The Vault

by Peter Lovesey

  "On what, precisely?" Eastland had a pair of half-glasses lodged at the top of his forehead. He flicked them downwards with his little finger on the bridge. All his movements were elegant.

  "I'll show you." Diamond grappled ineptly with the first knot in the string.

  "May I?" Eastland had it open almost at once, smoothing the bubble-wrap to reveal Councillor Sturr's watercolour. "What happened here, then?"

  "The glass? My fault. An accident in the kitchen." Diamond didn't mention the cat. His admission that a work of art had been taken into a kitchen was shocking enough.

  "A Blake," said Eastland, more to himself than Diamond. "What sort of Blake? William-or Sexton?"

  Diamond waited.

  "Am I permitted to touch?"

  "No problem."

  He picked up the picture and turned it over, and a chip of glass fell on the table.

  "Sorry," said Diamond. "Thought I'd got it all out."

  "Since it will have to be repaired," said Eastland, "presumably it won't matter if we remove the painting?"

  "I don't see why not."

  After some deft work with a knife and pliers, Eastland eased the paper from the frame and held it close to an anglepoise lamp. "The thing about Blake is that his style is so mannered. In one sense, he's a gift to a forger. I mean, the Blake hallmarks are well known and very persuasive, the pen and wash technique, the detailed musculature, the statuesque effect, the rather ineptly drawn background. He took immense trouble over the figures and then got bored with his backgrounds. You get some laughable trees." He put a jeweller's magnifier over his right eye and bent close to the painting. "This is all very suggestive of Blake. On the other hand, he's devilishly difficult to copy. Well known forgers like Tom Keating and Eric Hebborn left him well alone. It's one thing to mock up a Samuel Palmer, quite another to tangle with Blake."

  "So is this genuine?"

  "I'm not sure yet. If it's a fake, it's an exceptionally skillful one, I'll tell you that for nothing."

  Diamond chose not to say at this point that he would be telling him everything for nothing. The murder squad was well over budget this year. Good thing Eastland was so obviously enjoying this.

  "Dear old Blake was one of the most prolific of all artists. He never stopped. The list of works runs into thousands. As an engraver by training, he worked in series, you see. He would take a subject like the poems of Thomas Gray or the Book of Job and produce scores of pictures. This one, I can't place. The solitary figure in what looks like a frozen landscape with mountains." He turned the sheet over and held it at an angle, studying the grain. "Very old paper. A Whatman, I would think. No watermark, unfortunately."

  "Old enough to be by Blake?"

  "Oh, yes. The paper can so often be the giveaway when a work is not authentic. The poor old faker has a double problem. First he has to find a sheet of paper of the right age and quality. That's difficult, but not impossible. A favourite trick is to remove the fly leaves from the fronts of old books. And occasionally scrapbooks, sketchbooks, even stacks of unused paper turn up in attics. But old paper deteriorates. This would have been given a coat of size, or glue, when it was first manufactured, to provide a surface. Without it, you'd get an effect like writing on toilet paper. The paper is absorbent. You can't produce a fine line. So they apply this coating of size. In time, as I was saying, the size breaks down and the paper loses its surface. Result: the faker or restorer has to apply a fresh coat of size, preferably several thin coats, before the damned paper is workable."

  "More trouble than it's worth, I should think," said Diamond.

  "Not at all. The rewards are considerable if you get away with it. There are old recipes for these glues, just as there are recipes for the ink they used. It can be done."

  Now he took a larger magnifying glass from a drawer and studied the edges of the paper. "This has not been cut recently. The size of the work is about right for Blake, but you would expect nothing else in a piece of this quality." He held the picture at arm's length again. "What are you expecting me to say-that it's not authentic?"

  Diamond hoped to God he would. His entire case rested on it. "You said you didn't recognise the subject?"

  "Correct."

  "You also said he did his work in series."

  "I did."

  "Have you ever heard of a series based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?"

  Eastland shook his head at once.

  "There are two other watercolours of scenes from the book," Diamond went on. "Two, at least. I can't show them to you, but they exist. The tall, long-haired figure in this picture appears in the other two."

  Eastland glanced down at the painting again. "This is Frankenstein's monster?"

  "The original monster, yes, not the Hollywood version."

  "Can you describe these other works?"

  "One is a meeting in the mountains between this figure and a man of normal size who must be Frankenstein. The other is a death scene. A woman lies strangled on a bed. The Frankenstein character is beside her in despair while the monster leers through a window."

  "It's a long time since I read the book, but I remember that scene vividly enough."

  "The story was published in 1818, when Blake was sixty-one, still active as a painter," said Diamond, sounding like an expert himself.

  "Indeed, he was painting on his deathbed, nine years later," Eastland topped it, "but I've never heard of a Frankenstein series."

  "You sound doubtful."

  "It doesn't chime in too well with the rest. Mostly he illustrated religious subjects, or the classics, or his own mythology." He put the picture down. "On the other hand, the theme is a moral one that might well have appealed to Blake. As I recall it, Mary Shelley told a story distinctly different from the versions the cinema has given us. The monster is not inherently evil, not the result of spare parts surgery gone wrong. The mistakes come after he is created, when Frankenstein abandons him and treats him badly when they meet again. It's about rejection. The monster is sensitive, intelligent and innocent-innocent in the way Blake used the word. He becomes violent as a response to the way he is treated. Blake would have approved of the theme."

  "Enough to illustrate it?"

  "That's the nub of it. 1818, you said?"

  "There's another thing," said Diamond. "I discovered that only five hundred copies of Frankenstein were printed and most of them went into libraries. It wasn't exactly a bestseller. You have to wonder if Blake had heard of the book."

  "Perhaps it was reprinted soon after."

  Diamond shook his head. "After Blake was dead."

  Locked in thoughts of his own, Eastland bent over the picture again with his eye-glass. For some time he didn't speak. Finally he told Diamond, "I'd like to believe this is genuine. The draughtsmanship is exceptionally fine. Unknown Blakes have been known to turn up."

  "But…"

  "But the ink has not behaved as I would expect it to after a hundred and eighty years or so. Under magnification you can usually spot some disintegration, not so obvious as the cracks in old paint, but discernible. These lines are still surface marks. Nowhere has the ink amalgamated with the paper. I wish we could compare it with an undisputed Blake. I think we would notice a difference." He looked up. "I presume you'll send this for scientific tests."

  "Yes, but I was hoping for a quick opinion."

  He peered through the glass at another section. "I wouldn't testify to this in court, not without scientific backing, but I'm increasingly confident that I've detected the flaw. It's beautiful work, exquisite, only the artist hasn't aged the ink."

  "It's a modern ink?"

  "No, no. It's old-or made with genuine old ingredients such as oak galls. That's only half the battle. The marks have to be given the effect of ageing."

  "How would he do that?"

  "They distress it with a combination of heat, moisture and mild corrosives. There's a terrifying risk of overdoing it and messing up many hours of painstaking work. Probably he though
t he'd done enough to get by."

  "It is a fake?"

  "It still needs to be analysed," Eastland hedged.

  "But…?"

  "I now believe it is."

  "Brilliant."

  "Brilliant is the word. Do you know who did it?"

  Echoing the statement, Diamond answered, "I now believe I do." In his head he added, "And another one bites the dust."

  thirty-two

  JOE DOUGAN WAS ABOUT as livid as a mild Midwestern professor can get at being brought back to Bath. "This is the end," he complained to Diamond. "I should be halfway under the Channel by now. What am I doing here?"

  "Helping the police with their inquiries."

  "Is that sarcasm?"

  "It's only a form of words we use."

  "Oh, yeah? Coded words for the third degree?"

  Diamond put on a pained expression. "Haven't you been treated with courtesy?"

  "By the cops who brought me back? No complaints. My quarrel is with you, sir. You fixed this."

  "Did they let you phone your wife?"

  Joe gave a nod. "To Donna, it's another day's shopping."

  "Don't bill us," said Diamond, trying to defuse the bitterness a little. He preferred dealing with Joe in his good tempered mode. "Coffee?"

  "How long do you figure this will take?"

  "I wish I knew. I have things to do, the same as you. Would you mind opening your suitcases?" Two vast cases had been brought back with Joe from Waterloo and now lay on a table against the end wall.

  This triggered Joe into another protest. "What do you think is in there? For crying out loud, you don't think I have Mary Shelley's writing box in my baggage?"

  "The keys, professor."

  Muttering, Joe felt in his pocket and handed over a small leather key-case that Diamond passed to the constable brought in to conduct the search.

  Joe said he would have a black coffee.

  A pink nightie lay folded on top of the other things in the first suitcase, surrounded by glittery shoes padded out with panties. Joe had done a reasonable job of packing Donna's things. Methodically the constable lifted layer after layer of women's clothing and made a stack on the table. Then he started on the second case: more skirts and blouses, the overspill from Donna's shopping and, some way underneath, Joe's things. None of it brought Diamond from his chair.

  "Now your hand luggage."

  This was a shoulderbag with an array of zips and pouches. "Careful," Joe warned as he lifted it off the back of his chair and onto the desk. "Some of the stuff in here is fragile."

  "Empty it yourself, if you like."

  Joe co-operated. One of the first things out was the edition of Milton's poems.

  Diamond reached for it, but Joe's hand curled over it first. "You know what this is?"

  "That's why I want to examine it. The last time I was given a sight of it, you held onto it."

  "You bet I did. Would you mind using both hands? The spine is weak." He handed the book across.

  After the accident with Councillor Sturr's picture, Diamond was only too willing to take extra care. He glanced at the finely inscribed M.W.G., 5, Abbey Churchyard, Bath on the cover. Tentatively opening the book, he looked for the place at the front where the fly leaves were missing. The job had been neatly done. He would not have noticed unless it had been pointed out. The remnants of three sheets, tucked between the board cover and the title page. The cut was straight, sharp and as close to the hinge as you could get.

  "I know all about that," said Joe. "The book is mutilated. If I were looking for an investment, I'd be worried, but the missing endpapers don't bother me. To me the value of this little property is who it belonged to, not the state it's in."

  "I appreciate that," said Diamond, transferring the book to his other hand to look inside the back cover. "I see they've been cut from here as well. I was speaking to someone only this morning, an art historian. He was telling me forgers do this. They buy old books and cut out the blank sheets to get paper of the right age."

  Joe's eyebrows twitched. "You think a forger damaged the book?"

  "I wouldn't bet against it."

  "In recent times, you mean?"

  "I'd need a microscope to answer that."

  Joe's interest in his book was sufficient to ride over all the day's frustrations. "I'm not sure if I buy this theory of yours. When I talked to the bookseller, Mr Heath, he told me something I should have appreciated, but didn't, about the scarcity of paper a couple of hundred years back. It was a valuable commodity. People would use those blank pages as notepaper. So it's quite possible Mary Shelley cut them from the book herself."

  The possibility didn't much appeal to Diamond. His theory of the forger held more promise right now. "Maybe."

  "She could have used them for sketching," Joe continued to speculate as he removed more things from the shoulderbag. "We know she sketched."

  "We do?"

  "She was having lessons from an artist while she was in Bath."

  "Is that so?" Diamond said with the preoccupied air of someone working to a more significant brief.

  "As a matter of fact, Miss Redbird told me a sketchbook was found in the writing box, along with the book and an ink bottle."

  Abruptly Diamond's attention was focused again. "You didn't tell me that before."

  "You didn't ask. You wanted to know about this book and I told you everything I know. The rest is only something I was told."

  "This could be crucial information."

  "You think I don't know? Dear God, I'd like to get my hands on Mary Shelley's sketchbook. No chance."

  "What happened to it?"

  "Sold-a long while back, she said."

  "Did she say who bought it?"

  "No, sir. You see, at the time she had no idea who it belonged to so it had no special interest," Joe continued implacably. "I'm trying to remember the name of Mary Shelley's art teacher. It began with a 'W'. Wood? No, West. Mr West. She mentions him in letters. She found the drawing tedious. I guess it would have been, the way it was taught at the time. Her imagination ran to more exotic things than still life and perspective."

  "This sketchbook couldn't have been all that big," Diamond said. "To have fitted in the writing box, I mean."

  Joe indicated some modest limits with his hands. "It wasn't so small. If she wanted to work small she could have used those sheets from the book to practise on." The sheets cut from the book had ceased to hold any interest for Diamond. The existence of the sketchbook had set him off on a more promising track.

  "You can put the stuff back in the bag now." His brain worked through the possibilities while Joe began the task, sighing like a grounded balloon. Then Diamond said, "On Thursday evening when you returned to Noble and Nude, no one was there. That's what you told me?"

  "That's the truth."

  "But the place wasn't locked. Did that surprise you?"

  Joe weighed the question before replying. "Not at first. It's such a warren, that shop, I took it that the owner was in another room somewhere. Called her name a couple of times and she didn't answer, so I started trying keys in the box. You know how it is. When you concentrate, really put your mind to a job, the time flies by."

  "Did you have any suspicion someone else was present in the building?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Isn't it clear? If I was in your situation that night, walking into an empty shop, my senses would be primed for someone to come in. If a floorboard creaked, I'd hear it."

  "I heard nothing."

  "And you estimated you were there from around nine-thirty to when? Almost eleven?"

  "That's what I said."

  "The writing box was still there when you left?"

  "On her desk in the office, where I found it." Joe leaned forward, stressing the next remark with his open hand. "Listen, whatever else you think of me, I'm not stupid. If I'd walked out with the writing box, she would have known right off who took it."

  "She was murdered," Diamond po
inted out.

  Joe, wrong-footed, blinked and frowned. "I didn't know that at the time. How could I have known that?"

  Diamond left the question hanging.

  Joe stared at him woodenly for a moment, then said, "And another thing. Her colleague, the guy in the bow-tie, knew all about my interest in the box."

  "Ellis Somerset."

  "He would have blown the whistle on me if I took it."

  Diamond nodded. "Now I'll tell you something, professor. You have a way of making everything sound reasonable. Strange things happen to you through no fault of your own. You go down into a vault at the Roman Baths and you're mistaken for a forensic pathologist. Your wife disappears and turns up in Paris. You're trying to do deals with a woman on the night she is murdered. You can explain it all. There's one thing I wish you would explain because I can't see a way round it myself."

  "Try me."

  "The problem is this: someone stole the writing box on the night Peg Redbird was murdered and I haven't heard of anyone else but you with an interest in it. Only you. You worked out that it once belonged to Mary Shelley. No one else knew that."

  Joe frowned. He had no easy solution.

  Diamond twisted the knife. "Do you know of anyone else?

  Anyone?"

  "I told my wife, but she wouldn't…"

  "And you wouldn't have let Peg Redbird in on the secret because she would have raised the price."

  Joe partially closed his eyes, straining for an explanation. This was desperation point. "At the time I half wondered if the lady figured it out."

  "Peg?"

  "Right. I was never any use as a poker player. I may not have said anything-no, let's be clear, I didn't say anything-but I couldn't disguise my interest in the writing box. I wanted it badly. She was good at her job. She saw the initials on the cover of that book and she saw the address. Yeah, I reckon she figured it out."

  "Letting you off the hook?"

  "She could have talked to someone after she saw me."