Peter Lovesey: The Vault

She held out her slim hands in appeal. "Fine, I won't press it. I admired her style, the way she did her job."

"We all did."

"You must have chosen her as your deputy. Do you think a woman brings something extra to a crime squad?"

He pushed his chair back, prior to leaving. "I don't have time to chat."

She smiled. "Worth a try. Some time, I'd like to write a profile of you."

"Whatever for? I'm not a story of-what was it?-potential interest."

She ran her eyes over his substantial form. "If I pulled a few strings, I could interest a features editor in you."

"That's really made my day."

"I'll tell you one thing for sure. You're going to be sorry you dropped Julie from your team."

He didn't rise to the bait. The truth of it was that Julie had left at her own request. The strain of working with him, defending him, interpreting his moods, smoothing ruffled feathers, had finally got to Julie. And those who knew him best said that she had made his job too easy. Confrontation was his fix.

But he must have learned something from Julie, because he let Ingeborg Smith leave without a blasting. Even after she reminded him to pick up the business card he had left on the table.

SOME GENIUS from the forensic lab at Chepstow phoned him later. In the process of removing a substantial chunk of concrete adhering to the hand found in the vault, they had discovered the bones of a second thumb and two fingers. It seemed that two hands had been buried together.

"It makes sense," Diamond said. "If you go to the trouble of digging a hole you might as well use it for both."

"Assuming they both came from the same victim," the Chepstow man threw in casually.

"They did, didn't they? This is a left hand and a right?"

"It would appear so."

"Can't you fellows ever say a straight yes or no?"

"If we did, and we made a mistake, you'd be one of the first to complain, Mr Diamond."

"That's for sure, squire. All I want to know is are we talking about a pair of hands?"

"That I couldn't say with certainty."

"They're about the same size? Could you say that with certainty?"

"Oh, yes."

"Thank Christ for that. So there isn't any reason to think they're from different people?"

"Realistically, it's unlikely, but-"

"Don't complicate things. My life is hard enough."

LATE THE same afternoon, twenty minutes before the diggers in the vault were due to down tools, one of them working close to the external wall called for the sergeant who was supervising. At a depth of half a metre his brush had revealed a brownish domed shape that looked awfully like a human skull.

The sergeant ordered an early finish, and put a call through to Diamond.

NEXT MORNING, the vault was transformed into something like a Star Trek set: machinery, extra lights and SOCOs padding about in their overshoes and white paper zipper overalls. From the doorway Diamond registered an appearance and then slipped upstairs for a Pump Room breakfast.

Certainly it was a skull, he learned when he returned. They allowed him close enough to see it in situ, with most of the surrounding soil brushed away. It lay upwards, resting on the jaw, not quite so sinister as a clean skull may look, because the cavities for eyes and nose were blocked with earth. In this state it would be lifted by a pathologist and taken for examination. Any organic matter preserved inside the cranium could well provide DNA material.

"Any immediate clues?" he asked the senior man.

"Well, she was probably under thirty, by the state of her teeth."

"She?"

"See the ridges around the eye sockets? They're not so prominent as they would be in a male. And the nasal junction here is less developed."

"I wasn't expecting a female," Diamond said as if he doubted the opinion. "The hand was quite large."

"Some women's hands are big. You can't tell the sex from hand bones."

"Is Jim Middleton on his way?"

"He's doing post mortems this morning. He promised to be here by two."

Muttering, Diamond returned upstairs. In the staffroom he paused to speak to the two young constables working with a sieve over a wheelbarrow. A huge heap of earth and rubble lay on a tarpaulin. "Is this load sorted?"

"No, sir," said the spokesman. "That's waiting."

"What happens to the stuff you've sieved?"

"We wheel it across the way. There's another room."

"And have you found anything?"

"Some bits that could be finger-bones, or toes, or nothing at all."

"Do you want a break?"

"Sir?"

"I said do you want a break? Take ten, no more. I'll see if I have better luck than you."

Wide-eyed at this eccentric behaviour from the top man, they hesitated. But when he picked up the spade, half-filled the sieve and started shaking it over the barrow, they left him to it.

The gesture was not wholly altruistic. Diamond had a reputation for treating his staff without much consideration. The news that the old slave-driver-or whatever they currently called him-had taken his turn at the digging would spread around Manvers Street like word of a pay rise.

And a mindless task like this was an aid to concentration. He needed to reassess. If the victim was a woman, it seemed unlikely she had died as a result of a brawl among labourers. Women are employed on building sites, and were in the early nineteen-eighties, but the female brickie would have been a novelty. Her absence would have been noticed. What other reason would a woman have for being in the vault? he asked himself. Maybe she had been one of the archaeologists.

He preferred that, a scenario in which one of the builders lusts after a student in tight jeans jigging her bottom as she scrapes at the floor of the temple precinct. From most men, she would get looks, or remarks. But there is always the oddball, the psycho who believes she is put there to provoke him.

Either she willingly goes with him. Or she is tricked into going. Or forced. In the vault, he turns violent. Whatever goes on there-an argument, a rape, a fight-it ends with her death. He dismembers the corpse in the belief that it will make detection more difficult. He buries the parts in concrete.

This presupposes that no one interrupts. Well, the vault was used by the builders for storage. Maybe sand and cement had to be collected from time to time, but there would be intervals when no one was about. A body could be covered with a tarpaulin and left in a dark corner until the killer had an opportunity to dispose of it, perhaps at night, when everyone else had left.

The theory also requires that when the girl goes missing, no one raises the alarm. Archaeology is often carried out by student volunteers. And as anyone knows, students are not the most reliable people around. One young woman fails to turn up one morning and nobody thinks much of it. Not everyone likes squatting in a trench scraping at the soil by the hour and finding nothing.

So was there a young student who went missing in the early nineteen-eighties?

Scores, probably.

"No luck, sir?"

He looked up from the sieve. The ten minutes had passed and the constables were back.

"You're the ones who got lucky. I filled another barrow for you."

DEATH AND THE MONSTER.

The thing had started without the passion that came later. It grew in his brain by stealth, fitting into his life as no more than an idle thought here, a possiblity there. He could not trace its origin; the monster is so all-pervading that every child has heard of it. It seeped into his consciousness and was reinforced by the images everyone grows up with and has nightmares about.

"My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded and soon became so ardent and eager that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning whilst I was yet engaged in my laboratory."