The Vault

fourteen

THE MORNING PAPERS HAD gone bananas about human remains found in a cellar they called Frankenstein's vault. Here, in Bath.

He read every word with grim fascination. The press cynically mixed fact and fiction, severed hands, decapitation and Frankenstein. There was stuff about the miles of vaults under the city. No one with a cellar would sleep easy until the killer was arrested, his paper said-as if Mary Shelley's monster was alive and out for blood, living the life of a rat and coming up to kill at nights.

They had no conception.

"I need your help. I'm a guest at the Royal Crescent Hotel. My wife is missing."

"Your name, sir?" Flynn asked.

"Dougan. Professor Joseph Dougan. I'm on vacation here with my wife Donna. I've been waiting for her since before midnight. She ought to be here. I've been right through the hotel, all the public rooms, I mean. I've had the staff make a search. She isn't here."

"When did you last see her, sir?"

"Middle of the evening. Eight-thirty, nine, something like that. We had dinner out. I walked her back to the hotel, saw her right up to our suite, then I had to go out. I was back by eleven-thirty. No sign of Donna. I went downstairs and across to the Dower House to see if she was in the bar, or something. No one remembered seeing her. So I went back to our room to wait. Nothing. This isn't like her. This is the middle of the night and my wife is missing. I want you to find her, please."

"Right, sir, two of our officers will be with you shortly. Are you speaking from your hotel room?"

"The John Wood suite."

"Stay where you are and they'll meet you there."

"Listen, I want you to get on the job, find Donna. There's no sense in wasting time talking to me."

"Professor, we need a description."

"Okay, okay. Just be quick. I have a bad feeling about this."

After the line went dead, Flynn spoke to the switchboard operator. "Did we get that on tape?"

"Yes, sir."

"Keep it. And send a car up to the Royal Crescent to get the full story. Professor Joseph Dougan. He said he has a bad feeling about this. So do I." Maiden. God, I was going about in a black bomber jacket when I was past thirty."

"I should have spotted a case of retarded development."

He let that pass. "Motorhead. It's easy to talk about fifteen or twenty years ago, but it takes a find like this to give you a sense of how long ago it was."

"So was your victim a Heavy Metal freak?"

"It's got to be considered. The victim or the perpetrator, or both."

"A gang killing?"

"I doubt it. Rockers had a tough reputation, but it didn't often run to murder."

"Especially not in Bath."

He gave a tired smile. "I picture this as a dust-up between two labourers on the site. We're trying to trace people who worked there at the time."

"You made that very clear on television."

"Well, I hope it jogs someone's memory. We don't have many names so far."

"It's all very bizarre," said Steph.

"What is?"

"The link with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. How did the press get onto it?"

"The first I heard was some reporter from the News of the World."

"But who tipped them off"?"

"Does it matter?" He was uninterested, or appeared so. Then he shifted his head abruptly, like a thrush detecting a movement under the ground. "Maybe it does."

AT TEN past two in the morning, long after the calls from the Nationwide audience had dwindled to nothing, a 999 call was routed to Bath Central Police Station. It was put through to the senior officer on duty that night, Inspector George Flynn. The caller had an American accent, and was clearly agitated. borg, but not before the councillor asked Diamond sarcastically if it was safe on the streets of Bath tonight.

"Why-do you want a police escort?" Diamond asked.

Ingeborg giggled, clinging to Sturr's arm. "Thanks for the offer, darling, but I'm a simple lass. Two's company."

Sturr told her, "Anyway, Mr Diamond should be back at Manvers Street taking all the phone calls from his television audience."

"That's what lower ranks are for," said Diamond. "I'm off to my bed."

"I'VE SEEN worse things on the box," Stephanie assured him when they got home.

"I get brassed off with all the Frankenstein nonsense."

"That was obvious from your face. Television is very revealing."

"The young woman in Make-Up said I deserved a medal, but she was biased."

"Oh?"

"She thought me rather sexy."

Steph threw an oven glove at him. "Are you getting anywhere at all with this case?"

He held up his hand and showed a tiny space between his thumb and forefinger. "To be honest, I was hoping to put it on the back burner. It happened so long ago. But now it's in the headlines I'm not allowed to ignore it."

"What have you got so far, apart from the hands in the vault?"

"The very latest is that forensic have found an interesting relic in the bits of concrete from the vault: a Motorhead emblem that seems to have been part of a ring."

"You're talking about that rock group?"

"Heavy Metal. Remember?"

"When we married, you still had most of their LPs. You were nuts about them. And Black Sabbath."

"Black Sabbath… Lord help us," he reminisced. "Iron an excuse and went back inside the house. "God, I'd like to escape," he told Steph. "What time is it?"

"Twenty to ten. We can't," she said. "We've got to wait for the TV programme."

"That!"

"Did something go wrong?"

"Only that I called Georgina's pin-up a monster."

"Oh, Pete!"

"It was said in jest."

"Sometimes when you say things in jest they sound horribly serious."

"That's what bothers me."

The next fifty minutes went slowly. It was the kind of party when people said, "Isn't this fun?" whilst glancing furtively at their watches. Georgina flitted from group to group promising a surprise item at ten-thirty.

Across the room, Ingeborg's voice was showing the effects of the champagne. She seemed to be the only one enjoying herself, except John Sturr, her escort, who had his hand draped around her shoulder. They looked like gatecrashers from another party, Sturr with his lounge lizard looks and Ingeborg all legs and glitter.

Eventually Georgina began suggesting people move into the room where the TV was set up. "What are we in for?" one of the Assistant Chief Constables asked Diamond. "A blue movie?"

"Just blokes, I think."

"Really? What a bore."

Diamond drifted out of the room while the interview was transmitted and helped himself to a large scotch. By ten-forty, his bit of the show was over. Immediately after, people started making excuses and leaving. It was not really a response to the interview, more an opportunity made by the change in the pattern of the party.

Among the first through the front door were Sturr and Inge-police officer, and found a traffic warden, who called the police.

The crowd along the parapet increased.

Soon they saw two policemen in waders walk out along the edge of the weir to investigate. One of them stooped and grasped the body. For a second, the head was lifted clear of the water, a lily-white face with gaping mouth.

One of the crowd said, "It's a woman, poor soul."

The face was lowered again.

The police seemed uncertain what to do. Normally they would leave a body in the place where it was found for the scene of crime team and the forensic pathologist to inspect. In this situation there was a clear risk of its tipping over the weir and being carried downstream.

The two officers returned to the side for instructions. More senior policemen had arrived. A consultation followed, dominated by a man in plain clothes with a large moustache. After what seemed an age, a decision was taken, for the two in waders stepped out to the centre again and took a firm hold on the body and lifted it. One was unbalanced by the weight and lost his footing. He sank to his knees. His companion, trying to help, let go of his burden, stretched forward, stumbled over the corpse and fell face down into the water. The spectacle had its black humour that certain of the onlookers found amusing. The majority watched in silence.

In this undignified way, with several more stumbles, the body was dragged and carried around the arc of the weir to dry land, where it was placed on a stretcher, covered with a sheet of black plastic and loaded into a van.

The two officers in wet clothes got into a police car and were driven away. The van containing the corpse remained. Nothing more happened for twenty minutes. The watchers began to lose interest. A number of them left.

Down beside the undertaker's van, the CID officer with the moustache, John Wigfull, was assessing the situation. He hated dealing with anything that departed from routine procedures. Already those two buffoons sent to retrieve the body had made the police into a laughing-stock. His preference was to get away from here as soon as possible, but it took him some time to reach the decision. He had to satisfy himself that this was not the sort of incident requiring a search for evidence at the place where the body was found. The water would have carried any traces well downstream by now. The body had been seen floating towards the weir, so it must have entered the water higher up the river. To call a pathologist to the weir would surely be a waste of time.

Just to be sure he had missed nothing, he climbed into the van for a final look at the body, forced into closer proximity than he really wanted. So far as he could judge when he lifted the plastic covering, the victim had not been in the water for more than a few hours. She was small, even girlish in stature, with dark, bobbed hair. She appeared middle-aged, maybe in her forties, allowing that no one looks in the bloom of youth after drowning. Plain white blouse, black skirt and dark tights. No shoes. No evidence of violence other than superficial marks consistent with being in the river. Remembering that many suicides are drugs-related, he examined her arms for injection scars and found none.

Outside, he told the driver to take the body to the mortuary. Then he mopped his forehead, got into his own car and drove away.

DIAMOND DEVOTED the morning to Hands, as he had now dubbed the owner of the bones found in the vault. The case couldn't be soft-pedalled any longer. Two of the tabloids had splashed the story across their front pages that morning and even the most solemn broadsheet papers had covered it somewhere. He'd been forced to run the gauntlet of mikes when he'd arrived for work.

At least there was something promising to work on: the Motorhead emblem. It was a fair assumption that either the victim or his killer had worn it.

"Talk to every one of the builders you traced, Keith," he told Halliwell. "See if they remember a Heavy Metal freak who worked on the Roman Baths extension. It may be a name they supplied already, or someone they remember now, or just a face they can't put a name to."

His appeal for information on Newsnight had brought in over fifty calls, and he had a small team sorting the wheat from the chaff. The ratio of useful information was about one to twenty, if that, but they all had to be taken seriously. After a first sifting, he followed up on anything even faintly promising.

And something did emerge. Towards mid-day, he found himself talking to a retired plasterer in Winchester who had worked on the site for about five weeks in 1982. Retired, yes, but encouragingly all there. He reeled off a string of names, several that tallied with the list Halliwell had compiled.

Diamond wrote them all down, and found himself slipping into precisely the sort of shorthand he had mocked Halliwell for: Barham, talkative, ex-Korean War; Sims, short, snooker; Page, fancy rats; Andy…? nervous dyspepsia; Marshall, white Anglia… More than a dozen altogether.

"Is that the lot?"

"It's all I can think of now. I was only there a few weeks, chum."

"Was there anyone interested in rock music?"

"You want a lot for your money."

"Heavy Metal."

"Most of the young blokes, I reckon."

"So was there anyone who wore a Motorhead ring?"

"Motorhead?"

"Their trademark was the skull of a bull, with two big canine teeth."

After a pause came the statement that would transform the case. "There was someone with a ring like that. He didn't last long."

"What do you mean? He left?"

"Didn't turn up for work one day. They was casual labour, a lot of them blokes. They got a better offer and jacked in the job."

"You didn't see him again?"

"That's right."

Diamond's hand tightened on the phone. "Do you remember his name?"

He barely took time to think. "No. That's gone."

"Would you try, please?"

"Give me a break, guvnor. It was getting on for twenty years ago."

"Even so."

"Can't help. Sorry."

"Anything about him? What was his trade?"

"Trade? I told you he wasn't a tradesman. General labourer, most like. An overgrown kid. Scruffy hair. You know, rats' tails. Didn't wash it much, or didn't appear to. Brown leather jacket. The reason I remember the ring is he was real proud of it. Any time we had a tea break, he'd be sitting admiring it, turning it round on his finger, tapping his heel at the same time, like he could hear the music in his head. He didn't talk much. These days he'd have one of them Walkman things, wouldn't he?"

"This is someone young?"

"Twenty. Not much over."

"And he left suddenly?"

"He wasn't the only one. Other kids gave up. There were all sorts, and some of them wasn't suited to the work. Students, school-leavers."

"Was he a student?"

"I doubt it. No, he wasn't no brain."

"A loner?"

"I wouldn't say that. Now wait a bit. He had an oppo." The voice grew more animated. "This is coming back now. We used to call them Banger and Mash."

"Any reason?"

"Banger. Head-banger, I suppose. Kids who go in for that rock music, right?"

"What about Mash?"

"Well, Banger and Mash. Geddit?"

Diamond would forgive this man anything. "Was there any other reason for calling him Mash?"

"Not that I can think of. Except a Masher is a kind of ladies' man, isn't he?"

"Was he?"

"Search me."

"Can you describe him, this Mash?"

"It's so long ago. I've got a feeling he kept himself cleaner than Banger, fancied his looks a bit. No, I'm probably guessing now. You'd better forget what I just told you."

Nothing would be forgotten from this productive conversation. "After Banger stopped coming, did Mash carry on working?"

"Couldn't tell you. I was on a short contract myself. I left soon after."

"Did you come across either of them again, on other jobs?"

"No. Never saw 'em again."

"You said they were oppos. Did they spend time together outside work?"

"I've no idea, mate."

"If they had these nicknames," Diamond persisted, "it suggests they were thought of as a pair."

"They could have been stuck on a job together, couldn't they?" the old plasterer said. "Sometimes you get put to work with some bloke you never met, and before you know it, everyone's treating you like a double act."

"You think that's more likely?"

"I saw them shovelling wet cement out of a barrow. They must have been teamed up for that."

Diamond gripped the phone and leaned forward as if he was face to face with his informant. "They actually worked with cement?"

"I keep telling you they was general labourers. They had no trade. They was put to carting the cement across to the brickies, I reckon."

No more of any use emerged, though Diamond continued to try. Finally, he thanked the plasterer, and asked him to get in touch if anything else surfaced in his memory.

Progress. A Motorhead fan and his workmate. The cement squad.

He told Halliwell the salient bits. "I won't say we're closing in, Keith, but we're on the move now."

"How do we keep on moving?"

"By cross-checking. We go back to your contractors and all the others you traced and see if any of them have memories of Banger and Mash. More important, can they put a name to them?" He stood up and pushed his chair under the desk.

"You said 'we'?"

"And I meant you." He put a hand on Halliwell's shoulder. "My oppo."

DOWNSTAIRS IN an interview room, John Wigfull was face to face with the American professor whose wife had disappeared. It was apparent that Joe Dougan had not yet heard that the woman's body had been taken from the Avon. Either that, or he was giving the impression he knew nothing of it. Wigfull was doing his best to keep an open mind, but keeping an open mind didn't alter a fact well known to criminologists: that most murders are committed within the family.

"I don't understand it," said Joe with some conviction. "I reported this at two in the morning. You've been on the case twelve hours. Where is she?" To do him credit, he looked and sounded like a man in anguish. He had bluish bags under his red-lidded eyes and his face had sprouted overnight stubble.

Wigfull handled him calmly. No one was better at taking the heat out of a stressful situation. "I can assure you, professor, we put out a missing person report directly. I checked that. Can I just go over the description with you?"

"We did that in the night."

"Yes, sir, but you were in a state of shock. You may have missed something out." Wigfull picked up a copy of the description that had been circulated. "Looking at this, you did miss something. You didn't say what she was wearing, apart from a cream-coloured Burberry raincoat."

"I can't tell you what else she had on," said Joe.

"You must have seen what she was wearing earlier that evening. You had a meal out with her."

"I honestly don't remember. I don't look at her clothes. I can tell you what she said, how she was looking, what she had to eat."

Wigfull found himself insensitively thinking that what she had to eat might be of some use to the pathologist. "Didn't they go through the wardrobe with you?"

"Sure, but I couldn't help them. Call me an airhead if you like, but I don't know what she brought with her."

Wigfull sighed. It is a sad fact that a majority of men, if caught unprepared, cannot tell you what their wives are wearing. "Does she have any distinguishing marks?"

Joe Dougan frowned. "Birthmarks, you mean?"

"Tattoos."

"Donna?"

"Operation scars, vaccinations?"

"Why do you need this? She's not going to show anyone her appendix scar."

"So she has one?"

"I think so, but I don't see…" He turned paler. Panic threatened. "You mean she could be lying somewhere?"

Wigfull was not ready to tell all. "It's got to be considered when someone is missing this long. Has she ever done anything like this before?"

"No, sir, she has not."

It was wise to move on swiftly. "I'd like to go over your movements last evening, professor. After eating out, you returned to the Royal Crescent Hotel with your wife between eight-thirty and nine, and then you left her. You went out again."

"So I left her at the hotel. She's a grown-up. She's able to be on her own for an hour," Joe pointed out.

"Where did you go?"

"To an antiques store on Walcot Street. Noble and Nude. I was there earlier. I promised to come back."

"The shop was open as late as that?"

"The lady was taking in furniture. She told me she'd be there until midnight."

"You're speaking of the owner?"

"Her name is Miss Redbird."

"She can vouch for you, then?"

"Hey, what is this?" said Joe, his red eyes widening. "Am I under suspicion, or what? Would I call you people in the middle of the night if I'd done something wrong?"

Wigfull skipped that question. "Was your wife in any way upset that you went out so late without her?"

"I wasn't going after girls, for God's sake."

"But was she upset?"

Joe gave a slight, grudging nod. "Donna didn't see why it was important to me to go back to the store. I tried explaining, but she wasn't in a mood to be reasonable."

"You had a row?"

"A difference of opinion."

"Enough for her to walk out?"

"In a strange town in the night? I don't think so. Not Donna."

"She took her raincoat," Wigfull pointed out. "We established that. Do you have any friends she could have gone to?"

"In Bath? No."

"Nearby, then?"

"No, sir. We're tourists. The only people we spent time with here are other tourists."

"Does she have money?"

"A couple of hundred pounds, I guess. Sometimes she goes shopping without me. She also has credit cards. Her bag isn't in the room."

"Did you give details of the credit cards to the officers who saw you in the night?"

"Sure, as much as I knew."

"Was there any place your wife mentioned that she planned to visit while she is here?"

"We're finishing up in London, if that's what you mean. Tomorrow-I mean today-we were going to visit Wilton House. She loves big houses."

"Was that what brought you to Bath?"

Joe gave a nervous, angry sigh. "Look don't get me wrong, but talking about our vacation isn't helping to find my wife. I told you we're tourists."

Wigfull pressed on regardless. "All right. Would you mind telling me what you were doing visiting an antique shop as late as nine-thirty in the evening?"

Joe thought before he spoke, as if deciding how much to say. "There was something I was interested in buying, an antique writing box about two hundred years old. I found it in the afternoon, rummaging around, only it was locked and the key was missing. The lady had hundreds of keys in her office. We looked for one that fitted, but couldn't find one. I had to get back to the hotel to take Donna out to dinner. I promised to go back after and see if the lady had found the right key. That's all."

"You explained this to your wife?"

"Of course I did."

"And…?"

"She thought it was stupid. Couldn't it wait until next day? You know how they go on."

"You argued."

"I promised her the trip to Wilton House."

"But she had a point. Couldn't it have waited?"

"If you know anything about antiques," Joe said as if to a child, "you see something you want, you'd better buy it. If you go back later you can bet your life it won't be there. It might have been sitting in the store collecting dust for ten years, but some wiseguy will have moved in and beaten you to it. That's the first law of antique-buying."

"Did you get it, then?"

Joe shook his head. "No, sir. It's still down at the store. The lady won't part with it until she finds the damned key. So it was a wasted evening, and you can imagine how I feel about the whole fiasco."

Wigfull weighed the explanation, studying the little man's face: creased with the ordeal, vulnerable and nervous.

What else was he hiding?

"You were there until what time?"

"Eleven, or soon after."

"Trying keys?"

"Sure. By then, I figured Donna would be getting anxious about me, or apeshit, to be honest, so I beat it back to the hotel."

"Walked?"

"Yes, sir. No taxis in sight. I carried a map. I was back by eleven-thirty, easy. And Donna wasn't in the room. I told myself there must be some rational explanation and she would soon come back. I got more and more worried and asked the hotel staff to make a search. They couldn't have been more helpful, but we didn't find her. At two in the morning, I called the emergency number."

"We have it logged at two-ten."

"I'm being approximate here."

"Understood," said Wigfull. "I was just confirming your statement." Aware that he could not much longer delay telling Joe about the corpse in the river, he leaned back in his chair and pressed his thumb and forefinger against his big moustache, tracing the shape, as if to make sure it was still there, hiding his own insecurity. He had never been good at breaking bad news to people. "I, em, was down at the river an hour ago. It's probably someone else, but we have to check in a case like this."

Abruptly, Joe opened his eyes wide. "What are you saying exactly?"

"A woman was found."

"You mean in the river?"

"By the weir." Wigfull tried to soften the remark by adding, "Do you know Pulteney Weir?" Even as the words left his mouth, he realised how crass they sounded, like some conversation-piece at a cocktail party.

Joe gripped the arms of his chair. "She's dead?"

"It may not be your wife. This woman wasn't wearing a raincoat."

The detail made no impression on Joe. He covered his face and cried out, "Oh, Jesus, I can't believe this."

Wigfull looked down at the table and wondered what to say next.

Joe said, more to himself than Wigfull, "What have I done? So help me, what have I done?" When he opened his eyes they were streaming tears.

Wigfull was in turmoil himself. He didn't know how to react, whether to say something reassuring or lean harder on the man in the expectation that he was about to confess to murder. Finally he blurted, "I'll get you a coffee," got up and quit the room.