The Stone Wife

by Peter Lovesey

  Sister Erica waited for the urn to empty and said, “Amen.” It was as good a way as any to bring an end to the proceedings.

  Monica said, “Thank you, all of you. What happened to Tim?”

  A needless question. In full sight of everyone, Tim was sprinting away across the field, not in the direction of the car, but towards the motorway.

  Diamond would have a fit.

  “I must stop him,” Ingeborg said, kicking off her shoes. If her innate sense of occasion hadn’t browbeaten her into reciting Chaucer, she would have grabbed Tim the moment he stepped away. As it was, he was at least thirty yards off already. And he was quick. Bats and hell came to mind.

  So it was a sudden transition from the dignity of the scattering to a cross-country chase. Ingeborg prided herself on her fitness. She could run and now she had to. She could feel Diamond’s fury whipping her forward (‘You let him escape? Were you sleeping on the job?”). Striding over the ploughed ground, ignoring the pain of the occasional stone under her feet, she went flat out to try and reduce the advantage.

  Tim was bolting like a panicking goat, but he wasn’t a natural runner. He glanced over his shoulder and the long, brown hair got in the way and he had to drag it against his neck. When he sighted Ingeborg, he lost his line and veered left. Then he almost tripped. He staggered several paces just to stay on his feet.

  She cut across the angle and gained yards. Her left heel struck a flint and she cried out with the stab of pain, yet she kept going. Action like this was what she craved in all those dull hours in the office. Even so, she was more of a sprinter than a distance runner and she knew from experience she wouldn’t last a long run. She urged herself into another burst of top speed.

  Steadily she cut the distance Tim was ahead.

  He was slowing appreciably.

  Ten yards.

  Five.

  Two.

  She dived. It wasn’t quite a rugby tackle, but she managed to grasp the flapping gilet and halt his by now faltering progress. Tim flung out an arm and she ducked and felt it pass closely over her head. His balance was going. He toppled over and hit the mud and brought Ingeborg with him.

  Gasping loudly for air, he tried to fight her off, but she was in the superior position, bearing down on him from behind. She grasped his right arm and yanked it upwards. Then she struck him above the elbow with a karate shuto—the knife hand—that she knew would disable him. She grabbed his other wrist, slammed it against the numb one and handcuffed him. His resistance hadn’t amounted to much and now it was at an end.

  She hauled herself up and stood over him. She, too, was panting like a dog.

  “On your feet.”

  Not easy when you are pinioned. He achieved a kneeling posture first, and then forced one exhausted leg forward and levered himself up.

  Ingeborg looked across the field to where Monica and her sister were standing open-mouthed at what they had just witnessed.

  She told Tim, “Let’s go.” And the pair of them dragged their aching limbs across the ground to unite the party again.

  Erica, a headmistress by temperament if not by appointment, handed Ingeborg her shoes and said, “You both need a good bath after that. What on earth was it about?”

  It was too soon after the scattering to go into detail. Ingeborg simply said, “My boss said to make sure we all travelled back together.”

  While more coffee was being served in the museum office, the next phase of the police operation was under way outside in Blake Street. George the driver had moved the Land Rover and trailer to a new position at a right angle to the kerb on the far side of the Carroll brothers’ van, effectively sealing the street.

  As an extra safeguard, Diamond drove a screwdriver through the nearside front tyre of the van and enjoyed the sound of the air escaping. A screwdriver is a versatile tool. He scraped enough paint off the van’s bodywork to satisfy himself that it had been sprayed and was originally silver. Then he smashed the side window and let himself in. Finding the murder weapon was too much to hope for, but after a methodical search he located two plastic replica handguns taped against the sides of the seats. Both were Webley revolvers. He showed them to George.

  “They’re toys, aren’t they?” George said.

  “Not when a hitman points one at you. You’d take them seriously then. Under the ASBO legislation, it’s an offence to carry replicas in public. I’m thinking these were used in the hold-up at the auction.”

  “Fired, you mean?”

  “No. It’s likely the killers had one working weapon between them. These were used to back up the threat.”

  “Where’s the murder weapon? Still hidden in the van?”

  “They’ll have got rid of it unless they’re bigger idiots than I take them for.”

  “You’ve found your killer, then? Was it Wayne?

  “They were in it together. They’ll all face a murder rap.”

  “Why? What was the point? Surely not to steal that old lump of stone?”

  “Tell you later,” Diamond said. He’d spotted the flashing blues and twos at the end of the street. His request for back-up from Bridgwater police had been answered. It was time to interrupt the coffee drinkers.

  Taunton police station with its interview facilities was the setting for Diamond’s face to face with Tim Carroll, now mostly cleaned up after the fracas in the field. Ingeborg (fully cleaned) sat beside Diamond. The duty solicitor was on the other side of the table with Tim.

  “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to make a drama out of this,” Diamond said to the prisoner after the preliminaries had been got through. “You’ve had a stressful time. Joining in the final rites of the man you killed was obviously a step too far. I can understand that.” He’d found over the years that if you made an effort from the start to reach out to the suspect and understand his point of view, it helped, whoever you were interviewing.

  Tim was admitting nothing, but there was a sign that he appreciated the show of sympathy. He pressed his lips together, parted them as if about to speak and then appeared to think better of it.

  “Let’s recap on your first involvement with Professor John Gildersleeve,” Diamond went on. “You were a history student at Reading University, right? A first-year, October 1999 intake. I know you were because I’ve seen the list of undergraduates. You weren’t in Gildersleeve’s department, but as a historian you were offered a place on the dig at North Petherton he organised in the summer vacation. Good experience, you thought. How am I doing so far?”

  Tim glanced at the solicitor, who was there to assist the man under arrest and see that he was treated fairly, but was learning the facts of the case as they unfolded. The lawyer simply raised his eyebrows as if to say that only Tim himself could judge how innocuous the information was.

  Diamond didn’t wait for a response. “We both know what happened. The dig was no dig at all. It had already been dug. As the days went on and nothing was found, you students got discouraged and bored. Someone—and I suspect it was you—had brought cannabis with him and pretty soon Gildersleeve had a spaced-out team, in no condition to continue. It all ended in recrimination and bad odour. The professor was deeply scarred by the experience, more than any of you realised. He had never been too popular in the senior common room and now he became a laughing stock. As dean of the faculty, he felt entitled to respect.”

  He paused—an opportunity for Tim to come back at him—but nothing was said. No sweat, he thought. Move on. You haven’t yet played your best cards.

  “When the new term started, you landed yourself deeply in trouble, dealing in cannabis. You were reported to the dean. This isn’t guesswork, Tim. I’ve checked with the university. It’s all documented in their files. You were sent down—for good.”

  Tim blurted out, “He destroyed me. He didn’t give me a chance.”

  The solicitor was quick to shush him.

  Encouraged, Diamond said, “I’m sure it seemed harsh and still does, but you ought to
realise the damage you’d already done to Gildersleeve’s self-esteem. In his mind, the failure of the Chaucer dig and the misconduct of the students were fused together in the same humiliating episode. Years later, he related it all to his new wife and she repeated it to me. He never forgot you. So when you came before him for dealing in drugs, he couldn’t avoid being influenced by what had happened in Somerset. It was a repeat offence as far as he was concerned. He expelled you, and no redress.”

  Tim’s shoulders sagged, but he said nothing, locked in his own unhappy memories.

  “To your credit, you came back to Somerset, where you lived, and rebuilt your life. You got a job at the arts centre in Bridgwater. The interest in history hadn’t been knocked out of you. You joined the local archaeological society and took an interest in the early history of the area. They thought well of you. Unfortunately, when the economy went belly up you lost your job like everyone else. You worked for your brother instead, clearing houses. You’re not going to deny any of this because you told me about it yourself.”

  “That’s true,” Tim said. The exchanges were still civil: a good sign.

  “And although it was a comedown compared to what you might have achieved as a university graduate, you had one remarkable success. Down in the basement of the arts centre, you found the Wife of Bath sculpture and recognised it for what it was. A personal triumph, that, and a sweet revenge, finding a major medieval carving with a direct link to Chaucer that probably had been recovered originally from the Chaucer house in Parker’s Field. You were so proud of the find that you took me down there and showed me the empty space where you first spotted the thing.”

  “You asked to see it,” Tim pointed out.

  “You’re absolutely right. I had an interest. You were very obliging. But let’s backtrack to the excitement of that discovery, a terrific boost to your self-confidence. The people in the museum and your archaeological society were impressed. Terrific—until the Blake Museum committee discovered what a valuable asset the stone wife was. They were running the place on a modest grant from the council and donations and now they had a chance to boost their income by thousands of pounds. I don’t suppose you approved—”

  “I didn’t,” Tim couldn’t resist saying.

  “But you understood the economics. You couldn’t do anything to stop the sale. And then—to your horror—you learned that your old enemy John Gildersleeve was taking a strong interest and apparently had the funds to bid high at the auction. All the old wounds were opened. The thought that your find was about to fall into his hands was more than you could bear. You had to stop it and you had the means.” Diamond paused and watched across the table.

  The reaction came, even if it was unspoken. Alarm, if not panic, was all too obvious in Tim’s eyes.

  “We know that Gildersleeve was shot with a thirty-eight calibre bullet that was typically fired from a Webley—almost an antique in itself. I’m going to make a guess now, and it won’t be far out. Working at house clearances, as you do, I’m sure you come across plenty of things tucked away in old places. Some of the generation who served in the war hung on to their service revolvers until they passed on and then the guns lay in the loft or under the floorboards for professionals like you and your brothers to find when you cleared the house. Don’t worry. I don’t expect to find the murder weapon—if, indeed, the shooting was murder.”

  “It wasn’t,” Tim said, keyed up and quick to react.

  The solicitor said, “Careful now.”

  The interview was fast approaching the critical point. “Do you want to explain?” Diamond asked.

  Tim hesitated, and then shook his head.

  “Three masked gunmen were involved in the attempted hold-up at the auction,” Diamond continued, still willing to lay out the facts. “Those balaclava masks worked well. Fortunately, we had a helpful witness—a Miss Topham, from Brighton, known in the trade as the glass lady—and she was standing behind the one we called the first gunman before he pulled the balaclava on. His head was blocking her view and she noticed a few things about it. He had long dark hair going grey. The hair had refused to grow over a scar on the back of his neck described by Miss Topham as like a little crater on the moon. And there were no lobes to his ears. Now fast forward to this morning. We’re lifting the stone off the trailer, I’m next to your brother Wayne, and when he leans over the stone I get a good view of the back of his neck, the hair, the moon crater, the ears.”

  Tim’s attempts to stay aloof from the narrative were losing all conviction. He was trying to stare at the ceiling.

  “What’s more,” Diamond pressed on, “just after I had the twinge in my back and cried out with the pain, Wayne said, ‘Nobody move’—the same words he used at the auction. Denis Doggart, the auctioneer, tells me he’s certain it was the voice he’d heard before. If Wayne was the spokesman for you three—and he seems to have been—I have to ask myself who fired the fatal shot, and why?”

  The solicitor put a restraining hand over Tim’s arm. The intricacies of the case must have been difficult to follow, but when a fatal shot is mentioned, you don’t want your client uttering a single syllable.

  Diamond played his ace. “It could make all the difference to the charge, the question of intent. Did you go to that auction with the clear intention of murdering Gildersleeve?”

  “No!” Tim shouted. “Definitely not. It was never in the plan.”

  The solicitor said to Diamond. “That’s enough. I’m stopping this now.”

  But Tim saw this as his chance to head off the murder charge and he wasn’t letting it go by. “I only ever planned to get the stone back, to stop Gildersleeve from owning it. I knew he’d bid really high and he did. I couldn’t stomach the thought of it going to him.” He swung around to the solicitor who had stood up and spread his arms as if he was herding geese. “Let me have my say, for God’s sake. The bastard had messed up my life already, big time. This was more than I could bear. I persuaded my brothers to help me take the stone back. We didn’t plan to kill him. We’d have hidden the stone where no one would ever find it. Wayne and Roger wouldn’t have agreed to murder anyone. They were carrying plastic guns. I only loaded mine in case I needed to fire a warning shot. He was shot because he went berserk in there. He was trying to grab the stone. I hadn’t expected that. He was always this cold, unfeeling guy. I panicked and pulled the trigger. That’s the truth of it. One shot and it killed him. How unlucky was that?”

  “Thank you,” Diamond said. “We’ve got the picture now.”

  While Diamond had been interviewing Tim, Keith Halliwell, with a Taunton detective for company, had taken statements from the other two brothers. Nothing said by Wayne or Roger conflicted with Tim’s account.

  “What happens next?” Halliwell asked Diamond over beer and a sandwich with Ingeborg before they took to the road.

  “We transfer them to Bath and go over it all again.”

  “Is it a murder charge, or what?”

  “It’s homicide, for sure, and in the course of an attempted robbery.”

  “Tim on a murder rap and the others as accessories?”

  “Plus the driver. There must have been someone waiting in the van. We’ll talk to the CPS. My guess is that they’ll do Tim for murder and leave the court to decide on any leniency. A nice little earner for the lawyers.” Diamond looked across the table at Ingeborg. “How are you feeling?”

  “Great,” she said, frowning. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “I was thinking about the arrest in the field. I wasn’t there, but it sounded quite physical and you were covered in mud.”

  “It was nothing, guv.”

  He smiled. Ingeborg was never going to admit to frailty, even if she was covered in bruises. “That’s all right, then.”

  “And you?” she said.

  “Me?”

  “You gave quite a shout when you were lifting the Wife of Bath off the trailer. Were you faking, to distract us all while you looked at the back of W
ayne’s head?”

  “I didn’t think of that,” Diamond said. “Actually, I did feel something go in my lower back. I don’t mind admitting, it’s pretty sore.”

  Halliwell winked at Ingeborg. “That’ll be the sting in the tail.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Lovesey writes in a garden office he calls his shed, but in reality it’s a handsome white shingle-tiled building in the American colonial style. Carpeted, double-glazed and heated, it contains a collection of books on the history of track and field, his other strong interest. As a child in 1948, he was taken to the London Olympic Games and a lifelong enthusiasm was sparked. When, years later, he came across a picture of a Native American named Deerfoot who visited Britain in 1861 and amazed everyone with his running, Peter began a quest to find out more. From this ultimately came his first book, a history of the sport called The Kings of Distance.

  Encouraged, he entered the 1970 First Crime Novel contest with Wobble to Death, based on a Victorian long distance race, and won the £1000 first prize. This launched him as a mystery writer, but he continues his sports research and writing and is a mainstay of the International Society of Olympic Historians.

  The Victorian mysteries developed into the Sergeant Cribb series, which really took off when they were televised (leading in UK ratings in the 1980s) and were chosen to launch the PBS Mystery! series. One of the Cribb novels, Waxwork, was awarded the Silver Dagger of the Crime Writers Association. Peter now has a small armory of such weapons, including the 2000 Cartier Diamond Dagger in recognition of his career. For some twenty years he has been writing the Peter Diamond series, so the honor had an extra cachet.

  Peter married Jax, a psychologist he met at university, and she encouraged him to give up his lecturing job and become a full-time writer. As proof of her support, she co-wrote many of the TV episodes, but really she prefers painting and learning foreign languages to writing. While Peter was working on his novels, Jax embarked on a London University degree in Mandarin Chinese. They have a son, Phil, and a daughter, Kathy. Phil is a suspense writer who recently picked up his first Dagger Award for the best short story of the year. Kathy took a different route, moved to America and became a Vice President at JP Morgan Chase.