Peter Lovesey - The Vault

The heat was back on Joe Dougan. It always came back to Joe. Joe had met Evan. Of the other remaining suspects, Somerset and Pennycook, neither had any known link with the puppet man. Joe had sought him out on the day Peg Redbird was murdered.

So where had Joe been on the Saturday? He'd spent the whole of the afternoon doing the rounds of the Bath hotels looking for Donna, or so he claimed. What if-as well as checking hotels-he'd called at the Brains Surgery to find out more about Uncle Evan? The people in the pub could have told him Evan had a workshop out at Stowford. And Joe, being a stranger to the district, could easily have found himself in Westwood instead of Stowford and then spotted the sign for the footpath across the fields.

Why would Joe still be interested in Uncle Evan? Diamond's best answer was this: Evan had learned from Joe that the copy of Milton's poems he had bought and sold cheaply was worth much more. A prize had slipped through his hands. Years before, when he acquired the book from Peg, she may have told him she had found it in an antique writing box. Last week he would surely have reached the same conclusion as Joe: that if the book had belonged to Mary Shelley, so had the box.

Evan would know Mary Shelley's writing box would be worth a bit.

And the box disappeared from Noble and Nude on the night Peg was murdered. If Joe was the killer, it was easy to assume he'd stolen the box. The fanatical desire to own the thing was the reason he'd done it, his motive. There had been a struggle and Peg had been cracked over the head. But what if Evan came to Walcot Street the same night with plans to nick the box? His chance would have come while Joe was dumping the body in the river. Joe would have been appalled to find it gone when he returned. But he was intelligent. With time to reflect, he must have worked out the identity of the one other person who knew the value of the box. Determined to have it for himself, he returned to the Brains Surgery and picked up the trail of Uncle Evan. It was worth risking a trip to Stowford to see what was there.

It was looking as if Wigfull had been right all along about Joe. For Peter Diamond, that was humbling, if not galling. Joe was on a train to London by now. He'd be in Paris before the day was out.

At Frome, he called Manvers Street and said he wanted Joe Dougan stopped at Waterloo and brought back for questioning. A call to the Railway Police should do it.

LEAMAN WAS waiting on the town bridge. He had got the address of Little Terrors, he said. It was up the hill at the top, opposite the church.

"So what is it?" Diamond asked.

"An old factory, or warehouse, so far as I can make out."

"I mean what is it now?"

"A play place."

"OK. Be like that."

Leaman drove ahead in his car, through the town, and most of the way out of it. The church came up on the left and they turned right along a narrow street that presently opened out. And there was the name, bizarre in bold lettering over an innocent-seeming door.

Small children with their mothers were going inside.

Leaman cleared his throat in a way that signalled a problem.

"Yes?"

"Sir, has it crossed your mind that we're going to stand out a mile? Surrounded by little kids, with a few young mums."

"So?"

"This Uncle Evan is going to spot us the minute we walk in."

"We could be dads." After a pause, he added, "All right, grandad in my case."

"Thought I'd mention it, that's all."

"I'm going to mention something, too," said Diamond. "Once upon a time, I went into a house to make an arrest. I pushed a kid out of the way and he hit a radiator and cracked his head. I lost my job over it. We're going in to ask Uncle Evan to step outside and give us some help, right? That's all. Gently, gently. If anything goes wrong in there and kids are hurt…"

Inside, the Little Terrors were not so fastidious, ripping off their shoes and slinging them on racks, a rule of the house, it seemed. The noise was deafening. They could have called it Bedlam.

But at the point of entry some order was imposed. When the kids were in their socks they paid-or were paid for-and passed through a small turnstile.

"Yes?" said the chewing teenager with cropped hair dyed green who collected the money.

"We're police."

She was silent, stunned, it seemed. Until she grinned and said. "Is it, like, a bust?"

Diamond returned the grin. "They start young in Frome, do they?"

"So what's the problem?" she asked. "The council know about us. We're licensed."

"No problem," said Diamond. "Community relations." A useful phrase.

She had to shout to be heard. "You picked the wrong day. We got something special, a treat for the end of the summer holiday. Puppet show. You won't be able to move in there. I've never seen so many."

"We'll manage," Leaman bawled back. "We'll enjoy the show."

"It takes all sorts. Just watch where you put them big feet."

They passed through the turnstile into what would normally have been a place where the parents sat and drank coffee while the kids exhausted themselves playing. Today the serving counter was in use as the upper tier of the auditorium, with Little Terrors perched along its length banging their heels against the woodwork. Diamond and Leaman side-stepped around the mass bunched together seated on the floor. The idea was to reach the back, where the adults were. The show was already under way, the stage set up at the far end. Two skeletons on strings were being put through a dance and some of the young audience were enthralled. Plenty continued to fidget and talk as if nothing was going on.

A woman whose view was blocked said, "D'you mind?"

"Sorry." In trying to reach a space behind, Diamond made matters worse by nudging her chest with his arm. There just wasn't room for two men their size, so they had to progress right round the other side to where a sort of infants' assault course, clearly the centrepiece of the building, was set up. It was the only observation point left to them.

"House rules," said another woman, pointing to their feet. Obediently they took off their shoes and carried them in.

Some children, bored with the puppets, were playing on the apparatus. The space extended a long way back into the building and was equipped with rope ladders, balance beams, trampolines, tubes to climb through, shutes arid rings. Plunging their feet into a sunken area filled with thousands of plastic balls, the murder squad waded kneedeep to their vantage position. Two resourceful mums and their kids were already sitting in there watching the show through the mesh that kept the balls from spilling out.

They joined them, and it felt more comfortable than it looked.

After all the trouble it was some relief to catch a line of dialogue that went, "I work for Uncle Evan. Who do you work for?"

On the stage, the skeletons had been supplanted by a caterpillar and a butterfly on a stick. The man working them was visible, in fact prominent, standing up in an inset in the stage; his presence didn't seem to affect the illusion. The kids had their eyes fixed on the puppets; and, just as fixedly, the policemen had theirs on the puppeteer.

Diamond would have put him at younger than forty, Joe Dougan's estimate, but these things are always subjective. Hippy? Well, the hair was longish, blond, untidy. Hardly enough for a ponytail, he would have thought. No beard, not even a coating of stubble. Black T-shirt and jeans. The real surprise was that a young woman was assisting, getting the next set of puppets ready to hand to him. She was clearly visible from this side angle, her brownish-red hair tied Indian-fashion with a pink scarf.

The story-line quickly became clear. A boy puppet called Daniel was looking for his long-lost sister and meeting some strange, comical and whimsical characters in the process. They were borrowed freely from film, fairy tale and cartoon, and each had a few moments' interaction with the Daniel puppet. Half the fun for the kids was bawling out the names of characters they recognized: Donald Duck, Kermit, Popeye, Paddington, Barney, the Teletubbies. The copyright infringements were legion. And when a monster figure lumbered in, to spooky music, there were knowledgable shouts of "Frankenstein!"