?"

  "Criminal investigation." The stress Wigfull put on the first word made it into a personal slur. "There may be other clues to her disappearance, and you wouldn't want to get in the way of the search, would you?"

  Joe couldn't argue with that. He took a half-step backwards. "Do what you want."

  CID-trained the officers may have been, but the search did not take long. The possible hiding places for an object as large as the writing box were few. Once they had looked behind furniture and curtains, above and beneath the four-poster bed and in the bathroom, the job was virtually done. With no success.

  "Where are your suitcases?" Wigfull asked.

  Joe's eyes bulged. "You don't think she's in a suitcase?"

  "I don't see them here, sir."

  "The hotel people put them in storage for us, to give us more room."

  "We'd like to see them."

  "They're empty."

  "The keys?"

  Joe picked his trousers off the back of a chair, took out the keys and handed them across.

  Wigfull tossed them to one of his men, who left the room.

  "You said you left Noble and Nude when?"

  "Around eleven."

  "Without the writing box?"

  "I left that on the desk."

  "Well, it isn't there any more."

  "You're wrong," said Joe. "It's there."

  "I promise you it isn't."

  The little American passed a hand distractedly through his dark hair. "It's got to be," he said as if beginning to doubt himself.

  "Who-besides you-knew that the box may have belonged to Mary Shelley?"

  "No one."

  "Except Peg Redbird herself?"

  Joe shook his head emphatically. "She's the last person I would have told. I wanted to buy at a fair price."

  "Fair?"

  "Used goods are worth as much as people are willing to pay, no more."

  "She seemed reluctant to part with it if you had to go back a second time."

  "I thought about that," said Joe. "I guess she could see I badly wanted that box. She thought there was something inside, a hidden drawer maybe, and she wasn't going to sell until she'd seen inside."

  "So Peg Redbird didn't know what she was selling. Did you tell anyone else? Those other people you mentioned? The old bookseller? The Welshman, Uncle Evan?"

  "Wise up, will you? How could I have told them? I didn't know the writing box existed when I spoke to them. I only found out when I got to the shop."

  "Your wife?"

  Joe drew in a quick, shallow breath.

  Wigfull said with an air of triumph, "Over dinner you told your wife you had found Mary Shelley's writing box?"

  "Yep, I told her," Joe admitted. "She's the woman I share my life with, for God's sake. She was entitled to know why I kept her waiting so long."

  "In a public restaurant."

  "Give me a break. It was quiet there. Nobody was listening."

  "How do you know?" said Wigfull.

  "We had a seat in the window. No one else was near."

  "Except the waiter."

  "Get away!" said Joe, becoming annoyed. "What are you trying to prove?"

  "See it from the waiter's point of view. A couple come into the restaurant," said Wigfull, and as he laid out his scenario he found it increasingly persuasive. "The man is obviously excited. He starts to speak to his wife about something sensational that happened to him. The waiter is intrigued. He overhears a phrase or two that get repeated several times. 'Noble and Nude' and 'Mary Shelley' and 'writing box'. That's enough. This waiter sees a chance to get rich quick. At the end of the evening, when the restaurant closes, he decides to take a look at Noble and Nude. He makes his way down to Walcot Street, by car, motorbike-I don't know. This is after midnight. He finds Noble and Nude and it's open and nobody is about. He can't believe his luck. The writing box is on the desk in the office. He picks it up and walks out with it."

  "Is that it?" said Joe. "Have you finished?"

  "It was either your wife or the waiter. Who else knew the box was worth taking?"

  "Now you think Donna took it?" Joe fairly squeaked in disbelief.

  "That might explain why she went missing."

  "I'm going to let you in on something," said Joe. "Donna wouldn't go out on the streets after dark in a strange city if you paid her a million bucks. And the waiter was a young girl about fifteen years old. I think she was Greek. She didn't understand English. We had to point to the items on the menu. That little girl wouldn't know Mary Shelley from appleseed."

  It may have been Joe's imagination, but he thought the big moustache sagged a little. Certainly the mouth below it sagged. Wigfull had suffered a serious reverse.

  The officer who had gone to look at the suitcases returned. He shook his head. Joe got his keys back.

  He hitched his thumbs assertively in the waistband of his boxer shorts. "Any other business, gentlemen? Or can I go back to sleep?"

  nineteen

  DIAMOND USUALLY TRIED TO keep Saturdays free for shopping and sport, or-more accurately-looking at shopping and sport. This morning there was no chance he would be standing in some dress shop while Steph tried on the latest creation. Or relaxing in front of the television. Dr Frankenstein had put paid to that.

  Without much confidence of progress, he drove up to Chippenham to look at those bones. They were brought out in a cardboard evidence box tagged with the details of when and where they had been found. It was hard to believe they might have belonged to Hands. Stained yellowish brown, they were quite unlike the chalk-white bones from the vault. But he told himself these had spent time in the river and over ten years in this box.

  He handled them with respect, as if the act of touching would give some clue to their origin. Dry bones, chipped and broken, difficult to think of as once having supported living tissue. A smal
l, curved section of a rib-cage; a complete femur; a fibula; and the one that interested him most, the radius, or main bone of a forearm. This one was broken close to where the wrist would have been, and it was obvious that the bone had been shattered, not sawn through. He fingered the splintered end thoughtfully.

  "Nothing's ever simple, is it?" he said to soften up the evidence sergeant who acted as curator of the macabre little collection. The man had already made it clear that he was a stickler for protocol and inclined to be pompous, a Jeeves in police uniform. "The bones I want to compare them with" (Diamond said) "are in another country."

  "That is inexpedient, sir."

  "But not a catastrophe. The country is Wales."

  "A pity. The Welsh are peculiarly possessive about bones, sir."

  "But these are in the forensic laboratory at Chepstow."

  "That's more promising."

  "Just across the water, but it might as well be Zanzibar," said Diamond. "They're a stubborn lot over there, as you were saying. They have a skeleton hand broken off at the wrist. I sent it to them myself. I'd like to see if it fits this arm bone, but do you know they won't let the hand out of the building?"

  "They wouldn't be permitted to take such a liberty, sir. I'm under the same obligation myself."

  "Are you telling me these old bones aren't allowed out?"

  "That is the rule."

  "It isn't as if I want them all. I'm only interested in this arm bone and it's broken already."

  "That's immaterial, sir. It's all about continuity of evidence."

  A fact well known to Diamond.

  The sergeant coughed politely. "One could make a sketch."

  "If you saw my sketching…"

  "A photo?"

  Diamond shook his head and introduced a hint of conspiracy. "Be easier if you turned your back."

  "I'm not permitted to do that, sir."

  "One pesky bone that nobody has looked at in years?"

  "Much as I would like to assist, sir, turning my back is not an option."

  "You'd get the thing back."

  The sergeant sensed the heavy pressure he was under. "If I may tender a suggestion, I could make you a cast."

  "A cast?"

  "A plaster cast."

  "How long will that take?"

  "With quick-drying plaster of Paris? Less time than it would take to subvert me, sir."

  Clearly the sergeant also resembled Jeeves in resourcefulness. He went to a shelf and took down the wax for the mould and the packet of plaster.

  CHEPSTOW IS an easy run from Chippenham, up the M4 motorway and across the old Severn Road Bridge. Diamond could have sent someone of lower rank, but after handling the bones himself, he had a boyish curiosity to see if the jigsaw fitted.

  He was never going to be the flavour of the month at the Forensic Science Unit, having blasted the men in white coats for years, but by good fortune he was seen by a young officer called Amelia who had never heard of him. He had to brandish his ID to get in. Once admitted, he refrained from mentioning that the place was not exactly a hive of industry. They all stayed in bed on Saturday mornings, he supposed. And how many times had they told him they were working round the clock to get results?

  Amelia had some difficulty in finding Hands, but eventually they tracked the bones to a lab bench upstairs. They had been cleaned of most of the cement.

  "They must be working on them now," said Amelia.

  "Oh, yes?" Diamond said evenly. It was obvious that nobody had been in the lab all morning.

  Humming "Dry Bones" as he worked, he took the cast from his pocket and tried fitting it to the stump of bone, watched by the young woman.

  It didn't match.

  "Too bad," he said, resisting the impulse to swear, and chucking the cast into the nearest bin. "Thanks for your help, love. It was worth a try."

  Amelia gave a sympathetic murmur.

  He asked if it was coffee time.

  Amelia said tentatively, "Do you mind if I have a go? You were a bit quick making up your mind."

  "It's a lost cause."

  She retrieved the cast and began trying it with more sensitivity than Diamond, rotating it minutely each time. He watched with a bored expression, thinking of that coffee. His clumsiness was renowned, but he was not expecting to be shown up.

  She said as she worked, "The thickness is about the same. Looking at the jagged end, I'd say it's quite likely that there was some splintering, in which case you're not going to get a perfect join." She held the cast steady. "Ah. Now look at the points where it's touching. They're coming together. Clearly there's a biggish piece missing, but if the bone shattered, that's to be expected."

  Diamond screwed up his eyes in the attempt to see.

  Amelia said, "I think it's worth looking at under a magnifier."

  In another ten minutes she had convinced him that the bones at Chippenham belonged to Hands.

  HE FORGOT to wind up the window as he approached the nick, so half a dozen microphones were thrust in his face when he turned off Manvers Street. If anything, there were more hacks about than yesterday. They wanted something juicy for the Sunday papers.

  No, he told them blandly, he had nothing new to say and he did not expect to make any kind of statement that day.

  Inside the building, he was more forthcoming, treating Keith Halliwell to an overcoloured account of the morning's discovery. In this version, he took all the credit for the plaster cast and he surprised the scientists at Chepstow with his deft work matching the cast to the bone.

  Halliwell, who knew Diamond's limitations with technology as well as anyone at Manvers Street, listened to this with patience and then summed it up. "So Ingeborg was right."

  "What?"

  "She said the bones were worth comparing. She came up trumps."

  "This time, yes," Diamond grudgingly conceded.

  "Are you going to tell her?"

  The thought had not occurred to him. "Why should I?"

  "Give her the exclusive. She's earned it."

  "If I do, the jackals out there will tear me to bits tomorrow." He gave a rueful smile as he thought it through. "And if I don't, she'll talk to her friend the ACC and I'll be serving on that cruddy committee for the rest of my days."

  He rummaged among the papers on his desk for Ingeborg Smith's business card.

  Halliwell tactfully found something else to do.

  ALL THE ballyhoo about the vault meant that hardly any media attention was being given to Peg Redbird's death. Out at Walcot Street, house-to-house enquiries were being conducted without any interference from reporters.

  Before lunch, Diamond decided to take what the ACC termed as an overview. He went looking for Wigfull and found him downstairs in what had swiftly been set up as an incident room, with phones, computers and a board covered in maps and photographs.

  "How goes it?"

  "As well as I can expect at this stage," Wigfull answered guardedly.

  "Is the professor still in the frame?"

  "Naturally."

  "You had another go at him, I heard."

  "I searched his hotel suite yesterday evening, yes."

  "For Mary Shelley's writing box? No joy?"

  "It was a long shot anyway, but it had to be tried."

  "If he nicked it from the shop, he'd be a fool to keep it in the hotel. He isn't that."

  Wigfull shrugged.

  "No news of the wife, I suppose?" Diamond continued to press for information. "Do you take her disappearance seriously?"

  "Is that meant to be sarcastic?" said Wigfull. "Of course I take it seriously."

  "I mean when do you step up the search?"

  "I'll run this in my own way, if you don't object."

  "Just enquiring, John. That's my job. Has anything come out of the house-to-house?"

  Wigfull gave a nod so slight he might have been watching a money spider crawl down Diamond's shirt front.

  Diamond pricked up his eyebrows. "A witness?"

&nbs
p; "Good Lord, no. Nothing so helpful as that. Just a name."

  "Who's this, then?"

  "Oh, a fellow by the name of Somerset helps out in the shop. He was seen there on the day of the murder."

  "Acting suspiciously?"

  "No, no. We've got nothing on him. By all accounts he was a big support to Peg. They got on well. I'll be talking to him later. He may give me something on the professor."

  "So Joe Dougan is still your main suspect?"

  "Definitely. Motive, opportunity."

  "Means?"

  "She was cracked over the head with something. It could have been that precious writing box he was so desperate to own."

  "Which has disappeared."

  "For the time being, yes."

  "The box has disappeared. The wife has disappeared. How will you stop Joe from disappearing with them?"

  "I've covered that. The hotel people will call me the minute he tries to check out. But I don't think he will. He's too smart."

  "You could ask for his passport."

  Wigfull sighed.

  "All right," said Diamond. "Do it your way."

  "This is a battle of wits," said Wigfull. "I know he killed her, and he knows I know. He'll put a foot wrong some time, and I'm going to keep going back to him until he does."

  "Like Columbo."

  "Who?"

  "Detective Columbo on the telly."

  "I don't follow you."

  "That's his style," said Diamond. "The battle of wits. He knows who did it before the first commercial break. He always gets his man in the end." But he couldn't help thinking that Columbo was light years ahead of Wigfull in wheedling out the truth.

  IN THE spirit of Saturday, he took Halliwell across the street for a beer and a bite of lunch at the Bloomsbury, that unique watering-hole that combined Virginia Woolf, fried scampi and a pool table. Under a "Duncan Grant" mural, they talked football and the prospects for the coming season. They were into their second beer before Halliwell looked out of the window and remarked that the press people seemed to have quit the front of the nick.

  "It's Saturday, isn't it?" said Diamond. "They file their stories early for the Sundays. I was giving them nothing, so they shut up shop. They'll be back tomorrow."

  "Did you speak to Ingeborg?"