The Vault (7 page)

* * *

THE VOICE came loud and clear over the answerphone: "Do I know you, Professor?"

"I'm afraid you don't, sir. I'm from Columbus, Ohio, and I recently bought a book that—"

"A book? Come up straight away. First floor, first left," the voice cut in.

A tall, silver-haired gentleman in brown corduroys and a black polo-neck was standing at his open door. He extended a hand. "Oliver Heath. I'd better say at once that I've given up dealing, but I do enjoy meeting another book man."

Joe was shown into an apartment that might easily have passed for a bookshop. A couple of the floor-to-ceiling shelves had ornaments and family photographs, but otherwise only the spines of books were showing. Good books, too, many in fine bindings.

"Do you specialise?" Oliver Heath asked. "As you see, I go in for criminology and the theatre. You'd be surprised how much overlap there is."

Joe had the precious copy of Milton's poems under his arm. He took it from its paper bag. "Then I begin to understand how you were able to part with this one, sir. It falls outside your main interests."

"May I see?" The old man took a pair of half-glasses from his pocket. Handling the book with the care of a specialist, he glanced at the cover, opened it, found his sticker inside, examined the title page and leafed through the rest. "The one-volume Dr Johnson edition. I do remember this one. I suppose I remember most of the books I acquired over the years. I can't tell you what I paid for it, but it was on my shelf for a good long time. Not in the best of condition. I expect I disposed of it when I gave up the business in Union Passage. Where did you find it?"

"At Hay-on-Wye."

This was cause for a smile. "Sooner or later everything of no special distinction seems to end up there." He handed back the book.

Joe felt insulted. He had not intended to point out to Oliver Heath that the find of all finds had slipped through his hands. He had no wish to inflict unnecessary pain. But that condescending phrase "of no special distinction" caught him off guard. He reacted instinctively. "Sir, I wouldn't have thought Mary Shelley's personal copy of Milton was without distinction."

The smile faded. Oliver Heath gave a prim tug at his spectacles. "May I see it again?"

"Certainly."

A longer inspection. He took the book closer to a desk-lamp. "I take it that the hand-writing on the cover leads you to assume it belonged to Mary Shelley?"

Joe nodded. "Those were her initials before she married and that was her address."

"She lived in Bath?"

"She wrote Frankenstein in Bath, or most of it."

Oliver Heath became conciliatory. "Strange. I didn't know that. Here I am purporting to be a bookseller and I didn't know that."

"You're in good company," said Joe. "It's a piece of information you have to go looking for. People with a special interest in the Shelleys know about it, but for some reason it's ignored in this city."

"Intellectual snobbery, no doubt."

"I wasn't going to say that."

"But I can. I know my own city. They're happy with stories about silly young women in poke bonnets, but the greatest of all monster novels is about as welcome here as a cowpat on the cobbles. Well, congratulations, Professor. You evidently found a bargain in Hay. Would it be indiscreet to ask how much it cost you?"

"Twenty pounds. I, em, rubbed out the price."

"Sensible, in the circumstances. Twenty is about right, going by the state of it. You can probably add several zeroes if you can prove the ownership beyond all doubt. Intrinsically, it's nothing special." He opened the book at the front. "Do you see where some of the fly-leaves have been cut out? Rather neatly, I have to say—but it matters to a collector."

Joe had not noticed before. "Why would anyone do that?"

"Paper was harder to come by in the old days. Expensive, too. Blank sheets had their uses for notepaper, or whatever." He closed the book carefully and handed it back. "I suggest you get that inscription authenticated. There are scientific tests for ink. Then if you want to make a tidy profit I would offer it to one of the London auction houses."

"I don't know if I'll sell it," said Joe.

The blue eyes glittered in approval. "There speaks a true book man."

"Would you remember who you bought it from?"

"You're hoping to trace the provenance?" said Oliver Heath, his eyebrows peaking in surprise. "I don't think that's very likely with a book as old as this, unless it's been in a private library for many years."

"Any chance of that?"

He spread his hands to gesture that he had no answer. "I'm trying to remember who sold it to me. Not one of my regulars, I'm sure of that. I have the feeling he was not a bookish person at all." He tapped the end of his nose with his forefinger as if that might stimulate thought, and apparently it did. "I believe it was Uncle Evan."

"Your uncle?"

"No, no. He's about fifty years my junior. He's the puppeteer."

"Would you mind saying that again?"

"The puppeteer, Uncle Evan. He runs a puppet theatre for children. He's quite well-known in Bath. Very talented. Built the theatre himself, makes his own puppets, paints the scenery, writes the scripts and works the strings as well."

"Is he interested in poetry?"

"I couldn't say. You can never tell with people. He has depths, but I wouldn't have thought he troubled with things like
Paradise
Lost, unless he was planning to turn it into a puppet show."

Professor Joe Dougan winced at the concept. "But he definitely owned this book before you did?"

"Yes, I'm certain it was Evan, no doubt needing to raise some funds for one of the shows."

"Where do I find this theatre?" Joe asked.

"Lord only knows."

"Doesn't it have an address?"

"It's not a building. It's a mobile thing. Collapsible. He drives it around in a van, doing shows for schools, hospitals, birthday parties and so on. I don't know where you'll catch up with him."

"Do you know his surname?"

"If I did, it's gone. You could ask at the Brains Surgery. He's well known there. I think he gets some of his bookings through them."

There was a long, uneasy pause. "You did say 'Brain Surgery'?" Joe sought to confirm.

"Brains, with an ‘s’."

"That's where I should go to ask for Uncle Evan?" he queried the advice slowly, spacing the words. He was beginning to have doubts about the competence of Oliver Heath's brain.

"Don't look so shocked. It's a Welsh pub. In Dafford Street, Larkhall."

"A Welsh pub in Bath? You wouldn't be putting me on?"

"My dear chap, Brains Bitter is a beer brewed in Cardiff. The pub's name is a play on words."

"I understand now." Joe grinned. "I had a mental picture that was truly bizarre."

"Dare I suggest, professor, that you read a little less of
Frankenstein?'

THE ANTIQUES trade is big in Bath. Go window-shopping in any direction and it isn't long before you are looking at Stafford-shire dogs and Japanese fans. Two areas have a concentration of the trade: the streets north of George Street at the top of the town, stretching right up to Lansdown; and Walcot, on the main route out to the east. Walcot cheerfully admits to being the dustier end of the market, its shops co-existing with used clothes outlets and takeaways. Here, on Saturdays, the old tram shed becomes a flea market and hundreds of bargain-hunters jostle among the stalls.

At the far end of Walcot Street stood Noble and Nude, a shop unlike any other, three floors and a basement crammed with bygones, without the slightest attempt to classify them. This hoard was presided over by Margaret Redbird, a formidable little woman known in the trade as Peg the Pull, from her genius for "pulling" or buying cheaply from gullible sellers. Why Noble and Nude? For no extra charge, Peg would tell you that she plundered Swinburne as cheerfully as she plundered everyone else:

"We
shift and bedeck and bedrape us,

Thou art nobk and nude and antique."

The shop's name seemed right for Peg. Noble she certainly appeared. She might have been born a duchess, for every syllable she spoke was beautifully articulated. Nude she was not (when in the shop)—but a hint of the erotic was good for business. Her vitality attracted men and she was old enough—close to fifty, if the truth were told—to lavish endearments on males of all ages and get away with it. She was small, energetic and playful, all of which helped her strategies in the antique game.

Peg had been in Bath over twenty years and amassed a collection that was two-thirds junk, but with enough good things among the rubbish to have serious collectors slavering. Finding the treasures was the problem. You went through a confusing series of small rooms connected by stairs that themselves served as display areas, leaving only the narrowest ways up between figurines and candlesticks. Everywhere the display was haphazard. Each surface was crowded with ceramics, glassware and silver, all unclassified. If you opened the drawers in the furniture they spilled out prints, postcards and photographs. From hooks in the ceiling another whole area was put to use. Suspended on strings over the customers' heads were dolls, teddy bears, saucepans, parasols, hats and birdcages. A full-sized waxwork of a woman in a red velvet dress was poised on a swing like a Fragonard beauty, her petticoats wired out to give the impression of movement.

Peg managed her business from a boxed-in position behind the grandfather clocks facing the front door. Hidden, not very cleverly, under her desk was a small safe. In it she kept the cash, and a few precious items such as a silver watch, once allegedly owned by Beau Nash, an eighteenth century pearl necklace and a letter written by Oscar Wilde.

Visitors came through steadily from the time Noble and Nude opened, about ten in the morning. Not all came to look at the stock. Peg kept her finger on Bath's pulse by dispensing gin and tonic to a fair cross-section of local society. Keeping up with the gossip was a professional necessity. When someone died at a decent address, Peg was invariably the first to offer deepest sympathy and expert help in valuing the contents of the house.

Essential to the system, a friend with time to spare was on call to mind the shop when Peg went on a valuing foray. This useful person rejoiced in the name of Ellis Somerset. Ellis knew everything about silver and quite a lot about china, yet his overriding passion was Peg. Her charm enslaved him. Each time she called him Gorgeous or Poppet, he turned pink with pleasure, regardless that she used the same words for the milkman and the bank manager. This morning Peg had summoned him and he was here soon after lunch in his suede shoes and olive-green corduroy suit with the red bow-tie that gave a helpful air of authority. Ellis was not much over forty, slight, well-groomed and red-haired. To borrow a phrase that rather suited him, he was a single man in possession of a good fortune. Pity he had a face like a turnip.

"I shouldn't be more than a couple of hours, if that," Peg was saying. "This is one of the Minchendon family, old Simon, who had that tailor's at the top of Milsom Street at one time. He was gathered last Tuesday. Heart. His nephew asked me to run an eye over the furniture."

"You're in for a treat," said Ellis, quite as well-briefed as Peg about Bath's recently departed. "Old Si didn't buy rubbish. When I was up at Bartlett Street one afternoon a couple of years ago, he picked up a set of Queen Anne spoonback chairs, a four and two. They cost him two-fifty apiece, but they'll be worth twice that now."

Peg was giving a crocodile smile. "Not this afternoon, ducky."

Ellis raised an eyebrow. "You'll get us a bad name, Peg."

"Tell me something new." She reached for the black straw hat she wore for funerals and valuations.

"All right. I will. I know you don't bother much with antiquarian books—"

"Each to his own, blossom. Old farts with elbow-patches trade in books."

"Yes, but listen to this, straight off the grapevine. Remember an old boy by the name of Heath, who owned that antiquarian bookshop in Union Passage?"

"Of course I remember him. He's still alive, I think."

"He certainly is. He was in Shades at lunchtime telling this story to a crowd of us, and now the trade is buzzing with it."

"Buzz it to me, then," Peg said indifferently.

"It seems he had an unexpected visitor this morning, a professor from Ohio, or Oregon, or somewhere in the colonies, wanting an opinion on a book of poetry by John Milton. Nothing special about the edition, except this little American reckons it once belonged to Mary Shelley."

Peg wriggled her little nose in disbelief. "Oh, yes? And how does he know?"

"It carried her initials, I was told, and the address—five, Abbey Churchyard—and that, apparently, was where Frankenstein was written. Did you know that?"

"I'll own up. I did not," Peg said without the slightest stirring of enthusiasm. "Now, if anyone is serious about the furniture, ask them to come back later, when I'm here, right? Anything else, you can deal with."

"I haven't told you the interesting bit," said Ellis.

"Snap it up then, sweetie."

"This professor found that number five was knocked down years ago. It was where the entrance to the Roman Baths is now. But he doesn't give up easily. He discovered that the original vaults are still there, and he managed to go down and have a look."

"Is this going to take much longer, Ellis, because I'm expected at Camden Crescent ten minutes from now?"

"Hold on. It's worth it. He reckons the police were down there digging, and they'd just found a human skull—in the vault of the house where Mary Shelley wrote
Frankenstein.
Spooky, isn't it?"

"What do you mean—'the police were down there digging'? What for?"

"I don't know. Looking for something, I suppose. Stolen goods? Your guess is as good as mine."

"And they dug up a skull?"

"It makes your blood run cold, doesn't it?" Ellis breathed some drama into his piece of gossip, frustrated that Peg had missed the point. "In the place where this great gothic horror story was written, the monster put together from bits of old bodies, they actually discover this."