Peter Lovesey - Bloodhounds

"This gets more and more like party games," a detective sergeant commented morosely.

"Is it genuine?" someone else asked.

"Who can say? It's got to be taken seriously after the first one."

"Yes, but why would they do this? Mr. Wigfull was expecting a ransom demand, not another riddle."

"Maybe they don't want a ransom. This could be some kind of publicity stunt, couldn't it? When is the university rag week?"

"Too early in the year for that. The students have only just gone back. If it is a stunt, then my money is on some smartarse member of the glitterati."

"The what?"

"The rich and beautiful. The incrowd. Hooray Henrys. Leading the Old Bill up the garden path is their idea of fun."

The debate was taken a stage further at a special meeting of senior staff convened by the Assistant Chief Constable. "Since we are bound to treat this development seriously," he said in preamble, "I decided to pool our wits and experience. If the riddle is anything like the first one, it may involve knowledge of Bath, and any one of you may have the piece of information that clarifies everything."

From the expressions around the oval table no one was confident of clarifying anything.

"John, this is your inquiry," the ACC said to Wigfull with a motioning of the upturned palm, "so why don't you give us your immediate thoughts?"

Wigfull cleared his throat. "Well, sir, we can reasonably assume that the Victoria referred to is the cover."

"The what?"

"The missing stamp, sir."

"Why not call a stamp a stamp?"

"Because it's attached to an envelope. There's a datemark. The whole thing is known as a cover. Like the first-day covers they sell in the post office each time a new set of stamps is issued."

"That sort of cover," said the ACC, as if he'd known all along. "Carry on."

Wigfull referred to his notes. "The first two lines:

'Whither Victoria and with whom-

The Grand Old Queen?' must surely be a coded way of telling us that he is referring to the cover. I think we should focus our interest on the third and fourth lines:

'Look for the lady in the locked room

At seventeen.'

"I venture to ask three questions: Which lady? Which locked room? And which seventeen? The lady may, of course, be another reference to Victoria, the cover, but we should not exclude other possibilities. Does it link up with the last line, giving us a lady of seventeen? Do we know of any seventeen-year-old ladies in the present or the past who may be connected with the case in some way?"

Nobody spoke.

"The locked room may help to fix it," Wigfull went on. "If there was a local memory or story of some young woman kept locked up, for example. A prisoner. A mental patient. A nun, even. These are my immediate thoughts."

"Any response?" asked the ACC of the blank faces around the table.

Tom Ray said, "I was thinking along different lines, sir. The seventeen could be part of an address."

"That's rather good," the ACC commented, seeming to imply that not one of Wigfull's theories was even half good.

"Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand, lived at number seventeen, the Royal Crescent. There's a plaque outside."

"What's he got to do with this?" Peter Diamond asked. "Did he have a seventeen-year-old sex slave?"

"I rather doubt it," said the ACC frigidly. "I happen to know a little about Pitman. He was a man of the highest principles. Like me he was a teetotaller, a vegetarian, and a nonsmoker."

There was an uneasy pause. Not even Diamond was going to press the matter of Isaac Pitman's sex life, or the ACC's.

"It was a long shot," admitted Ray.

Another theory was advanced by Keith Halliwell. "Is it possible that the seventeen refers to a time, like five P.M., or seventeen hundred hours?"

"If it does, we've missed it by ten minutes," said Diamond, glancing at the clock on the wall. "Personally I don't think this joker has given us enough to catch him. He wouldn't, would he? It's like that book The Thirty-Nine Steps. It's no good looking for the blessed steps. You know you're there when you find them. I mean, we could rabbit on all evening about seventeen this and that. Seventeen-horsepower cars; seventeen trees in a row; the seventeenth day of the month; or fifteen rugby players and two reserves. It gets you nowhere without more information."

"So your advice would be…"

"Ignore it. Continue with the other lines of inquiry."

"What lines?" murmured Ray.

Wigfull said, "We've been extremely thorough."

"With what result?"

"Investigations can't be rushed."

"I don't know," said Ray. "Peter Diamond nicks a bloke for murder two minutes after getting to the scene."

The ACC drew a deep breath, and said, "Gentlemen, let's confine this to discussion of the stamp theft. To ignore this new development would, I think, be negligent. Peter may be right in saying that the thief won't give much away, but if we can make any sense of the riddle, it may link up with other evidence."

"Was this character seen at all on Monday morning?" Diamond asked. "Did anybody spot the ladder against the window?" "

Unfortunately, no," Wigfull answered. "But we have six, or seven descriptions of window cleaners near the scene reported as suspicious."

"Have you ever seen a window cleaner who doesn't look suspicious? What about forensic? Are they any help?"

"The thief seems to have used gloves. We've got an impressive list of fibers and hairs found in the room, but with so many people going through the museum by day, they could come from many sources. The display cabinet was forced with a rusty claw hammer. That's about it."

"And about the museum staff?"

"They're volunteers. Local stamp enthusiasts. They take turns to man the museum, at least two at a time. We've interviewed them all except two, who are away. Nobody seems to remember anyone casing the place in advance of the crime- but as several of them reasonably pointed out, how could you tell?"

Diamond let the meeting run its course without any more input from him. It was Bumblebee territory, and he didn't intend to get involved. They broke up shortly after six. "Have a good weekend, gentlemen," he said as he went out.

"Aren't you coming in?" Ray asked.

"No need. My murder is put to bed."

"So how will you spend the time?"

"House-training a new cat, if my wife can be believed."

Shirley-Ann was better prepared when she turned up at St. Michael's for the next meeting of the Bloodhounds on Monday evening. Rummaging one afternoon through a carton of books in the Dorothy House shop she had pulled out The Blessington Method, a dogeared and rare Penguin of some of Stanley Ellin's short stories. Having missed her turn the week before, she was sure to be asked to speak about a book she could recommend, and Ellin seemed an ideal, uncontroversial choice. He was one of the American writers she admired most, particularly for his short fiction. She could hardly wait to discover how many of the group were familiar with his work. If any of them objected to short stories she would pluck up courage to remind them that Poe, Conan Doyle and Chesterton had laid the foundations of modern crime fiction with their short stories.

It must have been a lucky day, because she had also found a thick-knit purple jumper as good as new in Dorothy House for only a pound and she was wearing that tonight with a black corduroy skirt from War on Want.

The evening was distinctly colder than the previous Monday, but dry. Down in the crypt the warmth from the central heating wafted pleasantly over her face the moment she entered. Miss Chilmark, who seemed to make a point of getting there early, said the place was like a furnace, and she was going to speak to the caretaker. She marched past Shirley-Ann with a determined look, but it turned out that she was only on her way to the cloakroom. If there was a complaint about the heating, it wouldn't get Shirley-Ann's support. Being so skinny- Bert called her slinky, which she rather liked-she could never get enough heat.