Peter Lovesey - The Vault

"What are you on about?" Diamond hedged, wondering what was in this for a national Sunday.

"The bodies in the vault. A couple of hands. A skull. Have you found anything else yet?"

" 'Dismembered bodies' is laying it on thick."

"It's only one body? The same victim?"

" 'Victim' isn't a word I'm using."

"Why not?"

"Look, we found some human bones in a cellar, a skull and a pair of hands, as you said. The cellar happens to be built over a churchyard. We believe the skull is several hundred years old. I wouldn't think this has any news value for a paper like yours."

"Parts of a body under the cellar of the house where Frankenstein was written? You're joking, Mr Diamond. It's going to make front pages all over the world."

AFTER YEARS OF STEEPING himself in the story, he felt driven, not precisely as Frankenstein had been, nor with the same objective, but just as powerfully. "My Umbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless and almost frantic impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit."

Driven towards the final killing.

"The road of excess," wrote the poet, "leads to the palace of wisdom."

Shortly he would find out.

CAMDEN CRESCENT, WHERE PEG Redbird arrived to carry out the valuation, is a flawed masterpiece. In 1788, the architect John Eveleigh sought to emulate John Wood's most famous building with a crescent of his own. The position above Hedgemead was arguably superior to the Royal Crescent, with sensational views to the east across the Avon Valley towards Bathwick Hill. The style was to be classical, the concept more ornate than Wood's. Building got under way at each end and the first houses were in place when problems were revealed at the eastern end. The foundation was unsafe. The exposed strata that had appeared to be sound for building had hidden faults, and slippage occurred. Four of the houses had to be abandoned. Poor Eveleigh was committed to the project and obliged to build the rest of his crescent, leaving an unsightly gap like an old fighter's grin, with the extreme eastern house standing alone for many years, mocking his grandiose ambition.

The rest of the truncated Crescent has survived two centuries of surveyors' reports, and is regarded as tolerably safe and one of the best addresses in Bath. Peg had hopes of some good finds in old Simon Minchendon's home.

The nephew who opened the door professed to know nothing about old furniture, but Peg was wary. The death of a relative often brings out the worst in people. She was pretty sure he would have his own ideas which items were the gems. Anything he talked up would get a high valuation.

His name was Ralph Pennycook, he told her, and he had come up from Brighton for the funeral.

"Some good antique shops there," Peg commented, trying him out.

"In the Lanes, you mean? I don't bother with all that crap," he said of the corner of Brighton everyone in the trade found irresistible. "If I go into town, I head for the computer shops." True, he looked custom-built for staring at a screen, with a slight curvature of the spine and deep-set brown eyes behind thick plastic lenses. A young man who neglected to look after himself, Peg decided. He was definitely under-nourished. Possibly that was why he was dressed in the black pinstripe jacket that looked like the top of a suit and made an odd combination with his blue corduroy trousers; he needed to wrap himself up, even in this hot summer.

"I hope you don't mind me asking. Are you the executor?" Peg enquired. These things need to be established at the outset. Private sellers sometimes offer goods that don't belong to them.

"What gives you that idea?" he said.

"Well, how exactly…?"

"I'm the lucky bugger who inherited this lot, aren't I? Poor old Si ran out of family. Uncle Tod and Aunt Nell were mentioned in the will, but they snuffed it before he did."

"Then what exactly do you want from me, darling? A full valuation? You can't dispose of anything until the probate comes through, and that can take months." She added, "Presumably."

"Yeah."

There was an awkward pause.

He resumed, "The bank are acting as whatchamacallits."

"Executors?" Peg supplied the word. Whatever else he had come into, this young man was not blessed with a silver tongue.

"And they want to make some kind of list."

"An inventory."

"Yeah. An inventory." Except he made it sound like "infantry".

"And a valuation, no doubt?" said Peg.

"Right. I thought I'd get me own one of them done-to protect me interests, like-and I was told you're the best in Bath."

"You want the full monty, piece by piece? That's going to take some time," said Peg, her eyes travelling over the contents of the entrance hall, making a snap valuation of her own.

"That isn't what I said." He cleared his throat. "I'm, er, jumping the gun. You're the first to see the stuff. The geezer from the bank is coming to do the proper job on Monday."

"So where do I fit into this arrangement?" asked Peg, playing the innocent.

"You get first sight of what's here." He looked away. He was sweating, in spite of his brash manner.

There was another uneasy interval.

"It all belongs to me," he insisted once more, reading Peg's thoughts as she watched him with her bright, miss-nothing eyes. "I need some cash in hand for a project I have in mind."

"When you say you want to protect your interests…"

"You know what I mean, don't you?" said Pennycook. "I'm offering you a few choice items now, if you want to do business. A few things wouldn't get onto the, em…"

"Inventory. And you'd save yourself some tax."

"You got it."

His cards were on the table, then. Peg's were not. "I wish you hadn't told me, ducky. I don't get involved in anything irregular."

"It happens all the time," he informed her superfluously. "Look, see me right on this, and I'll see you right later, when I got probate and I can sell the rest of the stuff legit. Do you do clearances?"

This was not a man who was ignorant of the trade, Peg noted, but she, too, was playing a canny game. "House clearances? I don't bother with them as a rule. It's more trouble than it's worth."

"So you're telling me to piss off?"

"Sweetie, the difficulty with what you're suggesting is that serious buyers of antiques-quality antiques-like to know the provenance of the items they acquire. See the bracket clock behind you on the shelf? That's William and Mary. If I were to offer anything as fine as that for sale, they'd want to know who owned it before me. If I said Si Minchendon, you and I could easily land ourselves in trouble."

He glanced up at the ceiling, as if the plasterwork interested him more than Peg's last remark.

She added without enthusiasm, "I suppose we could look at some less distinguished items."

"Want me to show you over the gaff?"

"Since I'm here, you might as well," she said, "but I can't promise a thing."

They toured the house and Peg's expert eye missed nothing. Old Si's furniture was collectable, no question, and some of the smaller items such as tripod tables and side-chairs could be removed without anyone knowing they had been there. In the drawing room were some bits of china she rather liked, a pair of Coalport plates by William Cook and a Minton pot pourri vase painted for the Great Exhibition of 1851. She priced them fairly, then said she wouldn't be able to go to such a price if he wanted to sell them prior to valuation. This put Pennycook in the position of reducing the figure and seeing if she would take the risk. With a show of reluctance, Peg agreed to buy them for two-thirds the price she had named.

The landing upstairs was lined with watercolours, landscapes that she suspected were by minor painters of the late nineteenth century, serene in concept and unremarkable.