The Stone Wife

by Peter Lovesey

  If he’d had antennae, they would have twitched. “I can call as soon as you want.”

  “Not here,” she said, lowering her voice. “Walls have ears. Do you know Hedgemead Park below the crescent?”

  “Quite well.”

  “The gazebo near the entrance?”

  “With the curved seat?”

  “Let’s meet there, say, at eleven. I’ll be in a black leather coat and purple scarf.”

  “I’ll find you.”

  He’d once heard another version of the proverb she’d used: fields have eyes and woods have ears. Parks have both, he reckoned, but he guessed the sister was the problem.

  He passed the next twenty minutes restoring his office to the shambles that made it his own. Then he put on his hat and stepped through the CID room. “Meeting someone. Shouldn’t be long.”

  “If you ask me, he isn’t comfortable in there,” John Leaman said when the big man was out of earshot.

  Hedgemead Park, on a strip of land topped by Camden Crescent and sloping steeply to London Road, was created out of a disaster. It was once occupied by two hundred and seventy-one Georgian houses known as Somerset Buildings, but whoever surveyed the site had been seriously at fault. The first landslips started in the 1860s and continued intermittently until June of 1881, when a hundred and thirty dwellings collapsed or were damaged beyond repair. With typical Victorian resource, the city fathers cleared the rubble, shored up the terrain, planted extensively and converted it into a pleasure ground with bandstand, water fountain and boundary railings. The former name of Edgemead was too suggestive of more slippage, so someone had the bright idea of adding the “H.” It was all about presentation in those days and it hasn’t changed.

  The octagonal gazebo close to the south entrance was a good viewpoint and a useful place to meet. The lady was already there when Diamond arrived. Short, slight and dressed in the sombre colours she’d described, she looked him over with dark, intelligent eyes before confirming her name and offering her hand.

  “Sorry you had trouble getting through to me,” he said. “Actually I was in Reading.”

  “At the university?”

  “Why don’t we sit and talk here?”

  She glanced right and left as if making certain her sister hadn’t followed her. “If you like, then. Who did you see at Reading?”

  “Dr. Poke.”

  The edges of her mouth turned down. “He wouldn’t have been John’s choice or mine. They didn’t get on.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Differences of approach, for one thing. Archie Poke is a linguist, while John adored the literature.”

  “The Canterbury Tales?”

  “And much else. He was a great champion of everything Chaucer wrote, poor darling. The man was alive for him. To hear him speak, you could almost believe they’d met. The poetry really excited him.”

  Hardly the impression Diamond had got from Gildersleeve’s book, but this wasn’t the time to say so. “That’s one way he differed from Dr. Poke, then. And the other thing?”

  “Oh?”

  “You said ‘for one thing,’ so there must be another.”

  “Only that John occupied the chair of Old English and had no plans to move on. I think he hoped to get a knighthood eventually. People do, for long service in high office. Archie Poke would have had to leave Reading to get a professorship. There aren’t many openings in semantics unless you’re willing to go abroad.”

  “A block on his promotion prospects?”

  She shrugged. She didn’t need to labour the point.

  But he was glad he’d asked. This could be crucial. Ambition is a strong motivating force and can easily lead to malice. What if the shooting hadn’t been over the Wife of Bath, but over Dr. Poke’s career prospects? Could he have hired the gunmen to kill his rival at the auction?

  “Do you think Poke will get to be the professor now?”

  “It’s on the cards. He’s the senior man in the department. He’s been there nearly twenty years.”

  “Longer than your husband?”

  “At least as long. But you can’t believe—”

  “May we talk about the auction?” Diamond interrupted her.

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “But you knew he was going?”

  “Of course.”

  “And did you know he was prepared to bid so high?”

  “He was fired up,” she said, and flapped her hand in a gesture that showed she didn’t care how high the bidding went. “He’d set his heart on that wretched carving. Believe me, he meant to have it.”

  “Did he already have other sculptures?”

  “No, but put yourself in his place. This was a link with Chaucer. He’d have loved to possess a medieval manuscript, but they’re all in museums.”

  “When you say it was a link, I recall Dr. Poke saying something similar, but there’s no proof, is there?”

  “The sculpture is fourteenth century, isn’t it?”

  “They say it is.”

  “That’s when Chaucer was alive. A carving of one of his main characters. It’s well possible the poet himself took an interest, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know how we’d find out.”

  “Chaucer’s family are known to have lived in the Bridgwater area at one time.”

  “Petherton Park,” Diamond said.

  “Why ask me if you know about it already?”

  He felt chastened. For the newly bereaved, she had a sharp side. “I’m no expert,” he told her. “I’m picking up bits of information where I can. I’m sure you know masses more than I do. Did he discuss the sale with you?”

  “He tried and I did my best to sound interested. After all, this was a major part of his professional life. And of course he’d gone through the false dawn of the dig.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “Haven’t you heard? About twelve years ago he led a dig at North Petherton, a joint effort with the history department, trying to locate the Chaucer house, a wonderful project for his students. The university have spent many years excavating the Roman town at Silchester, so they know what they’re doing. The geophysics showed them the site of a substantial building in a place called Parker’s Field, where the Chaucers were believed to have lived. The dig lasted right through the long summer vacation. They exposed the foundations, but found nothing more than a few fragments of pottery. It was a huge disappointment to John, like when you hear about an Egyptologist entering a tomb and finding the robbers got there first.”

  “Could that have happened?”

  “What—someone plundering the site? Impossible. They were living there in tents. Any disturbance would have been obvious. He told me the excavation was extremely well supervised.”

  “I meant before they even got there.”

  She shook her head.

  “What was he hoping to find?” Diamond asked. “Books and papers wouldn’t have survived.”

  “No, but other objects sometimes get discovered. Things more personal than shards of pottery, like combs, buckles, brooches, pins, shoes, even. Anyway, they gave up when the summer ended and the farmer insisted they filled in the holes in the ground.”

  “So there’s nothing to see any more?”

  “I believe it’s back to being a field now. John never went back. The entire experience was deeply depressing. Some of the students became bored and unruly.”

  “In what way?”

  “One had a supply of cannabis with him and encouraged the others to smoke when they were supposed to be digging. It led to more than one confrontation. The students claimed it was their summer vacation and this was recreation, but John insisted it was a university project and he couldn’t condone the use of drugs. He was dean of the faculty at the time, with responsibility for discipline. He felt he was undermined.”

  “Not a happy camp, then?”

  She gave a sad smile. “Not for John. Later, the same lad was reported to him for selling cannabis on
the university premises and he was sent down, a wretched postscript to the whole expedition.” Monica’s voice switched to a more optimistic note. “So perhaps you can understand the excitement after all this time when the Wife of Bath piece came up for auction. He was convinced it must have come originally from the site and after all the time and effort he’d invested he didn’t want anyone else to get his hands on it.”

  “It had been around a long time, hadn’t it? The auctioneers said it was in someone else’s collection before the museum acquired it.”

  “William Stradling of Chilton Polden. John told me all about that. Old Stradling was a magpie who amassed this huge collection and built a folly to house it. There’s no doubt that the carving was one of his pieces and he may have connected it with Chaucer, but nobody else did until recent times. It was catalogued as a much eroded medieval figure on horseback with fragments of lettering along the base—or some such. When the Stradling collection was dispersed after his death it ended up in a small museum at Bridgwater and wasn’t considered well enough preserved to display. So it was put into storage for a hundred and fifty years.”

  “She won’t have enjoyed that.”

  A gleam of recognition shone from Monica Gildersleeve’s eyes. “You’re talking just like he did—as if she’s a real person. I wasn’t going to say this in case you thought him odd, but he said he was going to rescue her at the auction.” She smiled for the first time. “In fact, he went on so much about her that I was starting to wonder if he preferred her to me.”

  Diamond grinned, too, encouraged that other people had been lured into treating the carving as more than just a slab of limestone. “Have you seen her? She’s seven hundred years old and shows it.”

  “I’ve seen the picture in the catalogue.”

  “She’s in my office now, an item of evidence. She won’t leave until justice is done.”

  “I approve of that.” She looked away at the view across the trees towards the city.

  “When we spoke on the phone, you said there were things you wanted to tell me,” he prompted her. “Things that worry you.”

  “It’s personal,” she said, continuing to stare into the distance.

  He waited.

  She seemed to need to psych herself up. “I don’t even know if I should be telling you this, but it keeps me awake at nights. My ex-husband, Bernie, is not a forgiving man. He was extremely angry when he found out about my affair with John. I don’t mind admitting I was unfaithful for two years before he found out, so I was in the wrong. Bernie was away from home a lot on business. He’s a property developer, a very successful one, and also very hard-working. He’d be away on projects for days on end. I met John at a literary lunch. Do you want to hear this?”

  “If you think it makes a difference, of course,” Diamond said.

  “It isn’t easy, but I’ve said it all to lawyers and the mediator, so I suppose I can say it to you. Well, we happened to be seated next to each other on the top table and I expressed interest in John’s field of study. I read English myself at Oxford and it was wonderful talking to him. It brought back golden memories of my student days. Bernie had been away on some development project for over a week and I was feeling sorry for myself. On the face of things, I was well looked after—a rich bitch, my sister called me once before this happened. The best of clothes, my own sports car and of course a show house to live in. But none of that can compensate for being ignored. John made me feel alive again. We went to the cinema a couple of times and then he took me for a meal and ended up in my bed. The old, old story. You’ll have heard it all before.”

  “It’s your life,” Diamond said. “I’m not here to judge you.”

  She turned to face him. “That’s kind. We got away with it for a surprisingly long time. I dreaded Bernie finding out, as he was bound to. In the end one of his business rivals saw us together and tipped him off, probably just to bug him. The showdown wasn’t pretty and I got what was coming to me.”

  “Violence?”

  “Bernie came from that sort of background. I expected nothing less. What I hadn’t expected was that he’d get drinks in and turn me over to his friends. As I’d behaved like a whore, he said, I deserved to be treated as one. He sat in a chair and watched.”

  “That’s horrible. Did you report it?”

  “I didn’t dare.” She added slowly, spacing her words, “And I don’t want you to follow it up.”

  “We could put him away for years, and the accomplices.”

  “I’d deny everything.” She was cool, measured and determined. “So you see, it wasn’t the sort of fight between man and wife that ends in reconciliation. The only thing we agreed on was divorce. I don’t know if you’ve gone through the process.”

  “Fortunately, no.”

  “You have to spend time with a mediator, in case you can be reconciled. Some chance! It was only then that I leaned Bernie had been having a series of one-night stands with women he employed as personal assistants. Life isn’t fair, is it? I got gang-raped for admitting I was unfaithful. There was nothing I could do about his cheating.”

  “Sickening.”

  “If nothing else, his infidelities ensured I got a fair share of the settlement. I can still live in some style. John was a single man, so we were able to marry soon after my divorce came through. We bought a nice house near the Thames in Caversham. And now this.” Her lip trembled. “I had to identify him.”

  “I don’t understand why you decided to tell me so much,” Diamond said to get her back on track.

  “Because of Bernie and something he said. He’s a powerful, ruthless man. You don’t come up through the building trade from nowhere without getting in fights. And as he got bigger in the business, he had his own heavies, who crushed the opposition for him. People he once worked for got taken over and old scores were settled before he trampled on them. No one got the better of him. I dreaded the day when he would find John with me in the house.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “Thank God, no. John and Bernie only came face to face once, at the divorce hearing, outside the court. Too many other people were about for Bernie to start a fight. He walked right up to John and looked him in the eye and said, ‘You’ll pay for this.’ I don’t know what John thought of it. My blood ran cold.”

  8

  The law can only function fully if people are willing to speak out. Many crimes go unpunished because victims are too frightened, or too traumatised, to describe their experiences and be cross-examined. Diamond knew he’d get nowhere trying to persuade Monica Gildersleeve to testify to the violence her former husband had unleashed. He understood why and sympathised, but he was appalled by the knowledge that such a vicious man was still at liberty and capable of repeating his crimes.

  Stay focused, he chided himself. You’re dealing with the professor and how he met his death. Weigh the information you’ve been given.

  The story Mrs. Gildersleeve had told without an atom of self-pity had rung true. There was no apparent reason for her to have lied or exaggerated. Thanks to her candour, there was a new perspective on the case. The auction may not have triggered the killing, as he and his team had supposed, but simply served as the backdrop to a planned execution. The professor’s affair with a married woman had brought him a dangerous enemy. A threat from Wefers meant more than mere words. Here was a vengeful man with the means to employ others to act for him.

  Slightly less compelling, but not to be ignored, a second suspect had emerged. Dr. Poke knew he would not be offered the chair of Old and Medieval English while Gildersleeve remained in the job. Thwarted ambition can nurture jealousy, hatred, even murder. The motive is the insidious kind that eats away day by day at morality and respect for the law.

  The team listened keenly when Diamond reported on his meeting with Monica Gildersleeve. The only surprise to him was the way Ingeborg reacted. He would have put money on her empathising strongly with the poor woman’s ordeal. Instead she remained a
s calm as if he’d been reading out the latest crime figures. He didn’t mind too much. Excesses of emotion never went down well with the team. Perhaps it was the way he’d told it, he reflected. Hearing the victim herself would have shocked them more.

  John Leaman was the first to comment.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t get what?” Diamond asked him.

  “If this was a deliberate, planned murder, what’s the point of doing it in such a public place?”

  “It’s smart. Everyone assumes the victim was killed in the course of a robbery that went wrong. That’s what we’ve been thinking up to now. Maybe it’s what we were meant to think.”

  Leaman shook his head. “That’s too Byzantine for me.”

  Looks were exchanged, but no one asked.

  “Plenty of people knew the sale was coming,” Diamond went on. “It was well publicised, in the paper and online. Gildersleeve wasn’t exactly silent about going there and bidding up for the carving. Anyone who knew about him and his interest in Chaucer could predict how he’d behave if he was thwarted. The auction was a very good cover for a killing.”

  “Except the killing wasn’t all that efficient,” Leaman said. “He died from a stomach wound rather than several bullets to the head, like you’d expect from an assassination squad.”

  Diamond shook his head and glanced round the room. “Did anyone hear me say the gunmen were hot shots? Plainly they weren’t.”

  Paul Gilbert took some heat out of the exchange. “They don’t get much practice here in sleepy old Zummerzet.”

  Smiles all round.

  Diamond wasn’t letting Leaman undermine him. “The thinking behind it may have been intelligent even though the execution was poor. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Then Keith Halliwell tried to move the discussion on. “It’s progress. We’re talking about suspects now. Real people. I never had much confidence in the British Museum as the killer.”

  “They have a high body count,” Paul Gilbert said, on a roll with his homely wit.