Питер Ловси - The Stone Wife

‘Drowning didn’t come into it, then?’

‘Didn’t need to.’

‘I thought I once read about a woman who survived.’

‘The famous case of the Victorian lady in a crinoline that acted as a parachute. Tragically, Nathan wasn’t wearing his crinoline on this occasion.’

As a reward for that mortuary duty, Halliwell found himself driving Diamond to Melksham, where Bernie Wefers was due to touch down in his helicopter. ‘What are we trying to achieve?’ he asked Diamond.

‘Some straight answers. When you and I met Bernie at Marlborough we didn’t explore his links with Nathan.’

‘It didn’t come up,’ Halliwell said. ‘Can’t say I blame him. If you’re being interviewed by the police you’re not going to throw in a mention of Bristol’s leading arms supplier.’

‘Actually, it did come up.’

Halliwell frowned.

‘But Nathan wasn’t mentioned,’ Diamond went on. ‘If you cast your mind back, Bernie told us he went to Bristol to build an extension for a client, including a gym and a sound studio. We didn’t pick up the significance because at the time we hadn’t heard from Ingeborg about what she found at Nathan’s.’

‘So he gave us the partial truth.’

‘We wrung it out of him. We knew he’d been to Bristol.’

‘Did we?’

Diamond shook his head. As a memory man, Halliwell wasn’t in John Leaman’s class. ‘The pilot told us about flying Nathan there and we checked the log and found it.’

‘Percy Sinclair.’

‘Come again.’

‘The pilot.’

‘You remember all the stuff it’s safe to forget. I sometimes wonder about your reports on the autopsies, whether you give me every blessed detail about the stomach contents and then forget to say that the head was sawed off.’

‘If you doubt me, you could attend the autopsies yourself.’

‘One of these days, I might,’ Diamond said, a boast about as likely as his completing a triathlon. Then he moved on smoothly. ‘Bernie remains the prime suspect.’

‘But he has an alibi for the day of the killing.’

‘So does everyone else. He could still have hired some gunmen to hold up the auction. His motive is stronger than anyone’s. He threatened Gildersleeve outside the divorce court.’

‘You’ll pay for this.’

‘You’re doing better now. And going by his brutal revenge on Monica when he caught her out with Gildersleeve, he takes a strong line on retribution.’

‘But he didn’t attack Dr. Poke when he caught her out with him.’

‘I’m sure he meant to. Poke is a special case. There’s something about the squeaky voice and the wispy hair that disarms people. I noticed it myself. Are you an apologist for Bernie, or what?’

‘Devil’s advocate,’ Halliwell said. ‘I agree he’s got questions to answer.’

Melksham was only twenty minutes from Bath, even at the modest speed Diamond insisted on. A small working town that was also a traffic hub, it had few friends. ‘Of all the small towns of Wiltshire,’ wrote Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England , ‘Melksham has least character and least enjoyable buildings.’ Whichever way you approached the place, you saw a sewage farm or a caravan park or the twenty-eight acres of tyre manufacturing. So it was possible that Bernie Wefers was doing Melksham a favour with his new shopping centre.

A centre maybe, but central it was not.

They followed the Wefers Construction notices by way of several small roundabouts to a site on the eastern edge of the town surrounded by the rutted mud of months of building work.

THE PALACE PRECINCT, declared the ironwork arch over the entrance to a concrete barrack block. ‘Who would have thought it?’ Diamond said.

‘Some jerk with a degree in public relations,’ Halliwell said.

‘I don’t know. If you planted a few trees, you might make it easier on the eye — in about thirty years.’

‘I expect they sawed down some fine trees here before they started.’

‘That’s known as landscape architecture, Keith. Let’s get to those sandwiches. I’m ready for them.’

They were pleased to see Bernie’s helicopter standing in a corner of the field. They’d timed this trip to perfection. The speeches were over and about twenty guests were being treated to drinks around a non-functioning fountain in the echo chamber that was the new precinct. Not one of the twenty-four shops was yet in use or even spoken for, so the excitement was limited to the potential of the concept. A few helium-filled balloons anchored to the fountain advertised Wefers Construction and a scratchy sound system was playing Elgar.

‘You’ve got to hand it to the Brits,’ Diamond said to Leaman. ‘We know how to celebrate.’

They each took a drink from a tray (sparkling wine, not champagne) and helped themselves to eats (mixed nuts, not salmon and cucumber sandwiches). Then they honed in on Bernie, who had broken away from the mayor’s group and was looking at his watch.

‘Not thinking of leaving already, were you?’ Diamond asked him.

‘You two again?’ he said. ‘I’m starting to feel hounded.’

‘We work just up the road. Couldn’t miss a chance to see your latest triumph and ask a couple of follow-up questions. When we last spoke, you didn’t mention your business link to Nathan Hazael.’

‘Nobody asked me.’

‘We know you built the major extension to his house at Leigh Woods. Did you also design the first-floor bathroom with the sliding shower cabinet?’

He frowned. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘The hidden gunroom behind the shower.’

‘That’s news to me. Goes in for field sports, does he? I never asked what he planned to do with it,’ Bernie said in a virtuous tone, wide eyes mocking them.

‘Come on, everyone knows how Nathan made his money. A collection of illegal weapons that featured in God knows how many recent crimes.’

‘Fancy that.’

‘You must have become a personal friend, doing so much work for him.’

‘We got on,’ Bernie said. ‘Didn’t talk guns at any point. Is that what you wanted to know?’

‘Didn’t you inspect the collection, even to judge how it would fit into the room?’

He raised a warning finger. ‘Lay off, will you? I told you I didn’t know it was a bloody gunroom. He wanted a hidden room. That was the deal. For all I knew, it was for storing inflatable sex toys. You don’t ask questions of somebody like Nathan.’

‘You must have spent plenty of time with him setting up all these projects.’

He shrugged. ‘Not ’specially. I have staff, you know, architects and surveyors.’

‘All sworn to secrecy? He wouldn’t have wanted his gunroom known to all and sundry.’

Bernie grinned. ‘After they done the work, he took them out and shot them.’

Now it was Diamond who wagged a finger. ‘Let’s have some honesty here, Bernie. Did you personally design and build the sliding shower?’

A shake of the head. ‘His design. My execution.’ And another grin. ‘Except I lived to tell the tale.’

‘It’s an expert job, I’ll give you that. When did you build it? Before the gym and the recording studio?’

‘They were done at the end of last year for some pop star he was shacking up with. The bathroom was an earlier job. I’d say four or five years ago.’

‘While you were still married to Monica?’

‘Must have been.’

‘Did she ever meet Nathan?’

‘Monica?’ He thought about it and shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge. “Work is work and wife is well out of it is my philosophy.” Hers, too. Long as the money kept coming in, she was happy.’

Not the impression Diamond had got from Monica. She’d been far from happy when Bernie was off on his business trips. ‘Didn’t she know you were doing work for a notorious arms dealer?’