The Stone Wife (25 page)

“Who was the lecturer?”

“You think I’m going to say Gildersleeve, but you’re wrong. It was a guy called Archie Poke.”

Diamond did his best to hide his surprise. He’d heard nothing from Monica about a friendship with Poke. She’d spoken of him only with contempt. “He’s known to me. In fact, I’ve met him.”

“I can save my breath, then,” Bernie said. “He’s told you all this.”

Diamond shook his head. “It’s new to me.”

“There isn’t much more to tell. After a bit, they started meeting Friday nights as well as Wednesdays.”

“In the pub?”

“And sometimes people’s houses. Like I said, they called it a club and gave it that crappy name. One Friday night I had a call from Monica saying she thought she was over the limit and unfit to drive, so she was staying over. I was a mug. I still thought nothing of it. It sounded like the right thing to do. These were college people. I thought they spent their time talking about stuff I’d never get my head round.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“They studied bits of ancient writing. She called it texts. I thought a text is what you send on a mobile. It was brain-fagging work, but they all liked it because they knew Anglo-Saxon and stuff. After a couple of hours of this they had to unwind, so they’d have a drink and a laugh and sometimes another drink. She had the sense not to get into her car.”

“That sounds believable,” Diamond said. “In your shoes, I wouldn’t have been suspicious.”

“Yep, she said when she got home in the morning it had been like her student days, bedding down on someone’s floor. I swallowed it. I don’t have time to question everything. Maybe if I didn’t have a business to run I’d have seen a warning light. Anyhow, this happened a few times. Not every week. But one evening the call didn’t come from Monica. It was one of the others. I didn’t know her, but I could tell from her voice she’d had a skinful. She wouldn’t give her name. She said she was one of the Diphthongs and Monica—she called her Mon, which I never did—Mon had asked her to say she wouldn’t be home that night. There was giggling in the background as if a bunch of them were listening to this. I asked her to put Monica on the phone and she said she’d already left with Arch. I asked who Arch was and she just laughed and put the phone down.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing that night. I didn’t sleep much, I can tell you. I’m not used to being treated like some schoolkid. I’m a major player, a managing director. I get respect wherever I go. When she came home next day we had a real set-to. She gave me some bilge about feeling ill with stomach pains in the pub the night before and Archie—that was the lecturer, Dr. Poke—had driven her to hospital to A&E and she’d spent most of the night there. I didn’t believe a word of it. The others wouldn’t have been pissing themselves laughing if she was on her way to hospital. I went over to the university and found Poke and got the truth of it. They didn’t go near a bloody hospital. He’d taken her back to his flat and shagged her and it wasn’t the first time.”

“He used those words?” Diamond said in disbelief.

“That’s what he meant. He said when an attractive grown-up woman like that came on to him he wasn’t going to say no.”

“Did you hit him?”

Bernie scratched his head. “It’s strange. I don’t know how to explain it. Educated people like him have a way of talking to you that stops you in your tracks. I didn’t like what I was hearing, but it came across as the truth. If he’d bullshitted me, I would have landed one on him for sure. He didn’t.”

“So did you take it out on Monica?”

“Not that time, no. Well …” He grinned at a secret memory. “Not really. We had a run-in for sure. I’d caught her out big time. She cried buckets and said she’d been scared to tell me the truth. She’d got in with this crowd and there was heavy drinking and most of them were pairing off. She was chuffed when this Archie started chatting her up rather than any of the other women, telling her she was the star of his class and he might be able to get her a higher degree or some such. She said it made her feel young, like she was a student all over again. I was broken up, but I knew where she was coming from. It was a part of her life I’d never be able to share. But I didn’t want to lose her. So we patched it up.”

“How?”

“Do you really want to know?” Bernie said, his face reddening. He glanced in Tess’s direction. “Cover your ears, sweetheart. I pulled her pants down and smacked her bare arse, followed by the best fuck we ever had. She was amazing. Squealed like six pigs, but didn’t shed another tear. After it, she said I should spank her more often and I was the only man she’d ever loved. She promised to leave the course and never go drinking with them again. She meant it. She could have killed Poke for telling me everything.”

“She stopped seeing him?”

“Totally. I’m sure of that.”

“So how did she meet the professor?”

He sighed and shook his head. “This was the real kick in the
teeth. I only found out the truth of it when the divorce was going on. It happened like this. After she left the Diphthongs, she had this gap in her life to fill, so she joined a fund-raising group for the local hospital. They were all women and some of them had been through college like her, so she enjoyed the company. I encouraged her. She liked talking about it. They put on a charity swim and a painting exhibition and all kinds of money-making stunts. One of these was what they called a literary lunch, with some jerk from the television talking about his latest book. All sorts of guests were invited and she was supposed to take care of Gildersleeve, sitting next to him, but, being Monica, she was all gooey-eyed at chatting up a real live professor.” He sighed and shrugged. “Same old story.”

“Except this time it ended in divorce,” Diamond said.

“Two years it went on, under my nose. Other people knew—I still don’t know how many—and I only found out when I was laying into one of my business rivals, a dickhead who gazumped my offer for a brownfield site, a power station in London. We were having this up-and-downer and he says you’re so thick you don’t know what’s going on—your own wife having an affair with some poncey professor. I thought he was dragging up the thing with Poke until he told me he was on about heavy sex going on right then. Broke me up, it did.”

“You faced her with it?”

He nodded. “Turned out she started seeing Gildersleeve the same year I forgave her for the other affair. We was finished. Anyway, she’d had enough of me. She wanted the divorce and she got it. I’m not a saint. I’ve had one-night stands, but nothing you could call a relationship. And she knew I was like that.”

“She says you treated her savagely when you found out.”

His expression didn’t alter. “If you want to pull me in for that, it’s a fair cop. In the world I come from, she got what was coming to her. I lost all respect for her the day I learned the truth.”

There was a silence, broken only when Tess said, “What happened?”

Bernie said, “You don’t want to know, darling.” He turned back to Diamond. “There’s nothing else I can tell you.”

The two detectives were driven the short distance into Marlborough by the pilot, who borrowed Tess’s four-by-four. He would be staying the night in one of the best hotels in the high street.

Halliwell’s car stood alone in the approach to the field. You wouldn’t have guessed that the street had been lined with vehicles from end to end only an hour before.

As they left the town and headed for Bath, Diamond said, “What did you make of all that?”

“It’s like any witness statement—one side of the story,” Halliwell said. “You heard Monica’s side of it. I didn’t.”

“She tells it differently, but they don’t disagree on the basics. What you heard from Bernie doesn’t conflict with what I got from her, except he added some detail. They both behaved badly—really badly—and they admit it. The bit that was new was Monica sleeping with Poke. It brings another dimension to the case.”

“In what way?”

“Come on, Keith. The rivalry between those two shoved together in adjoining offices in Reading University. We knew Gildersleeve had the professor’s job—the only one going—and was a block on Poke’s career. Now we have another issue altogether.”

“But she’d finished with Poke before she met Gildersleeve.”

“Yes, and she despises him. He shopped her. He told Bernie she invited him to sleep with her. But we haven’t heard Poke’s take on it. He may still carry a torch for Monica. Imagine how he felt when he learned his arch-rival was seeing her.”

“Even more of a motive.”

“Conceivably.” Diamond waited while they overtook a rider on horseback and then said, “It’s funny.”

“What is?”

“Bernie’s marriage could be straight out of Chaucer.”

19

While Halliwell was negotiating the series of roundabouts at Chippenham, Diamond checked his phone yet again for a text from Ingeborg.

“Did it beep?” Halliwell asked.

“I’m wondering if the damn thing is broken,” Diamond said. “It’s turned on, but nothing has come through all day.”

“There won’t be a problem. She’ll be in touch when she’s ready.”

“She’s a compulsive texter. It’s been a couple of days.”

Halliwell smiled.

“What’s amusing you?” Diamond asked.

“Just a thought. When it finally comes through, will you understand it? Texting is like another language.”

“She knows my limitations. She’ll keep it simple. I just wish she’d send something, so we know she’s okay.”

“Infiltrating the enemy takes time. Shouldn’t be rushed. What’s she going to text, anyway? ‘I’m all right, guv. Don’t fret.’ ”

“Sarcastic bugger.”

But he understood the point. Ingeborg herself had told him he sometimes sounded like her father. The responsibility for sending her undercover was hard to live with. He’d pressured her into doing this because she seemed the right choice at the time, and now her initial reluctance kept coming back to torment him. But he had to keep reminding himself that she’d said she might not be in contact for some time. He’d taken that to mean twenty-four hours maximum. She must have meant longer.

She was no babe in arms. She’d worked as an investigative journalist, taking on tough assignments. Treating her as a raw recruit did her no favours, but deep down he had an old-fashioned instinct that women needed protecting.

He said to Halliwell when they were on the long stretch to Corsham, “Am I out of touch?”

“How do you mean, guv?”

“In that field, if you remember, we were talking about endangered species.”

“The dormouse.”

“Right.”

“No way are you a dormouse,” Halliwell said.

He seemed to have missed the point and Diamond wasn’t going to labour it, so he went back to staring out of the window.

They had almost reached Batheaston when Halliwell picked up the conversation as if it was continuous. “There’s the great-crested newt, but I wouldn’t compare you to that.”

“Thanks.”

“And then there are butterflies. When I was growing up I was into butterflies in a big way. Some of them are protected. Do you know what the rarest butterfly in Great Britain is called?”

“No idea.”

“It’s so rare, it may be extinct.”

“Tell me. I can’t stand the suspense.”

“The large copper.”

His phone finally beeped when they reached Bath and were parking in the reserved area in Manvers Street police station. He snatched it from his pocket.

“It’s a text.”

“There you go,” Halliwell said.

“But not from her. It’s Paul Gilbert.” He’d almost forgotten sending his eager DC to check on Ingeborg’s parked car.

The message raised more questions than it answered:

CAR STILL HERE
.
NO DAMAGE
.
I WAS ON GB FOR NIGHT VIDEO SHOOT
.
PRODUCER MARCUS TONE AND BLONDE MAYBE I SEEN FIGHTING BRIDGE NEAR ARNOLFINI
.
G2G SEE TONE CLIFTON
.

He handed the phone to Halliwell. “Impress me. Make sense of that.”

“Tricky. ‘GB’ must mean the
Great Britain
.”

“But he says he was on it for a night video shoot. He couldn’t have been. He only went this morning.”

Halliwell frowned. “Then the ‘I’ must stand for Ingeborg.”

“
She
was at a video shoot?”

“Look, the second ‘I’ makes it clear. ‘Blonde, maybe I.’ If so, it seems she got into a fight. Doesn’t sound like undercover work.”

“What’s ‘G2G?’ ”

“Got to go,” Halliwell said. “Our Paul is on his way to Clifton right now to meet this Marcus Tone.”

“Idiot. I only gave him instructions to check the car.”

“He’s always wanted a piece of the action.”

“Tell me about it! I had him volunteering to go undercover.” Diamond swung the car door open. “Tone sounds bloody dangerous, whoever he is. Let’s see if we’ve got anything on him.”

In the CID room, they asked John Leaman to check criminal records for Marcus Tone. Nothing. He had more success when he Googled the name. The man was well known in the pop music industry as a producer of videos. He had his own website and an office in Clifton.

“What time is it?” Diamond said. “Will his office be open as late as this?”

They obtained Tone’s home address—also in Clifton—from the electoral register. Diamond was on the point of sending a response car when another text came through.

Paul Gilbert again:

TONE SAYS I AND SINGER LEE LI DRIVEN OFF AFTER FRACAS BY NATHAN HAZAEL WITH MINDERS
.
NH LIVES WITH LL LEIGH WOODS
.
FOLLOWING UP
.
G2R
.

“Following up? Is he out of his mind?” Diamond said, handing the phone to Halliwell.

“You can text him, guv.”

“Do it for me, and fast. Tell him he’s to get back here
now. On no account is he to go to Leigh Woods and mess with Hazael.”

Halliwell’s thumb pressed out Diamond’s instructions. “This may be too late. He’ll be well on his way, if not there already. ‘G2R’ is ‘Got to run.’ From Clifton he only has to drive over the suspension bridge. Under ten minutes, easy.”