‘Topped him, for sure.’ He passed his fingertips along the chipped surface. ‘It’s not even in good condition.’
‘It’s antique,’ Ingeborg said and added before realising he wasn’t being serious, ‘There are going to be signs of wear.’
‘As I say when I look in my shaving mirror each morning.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Why would anyone want such a thing? It’s not decorative. Would you give it house room?’
‘Speaking personally, no, but people were bidding good money for it.’
‘Did you find out how much?’
‘Twenty-four thousand and rising.’
‘Twenty-four grand?’ Diamond said on a high note that startled the CSI team behind him. ‘For this?’
The object in front of them, standing on a wooden dolly, was a slab of carved stone about one metre in length, half a metre wide and as thick as a mattress. Whoever had lifted it on was probably nursing a back strain.
‘Can you make out what it is?’
‘Isn’t it supposed to be someone on horseback?’ Ingeborg said.
‘Looks to me like a bunch of bananas.’
The face of the slab had been worked by a sculptor at some time in the remote past and most of the detail had long since been eroded. Thanks to the build-up of centuries of grime in the chiselled areas you could conceivably make out the outline of a horse and rider. If so, the horse had thick legs, which was no bad thing. Either the sculptor’s sense of proportion was faulty or the person in the saddle was an XXL.
‘Does the writing give any clues?’ Diamond asked.
Along the base was some damaged lettering: ‘N AMB RE ES Y SHE SAT.’
Ingeborg shook her head. ‘The last two words are all I can make out. I suppose they tell us the rider is female.’
He eyed the carving again. ‘You could have fooled me.’
‘The auction catalogue may throw some light. There must be some about.’
He nodded. ‘See if you can find one while I have a word with the pathologist.’
Bertram Sealy in his blue zip-suit was squatting in a mass of broken china beside the body and speaking into an audio recorder. He put up his hand as Diamond approached. ‘Don’t come any closer with your big feet.’
Diamond let go of the do-not-cross tape as if he had never intended to creep under it. ‘I’m not new to this. First impressions?’
‘No great loss,’ the pathologist said.
There was a pause. ‘That’s callous even by your standards.’
‘Bits of a tea service, cheap 1950s willow pattern. The table may take some repairing, but they’re clever, these restorers. It will take something off the value, even so.’
There is an unwritten law that the professionals hide their emotions, and black humour often comes to the rescue. Sealy’s laborious efforts always put an extra strain on his dealings with Diamond. ‘I was asking about the victim.’
‘Him? He’s beyond repair.’
‘I can see that. What’s your opinion?’
‘I’m not a ballistics man.’
‘And you’re not here because a few cups and saucers got broken.’
‘Single shot to the abdomen seems to have killed him. The witnesses say he died in a short time, so it must have hit a vital organ. You don’t expect one bullet to the body to kill someone outright. In the skull, yes. In the belly, hardly ever.’
‘Bad luck, then?’
‘Not at all,’ Sealy said. ‘I just told you it was quick. Could have been slow and painful. That’s what I would call bad luck.’
Diamond should have saved his breath. Whatever was said to Sealy got corrected. A sure sign of insecurity.
‘You’re going to tell me you’ll find out more when you open him up.’
‘And you can have a ringside seat.’
Diamond didn’t answer. He’d long ago stopped attending autopsies.
‘Or will you send your deputy as usual?’ Sealy added with a sly smile.
‘There are more important matters to attend to in a murder enquiry,’ Diamond said with dignity. ‘I’m better employed in the incident room than watching you pick over the entrails.’ With that, he turned away to see where Ingeborg was.
She was waving the auction catalogue as she approached. ‘Found it, guv. Lot 129. Relief sculpture, medieval, depicting a bunch of bananas.’
The joke wouldn’t have been worthy of Sealy.
‘Pull the other one, Ingeborg.’
‘What it really says is that it’s a figure on horseback believed to be the Wife of Bath.’
‘You’re serious now?’
‘Chaucer.’
He didn’t respond. Memories from way back stirred in his brain, of struggling through a dog-eared school textbook much defaced by notes of uncertain reliability from previous users. Like most of his classmates, he’d survived with the secret aid the English master turned a blind eye to, a translation into modern verse even an eleven-year-old could understand.
Ingeborg took his silence for ignorance. ‘The Canterbury Tales.’
‘Remarkable as it may seem to you, I once went to grammar school and passed an exam on Chaucer,’ Diamond said. ‘Does it tell us any more?’
She read from the catalogue: ‘The inscription is damaged, but is almost certainly line 469 of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales: “Upon an amblere esily she sat.” What’s an amblere?’
He sniffed and looked away. ‘Can’t remember everything I was taught.’
She stooped to examine the stone. ‘The words do seem to fit. If it’s a quote from the poem, then I begin to understand the interest.’ She read some more from the catalogue: ‘Formerly in the collection of William Stradling of Chilton Priory, Somerset antiquarian.’
‘A medieval carving of the Wife of Bath must be a rarity,’ he said. ‘I still can’t see why someone had to be killed for it.’
‘Especially as the killers left it behind,’ Ingeborg said.
‘Botched job. They panicked when the shot was fired. The whole idea of hijacking a block of stone strikes me as daft.’
‘It’s not any old block of stone, guv.’
‘But you can’t pick it up and run with it.’
‘It was on wheels,’ Ingeborg said, trying to be patient with him. ‘If they’d succeeded, we might have said they were master criminals. It was audacious. It involved planning — the masks, the firearms and the van. If there was any security, they cracked it. No one was prepared for three masked men interrupting the auction.’
‘No one was prepared for a fatal shooting. It was never in the script. The victim’s actions weren’t predictable.’
She nodded. ‘As you say, he must have got shot because he created a moment of panic. Everyone was supposed to respect the guns and let the robbers get away. I would have. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Every time,’ Diamond said, looking down at the stone, ‘but then I can’t think why I’d want to own this. He must have wanted it badly. We need to discover what made it such a desired object.’
‘I’ve bought things at auctions,’ Ingeborg said. ‘The pressure builds, even at the low levels I was involved in. When the bidding is in the thousands it must be heartbreaking to see a bunch of crooks about to walk off with the prize.’
‘What were you buying?’
Ingeborg reddened. ‘Shoes. Designer shoes.’
Diamond decided to speak to the auctioneer, whose name was on a card still displayed on the front of the rostrum: Mr. Denis Doggart. He’d been pointed out when they arrived, a stocky figure in a red corduroy jacket doing his best to cope with the crowd outside the entrance. After their contact details had been taken by the police the bidders had all been asked to quit the building. They weren’t going far. Most were dealers who had no intention of leaving Bath without their booty.