The Vault

by Peter Lovesey

  "Someone could have beaten her over the head and dropped her in?"

  Leaman smoothed his hands nervously down his sides. "That's it, sir. Mr Wigfull ought to be told before they go in to view the body, but not while the professor is with him. It's possible-"

  "You're damned right, it is," said Diamond, galvanized. "Keith, get on the phone. Get the mortuary-keeper, or whoever is in there, to keep them waiting outside. He's to tell them nothing about the injuries. Make out that the body isn't ready to be seen. If Wigfull wants to know why, tell him I'm on my way and I'll explain all."

  HE WAS at the Royal United Hospital inside ten minutes, thanks to a good young driver and a siren that would carry on ringing in his ears twenty minutes after it was switched off. He found Wigfull and Professor Dougan waiting in a side room. Wigfull was pacing the room, the professor hunched on a chair. This was Diamond's first sight of Joe Dougan, a short, tanned, middle-aged man with anxiety deeply etched across his features.

  The first duty was to take Wigfull outside and tell him what the police surgeon had found.

  Predictably, Wigfull's reaction was to exonerate himself. "How could I have noticed injuries to the back of the head? When I looked at her, she was lying face up in the undertaker's van."

  "It doesn't matter, John. What matters is the way we handle the professor."

  "We?"

  "This could be murder."

  "But it's my case. I was down at the weir directing the operation."

  "She was just a floater then." He waited for Wigfull to grasp the altered situation.

  He was defiant. "So she could be a murder victim. I can handle it myself."

  "I think we should work together at this stage," Diamond said firmly. If he had to pull rank, he would. He had prior responsibility for murder cases.

  "I thought you were fully stretched on the other inquiry-the body parts in the vault-what with all the media interest."

  "You've put your finger on it, John. The professor may be involved. He conned his way into the vault the day before yesterday. The lads stupidly took him for a pathologist."

  "I heard about that. It was just a mistake."

  "He lost his way. Oh, yeah."

  "What's it got to do with his wife being found dead?"

  "We'll find out presently. Before we show him the body, I want a preview, a look at these injuries, if you don't object."

  "I'll come with you," Wigfull said quickly.

  Inside, a mortuary attendant had the body ready on a trolley. He lifted the sheet from the bloated face of a small-featured, middle-aged woman with dark hair.

  Neither detective spoke. A few hours' immersion in water has dramatic effects on the appearance of a body. Not only does the face swell. After removal from the water the pigmentation darkens.

  "The back of the head, if you don't mind," Diamond said.

  The attendant put his hands under the shoulders and raised the torso towards him, untroubled by the strange embrace. Diamond lifted some matted strands of hair and the injuries underneath were obvious. The surface was concave in one place. It must have taken a terrific impact.

  "A cosh?"

  Wigfull shrugged.

  Diamond thanked the attendant and went to a sink to wash his hands.

  Joe Dougan stood up when they returned to the waiting room. His eyes were bloodshot and deep ridges of tension had appeared at the edge of his mouth. "Can we get this over now?"

  "I didn't introduce myself," said Diamond. "Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond. Murder squad."

  "Joe Dougan." Then he reacted, blinked and swayed. "Did I hear you right?"

  "I head the murder squad," Diamond said genially. "I don't think we've met. I missed you the other day when you visited one of our crime scenes, the vault under the Pump Room."

  "That seems a long time ago now," said Joe. "You did say murder?"

  "That's my job. Someone has to do it. What was your interest in the vault?"

  "What did you say?" Joe was ashen-faced.

  "The vault. What were you doing there?"

  "Do I have to explain at this point in time? If you don't mind, I'd like to get this ordeal over with and get out of this place."

  "Understood, sir," said Diamond, unusually considerate. "We'll talk about it after."

  They went back to the main post mortem room, a tiled, white place. The corpse had been covered again for this formality. The attendant stood ready.

  Wigfull explained, "It's just a matter of letting us know if you recognise her. I'd better warn you that her face has puffed up and darkened a bit. The water does that."

  He nodded to the attendant. The dead features were revealed again.

  Only a faint sibilance, a slight in drawing of breath, came from Joe.

  Diamond put the necessary question to him.

  The little man was silent some time before saying in a low, but steady voice, "Yes, I recognise her."

  Unable to deal impassively with the stress of the moment, Wigfull swept suspicion aside and said, "You have my sympathy, professor."

  Joe turned to him and said with raised eyebrows, "All I said is I recognise her. This isn't Donna. It's a lady who runs an antique store I visited. Miss Redbird."

  seventeen

  "WHERE ARE WE GOING?" Joe Dougan asked Diamond.

  "Bath Central Police Station."

  "You taking me in, or what?"

  "Depends what you mean. We just want to ask you some questions."

  "Can't it be done here?"

  "In the hospital grounds? We'd rather do it at the nick."

  "And if I refuse?"

  Diamond was being unusually considerate. "Is there somewhere else you would rather go?"

  "My hotel."

  "Fine. We'll go there."

  "I'm thinking my wife may have come back."

  "Let's find out, then."

  From the car, they radioed headquarters that the body taken from the river was that of Peg Redbird and gave instructions for her shop to be sealed as a possible crime scene.

  THE ROYAL Crescent Hotel is at the centre of the great terrace from which its name is taken. At the sedate pace of a horse-drawn carriage, they were driven over the cobbles in front. A top-hatted concierge in blue livery automatically started towards the car, saw that it was a police vehicle and hesitated. Joe swung open the door and hailed him by name. "Any news of my wife yet?"

  "I haven't heard anything, professor."

  "Darn."

  The Dougans' suite was on the second floor. The two trim members of the party moved towards the elegant main staircase. Diamond stopped to press the lift button. They looked round for him and came back.

  He said with an air of dignity, "If there's such a place as Heaven, and I get the nod from St Peter, he'd better not expect me to use the stairs."

  Wigfull passed no comment.

  This went over Joe's head. He was still talking about his wife. "She may have come back when the concierge was off duty."

  "It's possible."

  But when they entered the John Wood suite, nobody was there.

  "Hell," said Joe, and he couldn't have been talking about the accommodation. The lounge area in a toning scheme of brown, orange and cream, was bigger than the dining room of some hotels. Padded settee and armchairs, fireplace and huge pelmeted and draped windows with front views across the lawns to the city. Up a couple of steps a white balustrade like a communion rail separated the bedroom from the rest.

  It definitely had the edge over an interview room at the nick.

  "I'm not paying for this," Joe thought fit to explain, as if affluence would damn him in the eyes of the law. "We ordered a simple bedroom at one-sixty a night, but as this suite wasn't in use they upgraded us for no extra charge."

  "Lucky for you."

  "My luck ran out last night. So what are you going to do about Donna?"

  "A missing person alert has gone out to all our patrols. We can't do more," Diamond explained, "unless there's something else you
want to tell us."

  Joe's voice shrilled in outrage. "What do you mean? I told you all I know."

  "Then you've got to be patient, sir."

  "I'm doing my best." He sighed, and made an effort to unwind. "Anyone want a drink?"

  The room had its own cocktail cabinet. The guardians of the law shook their heads.

  "Well, I'm having a scotch," Joe declared.

  "How did you know the woman in the mortuary is Miss Redbird?" Diamond asked him when he had poured the drink.

  "Didn't I say? I met her yesterday."

  "In her shop?"

  "In her shop, right."

  "Pure chance, or what?"

  "No, I was directed there. You want to know how it happened?" He went to the chest of drawers and took out his precious book, the edition of Milton's poems, and showed them the inscription on the cover and explained why he believed this was Mary Shelley's personal copy. In a dogged account that revealed the persistence of his character, he took them through the various steps of his quest to trace the previous owners: Hay-on-Wye; the Abbey Churchyard; O. Heath, the retired bookseller; Uncle Evan at the Brains Surgery; and Peg Redbird at Noble and Nude.

  Diamond was a brooding, restless listener to all this. "You make it all sound reasonable," he responded finally. "The part I don't understand is where you thought this trail was leading. Surely you weren't expecting to trace the book all the way back to Mary Shelley?"

  "You never can tell." A faint smile followed, edged with self-congratulation.

  "We're listening," said Diamond, becoming intrigued.

  So they heard the remarkable story Peg Redbird had given Joe, of the writing box that had once contained the book.

  At this John Wigfull cut into the narrative. "This is the box you told me about this morning, the one that was locked, and you went back for?"

  "Correct."

  "You didn't tell me it belonged to Mary Shelley. You said it was an antique."

  "That's the truth."

  "No, professor, that's evasion."

  Joe Dougan shrugged and spread his hands. "I can't say for certain it belonged to her."

  Wigfull was furious. "You went back to the shop at the end of the evening because you believed it was hers. You didn't say a damned thing about Mary Shelley this morning."

  "What's your problem?" said Joe. "Donna is gone. That's all that matters to me. Can't you appreciate that?"

  Diamond broke up the exchange before Wigfull burst a blood vessel. "Let's move on. Would you mind telling me what happened when you went back to Noble and Nude?"

  "Nothing happened. Miss Redbird wasn't there."

  "The shop was closed, you mean?"

  "No, it was open."

  "But unattended?"

  He nodded.

  Wigfull blurted out accusingly, "You didn't tell me any of this."

  "You didn't ask."

  "You implied she was there. You said you spent some time trying to unlock the box."

  Joe remarked as if to a child, "You got it. I sat down in her office to wait for her. The writing box was still on her desk and so were the tins of keys, so I tried some more. But the lady didn't show up at all. In the end I thought about Donna alone here and I gave up."

  Diamond said with more control than Wigfull, "Are you telling us the whole story this time, professor?"

  Joe seemed to shrink a little into the thick upholstery. "I'm doing the best I can."

  "When you found the shop unattended, did you make any effort to find Miss Redbird?"

  "I called her name. There was no answer."

  "A golden opportunity to try more keys on the precious box. Did you get it open?"

  Joe looked away, out of the window, as if he wanted to be anywhere else but here.

  "Did you hear my question?" Diamond pressed him.

  "I don't know what she did with the damned key."

  "You must have been tempted to force the lock."

  "It crossed my mind a couple of times, but I didn't do it."

  "The box is still intact, then?"

  "Should be. That's how I left it."

  "On Miss Redbird's desk?"

  "Yep."

  "And you say she didn't show up at all?"

  "That's the truth of it."

  "How long were you there?"

  "Hour and a quarter, hour and a half."

  "Did anyone see you?"

  "No one I noticed."

  Diamond continued to probe. If Peg Redbird had been bludgeoned to death that evening and dropped in the river, that hour and a half was crucial.

  "When you found the shop open and let yourself in, did you notice any sign of a disturbance?"

  "No, sir, I did not."

  "Any damage would be obvious in an antique shop, I imagine.

  Joe gave him an abstracted look. "What did you say?"

  "Things get knocked over if people fight in a place like that."

  "You're losing me."

  "Everything was as you'd seen it before?"

  "I guess so."

  "We can assume, then, that she left the shop before you arrived, and nobody forced her to go."

  Joe Dougan was a tired, troubled man, and he had reached the limit of his patience. "All you guys want to talk about is this dead woman. She's gone. No one can help her now. You should be finding out what happened to my wife, for God's sake. Don't you have any priorities?"

  They left soon after.

  " WHAT DID you make of that?" Diamond asked in the car.

  Wigfull sniffed. "He spins a good yarn."

  "Do you think it's all an act-his concern about the wife?"

  "I caught him out over Peg Redbird, didn't I? He changed his story."

  "He was pretty uncomfortable about it."

  "The man's a killer," said Wigfull. "We should have taken him in."

  "I don't know what you base that on."

  "He was at the scene, wasn't he? He went to the shop the evening she was killed. He admits that now. He coveted that box. It was an obsession with him. You've got to understand the mentality of these people who buy antiques. They spot a bargain and nothing will put them off. But Peg Redbird was a canny dealer. She guessed the value of the box from the way he conducted himself. I expect she made the fatal mistake of trying to withdraw it from sale. He saw the prize being snatched away and he lashed out. If that isn't motive enough, I don't know what is."

  "He comes across as a mild character."

  "So did Crippen."

  They drove directly to Noble and Nude. Walcot, where the shop stood, was one of Diamond's favourite areas of Bath. With its craft workshops, secondhand goods and a market style of shopkeeping, it preserved a link with the medieval traders who had once done business here. The down-at-heel, but chipper character of the place was staunchly defended against the city developers. There was even a guild of sorts that had organized a Walcot Street Independence Day the previous summer.

  A uniformed PC stood on duty outside.

  "Before we go in," Diamond said, "I'll check how close we are to the river."

  "It's only a stone's throw. It runs parallel to the street."

  That wasn't enough for the head of the murder squad. "I'll take a look."

  Professional competence was at stake here. Not wanting to miss a thing, Wigfull tagged along. There were a couple of passageways through private premises that had gates in front. These, Diamond reasoned, were almost certainly locked at night. He found the nearest open access to the river some sixty yards up the street, through Chatham Row, a cul-de-sac lined with gentrified eighteenth century terraced housing. In silence, the two detectives paced the short distance past the houses to a set of railings overlooking the Avon. A gate gave access to a flight of twenty-two stone steps down to a section of river bank.

  "Could she have bashed her head falling down the steps?" Diamond mused aloud.

  "You mean by accident?" Going by the tone of Wigfull's voice, it was as likely as abduction by aliens.

  "If she did,
" Diamond went on, "I don't know how she got in the water. She would have ended up on the grassy bit down there."

  "He killed her in the shop and dumped the body in the water."

  "That little man we saw in the Royal Crescent?"

  "Who else?" said the man who usually kept an open mind. No comment from Diamond.

  For a few moments they watched the river's placid progress towards Pulteney Bridge. Any current was barely discernible here, along one of the wider stretches. Further on, the course narrowed a little, but not enough to propel a floating corpse against an obstruction with enough force to cause head injuries. Even at the weir, the flow would be minimal in present conditions.

  Diamond was working on logistics. "If you're right, he must have brought the body here somehow. He doesn't have a car. He's not a big man. It was a short walk for us, but a fair old distance to carry a corpse."

  "She was a small woman."

  "Another thing," said Diamond. "He's a stranger to Bath. How did he know the river was so close? You can't see it from Walcot Street."

  "He carried a map."

  "Do you know that for certain?"

  "He told me," said Wigfull with an air of triumph.

  Diamond continued to stare at the river.

  Wigfull added, "He said he used a map to find a quick way through the side-streets to the hotel."

  In a moment Diamond said, "Seen enough?"

  Wigfull nodded.

  They returned to Noble and Nude.

  "Do you collect antiques?" he asked Wigfull before they went in.

  "On my salary?"

  He gave Wigfull a speculative glance. "You can pick up some useful things quite cheaply. The Victorians made special mugs for people with large moustaches. There was a trough across the top to keep the whiskers from getting soggy. Worth looking out for."

  Wigfull's brown eyes above the great friz were a study in hostility.

  No trace of amusement crossed Diamond's features. He contained it all.

  Inside the shop, the sheer spectacle of bric-a-brac at every level was an immediate distraction. The two detectives stood for a time, taking it in. To Diamond's right was a stuffed grizzly bear, forever up on its haunches with a tray resting across its forepaws piled with what looked like junk mail. Opposite was a Victorian Bath-chair with its black hood.