The Vault

said he needed to phone New York. Over there it was still business hours. He opened a bottle of bubbly, poured me one and took me into another room and put on some rock and roll video while he went off to make his call. I was too loaded to the gills to make an issue of it. When he finally got off the phone, a good forty minutes later, he was all apologies.' She looked away again. 'The story of the night.'

'Yet you made another date for Sunday.'

'Right. I met him by chance at the Forum Saturday night.'

'The Elgar concert?' he said with interest. This could be crucial.

'Yes. I was sitting two rows behind him. He suggested this meal on Sunday. By then I knew about this interview. I'm not stupid.'

John Sturr's movements on the afternoon and evening Wigfull was beaten unconscious had become central to the investigation. 'Tell me, was he there from the beginning of the concert?'

'That's when we spoke-before it started, I mean.'

He nodded, but wistfully. This piece of information clinched Sturr's alibi for that afternoon. He was at Castle Cary until six. It was impossible for him to have attacked Wigfull and made the start of the concert.

'What time are the interviews?'

'Seven o'clock?'

'You're about ten hours too early.'

She laughed again. 'Right now I'm wearing my other hat. Inspector Halliwell's press conference.'

'Busy day for both of us, then.' He took a step away, but Ingeborg still wanted to say something.

'I wasn't going to stay another night at John Sturr's. You don't think I'm that desperate?'

'Ingeborg, at the moment I just want to get to work.'

'Why were you there?' she asked, becoming the journalist again. 'What was it about? Is he up to naughties?'

'I reckon he thought he was,' said Diamond, 'even if you didn't.'

'That isn't what I meant.'

Buoyed up just a little, Diamond ambled into work.

INSIDE, HE asked Keith Halliwell how the press briefing had gone.

Some of the crime reporters, it seemed, had been touchy about Ingeborg's exclusive on the bones found in the River Wylye until they heard it confirmed by Halliwell that it really had been her digging in back numbers of the Wiltshire Times that had made the breakthrough. But there was real satisfaction over the appeal for information about the two men known as Banger and Mash. Papers can make something of names like that.

'We're back in the news,' Halliwell claimed, not without pride. He'd handled a large press conference smoothly.

'Were we ever out of it?' Diamond commented.

'I've done a load of interviews for TV and radio.'

'You'll have your own chat show next.'

He strolled into the incident room where the information on Peg Redbird's murder was being co-ordinated. The man he wished to speak to was busy on the phone, so he stood by the board where photos of the crime scene were displayed, a custom that had never, in all his years as a murder man, been of any practical use. There were shots of Peg's office in Noble and Nude, of her body lodged against Pulteney Weir and of the stretch of river bank closest to the shop where, presumably, the body had been tipped into the Avon.

Leaman, still with the phone to his ear, snatched up a sheet of paper and waved it. Diamond went over.

The paper had the BT heading familiar from countless phone bills. They had supplied a longish list of numbers, the calls Peg Redbird had made on the day she was killed. Someone had scribbled notes in pencil beside some of them. British Museum, Tate, Courtauld, Fitzwilliam. It seemed Peg had devoted the first part of that afternoon to calling art galleries and museums. Later she had spoken to someone at Sotheby's, the auctioneers. Then there were two local calls, as yet unidentified.

'Helpful, sir?' Leaman said, now off the phone.

'Could be. Are these your notes?'

'Sally Myers, sir.'

One of the younger members of the squad looked up fleetingly from her keyboard.

Leaman said, 'It's clear Peg was pretty active that afternoon, trying to check on something. It has to be the Blakes, doesn't it?'

Diamond had worked that out and moved on. 'What about these Bath numbers? Why haven't we got names beside them?'

'Sally's working on it. I thought we'd trace the long distance calls first.'

Diamond made a sound deep in his throat that registered disagreement. The local calls were of more interest. 'What's the news of John Wigfull?'

'Slightly better. He's semi-conscious some of the time, but in no condition to talk.'

'Wigfull can't help us. Even if he sits up and asks for meat and two veg, he won't remember a damned thing. People don't after serious concussion.'

'We checked Councillor Sum's statement, sir-the people in Castle Cary he went to see Saturday afternoon. It stands up well. He was with them until ten to six.'

'And by seven-thirty he was at the Elgar concert in Bath,' said Diamond. 'He met Ingeborg there. She just told me.'

Barely disguising his disappointment, Leaman said, 'He's squeaky-clean, then. Shall I rub his name off the board?'

'Christ-who put it up there? If Georgina sees it she'll go ape. Give me the damned duster.' He grabbed it and erased the name himself. 'Don't you have anything new to report?'

Leaman shrugged. There was no pleasing some people.

'I'm off to Stowford for a bit,' Diamond announced.

Nobody applauded, but they must have cheered inwardly, and he knew it. He was no fun to have around this Monday morning.

STOWFORD SCARCELY merits a name at all. You wouldn't call it a village; a hamlet would be an exaggeration. It is a farm and a cluster of buildings presenting their backs to the A366 between Radstock and Trowbridge. Only the cream teas board at the side of the the road would persuade a passing driver that there was anything to stop for. The place is a relic of the wool trade that flourished for four centuries, now just an ancient, crumbling farmhouse, some farm buildings and a mill.

'Why Stowford?” Steph had asked.

Diamond left the road and took the track that curved left towards the farmyard. He parked against a barn. Nobody seemed to be about, just a black cat sunning itself against the barn wall. On seeing the visitor it rolled on its back and looked at him upside down, suggesting it would not object to some admiration, but no cat stood a chance with Diamond so soon after last night's incident in the kitchen.

He walked around the side of the barn and looked through a window. The interior was fitted out as a furniture-maker's workshop. Nice pieces, too. A table and chairs he would have been happy to own. These buildings, he remembered from his previous visit, barns, cowsheds or whatever, had been put to use as craft workshops. Next door was a stonemason's studio and beyond that a metalwork shop.

'Why Stowford?”

Why not?

He continued the slow inspection of the buildings and the cat came with him, intermittently pressing its side against his legs. Not one of the workshops was in use. Well, it was only Monday morning. How nice to be self- employed, he thought.

Through the farmyard he went, across to the gabled farmhouse where he and Steph had gone for the cream tea. Fifteenth century, this building was said to be, and, candidly, looked its age. Moss was growing in profusion on the tiled roof.

He rang the handbell provided on a table by the door. The sound seemed excessive.

No one came. Although the small front lawns at either side of the path were filled with tables and chairs, the people didn't do morning coffee, it seemed. Just the cream teas.