The Stone Wife
- Автор: Ловси Питер
- Серия: Peter Diamond #14
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Sphere
- ISBN: 978-0-7515-5405-2
- Жанр: Полицейские детективы
Электронная книга - «The Stone Wife». Краткое содержание книги:
‘You see?’ Halliwell touched the screen and restored the list of hits. ‘But this is good news. North Petherton must be the right place.’
‘I wouldn’t get too excited. We’ve got a Chaucer Close in Reading,’ Poke said.
‘There’s a Chaucer Road in Bath,’ Diamond said.
Halliwell leaned over Diamond and brought up a map that showed the location of North Petherton. ‘Well, I wasn’t wrong about where it is, just down the road from Bridgwater.’
‘I saw another hit mentioning Petherton Park,’ Diamond said.
They returned to it and Halliwell was proved correct. Petherton Park, North Petherton, was, indeed, a one-time forest, and Geoffrey Chaucer had been the deputy forester from 1391. After his death in 1400, his son, Thomas, had succeeded him with the title of forester and had lived in the Park House in Park House Field, currently known as Parker’s Field.
‘This is getting better,’ Diamond said. ‘We have a house.’ He was starting to enjoy the hunt for evidence. He could even see some pleasure in using the internet.
‘It tells us the son lived there,’ Poke said, ‘not necessarily the father.’
‘But we now know that being the forester was more than — what was your word?’
‘A sinecure.’
‘Yes, Thomas Chaucer must have taken the job seriously, so why shouldn’t his father have lived in Petherton Park before him? Nothing says he did, but nothing says he didn’t. And if there was a house, it wouldn’t be remarkable if somewhere in the structure they commemorated The Canterbury Tales with a piece of sculpture. Does Park House still exist?’
‘You’re an optimist,’ Poke said. ‘Just as poor Gildersleeve was.’
Notes from a website called British History Online revealed that Park House had been in place as early as 1336 and may have been renamed The Lodge about 1400. Most of it was dismantled during Queen Elizabeth’s reign.
‘Pieces may have been preserved,’ Halliwell said, ‘particularly anything associated with Chaucer himself.’
‘All of this is tenuous, to say the least,’ Poke said.
Diamond nodded. ‘But at the end of the day, I have a chunk of masonry in my office that no one disputes is the Wife of Bath. And she must have come from somewhere.’
With the computer and other items from Professor Gildersleeve’s office stacked into the boot of Halliwell’s car, the two detectives drove home. They agreed on one thing: Dr. Poke was a jealous man as well as a pompous twit.
‘He thought he should have been the professor,’ Halliwell said.
‘With Gildersleeve dead, he may get his wish,’ Diamond said. ‘But in case you’re about to say it gives him a motive for murder, let’s keep a grip on what really happened. The professor was shot because he tried to take on the hold-up men. Everyone who was there agrees on that. The mystery is why he was so possessive about the Wife of Bath.’
‘And who hired the robbers.’
‘Exactly. I can’t picture Dr. Poke staging a hold-up himself, even if he thought it would upset his rival to this extent.’
‘He’d be obvious, with a voice like his, and that hair.’
‘They were wearing balaclavas, remember.’
‘Well, he isn’t the gun-toting type,’ Halliwell said.
‘Agreed. But I didn’t ask him where he was on the day of the auction. Slipped up, there.’
‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that, guv.’
‘One thing he said gave me a bit of a turn. About the curse of the Wife of Bath. I’m sharing an office with her.’
‘He was on about Tutankhamun’s curse, the old story about people dying during the excavations, supposedly because they disturbed the tomb. Load of balls dreamed up to sell newspapers.’
They checked in at the incident room at the end of the afternoon and found an email printout from the CSI team. Diamond read it, frowning, and jerked back in disbelief.
‘Something the matter?’ Halliwell asked.
He handed the paper across. ‘The bullet that killed the professor was more than fifty years old. It was a thirty-eight calibre designed to be used with a Webley Mark IV revolver.’
Halliwell looked it through. ‘That’s a name from the past. Webley. The army were using them as standard sidearms in the war.’
‘Both wars.’
‘Long time ago. It says here the Mark IV remained in service until 1963.’
‘When sexual intercourse began.’
From Halliwell’s dropjaw reaction, it was obvious he missed the reference.
In a lofty tone, Diamond said, ‘The Larkin poem. Do I have to quote the lines? And you thought I was just a Chaucer expert.’
Halliwell was lost for words.
‘Don’t look like that. Let’s stay with guns. You’re going to ask me how they can tell it was fired from a Webley and not some other weapon.’
Now Halliwell grinned. ‘No I’m not. It’s the striations.’
Diamond was impressed. He knew the basics, but he had never bothered much with the terminology.
‘The grooves on the side of the bullet,’ Halliwell went on. ‘All the makes have their own pattern so that when the bullet passes through the barrel it gets marked. You’ll find six grooves when it was fired from a Colt and seven with a Webley. A Colt has a left-hand twist and a Webley a right. Now, a BrowningБ’
‘Enough said,’ Diamond interrupted the lecture. ‘It was a Webley. If ballistics are convinced, so am I. My point was that this is an out-of-date weapon.’
Halliwell nodded. ‘But it doesn’t have to be the latest model. If it works, it can kill. Obviously this one did. In a way it’s fitting that an obsolete firearm was used at an antiques auction. At least it wasn’t a duelling pistol.’
‘Does it tell us anything about the hitmen?’
‘Only that they didn’t have state-of-the-art guns.’
‘Cut-price hitmen.’
‘They messed up badly, that’s true.’
‘The email goes on about making a check of the records. It’s not going to be a licensed gun, is it?’
‘Definitely not,’ Halliwell said. ‘But there are still plenty of old Webleys knocking around. Thousands of servicemen never handed them in. I expect what they mean is that they’re comparing the, um’ — pause for a smile — ‘striations with ammunition recovered from other firearms incidents. We may discover the gun was fired in some other raid.’
‘We could use some help like that. But let’s not get our hopes up. It may have been sitting in someone’s sock drawer since 1963.’
7
One of the items they had brought back in Halliwell’s car was John Gildersleeve’s book, Chaucer: The Bawdy Tales. Diamond took it home to read. A spot of bawdiness would go down well, and he might get a clue as to why the Wife of Bath was worth at least twenty-four grand to the professor. His chance to impress the academic world? Or was the man obsessed, in thrall to one of Chaucer’s best known creations? As a policeman who had seen a lot in his time, Diamond couldn’t accept that the weather-beaten piece of stone had anything remarkable about it. He wasn’t impressed. The experience of being evicted from his own office had left him only with negative thoughts, a suspicion that this thing was trouble. If nothing else, the book ought to act as a corrective.
In his small house in Weston, with Raffles perched on the arm of the chair — and purring — he turned to the chapter entitled ‘As Help Me God, I Was a Lusty Oon: The Much-Married Wife of Bath.’ It was not the hot stuff he expected. It opened with a statement that this would be a ‘deconstructive study of certain assumptions, avoiding the twin snares of reductivity and indeterminacy.’ Even Raffles turned his head away in disappointment. Two pages in, Raffles was yawning. Diamond dropped the book on the floor and reached for the modern English version of The Canterbury Tales Paloma had given him.