The Stone Wife

‘It had been around a long time, hadn’t it? The auctioneers said it was in someone else’s collection before the museum acquired it.’

‘William Stradling of Chilton Polden. John told me all about that. Old Stradling was a magpie who amassed this huge collection and built a folly to house it. There’s no doubt that the carving was one of his pieces and he may have connected it with Chaucer, but nobody else did until recent times. It was catalogued as a much eroded medieval figure on horseback with fragments of lettering along the base — or some such. When the Stradling collection was dispersed after his death it ended up in a small museum at Bridgwater and wasn’t considered well enough preserved to display. So it was put into storage for a hundred and fifty years.’

‘She won’t have enjoyed that.’

A gleam of recognition shone from Monica Gildersleeve’s eyes. ‘You’re talking just like he did — as if she’s a real person. I wasn’t going to say this in case you thought him odd, but he said he was going to rescue her at the auction.’ She smiled for the first time. ‘In fact, he went on so much about her that I was starting to wonder if he preferred her to me.’

Diamond grinned, too, encouraged that other people had been lured into treating the carving as more than just a slab of limestone. ‘Have you seen her? She’s seven hundred years old and shows it.’

‘I’ve seen the picture in the catalogue.’

‘She’s in my office now, an item of evidence. She won’t leave until justice is done.’

‘I approve of that.’ She looked away at the view across the trees towards the city.

‘When we spoke on the phone, you said there were things you wanted to tell me,’ he prompted her. ‘Things that worry you.’

‘It’s personal,’ she said, continuing to stare into the distance.

He waited.

She seemed to need to psych herself up. ‘I don’t even know if I should be telling you this, but it keeps me awake at nights. My ex-husband, Bernie, is not a forgiving man. He was extremely angry when he found out about my affair with John. I don’t mind admitting I was unfaithful for two years before he found out, so I was in the wrong. Bernie was away from home a lot on business. He’s a property developer, a very successful one, and also very hard-working. He’d be away on projects for days on end. I met John at a literary lunch. Do you want to hear this?’

‘If you think it makes a difference, of course,’ Diamond said.

‘It isn’t easy, but I’ve said it all to lawyers and the mediator, so I suppose I can say it to you. Well, we happened to be seated next to each other on the top table and I expressed interest in John’s field of study. I read English myself at Oxford and it was wonderful talking to him. It brought back golden memories of my student days. Bernie had been away on some development project for over a week and I was feeling sorry for myself. On the face of things, I was well looked after — a rich bitch, my sister called me once before this happened. The best of clothes, my own sports car and of course a show house to live in. But none of that can compensate for being ignored. John made me feel alive again. We went to the cinema a couple of times and then he took me for a meal and ended up in my bed. The old, old story. You’ll have heard it all before.’