Authors: Peter Lovesey
Bloodhounds (7 page)
The real mystery had ceased to interest Jessica. "Did she have any advice for the new member?"
"Oh, I think it was just a friendly gesture," said Shirley-Ann, resolved to stonewall.
"Polly is good at giving advice," remarked Jessica, and it didn't sound like a compliment.
"Well, I'm grateful for all the friendship. I feel as if I belong already. I'm certainly going to come again."
"Good—we can do with you," said Jessica more warmly. "It was getting polarized between the whodunit readers and the blood-and-guts lot. There's so much else we could talk about, but we hardly ever do."
"Apart from Umberto Eco."
Jessica smiled. "Apart from him. They're charming people, but they will insist on taking up positions, and it's only because they don't read widely enough. If Rupert were to try a Peter Dickinson for a change, with that fertile imagination thinking up the most amazing plots and settings—"
"Oh, yes!"
"—and still worked out as puzzles, with clues and a proper investigation, he'd be jolted out of the rut he's in. And I'd
love
to
get
Milo reading American thrillers. I know the way in for him. It's through the Fletch books."
"Gregory McDonald."
"Yes. He'd adore the humor, and he'd appreciate the logic of the plots and he'd soon be into Westlake and McBain and Block and ultimately Ellroy."
"There is a way in through women writers," Shirley-Ann pointed out.
"True." Jessica laughed. "True in theory. But you don't know Milo."
Shirley-Ann raised her eyebrows, and Jessica nodded.
Much more gossip about the Bloodhounds would certainly have emerged, but Shirley-Ann didn't want to appear overcurious. She turned the conversation back to the art and was rewarded with an invitation to a private view on Wednesday of the following week.
"I won't pretend it's anything amazing," Jessica explained. "Rearranging the deckchairs on the
Titanic,
A.J. calls it. The same people tend to come each time, but it does pull in a few dealers, and I sell enough to cover the cost of the buck's fizz and Twiglets. You'll see a couple of faces there you know. And don't, for God's sake, feel under any obligation to buy."
When John Wigfull emerged from his press conference Diamond was in the main office reading the poem—if that isn't too grandiose a description of the four lines of verse that had misled everyone, including himself.
"Was it grueling, John?" he asked, with a matey grin.
"I didn't expect an easy ride."
"You took.my advice, I hope?"
"What was that?" said Wigfull in a hollow, preoccupied tone. "Look, no offense, Peter, but I don't have time to talk. There are urgent things to attend to."
"Like a strong coffee? The throat does get dry, answering those damn fool questions."
Whatever the state of Wigfull's throat, his vocal cords had no difficulty in projecting his growing impatience. "I'm heading a major inquiry. This is the world's most valuable stamp. It's far more serious than your shooting in Saltford."
"Not in the eyes of the law, it isn't, and not to the bloke who was Jdlled. So you're calling for reinforcements, no doubt?"
"I'll use every man and woman on the regional crime squad if necessary." There was no doubting Wigfull's commitmerit. His jaw jutted like Churchill's uttering the "blood, toil, tears and sweat5' speech.
"And what are your lines of inquiry?"
"For a start, I'm going to have that bloody poem analyzed by forensic."
"What for—to see if it scans?" Before Wigfull reacted to that, Diamond added, "Because if you hope to learn something from the copies that were sent to the media, you'd better think again. I've got one here." He held out the sheet of paper he had been studying, but Wigfull displayed no interest. "There was a time when it was possible to look at a piece of typing and say which typewriter was used, thanks to some tiny flaw in one of the characters. 'Pray examine this small irregularity in the letter
W.
It proves conclusively that the note was typed on Professor Moriarty's Smith-Corona.' Not these days, laddie. Moriarty puts it through a word processor and runs it off on a laser printer that gives a perfect finish, indistinguishable from a million others. Then he photocopies it. Your forensic friends aren't going to help you, John." A favorite theme of Diamond's, and worth repeating each time he got the chance.
Wigfull was not to be downed. "Wrong. With fluorescence under laser illumination they can get good fingerprints off paper these days."
"All the prints except the thief's."
"You can't say that."
"This guy is smart, John. He won't have left any prints. Have you checked the spelling?"
"The spelling?"
"Of the words in the note."
"Let me have another look." Wigfull snatched the scrap of paper from Diamond and stared at the words. "I can't see anything wrong with this."
"Nor I," said Diamond, after a pause. "Like I said, he's smart. We know the bugger can spell."
That "we" rang an alarm bell for Wigfull. He thrust his head forward combatively. "You and I had better
get
one thing straight, Peter. This one is mine. Just because I listened to you about the press conference it doesn't mean you can muscle in."
"Muscle in?" Diamond blandly echoed. "You know me better than that. I'm far too busy talking to bank clerks."
The grin faded as the week progressed. The bank clerks failed to revive it. Every one of them had a tale to tell of meanness, injustices, and slights inflicted by the former manager. If only the chief clerk, Routledge, hadn't confessed, the liturgy of complaints might have been worth listening to, because the bank was chockfull of potential suspects, and a number of customers with grudges would have come into the reckoning as well. Dispiriting for a keen detective, there was no question that Routledge had fired the fatal shot. Forensic confirmed his statement. By Friday, Diamond was so bored with the business that he told Julie Hargreaves to finish up at Saltford without him. He spent the day in the office attacking the stack of paper that was spilling off his intray and across the desk.
Late in the morning he took a phone call from Dorchester. John Croxley was formerly one of the murder squad at Bath, a pushy young inspector with an ego like a hotair balloon. His naked ambition had grated on the nerves of everyone. He had transferred to Dorset CID in the period Diamond was away, a sideways move that had been greeted with relief in Avon and Somerset.
"Thought I'd give you a call, Mr. Diamond." The voice made a show of sounding casual. "I heard you were back. This isn't a busy moment, I hope?"
"Rushed off my feet—but carry on."
"Are you handling the Penny Black case, then?"
"Not at this minute. I'm on the phone to you, aren't I? Must keep it short, I'm afraid. How are things down there in Dorset? Statistics perking up no end since you arrived, I bet."
"To be perfectly honest, it's not entirely what I expected," Croxley confided. "I hadn't appreciated how much more rural this county is than Avon and Somerset."
"More what?"
"Rural. You know, countrified."
"You mean sheep-shagging?"
There was a pause. "I don't know about that. I'm not getting much work in the field of murder."
Diamond chuckled and said insensitively, "Plenty in the field of turnips, however."
"Not so much turnips as cattle, Mr. Diamond," Croxley said with total seriousness. His sense of humor had never blossomed. "My main job just now is noseprints."
"Is what?"
"Noseprints. It isn't widely known that every bovine noseprint is unique to the individual, like a fingerprint. You coat the animal's nose with printing ink and then press a sheet of paper against it."
"You wouldn't be having me on, John?"
"I wouldn't do that, Mr. Diamond. It's a scheme we've set up with the Dorset County Landowners' Association to combat the rustling of cattle. We've processed seven hundred cows already."
Diamond was containing himself with difficulty. "You get noseprints from cows? Go on, John."
"Well, that's all there is to it. They've recently put me in charge. I don't know why. It isn't as if I was brought up in the country. And I don't see much prospect in it."
"I don't know," said Diamond, tears of amusement sliding down his cheeks. "Things could be worse."
"Do you think so?"
"If it's their noses you deal with, you're out in front, aren't you?"
"I suppose so."
"Good thing you're not taking prints from the other end."
"I hadn't thought of that, Mr. Diamond."
"Think of it when you're feeling low, John. This is new technology, and you're the man who does it. Get your noseprints on the computer. You can set up—what is it they call it?—a database on all the cows in Dorset. You asked about prospects. You've got unlimited prospects, I would think. Ypu could go on doing this for years."
"That's what I'm afraid of," said Croxley bleakly. "I was wondering if—with so much interest in the Penny Black business— you might be mounting a major inquiry, recruiting extra detectives."
"You'd be willing to give up your exciting new job?"
"If there was half a chance."
"No chance at all, I'm afraid. You know how it is with budgets as they are. I'd stick with the cows, if I were you. You could be the world's foremost authority on bovine noseprints."
When he put down the phone, he sat back and rocked with laughter for the first time in a week. He could hardly wait to tell Steph at the end of the day. But something else later that afternoon put it clean out of his mind.
On BBC Radio Bristol after the four o'clock news headlines, the presenter said, "Something different here. I've just been handed a note that my producer believes could link up with that cryptic verse we gave you last Monday morning. Remember? The one the police later said was almost certainly linked to the million-pound stamp theft from the Bath Postal Museum. The Penny Black, right? Well, this looks like another poetic effort from the cryptic cat burglar. It's printed on a sheet of A4 paper with no covering note. Came with the afternoon post, I gather. See what you make of this. Is it a hoax, or could it be a genuine clue? We'll be handing it pronto to the Old Bill, listeners, but you'll be able to say you heard it first on Radio Bristol. Are you ready with pen and paper?
"
'Whither Victoria and with whom
—
The Grand Old Queen?
Look for the lady in the locked room
At seventeen.'
"That's all. We know who or what Victoria is this time, I think, but do we know of any locked rooms? And how does the number seventeen come into it? I'm sure we'll get some calls about this. If you have any brilliant suggestions before the end of the program, we'll be pleased to pass them on. I'll repeat the verse one more time."
The producer had diplomatically phoned the Bath police before the item was broadcast, so a radio was tuned in, and the entire control room heard it, including Diamond, whose sixth sense had told him something was afoot and got him from behind his desk at the critical time. The only notable absentee was John Wigfull, listening privately on a separate radio upstairs.
"This gets more and more like party games," a detective sergeant commented morosely.
"Is it genuine?" someone else asked.
"Who can say? It's got to be taken seriously after the first one."
"Yes, but why would they do this? Mr. Wigfull was expecting a ransom demand, not another riddle."
"Maybe they don't want a ransom. This could be some kind of publicity stunt, couldn't it? When is the university rag week?"
"Too early in the year for that. The students have only just gone back. If it is a stunt, then my money is on some smartarse member of the glitterati."
"The what?"
"The rich and beautiful. The incrowd. Hooray Henrys. Leading the Old Bill up the garden path is their idea of fun."
The debate was taken a stage further at a special meeting of senior staff convened by the Assistant Chief Constable. "Since we are bound to treat this development seriously," he said in preamble, "I decided to pool our wits and experience. If the riddle is anything like the first one, it may involve knowledge of Bath, and any one of you may have the piece of information that clarifies everything."
From the expressions around the oval table no one was confident of clarifying anything.
"John, this is your inquiry," the ACC said to Wigfull with a motioning of the upturned palm, "so why don't you give us your immediate thoughts?"
Wigfull cleared his throat. "Well, sir, we can reasonably assume that the Victoria referred to is the cover."
"The what?"
"The missing stamp, sir."
"Why not call a stamp a stamp?"
"Because it's attached to an envelope. There's a datemark. The whole thing is known as a cover. Like the first-day covers they sell in the post office each time a new set of stamps is issued."
"That sort of cover," said the ACC, as if he'd known all along. "Carry on."
Wigfull referred to his notes. "The first two lines:
'Whither Victoria and with whom
—
The Grand Old Queen?'
must surely be a coded way of telling us that he is referring to the cover. I think we should focus our interest on the third and fourth lines:
'Look for the lady in the locked room
At seventeen.'
"I venture to ask three questions: Which lady? Which locked room? And which seventeen? The lady may, of course, be another reference to Victoria, the cover, but we should not exclude other possibilities. Does it link up with the last line, giving us a lady of seventeen? Do we know of any seventeen-year-old ladies in the present or the past who may be connected with the case in some way?"
Nobody spoke.
"The locked room may help to fix it," Wigfull went on. "If there was a local memory or story of some young woman kept locked up, for example. A prisoner. A mental patient. A nun, even. These are my immediate thoughts."
"Any response?" asked the ACC of the blank faces around the table.
Tom Ray said, "I was thinking along different lines, sir. The seventeen could be part of an address."
"That's rather good," the ACC commented, seeming to imply that not one of Wigfull's theories was even half good.
"Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand, lived at number seventeen, the Royal Crescent. There's a plaque outside."
"What's he got to do with this?" Peter Diamond asked. "Did he have a seventeen-year-old sex slave?"
"I rather doubt it," said the ACC frigidly. "I happen to know a little about Pitman. He was a man of the highest principles. Like me he was a teetotaller, a vegetarian, and a nonsmoker."
There was an uneasy pause. Not even Diamond was going to press the matter of Isaac Pitman's sex life, or the ACC's.
"It was a long shot," admitted Ray.
Another theory was advanced by Keith Halliwell. "Is it possible that the seventeen refers to a time, like five P.M., or seventeen hundred hours?"
"If it does, we've missed it by ten minutes," said Diamond, glancing at the clock on the wall. "Personally I don't think this joker has given us enough to catch him. He wouldn't, would he? It's like that book
The Thirty-Nine Steps.
It's no good looking for the blessed steps. You know you're there when you find them. I mean, we could rabbit on all evening about seventeen this and that. Seventeen-horsepower cars; seventeen trees in a row; the seventeenth day of the month; or fifteen rugby players and two reserves. It gets you nowhere without more information."
"So your advice would be . . ."
"Ignore it. Continue with the other lines of inquiry."
"What lines?" murmured Ray.
Wigfull said, "We've been extremely thorough."
"With what result?"
"Investigations can't be rushed."
"I don't know," said Ray. "Peter Diamond nicks a bloke for murder two minutes after getting to the scene."
The ACC drew a deep breath, and said, "Gentlemen, let's confine this to discussion of the stamp theft. To ignore this new development would, I think, be negligent. Peter may be right in saying that the thief won't give much away, but if we can make any sense of the riddle, it may link up with other evidence."