Peter Lovesey - The Vault

"Were we ever out of it?" Diamond commented.

"I've done a load of interviews for TV and radio."

"You'll have your own chat show next."

He strolled into the incident room where the information on Peg Redbird's murder was being co-ordinated. The man he wished to speak to was busy on the phone, so he stood by the board where photos of the crime scene were displayed, a custom that had never, in all his years as a murder man, been of any practical use. There were shots of Peg's office in Noble and Nude, of her body lodged against Pulteney Weir and of the stretch of river bank closest to the shop where, presumably, the body had been tipped into the Avon.

Leaman, still with the phone to his ear, snatched up a sheet of paper and waved it. Diamond went over.

The paper had the BT heading familiar from countless phone bills. They had supplied a longish list of numbers, the calls Peg Redbird had made on the day she was killed. Someone had scribbled notes in pencil beside some of them. British Museum, Tate, Courtauld, Fitzwilliam. It seemed Peg had devoted the first part of that afternoon to calling art galleries and museums. Later she had spoken to someone at Sotheby's, the auctioneers. Then there were two local calls, as yet unidentified.

"Helpful, sir?" Leaman said, now off the phone.

"Could be. Are these your notes?"

"Sally Myers, sir."

One of the younger members of the squad looked up fleetingly from her keyboard.

Leaman said, "It's clear Peg was pretty active that afternoon, trying to check on something. It has to be the Blakes, doesn't it?"

Diamond had worked that out and moved on. "What about these Bath numbers? Why haven't we got names beside them?"

"Sally's working on it. I thought we'd trace the long distance calls first."

Diamond made a sound deep in his throat that registered disagreement. The local calls were of more interest. "What's the news of John Wigfull?"

"Slightly better. He's semi-conscious some of the time, but in no condition to talk."

"Wigfull can't help us. Even if he sits up and asks for meat and two veg, he won't remember a damned thing. People don't after serious concussion."

"We checked Councillor Sum's statement, sir-the people in Castle Cary he went to see Saturday afternoon. It stands up well. He was with them until ten to six."

"And by seven-thirty he was at the Elgar concert in Bath," said Diamond. "He met Ingeborg there. She just told me."

Barely disguising his disappointment, Leaman said, "He's squeaky-clean, then. Shall I rub his name off the board?"

"Christ-who put it up there? If Georgina sees it she'll go ape. Give me the damned duster." He grabbed it and erased the name himself. "Don't you have anything new to report?"

Leaman shrugged. There was no pleasing some people.

"I'm off to Stowford for a bit," Diamond announced.

Nobody applauded, but they must have cheered inwardly, and he knew it. He was no fun to have around this Monday morning.

STOWFORD SCARCELY merits a name at all. You wouldn't call it a village; a hamlet would be an exaggeration. It is a farm and a cluster of buildings presenting their backs to the A366 between Radstock and Trowbridge. Only the cream teas board at the side of the the road would persuade a passing driver that there was anything to stop for. The place is a relic of the wool trade that flourished for four centuries, now just an ancient, crumbling farmhouse, some farm buildings and a mill.

"Why Stowford?” Steph had asked.

Diamond left the road and took the track that curved left towards the farmyard. He parked against a barn. Nobody seemed to be about, just a black cat sunning itself against the barn wall. On seeing the visitor it rolled on its back and looked at him upside down, suggesting it would not object to some admiration, but no cat stood a chance with Diamond so soon after last night's incident in the kitchen.

He walked around the side of the barn and looked through a window. The interior was fitted out as a furniture-maker's workshop. Nice pieces, too. A table and chairs he would have been happy to own. These buildings, he remembered from his previous visit, barns, cowsheds or whatever, had been put to use as craft workshops. Next door was a stonemason's studio and beyond that a metalwork shop.

"Why Stowford?”

Why not?

He continued the slow inspection of the buildings and the cat came with him, intermittently pressing its side against his legs. Not one of the workshops was in use. Well, it was only Monday morning. How nice to be self-employed, he thought.

Through the farmyard he went, across to the gabled farmhouse where he and Steph had gone for the cream tea. Fifteenth century, this building was said to be, and, candidly, looked its age. Moss was growing in profusion on the tiled roof.

He rang the handbell provided on a table by the door. The sound seemed excessive.

No one came. Although the small front lawns at either side of the path were filled with tables and chairs, the people didn't do morning coffee, it seemed. Just the cream teas.

He tried the front door and found it open. He recalled coming in here to pay for the tea. If you didn't notice the low lintel you paid with a bruised head as well.

Ahead was a narrow hallway with a kitchen off to the left. The cat trotted confidently in there.

"Anyone about?"

He was beginning to get that Marie Celeste feeling. The large room to the right was obviously the living room, with a generous fireplace, a piano and a box of children's toys. A table big enough to seat ten stood at the centre and other tables filled the window spaces, with pews instead of chairs. When the weather was unkind, the cream tea clients came in here.

He called out again.

The silence was not helping his Monday gloom.

Rather than venturing into the private rooms beyond, he returned outside and explored around the back, thinking possibly he had heard some sounds from that direction.

The source was revealed. He looked over a low wall at a large sow. It eyed him and seemed almost to smile.

Then a voice behind him said, "Lift me up, please."

A small girl had come from nowhere, perhaps six years old, with fair hair in a fringe and dressed in a pink T-shirt and black Lycra shorts. As small girls go, she was not the most prepossessing. Pale, snub-nosed and gap-toothed. And barefoot.

He asked, "Who are you?"

"Winnie."

"Do you live here, Winnie?"

She shook her head.

"Just visiting?"

A nod. "I want to see the pig."

"It's here."

"I can't see over the wall."

He knew better than to lift up a child he didn't know, natural as it may have seemed. "I can fix that," he said, spotting a blue plastic milk crate. "You can stand on that."

"I'll fetch it."

She was back with the crate very quickly and placed it in position herself and stepped up. "I can see now."

"Good."

"I call her Mrs Piggy."

"That's not a bad name," he said. Talking seriously to a child was a rare treat.

"She can't be Miss Piggy," Winnie said in a way that begged a question, and he wondered if he was about to be told something intimate, with the candour you must expect from small children.

"Why is that?"

"Get real. Miss Piggy is a Muppet."

"So she is. And where's your Mummy this morning?"

"Shopping, I 'spect. Look at all her titties. Why's she got so many?"

He should have been expecting something like this. "Those are for all the piglets. When she has a litter-that's baby pigs- they come in big numbers. Each one needs a place to suck."

"Miss Piggy doesn't have all those titties."

"Get real," he said. "Miss Piggy is a Muppet."

She almost fell off the crate laughing.

If she were ours, he thought, mine and Steph's, we wouldn't leave her and go shopping. Some people didn't deserve children. "Are you staying in the farmhouse?"