The Stone Wife

by Peter Lovesey

  “If he’s dealing on a big scale he must have a stash in the house somewhere. Where does he store it, do you think?”

  “I haven’t seen all over the house. There’s a locked room on the same floor as his bedroom. One afternoon when he was out, I did some exploring upstairs, hoping to find out more. I’ve often heard him go up there with his customers, as he calls them.”

  “Why would he do that?” Ingeborg asked, trying to sound calm while her heart was pumping harder than the jacuzzi. “The customers don’t need to see what he stores up there.”

  A look of uncertainty crossed Lee’s face. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “It would be a huge risk, showing them his stash of drugs. A dealer doesn’t want people knowing how much he has.”

  “That’s true.” She was crestfallen.

  “Did you get into the room?”

  “No. Like I say, it’s kept locked.” Lee hesitated. “If he doesn’t deal in drugs, what else could he have in there? A machine for printing banknotes? No, he wouldn’t invite people in there to see. How about fake paintings? He’d need to let the customers have a sight of them if he was selling.”

  “He isn’t the artistic type,” Ingeborg said. “Believe me, I’ve met a few artists and Nathan doesn’t cut it as a Leonardo. Even a Picasso.”

  They both laughed.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen a single picture in this house.”

  “You’re right.” Lee sighed. “I’m running out of ideas. Do you have a theory yourself?”

  Ingeborg did, but she wasn’t ready to reveal it. First, she needed to coax more information from Lee. “Maybe there’s something to be learned from the people he calls his customers. Are there any regulars?”

  “I don’t think so. The ones I’ve seen have been different each time. And they’re all sorts, going by their cars, beat-up old bangers to Rolls-Royces.”

  “Local people, would you say?”

  “I can’t tell. I haven’t spoken to many of them.”

  “Do they come alone?”

  “Nearly always, and almost all of them are men.”

  “Thinking back over the last two or three weeks, can you remember any in particular?”

  “Now you’re asking.” Lee sank up to her neck in the churning water, and for a moment Ingeborg thought she was about to duck the question as well. “I did open the door last week to a man who came in a Range Rover and said he was sorry he was early, but he’d miscalculated the journey, so I guess he came from a long way off. He said his name was Rollo, and he was expected at three. This was about two thirty and Nathan was having a siesta, as he calls it. Anyway, I sat Rollo down in one of the living rooms and gave him a magazine to look at. I’m sure it was his first time here. He was so twitchy, as if he was nervous of meeting Nathan.”

  “Do they often seem nervous, his visitors?”

  “Now you mention it, they do. A man who came one day last month asked if he could use the toilet as soon as he came through the door. He almost pushed me over, he was in such a hurry. I never discovered what his name was. As a rule, they’re not keen to give their names.”

  “And none of them say what they’re here for?

  “Not to me. They’ll say they have an appointment with Nathan, or Mr. Hazael, if they’re really being polite. And of course, most times Nathan or one of the staff lets them in. The exceptions are the valuers, who come to look at the armour and stuff we’re trying to sell off. They nearly always have a visiting card and show it as soon as they arrive. And they treat the place as if they own it.”

  “Nathan was telling me about this. He wants to give the house a more modern look.”

  “Yes, but he discovered that some of the armour is really old and valuable, and he doesn’t want it undersold. That’s why he had a series of valuations done. Most of the swords are worth four or five grand and some of the armour even more.”

  “Wow! Nathan could ditch his main business and live off the proceeds of what’s hanging on the walls.”

  “I don’t think he’d enjoy that,” Lee said, treating the remark seriously. “He gets a lot of pleasure from his business. It seems to give him a sense of power, and guys can’t get enough of that. I’m different. I want fame and attention and loads of awards. He’s happy to keep a low profile, as he calls it. And he seems to make plenty of money.”

  Ingeborg decided this was the time for straight talking. She dipped lower in the water, on a level with Lee. “Have you ever thought he might be supplying criminals with guns?”

  Lee bit her lip. “I don’t want to believe that. I hate guns.” Something in her eyes suggested she’d known all along and refused to admit the truth. She glanced away. “Where would he get them from and where would he keep them?”

  “I can answer the second part. He’d have them in that locked room.”

  The singer’s look returned to Ingeborg, fixing on her as if she’d only just noticed her. She didn’t speak.

  “It could be the reason why he invites his customers up there, to choose which weapon they want.”

  Lee had lost all the colour the warm water had given her. “Oh God, you could be right. I’m living with an illegal arms dealer.”

  “Have you ever seen him with a gun?”

  “A shotgun, but he says he has a licence for it. He shoots rabbits and pigeons sometimes. I don’t go anywhere near.”

  “Small arms? Revolvers and automatics?”

  She swallowed hard and nodded. “At one time he set up a target behind the house and was firing at it with one of his customers. They were using handguns. When I asked him about it later, if it was legal, he said pistol shooting is an Olympic sport.”

  “Sounds more like a demonstration than a competition. There are strict rules about firearms. He’ll need to have a firearms certificate as well as one for the shotgun. The guns have to be stored securely to prevent unauthorised persons from using them. The law doesn’t state exactly how, but you get inspected by the police and they insist on a steel gun cabinet that locks.”

  Lee shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like that in this house.”

  “It needs to be flush to the wall and secured with coach bolts so it can’t be prised away.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Went overboard there, Ingeborg chided herself. “I’m a journalist. We’re picking up information all the time.”

  “I’m scared now.”

  “It’s only a theory,” Ingeborg said, backtracking a little.

  “But he must keep the shotgun somewhere. And the handguns. It all adds up,” Lee said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “You’ll be okay. He’d never point a gun at you.”

  “If I threaten to leave him, he might.”

  “He loves you.”

  “But I need to break up with him. What am I going to do?”

  Lee’s distress was getting to Ingeborg and it was impossible to give honest advice—another consequence of going undercover. She dug deep for the right words. “I think you need to empower yourself more.”

  “How exactly?”

  “By learning the truth about him and what goes on here. If we can find out for certain that he’s providing criminals with firearms, you’ve got every reason for leaving him. And if he objects, you threaten to report him.”

  Lee clasped her hand to her head. “That seems so ungrateful.”

  “Don’t look at it like that. He’s kept things from you that could get you into trouble as an accessory. If he’s investigated and you’re living with him it will be difficult to prove you didn’t know what was going on.”

  She nodded. “I know what you’re going to say. I must work out a way of getting inside that room. God knows what I’ll find there.”

  Enough evidence to put away Nathan for the foreseeable future, not to mention some of the top criminals in the southwest, Ingeborg thought. Ballistics would have weeks of fun finding which weapons had been used to commit crimes in and around B
ristol. But the main prize would be a list of Nathan’s clients. Surely he must need to keep a record of who hired or bought which weapons. And surely it was inside that locked room.

  “Listen, if you can get the key,” she said, “I’ll look inside while you keep Nathan distracted. Does he carry a set of keys with him?”

  Lee nodded.

  “You can bet the key to the gun room is one of them. Will he want to sleep with you tonight? He was all over you in the car.”

  “I guess he will.”

  “He’s mentally shaken. He’s looking for reassurance. When he undresses, where does he put his clothes?”

  “Over a chair mostly. If he’s had a few drinks or he’s eager to get into bed with me, they’ll be scattered over the floor.”

  “Does he remove the keys from his pocket?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think you could get them and pass them to me if I wait outside the bedroom?”

  Lee looked alarmed.

  “When he’s in the bathroom or something?”

  Lee was looking as if she wished she’d never started this conversation.

  Ingeborg said, “Is he a heavy sleeper?”

  “Not especially.”

  “After sex he is—I bet.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Could you do it then? Is he likely to make love to you soon after going to bed?”

  She nodded.

  “Let me guess. He doesn’t take long.”

  A fleeting smile. “That’s how I put up with it.”

  “You could wait twenty minutes and, when he’s breathing deeply, slip out of bed, get the keys and put them outside the door. I’ll be ready outside. Could you do that? It’s really important that you know the truth about what’s going on.”

  “I suppose. But how will you get them back to me?”

  “Same way. I’ll open the door—or you can leave it ajar—and I’ll put them inside. You can choose the right moment—go to the bathroom or whatever—replace them in his pocket. Job done.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “I’ll need to do a recce first, so I know which door to unlock. Is the gun room anywhere near the guest room I’m in?”

  “Very close. We can go up there now if you like. We both need to change into some fresh clothes.” She hesitated. “I just remembered a saying: good clothes open all doors.”

  “Nice,” Ingeborg said, “but I think we’ll need the key, even so.”

  21

  The risk was high, but the prize was the big one.

  Ingeborg sat on the bed in the guest suite, ready for the night’s adventure. She’d changed into black sweatpants and a loose-fitting top Lee had found for her and she was wearing her own trainers.

  These nervous minutes before anything happened were a chance to focus on the whole point of the undercover operation. Getting into the locked room wasn’t just about confirming Nathan was the major supplier of weapons to armed gangs. She needed evidence that linked him to the saleroom killing. Logic suggested that some record of transactions was kept secure, inside the room, with the arsenal itself. Surely Nathan kept an inventory or something. He would need it in there each time he made a visual check of the guns. The best guess was a notebook with everything listed by date. Another possibility was a card index. She doubted whether he trusted a computer with such sensitive information.

  She had her phone in her pocket. Some photos of the interior of the gun room would be useful. Even better, if it existed, the notebook. If she could find and photograph the names of recent clients, the weapons themselves would be of secondary interest.

  She checked the time. Eleven twenty. Lee had said Nathan would be ready for bed before midnight. Right now the couple were in the main sitting room downstairs watching a film that was due to end soon. At Ingeborg’s suggestion Lee had arranged for one of the staff to serve champagne in celebration of her homecoming.

  “Make sure Nathan drinks most of it,” Ingeborg had stressed, bearing in mind that Lee had already sunk a couple of glasses of Chablis. She didn’t want her accomplice falling asleep or falling over.

  The couple would come past the guest room on their way up to bed, so she was listening up.

  Another ten minutes went by.

  Huge relief when she heard footsteps in the corridor. Soft giggling, too. The champagne seemed to be working.

  The steps grew fainter and she heard the click of their bedroom door being closed.

  Now it was a question of how long to wait before making a move. She didn’t want to risk stationing herself outside before they were settled. There was always a risk Nathan would think of some reason to go downstairs again. Allowing time for him to undress and use the bathroom (he didn’t shower at night, Lee had said), he ought to be in bed and proving his manhood inside the next twenty minutes. Lee, never short of an apt idiom, had confided that the lovemaking was like two shakes of a lamb’s tail. After that, it was a question of how soon lover boy would drift into a deep sleep.

  Say half an hour from now.

  Just after midnight.

  Ingeborg didn’t want Lee in more trouble over this. There were limits to Nathan’s tolerance, however much he doted on his pet pop star. Lee’s openness was both brave and troubling. Subterfuge was foreign to Lee’s nature. She was deeply uncomfortable about breaking up with Nathan after he had spent so freely to launch her in the music business. But she was driven by this overwhelming ambition to succeed as a singer and she knew the time had come to move on. The complicating factor was Nathan’s emotional state. From all that had been said, the relationship had started out in a businesslike way with Lee trading sex for Nathan’s backing. He’d invested money, not love, and neither of them had expected much to change. But Lee’s winning personality had softened and mellowed the tough professional criminal and his desire had grown into love. In this state he was capable of being badly hurt.

  If tonight’s plan went wrong, and he knew he had been betrayed, all bets were off.

  Once again, Ingeborg was forced to remind herself that her mission came before everything else. Come what may, she must get inside that room.

  The minutes dragged by. She fastened and unfastened her hair a couple of times. Putting it up made her feel more positive. She wasn’t sure why.

  Midnight arrived.

  Taking care not to make any sound, she eased the door open and tiptoed along the corridor, sidestepping the boards that might creak. The whole house was as silent as falling snow.

  On her right, she passed the locked door. The location of everything was all so convenient—and so fraught with danger.

  At the end of the corridor she flattened herself against the wall to the left of the door. Really there was no way she could hide if Nathan got out of bed and looked out, but the semblance of stealth helped her nerves.

  No sound from within.

  She imagined Lee, tense and apprehensive after the lamb’s tail had stopped shaking, waiting for the regular breathing that would mean Nathan had drifted into post-coital slumber. Slipping out of bed wouldn’t be a problem. If the movement woke him, she could say she was going to the bathroom. The dangerous part would be picking up his trousers and rifling the pocket for his keys. Difficult to explain that away. And next there was the added challenge of creeping to the door, turning the handle, opening it and handing over the keys, all without making a sound.

  What could she say if he woke up? I must have been sleepwalking?

  Ingeborg snapped out of this destructive train of thought. How many times did she have to tell herself that empathising with Lee was unhelpful? What mattered was her own plan of action.

  More time went by and there was no sound from inside the bedroom. She checked. Almost 12:15.

  Doubts crept into her mind. Had Lee fallen asleep? Or become so petrified that she couldn’t go through with the plan?

  And now her right leg started cramping below the knee, a familiar but excruciatingly painful spasm that usually made her
cry out. All this tension was getting to her. Gritting her teeth, she tried stretching the muscle, working her foot up and down, hoping the stiffness would go, but now it was in her thoughts, it was difficult to shift.

  About 12:25, the door opened and a small hand emerged with a set of keys resting on the palm.

  Lee had delivered.

  Heart going like the climax of a drum solo, Ingeborg closed her fingers over the bunch and backed away.

  The door closed.

  Now it was up to Ingeborg. She crept the few steps to the door of the locked room and stood outside in the dim light examining the keys on the ring. Two at least were of the Yale type. This was more of a mortise lock, needing a longer key. She found one and tried it, her hand shaking.

  It wouldn’t turn.

  A second key made a metallic rasp as she pushed it in.

  She froze, fearful she must have been heard.

  After waiting a few seconds, she turned her wrist and felt the key engage and shift the lock. She grasped the handle and eased open the door.

  The interior was even darker than the corridor. She had to keep the door ajar for a source of light. For a couple of seconds she stood in the doorway, allowing her eyes to adjust.

  But she wasn’t standing in an armoury. She was in a bathroom. There wasn’t a gun in sight.

  Her expectation dashed, she closed the door behind her and felt for the cord that switched on the light. It was no illusion. This was a fully tiled bathroom in duck-egg blue and white, with an oval bathtub set into the corner, a shower cabinet, toilet, bidet, vanity cabinet, wash basin, towel rail and mirrors. There were matching blue towels, a white candlewick bathmat, facecloths, soap and toilet paper. Toothpaste, electric toothbrush, shampoo and a shaver. Even a toilet bag.

  She couldn’t have been more devastated if she’d gone through the gates of heaven and found it was Terminal 3 at Heathrow. All the speculation, the planning, the risk-taking—for this, a sodding bathroom. She could have wept.

  But why would anyone keep a bathroom locked from the outside? It appeared to be set up for regular use, but who would use it? Only Nathan or Lee, and they had an en suite bathroom. Did Nathan have this as a back-up, for when Lee was using the other one? It had the look of a man’s bathroom.