The Stone Wife

by Peter Lovesey

  Diamond went over to his most reliable civilian assistant, a woman in her fifties called Penny. She had been given the task of analysing Nathan’s paperwork recovered from the gunroom. “What did you discover?”

  “He was selling or renting firearms at the rate of three or four a week,” she said. “A variety of weapons, too, from Kalashnikovs to nine-millimetre pistols.”

  “I’m interested in the two Webleys Ingeborg saw.”

  “It’s not an inventory,” Penny said. “It’s a record of the guns that went out. Nobody rented a Webley, not even one.”

  “Pity. That was the type of gun that killed Professor Gildersleeve. How about the customers? Can we identify anyone?”

  “You might,” she said. “I haven’t—but then I only have initials to go by.”

  “Was he using a code, or are they the real initials?”

  “They look real to me. Four months ago, there was an armed robbery at a jeweller’s in Keynsham. A Bristol man by the name of Leslie Beech was charged and is now awaiting trial. He was found in possession of a Browning self-loading pistol. If you look at November seventeenth, you’ll see a Browning nine millimetre out to someone listed as LB.”

  “No argument about that,” Diamond said, studying the sheet, now enclosed in a transparent filing pocket. “Is there any link to our suspects Bernie Wefers, Archie Poke or Monica Gildersleeve?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Diamond, but their initials don’t feature at all.”

  “Too bad. We know Bernie oversaw the building of the sound studio and the gym and probably the gunroom as well, so he had opportunities to help himself and not be listed here, but the others, no.” He dropped the sheet on her desk. “I was hoping we’d learn more from this. I was thinking it might be in code, but you say it makes sense the way it is.”

  Penny looked up at him. “You like a puzzle, do you, Mr. Diamond?”

  “Not sure about that. I like a challenge.”

  “Crosswords?”

  “I don’t do crosswords.” His face softened as the memory of an earlier time stirred in his brain. “When Steph was alive—she was my wife—we did the occasional jigsaw, but I was more of a hindrance than a help. We’d use up all the pieces we’d got and find one missing and it would be stuck to the bottom of my shoe.”

  “But you found it in the end.”

  “Most times, yes. I don’t give up easily.” He returned to his office and found the Wife of Bath back in occupation, returned from her photocall. “And neither do you.”

  He’d come to another decision. He picked up the phone and spoke to Bristol police about organising a search of Leigh Woods at first light next morning, using dogs.

  “It’s a big area,” the inspector said. “Forest terrain.”

  “I know. I cycled through it this morning. You’ll need everyone you can spare, and more.”

  “Are we looking for a corpse?”

  “Unhappily, yes.”

  “Will you be there to supervise?”

  “Sorry. I’m needed here, but someone from Bath will definitely join you.”

  He sank into his chair and reflected on twenty-four hours he wished to God he could re-run. This time yesterday he had been receiving texts from Paul Gilbert. He’d forever blame himself for consigning the young DC to his fate.

  Don’t dwell on it, he told himself. If nothing else, you have a duty to put the investigation to bed. That won’t be redemption, but it’s the least you can do if the boy’s death isn’t to be completely wasted.

  What have you learned from the whole debacle?

  He’d pinned too much hope on the log sheets from the gunroom. The best they could provide would be information for other investigations. Another disappointment was the removal of the gun hoard to some new hiding place. Difficult to track down now that Nathan was dead. No doubt the criminal world would find a way of bringing the weapons back into use.

  The bodyguards, too, would disappear into the underworld. He had no great hopes of detaining them. Lowlifes like that were adept in merging with the background and leaving no trace.

  The one breakthrough was learning of Bernie’s involvement with Nathan. The boorish property developer had become the prime suspect in the shooting of Gildersleeve. The case against him had strengthened markedly in spite of the fact that under questioning he’d claimed to have an alibi—on the day of the auction he’d been at one of his homes in Maidenhead or London. He wasn’t even sure which one, and it was just his word.

  Diamond called Wefers Construction and got a recorded message saying that the office was closed. Easy to forget that the rest of the world worked to civilised hours like nine to five.

  Plenty was still going on in the incident room. He shouted for Keith.

  Halliwell put his head round the door. “Guv?”

  “Do we have Bernie’s mobile number?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  Bernie’s recorded voice said, “I’m out of the country right now. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Out of the country?” Diamond said. “Has he done a runner?”

  “I doubt if he’d record a message if he had,” Halliwell said.

  He scratched his head. “What was the name of his PA?”

  “Colleen.”

  “She must keep a diary of his appointments. I’ll phone her in the morning, find out where she thinks he was on the day of the shooting. And I’ll have another go at Monica. I need more background on her ex.”

  “She’s got her second husband’s funeral tomorrow.”

  “Where? Reading?”

  “The crematorium at eleven thirty.”

  “We must be there. We can make it, can’t we?”

  “You mean you and me?” Halliwell said. “If you remember, I’ll be at Bristol mortuary.”

  “How come you get all the luck? It will have to be John Leaman, then. Not my first choice of companion at a funeral.”

  Halliwell gave him a look that was not overburdened with sympathy and left for home soon after, and the CID room entered ticking-over mode, with just two DCs and a sergeant on duty.

  Diamond remained in his office until ten thirty waiting for the news that refused to come. When fatigue finally hit him and he signed off, it was with instructions that he should be phoned at home as soon as a report came in of an unidentified body.

  Somewhere between Membury services and junction 14 on the M4 next morning, John Leaman made his first intelligent remark of the day: “There’s a toll on the Clifton suspension bridge. Does it have cameras?”

  “It must do, for security,” Diamond said and then sat forward so abruptly that the safety belt tightened across his chest. “Good point. It’s the obvious route out of Leigh Woods. Nathan ended up on the bridge for sure.”

  “He ended up in the river,” Leaman said with his dogged logic.

  “Okay.” Diamond took out his mobile. “But there should be footage of the limos at the bridge. I’m calling Manvers Street now to get those cameras checked.”

  After the call was made and the instructions issued, Leaman said, “So what was the sequence of events after the two Daimlers drove away from the house yesterday morning?”

  “Another good question,” Diamond said, and meant it. With so much else on his mind, he hadn’t looked at Nathan’s actions in a systematic way. “Whatever opinion we have about the man, he was well organised. He’ll have moved his precious guns to a safe place first. A lock-up is the most likely. Leigh Woods isn’t noted for them, but across the bridge near the docks there are storage facilities in plenty. The place is stiff with old warehouses and lock-ups. He’ll always have had some place in mind. That would be his first stop, definitely.”

  “You don’t think he’d trust his men to unload the stuff later?”

  “He was too controlling.”

  “Then would he also want to supervise the disposing of Paul’s body?”

  Diamond composed himself, resolved to accept the gruesome reality as impassively as Leaman s
poke of it. “I believe so.”

  “Difficult. It would have been almost daylight by then and people were about.”

  “They could have shoved him into a lock-up with the guns. They back the limo up to the entrance and no one sees.”

  Leaman nodded. “There is another possibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They dropped him off the bridge.”

  “Before Nathan jumped? Difficult. There are cars crossing the bridge all the time and sometimes pedestrians. I’ve seen how high the barrier is. You’d have a job heaving a body over it without being seen.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Besides,” Diamond added, now thinking as coolly as his ultra-cool companion, “I’m pretty certain Nathan was alone when he climbed up and jumped. You don’t commit suicide in front of your staff. He told his men to drive away and get the cars off the road before the hunt started. Then he made his own way to the bridge and put an end to himself.”

  “You must be right, guv,” Leaman said after weighing what had been suggested. “It makes more sense.”

  A mile or two more along the motorway, Diamond got through to Colleen. “At last! Am I really speaking to a human being and not a cassette?”

  “Who is this?” Colleen said.

  He introduced himself and asked where her boss was. It turned out that Bernie had a meeting in Paris to discuss a building project and would return on Eurostar in the evening and stay overnight at his London address.

  “So I can see him tomorrow.”

  “He’s extremely busy,” Colleen said.

  “And now he’s going to be busier still.”

  After running through Bernie’s appointments they agreed that the best location would be Melksham, where a new shopping precinct was to be officially opened by the mayor at eleven.

  “Excellent,” Diamond said. “If the mayor is attending, there’ll be champagne with salmon and cucumber sandwiches.”

  When they left the motorway at Reading, Leaman seemed to have a good grasp of the direction, so Diamond didn’t offer help with the navigation. Once before he’d asked this cerebral DI why he didn’t use a sat-nav and had been told he preferred to memorise the route. Around Reading’s maze of roads, this was a formidable challenge. Unerringly they cruised through to Caversham, north of the town, and All Hallows Road where, appropriately, the crematorium sits.

  With time to spare, they sat in the car park watching the other arrivals while Diamond called Bristol Central to ask how the search of Leigh Woods was progressing. And there had been a development. They had found Paul Gilbert’s car parked on the verge in North Road some two hundred yards from Nathan’s front gate. He must have left it there when he went to the house.

  He spoke his thoughts to Leaman. “It’s a step forward, I suppose. It confirms he didn’t get back there.”

  “Not good news,” Leaman said.

  Trying to be positive, Diamond turned his attention back to the mourners.

  “The high and mighty of the university will turn out for this,” he told Leaman. “One of their professors cruelly gunned down. They have to be here, don’t they? The vice chancellor and the dean and most of the senior common room. What interests me is whether Dr. Poke puts in an appearance.”

  “Why shouldn’t he?” Leaman asked.

  “They were rivals, weren’t they? Sworn enemies. He had scarcely a good word to say for Gildersleeve. It’s a dilemma for him. He’s sweating on Gildersleeve’s job, so he’ll want to rub shoulders with the people who have a say in the appointment. I reckon he’ll want to be seen here. Some will call him a bloody hypocrite, but if he stays away it will look worse.”

  The turnout was impressive, in dress as well as numbers. This was a more formal funeral than some others Diamond had attended. So many immaculately tailored dark suits, white shirts and black ties emerged from the cars that he wished his second-best suit had been a black pinstripe like his first instead of chestnut brown. He used the rearview mirror to check his tie, which was mainly black with hints of brown. “Let’s get in there.”

  “At the double,” Leaman said. “The hearse is coming up the drive.”

  Everyone was waiting outside for the principal mourners to appear, but the undertaker—in top hat and tails—ushered them in first. Diamond felt more conspicuous than ever, a brown slick in the sea of black. Even Leaman was in a leather jacket and black jeans.

  Monica came in last with a woman who was presumably her sister Erica and a bearded man who must have been the brother-in-law. The widow had gone to some trouble with her outfit. She had a cape not unlike the garment Diamond had worn on rainy nights as a young copper in the Met, a fascinator hat with jet beads on tendrils (which he hadn’t), tight black trousers and startlingly high heels.

  The humanist service took a lot of the formality out of the occasion. Instead of hymns they listened to taped music from Duke Ellington and the Modern Jazz Quartet and some of the congregation joined in with the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” When the eulogy particularly mentioned John Gildersleeve’s admiration for Chaucer’s joy in poking fun at religious and secular institutions, Diamond didn’t feel so bad about being the standout in the brown suit.

  Just before the curtains moved and put the coffin out of sight, he scribbled G2G on the order of service and showed it to Leaman, who of course knew all about texting, but wasn’t amused.

  A footnote invited everyone to a reception afterwards at the Griffin, a pub-restaurant close to Caversham bridge. There, sure enough, Dr. Poke’s shock of red hair was much in evidence as he sashayed from the vice chancellor’s group to the registrar’s to the dean’s.

  “Keep him in your sights,” Diamond told Leaman. “When he’s finished sucking up, I want a word with him.”

  He also wanted a word with Monica, but it was she who found him—courtesy, no doubt, of the suit. He didn’t get the kiss she was giving most people, but he was warmly received. “How kind of you to come, detective superintendent. I’ve been telling people you’re close to making an arrest and I hope it’s true. Living with this uncertainty is a trial.”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m close, ma’am, but I’m working on it.”

  “Did you catch up with my former husband?”

  “Bernie Wefers? Yes. In Marlborough the other day.”

  “I expect he denies everything.”

  “He did tell me something I didn’t know and I’m wondering if it’s true. Can we, em, speak somewhere more private? I notice there’s a patio nobody seems to have populated yet.”

  She followed him outside, accepting sympathetic kisses on the way from various friends. They had the patio to themselves. “This is heated for meals in the evenings,” she said. “I used to come here with John, bless him. Shall we sit down? These heels are murder.”

  The chance of being interrupted out here was less likely, especially if they were seated and in conversation.

  Diamond cleared his throat. “I’d better come straight to the point.”

  “Bernie told you about my little fling with Archie Poke,” Monica cut in. “That was a long time ago and has no bearing on your investigation.”

  “Why didn’t I hear it from you, ma’am?”

  “Heaven help us, when we met in Hedgemead Park, you were a total stranger. I wasn’t going to titillate you with lurid details of my sex life.”

  “You spoke about Dr. Poke as a rival of your husband with no chance of becoming professor while he was alive.”

  “It’s true. Didn’t you see him in there just now, schmoozing the vice chancellor?”

  “Your relationship with him ended when you left the group called the Diphthongs, is that right?”

  “Emphatically. I wouldn’t spend another minute with the man who ratted to my husband,” she said with such force that the jet beads bounced with each syllable.

  “But it’s possible he still carried a torch for you.”

  “He had a funny way of showing it.”

  “What I’m getting
at is that he may have taken it badly when you started seeing his rival, the professor.”

  She looked down thoughtfully and tapped her fingertips on the table. “Archie never said a word of reproach to me—and if he had, I would have had his guts for garters. I don’t know what goes on inside that calculating head of his, so I won’t say it’s impossible, but I saw no sign of it. Speaking for myself, we were finished the day he betrayed me to Bernie.”

  “Can you think of anyone else your husband had reason to fear?”

  “Apart from Bernie and Archie?” The beads were exercised again, laterally.

  Recalling Paloma’s tongue-in-cheek theory that Monica herself hired the gunmen to seize the carving when she heard the British Museum was bidding, he asked, “Did you know in advance that there was so much interest in the auction?”

  “I heard about it constantly from John. He knew as soon as the catalogue went out that Chaucer scholars across the world would put two and two together. He was extremely nervous, losing sleep over it. I promised him I’d underwrite whatever bid he had to make.”

  “But did he know he was up against the British Museum?”

  “I expect so. I imagine even they had an upper limit.”

  “Did you discuss what it was worth with him?”

  “No. He simply had to possess it. You have to remember the background to this, the crushing disappointment of the dig at the Chaucer house in Somerset in two-thousand when nothing except a few worthless shards turned up. John was a broken man. He’d staked his career on finding some proof that Geoffrey Chaucer lived there. So when the Wife of Bath piece came up for sale and he realised its provenance, he felt it was fated to be his, a sort of vindication. He planned to publish papers and probably a book.”

  “It seems there was a dig in early Victorian times that cleaned out the site. The stone was probably excavated then.”

  “I’ve heard something of the sort. John didn’t ever find out about that, certainly not in two-thousand.”

  “It was in a local newspaper archive. These days plenty of them are digitised. All you have to do is put the words ‘Chaucer’ and ‘excavation’ into the search engine and it takes you straight to the right paper.”