The Stone Wife

Just before the curtains moved and put the coffin out of sight, he scribbled G2G on the order of service and showed it to Leaman, who of course knew all about texting, but wasn’t amused.

A footnote invited everyone to a reception afterwards at the Griffin, a pub-restaurant close to Caversham bridge. There, sure enough, Dr. Poke’s shock of red hair was much in evidence as he sashayed from the vice chancellor’s group to the registrar’s to the dean’s.

‘Keep him in your sights,’ Diamond told Leaman. ‘When he’s finished sucking up, I want a word with him.’

He also wanted a word with Monica, but it was she who found him — courtesy, no doubt, of the suit. He didn’t get the kiss she was giving most people, but he was warmly received. ‘How kind of you to come, detective superintendent. I’ve been telling people you’re close to making an arrest and I hope it’s true. Living with this uncertainty is a trial.’

‘I wouldn’t say I’m close, ma’am, but I’m working on it.’

‘Did you catch up with my former husband?’

‘Bernie Wefers? Yes. In Marlborough the other day.’

‘I expect he denies everything.’

‘He did tell me something I didn’t know and I’m wondering if it’s true. Can we, em, speak somewhere more private? I notice there’s a patio nobody seems to have populated yet.’

She followed him outside, accepting sympathetic kisses on the way from various friends. They had the patio to themselves. ‘This is heated for meals in the evenings,’ she said. ‘I used to come here with John, bless him. Shall we sit down? These heels are murder.’

The chance of being interrupted out here was less likely, especially if they were seated and in conversation.

Diamond cleared his throat. ‘I’d better come straight to the point.’

‘Bernie told you about my little fling with Archie Poke,’ Monica cut in. ‘That was a long time ago and has no bearing on your investigation.’

‘Why didn’t I hear it from you, ma’am?’

‘Heaven help us, when we met in Hedgemead Park, you were a total stranger. I wasn’t going to titillate you with lurid details of my sex life.’

‘You spoke about Dr. Poke as a rival of your husband with no chance of becoming professor while he was alive.’

‘It’s true. Didn’t you see him in there just now, schmoozing the vice chancellor?’

‘Your relationship with him ended when you left the group called the Diphthongs, is that right?’

‘Emphatically. I wouldn’t spend another minute with the man who ratted to my husband,’ she said with such force that the jet beads bounced with each syllable.

‘But it’s possible he still carried a torch for you.’

‘He had a funny way of showing it.’

‘What I’m getting at is that he may have taken it badly when you started seeing his rival, the professor.’

She looked down thoughtfully and tapped her fingertips on the table. ‘Archie never said a word of reproach to me — and if he had, I would have had his guts for garters. I don’t know what goes on inside that calculating head of his, so I won’t say it’s impossible, but I saw no sign of it. Speaking for myself, we were finished the day he betrayed me to Bernie.’

‘Can you think of anyone else your husband had reason to fear?’

‘Apart from Bernie and Archie?’ The beads were exercised again, laterally.

Recalling Paloma’s tongue-in-cheek theory that Monica herself hired the gunmen to seize the carving when she heard the British Museum was bidding, he asked, ‘Did you know in advance that there was so much interest in the auction?’

‘I heard about it constantly from John. He knew as soon as the catalogue went out that Chaucer scholars across the world would put two and two together. He was extremely nervous, losing sleep over it. I promised him I’d underwrite whatever bid he had to make.’

‘But did he know he was up against the British Museum?’

‘I expect so. I imagine even they had an upper limit.’

‘Did you discuss what it was worth with him?’

‘No. He simply had to possess it. You have to remember the background to this, the crushing disappointment of the dig at the Chaucer house in Somerset in two-thousand when nothing except a few worthless shards turned up. John was a broken man. He’d staked his career on finding some proof that Geoffrey Chaucer lived there. So when the Wife of Bath piece came up for sale and he realised its provenance, he felt it was fated to be his, a sort of vindication. He planned to publish papers and probably a book.’

‘It seems there was a dig in early Victorian times that cleaned out the site. The stone was probably excavated then.’

‘I’ve heard something of the sort. John didn’t ever find out about that, certainly not in two-thousand.’

‘It was in a local newspaper archive. These days plenty of them are digitised. All you have to do is put the words “Chaucer” and “excavation” into the search engine and it takes you straight to the right paper.’