'I expect he thrives on it,' said Diamond. 'They'll edit that bit out.'
'No, they won't. It was good television.'
Wearily, he returned to his car and cruised around the city's infuriating one-way system looking for the route to Bath. He always got it wrong. At one stage, trying to read the directions, he drove through a red light. It was a pedestrian crossing and nobody was in the way, but with a sense of inevitability he saw in his mirror the pulsing blue beacon of a police car. They overtook him and forced him to stop.
'This is all I need,' he told the young officer whose head appeared at the window.
'Superintendent Diamond?'
'You know me?'
'We were under orders to find you, sir. You're asked to make contact with Bath CID.'
'That's why you stopped me?'
The young man grinned. 'Well, it wasn't to ask the way.'
Revived, he got out and ambled across to the patrol car to use their radio. Keith Halliwell answered the call.
'What's this-overtime?' Diamond asked, chirpy again.
'I've been trying to reach you, sir. You were supposed to get a message at the TV studio. We had a call from the lab at Chepstow earlier. They found something.'
'What's that?'
'In the bits of concrete that came with the hand bones, they chipped out a piece of metal shaped into a skull.'
'Full size?'
'No. Really small. Like a badge. This was curved, so they assume it was attached to a ring originally. You can see where it broke at the back.'
'A ring? What are we talking about here? The kind of thing kids wear?'
'Yes. Cheap metal.'
'In the shape of a skull, you said?'
'An animal skull, like a bull, but with large teeth sticking up, as far as the eyes.'
'Motorhead.'
'I'm sorry?' said Halliwell.
'You should be,' Diamond chided him. 'Don't you remember Heavy Metal?'
'Would you say that again, sir? I'm getting some static.'
Diamond rolled his eyes at the young officer beside him. 'He's getting some static. Rock music in the seventies, Keith. The animal skull with the teeth was the Motorhead emblem. Your musical education is sadly lacking. Where were you-at the ballet?'
'I was just a baby.'
'Oh, yes?'
'The point is, sir, the ring could have broken when the body was dismembered. It may have belonged to the victim.'
'Where's the rest of it, then? Shouldn't it be with the bones?'
'The killer could have removed it from the victim's hand, thinking it would help identify the corpse.'
'Equally, it could have belonged to the killer and snapped off when he was doing his grisly work.'
'His what, sir?'
'Never mind, Keith. You can knock off now.'
He said goodnight to the patrol team, ambled across to his own car and drove home thinking it had not been such a bad day's work. Starting off with no more than a few bones to investigate, he was ending up with a mental picture of someone: probably young, in leathers and jeans, long-haired, a rocker. Rightly or wrongly, victim or killer, this had to be progress.
Then he remembered the ACC's 'At Home'. He would never make it there by eight. Steph would be sitting at home, dressed and ready to go. He'd better get to a phone.
NOT LONG after Joe left Noble and Nude, Ellis Somerset returned with the vanload of antiques from Si Minchendon's house in Camden Crescent.
Peg helped unload. To be precise, she unloaded the two pictures. The rest she left for Ellis to move.
She had been on tenterhooks to inspect those pictures. There could be no question that they were watercolours in William Blake's style, with the strange, archaic look his drawing had acquired from making hundreds of studies of medieval tombs during his apprenticeship as an engraver. They were essentially graphic illustrations in quill and ink, using the colour mainly as tint, rather than to indicate form. But the subjects of the pictures, if Peg's interpretation was correct, were not recorded anywhere. On her way back from Camden Place she had called at Bath Library and looked at the major biographies of Blake by Peter Ackroyd and David Erdman; neither made any mention that he had illustrated Mary Shelley's
She was sure in her mind that they could represent nothing else. The first had to be the frozen valley of Chamonix, with Mont Blanc 'in awful majesty' as a backdrop for the meeting between Frankenstein and the creature he had brought to life. The figures facing each other differed markedly in physique, the one a mere man, puny beside the abhorred monster, who was unlike the Hollywood version, but faithful to Mary Shelley's concept: yellow skin thinly covering the muscles and arteries, lustrous black hair, pearly white teeth, black lips and watery, dun-white eyes.
In the second picture, the same grotesque face was staring through the window of the inn where Frankenstein's bride Elizabeth lay strangled on her wedding night. The gloating, grinning monster was mocking Frankenstein. What other interpretation could anyone make?
Peg had worked long enough in the antiques trade to know that synchronicity occurs from time to time in a quite eerie fashion. So she was not troubled that Mary Shelley had cropped up in another context the same day. It was not mere coincidence, nor entirely the mysterious working of fate. With the idea of Frankenstein already planted in her mind, she would have been alert to anything in Simon Minchendon's house that made connection with the story.
Were the pictures genuine? Blake had been so prolific, despite failing health towards the end, that no one could be certain how many unrecorded works had survived.
Peg decided there was only one way to find out. Using a penknife, she cut into the already disintegrating brown paper backing one of the frames. Methodically she prised out the rusty pins and removed the board that held the picture against the glass. The age of the mount and frame was of no importance, but did the drawing paper pass the test? Was it almost two hundred years old?
With extreme care, she lifted out the painting and studied it. Certainly the paper smelt old. There was foxing at the edges, which were rough and fraying. She was not an expert on the age of paper, but her knowledge of antiques of all sorts gave her a pretty reliable sense of what was genuinely old. This, she decided without wishful thinking, could safely be placed in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
Nothing was written on the reverse. A faker will often try too hard and add some embellishment to bring extra conviction.
She performed a similar dissection of the second frame and mount. No further clues were revealed.
'I'm all fired up, Ellis. You know whose work this is, don't you?'
'They're not signed,' he pointed out.
'That's no guide, ducky. Blake often left his work unsigned. These look to me like studies for engravings. He did thousands.' She smiled. 'Well, it would have been nice in a way if there was a signature, but then I would never have got them so cheap.'
'Are you sure they're kosher?'
'What's your opinion?' Holding it delicately by the edge to avoid marking it with her dusty fingers, she handed him the exterior scene.
'You think this is Frankenstein and the monster?'
'It's the core of the book, their meeting in the shadow of Mont Blanc. The monster has strangled Frankenstein's young brother, the child William, and the servant Justine has been hanged for the crime.'
