The Vault

seventeen

"WHERE ARE WE GOING?" Joe Dougan asked Diamond.

"Bath Central Police Station."

"You taking me in, or what?"

"Depends what you mean. We just want to ask you some questions."

"Can't it be done here?"

"In the hospital grounds? We'd rather do it at the nick."

"And if I refuse?"

Diamond was being unusually considerate. "Is there somewhere else you would rather go?"

"My hotel."

"Fine. We'll go there."

"I'm thinking my wife may have come back."

"Let's find out, then."

From the car, they radioed headquarters that the body taken from the river was that of Peg Redbird and gave instructions for her shop to be sealed as a possible crime scene.

THE ROYAL Crescent Hotel is at the centre of the great terrace from which its name is taken. At the sedate pace of a horse-drawn carriage, they were driven over the cobbles in front. A top-hatted concierge in blue livery automatically started towards the car, saw that it was a police vehicle and hesitated. Joe swung open the door and hailed him by name. "Any news of my wife yet?"

"I haven't heard anything, professor."

"Darn."

The Dougans' suite was on the second floor. The two trim members of the party moved towards the elegant main staircase. Diamond stopped to press the lift button. They looked round for him and came back.

He said with an air of dignity, "If there's such a place as Heaven, and I get the nod from St Peter, he'd better not expect me to use the stairs."

Wigfull passed no comment.

This went over Joe's head. He was still talking about his wife. "She may have come back when the concierge was off duty."

"It's possible."

But when they entered the John Wood suite, nobody was there.

"Hell," said Joe, and he couldn't have been talking about the accommodation. The lounge area in a toning scheme of brown, orange and cream, was bigger than the dining room of some hotels. Padded settee and armchairs, fireplace and huge pelmeted and draped windows with front views across the lawns to the city. Up a couple of steps a white balustrade like a communion rail separated the bedroom from the rest.

It definitely had the edge over an interview room at the nick.

"I'm not paying for this," Joe thought fit to explain, as if affluence would damn him in the eyes of the law. "We ordered a simple bedroom at one-sixty a night, but as this suite wasn't in use they upgraded us for no extra charge."

"Lucky for you."

"My luck ran out last night. So what are you going to do about Donna?"

"A missing person alert has gone out to all our patrols. We can't do more," Diamond explained, "unless there's something else you want to tell us."

Joe's voice shrilled in outrage. "What do you mean? I told you all I know."

"Then you've got to be patient, sir."

"I'm doing my best." He sighed, and made an effort to unwind. "Anyone want a drink?"

The room had its own cocktail cabinet. The guardians of the law shook their heads.

"Well, I'm having a scotch," Joe declared.

"How did you know the woman in the mortuary is Miss Redbird?" Diamond asked him when he had poured the drink.

"Didn't I say? I met her yesterday."

"In her shop?"

"In her shop, right."

"Pure chance, or what?"

"No, I was directed there. You want to know how it happened?" He went to the chest of drawers and took out his precious book, the edition of Milton's poems, and showed them the inscription on the cover and explained why he believed this was Mary Shelley's personal copy. In a dogged account that revealed the persistence of his character, he took them through the various steps of his quest to trace the previous owners: Hay-on-Wye; the Abbey Churchyard; O. Heath, the retired bookseller; Uncle Evan at the Brains Surgery; and Peg Redbird at Noble and Nude.

Diamond was a brooding, restless listener to all this. "You make it all sound reasonable," he responded finally. "The part I don't understand is where you thought this trail was leading. Surely you weren't expecting to trace the book all the way back to Mary Shelley?"

"You never can tell." A faint smile followed, edged with self-congratulation.

"We're listening," said Diamond, becoming intrigued.

So they heard the remarkable story Peg Redbird had given Joe, of the writing box that had once contained the book.

At this John Wigfull cut into the narrative. "This is the box you told me about this morning, the one that was locked, and you went back for?"

"Correct."

"You didn't tell me it belonged to Mary Shelley. You said it was an antique."

"That's the truth."

"No, professor, that's evasion."

Joe Dougan shrugged and spread his hands. "I can't say for certain it belonged to her."

Wigfull was furious. "You went back to the shop at the end of the evening because you believed it was hers. You didn't say a damned thing about Mary Shelley this morning."

"What's your problem?" said Joe. "Donna is gone. That's all that matters to me. Can't you appreciate that?"

Diamond broke up the exchange before Wigfull burst a blood vessel. "Let's move on. Would you mind telling me what happened when you went back to Noble and Nude?"

"Nothing happened. Miss Redbird wasn't there."

"The shop was closed, you mean?"

"No, it was open."

"But unattended?"

He nodded.

Wigfull blurted out accusingly, "You didn't tell me any of this."

"You didn't ask."

"You implied she was there. You said you spent some time trying to unlock the box."

Joe remarked as if to a child, "You got it. I sat down in her office to wait for her. The writing box was still on her desk and so were the tins of keys, so I tried some more. But the lady didn't show up at all. In the end I thought about Donna alone here and I gave up."

Diamond said with more control than Wigfull, "Are you telling us the whole story this time, professor?"

Joe seemed to shrink a little into the thick upholstery. "I'm doing the best I can."

"When you found the shop unattended, did you make any effort to find Miss Redbird?"

"I called her name. There was no answer."

"A golden opportunity to try more keys on the precious box. Did you get it open?"

Joe looked away, out of the window, as if he wanted to be anywhere else but here.

"Did you hear my question?" Diamond pressed him.

"I don't know what she did with the damned key."

"You must have been tempted to force the lock."

"It crossed my mind a couple of times, but I didn't do it."

"The box is still intact, then?"

"Should be. That's how I left it."

"On Miss Redbird's desk?"

"Yep."

"And you say she didn't show up at all?"

"That's the truth of it."

"How long were you there?"

"Hour and a quarter, hour and a half."

"Did anyone see you?"

"No one I noticed."

Diamond continued to probe. If Peg Redbird had been bludgeoned to death that evening and dropped in the river, that hour and a half was crucial.

"When you found the shop open and let yourself in, did you notice any sign of a disturbance?"

"No, sir, I did not."

"Any damage would be obvious in an antique shop, I imagine.

Joe gave him an abstracted look. "What did you say?"

"Things get knocked over if people fight in a place like that."

"You're losing me."

"Everything was as you'd seen it before?"

"I guess so."

"We can assume, then, that she left the shop before you arrived, and nobody forced her to go."

Joe Dougan was a tired, troubled man, and he had reached the limit of his patience. "All you guys want to talk about is this dead woman. She's gone. No one can help her now. You should be finding out what happened to my wife, for God's sake. Don't you have any priorities?"

They left soon after.

" WHAT DID you make of that?" Diamond asked in the car.

Wigfull sniffed. "He spins a good yarn."

"Do you think it's all an act-his concern about the wife?"

"I caught him out over Peg Redbird, didn't I? He changed his story."

"He was pretty uncomfortable about it."

"The man's a killer," said Wigfull. "We should have taken him in."

"I don't know what you base that on."

"He was at the scene, wasn't he? He went to the shop the evening she was killed. He admits that now. He coveted that box. It was an obsession with him. You've got to understand the mentality of these people who buy antiques. They spot a bargain and nothing will put them off. But Peg Redbird was a canny dealer. She guessed the value of the box from the way he conducted himself. I expect she made the fatal mistake of trying to withdraw it from sale. He saw the prize being snatched away and he lashed out. If that isn't motive enough, I don't know what is."

"He comes across as a mild character."

"So did Crippen."

They drove directly to Noble and Nude. Walcot, where the shop stood, was one of Diamond's favourite areas of Bath. With its craft workshops, secondhand goods and a market style of shopkeeping, it preserved a link with the medieval traders who had once done business here. The down-at-heel, but chipper character of the place was staunchly defended against the city developers. There was even a guild of sorts that had organized a Walcot Street Independence Day the previous summer.

A uniformed PC stood on duty outside.

"Before we go in," Diamond said, "I'll check how close we are to the river."

"It's only a stone's throw. It runs parallel to the street."

That wasn't enough for the head of the murder squad. "I'll take a look."

Professional competence was at stake here. Not wanting to miss a thing, Wigfull tagged along. There were a couple of passageways through private premises that had gates in front. These, Diamond reasoned, were almost certainly locked at night. He found the nearest open access to the river some sixty yards up the street, through Chatham Row, a cul-de-sac lined with gentrified eighteenth century terraced housing. In silence, the two detectives paced the short distance past the houses to a set of railings overlooking the Avon. A gate gave access to a flight of twenty-two stone steps down to a section of river bank.

"Could she have bashed her head falling down the steps?" Diamond mused aloud.

"You mean by accident?" Going by the tone of Wigfull's voice, it was as likely as abduction by aliens.

"If she did," Diamond went on, "I don't know how she got in the water. She would have ended up on the grassy bit down there."

"He killed her in the shop and dumped the body in the water."

"That little man we saw in the Royal Crescent?"

"Who else?" said the man who usually kept an open mind. No comment from Diamond.

For a few moments they watched the river's placid progress towards Pulteney Bridge. Any current was barely discernible here, along one of the wider stretches. Further on, the course narrowed a little, but not enough to propel a floating corpse against an obstruction with enough force to cause head injuries. Even at the weir, the flow would be minimal in present conditions.

Diamond was working on logistics. "If you're right, he must have brought the body here somehow. He doesn't have a car. He's not a big man. It was a short walk for us, but a fair old distance to carry a corpse."

"She was a small woman."

"Another thing," said Diamond. "He's a stranger to Bath. How did he know the river was so close? You can't see it from Walcot Street."

"He carried a map."

"Do you know that for certain?"

"He told me," said Wigfull with an air of triumph.

Diamond continued to stare at the river.

Wigfull added, "He said he used a map to find a quick way through the side-streets to the hotel."

In a moment Diamond said, "Seen enough?"

Wigfull nodded.

They returned to Noble and Nude.

"Do you collect antiques?" he asked Wigfull before they went in.

"On my salary?"

He gave Wigfull a speculative glance. "You can pick up some useful things quite cheaply. The Victorians made special mugs for people with large moustaches. There was a trough across the top to keep the whiskers from getting soggy. Worth looking out for."

Wigfull's brown eyes above the great friz were a study in hostility.

No trace of amusement crossed Diamond's features. He contained it all.

Inside the shop, the sheer spectacle of bric-a-brac at every level was an immediate distraction. The two detectives stood for a time, taking it in. To Diamond's right was a stuffed grizzly bear, forever up on its haunches with a tray resting across its forepaws piled with what looked like junk mail. Opposite was a Victorian Bath-chair with its black hood.

"You wanted to know how he shifted the body," said Wigfull, pointing to it.

Diamond gave a grudging nod. "It's possible."

They edged past a ship's figurehead, a huge, bare-breasted wooden torso threatening to crush anyone who brushed against it. Suspended over them, by wires to the ceiling, was a model of a Tiger Moth aircraft not much smaller than the real thing. Beyond was an area staked out by grandfather clocks lined up like guardsmen. It was dominated by a leather-topped desk of the sort owned by newspaper barons-except that the leather was torn in places and the wood was crying out for some polish. At one end were three biscuit tins without lids.

"The key collection," said Diamond after glancing into one.

"Where's Mary Shelley's writing box, then? The professor said it was here when he left."

Wigfull eased his way carefully around the desk and looked behind. Peg had a bentwood chair in the peacock design, with velvet cushions. Ranged beside it he found a paraffin stove, a safe, a wastebin and a stack of magazines and reference books.

No writing box.

"Dougan was definitely lying," Wigfull said.

"Stupid, if he was. We were sure to check."

"Stupid he is not."

"So he wasn't lying."

Wigfull glared back, defeated by the logic, or what passed for logic.

"No signs of a fight," Diamond commented. "He was right about that."

"He could have tidied up."

They made a slow inspection of the shop. Necessarily slow. It was difficult in such a warren to retain a sense of where they were. Not only were the rooms small and connected by confusing flights of stairs; the way through was serpentine, dictated by the arrangement of furniture.

The wax woman on the swing gave them a moment's unease, and in another room they found a broken fragment of pottery, presumably from the urn Joe claimed to have smashed, but otherwise the tour was uneventful. On the way out, Diamond scooped the heap of junk mail from the grizzly bear's tray and handed it to Wigfull. "Something to pass the time."

"Thanks," Wigfull said ironically.

"Check it before you chuck it, won't you?"

They returned outside and stood by the car. Twenty minutes of wandering through the shop had brought on symptoms of claustrophobia in the case of Wigfull, and, on Diamond's side, hunger.

"I wonder if there's a chippie round here."

"It looks dead to me."

"I wouldn't mind trying the kebab takeaway in Kingsmead Square."

Resignedly, Wigfull drove them there. It was a no parking zone, but they sat outside in the car. He leafed through Peg Redbird's junk mail whilst Diamond started on a kebab that must have represented everything the shop stocked.

"What size was this writing box?"

Wigfull gave a shrug.

"It can't have been all that large," Diamond developed his theme.

Wigfull continued to look at pamphlets about double-glazing and insurance. There was nothing personal in all this rubbish.

"If it was owned by a woman, it had to be light enough to carry about."

"You're thinking the professor walked out of the shop with it?"

"I'm thinking whoever walked out with it wouldn't have had any trouble tucking it under an arm."

"The professor?" Wigfull repeated, determined to nail the man who had strung him along.

"Who else knew it was worth taking?"

"Because it once belonged to Mary Shelley?" Wigfull was becoming interested. He slung the junk mail onto the back seat and turned towards Diamond. "No one else. Only the professor. He was on to the find of a lifetime, so he wouldn't have shared the secret with anyone else. He must have nicked it."

"He had the opportunity," Diamond continued to think aloud, "and the temptation." He was silent for a moment, testing his own hypothesis. "But if he stole the box, why did he tell us the place was unattended when he went back? We're bound to suspect him. He ought to have insisted Peg was there."

"He did originally," said Wigfull. "At any rate, he gave the impression. That's why I got so stroppy when he denied it."

"Did he say she was there?"

"Not exactly. He let me assume she was. You know why he changed tack, don't you?"

"Go on."

"When I spoke to him first, he didn't know the body was found. He thought he'd disposed of her. Plenty of people-intelligent people-don't know that a dead body thrown into water still has air in the lungs and may not stay under. After she was found he had to think again. He came out with this load of codswallop that the shop was empty."

"You're saying Peg Redbird was actually here when he came back the second time?"

"I am. And I'm saying he wanted that writing box so badly that he killed her for it. It stands out a mile. She refused to sell, or asked some exorbitant price, and got her head beaten in."

"If that's true," said Diamond, "where did the killing take place? Not in the shop."

Wigfull was unstoppable. "Here. Outside. He grabbed the box and walked out with it. She followed, he cracked her over the head with it and killed her."

"In the struggle, you mean?"

"Then he had to dispose of the body. Either he carried her to the river, or he used that invalid chair."

"Without being seen?"

"The place was in darkness. There's damn all going on at that end of Walcot Street after ten at night. When it was done, the body dropped in the river, he came back to the shop, collected the precious writing box and legged it back to the Royal Crescent."

Diamond pondered the theory.

"There's no one else," insisted Wigfull.

"If you're right, how does his wife's disappearance fit into this?"

For a moment it seemed Wigfull was thrown by the question, but then his eyes widened again. "I know. She was in the hotel room when he got back. She saw the state he was in and realised something dreadful had happened. She got the truth out of him. He'd just killed a woman. She was so appalled that she couldn't stay in the same room with him. She left."

"To wander the streets?"

"Booked into somewhere else, I expect. We should check all the hotels and boarding houses."

Diamond thought about it coolly, tapping the end of his chin with the empty kebab stick. "There's a big hole in all this, isn't there, John?"

"What's that?"

"Dougan's behaviour since he got back to the hotel. He calls us at two in the morning to report his wife missing. He gets on the phone and sets in train an inquiry that is sure to put him in the frame for Peg Redbird's death. If he'd kept quiet, you and I wouldn't have heard of Professor Joe Dougan."

Wigfull listened to the objection and dealt with it adroitly. "Someone else saw him at Noble and Nude."

"Who was that?"

"Doesn't matter who. Anyone. Another customer. Dougan expected to be fingered, so he did the smart thing and told us he was there."

"Not many killers behave as artfully as that, John."

"This one is a professor."

"It doesn't explain why he called us when he did. You say he went to the trouble of dumping her in the river. If so, he hoped to get away with it. His best plan was to wait and see if the body was found and identified."

Wigfull would not give up. "All right. Try this for size. His wife didn't walk out. He killed her."

"Two in one evening?" The line of Diamond's mouth arched sceptically.

"She threatened to turn him in, so he did for her as well. He made the emergency call after he'd disposed of her."

"Disposed of her where?"

"I don't know yet. I just thought of this."

"Difficult, getting rid of a corpse in the Royal Crescent Hotel, even in the small hours of the morning."

"Not all the rooms are in use this week."

"How do you know that?"

Wigfull had that special glint in his eye that meant he was ahead of Diamond. "Dougan told us he was upgraded."

"True."

"Her body could be lying in an empty room."

"Waiting for some unfortunate chambermaid to walk in?" Diamond said as if this grim hypothesis had worn him down at last. "If you're right, we should be hearing soon." He left a judicious pause. "But I won't hold my breath."