Peter Lovesey - The Vault

"Have you found her?" Joe asked, eyes dilating like oil slicks.

"Not yet," said Wigfull. "With your permission, we'd like to search these rooms, sir."

He kept a firm hold on the door. "What for?"

Mary Shelley's writing box was the true answer to that one, but Wigfull didn't give it. He answered obliquely, "You want us to spare no efforts in finding your wife?"

"For the love of Mike, she isn't here," said Joe, still barring the way. There was no mistaking this detective's hostility.

"We know that."

"You already made a search."

"The officers who were here before weren't trained in CID work."

"What's that in plain English?"

"Criminal investigation." The stress Wigfull put on the first word made it into a personal slur. "There may be other clues to her disappearance, and you wouldn't want to get in the way of the search, would you?"

Joe couldn't argue with that. He took a half-step backwards. "Do what you want."

CID-trained the officers may have been, but the search did not take long. The possible hiding places for an object as large as the writing box were few. Once they had looked behind furniture and curtains, above and beneath the four-poster bed and in the bathroom, the job was virtually done. With no success.

"Where are your suitcases?" Wigfull asked.

Joe's eyes bulged. "You don't think she's in a suitcase?"

"I don't see them here, sir."

"The hotel people put them in storage for us, to give us more room."

"We'd like to see them."

"They're empty."

"The keys?"

Joe picked his trousers off the back of a chair, took out the keys and handed them across.

Wigfull tossed them to one of his men, who left the room.

"You said you left Noble and Nude when?"

"Around eleven."

"Without the writing box?"

"I left that on the desk."

"Well, it isn't there any more."

"You're wrong," said Joe. "It's there."

"I promise you it isn't."

The little American passed a hand distractedly through his dark hair. "It's got to be," he said as if beginning to doubt himself.

"Who-besides you-knew that the box may have belonged to Mary Shelley?"

"No one."

"Except Peg Redbird herself?"

Joe shook his head emphatically. "She's the last person I would have told. I wanted to buy at a fair price."

"Fair?"

"Used goods are worth as much as people are willing to pay, no more."

"She seemed reluctant to part with it if you had to go back a second time."

"I thought about that," said Joe. "I guess she could see I badly wanted that box. She thought there was something inside, a hidden drawer maybe, and she wasn't going to sell until she'd seen inside."

"So Peg Redbird didn't know what she was selling. Did you tell anyone else? Those other people you mentioned? The old bookseller? The Welshman, Uncle Evan?"

"Wise up, will you? How could I have told them? I didn't know the writing box existed when I spoke to them. I only found out when I got to the shop."

"Your wife?"

Joe drew in a quick, shallow breath.

Wigfull said with an air of triumph, "Over dinner you told your wife you had found Mary Shelley's writing box?"

"Yep, I told her," Joe admitted. "She's the woman I share my life with, for God's sake. She was entitled to know why I kept her waiting so long."

"In a public restaurant."

"Give me a break. It was quiet there. Nobody was listening."

"How do you know?" said Wigfull.

"We had a seat in the window. No one else was near."

"Except the waiter."

"Get away!" said Joe, becoming annoyed. "What are you trying to prove?"

"See it from the waiter's point of view. A couple come into the restaurant," said Wigfull, and as he laid out his scenario he found it increasingly persuasive. "The man is obviously excited. He starts to speak to his wife about something sensational that happened to him. The waiter is intrigued. He overhears a phrase or two that get repeated several times. 'Noble and Nude' and 'Mary Shelley' and 'writing box'. That's enough. This waiter sees a chance to get rich quick. At the end of the evening, when the restaurant closes, he decides to take a look at Noble and Nude. He makes his way down to Walcot Street, by car, motorbike-I don't know. This is after midnight. He finds Noble and Nude and it's open and nobody is about. He can't believe his luck. The writing box is on the desk in the office. He picks it up and walks out with it."

"Is that it?" said Joe. "Have you finished?"

"It was either your wife or the waiter. Who else knew the box was worth taking?"

"Now you think Donna took it?" Joe fairly squeaked in disbelief.

"That might explain why she went missing."

"I'm going to let you in on something," said Joe. "Donna wouldn't go out on the streets after dark in a strange city if you paid her a million bucks. And the waiter was a young girl about fifteen years old. I think she was Greek. She didn't understand English. We had to point to the items on the menu. That little girl wouldn't know Mary Shelley from appleseed."

It may have been Joe's imagination, but he thought the big moustache sagged a little. Certainly the mouth below it sagged. Wigfull had suffered a serious reverse.

The officer who had gone to look at the suitcases returned. He shook his head. Joe got his keys back.

He hitched his thumbs assertively in the waistband of his boxer shorts. "Any other business, gentlemen? Or can I go back to sleep?"

DIAMOND USUALLY TRIED TO keep Saturdays free for shopping and sport, or-more accurately-looking at shopping and sport. This morning there was no chance he would be standing in some dress shop while Steph tried on the latest creation. Or relaxing in front of the television. Dr Frankenstein had put paid to that.

Without much confidence of progress, he drove up to Chippenham to look at those bones. They were brought out in a cardboard evidence box tagged with the details of when and where they had been found. It was hard to believe they might have belonged to Hands. Stained yellowish brown, they were quite unlike the chalk-white bones from the vault. But he told himself these had spent time in the river and over ten years in this box.

He handled them with respect, as if the act of touching would give some clue to their origin. Dry bones, chipped and broken, difficult to think of as once having supported living tissue. A small, curved section of a rib-cage; a complete femur; a fibula; and the one that interested him most, the radius, or main bone of a forearm. This one was broken close to where the wrist would have been, and it was obvious that the bone had been shattered, not sawn through. He fingered the splintered end thoughtfully.

"Nothing's ever simple, is it?" he said to soften up the evidence sergeant who acted as curator of the macabre little collection. The man had already made it clear that he was a stickler for protocol and inclined to be pompous, a Jeeves in police uniform. "The bones I want to compare them with" (Diamond said) "are in another country."

"That is inexpedient, sir."

"But not a catastrophe. The country is Wales."

"A pity. The Welsh are peculiarly possessive about bones, sir."

"But these are in the forensic laboratory at Chepstow."

"That's more promising."

"Just across the water, but it might as well be Zanzibar," said Diamond. "They're a stubborn lot over there, as you were saying. They have a skeleton hand broken off at the wrist. I sent it to them myself. I'd like to see if it fits this arm bone, but do you know they won't let the hand out of the building?"

"They wouldn't be permitted to take such a liberty, sir. I'm under the same obligation myself."

"Are you telling me these old bones aren't allowed out?"