The Stone Wife

Book 14: A Detective Peter Diamond Mystery

by Peter Lovesey

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Just as the bidding gets exciting in a Bath auction house, three armed men stage a hold-up and attempt to steal Lot 129, a medieval carving of the Wife of Bath. The highest bidder, appalled to have the prize snatched away, tries to stop them and is shot dead.

Peter Diamond, head of the murder squad, soon finds himself sharing an office with the stone wife - until he is ejected. To his extreme annoyance the lump of stone appears to exert a malign influence over him and his investigation. Refusing to be beaten, he rallies his team and begins finding suspects and motives.

The case demands that someone goes undercover. The dangerous mission falls to Sergeant Ingeborg Smith, reverting to her journalist persona to get the confidence of a wealthy local criminal through his pop star girlfriend. And soon, murder makes a reappearance . . .

Release date: September 16, 2014

Publisher: Soho Crime

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter 1
 
‘Will somebody start me at five hundred?’
            A card with a number was raised near the front.
            ‘Thank you. Five-fifty. Six hundred. Six-fifty. Seven. Seven-fifty at the back. Eight.’
            The bidding was keen by West Country standards. Morton’s auction house in Bath was used to lots being knocked down without much show of enthusiasm. The dealer’s faces were giving nothing away.
            ‘A thousand.’
            Now the increments would be in hundreds. Four or five bidders were still interested and Denis Doggart, the auctioneer, needed the help of his assistants to keep track of the small movements that signified bids.
            ‘Fifteen hundred. Sixteen. Seventeen on the phone.’
            Heads turned. Not everyone in the room had realised bids were being phoned in. This wasn’t a sale of impressionist paintings at Sotheby’s. It was only the regular quarterly disposal of bits brought in to the Bath office for valuation, and most of them were bric-a-brac or tat.
            Doggart was unfazed. He had been told to expect two telephone bidders, from New York and Tokyo.
            ‘Two thousand.’
            The opening bidder shook his head. This was beyond his top figure. But the others were still in. The price mounted steadily, in two hundreds now.
            ‘At three thousand pounds.’
            A stifled gasp came from the back where some onlookers had gathered.
            Doggart knew who the main bidders were, except one, a dark-haired man in a cream coloured linen jacket and white shirt with a red bow tie. This stranger, more than anyone, was driving the sale. A spark of determination had kindled in his blue eyes. But who the hell was he? He’d obviously registered and been given his number. He’d shown no interest in any of the hundred and twenty-eight lots that had gone before. Doggart would have liked to check with his clerk to learn the name, but controlling the auction demanded total concentration.
After three thousand, the bidding is stepped up by larger amounts.
            ‘Four thousand in the front.’
            Bow Tie Man was in it to win it.
A pause.
‘All done?’
            Far from it. A new bidder raised his card, Sturgess, a London dealer who only made the trip to Bath when the catalogue contained something exceptional.
            Immediately Bow Tie topped the bid.
            The interest from Japan and America had ended somewhere between three and four thousand. Sturgess and the mystery man could settle this between them. And now the bids were coming in with the pendulum precision that auctioneers love. 
            ‘Five thousand, then.’
            Who wears a bow tie these days? A few doctors and academics. The occasional eccentric. Certain auctioneers.
            After a moment’s consideration, Sturgess nodded for five thousand five.
            No hesitation in the response.
            ‘Six thousand from the gentleman in the front. Are we there yet? A unique item of excellent provenance.’
            A new, aggressive voice broke in: ‘Nobody move.’
            The shock in the room was unimaginable. When an auctioneer is at work, his voice and his alone is all anyone expects to hear. The bidding is silent. An utterance from anyone else is an outrage.
            If “Nobody move” was an order, it was not obeyed. After the collective jerk of surprise, all heads turned to see who had spoken.
            A larger shock awaited. The speaker was wearing a black mask that covered his face and was holding a handgun. He must have been standing all the time against the wall within ten feet of the auctioneer. He’d slipped on the mask and produced the gun and spoken his two words while all the attention was on the bidders.
            Denis Doggart, on his rostrum, was supposed to be directing the show. He turned his head and said, ‘What’s this about?’
            ‘Shut up.’ The masked man said, ‘Everyone stay right where you are and nobody will get hurt.’
            Doggart said, ‘This is intolerable.’
            ‘I already told you to shut it.’
            If any doubt remained how serious the situation was, it evaporated when two more masked men with guns entered the saleroom by the door facing the rostrum. They marched up the aisle that was kept clear for safety reasons and took a grip on the handle of the wooden dolly supporting lot 129, the object currently under the hammer.
            This was too much for the bidder with the red bow tie. ‘You can’t steal that,’ he said in a shrill, appalled voice. ‘Get away.’
            ‘Shut up, mister,’ the first gunman said. ‘Get on with it,’ he told his companions.
            ‘It’s under auction. I made the last bid. No one is taking it.’
            ‘Let them be, sir,’ the auctioneer said. ‘They’re armed.’
            ‘They’re not having it. It’s too precious.’ Bow Tie was up from his chair and striding towards the men starting to shift the heavy burden. ‘Get your hands off.’
            The steady build-up of adrenalin during the auction must have given him extra courage, blind, foolhardy anger at the crime being committed in front of everyone. He was a slight man, no match for the crooks except in strength of will. He grabbed the sleeve of the nearest and succeeded in tugging his hand away from the dolly.
            The gunman swung around. He had the automatic in his right hand. He levelled it and squeezed the trigger.
            The report echoed through the auction room, deafening everyone.
            The force of the bullet sent Bow Tie Man crashing against a walnut table stacked with china. He hit the ground at the same time as a mass of cups, saucers and plates. Pandemonium followed, screams and shouts, some people diving for cover, others heading for the door.
            The would-be thieves panicked like everyone else. Any thoughts of stealing lot 129 were abandoned without a word passing among them. All three dashed for the exit, stepping over their wounded victim.
            A silver delivery van was waiting in the street outside with rear door open and a ramp in place. Two of the crooks dived in and hoisted the ramp aboard and the third slammed the door, dashed to the front and climbed in. The driver, obviously primed for the getaway, had the wheels in motion before the door closed. With a screech of rubber on tarmac, the getaway vehicle rounded the tight corners of Queen Square and was gone.
 
Inside the auction room fumes of cordite hung in the air. People were kneeling beside the victim, wanting to assist, but a man shot through the belly needs more than first aid. Blood had seeped through his clothes and dribbled from his mouth. He had turned as grey as the lump of stone he’d been bidding for.
            ‘Who is he?’
            ‘No idea.’
            ‘Doesn’t anyone know who the poor guy is?’
            ‘He was bidding. He must have signed in.’
            ‘Good point. We can check.’
‘Someone better phone the police.’
            ‘I already did,’ Doggart said, down from his rostrum. ‘They’re on their way and so is the ambulance.’
            ‘Looks like he needs an undertaker’s van, not an ambulance.’
  
             
           
 
Chapter 2
 
From saleroom to crime scene: a swift, harsh transformation. A forensics team was already at work in a cordoned area among the array of antique glass, silver and furniture.
There is only so much information you can get from looking at a shot corpse. Peter Diamond, Bath’s head of CID, had now moved past and was taking more interest in lot 129. ‘Someone was killed for this?’
            ‘I know what you mean,’ Detective Sergeant Ingeborg Smith said. ‘As a motive for murder, this tops everything.’
            ‘Topped him, for sure.’ He passed his fingertips along the chipped surface. ‘It’s not even in good condition.’
            ‘It’s antique,’ Ingeborg said and added before realising he wasn’t being serious, ‘There are going to be signs of wear.’
            ‘As I say when I look in my shaving mirror each morning.’
            ‘Don’t.’
‘Why would anyone want such a thing? It’s not decorative. Would you give it house room?’
            ‘Speaking personally, no, but people were bidding good money for it.’
            ‘Did you find out how much?’
            ‘Six thousand and rising.’
            ‘Six grand?’ Diamond said on a high note that startled the CSI team behind him. ‘For this?’
            The object in front of them, standing on a wooden dolly, was a slab of weathered stone about one metre in length, half a metre wide and as thick as a mattress. Whoever had lifted it on was probably nursing a back strain.
            ‘Can you make out what it is?’
            ‘Isn’t it supposed to be someone on horseback?’ Ingeborg said.
            ‘Looks to me like a bunch of bananas.’
            The face of the slab had been worked by a sculptor at some time in the remote past and any detail had long since been eroded. Thanks to the build-up of centuries of grime in the chiselled areas you could conceivably make out the outline of a horse and rider, Diamond was willing to admit. If so, the horse had thick legs, which was no bad thing. Either the sculptor’s sense of proportion was faulty or the person in the saddle was an XXL.
            ‘Does the writing give any clues?’ he asked.
Along the base was some damaged lettering: ‘. . . N  . .  AMB . . RE  ES . . Y  SHE  SAT.’
            Ingeborg shook her head. ‘The last two words are all I can make out. I suppose they tell us the rider is female.’
            He eyed the carving again. ‘You could have fooled me.’
            ‘The auction catalogue may throw some light. There must be some about.’
            He nodded. ‘See if you can find one while I have a word with the pathologist.’
 
Bertram Sealy in his blue zip-suit was squatting in a mass of broken china beside the body and speaking into a tape-recorder. He flapped a hand as Diamond approached. ‘Don’t come any closer with your big feet.’
            Diamond let go of the do-not-cross tape as if he had never intended to creep under it. ‘I’m not new to this. First impressions?’
            ‘No great loss,’ the pathologist said.
There was a pause. ‘That’s callous even by your standards.’
‘Bits of a tea service, cheap nineteen-fifties willow pattern. The table may take some repairing, but they’re clever, these restorers. It will take something off the value, even so.’
            There is an unwritten law that the professionals hide their emotions, and black humour often comes to the rescue. Sealy’s laborious efforts always put an extra strain on his dealings with Diamond. ‘I was asking about the victim.’
            ‘Him? He’s beyond repair.’
           ‘I can see that. What’s your opinion?’
            ‘I’m not a ballistics man.’
            ‘And you’re not here because a few cups and saucers got broken.’
            ‘Single shot to the abdomen seems to have killed him. The witnesses say he died in a short time, so it must have hit a vital organ. You don’t expect one bullet to the body to kill someone outright. In the skull, yes. In the belly, hardly ever.’
            ‘Bad luck, then?’
            ‘Not at all,’ Sealy said. ‘I just told you it was quick. Could have been slow and painful. That’s what I would call bad luck.’
            Diamond should have saved his breath. Whatever was said to Sealy always got corrected. A sure sign of insecurity.
            ‘You’re going to tell me you’ll find out more when you open him up.’
            ‘And you can have a ringside seat.’
            Diamond didn’t answer. He’d long ago stopped attending autopsies.
            ‘Or will you send your deputy as usual?’ Sealy added with a sly smile.
           ‘There are more important matters to attend to in a murder enquiry,’ Diamond said with dignity. ‘I’m better employed in the incident room than watching you pick over the entrails.’ With that, he turned away to see where Ingeborg was.
            She was waving the auction catalogue as she approached. ‘Found it, guv. Lot 129. Stone tablet, medieval, depicting a bunch of bananas.’
            The joke wouldn’t have been worthy of Sealy.
            ‘Pull the other one, Ingeborg.’
            ‘What it really says is that it’s a figure on horseback believed to be the Wife of Bath.’
            ‘You’re serious now?’
            ‘Chaucer.’
            He didn’t respond. Memories from way back had surfaced in his brain, of struggling through a dog-eared school textbook much defaced by notes of uncertain reliability from previous users. Like most of his classmates, he’d survived with the secret aid that the English master turned a blind eye to, a translation into modern verse even an eleven-year-old could understand. 
            Ingeborg added, ‘The Canterbury Tales.’
            ‘Remarkable as it may seem to you, I once went to grammar school, and passed an exam on Chaucer,’ Diamond said. ‘Does it tell us any more?’
            She read from the catalogue: ‘The inscription is indistinct, but is almost certainly line 469 of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: “Upon an amblere esily she sat.” What’s an amblere?’
            He sniffed and looked away. ‘Can’t remember everything I was taught.’
           She stooped to examine the stone. ‘The words do seem to fit. If it’s a quote from the poem, then I begin to understand the interest.’ She read some more from the catalogue: ‘Formerly in the collection of William Stradling of Chilton Priory, Somerset antiquarian.’
            ‘A medieval carving of the Wife of Bath must be a rarity,’ he said. ‘I still can’t see why someone had to be killed for it.’
            ‘Especially as the killers left it behind,’ Ingeborg said.
            ‘Botched job. They panicked when the shot was fired. The whole idea of hijacking a block of stone strikes me as daft.’
            ‘It’s not any old block of stone, guv.’
            ‘But you can’t pick it up and run off with it.’
            ‘It was on wheels. If they’d succeeded, we might have said they were master-criminals,’ Ingeborg pointed out. ‘It was audacious. It involved planning – the masks, the firearms and the van. If there was any security, they cracked it. No one was prepared for three masked men interrupting the auction.’
            ‘No one was prepared for a fatal shooting. It was never in the script. The victim’s actions weren’t predictable.’
            She nodded. ‘As you say, he must have got shot because he created a moment of panic. Everyone was supposed to respect the guns and let the robbers get away. I would have. Wouldn’t you?’
            ‘Every time,’ Diamond said, looking down at the stone, ‘but then I can’t think why I’d want to own this. He must have wanted it badly. We need to discover what made it such a desired object.’
            ‘I’ve bought things at auctions,’ Ingeborg said. ‘The pressure builds, even at the low levels I was involved in. When the bidding is in the thousands it must be heartbreaking to see a bunch of crooks about to walk off with the prize.’
            ‘What were you buying?’
           Ingeborg reddened. ‘Shoes. Designer shoes.’ 
            Diamond decided to speak to the auctioneer, whose name was on a card still displayed on the front of the rostrum: Mr Denis Doggart. He’d been pointed out when they arrived, a stocky figure in a red corduroy jacket doing his best to cope with the crowd outside the entrance. After their contact details had been taken by the police the bidders had all been asked to quit the building. They weren’t going far. Most were dealers who had no intention of leaving Bath without their booty.
            Doggart was now with his clerk checking the computer record of who had been there.
            ‘This is a situation I’ve never encountered before,’ he said when Diamond went over.
            ‘Pleased to hear it,’ Diamond said.
            ‘We’re not a war zone. We’re country auctioneers. Most of what we offer is pretty small beer. Security isn’t usually an issue.’
            ‘Meaning what? You don’t have any?’
            Doggart reddened. The reputation of Morton’s obviously mattered to him. ‘There’s always someone here. We had two people in the entrance issuing paddles and taking names.’
            ‘Paddles?’ Diamond frowned, thinking about canoeing.
            ‘Cards with numbers on them. They raise them when they bid.’
            ‘Does everyone get a paddle, then?’
            ‘Serious buyers. Everyone intending to bid. All the dealers, certainly.’
            ‘Can other people get in – without a paddle?’
            Doggart shrugged. ‘It’s open to all.’
           ‘I expect you recognise most of them.’
            He hesitated, as if it was a trick question. ‘The regulars, anyway.’
            ‘Did you know the robbers?’
            Doggart took a sharp breath between his teeth. ‘Certainly not.’
            ‘So did you notice them as newcomers before the incident happened?’
            ‘No chance of that. I’m fully occupied looking for bids – watching for numbers, basically. I don’t have the luxury of checking everyone in the room.’
            ‘After they interrupted the auction you must have got a look at them.’
            ‘They were masked. Balaclavas with holes for eyes. I haven’t a clue who they were.’
            ‘They couldn’t have arrived wearing balaclavas.’
            ‘The main man must have pulled his on a moment before he spoke. The others came in after he’d drawn the gun.’
            ‘You didn’t recognise the voice of the first man?’
            ‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with auctions, inspector.’
            ‘Superintendent.’
            ‘The bidding is silent. I’m the only one who speaks.’
            ‘Yes, I got that much,’ Diamond said. ‘It’s all done with paddles. But he spoke.’
           ‘I said I’ve no idea who he was.’
            ‘Do you recall anything about him, what he was wearing, what he looked like?’
            ‘About your height.’
            ‘A bit above average, then.’
            ‘But slimmer, quite a lot slimmer.’
           Diamond didn’t take it personally. He’d heard worse.
            ‘Black top and blue jeans,’ Doggart added. ‘All three were dressed the same.’
            ‘And they all carried guns?’
            ‘Yes, the one who fired the shot was one of the pair who came in after. A young man, going by the way he moved.’
            ‘Did you get a look at the guns?’
            ‘Revolvers, all of them.’
            ‘You’re sure of that.’
            ‘I know what a revolver looks like.’
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