The Vault

by Peter Lovesey

  "You wanted to know how he shifted the body," said Wigfull, pointing to it.

  Diamond gave a grudging nod. "It's possible."

  They edged past a ship's figurehead, a huge, bare-breasted wooden torso threatening to crush anyone who brushed against it. Suspended over them, by wires to the ceiling, was a model of a Tiger Moth aircraft not much smaller than the real thing. Beyond was an area staked out by grandfather clocks lined up like guardsmen. It was dominated by a leather-topped desk of the sort owned by newspaper barons-except that the leather was torn in places and the wood was crying out for some polish. At one end were three biscuit tins without lids.

  "The key collection," said Diamond after glancing into one.

  "Where's Mary Shelley's writing box, then? The professor said it was here when he left."

  Wigfull eased his way carefully around the desk and looked behind. Peg had a bentwood chair in the peacock design, with velvet cushions. Ranged beside it he found a paraffin stove, a safe, a wastebin and a stack of magazines and reference books.

  No writing box.

  "Dougan was definitely lying," Wigfull said.

  "Stupid, if he was. We were sure to check."

  "Stupid he is not."

  "So he wasn't lying."

  Wigfull glared back, defeated by the logic, or what passed for logic.

  "No signs of a fight," Diamond commented. "He was right about that."

  "He could have tidied up."

  They made a slow inspection of the shop. Necessarily slow. It was difficult in such a warren to retain a sense of where they were. Not only were the rooms small and connected by confusing flights of stairs; the way through was serpentine, dictated by the arrangement of furniture.

  The wax woman on the swing gave them a moment's unease, and in another room they found a broken fragment of pottery, presumably from the urn Joe claimed to have smashed, but otherwise the tour was uneventful. On the way out, Diamond scooped the heap of junk mail from the grizzly bear's tray and handed it to Wigfull. "Something to pass the time."

  "Thanks," Wigfull said ironically.

  "Check it before you chuck it, won't you?"

  They returned outside and stood by the car. Twenty minutes of wandering through the shop had brought on symptoms of claustrophobia in the case of Wigfull, and, on Diamond's side, hunger.

  "I wonder if there's a chippie round here."

  "It looks dead to me."

  "I wouldn't mind trying the kebab takeaway in Kingsmead Square."

  Resignedly, Wigfull drove them there. It was a no parking zone, but they sat outside in the car. He leafed through Peg Redbird's junk mail whilst Diamond started on a kebab that must have represented everything the shop stocked.

  "What size was this writing box?"

  Wigfull gave a shrug.

  "It can't have been all that large," Diamond developed his theme.

  Wigfull continued to look at pamphlets about double-glazing and insurance. There was nothing personal in all this rubbish.

  "If it was owned by a woman, it had to be light enough to carry about."

  "You're thinking the professor walked out of the shop with it?"

  "I'm thinking whoever walked out with it wouldn't have had any trouble tucking it under an arm."

  "The professor?" Wigfull repeated, determined to nail the man who had strung him along.

  "Who else knew it was worth taking?"

  "Because it once belonged to Mary Shelley?" Wigfull was becoming interested. He slung the junk mail onto the back seat and turned towards Diamond. "No one else. Only the professor. He was on to the find of a lifetime, so he wouldn't have shared the secret with anyone else. He must have nicked it."

  "He had the opportunity," Diamond continued to think aloud, "and the temptation." He was silent for a moment, testing his own hypothesis. "But if he stole the box, why did he tell us the place was unattended when he went back? We're bound to suspect him. He ought to have insisted Peg was there."

  "He did originally," said Wigfull. "At any rate, he gave the impression. That's why I got so stroppy when he denied it."

  "Did he say she was there?"

  "Not exactly. He let me assume she was. You know why he changed tack, don't you?"

  "Go on."

  "When I spoke to him first, he didn't know the body was found. He thought he'd disposed of her. Plenty of people-intelligent people-don't know that a dead body thrown into water still has air in the lungs and may not stay under. After she was found he had to think again. He came out with this load of codswallop that the shop was empty."

  "You're saying Peg Redbird was actually here when he came back the second time?"

  "I am. And I'm saying he wanted that writing box so badly that he killed her for it. It stands out a mile. She refused to sell, or asked some exorbitant price, and got her head beaten in."

  "If that's true," said Diamond, "where did the killing take place? Not in the shop."

  Wigfull was unstoppable. "Here. Outside. He grabbed the box and walked out with it. She followed, he cracked her over the head with it and killed her."

  "In the struggle, you mean?"

  "Then he had to dispose of the body. Either he carried her to the river, or he used that invalid chair."

  "Without being seen?"

  "The place was in darkness. There's damn all going on at that end of Walcot Street after ten at night. When it was done, the body dropped in the river, he came back to the shop, collected the precious writing box and legged it back to the Royal Crescent."

  Diamond pondered the theory.

  "There's no one else," insisted Wigfull.

  "If you're right, how does his wife's disappearance fit into this?"

  For a moment it seemed Wigfull was thrown by the question, but then his eyes widened again. "I know. She was in the hotel room when he got back. She saw the state he was in and realised something dreadful had happened. She got the truth out of him. He'd just killed a woman. She was so appalled that she couldn't stay in the same room with him. She left."

  "To wander the streets?"

  "Booked into somewhere else, I expect. We should check all the hotels and boarding houses."

  Diamond thought about it coolly, tapping the end of his chin with the empty kebab stick. "There's a big hole in all this, isn't there, John?"

  "What's that?"

  "Dougan's behaviour since he got back to the hotel. He calls us at two in the morning to report his wife missing. He gets on the phone and sets in train an inquiry that is sure to put him in the frame for Peg Redbird's death. If he'd kept quiet, you and I wouldn't have heard of Professor Joe Dougan."

  Wigfull listened to the objection and dealt with it adroitly. "Someone else saw him at Noble and Nude."

  "Who was that?"

  "Doesn't matter who. Anyone. Another customer. Dougan expected to be fingered, so he did the smart thing and told us he was there."

  "Not many killers behave as artfully as that, John."

  "This one is a professor."

  "It doesn't explain why he called us when he did. You say he went to the trouble of dumping her in the river. If so, he hoped to get away with it. His best plan was to wait and see if the body was found and identified."

  Wigfull would not give up. "All right. Try this for size. His wife didn't walk out. He killed her."

  "Two in one evening?" The line of Diamond's mouth arched sceptically.

  "She threatened to turn him in, so he did for her as well. He made the emergency call after he'd disposed of her."

  "Disposed of her where?"

  "I don't know yet. I just thought of this."

  "Difficult, getting rid of a corpse in the Royal Crescent Hotel, even in the small hours of the morning."

  "Not all the rooms are in use this week."

  "How do you know that?"

  Wigfull had that special glint in his eye that meant he was ahead of Diamond. "Dougan told us he was upgraded."

  "True."

  "Her body could be lyin
g in an empty room."

  "Waiting for some unfortunate chambermaid to walk in?" Diamond said as if this grim hypothesis had worn him down at last. "If you're right, we should be hearing soon." He left a judicious pause. "But I won't hold my breath."

  eighteen

  PEG REDBIRD HAD LIVED over the shop.

  "I don't believe this," said Wigfull when they forced open the door to her flat and looked in.

  "It's not a bad principle," Diamond commented.

  "What's that?"

  "Never take your work home."

  There was not an antique in sight. The sitting room furniture was modern in style, in light ash, with pale upholstery and scatter cushions in strong colours. She had sunken lighting, roller-blinds, steel-framed Hockney prints of his Californian swimming-pool phase, cork-tiled floors with plain, pastel-coloured rugs, and a total absence of clutter.

  Finding this hard to reconcile with the glorified scrapyard that was Noble and Nude, the two detectives opened the doors to the bedroom and kitchen. Those, also, were straight out of a Sunday colour supplement.

  "Obviously a split personality," said Wigfull the Open University degree man, in that self-regarding tone that Diamond found so irritating. "Jekyll and Hyde."

  "That's putting it strongly considering she was the victim."

  "You should have been on the Bramshill course in criminology that I did last year. Victims often provoke their attackers."

  "With their choice of interior decoration? Come off it, John."

  "People's rooms reveal more than they realise about their inner selves."

  "I'll stick with the outer self, thanks. Let's get to work. You do this room. I'll take the bedroom."

  "Shouldn't we call in the SOCOs first?"

  Diamond eyed him with searing scorn. "Does this look like a scene of crime to you? Do you really believe she was bludgeoned in here and dragged all the way downstairs through the shop and off to the river?"

  After a lengthy pause, Wigfull admitted, "It doesn't appear so."

  "Well, then."

  "What are we looking for?"

  "I don't know until we find it, do I? Anything that links her to the rest of humanity. Answerphone messages, letters, address-books, diaries. You've done this before, man."

  He stepped into the bedroom. This should not take long. Seeing it, he began to have second thoughts about Wigfull's Jekyll and Hyde theory. Peg, it seemed, had been slavishly tidy at home. The duvet was squared on the bed, the pillow plumped and all the clothes put away. The bedside drawers contained no item more interesting than a bottle of herbal sedative pills.

  From the sitting room, Wigfull called out, "No answer phone, but there's an address-book here."

  Diamond confirmed that nothing of interest was secreted in the dressing-table drawers and was on his way through when the phone rang.

  Wigfull put out a hand for it, then hesitated.

  Diamond gave him the go-ahead with a nod.

  The right way to deal with an incoming call at a possible crime scene was to listen and say nothing. If you spoke and the caller heard an unfamiliar voice, you could be sure they would slam down the phone if they had anything to hide.

  Wigfull knew the procedure. He had the phone to his ear.

  After listening briefly, he rolled his eyes and said, "I'll put him on." He handed the phone to Diamond. "Keith Halliwell."

  Disappointing.

  "What is it now?"

  "Something new has come up, sir," Halliwell told him.

  "Another stiff?"

  "Not entirely."

  "What do you mean-not entirely?"

  "Not an entire body. We're talking parts. Some leg bones, a rib cage and a piece of an arm."

  Bones. With an effort he made a mental switch to the case Halliwell was working on. "Not in the vault? We dug every inch of the vault."

  "No. The River Wylye, near Warminster."

  "That's Wiltshire."

  "It's only a half-hour drive."

  "It's not our patch."

  "With respect, sir, killers don't work to county borders like us."

  "What do you mean-'with respect'?" he rasped into the mouthpiece. "I'm not questioning whether the bones are worth checking out. I'm trying to work out how we got onto them. Are they still available for inspection?"

  "At Chippenham. I've just been speaking to CID there."

  "When you said a piece of an arm…"

  "The radius."

  "Come again."

  "Radius. The long bone in the forearm. In my opinion…em, I wonder if you think it's worth comparing it with the hand we have, see if they join up at the wrist."

  "It's a long shot, considering our bones were in the cellar nearly twenty years."

  "These haven't just been found, sir. They were picked up in 1986 by some boys fishing."

  "And this is the first we've heard of it?"

  "It didn't get much attention at the time."

  "It's going to get plenty now. When the press get to work on it, they'll tell us Frankenstein's monster is roaming the country ripping people apart. Get it organised, then," Diamond said mechanically, more interested in the way this came to light. "Was this your idea, Keith, checking old files?"

  "I can't take the credit, sir."

  "Don't depress me. You got it off a flaming computer."

  "No. It's one-up to the human race. Someone had the bright idea of checking newspapers. They found this report in the files of the Wiltshire Times."

  "Nice work. One of our rising stars in CID?"

  "Actually it was a tip-off."

  "Oh, yes? From a member of the public?"

  "Not exactly." Halliwell's stonewalling was ominous.

  A chill note of reserve crept into Diamond's voice. "Anyone I know?"

  "You do know her actually. Ingeborg Smith."

  Diamond sighed in a way that confirmed the inevitable. "Something else to put in the job application."

  "She'd like to tell you about it herself. I told her if she looked in here again about five-thirty…"

  "Thanks a bunch, Keith."

  Muttering, he put down the phone and shifted his thoughts back to the immaculate home life of Peg Redbird. The address book Wigfull had found was helpful only in the sense that it contained about three hundred entries. Peg had not been short of contacts.

  "We'd do just as well knocking on doors," he said. "What we want first is an itinerary of the last hours she was alive-the last day, in fact. The only information we have so far comes from Joe Dougan."

  "And I wouldn't put any reliance on that," Wigfull sourly added.

  "But do you agree with me?"

  "About what?"

  Some subtle power-play was in progress here. Diamond wanted more than a consultative role. He was willing to cede the nuts-and-bolts work to Wigfull and his team whilst reserving the crucial decisions for himself. "Knocking on doors."

  "Of course I agree."

  "Then will you get a door-stepping team on the job, or shall I?"

  "Leave it to me," said Wigfull, thinking this was the opening he needed. "You've got enough on your plate."

  "Enough on my plate? You know me, John. No table manners at all. If I see something tasty on another fellow's plate, I help myself, whether mine is full or not."

  BY USING the back door of the nick, he avoided being waylaid by Ingeborg. She would be out front somewhere, wanting her pound of flesh for providing the breakthrough in the case. He wasn't ready to admit such a thing. Ingeborg had given him one false lead already-Violet "Tricks" Turner-and the bones from the River Wylye might prove to be another.

  So he gave Ingeborg the slip-and that was how he met the Assistant Chief Constable coming out to the car park with Councillor Sturr. A polite exchange of words was inescapable.

  The councillor said with a smile as slick as his three-piece pinstripe, "Fancy meeting you, superintendent. Only just now I was reminded of your comforting remarks at the PCCG meeting. The Assistant Chief Constable tells me you
have another violent death to investigate. Ironic, isn't it? Rather bears out my point that Bath is a dangerous place to live these days."

  "One swallow doesn't make a summer," was the best Diamond could think to say in reply.

  "Quite a high-flying swallow, Peg Redbird. The antiques trade is not going to like this. They're a close-knit group, as I'm sure you're finding out, and they'll expect some rapid action from you."

  "People always do," said Diamond. "Rapid can mean hasty, and hasty can mean faulty, so I don't let it get to me."

  "Well, if I can be of service…"

  "I don't suppose you can, sir, unless you were in the area of Walcot Street last evening."

  "I'm not offering myself as a witness. I meant in my official capacity, backing your efforts."

  "Much appreciated, sir."

  "I was on the other side of town," Sturr volunteered, in case there was any doubt, "at a rather enjoyable 'At Home'." He smiled at Georgina Dallymore.

  "Of course you were," said Diamond.

  "If you want to know who I was with…" Sturr was milking this for more than it was worth.

  "I saw you leaving together."

  "So it seems I can't help you after all."

  "Shame. I'll have to widen the net."

  For this ill-considered quip, Diamond received a cold stare.

  Sturr shook hands with Georgina and strolled across to his car.

  Diamond, too, started to move on, but the ACC asked him to wait.

  "That last remark was uncalled for," she rebuked him.

  "I'm sure he's heard worse than that, ma'am. He's a politician."

  "But we're not in the business of baiting people, least of all the people who make decisions about resources." She raised her hand in salute as the councillor drove past them in his silver Mercedes, out of the car park.

  "He was having a swipe at me, going on about the murdered woman. Right, I was out of order," he said quickly, noting the muscles tighten at the edge of Georgina's mouth. "Pressure of work, I expect."

  "I'm glad you mentioned that," she said. "I was going to raise it with you anyway. This is too much, the murder of the antiques dealer, coming on top of all the brouhaha about the hand in the vault. It's obvious that you can't run two inquiries yourself. You must delegate."