The Vault

thirty-six

PROMPTLY AT FIVE TO seven John Sturr arrived at Manvers Street spry and smiling for the recruitment interviews. He was welcomed by the Assistant Chief Constable and introduced to Julie Hargreaves. "This should be straightforward, shouldn't it?" he said. "How many are there?"

Julie said she thought there were eight candidates. It was agreed that about ten minutes would be sufficient for each interview. Before going in, Sturr asked Georgina if what he had heard was true: that a man had just been brought in for questioning about recent serious crimes.

"I'm happy to confirm it," Georgina said, "and we've charged him."

"So soon?"

"He confessed."

"To everything?"

"To assaulting DCI Wigfull. It's enough for us to hold him. There's a lot more to come out."

"Did you discover why…?"

"He's an art forger. It all stems from that."

"Forgery," said Sturr, flushing at the word and then recovering his composure with several nods of the head, as if to confirm a melancholy truth. "Now I understand. I was able to provide some crucial evidence from my own collection."

"We appreciate your help, John."

"Little enough. Be sure to pass on my congratulations to your man Diamond."

"Diamond? I don't know where he is at this minute," said Georgina. "Probably down in the cells with the suspect."

But he was not. Unknown to Georgina or anyone else except Keith Halliwell, who was with him, Peter Diamond was on his way to Sturr's house in Lansdown Road.

THE CANDIDATES were assembled in a waiting area at the end of a corridor, five men and three women, among them Ingeborg Smith. A uniformed sergeant was with the group, doing his best to allay last-minute jitters. This was just a preliminary interview, he explained. The selection would be based on a series of assessments including practical exercises overseen by serving constables. No single element in the process was a "pass" or "fail". This evening's interview was meant to be a two-way process, a chance for them to have their questions about the police answered. They should feel relaxed about it.

Nobody believed him.

"Who are they-the interviewers?" one twitchy young man asked.

"A detective inspector-female-DI Hargeaves, from Headquarters, and a lay person, Mr Sturr, who serves on the Police Authority."

Nothing else was said about Sturr, but as soon as the sergeant had gone, Ingeborg hurried away to the ladies' room.

DIAMOND TRIED the side gate and found it bolted. "Over you go, Keith."

Halliwell was halfway over when Diamond added, "Watch out for the Rottweiler."

Halliwell froze.

"Joke. Just jump down, open up and let me in."

Sturr's garden was large, with mature fruit trees and a well-tended lawn, too well-tended to be of any interest to Diamond. "The vegetable patch at the end looks promising," he said, striding across the lawn.

"Promising what, sir?"

"Evidence, Keith. Everything up to now is circumstantial." He started up a paved path between rows of runner beans and onions, heading for the garden shed at the end. "Right. Spades and a sieve."

"Has he buried it?"

"If he has, it will take more than you and me to find it. No, I picture this as more of a cremation than a burial. We're looking for ashes."

They found a heap reduced to whitish powder under a wire mesh incinerator behind the rhubarb in a corner of the vegetable garden. Halliwell stooped and felt the texture of some of the ash between finger and thumb. "This won't tell us much."

"Get some on your spade and put it through the sieve."

He obeyed.

Diamond gently shook the sieve and picked at the few fragments remaining. They disintegrated in his hand and fine ash wafted up and settled on his suit.

Halliwell was resigned to a wasted trip. "Do you want me to go on?"

"That's why we're here."

"Isn't this a job for forensic?"

"In the first place, I can't ask forensic to climb over Councillor Sturr's gate. In the second, there isn't time. I want a result now."

"I meant we don't have the facilities."

"You don't need facilities to find bits of metal in a heap of ash."

There was no response from Halliwell. The mental leap was more than he could make.

"The lock, the hinges."

"Ah. Wouldn't he have destroyed them?"

"Like as not, but he must have missed something. Maybe as small as a screw. Try another spadeful, Keith."

THE ORDER was alphabetical and Ingeborg was the last candidate to go in. The wait had been stressful. She seriously considered not going in at all, in spite of reassurances from the others, who came out saying it had been a doddle. She was no coward, but she felt certain John Sturr had got himself onto the panel to give her a hard time. The sadistic bastard had put himself up for this at the last minute as an act of revenge for the things she had said on Sunday night.

Hers was no pushover.

The two interviewers were in chairs over by the window, clipboards in hand. Julie Hargreaves had the kindness to smile- and she represented the police, Ingeborg reminded herself as she sat down.

It was Sturr who began, staring at her as if she were a stranger. "Miss, em, Smith." He made her name sound like a cheap joke. "You're a freelance journalist according to your application, successful, earning a good living. What on earth are you doing here, sitting in front of us?"

She resisted a sharp answer. She was not going to let him goad her into a verbal fencing match that she would win, but at the cost of appearing too bolshie for the job. "I think I'm suited to police work," she answered evenly. "I've seen it at close hand as a reporter, and it's a worthy occupation and a challenging one, more worthy and more of a challenge than my present job."

"In other words you're fed up to the back teeth with journalism:? "

"I'm looking for something closer to the action, if that's what you mean, rather than reporting it."

Julie Hargreaves said, "That's good, but I have to say that there's a lot of report-writing in police work and some of it is extremely dull."

"I understand," said Ingeborg. "I can handle that."

Below them, in the car park at the back of the police station, some large vehicle was manoeuvring, sending a heavy throbbing noise through the open windows.

Sturr said something that was drowned by the sound.

"I'm sorry," said Ingeborg. "I didn't catch the question."

He spoke it again, practically shouting. "How do you feel about taking orders?"

A joke about waitressing popped into her head, and she popped it out again. "There's discipline involved in every job, certainly in freelance journalism. I'm very willing to learn."

Julie jotted something on her pad, something positive, Ingeborg hoped. Sturr, obviously unimpressed, was increasingly distracted by the engine sound from below. He leaned back in his chair and tried to look out.

Raising her voice, Julie suggested, "Why don't we shut the windows?"

Sturr didn't reply. He continued to stare out.

Julie gave Ingeborg a sympathetic look. "Sorry about this."

In a move so sudden that it startled both women, Sturr stood up and said stridently, "What's going on? God, that's my Mercedes they're moving. There's a towaway truck being hitched to my car." He pulled the window open wide and shouted, "What the bloody hell do you think you're doing? That's my car."

Julie Hargreaves got up to look out.

Ingeborg remained seated, conducting herself as well as she could in the strangest interview she had experienced.

"I'm going to sort this out," Sturr said. White-faced, he turned with such force that he knocked over his chair and sent it sliding across the floor.

Ingeborg was aware of another movement on the far side of the room. She had not heard the door open and Peter Diamond come in.

The head of the murder squad said, "My orders, Councillor. I want the car examined."

Sturr's voice climbed at least an octave. "You what?"

"For traces of blood, hair, DNA, whatever."

Ripples of tension ran over Sturr's cheeks. Then he blustered. "You… you have no right."

"Probably not," Diamond agreed.

"You can't just take possession of someone's car."

"I couldn't agree more, but I'm sure we can rely on you to cooperate and let us have the keys. I don't think you'll be using the car for some time, sir. You've got questions to answer."

"What about?"

"The deaths of two people-Jock Tarrant, in September, 1982, and Peg Redbird, on Thursday of last week."

"This is totally out of order."

"Yes," said Diamond. "I'm sorry to interrupt the interview, but I'm sure DI Hargreaves can make the right decision on her own."

Sturr said loftily, "I shall bring this to the attention of the Assistant Chief Constable."

"I've just spoken to her," Diamond said, "and got her backing. I showed her these." He held up a transparent bag. "A couple of tiny screws that we found among the ashes in your garden."

"You've been in my garden?"

"Just left it. I'm no antiques expert, but these screws are not modern, I'm sure of that. They're all that is left of Mary Shelley's writing box. You got rid of all the other metal fitments. Destroyed all traces, except for these."

Sturr shook his head. "Why should I-?"

"It was the box that linked you to the killing of the young man Tarrant in the vaults of the Roman Baths."

Sturr switched from taking offence to refuting the charges. "Two rusty screws from a garden don't prove anything."

"You're right," said Diamond. "That's why I want your car examined for evidence that you moved Peg Redbird's body from the place where you killed her."

"I didn't-" He stopped.

"You didn't use the car to move the body," said Diamond. "Right?"

Sturr was silent.

"Either you had some other means of moving it or you attacked her close enough to the river to drag her there and throw her in."

"You're talking through your fat arse," Sturr snapped back at him. "You know I wasn't with the woman the night she was killed. I was at the same party as you, man. You saw what time I left."

"Around a quarter to eleven."

"And she"-he flapped his hand towards Ingeborg-"was with me. We drove back to my house, and she was with me all that night."

Diamond exchanged a brief look with Ingeborg, still seated impassively in the candidates' chair. "Yes, Miss Smith and I have spoken about this alibi of yours. You get in, and there's a message on the answerphone requiring you to call New York for the next forty minutes, while your guest is left listening to pop music and drinking champagne. Your house on Lansdown Road can't be more than five minutes from Noble and Nude. Forty minutes is more than enough for you to meet your victim, hit her over the head and dump her in the Avon."

Sturr said tautly, "She told you this?"

Diamond nodded, "And I'm not surprised you couldn't get your end up after that."

"Bitch!" Sturr took a stride towards Ingeborg, grabbed her shoulder and swung his fist at her face. The blow would have split her mouth and knocked out some of her teeth had not Diamond reacted fast. He grabbed the raised arm and twisted it sharply behind Sturr's back.

The councillor cried out with pain. Diamond steered him back to his chair, thrust him into it and stood over him.

When his breathing allowed, Sturr said, "That lying bitch wants to frame me."

"You made no calls to New York that evening," Diamond said. "I had your line checked. The only call was a short one at six ten to Peg Redbird. No prize for guessing what that was about."

"Oh?"

"You were setting up the meeting that was to be her execution. The reason Peg had to die is that she was the only person who could link you to the killing of Jock Tarrant all those years before. She remembered who sold her the writing box."

At the mention of Tarrant, Sturr went silent, his eyes lowered. He was not the sort to roll over and tell all. He would protest his innocence all the way through the legal process, admitting nothing, insisting on having a solicitor beside him when they questioned him formally, but the fight had gone out of him. He knew he would go down.

Diamond spared him the ignominy of handcuffs as he escorted him down to the cells. But there were amazed looks from the row of candidates seated outside watching the man who had interviewed them being led away.

IN THE incident room, the murder squad gathered to drink to the successful conclusion of two inquiries. Halliwell took it all calmly, as an old-stager; young Leaman was more animated; and Julie, her interviewing duties over, was a welcome visitor. At Diamond's suggestion, Ingeborg was invited in as well, pink with excitement at having convinced Julie she had a future in the police. And, just inside the door, uninvited, but impossible to turn away, stood Georgina.

Nobody insisted Diamond explain the logic of the case, but once he started telling it to a small group, the entire room closed in to listen. Individuals knew their own bits, and now for the first time, they learned how it came together. "Back in 1982, John Sturr was a chemistry student at the University here. He was a local lad and got a vacation job as a general labourer on the Roman Baths extension. There, he was teamed with another youngster, Jock Tarrant, down from Scotland. Jock wasn't a student. He was a drifter, into rock music, Heavy Metal, and the site-workers nicknamed him Banger. Naturally enough, Sturr was given the name of Mash. Their main job was mixing cement in an underground vault and wheeling it out to the bricklayers. The vault had not been used for many years. It was outside the area of the Roman remains, of no interest to the archeologists.

"One day the two lads made a discovery. Whilst shifting sacks of cement into some obscure corner of the vault they found an antique writing box. They weren't antiques experts, but once they'd dusted it off they could see it was worth a few weeks' wages at least. Maybe more than that. Especially when they got it open and found it contained an early edition of Milton, a sketchbook and a cut-glass ink-bottle.

"Each of those two young blokes felt he had a claim. As often happens with easy pickings, they argued, and it turned to violence. I don't suppose we'll ever know precisely what happened, except that they fought with the spades they used and Tarrant was killed. Manslaughter, I would guess, rather than murder. Sturr, to his horror, found himself down in that vault with a dead body. In one way he was fortunate. Nobody else had reason to go in there, so he had time and opportunity to dismember the corpse, removing the head and the hands. He buried the hands in cement in the vault and drove the torso some miles off and buried it in the soft earth beside the River Wylye. Where the head ended up, only Sturr knows.

"He waited some years before cashing in on the writing box. Sold it-with contents-to Peg Redbird without realising who it had once belonged to. Neither did she. Sturr's secret seemed to be safe. Nobody had raised alarm bells about Jock Tarrant. Casual workers come and go in the building trade. Tarrant had come and he'd gone." By way of illustration, Diamond took a long drag of lager, crushed the can and dropped it into a waste-bin.

"Fast forward to last week. The security guard finds the hand bones in the vault and brings them to us. After a hiccup or two, we know we're dealing with bones from about twenty years back. Someone tips off the press that Mary Shelley once lived in the house above the vault and suddenly we're in the news. And this is when John Sturr has a double shock, because he hadn't the faintest idea until then that the vault where he'd buried the hands was part of the house where Frankenstein was written. You see the problem? He sold the writing box and its contents to Peg Redbird. On the pretext of keeping up with developments-" Diamond avoided eye contact with Georgina "-he learns from a high-ranking source that the book he sold to Peg has turned up again, and it once belonged to Mary Shelley. An American professor is touting it around Bath and asking questions. Sturr does his proverbial nut. He's certain Peg Redbird will remember him selling her the box and its contents and work out where they came from. TV and radio are already putting out bulletins about the mystery bones in the Frankenstein vault. A police inquiry is under way.

"He looks for a way out of this. He believes Peg is the only person alive who can finger him. He's a pillar of society now, a city councillor, on any number of committees, not least the Police Authority. He reckons if he can dispose of Peg, his problem disappears. So he makes a plan. He's been invited to a party at the ACC's. Could you think of a better cover than that?"

Over by the door, Georgina flushed to the tips of her ears and said nothing. To her credit, she stayed to hear Diamond out.

Diplomatically, he shifted the attention elsewhere. "At the party he makes a pitch to a blonde charmer. Where's Ingeborg?"

A hand was raised coyly to shoulder level.

"It happens that this blonde charmer is looking for a chance to get into the police, and this interest from a member of the Police Authority is not the kind you turn down. It's a mutually helpful arrangement. He keeps her tanked up all evening. She won't mind me saying she's well bevvied by the time they leave together. He takes her home, opens another bottle of champagne, puts on some music and then makes some excuse about a phone call to New York.

"The only call he made that evening was to Peg Redbird at ten past six, arranging to meet her later. He used a false name on the phone, of course, and-this is only my theory, I have to say-offered to give her a prior look at some mouth-watering antique on offer at the antiques fair starting next day in the Assembly Rooms. Unknown to Sturr, Peg had a prior engagement. She was putting the screws on a forger called Uncle Evan. That's a story for another time. All that matters here is that Evan told me Peg was most particular about getting back to the shop by eleven.

"So, at eleven or soon after, he calls at Noble and Nude, where the first thing he sees is the writing box sitting on Peg's desk. She's surprised to find that her mystery caller is John Sturr, but not alarmed. He says he has something of exceptional interest outside in the car. Ever alert to a bargain, but not her own safety, Peg thinks he must be about to offer her another of Mary Shelley's possessions. She goes with him round the back of the shop to the car. He bashes her over the head, killing her, and moves the body the short distance to the river and drops her in, confident it will look like an accident, the injury caused by the fall. Then he goes back into Noble and Nude, picks up the writing desk and drives home. It's not much after eleven-thirty and Ingeborg is still where he left her, listening to the same CD. Is that fair, Police Cadet Smith?"

Ingeborg spoke up clearly. "It may not be fair, sir, but it's true."

"What happened after?"

She looked up in surprise. "Do you really want to know?"

"You were there," said Diamond. "You can tell it better than me."

"All right. It was like that famous quote from Sherlock Holmes about the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Watson said, 'But the dog did nothing in the night-time' and Holmes said, 'That was the curious incident.' "

"You mean…?"

"My date did nothing in the night-time. I should have known something was up-because he wasn't."

There was laughter. Police Cadet Smith was a definite addition to the strength at Manvers Street.

JOE DOUGAN and the luggage finally arrived at the Paris Ritz the next afternoon. He was tired. The Bath police had kindly driven him to the train station early that morning, but the last forty-eight hours had been stressful. Relieved to have the bell-captain take charge of those enormous suitcases, he stepped over to the check-in.

The young woman on duty asked him his name and he gave it, adding, "My wife arrived at the end of last week."

"Yes, sir," she said in the delightful way Parisiennes have of speaking English, "I 'ope Madame Dougan enjoyed her days shopping."

"I'm sure she has. Now, if you tell me the number of our suite…"

"One minute, if you please, professor." She picked a note from the rack behind her. "A little note for you."

Sighing, Joe opened the envelope and took out a short letter in Donna's handwriting:

Joe, Baby,

I finished shopping here. The bell captain has charge of the two suitcases I bought here, cosmetic case and hatboxes. Would you be an angel and pick them up for me? I figured you were sure to want to make the trip to Switzerland to look up the place where Frankenstein was first thought of, so I booked us in at the Intercontinental in Geneva. I'm told the Swiss jewelry shops are something special.

See you as soon as you can fix a flight. Don't forget the baggage, will you?

Your ever loving,

Donna XXX