The Vault

by Peter Lovesey

  "Go figure," murmured Donna. "He only wants me to read the walls in a rest room."

  "Don't you follow me? It could be part of the original Frankenstein house."

  Shaking her head, Donna walked to the door of the Ladies' Room and disappeared from view.

  Joe waited, tapping his foot.

  Donna came out again after only a couple of seconds. "No basement. It's all on this level and totally modern. Now can we go?"

  Frustrated, Joe looked around, orientating himself again. Without answering Donna, he stepped along the corridor.

  Her patience snapped. "Stay here if you want. I'm going shopping."

  Joe was preoccupied. A short way ahead, he had spotted some stairs down to a door marked "Staff Only".

  Without giving him another look, Donna walked out of the building.

  Joe was not deterred by the sign on the door. He went down the curved stone stairs. Inside the staff room, two men in black overalls were sieving earth into a wheelbarrow.

  "You don't mind if I go through?" he said, pointing across the room. He was already on his way.

  "Who are you?" one of them asked.

  "Professor Joe Dougan."

  The title made enough of an impression to allay suspicion. "Mind how you go, professor," said the workman. "It's muddy."

  Joe pushed open the second door and was astonished. Below, at the foot of some steps, arc-lamps on stands gave a brilliant view of what was clearly a vast ancient cellar, with arched vaulting above solid pillars of stone. His mouth went dry and a pulse beat in his head. He had surely found what he had hardly dared hope would still exist-the basement to number five. The Pump Room extension must have been built over this. They had not demolished the original vault when they cleared the rest of the old house at the end of the last century.

  The presence of the lights was odd, and so were the flagstones stacked against the walls, but he was so excited that he thought little of it until someone dressed entirely in a white overall appeared at his side and asked, "Do we know you, sir?"

  "I don't believe you do," Joe answered, still euphoric at this discovery. "I'm Joe Dougan. Professor Joe Dougan." He shook the man's hand.

  "Andy Mills. You see, we were expecting Dr Middleton at two."

  "I don't know about that," said Joe.

  "We were told he had some trouble with his car."

  "That would explain it, then," said Joe affably.

  "You're here in Dr Middleton's place?"

  "Suits me," said Joe. "I'm just delighted to see all this."

  "I have a spare oversuit if you'd care to use one, Professor."

  Joe thanked Andy Mills. His own linen suit was liable to get dirty down here. They had taken up the flagstones and the floor appeared to be under excavation.

  He pulled on the oversuit. They even had gloves and overshoes for him.

  "It's there, against the wall," Andy Mills told him. "The access is not marked as well as it should be, so would you follow me?"

  Joe followed, not entirely sure what this was about, but happy as a cat in a creamery. His one regret was that Donna had not shared this moment. She would take some convincing when he told her about it.

  Mills asked, "Didn't you bring your kit?"

  "Just what I'm dressed in," said Joe. "What are you going to show me?"

  "Didn't they tell you?" The man stopped and crouched. "It's right here."

  Joe did likewise and found himself looking at a human skull at the bottom of a shallow excavation trench. "Well, isn't that something?" he said. "Is it real?"

  Andy Mills gave an uneasy laugh.

  Joe stood upright again. It was uncomfortable squatting. "Got anything else?"

  "That's it," said Mills, increasingly perplexed.

  "I'll just take a look around, if you don't mind. This chance is too good to miss." He stepped across the lumpy floor to the opposite wall.

  "Don't you want to lift the skull?" said Mills.

  "No thanks."

  There was an uneasy pause.

  Mills eventually said, "You think it should remain here?"

  "To give it to you straight," said Joe, "the skull doesn't interest me. The cellar doesn't need dressing up. For me, it has great atmosphere without the extras."

  After another interval Mills said, "Excuse me asking, professor. You are from the Royal United?"

  "No, from the Royal Crescent, if you want to know. Is this important?"

  * * *

  INGEBORG SMITH was hovering near the Pump Room entrance when Diamond approached, looking as usual as if he had escaped from an old black and white film in his trilby and striped suit. He asked her graciously if she would mind waiting a few minutes while he checked with his people inside.

  The men sifting the rubble in the staff room were not the pair he had met in the morning. They told him someone had come in earlier and gone into the vault through some misunderstanding. Dr Middleton had still not arrived. And nothing new had been discovered in the sieving.

  He returned upstairs.

  He and Ingeborg sat in the open at one of the tables outside Monks Coffee House, opposite the Pump Room entrance. From there, Jim Middleton would be seen arriving, if he appeared at all.

  The Abbey Churchyard was quite a sun-trap this August afternoon, and they ordered ice-cream rather than tea. Diamond loosened his tie and kept his jacket on. Too many police officers were coming and going. Out here he felt conspicuous looking relaxed with the blonde journalist.

  "I may get up at any time," he cautioned her.

  "Leaving me to pay?" she said.

  He took a five-pound note from his back pocket and pushed it under an ashtray. "This student you mentioned over the phone-who is she?"

  Ingeborg was reluctant to come to the point-that point, anyway. "What are the chances of someone like me joining the police?"

  He almost needed the question repeated. "You mean this seriously? You have a career already."

  "People switch jobs. Could I work in CID?"

  "Not right off. You'd go through training school first, Probation. Two years on the beat." He was unsure if this was a serious enquiry, or some debating point she was leading up to.

  She asked, "Isn't there a fast track?"

  "Accelerated promotion? That doesn't apply until you're qualified, and then it's mainly for graduates."

  "Two years in that gruesome uniform?"

  "We've all been through it."

  She smiled. "Skirts and black tights?"

  "You know what I mean. After that, you might get transferred to CID if you're promising-and lucky."

  "How soon?"

  "Depends."

  "On who you know, I suppose."

  He was careful not to return her faint smile. "That can be a factor. You're not serious about this, Ingeborg? It's not a bit like journalism."

  "Do you think I could do it-detective work?"

  "You have some of the qualities."

  "But…?"

  "But could you put up with the discipline? Can you handle routine as well as stress? Stupid colleagues? Coarse remarks? Idiot people doing idiot things? I have problems myself."

  "With coarse remarks?"

  "I'm trying to see it from your point of view."

  "Don't try. If you're on about women being given a hard time, that's not unique to the police. You're not selling it very well, Mr Diamond."

  "That isn't my mission, Ingeborg. If you choose to join, don't ever say I talked you into it."

  Her eyes glittered amusedly. "No fear of that."

  "Now can we talk about this student who disappeared?"

  She nodded. "When I heard about the skull being female, I asked around. My ex-landlady is a whiz with anything like that. She's convinced we're all going to be raped and murdered one of these days, and she memorises every case of violence and abuse that supports her thesis. Unsolved cases, missing girls. Her recall is amazing. She reels them off like the football results. I'd back her against your computers."

&nbs
p; "She remembered this case?"

  "I didn't tell her what it was about. I simply asked her about women who went missing during the nineteen-eighties. She gave me upwards of a dozen names. This one fitted the best."

  "So who is she?"

  "Violet Turner, known unofficially as Tricks."

  "Any reason?"

  She turned her large shrewd eyes on him. "Tricks Turner. If you can't work that out…"

  "She was on the game?"

  She shook her head.

  "Generous with it?"

  "After three years reading Ancient History at Durham, wouldn't you be?"

  "I thought Ancient History was full of that sort of thing. So when did she come down here?"

  "She was a postgrad at Bristol. Topped up her grant by working one day a week as a guide at the Roman Baths. I checked all this in the local press, and my landlady had the details right. In February, 1983, Violet Turner went missing. Never completed her course. Hasn't been heard of since."

  "Was it given much space in the papers?"

  "Very little. There was never a time when they were certain she was dead. People assumed at first that she'd taken off on a trip with some bloke. When she didn't come back after two or three months, the alarm was raised. Her parents, up in Newcastle, knew nothing and heard nothing from her."

  "Was there a man in her life?"

  "At least four."

  "They would have been questioned," said Diamond. "There should still be statements on file. Did they publish a picture?"

  "Yes, in black and white. She was dark, apparently. Large eyes. Reminded me a bit of that girl who played Tess."

  "Nastassja Kinski? No wonder she was popular." Up to now, he had only the image of the skull in the vault with its earth-filled eye-sockets.

  "Is that helpful?" Ingeborg asked.

  Wary of her agenda, he played it down. "One thing you'd learn if you ever joined CID is that the most promising leads aren't always the right ones."

  "If it is her, when do you expect to announce it?"

  "You want to scoop the others?"

  "It's my job."

  "There are tests-once I finally get a pathologist to the scene. We're unlikely to get an identification for some days. Dental records may help. I can't see us going public on a named individual until we're sure. You'd be unwise to rush into print yet."

  "So what shall I write-that you haven't yet linked this with the disappearance of Violet Turner, who worked in the Roman Baths and disappeared in 1983?"

  He almost snarled, "Don't bait me." As he was saying it, he spotted Jim Middleton striding across the yard. "Stay in touch," he heard himself tell her unnecessarily as he got up, but it softened the last remark.

  He caught up with Middleton in the corridor. "What happened?"

  The pathologist swung around. "Jesus Christ, Peter, you shouldn't creep up on people like that. I nearly dropped my guts-bag."

  "We expected you at two."

  "Sorry, old friend. The gearbox went on my Ultimate Driving Machine."

  "You could have phoned."

  "What with? I don't carry one of those ghastly mobiles."

  Diamond didn't pursue it. "This way. It's down in the vault."

  "Where the hands were found?"

  "Yes." He escorted Middleton down to the vault.

  "My word," said the pathologist as he shook open the protective overall he was handed, "you've got major earthworks here. Is the skull where you found it?"

  "Exactly as it was. We brushed away some of the earth around it, that's all."

  "And no doubt brushed away the hairs I'll be hoping to find." He stepped into the overall and zipped it up. "Hair is durable. It often remains after other tissues have decomposed. No, I won't complain. Let me help you with that." He grabbed the back of the garment Diamond was struggling with and hauled it up to shoulder height. "Don't they make an XXL?"

  They put on overshoes and walked over to the skull. Diamond said, "The Scene of Crime team say she's female."

  "I wouldn't disagree with that." Middleton took a torch from his bag and bent over the skull. "No hair that I can see." He tapped the cranium lightly with his gloved knuckle and stroked its surface with something like affection. Then, against all the rules, he burrowed with his fingers, took a grip and plucked the entire thing from the earth and placed it on the level above. "And where were the hands found?"

  "Some distance off. Over there, between two flagstones."

  Middleton flicked off some earth, pressed the skull backwards and opened the jaw. "Because, you see, the evidence suggests that the hands and the skull are not related."

  He felt himself blush scarlet. "Get away."

  "Have you noticed the colour? I know it's difficult under these lights, but I'd call this brownish-yellow. Caramel, shall we say? The hand bones I saw were paler, whitish in colour."

  "They were in concrete. They weren't stained by the soil," Diamond pointed out.

  "Fair enough. What clinches it for me are the teeth." Middleton worked the jaw again, and for an instant the skull looked animated, seeming to enjoy Diamond's confusion. "Several molars missing, but no dental work. Unusual in a modern adult."

  "True."

  "Now run your fingers gently over the cranium, like this."

  Diamond did as instructed.

  Middleton turned to face him, smiling. "I know it's not so obvious through latex, but do you feel the coarseness of the surface texture? I mean you can see the cracks in places. This is deterioration I would expect after many, many years of seasonal changes in temperature. Heat-waves, frosts. And I'm not talking ten or fifteen years, Peter." He bent closer, pressing the torch almost to the bone. "It looks to me as if petrification is well under way, meaning that this little lady is turning into a fossil. She was dead a few centuries before the owner of the hand was born. You don't want me on this job. You want an anthropologist."

  A DAY as discouraging as this should have ended with a couple of beers. Instead, he found himself in the Victoria Gallery looking at a carafe of water. He was seated at a long table between the Head of CID Operations, John Wigfull, and a woman with a wheezy chest. It was five to seven and the meeting of the PCCG was shortly to begin.

  Diamond casually asked Wigfull, "Have you, em, had an invitation from Georgina?"

  "Georgina?"

  "Dallymore."

  "The new ACC." Wigfull blinked nervously several times. "No. Have you?"

  "I expect she's doing it alphabetically," Diamond said. "It's an 'At Home'. Thursday. I suppose I'll turn up."

  An extraordinary stillness came over Wigfull.

  Diamond said, "I won't have any evenings to myself at this rate."

  Eventually Wigfull managed to think of a comeback. "Heard about your skull."

  "Oh, yes?"

  "Couldn't they estimate the time of death, then?"

  "I knew it was old."

  "But not prehistoric?"

  "Prehistoric, my arse."

  "How old is it, then?"

  "Medieval, Middleton says."

  "Oh-a mere five hundred years or so?"

  Diamond turned his back and introduced himself to the wheezing woman. She said she was from Victim Support and he told her she couldn't have chosen a more suitable person to sit beside. She eyed him warily.

  The meeting got under way. As the senior policeman present, he was forced to defend the latest crime figures. Violent crime was on the increase, and Councillor Sturr, across the table, wanted an explanation. "I'm a forthright man, Superintendent, and I don't mind telling you these figures are deplorable. We employ you to keep our streets safe, and look at the result. It's getting steadily worse."

  Diamond was tempted to give the forthright man a forthright riposte, but this was not the occasion. "If you're worried about the streets, Councillor," he said in as measured a way as he could at the end of a trying day, "you need not be. Most of this increase is domestic violence."

  "Is that supposed to be good news?"

&
nbsp; "It's my answer to your concern about our streets. They're relatively safe."

  "Our homes aren't."

  "They never were. Someone in your family is more likely to attack you than a stranger."

  "What a world we live in now."

  "The figures are rising because people are reporting it more, thanks to the better climate of opinion."

  The last phrase was totally misunderstood by one of the delegates, who interrupted to say he was sure Mr Diamond was right about global warming. He had noticed riots always happened on hot summer nights.

  The aptly-named Councillor Sturr returned to the attack. The name was familiar; he was a millionaire who had made his money out of stone-cleaning, washing the fronts of old buildings, a profitable business in Bath. He was probably still under forty, slim, in a tailored grey suit, with brown eyes that missed nothing, and dark hair slicked back. He was always in the local press, giving away the prizes at flower shows and school speech days. This combative stuff was another side to the man. "So what are you saying, Mr Diamond? That this increase is down to people attacking each other in the privacy of their own homes?"

  "Not entirely, but broadly, it's true."

  "Weasel words, Superintendent."

  "Yours, sir, or mine?"

  Diamond heard Wigfull's sharp intake of breath.

  The Councillor bulldozed some more. "Look here, I was brought up in Bath. I know this city as well as anyone sitting around this table, and I tell you it's turned into a dangerous place. What with drugs and beggars and barmy people who ought to be locked up, it's no wonder these figures are so shocking. When I was a boy it was safe for kids to go out to play on a warm evening like this. Now, I think twice about going out myself."

  Diamond nodded, as if to confirm the dismal truth. "You're speaking of the nineteen-sixties, I would guess."

  "I was born in 1963, the year sexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin's silly poem-but my parents didn't think much of Larkin or the so-called sexual freedom and nor did most of the people of Bath. Flower power, hippies, the Beatles and all that nonsense. The revolution came late to Bath. The buildings here were covered in grime in those days, but it was a clean place to live in. Law-abiding and safe."

  "Safe?" said Diamond.