The Stone Wife

by Peter Lovesey

  No negative thinking this morning, he told himself. There’s a killer at liberty and it’s my job to find him.

  He marched in and greeted the team. It was always good to see the place transformed with the trappings of an incident room: display boards, crime scene photos, extra phones, more civilian staff. The fire service had done their work and he could get into his office—or so he briefly believed. All traces of the shattered VDU, as Leaman had called it, had been removed, but the Wife of Bath on her dolly had not, and she remained a hazard. Worse, the room reeked of ammonia or some chemical. Having stepped inside, he came straight out again, forced to slum it with the rest of the team.

  He parked himself temporarily at Keith Halliwell’s vacant desk. There was plenty to catch up on. John Leaman with his brain-numbing efficiency had been looking through CCTV footage from a camera in Queen Square in the hope of spotting the silver getaway van. The one-way system round the square meant that there was not much interference in the view of traffic. The imaging was good and the registration numbers showed up well.

  “This could be our best chance, guv,” Leaman told him. “I’ve recorded seventeen sightings of silver vans in the two-hour slot.”

  “Where’s this camera located?”

  He pointed to the map on the whiteboard. “Top corner, where it links with Queen Square Place and Charlotte Street.”

  Diamond spotted the snag straight away. “The auction rooms are on the other side of the square, so this would be the second possible exit.”

  Leaman reddened. “Actually the third. They could have escaped down Barton Street. But if I was driving a getaway van, this is the way I’d go, heading straight out of the city.”

  Diamond wasn’t persuaded. Professional criminals would surely have taken note of where the cameras were sited. “Better trace the owners, then.”

  “Do you want me to run the film for you?”

  “Of seventeen silver vans? No thanks, John. I’m sure you missed nothing. Why is this desk empty? Where’s Keith?”

  “At the autopsy.”

  “Right you are.” He wished he’d remembered. It was well known in CID that Halliwell regularly got the grisly job that should, by rights, have been the top man’s. All Diamond could offer as an excuse was that he expected little of interest to emerge from the mortuary. Everyone knew how Gildersleeve had met his death and there was small likelihood that the dissected corpse would yield more information about the killer. Ballistics would specify the bullet used and maybe the type of weapon, and that was it. In a shooting such as this, forensic science was about as helpful as clairvoyancy. The CSI team were unlikely to have recovered any DNA, fingerprints, shoeprints, stray hairs or specks of blood other than those of the victim.

  “Has anyone talked yet?” he turned in his chair and asked Ingeborg. He was damned sure the case wouldn’t be cracked without outside help.

  “It’s early days, guv.”

  “That’s a negative?”

  “Well, yes. Making contact can’t be rushed.”

  She was right. Meetings with informants generally happened over a few beers at a time and place of their choosing. They couldn’t risk being seen with a detective.

  Diamond felt his arm touched lightly. He looked up at Paul Gilbert.

  “Guv, could I have a word?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s personal.”

  “I see. We can go outside.”

  Normally he would have used the office.

  The corridor was crowded with uniformed officers just out of their morning briefing. He took the young DC out of the building and across the street to a coffee shop.

  “Something up?” he asked when they’d been served and had found a table well away from anyone else.

  “No, guv. It’s this. You said yesterday you might need someone to go undercover and find out who fired the shot. I want to volunteer.”

  “Really?” He was taken by surprise. “That’s good to hear. Thanks.” Pity he couldn’t have sounded more enthusiastic. Gilbert wasn’t remotely right for the job. The lad had performed well in some tough situations, but this was a totally different assignment calling for guile and coolness under pressure.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I’m going to keep it in mind,” he said. “The situation hasn’t yet arisen. I’m bound to say you’re the least experienced member of the team, even if you’re one of the keenest. For one thing this will be bloody dangerous and for another it’s walking a tightrope. Whoever does it needs to get in with the pond life without dirtying his hands.”

  “With all due respect, guv, I’m up for it.”

  “Right. You’ve made yourself clear.”

  Gilbert appeared to sense the barrier coming down. “I’ve been attached to CID for four years now. I’m not the rookie I was when you took me on for the hangman case.”

  “As long ago as that, was it? Time flies.”

  “I’ll be perfect for this because my face isn’t all that well known locally. Some of the others will be known to the gangs.”

  “Did someone put you up to this?”

  Gilbert coloured a little and shook his head. “It’s my own idea.”

  And he had to be believed. He spoke the truth, which was the quality that barred him from the job.

  “I want to get more sand in my boots.”

  “You what?”

  “Sand in my boots. Experience.”

  “Odd turn of phrase for a young guy.”

  The blush became more obvious. “It’s something my mum says.”

  “So your mum’s been getting at you, has she? You’re still living at home?”

  “Can’t afford a place of my own. It’s expensive round here. On a sergeant’s wage I could manage it, but I won’t get the stripes for years and years at the rate I’m going. They still ask me to fetch tea for them.”

  “You’re out of uniform. Plenty would swap with you.”

  “I know. But mum keeps on—”

  Diamond tensed. “Have you talked at home about this case?”

  “Christ, no. I wouldn’t do that,” Gilbert said with such a start that he slopped his coffee. “It’s an ongoing gripe of hers. She says I’ve got no ambition.”

  “I expect she’s as keen as you are to see you in your own place. What does your dad say?”

  “He died when I was eleven. An operation that went wrong. There’s just the two of us.”

  Diamond had a rush of sympathy. He could see it all now. “Your mum wants the best for you. It’s understandable. But you can be sure she’d miss you if you moved out.”

  “I don’t think so. She’s got a boyfriend.”

  He’d thought he could see it all. The pressure on young Gilbert wasn’t what he’d imagined. “All I can say is this. In CID, opportunities present themselves sometimes when you least expect them. You may not be right for one job, but there’s always another in the offing.”

  Gilbert nodded. He couldn’t hide the disappointment.

  “It’s good that you spoke to me,” Diamond said. “Your mum’s wrong about you not having ambition. We’d better drink up and get back to the job.”

  Keith Halliwell was back from the autopsy and biting into a doughnut, unaffected by what he had witnessed. He stood beside his desk uncertain how to deal with the large cuckoo in occupation. After yesterday there was still tension between them—not so much over Diamond’s pratfall as the fact that Halliwell had spoken out about the suggestion to send someone undercover.

  Diamond showed no sign of moving. “What’s the story?”

  “The professor was unlucky. The bullet severed the aorta. That’s the main artery that supplies blood from the heart to the rest of the body.”

  “Not much doubt about that, then.”

  “But he probably wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway. When Dr. Sealy opened the brain he found a tumour the size of a plum. The medical records made no mention of it. I’m wondering if that helps to explain Gildersleeve’s beha
viour at the auction.”

  “Erratic, you mean? Taking on the gunmen? Possible, I suppose. On the other hand, you’d expect people to get hyped up when the bidding is going on. We don’t know enough about this guy and what drove him. Want to come with me to Reading and find out?”

  6

  “Someone has to go undercover,” Diamond said as they headed north to join the motorway.

  “You said.” Halliwell took a glance in the mirror as if he needed to check who was following. Out of favour for challenging the idea when the boss had first put it to the team, he had no wish to be drawn into an argument that could last the rest of the journey.

  “It’s bloody obvious.”

  “If you say so.” There’s no escape when you’re at the wheel and your passenger wants to thrust his opinion on you.

  But the force of the last utterance struck home. Bloody obvious? Was it possible Diamond wanted him to be the fall guy?

  “I see it as an opportunity,” Diamond said. “If I wasn’t running the show, I’d take it on myself. Somebody has to.”

  Halliwell stared at the road ahead. He knew better than to show a scintilla of interest after such a statement.

  Then Diamond surprised him by saying, “I’ve had an offer already.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not my number one choice.”

  “You don’t say?” The response sounded feeble even to the man who made it.

  “I might as well tell you. Young Gilbert.”

  “Good lad.”

  “Up to a point, but …”

  A long pause. Clearly Diamond wasn’t going to complete the statement. He could play this game for as long as both men were strapped into their car seats. The pressure on Halliwell was unrelenting.

  “But what?”

  “It’s not a risk I’m willing to take,” Diamond said. “However …”

  Halliwell waited yet again, flogging his brain for cast-iron reasons to reject what was coming.

  “… he did make one telling point. He’s not known to the local godfathers.”

  “Very true.” This could be a lifeline. “You and I have tangled with too many of them, guv. We’d never get away with it.”

  “Not in a million years.”

  Mightily relieved that he seemed to be off the hook, Halliwell asked, “Who were you thinking of—John? He’s more of a backroom man.”

  “Leaman? Too inflexible. He has qualities, certainly. Great in the office beavering away, but I can’t see him rubbing shoulders with crooks.”

  “Ingeborg?”

  This time Diamond’s silence was as good as a nod.

  “She’s the only one I can think of,” Halliwell said with more confidence. “More streetwise than Leaman, for sure.”

  “But she hasn’t volunteered. I was hoping she might. I’m not going to pressgang anyone into something as dangerous as this.”

  “She’s bright enough to carry it off,” Halliwell said. “I don’t think she’s known to any of the mob. The only one she met was Soldier Nuttall and we put him away last year.”

  “What’s going on in her life these days? Is she in a relationship?”

  “If she is, she hasn’t spoken about it. Blokes come and go, I think. She lives alone, doesn’t she?”

  “A year ago, she would have been the first to volunteer. She’s more cagey since she got to sergeant. Doesn’t need to impress, I suppose.”

  “I can sound her out if you like,” Halliwell said. “See what’s holding her back.”

  “Would you?”

  They ignored the first sign on the M4. Driving anywhere near the centre of Reading is enough to reduce even long-serving policemen to quivering wrecks. Five miles further along the motorway, just when you think you’ve overshot, the next exit brings you without much hassle to the campus at Whiteknights Park, southeast of the town. It wasn’t long before they were seated in the office of the lecturer put up by the university as the colleague Gildersleeve had known best.

  “Unfortunate name,” Diamond commented to Halliwell while they waited for Dr. Poke to finish a seminar.

  “I’ve heard worse.”

  “There was a story at police college about a new instructor on his first day. The old hands on the staff had already looked at the intake and handpicked his class to embarrass him when he first called the register. As far as I remember, it went Adcock, Allcock, Badcock, Balls. At that point he lost control and fled the room.”

  Diamond had barely finished the story when Dr. Poke entered his office, a short man with a shock of fine, flame-red hair in a bouffant extravagance. “Don’t get up, gentlemen,” he said in a voice that could only be described as precious. “I’m Archie Poke. I gather you’re here to enquire about the unfortunate John Gildersleeve, late of this parish.”

  Diamond wasn’t new to academics. There were plenty in Bath. In their own surroundings their status gave them an air of importance not easily blown away—and their desire to impress could be useful when you wanted inside information. He identified himself and Halliwell. “The professor was a close colleague of yours, I was told.”

  “Depends what you mean by close,” Poke said with a sharp glance. “We had adjoining offices with the same entrance, but that wasn’t our doing. They removed his name from the door only this morning. All his things are still in there.”

  “We’ll look inside presently, in that case. Is this the Chaucer suite, then? Are you another expert?”

  “Not to the extent Gildersleeve was. The Anglo-Saxon language is my specialty, but I do some lecturing in Middle English to take up the slack in the timetable.” He made it sound like slumming.

  “Did you know about his trip to Bath for the auction?”

  “Everyone in the senior common room knew. He made no secret of his ambition to—how shall I put it?—possess the Wife of Bath.” There was a twitch of the lips in case the visitors had missed the innuendo.

  “Put it any way you like,” Diamond said. “Was he bidding on behalf of the university? Do you have a museum here?”

  Poke raked a hand through the spectacular hair. “I’m not Gildersleeve’s spokesman, you know. I was asked to meet you because I saw more of him than anyone else. From all I can gather, his interest was entirely selfish. Quite where he intended to keep the lady he coveted so much, he didn’t ever say. She’s substantial, I was told.”

  “He’d have a job carrying her upstairs. So he was bidding with his own money?”

  “His wife’s, more likely. She’s comfortably well off. I can’t imagine any bank would have given him a loan.”

  “Is there any way he could have sold the carving on? He’d bid twenty-four thousand when the gunmen arrived.”

  Each time Poke shook his head, the locks sprang out like solar flares. “I don’t think he had the slightest intention of making a profit. Owning her was the prize. From the way he was boring us all with his raptures about the wretched thing, he would have bought her at any price.”

  “What exactly was he saying?”

  “How miraculous it was that this amazing relic had been sitting in a small town museum for donkey’s years and no one had appreciated its importance. You’d think it was Tutankhamun’s tomb.”

  “But it wasn’t his discovery, was it?”

  Dr. Poke laughed. “You’re right. The credit for that went to some sharp-eyed fellow who was working at the museum and is probably blissfully unaware of the curse of the Wife of Bath.”

  “The what?” Diamond felt a creeping sensation down his spine.

  “Do I have to explain everything? A clumsy attempt at wit. Another allusion to Tutankhamun.”

  “Okay.” Mostly reassured, Diamond said, “I still can’t understand why this lump of stone was so important to him.”

  “Possibly he knew something the rest of us didn’t.”

  “Such as?”

  “A connection to Chaucer himself. It’s old enough.”

  “Is there any chance of that?”

  This was greet
ed with an indrawn, cynical laugh. “I can’t imagine how one would find out after so long.”

  “What sort of connection?”

  Dr. Poke gave a shrug. Having raised this hare, he didn’t want to run with it.

  Diamond refused to let it rest. “Is much known about Chaucer’s life?”

  “Considerably more than we know about Shakespeare’s. He had a public profile. Diplomat, justice of the peace, customs officer, member of parliament, clerk of the king’s works. The poetry was only a sideline. I can’t help wondering how he fitted in the time.”

  “When did he write The Canterbury Tales?”

  “Towards the end of his life. It was a hugely ambitious project that was not even a quarter finished when he died in 1400. He makes clear in the prologue that each of the pilgrims was to tell four tales, two on the journey to Canterbury and two on the return, making about a hundred and twenty in all.”

  “How many did he write?”

  “Twenty-odd that we know about—and some of those are incomplete. The tales we have aren’t even in Chaucer’s hand. Nothing has survived that shows us how he worked. They are all copies by fifteenth-century scribes, up to eighty of them, but it’s generally agreed that two manuscripts are the earliest and most reliable, one now in the National Library of Wales and the other in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.”

  “Professor Gildersleeve was an expert on all this?”

  “No question of that. He’d written some of the standard commentaries. I expect he visualised the Wife of Bath gracing the cover of his next volume.”

  “She’s no Gwyneth Paltrow.”

  Light-hearted comments from anyone else passed Dr. Poke by. “But the finding of this unknown likeness would guarantee good publicity, especially as it seems to have been carved in the fourteenth century. The international press make hay with a story like this. Hardly a year passes without some report of a new Shakespeare play or an undiscovered portrait of Jane Austen. Why shouldn’t the father of English poetry get his share of the limelight?”