The Vault (23 page)
Authors: Peter Lovesey
Left in the room with Leaman, Diamond picked up the picture that had caused so much excitement and examined the flaking brown paper on the reverse. Nothing was written there. "I'd like to show this to Ellis Somerset, see if he thinks it looks anything like the other two."
"Will he let you borrow it?"
"I can ask nicely."
"Where's this leading us, sir?"
"To a plausible motive for murder. You've just seen the grip it can get on a man, this passion for collecting. They hear about something and they have to possess it. It's an addiction."
"Is he the killer? If he is, he would have known about the other two Blakes. He's a bloody good actor if he did."
"Let's not jump to conclusions... yet."
"Nobody else around here collects Blakes, do they?"
Diamond didn't answer. Sturr's tread was sounding across the hall. When he came in, he was carrying a dark red pocket file. "I'm afraid I can't tell you the previous owner of my Blake," he told them, still fired up. "The catalogue lists vendors for some of the other lots, but not this one."
"A secret seller?"
"Anonymous. It's not unusual for a vendor to want his name kept off the catalogue, and you'll find that all auctioneers guard people's privacy if requested. You said these others were owned by someone from Camden Crescent."
"Simon Minchendon."
"Who died last week? Good Lord, I knew him. Visited his house. I had no idea he was interested in Blake."
"Maybe these were not on view."
"I would certainly have noticed them if they had been. It was a fine house, filled with interesting things. This is so tantalising. You say they were stolen from Noble and Nude?"
"No, I said they disappeared on the day the owner was murdered. She could have sold them. We're trying to get a picture of her last hours."
"That's why you came to me?" The Councillor's features creased into a smile. "I wish you'd mentioned it first. Do you know, I was beginning to think you suspected me of murder?"
DIAMOND LET HIMSELF IN, not expecting to find Steph still up. They had an understanding that if ever he got home late, she would be in bed. So he took off his shoes by the front door and padded through to the kitchen to see if she had left anything in the oven. Some hours had gone by since his visit to the canteen, though the half-price lamb was not forgotten. Bad meals have ways of lingering on the palate that good meals do not.
Under his arm he had Councillor Sturr's Blake, cocooned in bubblewrap. Easing the picture from its owner had been a triumph of persuasion. The lure: the chance to have it examined by forensic scientists specialising in art works, who, using the latest technology, would surely confirm it as genuine—or so Diamond had suggested. Sturr could then announce to the art world that he possessed an accredited Blake, and moreover that it was one of a previously unknown series illustrating
Frankenstein.
No one excelled the big detective at exploiting a suspect's vanity.
He switched on the light, put the picture in a place of safety on top of the fridge and looked for Steph's note about supper. It wouldn't be like her to go to bed without leaving a note.
No note this time, but there was a chicken dinner on the table covered in clingfilm. Steph had not let him down. Roast potatoes, runner beans, peas and carrots. It was still slightly warm. He would give it a whirl in the microwave and shortly expunge the memory of the lamb.
An ice-cold lager would go down nicely with the chicken. He reached for the fridge door and was surprised by a sudden movement at the edge of his vision that made him lean sharply to the left and put up a protective arm. Something dark leapt up from the floor. Warm fur brushed the back of his hand, Raffles, expecting to be fed.
A cat will judge the minimum effort required to make a leap, and will always succeed unless the unexpected happens. Nudged in mid-air by Diamond's flailing hand, Raffles lost some momentum, got the front paws up, but not the rest. Two sets of claws caught in the bubblewrap covering Councillor Sturr's Blake. The hind paws scraped frantically against the side of the fridge, trying for a purchase that was not there. The package was dragged inexorably to the edge and tipped over. Cat and picture crashed to the tiled floor. There was the sickening sound of glass breaking.
Diamond shouted, "Bloody hell, I'll skin you."
Raffles bolted out of the kitchen and upstairs, all prospect of a late supper gone.
So unfair. Diamond was notorious for being clumsy, but this time he'd taken special care. You'd think the top of a fridge would be a safe place.
He picked the package off the floor. It chinked. He placed it on the kitchen table and untied the string.
"What was that?"
He jerked again. His nerves were bad. Steph had come in, as silent as the cat.
He explained the accident, while she watched him ease aside the bubblewrap. The splintered glass was mostly still in place, but a few pieces had fallen out of the frame. Steph warned him not to touch. They upended the picture and let the loose fragments fall onto the wrapping.
"The worst thing is it doesn't belong to me."
"Thank God for that," Steph commented.
"Why do you say that?"
"It's not the sort of thing I'd want on the wall, that's why. It's a Blake print, isn't it?"
"It's an original."
"Oh, Pete!"
"Well, I can't see that it's damaged." He let out the tension with a long breath. "Where did you come from? I thought you'd gone up."
"I was dozing in my armchair in the back room. You gave me a proper shock."
"The cat did."
"It wasn't the cat that shouted. All right," she said, lifting a hand to pacify him. "You've had one hell of a Sunday. Did you find who attacked John Wigfull?"
"Not yet."
"They say there's a slight improvement. He's drifting in and out of consciousness. I phoned a friend at the hospital two hours ago."
One of Steph's network. Nothing happened anywhere without her hearing about it.
"They won't let us near him," he said. "They never do."
"He won't remember anything," she said.
"You're probably right."
She put the dinner in the microwave and pressed the reheat pad. "It isn't obvious, then?"
"What isn't?"
"The person you're after."
"Not obvious, no." Steph had a remarkable gift for unlocking mysteries, so he summarised his day, the interviews with Somerset, Dougan, Pennycook, Heath and Sturr. "I can't see any of them bludgeoning a police officer. Well, old Heath isn't in the frame, anyway. He's too old and too frail."
"Why did you bother with him, then?"
"Checking back on Joe Dougan—who was the man most likely to be chased across a field by Wigfull. There's no question Wigfull had him top of the list. But everything the little rogue has told us is true."
"Sounds as if you like him."
"That means nothing, but, yes, I do. In spite of everything, he's chirpy."
"And the others?"
"Not so lovable." He returned to the fridge for that lager. "But I haven't caught them seriously lying. Somerset is the bloke in a bow-tie you don't see out of doors, let alone wielding a bludgeon in a Wiltshire field. Pennycook is a junkie without a car. And Sturr doesn't have any reason to bash Wigfull. He wasn't even seen by Wigfull. What's more, he has an alibi."
"There's no one else?"
"No one I would call a suspect. I tried to see a character known as Uncle Evan who Wigfull may conceivably have gone to interview, but he's proving elusive."
"Where does he fit in?"
"He was one of the people Joe Dougan visited the day Peg Redbird was killed. At one time he owned the book that started Joe on this trail—Mary Shelley's copy of Milton."
"Uncle Evan?" The microwave pinged and she opened it and peeled the clingfilm off the plate. "I'm sure I've heard of him."
"Puppet shows. He tours the fetes and fairs all summer."
"That's it, then. I've seen his advert in the paper. Do you want to eat here?"
"Fine."
"Brown sauce?"
"Please."
"Better take the picture off the table, then. You know what happened last time you shook the bottle."
She moved it to the safety of the front room. While Diamond ate, Steph gave some thought to the problem of Wigfull's attacker. "This all happened out Stowford way, didn't it?"
"A field between Westwood and Stowford."
"Where did they start—Westwood?"
"Must have. We found his car there."
"John Wigfull's?"
"Yes."
"Presumably he was following someone—or someone followed him. Have you worked out where he was going?" She doggedly thought through the logic of events, as she liked to do, but this time she appeared to have come full circle.
"Stowford, like I said."
"Why Stowford?" Steph persisted. "Not for a cream tea, surely?"
He thought about that, frowning. Then he smiled.
"THE MURDEROUS MARK
OF
the fiend's grasp was on her
neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips."
Strangulation was the monster's method. How inconvenient that his victims didn't shed blood.
MONDAY MORNING, AND WHATEVER happened to the weekend? Feeling blue, Diamond drove into his space at Manvers Street nick, switched off the ignition, sighed, felt for the door handle, heaved himself out and slammed the door. Then he heard a shout of, "Hi," from the far side of the car park. He stared across the car tops. She was blonde, a blonde to make Monday morning feel like Friday afternoon. What was even better, she waved and started running towards him.
He no longer felt blue. There was a definite tinge of rose.
"Mr D," she called out, and he recognized the voice as Ingeborg Smith's. The rose turned purple. It was time he had his eyes tested.
She stopped in front of him, breathless. "I won't keep you a moment."
"That's for sure."
"I just wanted to ask how John Sturr took it last night."
"You mean your dramatic exit? He didn't say much at all. Stunned, I expect."
"He didn't mention anything about my chances?"
"Your chances?"
"Of joining the police."
"Forget it, Ingeborg. He's a big wheel. He's not bothered with recruiting. You're pushing at an open door. You've done enough to get noticed."
Her face relaxed into a confident smile. "You've heard then."
"Heard what? Don't ask me, I only work here."
"Didn't they tell you? My recruitment interview." She let that sink in, and then said, "I got my application in just in time. They phoned me specially. They're seeing some applicants today and could I come in at short notice? Could I, man, oh man!"
"I'll cross my fingers."
"For me?"
"For Bath Police—if you get taken on."
She laughed and said, "Fat chance really. All bets are off after last night. John Sturr can pull the plug on me even if they like me."
"Did you tell him about the interview?"
"Yes. I thought it would help me. Didn't know I was going to blow a fuse and foul up everything."
"You spoke for all of us. But I thought you two were friends."
"Just because he took me to Georgina's party?"
"I saw you leave with him. You did stay the night?"
She said, level-eyed, "I did."
"You don't mind me asking? Did you go straight from the party to his house?"
"Yes."
"And then ... ?"
She laughed. "Oh, come on."
He wanted to know. "You spent the entire night with him?"
"You know I did."
"You'd had a few drinks by that time. Maybe your memory—"
She said with scorn, "I may have looked pie-eyed, but I know exactly what happened ... or didn't."
"Didn't?"
Now she clicked her tongue and looked away across the car park. "Forget it. This is too personal."
"Yesterday you made some remark about business calls to America."
She nodded. "You don't miss much, do you? When we got in, there were messages on his answerphone. He said he needed to phone New York. Over there it was still business hours. He opened a bottle of bubbly, poured me one and took me into another room and put on some rock and roll video while he went off to make his call. I was too loaded to the gills to make an issue of it. When he finally got off the phone, a good forty minutes later, he was all apologies." She looked away again. "The story of the night."
"Yet you made another date for Sunday."
"Right. I met him by chance at the Forum Saturday night."
"The Elgar concert?" he said with interest. This could be crucial.
"Yes. I was sitting two rows behind him. He suggested this meal on Sunday. By then I knew about this interview. I'm not stupid."
John Sturr's movements on the afternoon and evening Wigfull was beaten unconscious had become central to the investigation. "Tell me, was he there from the beginning of the concert?"
"That's when we spoke—before it started, I mean."
He nodded, but wistfully. This piece of information clinched Sturr's alibi for that afternoon. He was at Castle Cary until six. It was impossible for him to have attacked Wigfull and made the start of the concert.
"What time are the interviews?"
"Seven o'clock?"
"You're about ten hours too early."
She laughed again. "Right now I'm wearing my other hat. Inspector Halliwell's press conference."
"Busy day for both of us, then." He took a step away, but Ingeborg still wanted to say something.
"I wasn't going to stay another night at John Sturr's. You don't think I'm that desperate?"
"Ingeborg, at the moment I just want to get to work."
"Why were
you
there?" she asked, becoming the journalist again. "What was it about? Is he up to naughties?"
"I reckon he thought he was," said Diamond, "even if you didn't."
"That isn't what I meant."
Buoyed up just a little, Diamond ambled into work.
INSIDE, HE asked Keith Halliwell how the press briefing had gone.
Some of the crime reporters, it seemed, had been touchy about Ingeborg's exclusive on the bones found in the River Wylye until they heard it confirmed by Halliwell that it really had been her digging in back numbers of the
Wiltshire Times
that had made the breakthrough. But there was real satisfaction over the appeal for information about the two men known as Banger and Mash. Papers can make something of names like that.
"We're back in the news," Halliwell claimed, not without pride. He'd handled a large press conference smoothly.
"Were we ever out of it?" Diamond commented.
"I've done a load of interviews for TV and radio."
"You'll have your own chat show next."
He strolled into the incident room where the information on Peg Redbird's murder was being co-ordinated. The man he wished to speak to was busy on the phone, so he stood by the board where photos of the crime scene were displayed, a custom that had never, in all his years as a murder man, been of any practical use. There were shots of Peg's office in Noble and Nude, of her body lodged against Pulteney Weir and of the stretch of river bank closest to the shop where, presumably, the body had been tipped into the Avon.
Leaman, still with the phone to his ear, snatched up a sheet of paper and waved it. Diamond went over.
The paper had the BT heading familiar from countless phone bills. They had supplied a longish list of numbers, the calls Peg Redbird had made on the day she was killed. Someone had scribbled notes in pencil beside some of them. British
Museum,
Tate, Courtauld, Fitzwilliam.
It seemed Peg had devoted the first part of that afternoon to calling art galleries and museums. Later she had spoken to someone at Sotheby's, the auctioneers. Then there were two local calls, as yet unidentified.
"Helpful, sir?" Leaman said, now off the phone.
"Could be. Are these your notes?"
"Sally Myers, sir."
One of the younger members of the squad looked up fleetingly from her keyboard.
Leaman said, "It's clear Peg was pretty active that afternoon, trying to check on something. It has to be the Blakes, doesn't it?"
Diamond had worked that out and moved on. "What about these Bath numbers? Why haven't we got names beside them?"
"Sally's working on it. I thought we'd trace the long distance calls first."
Diamond made a sound deep in his throat that registered disagreement. The local calls were of more interest. "What's the news of John Wigfull?"
"Slightly better. He's semi-conscious some of the time, but in no condition to talk."
"Wigfull can't help us. Even if he sits up and asks for meat and two veg, he won't remember a damned thing. People don't after serious concussion."
"We checked Councillor Sum's statement, sir—the people in Castle Cary he went to see Saturday afternoon. It stands up well. He was with them until ten to six."
"And by seven-thirty he was at the Elgar concert in Bath," said Diamond. "He met Ingeborg there. She just told me."
Barely disguising his disappointment, Leaman said, "He's squeaky-clean, then. Shall I rub his name off the board?"
"Christ—who put it up there? If Georgina sees it she'll go ape. Give me the damned duster." He grabbed it and erased the name himself. "Don't you have anything new to report?"
Leaman shrugged. There was no pleasing some people.
"I'm off to Stowford for a bit," Diamond announced.
Nobody applauded, but they must have cheered inwardly, and he knew it. He was no fun to have around this Monday morning.
STOWFORD SCARCELY merits a name at all. You wouldn't call it a village; a hamlet would be an exaggeration. It is a farm and a cluster of buildings presenting their backs to the A366 between Radstock and Trowbridge. Only the cream teas board at the side of the the road would persuade a passing driver that there was anything to stop for. The place is a relic of the wool trade that flourished for four centuries, now just an ancient, crumbling farmhouse, some farm buildings and a mill.
"Why Stowford?”
Steph had asked.
Diamond left the road and took the track that curved left towards the farmyard. He parked against a barn. Nobody seemed to be about, just a black cat sunning itself against the barn wall. On seeing the visitor it rolled on its back and looked at him upside down, suggesting it would not object to some admiration, but no cat stood a chance with Diamond so soon after last night's incident in the kitchen.
He walked around the side of the barn and looked through a window. The interior was fitted out as a furniture-maker's workshop. Nice pieces, too. A table and chairs he would have been happy to own. These buildings, he remembered from his previous visit, barns, cowsheds or whatever, had been put to use as craft workshops. Next door was a stonemason's studio and beyond that a metalwork shop.
"Why Stowford?”
Why not?
He continued the slow inspection of the buildings and the cat came with him, intermittently pressing its side against his legs. Not one of the workshops was in use. Well, it was only Monday morning. How nice to be self-employed, he thought.
Through the farmyard he went, across to the gabled farmhouse where he and Steph had gone for the cream tea. Fifteenth century, this building was said to be, and, candidly, looked its age. Moss was growing in profusion on the tiled roof.
He rang the handbell provided on a table by the door. The sound seemed excessive.
No one came. Although the small front lawns at either side of the path were filled with tables and chairs, the people didn't do morning coffee, it seemed. Just the cream teas.
He tried the front door and found it open. He recalled coming in here to pay for the tea. If you didn't notice the low lintel you paid with a bruised head as well.
Ahead was a narrow hallway with a kitchen off to the left. The cat trotted confidently in there.
"Anyone about?"
He was beginning to get that Marie
Celeste
feeling. The large room to the right was obviously the living room, with a generous fireplace, a piano and a box of children's toys. A table big enough to seat ten stood at the centre and other tables filled the window spaces, with pews instead of chairs. When the weather was unkind, the cream tea clients came in here.
He called out again.
The silence was not helping his Monday gloom.
Rather than venturing into the private rooms beyond, he returned outside and explored around the back, thinking possibly he had heard some sounds from that direction.
The source was revealed. He looked over a low wall at a large sow. It eyed him and seemed almost to smile.
Then a voice behind him said, "Lift me up, please."
A small girl had come from nowhere, perhaps six years old, with fair hair in a fringe and dressed in a pink T-shirt and black Lycra shorts. As small girls go, she was not the most prepossessing. Pale, snub-nosed and gap-toothed. And barefoot.
He asked, "Who are you?"
"Winnie."
"Do you live here, Winnie?"
She shook her head.
"Just visiting?"
A nod. "I want to see the pig."
"It's here."
"I can't see over the wall."
He knew better than to lift up a child he didn't know, natural as it may have seemed. "I can fix that," he said, spotting a blue plastic milk crate. "You can stand on that."
"I'll fetch it."
She was back with the crate very quickly and placed it in position herself and stepped up. "I can see now."
"Good."
"I call her Mrs Piggy."
"That's not a bad name," he said. Talking seriously to a child was a rare treat.
"She can't be Miss Piggy," Winnie said in a way that begged a question, and he wondered if he was about to be told something intimate, with the candour you must expect from small children.
"Why is that?"
"Get real. Miss Piggy is a Muppet."
"So she is. And where's your Mummy this morning?"
"Shopping, I 'spect. Look at all her titties. Why's she got so many?"
He should have been expecting something like this. "Those are for all the piglets. When she has a litter—that's baby pigs— they come in big numbers. Each one needs a place to suck."
"Miss Piggy doesn't have all those titties."
"Get real," he said. "Miss Piggy is a Muppet."
She almost fell off the crate laughing.
If she were ours, he thought, mine and Steph's, we wouldn't leave her and go shopping. Some people didn't deserve children. "Are you staying in the farmhouse?"
She shook her head, still watching the sow.
"Where, then?"
"Van."
He'd seen a tractor and some farm machinery where he'd parked the car. No van.
"Over there," said Winnie, gesturing in the general direction of the fields, but without taking her eyes off the sow.
He remembered seeing a caravan with a tent attachment on the far side of the field as he drove in.
She turned and jumped off the crate. She'd seen enough of the sow. "What shall we do next?"
Such confidence. He said, "I was about to leave. Aren't there any grown-ups about?"
"Don't know. Do you want to see the Muppets?"
"Watch TV, you mean? I'd really like to, but I don't have time today."