The Vault (27 page)

The last words may have been sincerely meant, but they were too much for Sergeant Leaman, who suddenly turned vengeful. "Sorry? That's easy to say now. We don't take crap from bastards who lay into unarmed coppers. John Wigfull was my guvnor. 'Never done anything violent before'! Bloody liar." He caught Evan by the arm and swung him against the wall.

"Leave it out," Diamond snapped.

"He's all wind and piss, sir."

"I said leave it. Are you deaf?"

Leaman put his face close to Evan's and said, "Scumbag." Then he took a step back.

The outburst was understandable but unexpected from the man who had given the impression nothing would make him lose his rag. Later, they would talk it through. Diamond was far from blameless in the treatment of suspects, but even as a youngster he wouldn't have cut loose with a suspect who was singing like an Eisteddfod winner.

Now Evan was cowering against the wall, terrified. It was a real setback.

Diamond tried again, and felt the scorn of Leaman as he said almost apologetically, "You've been frank about John Wigfull. Now I want you to tell us about Peg Redbird."

Evan seemed not to have heard.

"Miss Redbird, the owner of Noble and Nude," Diamond had to repeat.

"What about her?"

"What about you, the evening she was killed."

"That wasn't me," he answered, his voice shrilling, close to hysteria. "You can't pin that on me, for pity's sake."

"We know she phoned you at seven forty-three and had a six minute conversation with you."

"You know that?"

"She tried the Brains Surgery first. It was about the paintings she'd just acquired, wasn't it, two watercolours in the style of William Blake?"

"If you know it all, why are you asking me?"

"It's up to you, my friend," said Diamond. "You can tell it to me now and I'll listen. You're the one with a lot to explain. Or you can go back to the nick with Sergeant Leaman and see what he can do."

Evan found that unappealing. The words began to flow again. "Peg and I knew each other pretty well. I won't say I was a regular in the shop, but I looked in from time to time. You could find useful things there. Once I bought a Victorian paintbox from her in beautiful condition. Five pounds. Treasure for me. Well, Peg phoned me Thursday evening, as you know. She'd put two and two together, of course—my interest in art materials. Remembered selling me a certain sketchbook years ago, an old one, almost unused. I can't tell you exactly when it was. Ten years? Fifteen? I don't know. I bet she knew exactly. Peg was nobody's fool. And she sold me an old book about the same time, the poems of John Milton. I wanted it for the blank sheets inside. Proper paper made from rags. Lovely for the style of painting I do. Got rid of it after. I only mention the book because someone came into the Brains Surgery with that book a few days ago."

"An American?"

"Tourist, wanting to know who owned it before him and willing to buy drinks to find out. You see how this all ties up? He asked me where I got the bloody book and I told him about Noble and Nude. He must have jogged Peg's memory. Well, on the phone to me she wasn't on about Milton. She wanted to know about the sketchbook, if I still had it. She was mighty keen to get it back, whatever the state of it."

This made sense to Diamond, who was adding a subtext of his own. That Thursday evening when she made the call to Evan, Peg had just discovered she had Mary Shelley's writing box in her shop. Little wonder she was desperate to recover the sketchbook it had once contained. Those drawings would create massive interest in the literary world, regardless of their competence. Marketed right, with maximum publicity, they would bring in a small fortune.

"I wasn't keen," Evan said. "Actually, I'd cut out all the blank sheets already, getting on for fifty, I reckon. When they're as old as that they need sizing before you can paint on them, and you don't mess about with single sheets. You do a batch of them together. So the sketchbook was in tatters really. The only sheets left were four or five used ones drawn on by the original owner, pencil sketches, rather dull still-life studies." He paused and something new crept in, a catch in the voice that promised bigger revelations. "Except one. This was right at the back, the last sheet in the book, as if the artist kept it for something special, unconnected with the boring old still life. An amazing page. I don't know what you'd call it. An elaborate doodle, I suppose, the paper totally covered in thumbnail sketches of mountains, snow scenes, little houses, forests, sailing ships, all interspersed with a strange mix of faces, men and women, some of them normal enough, others horrific, corpselike. The drawing was not good in a technical sense, but the effect of the whole thing was striking. It appealed to my imagination, anyway. I kept returning to it and finding new things. Actually it was inspirational. I really think it turned me onto fantasy, the great gothic horror themes of the nineteenth century, and led me to embark on this
Frankenstein
series."

"You know who the artist was?"

"Artist?" Evan smiled. "Artist isn't the word I would use. I haven't the faintest idea."

Diamond chose not to enlighten him at this point. "You wanted to keep the sketchbook because of this one drawing?"

"Exactly. I told Peg the truth, that the paper in the book was all used up now, and that was a mistake, because it was pretty clear I'd used it myself. She was getting very excited. You know how voices on the phone give away more than they realise. She was eager to know if I'd kept the old drawings, the ones already in the sketchbook. I said I thought I still had them somewhere. She wanted to come and see them. That night. I tried to put her off, but she wasn't having it." He looked down, his face still strained, as if he needed to gather himself before going on. "And then she shook me rigid. She told me about these two pictures she'd bought that afternoon. They were in the style of Blake. Clever fakes, she called them. She said she was planning to blow the whistle on them, get an expert to expose them. She asked me if I'd heard of the fraud squad. I was pissing in my pants. She didn't say so, but it was obvious she knew it was my work. She offered them to me in exchange for the remains of the sketchbook, with a promise that the deal would be confidential. Neither of us would speak of it again." Evan groaned at the memory. "She'd got me over a barrel. She could expose me as, em ..."

"A forger."

He didn't like the word. "I've sweated blood over these paintings, getting them right. I study the text, immerse myself in the words. I'm not ripping people off."

"You're turning out fakes."

"They're originals. I haven't copied anything."

"Come off it," said Diamond. "You go to all the trouble of finding antique paper and covering it with size and backing them with paper that crumbles in your hands. You're passing them off as something they're not."

"I've never claimed they're Blakes. If people want to make that assumption, so be it. Look, I'm a painter. For years I did better things than these in my own style, miles better, and got no bloody recognition for them."

"But these are in demand. That's how you get your revenge, is it? When some expert thinks he's found an unknown William Blake?"

"That's out of my control."

Diamond found the reasoning specious, but he wanted to hear the rest of what happened, so he didn't pursue it. "Peg threatened to blow the whistle on you and you agreed to meet her?"

"What else could I do?"

"That evening?"

"Yes."

"What time?"

"We agreed on nine-thirty. First I had to drive out here and collect the sketchbook. I kept it in the plan-chest, see?"

"Where did you meet?"

"She didn't want me coming to the shop. You know the old horse trough in Walcot Street, the one built into the wall? It's just a short walk from the shop. I drove down there and she got in the car. She had no transport of her own. She was carrying the pictures."

It chimed in neatly with Ellis Somerset's version, the conversation that had so upset him, about the meeting that sounded like a heavy date. "I'm
expecting an offer tonight, if that doesn't
sound indelicate."

"Did you make the exchange?"

"I tried. I had the remains of the sketchbook with me. I'd removed one drawing."

"The one you just described to us, with all the detail?"

Evan nodded. "I didn't think Peg Redbird knew it was in there, but she did. By God, she did. I told you she was smart, didn't I? When she first had the sketchbook in her hands she must have flicked through and found it at the back, same as me, and she
remembered.
She asked if I still had that crowded page from the back. Believe it or not, I find it difficult to lie. I said yes, but I wasn't willing to part with it. She could take the other drawings."

"She wouldn't agree?"

"No way. She called me a cheat. Said she knew enough to put me away for years. That drawing was part of the deal, she said. If I didn't produce it, she would have me exposed as a forger." He shook his head miserably. "What could I do? She wouldn't leave the car until I drove her out here, to Stowford, and collected it."

"Is that what you did?"

"Yes. I wasn't happy, I can tell you. It was blackmail, wasn't it? But I had no remedy."

At this, Leaman said with heavy sarcasm, "Oh, no?"

The muscles tightened at the side of Evan's face. "I drove her back to Bath and set her down where I met her."

"What time?" demanded Diamond.

He gave it some thought. "It was by eleven, I tell you that. She had to be back by eleven, she said. I didn't do bad, getting her there on time, allowing for all the wrangling, and the drive out here and back."

"Was it much before eleven? Did you look at the clock in the car?"

"I was too bloody angry to look at the time."

"You set her down in Bath and that was the last you saw of her?"

"Correct."

"Was anyone around, anyone who might have seen you?"

"Not that I noticed."

"What did you do after?"

"Drove home and went to bed. I was shocked when I heard what happened to her."

"You didn't come forward as a witness."

"Would you, in the circumstances? I was bloody terrified."

"Can you produce these paintings she exchanged with you?"

He went to a drawer of the plan-chest and took them out, still loosely covered in bubblewrap. At Diamond's suggestion, Evan himself uncovered them and lay them on the desk for inspection. The ham-fisted detective wasn't risking another accident.

They were the scenes from
Frankenstein
just as they had been described by Ellis Somerset, dramatic images, skilfully drawn and painted. Peg Redbird must have been a shrewd judge to have spotted them as fakes.

Evan was talking aloud, but to himself, quoting Mary Shelley. " '...
the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me
with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice,
among which I had walked with caution; his stature, also as he
approached, seemed to exceed that of a man.'
"

Diamond said, "They're remarkable."

Evan turned to him. "Everything I told you is the truth. I hit out at the copper in a panic, and I'm sorry. I swear to God I didn't touch Peg Redbird. I'm not a killer."

"Don't count on it," said Diamond. "John Wigfull is still on the danger list."

thirty-five

AFTER SO MANY YEARS in the police, Peter Diamond was not surprised by much, but he was rendered speechless when he walked into the Manvers Street control room and recognized an elegant young woman in a dove grey suit chatting to one of the sergeants.

She turned and smiled.

He eventually said, "Well, who would have thought it?"

DI Julie Hargeaves, his much-missed deputy, said, "It hasn't been all
that
long."

She was supposed to be on attachment to Headquarters.

"What brings... ?"

"Interviewing duty," she explained. "They're taking on new recruits, some women among them. I had an evening off, or so I thought. I haven't now."

He was disappointed. "I thought for a moment..."

"No," said Julie firmly.

"Are you doing the interviews alone?"

She shook her head. "Someone has to represent Joe Public. Regulations. I'm teamed up with Councillor Sturr. Have you met him?"

"Him? God help us if the rest of the public is anything like him."

"He's on the Police Authority," said Julie. "A sledge-hammer to crack a nut, if you ask me, but I gather he insisted."

"Typical," said Diamond, thinking of the shock Ingeborg was going to get.

Julie shrugged and said, "How's it going here? I heard about John Wigfull, poor old lad."

"He's getting over it."

Her lips shaped into the beginning of a smile. "Shouldn't I waste my sympathy?" She well knew of Diamond's feud with the injured chief inspector.

He made an effort to sound upbeat. "I just got the latest from the hospital. They're saying there's been a big improvement in the last hour. He's fully conscious. All the signs are that he'll make a full recovery."

"That's wonderful. And you phoned up to ask how he was doing?"

He gave the honest explanation. "I needed to know in case he was dead. We just nicked someone for the assault."

"Reliable?"

"Cast iron. He confessed. Runs a puppet show. Calls himself Uncle Evan."

"Did he also murder the antiques lady?" Julie, as he would have expected, was well up on the case.

"He had the motive. He had the opportunity."

"Going by the tone of your voice, you don't think he did."

At this point, the Assistant Chief Constable steamed in like the royal yacht, straight towards Julie. "Inspector Hargreaves?"

"Ma'am."

They shook hands and Georgina—who didn't go in for small talk—started explaining how the interviews were arranged. Diamond, sidelined by all this, left them to it. He'd missed his chance to put in a good word for Ingeborg. He just hoped Julie would remember her from press conferences as a bright young prospect ready to take on the world. With Sturr on the panel, Ingeborg's chances had taken a nosedive.

Annoyed with himself, he went over to talk to Halliwell. The hapless inspector had been beavering away on the bones in the vault case for days. Now he had a new stack of paper on his desk, the first telephoned responses to the appeal for help in identifying Banger and Mash.

"What's the story, Keith?"

"What you'd expect, really. Any number of people thinking they must have known the dead man. Parents whose sons left home and haven't been heard of since. Women who got ditched by blokes and would like to think it wasn't their fault. All a bit sad really. The only thing I can say for sure is that Motorhead must have had a big following in the nineteen-eighties."

"Most of these are on about the victim?"

"That's right."

"What have we got on the other one, Mash?"

"Bugger all, sir. We couldn't give them much of a description. What do we know—that he kept himself clean and fancied his looks a bit? You can't put that in a press release."

Diamond picked up the sheaf of papers, jottings taken by the civilian women who answered the phones. The handwriting reflected the speed at which the notes had been taken.

"There's one possible girlfriend of Banger who might be worth following up," said Halliwell. "Near the top, marked with the highlighter. A Mrs Warmerdam, living in Byron Road."

Diamond found it and started to read:
"11.20 a.m. Mrs Celia
Warmerdam, Holt House, Byron Road. "Going steady" 1982 with
rock fan Jock Tarrant
—
casual labourer
Roman Baths
extension.
Description fits. Remembers Motorhead ring. Still has her diary. JT
failed to turn up for date on 10/9/82. Never heard from again."

Halliwell said, "I thought I'd go and see her in the morning."

Diamond was still charged up from collaring Uncle Evan. He wasn't in tune with the slower tempo of the Banger and Mash case. "Byron Road isn't far. It's one of those streets on Beechen Cliff named after poets."

"I know," said Halliwell impassively. "I live there."

"What—Byron Road?"

"Longfellow, actually."

"We can go now. You've had a day of it. I'll drive you home after."

CELIA WARMER DAM would have been worth visiting whatever she had to say, as unlikely an ex-rocker as you could hope to meet, a plump sugar-plum fairy in her late thirties. Her silver-highlighted hair stood out like a seeded dandelion. She brought them tea in bone-china cups in a pink front room with a baby grand piano and lace curtains gathered in great, dramatic scallops. "It's all so laughable now," she said, making the "so" last as long as the rest of the words together. "My Heavy Metal phase. I knew nothing whatsoever about the bands or the things they performed, but I dressed the part, in my thigh-length boots and faded denims and motorbike jacket. I just had this enormous pash for Jock Tarrant, my bit of rough. And was he rough! Kissing him was worse than rubbing your face against a pineapple. He had the most revolting, smelly hair down to his shoulders, incredibly evil clothes, all studs and leather and engine-oil, and of course I adored the brute." She giggled. "I've had two husbands and a partner since, and they were all nicely groomed. They shaved and showered every day, and didn't dream I once slept with an apeman—well, more than once." She smiled wistfully. "More times and more ways than I'd care to describe. It was hearing you on Radio Bristol this morning that got me thinking about Jock, because he had one of those rings with the animal's skull or whatever it was and he was easily the size you said, six foot two or three. I only came up to his elbows."

"And he went missing?" Halliwell prompted her.

"Yes. When did I say? I looked it up in my diary and told the young lady on the phone."

"September 10th, 1982."

"I know I was devastated at the time. Heartbroken. Jock was going to take me to one of the best hotels in Edinburgh for the weekend. God knows what they would have thought of us. He'd had a bit of luck, he said. Some money was coming his way. Bread, he called it."

Diamond latched onto that at once. "Did he say where from?"

"Something to do with work, I think. He was a casual at the Roman Baths, on the extension. I thought it sounded an interesting job, but he said it was boring. My best guess is that he dug up something Roman, a piece of jewellery or some coins, and smuggled it out to sell somewhere. He didn't say and I didn't ask."

This was more useful than they had dared to hope. A possible motive for violence in the vault.

"So you arranged to go away for the weekend?"

She laughed at her youthful folly. "I stood on Bath Station with my overnight bag for hours. It was a Friday, and really cold for September. Jock didn't turn up. I caught a chill and spent the rest of the weekend in bed shivering and crying. I never saw him again."

"Did you ask around at the places where you met? Clubs? Pubs?"

The hair quivered. "I had my pride. Friends asked me about him. Nobody seemed to have seen him anywhere. I just assumed he'd gone off with his money to start up in some other town. I cried buckets, but you get over it eventually, don't you?"

Diamond caught a significant glance from Halliwell. The crucial question still had to be asked.

He prolonged the moment, sipping his tea. Then: "Did he ever talk about the people he worked with?"

"Only that they were brain dead, or words to that effect."

"Yes, but did he speak of them by name?"

"If he did, I don't remember. Between ourselves, Jock wasn't much of a communicator."

"I'm thinking of one man in particular," Diamond tried again, "one he was teamed with, mixing cement for the bricklayers."

Briefly, it seemed she hadn't taken in the suggestion, for she said, "Shall I take that cup and saucer now? You look as if you aren't used to it." And after rescuing her china, she surprised them both with, "Would he have been a college boy called John?"

"I'm asking you, ma'am."

"Jock called him a college boy anyway. I suppose he was a student on vacation work. They skived off for a smoke sometimes. That's about all I remember."

It was all they were destined to find out from Celia Warmer-dam. They tried, and she tried too, for a surname, or the name of the college, or some physical description. If she had ever known such details, they had sunk into oblivion with her thigh-length boots and faded denims.

Outside in the car, Diamond asked Halliwell which year it was that sexual intercourse began.

Halliwell stared at him.

"Some time early in the nineteen-sixties. Dates are not my strong point. I thought you might know it," Diamond tried to explain. " It's something I heard a few days ago, in a poem by Philip Larkin. Hold on, the words are coming back to me:

'Sexual intercourse began

In Nineteen Sixty'Three

(which was rather late for me)
—

Between the end of the Chatterley Ban

And the Beatles' first LP.'

That's all I wanted to know. Sixty-three."

"Right," said Halliwell, still mystified.

"A man born in sixty-three would have been—what, nineteen?— in 1982, when Banger disappeared? That's about right for a college boy called John."

The Diamond system of mental arithmetic was too occult for Halliwell to follow.

"Check the graduation lists for 1983,84 and 85. Start at Bath. Then try Bristol. Then the polytechnics. It's a chemistry degree."

"You want me to do this now, sir?"

Diamond had forgotten that Halliwell was supposed to be on his way home. "Soon as we get back to the nick. Get on the phone to the universities."

"John who, sir?"

"Sturr."

"Councillor Sturr?"

"Of the Bath and North East Somerset Police Authority. And may the Lord have mercy on our souls."

JOHN STURR had been awarded a B.Sc. in chemistry at the University of Bath in 1984, the registrar's office confirmed. Triumphant at finding gold at his first strike, Halliwell informed Diamond.

"Right," came the response, so low key that it sounded to Halliwell like a putdown. "Now we need to know if they keep records on their students. Well, of course they must. Try the chemistry department. See if there's anything in Sturr's file about vacation work."

Unfortunately there was not.

"Let's think a bit," said Diamond. "There's another way to find out if he worked on the Roman Baths. There must be."

"We've been through this before, sir," Halliwell reminded him. "We tried the Trust, the building firms. No joy at all."

Diamond stared ahead.

Halliwell waited, consoled only by the knowledge that in this sort of impasse, his obstinate, boorish boss was capable of brilliance.

"Okay," the big man said after some time. "Get on to the chemistry department again. Ask about references."

"I already did," said Halliwell, disappointed. "The professor did write a couple for him when he applied for jobs, but there's no mention of holiday work."

"That isn't the point, Keith. Who were the references for?"

Halliwell frowned.

"If we find out who he worked for," Diamond went on, "they may have his job application on file. A student applying for his first job had damn all to put down except exam results. Work experience would help pad out the form."

Halliwell grinned, liking it. "I'll try them again."

And Diamond's persistence paid off. In August, 1984, the chemistry department had supplied a reference on John Sturr for a stone-cleaning firm called Transform. The records showed that he had got the job and stayed with them for three years. Better still, Transform were still in business. They had kept Sturr's records, and his original application listed various vacation jobs, among them construction work at the Roman Baths in July and August, 1982.

"Got him!" said Halliwell, flinging up his arms like a golfer at the eighteenth.

Diamond shook his head. "Not yet, Keith."