Peter Lovesey: The Vault

Sturr switched from taking offence to refuting the charges. "Two rusty screws from a garden don't prove anything."

"You're right," said Diamond. "That's why I want your car examined for evidence that you moved Peg Redbird's body from the place where you killed her."

"I didn't-" He stopped.

"You didn't use the car to move the body," said Diamond. "Right?"

Sturr was silent.

"Either you had some other means of moving it or you attacked her close enough to the river to drag her there and throw her in."

"You're talking through your fat arse," Sturr snapped back at him. "You know I wasn't with the woman the night she was killed. I was at the same party as you, man. You saw what time I left."

"Around a quarter to eleven."

"And she"-he flapped his hand towards Ingeborg-"was with me. We drove back to my house, and she was with me all that night."

Diamond exchanged a brief look with Ingeborg, still seated impassively in the candidates' chair. "Yes, Miss Smith and I have spoken about this alibi of yours. You get in, and there's a message on the answerphone requiring you to call New York for the next forty minutes, while your guest is left listening to pop music and drinking champagne. Your house on Lansdown Road can't be more than five minutes from Noble and Nude. Forty minutes is more than enough for you to meet your victim, hit her over the head and dump her in the Avon."

Sturr said tautly, "She told you this?"

Diamond nodded, "And I'm not surprised you couldn't get your end up after that."

"Bitch!" Sturr took a stride towards Ingeborg, grabbed her shoulder and swung his fist at her face. The blow would have split her mouth and knocked out some of her teeth had not Diamond reacted fast. He grabbed the raised arm and twisted it sharply behind Sturr's back.

The councillor cried out with pain. Diamond steered him back to his chair, thrust him into it and stood over him.

When his breathing allowed, Sturr said, "That lying bitch wants to frame me."

"You made no calls to New York that evening," Diamond said. "I had your line checked. The only call was a short one at six ten to Peg Redbird. No prize for guessing what that was about."

"Oh?"

"You were setting up the meeting that was to be her execution. The reason Peg had to die is that she was the only person who could link you to the killing of Jock Tarrant all those years before. She remembered who sold her the writing box."

At the mention of Tarrant, Sturr went silent, his eyes lowered. He was not the sort to roll over and tell all. He would protest his innocence all the way through the legal process, admitting nothing, insisting on having a solicitor beside him when they questioned him formally, but the fight had gone out of him. He knew he would go down.

Diamond spared him the ignominy of handcuffs as he escorted him down to the cells. But there were amazed looks from the row of candidates seated outside watching the man who had interviewed them being led away.

IN THE incident room, the murder squad gathered to drink to the successful conclusion of two inquiries. Halliwell took it all calmly, as an old-stager; young Leaman was more animated; and Julie, her interviewing duties over, was a welcome visitor. At Diamond's suggestion, Ingeborg was invited in as well, pink with excitement at having convinced Julie she had a future in the police. And, just inside the door, uninvited, but impossible to turn away, stood Georgina.

Nobody insisted Diamond explain the logic of the case, but once he started telling it to a small group, the entire room closed in to listen. Individuals knew their own bits, and now for the first time, they learned how it came together. "Back in 1982, John Sturr was a chemistry student at the University here. He was a local lad and got a vacation job as a general labourer on the Roman Baths extension. There, he was teamed with another youngster, Jock Tarrant, down from Scotland. Jock wasn't a student. He was a drifter, into rock music, Heavy Metal, and the site-workers nicknamed him Banger. Naturally enough, Sturr was given the name of Mash. Their main job was mixing cement in an underground vault and wheeling it out to the bricklayers. The vault had not been used for many years. It was outside the area of the Roman remains, of no interest to the archeologists.

"One day the two lads made a discovery. Whilst shifting sacks of cement into some obscure corner of the vault they found an antique writing box. They weren't antiques experts, but once they'd dusted it off they could see it was worth a few weeks' wages at least. Maybe more than that. Especially when they got it open and found it contained an early edition of Milton, a sketchbook and a cut-glass ink-bottle.

"Each of those two young blokes felt he had a claim. As often happens with easy pickings, they argued, and it turned to violence. I don't suppose we'll ever know precisely what happened, except that they fought with the spades they used and Tarrant was killed. Manslaughter, I would guess, rather than murder. Sturr, to his horror, found himself down in that vault with a dead body. In one way he was fortunate. Nobody else had reason to go in there, so he had time and opportunity to dismember the corpse, removing the head and the hands. He buried the hands in cement in the vault and drove the torso some miles off and buried it in the soft earth beside the River Wylye. Where the head ended up, only Sturr knows.

"He waited some years before cashing in on the writing box. Sold it-with contents-to Peg Redbird without realising who it had once belonged to. Neither did she. Sturr's secret seemed to be safe. Nobody had raised alarm bells about Jock Tarrant. Casual workers come and go in the building trade. Tarrant had come and he'd gone." By way of illustration, Diamond took a long drag of lager, crushed the can and dropped it into a waste-bin.

"Fast forward to last week. The security guard finds the hand bones in the vault and brings them to us. After a hiccup or two, we know we're dealing with bones from about twenty years back. Someone tips off the press that Mary Shelley once lived in the house above the vault and suddenly we're in the news. And this is when John Sturr has a double shock, because he hadn't the faintest idea until then that the vault where he'd buried the hands was part of the house where Frankenstein was written. You see the problem? He sold the writing box and its contents to Peg Redbird. On the pretext of keeping up with developments-" Diamond avoided eye contact with Georgina "-he learns from a high-ranking source that the book he sold to Peg has turned up again, and it once belonged to Mary Shelley. An American professor is touting it around Bath and asking questions. Sturr does his proverbial nut. He's certain Peg Redbird will remember him selling her the box and its contents and work out where they came from. TV and radio are already putting out bulletins about the mystery bones in the Frankenstein vault. A police inquiry is under way.

"He looks for a way out of this. He believes Peg is the only person alive who can finger him. He's a pillar of society now, a city councillor, on any number of committees, not least the Police Authority. He reckons if he can dispose of Peg, his problem disappears. So he makes a plan. He's been invited to a party at the ACC's. Could you think of a better cover than that?"

Over by the door, Georgina flushed to the tips of her ears and said nothing. To her credit, she stayed to hear Diamond out.

Diplomatically, he shifted the attention elsewhere. "At the party he makes a pitch to a blonde charmer. Where's Ingeborg?"

A hand was raised coyly to shoulder level.

"It happens that this blonde charmer is looking for a chance to get into the police, and this interest from a member of the Police Authority is not the kind you turn down. It's a mutually helpful arrangement. He keeps her tanked up all evening. She won't mind me saying she's well bevvied by the time they leave together. He takes her home, opens another bottle of champagne, puts on some music and then makes some excuse about a phone call to New York.