The Stone Wife Read online

  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 clicked his tongue and drew an angry breath. 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 every face 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?”

  “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 T-shirts 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.”

  “What about the victim? Is he a dealer?”

  “Not to my knowledge. It’s the first time I’ve seen him here.”

  “You must have his name from the list of bidders.”

  “We do. We already checked and it’s Gildersleeve.”

  Diamond turned to Ingeborg. “Did you get that? See what you can find out.” He glanced back at lot 129 before asking Doggart, “Was the Wife of Bath the main attraction today?”

  The auctioneer nodded. “Certainly there was a lot of interest. We circulated dealers in advance and there were telephone bidders from America and Japan. As it turned out, the bidding went considerably higher than our valuation.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “A piece such as this is a challenge. You don’t have anything to compare it with. We settled on three thousand and evidently underestimated the value. Mr. Gildersleeve got into competition with a London dealer and things were getting exciting when the interruption came.”

  “At twenty-four thousand, I heard.”

  “Yes. When the bids outstrip the valuation by as much as that, there’s an element of embarrassment I can’t deny. Did we miss something that certain people in the know discovered? In the trade we call that kind of item a sleeper. Our reputation as experts is called into question.”

  “Twenty-four grand sounds a good whack to me for a carving you can hardly recognise,” Diamond said. “I suppose it was the link to Chaucer that pushed up the bidding.”

  “Yes, and the provenance. The piece was once in the collection of an early nineteenth-century antiquarian called William Stradling who made it his mission to rescue bits of masonry at risk of destruction from modernisers. There was a campaign of so-called restoration going on in the early eighteen hundreds and Stradling’s home at Chilton Polden became a refuge for fragments that would otherwise have been destroyed or discarded. The tablet was listed as one of his finds, so we know it can’t be a modern fake.”

  “A fake?” Diamond’s eyes widened. “Faking never crossed my mind.”

  “It happens all the time. We’re trained to watch out for it. Reputations can be ruined if you get taken in.”

  “Difficult to fake a block of old stone.”

  “But well worth it if the artist does a good job. They’re still artists, even if the work is fraudulent.”

  “But this, you say, must be genuine?”

  Doggart nodded. “The provenance. Stradling knew what he was doing. His pieces came from centuries-old buildings.”

  “You knew there would be a lot of interest?”

  “It’s always difficult to predict, but as I told you we had plenty of enquiries.”

  Diamond gave the matter some thought. There was more to this auction business than he’d first appreciated. “Anyone keen enough to bid would want to see the thing ahead of the auction, I expect.”

  “Anyone able to get here. We’re open for viewing six days a week.”

  “I’m thinking one or more of the gunmen may have come here to case the place, posing as a possible buyer.”

  “Conceivably.” Doggart plainly didn’t enjoy the suggestion.

  “We’ll need to talk to your staff.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “They would have been hired thugs—the crooks, I mean, not your staff. We can assume they were acting for someone else, someone with a good eye for an antique sculpture.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not a Dresden shepherdess,” Doggart said.

  “Come again.”

  “A unique item such as this is difficult to classify and even more difficult to dispose of.”

  “I get you now. Like trying to unload the Mona Lisa.”

  The auctioneer wasn’t impressed with Diamond’s example. “One of the Elgin marbles might be a better comparison.”

  “True,” Diamond said. “Unique and a bugger to move. Who would have dreamed up something like this?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Doggart said.

  “You’re in the trade. Better placed than I am.”

  “I can’t think of anyone.”

  Ingeborg had been busy with what Diamond liked to call her pocket computer. “This sounds as if it could be the dead man, a John Gildersleeve, author of a book called Chaucer: The Bawdy Tales.”

  “I hope we’re not getting into something my mother wouldn’t have approved of,” Diamond said with a wink at Doggart. “How did you find this out?”

  “Googled the name.”

  “You Googled Gildersleeve.” He turned back to Doggart, who was more his age. “Sounds like something out of The Goon Show.”

  “Professor of Medieval English Literature at Reading University,” Ingeborg added, still using her iPhone. “Here’s a picture of him.”

  Modern technology regularly ambushed Peter Diamond, but he tried not to show it. He glanced at the tiny head and shoulders photo. “That’s the
victim, I’ll grant you. Now it’s falling into place. He must have lectured on Chaucer. Not surprising he was a bidder.”

  “As an expert, he may well have been consulted when the piece was identified earlier this year,” Doggart said. “Until then, it was a miscellaneous stone tablet of the medieval period of no particular interest. It was in storage in the Bridgwater museum for at least half a century. The story is that one of the staff took another look one day and worked out what the lettering was and where the quote came from. Some Chaucer experts confirmed that he was right. The museum committee had a meeting. Some were in favour of keeping the thing, but the majority voted to cash in on the discovery and do a modest upgrade of the museum. They had their exhibits crowded into a few Victorian showcases. So the piece was put up for auction.”

  “The news must have travelled fast in academic circles,” Ingeborg said.

  “We publicised it quite widely,” Doggart said. “It got into The Times and History Today, which would explain the telephone bidding. America and Japan are quickly onto anything like this. Even so, I couldn’t see it making much over three thousand. It’s a mystery to me why the bidding went so high.”

  “The bigger mystery is why Professor Gildersleeve took on the gunmen,” Diamond said. “That wasn’t the act of an intelligent man.”

  “I warned him from the rostrum not to get involved,” Doggart said. “He took no notice. He was very agitated.”

  “We’ll look into his motives.”

  “Was the Wife of Bath a bawdy character?” Ingeborg asked.

  Neither man answered.

  “I’m thinking about the professor’s book,” she said. “He’d written about the bawdy tales.”

  “All I can recall about the lady is that she’d been married several times,” Diamond said. “I suppose you’d call her a woman of the world. I don’t remember anything bawdy, as you call it. My school would have made sure we didn’t get to read stuff likely to corrupt our pure young minds.”

  “ ‘The Miller’s Tale’ is the rude one,” Doggart said.

  Diamond grinned. “Now you mention it, yes, I do have a memory of that. A copy was passed round, but not in class.”

  “Your young minds weren’t so pure after all,” Ingeborg said.

  “I was being ironical. I bet you read it at school.”

  “That’s beside the point,” she said, giving nothing away. “We’re dealing with the Wife of Bath here, not the miller.”

  “One thing of immediate concern is what happens next about the tablet,” Doggart said. “Clearly someone will stop at nothing to acquire it. I can’t see the owners wanting it back in the Bridgwater museum and we can’t keep it on the premises here, with the risk of a break-in.”

  “That’s all right,” Diamond said. “It’s evidence. We’ll get it shifted to the nick. I’ll send a van and some fit young coppers. But I’ll let you know when to expect them. These villains are well capable of impersonating the police to get what they want.”

  “This much is certain,” he told Ingeborg when they were far enough away from Doggart. “It’s an organised crime—or was meant to be, anyway. We must get the local pond life under the spotlight. Use all our snouts to see if there’s word of a failed job that ended with a shooting.”

  “You want me to handle that?”

  “Not at this point. There’s something more urgent.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t look so suspicious. I’ll get reinforcements.”

  “What for, exactly?”

  “Freeing me up to work out what the hell was going on.”

  “Okay,” she said in a tone that left him in no doubt she’d expected a better answer.

  But Diamond was off on his own track. “I need to look at it from the angle of the victim, try to find out why he was so keen to buy the tablet, as Doggart calls it. I find this fascinating. What’s so special about a beaten-up chunk of old stone you can hardly recognise as anything at all?”

  “He’s dead. He can’t tell us.”

  “We can question the other bidder, the London dealer who was pushing the professor all the way.”

  She nodded. This was a point she’d missed.

  “Who was he?” Diamond asked.

  “His name is Sturgess. Came down from London.”

  “Still about?”

  “Most of the bidders are, waiting to collect their purchases.”

  “Did Sturgess bid for anything else?”

  “I’d better find out. He could be gone by now.”

  She left to check and was soon back.

  “Sturgess is still here, but I don’t think you’ll get much from him.”

  “Try me. Did you say I’ll see him now?”

  “Yes, and he said you’ll be wasting your time.”

  “He’s got something to hide, then,” Diamond said. “Bring him in.”

  She hesitated. “What about all the other bidders?”

  “Are they outside as well?”

  “Well, yes. I’m thinking someone in that auction must have got a good look at the first gunman before he put his mask on. People were standing pretty close. We’re going to need statements from everyone who was present.”

  “Thanks, Ingeborg,” he said. “You’re a mind-reader.”

  3

  Sturgess, the dealer from London, began in a lofty tone that irritated Diamond straight away. “I hope the police are competent to deal with this. John Gildersleeve was a leading authority on Chaucer.”

  “He’s a dead man.”

  “That doesn’t alter anything.”

  “It altered him. He’s not the leading authority on anything now.”

  Sturgess gritted his teeth, obviously more used to dealing with connoisseurs than smart-mouthed policemen. “I’m saying the reason for his death may have to do with his field of expertise.”

  “It was murder, whichever way you look at it. That’s my field of expertise.”

  “But one needs to know what the motive might have been.”

  “Which is why I’m interviewing you, Mr. Sturgess.”

  “I’m not a Chaucer expert.”

  “You’re not?”

  A shake of the head.

  “You knew enough to bid well above the valuation. Were you acting for someone else?”

  “Certainly. My firm wouldn’t bid at that level without instructions.”

  “Who from?”

  “No comment.”

  Diamond blinked in surprise.

  Sturgess raised his chin defiantly. “Wild horses wouldn’t drag the name from me. Client confidentiality.”

  “I don’t think I’m getting through to you,” Diamond said. “Do you see what’s going on across the room? That’s a forensic pathologist examining a murder victim. I’m the chief investigating officer and you’re a witness. Don’t talk to me about client confidentiality.”

  “The name isn’t relevant, anyway,” Sturgess said.

  “I’ll be the judge of that. I could do you for withholding information.”

  “I won’t be bullied.”

  Diamond took that as a challenge. “Were you hoping to return to London tonight?”

  Sturgess turned pale. “You wouldn’t detain me?”

  “Tonight, tomorrow and next week if necessary. Don’t look so alarmed. We allow you to contact your solicitor.” Threats have to carry conviction and Diamond issued this unlikely one as coolly as if he was stating the time of day.

  There was an immediate change of tone. “Officer, I’d better explain. I’ve no wish to put myself on the wrong side of the law. It’s just that our whole business is founded on good faith, respecting the confidence of clients. To reveal the name of a potential buyer would be ruinous to our reputation. It might mean losing not merely the account in question, but numbers of others when they learn that trust has been broken.”

  “So who is it?” Diamond said.

  “Weren’t you listening? I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Carry
on like this, my friend, and you won’t be at liberty, full stop.”

  The man was shaken, but he wasn’t about to cough. “I don’t see why you need to know it.”

  “That’s pretty obvious, I would have thought,” Diamond said, his patience exhausted. “There were two bidders left in this auction and one was murdered. The survivor has some explaining to do.”

  “But the people who killed him weren’t bidding.”

  “We don’t know who they were acting for.”

  “Can’t you take my word as a gentleman that it’s impossible for my client to have been involved?”

  Diamond shook his head.

  “This is beyond a joke,” Sturgess said. “May I make a phone call?”

  “To tip off your client?”

  This was received with an icy stare. “To my office, to explain the impossible position I find myself in.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll be listening.” He could see this nonsense going on indefinitely, and he reckoned Sturgess was a minor player.

  Whoever was on the other end of the call took some convincing, but Sturgess was a man in a fix, explaining that he was facing arrest, with all the damage that would do to the good name of the firm. Finally, he switched off, pulled at his tie as if it was strangling him, and said, “This must be in the strictest confidence.”

  Diamond waited.

  Sturgess glanced to right and left before saying in little more than a whisper, “I was bidding on behalf of …” He mouthed the words.

  “Come again.”

  As if he was in breach of the Official Secrets Act, he put his mouth within six inches of Diamond’s ear and said, “The British Museum.”

  A moment was needed to absorb this. “Yes?” Diamond said.

  “Yes.”

  “I hadn’t thought of them.”

  “Now do you see my difficulty?”

  “I suppose they would have an interest.”

  “Please keep your voice down. If it got out, all manner of complications would arise.”

  “But the sale didn’t take place.”