The Vault

THE WORRY LINES FADED from Georgina's face. Her friend the Councillor was not at home, or not answering his phone. Diamond quit her office, promising nothing.

Mindful of his blood pressure, he left the building and took a steady walk along Manvers Street towards the Abbey. The street lights were on and not many people were about.

The great West window of the Abbey was illuminated from inside, and the sound of Evensong drifted across the paved yard. With difficulty in the fading light, Diamond looked for the carved figures of angels ascending the twin ladders on either side of the window. He was not a church-goer and was not sure about God's existence, let alone the angels', but these were less than perfect angels anyway, old friends he returned to in times of stress. Weatherbeaten after five hundred years, some with stumps for limbs, they still had a restorative effect on a less than perfect policeman. They always made him smile. They were not, as many supposed, climbing Jacob's ladder, but the ladder seen in a dream by the builder of the Abbey, Bishop Oliver King. A nice triumph of human vanity over piety, Diamond always thought, for the Bishop to insist that his own dream was on the front of the Abbey, and sucks to Jacob.

Across the yard by the railings in front of the Roman Baths was a human shape Diamond took for one of the dossers. He went over to see who it was. He knew most of them. Unusually, the man wished him good evening and called him 'sir'. The voice was Keith Halliwell's.

'What are you doing here, leaning on the railings?'

'It's all right, sir. I'm sober. Just taking stock, that's all.'

'Me, too.'

'To be truthful, I came up here hoping for some inspiration.'

'From the Abbey?'

'The vault. It's below us.'

'Right. So it is. The bloody vault.'

'Locked up now. This is the closest I can get.'

'You think the answer is down there?'

'I don't know, sir. I don't know if we'll ever get an answer.'

'We will, Keith. It's coming together. It's the key to everything, what happened down there.'

'But I'm getting nowhere with it.'

'Don't say that.' Diamond put a hand on Halliwell's shoulder. 'I looked at your press release. Fine.'

'Thanks.'

They started walking back towards the police station. The experience between them, two old colleagues united at the end of the day, encouraged confidences. Halliwell asked what would happen about Joe Dougan.

Diamond said simply, 'He'll leave for Paris in the morning.'

'Is he in the clear?'

'That's another question. I'd pull him in if I knew we had something that would stick. You know the rules as well as I do.'

'Do you believe his wife is alive and well in Paris? Can't we get the French police to check?'

'I checked already. There's a Mrs Donna Dougan registered at the Ritz.'

'She's OK, then? He was speaking the truth.'

'It doesn't mean we have to believe every damned thing he said.'

They walked on, and although no more was said about the investigation, it got through to Halliwell-he was seized with the conviction-that Diamond knew everything now. He had worked out precisely what had happened. It was only a matter of nailing his man.

The old tyrant could be a pain to work with, but no detective on the Force had such clarity of mind.

As if he was a mind-reader too, Diamond said with compassion, 'You should go home now. You've done enough today.'

Halliwell agreed.

OF THE Murder Squad, only Sergeant Leaman remained. Diamond asked him to bring in copies of Joe Dougan's statements.

Predictably, John Wigfull's paperwork was immaculate. He had painstakingly recorded things from the interviews at the Royal Crescent that Diamond would have disregarded. There was the whole chain of contacts that had led the dogged American professor to Noble and Nude.

He asked Leaman, 'Did John Wigfull follow up any of this stuff Joe Dougan told him-the bookshop at Hay-on- Wye and so on?'

Leaman shook his head. 'Have you ever been to Hay, sir?'

'Never.'

'I was there once. I do a bit of cooking and I wanted a book by Fanny Craddock that had been out of print for thirty years. It's incredible, the number of bookshops in a small country town. A whole cinema stuffed with old books. A castle. There's no way you could trace a particular sale.'

Diamond studied the notes. 'How about these Bath people, Oliver Heath and Uncle Evan?'

'They certainly exist. They're known locally, sir. Mr Heath owned a bookshop in Union Passage for many years and Uncle Evan has a puppet theatre.'

'Did anybody go to see them?'

'To check on Dougan's story? It wasn't thought necessary, sir, seeing that he didn't invent the names.'

'You didn't bother.'

Harsh words that pained Leaman. 'Those people were stepping-stones, so to speak. Things only began to happen after he found his way to the antiques shop.'

'We need to see them.'

'Tomorrow morning?'

'Too late.'

Leaman had rashly hoped there was still time for a quiet Sunday evening drink with his girlfriend.

THE RETIRED bookseller Oliver Heath greeted them at the door of his Queen Square apartment, dapper for an elderly man in shirt and cravat, grey slacks and tan-coloured brogues. 'I was only listening to the radio,' he said, making clear that he didn't at all object to having his Sunday evening disturbed. 'Sometimes you get some interesting talks on Long Wave with the Open University, but tonight is not my cup of tea exactly: Feminism in the Third World.'

Diamond explained their visit.

'Oh, yes,' the old man confirmed. 'The professor was here, just as he said, and showed me a copy of Milton that once passed through my hands. I say passed through them; actually it was on my shelves for years. I never regarded it as anything special. It wasn't a first edition or anything. Some of the fly-leaves were missing, I recall.'

'The blank sheets at the front?'

'And the back. You often find this with old books. Paper was far more expensive in former times than now. People used the sheets as notepaper. Can't blame them, but it does ruin a nicely bound book. What I failed to notice-or appreciate the significance of-was the inscription on the cover.'

'Mary Shelley's initials?'

'And of course the Abbey Churchyard address.' Oliver Heath managed an ungrudging smile. 'Good spotting on Professor Dougan's part-and good luck to him.'

'Was it genuine?'

'The writing on the cover? I've no reason to think it wasn't. But you see I was ignorant of Mary Shelley's connection with Bath. Well, I knew the Shelleys had stayed here at some point, but I didn't know Frankenstein was written here. I've checked since, and he was right. Five, Abbey Churchyard. It's a salutary thought that the world's most famous horror story was penned within a few yards of our great Abbey Church.'

'A first edition of Frankenstein would be worth a bit, I imagine?' said Diamond, seeing that Heath was so generous with his information.

'My word, yes. A set in good condition would fetch a huge sum. I think the 1818 edition amounted to only five hundred copies. It was in three volumes, to appeal to the circulating libraries. They liked books published that way