The Vault (24 page)

"Not telly Muppets, stupid. Real ones," said Winnie. She gave him one of those challenging looks children have for adults, daring him to disbelieve.

"Some of your toys?" This was not a good idea.

"No, silly. I'll show you." She walked a few steps and looked round to see if he was following.

He took a last look at the scene. The whole yard was still deserted. Even the cat had gone. He let Winnie lead him away from the farm. Not, he discovered with some relief, in the direction of the caravan, but towards a spinney, following the mill stream.

The child ran ahead, obviously familiar with the path. Diamond had to step out briskly. Butterflies swooped and soared and a startled pheasant scuttled out of the cover and crossed his path.

The water mill came into view, just. It was well camouflaged by creepers, a building long since fallen into disuse. Once it would have been used as a fulling mill, making the local cloth stronger and more compact. Winnie ignored it and ran on.

She stopped finally at another ivy-clad structure that must have been associated once with the production of wool and cloth. The miller's cottage maybe. This building was better hidden than the mill, but Winnie was familiar with it from the way she ran confidently to a window and stood on tiptoe to look in.

"See?"

He caught up with her. Surprisingly, the window was intact. In fact, it must have been cleaned recently. The interior was dark, and he screwed up his eyes to make out anything at all. Then he felt a gathering of tension as he saw what so excited the little girl. The place was fitted out like a coat check, with stands and hangers, except that instead of coats suspended from the hangers, there were weird and mis-shapen figures with heads hanging grotesquely and limp, shrunken bodies.

His first impulse was to drag the child away from the ghoulish spectacle. But she was clearly exhilarated by it, and he saw that she had been right, for these were puppets with the faces of people, animals and fantasy creatures. Some were lifesize, some quite small. Further in, were wood puppets on strings.

Winnie was singing the theme music from the Muppet Show, swaying rhythmically.

"Who does this belong to?" Diamond asked, knowing the answer.

To the same tune, she sang, "Don't know. .. Don't know. Don't know."

"Have you seen the man who comes here?"

She didn't answer.

He walked around the building, trying to see in, but the other windows were boarded, the door fastened with a padlock. "Well, you've solved a mystery, Winnie," he said when he came back to her. "I didn't need a grown-up after all."

"Do you want to go in?" she asked, looking up at him with her steady brown eyes.

"In here?"

"He keeps the key under that thing."

A boot scraper made of bristles mounted in wood. He looked underneath and found she was right.

The key fitted the padlock.

Winnie pushed past him when he drew the door open. "Hold on," he warned. "We don't know what's in there."

But Winnie knew. She was already inspecting the puppets, skipping up and down the racks, lifting faces and pulling strings, humming her tune again.

It was a kids' treasure-house. Along the walls were tea-chests crammed to overflowing with the materials the puppets were made from, rolls of latex, sponge rubber, bright-coloured, glittery fabrics, gauze, coils of wire, balsawood, spray-cans, marker pens, wigs, beards and moustaches. At the far end was an old metal filing cabinet with a basket of golden eggs on top.

Diamond tried the top drawer, hopeful of finding some correspondence. Surely an enterprise like this had to have some organisation. But the drawer had no files. It was filled with cans of paint. And the lower drawers contained only string, newspapers and pots of glue.

"Careful with that, Winnie." She was swinging on the tentacles of an octopus, stretching them alarmingly. "I think we'd better leave now."

"Don't want to."

"We've had our fun now."

"Haven't."

He started walking towards the door. "I'm going, anyway, and I'll have to shut you in if you're not coming."

"Don't care."

By the door, hanging from a nail in the wall, he found something helpful at last. An office-style appointments calendar. Someone had scribbled in the names of places and organizations, with times. He checked to see if there was an entry for Saturday. Bath Rotarians,
11-5, Victoria Park.
The day Wigfull had been attacked.

Thursday, the day of Peg Redbird's murder. Blank.

Today, then. Monday. Little Terrors,
11 a.m.
What on earth was he to make of that? From Bath Rotarians to Little Terrors in one weekend. Quite a comedown.

"What does it say?"

Winnie was at his side, not choosing after all to be left alone with the puppets.

"I don't know," he said.

"Can't you read?" she asked.

"I mean I don't know what it is. It says Little Terrors."

"Don't you know?" said Winnie with a superior air. "It's a play place in Frome. I been there hundreds of times."

thirty-one

LITTLE TERRORS.

The old market town of Frome was a mere eight miles south of Stowford. Diamond knew it well—or so he thought. He hadn't heard of Little Terrors.

Neither had Leaman when he called him on the phone. "What is it, sir—a toyshop?"

"A play place."

"Like a park, you mean?"

"Don't you know what a play place is?"

"With swings and things?"

It had been easier discussing this with Winnie. "You're a detective. Find out."

They arranged to meet on the Frome town bridge. Leaman was to come with clear directions to Little Terrors, whatever it turned out to be.

After this fresh tweak to the investigation, Diamond drove down the A36 with the Muppet tune refusing to go out of his head and his thoughts jigging to it. Who would have expected the violence done to Wigfull to link up with puppets and a play place?

There was a strong temptation to make the connection with Uncle Evan, the puppeteer Joe Dougan had spoken about. But what connection could that be? Uncle Evan was not really in the frame for Peg Redbird's murder or the attack on Wigfull. He was simply one of the people who had once owned Mary Shelley's copy of Milton.

Who was Uncle Evan anyway? His real name had not emerged so far. From Joe's account, he was a fortyish hippie with John Lennon glasses and a pony-tail hairstyle who got his bookings through the Brains Surgery at Larkhall. He'd bought the book at Noble and Nude some years ago and sold it on to Oliver Heath, the old gent with the shop in Union Passage. Heath had called him a multi-talented young man—"young", presumably, from the perspective of eighty years or more.

If it
was
Uncle Evan's puppet workshop at Stowford, who was it who had crossed the fields towards it some time Saturday afternoon or evening? Wigfull, for sure. But who else? Evan himself, returning from the show for the Bath Rotarians? Why would he approach it on foot across the fields rather than driving straight there as Diamond himself had just done? The footpath route made no sense. He'd have a vanload of equipment with him.

The heat was back on Joe Dougan. It always came back to Joe. Joe had met Evan. Of the other remaining suspects, Somerset and Pennycook, neither had any known link with the puppet man. Joe had sought him out on the day Peg Redbird was murdered.

So where had Joe been on the Saturday? He'd spent the whole of the afternoon doing the rounds of the Bath hotels looking for Donna, or so he claimed. What if—as well as checking hotels—he'd called at the Brains Surgery to find out more about Uncle Evan? The people in the pub could have told him Evan had a workshop out at Stowford. And Joe, being a stranger to the district, could easily have found himself in Westwood instead of Stowford and then spotted the sign for the footpath across the fields.

Why would Joe still be interested in Uncle Evan? Diamond's best answer was this: Evan had learned from Joe that the copy of Milton's poems he had bought and sold cheaply was worth much more. A prize had slipped through his hands. Years before, when he acquired the book from Peg, she may have told him she had found it in an antique writing box. Last week he would surely have reached the same conclusion as Joe: that if the book had belonged to Mary Shelley, so had the box.

Evan would know Mary Shelley's writing box would be worth a bit.

And the box disappeared from Noble and Nude on the night Peg was murdered. If Joe was the killer, it was easy to assume he'd stolen the box. The fanatical desire to own the thing was the reason he'd done it, his motive. There had been a struggle and Peg had been cracked over the head. But what if Evan came to Walcot Street the same night with plans to nick the box? His chance would have come while Joe was dumping the body in the river. Joe would have been appalled to find it gone when he returned. But he was intelligent. With time to reflect, he must have worked out the identity of the one other person who knew the value of the box. Determined to have it for himself, he returned to the Brains Surgery and picked up the trail of Uncle Evan. It was worth risking a trip to Stowford to see what was there.

It was looking as if Wigfull had been right all along about Joe. For Peter Diamond, that was humbling, if not galling. Joe was on a train to London by now. He'd be in Paris before the day was out.

At Frome, he called Manvers Street and said he wanted Joe Dougan stopped at Waterloo and brought back for questioning. A call to the Railway Police should do it.

LEAMAN WAS waiting on the town bridge. He had got the address of Little Terrors, he said. It was up the hill at the top, opposite the church.

"So what is it?" Diamond asked.

"An old factory, or warehouse, so far as I can make out."

"I mean what is it now?"

"A play place."

"OK. Be like that."

Leaman drove ahead in his car, through the town, and most of the way out of it. The church came up on the left and they turned right along a narrow street that presently opened out. And there was the name, bizarre in bold lettering over an innocent-seeming door.

Small children with their mothers were going inside.

Leaman cleared his throat in a way that signalled a problem.

"Yes?"

"Sir, has it crossed your mind that we're going to stand out a mile? Surrounded by little kids, with a few young mums."

"So?"

"This Uncle Evan is going to spot us the minute we walk in."

"We could be dads." After a pause, he added, "All right, grandad in my case."

"Thought I'd mention it, that's all."

"I'm going to mention something, too," said Diamond. "Once upon a time, I went into a house to make an arrest. I pushed a kid out of the way and he hit a radiator and cracked his head. I lost my job over it. We're going in to ask Uncle Evan to step outside and give us some help, right? That's all. Gently, gently. If anything goes wrong in there and kids are hurt..."

Inside, the Little Terrors were not so fastidious, ripping off their shoes and slinging them on racks, a rule of the house, it seemed. The noise was deafening. They could have called it Bedlam.

But at the point of entry some order was imposed. When the kids were in their socks they paid—or were paid for—and passed through a small turnstile.

"Yes?" said the chewing teenager with cropped hair dyed green who collected the money.

"We're police."

She was silent, stunned, it seemed. Until she grinned and said. "Is it, like, a bust?"

Diamond returned the grin. "They start young in Frome, do they?"

"So what's the problem?" she asked. "The council know about us. We're licensed."

"No problem," said Diamond. "Community relations." A useful phrase.

She had to shout to be heard. "You picked the wrong day. We got something special, a treat for the end of the summer holiday. Puppet show. You won't be able to move in there. I've never seen so many."

"We'll manage," Leaman bawled back. "We'll enjoy the show."

"It takes all sorts. Just watch where you put them big feet."

They passed through the turnstile into what would normally have been a place where the parents sat and drank coffee while the kids exhausted themselves playing. Today the serving counter was in use as the upper tier of the auditorium, with Little Terrors perched along its length banging their heels against the woodwork. Diamond and Leaman side-stepped around the mass bunched together seated on the floor. The idea was to reach the back, where the adults were. The show was already under way, the stage set up at the far end. Two skeletons on strings were being put through a dance and some of the young audience were enthralled. Plenty continued to fidget and talk as if nothing was going on.

A woman whose view was blocked said, "D'you mind?"

"Sorry." In trying to reach a space behind, Diamond made matters worse by nudging her chest with his arm. There just wasn't room for two men their size, so they had to progress right round the other side to where a sort of infants' assault course, clearly the centrepiece of the building, was set up. It was the only observation point left to them.

"House rules," said another woman, pointing to their feet. Obediently they took off their shoes and carried them in.

Some children, bored with the puppets, were playing on the apparatus. The space extended a long way back into the building and was equipped with rope ladders, balance beams, trampolines, tubes to climb through, shutes arid rings. Plunging their feet into a sunken area filled with thousands of plastic balls, the murder squad waded kneedeep to their vantage position. Two resourceful mums and their kids were already sitting in there watching the show through the mesh that kept the balls from spilling out.

They joined them, and it felt more comfortable than it looked.

After all the trouble it was some relief to catch a line of dialogue that went, "I work for Uncle Evan. Who do you work for?"

On the stage, the skeletons had been supplanted by a caterpillar and a butterfly on a stick. The man working them was visible, in fact prominent, standing up in an inset in the stage; his presence didn't seem to affect the illusion. The kids had their eyes fixed on the puppets; and, just as fixedly, the policemen had theirs on the puppeteer.

Diamond would have put him at younger than forty, Joe Dougan's estimate, but these things are always subjective. Hippy? Well, the hair was longish, blond, untidy. Hardly enough for a ponytail, he would have thought. No beard, not even a coating of stubble. Black T-shirt and jeans. The real surprise was that a young woman was assisting, getting the next set of puppets ready to hand to him. She was clearly visible from this side angle, her brownish-red hair tied Indian-fashion with a pink scarf.

The story-line quickly became clear. A boy puppet called Daniel was looking for his long-lost sister and meeting some strange, comical and whimsical characters in the process. They were borrowed freely from film, fairy tale and cartoon, and each had a few moments' interaction with the Daniel puppet. Half the fun for the kids was bawling out the names of characters they recognized: Donald Duck, Kermit, Popeye, Paddington, Barney, the Teletubbies. The copyright infringements were legion. And when a monster figure lumbered in, to spooky music, there were knowledgable shouts of "Frankenstein!"

After ten minutes Diamond said in an aside to Leaman, "Is there much more of this, do you think?"

"They must be running out of puppets."

"They could easily bring them on again."

The puppets themselves were superbly crafted, no question. It was a pity the script—if you could call it that—was so abysmal. Even a half-intelligent four-year-old must have found it repetitive.

The performance reached its finale—or ran out of puppets— mercifully soon, with the slaying of a giant and the release of Daniel's little sister from a spell that had put her to sleep.

There were cheers from the kids and the grown-ups clapped.

"That's the end of the show, boys and girls," announced the female puppeteer in her natural voice. "Don't all move at once, will you? And, whatever you do, please don't touch the puppets."

Just about everyone stampeded towards the activity area. A few tried to go against the tide in search of their mums. Some gave up, some cried and others used their elbows. Three remained helpless on the serving counter, sucking their thumbs. At the front, the puppeteers were totally occupied in preventing their stage being pulled apart.

Scattering plastic balls, the murder squad stumbled out of their vantage point, getting puzzled looks from some of the small children coming the other way.

In a short time, the area where the audience had been was almost clear. The hidden interior of the building must have been large to absorb so many.

The puppeteers started dismantling the stage. Diamond went over, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, quietly, "Police."

He turned, startled. "What's up?"

The woman was more controlled. "Is it the van? Did we park in the wrong spot?"

"Nothing to do with the van. Would you mind telling me your name, your real name?"

The man frowned and ran his fingers nervously through his blond hair. "Paul Anderson. What am I supposed to have done?"

"Where do you live, Mr Anderson?"

"Larkhall."

"Up near the Brains Surgery?"

"That direction, anyway."

"Where you're a regular?"

"I wouldn't call myself that."

"You met a man there a few days ago—Thursday of last week—Professor Joe Dougan, from Columbus, Ohio."

"Did I?"

Diamond was beginning to be annoyed, but he persevered.

"American, middle-aged, on the short side."

"Doesn't mean a thing to me." He added, gathering confidence, "Listen, mate, I think you may have got your wires crossed. I visit the pub, yes, but I'm not Uncle Evan."

"That's the truth," said the woman.

"Annie and me, we're filling in for him. Couldn't you tell from the crap show we just did?"

This, more than anything, made Diamond hesitate. It
had
been a godawful show, even though the puppets were beautifully constructed and painted. He would have expected something more classy.

"We had to wing it," said Annie. "We haven't seen Evan's show. There wasn't time."

The man who called himself Paul Anderson said, "He only asked us yesterday. We used to have our own show, right? We got fed up. Everyone wants you to do it for peanuts."

"It's not worth it. It's bloody expensive, setting up the gigs," Annie said in support.

"So Evan asked you to fill in. What's he up to?"

"God knows. Well, he did say something about a family crisis," said Paul Anderson. "I've never heard him talk about his family before. Didn't know he had one. We don't know him all that well. It's just that with all our experience ..."

"When somebody's in a spot, you help them out, don't you?" said Annie.

They had convinced Diamond. He was disappointed and elated at the same time. Uncle Evan's behaviour was deeply suspicious and his "family crisis" looked like a flimsy excuse to avoid being traced and questioned. He was behaving like a guilty man. Diamond continued to question the couple, but they said nothing more of substance. They claimed not to know Evan's real name, or where he lived. He had handed them the keys of the van containing everything they needed for the show and they had driven it away from the pub the previous afternoon. He didn't want it back for a week.