‘The hairline was uneven. Some kind of scar had stopped it from growing normally.’
‘This is helpful,’ Diamond said. ‘Was there a shape to the scar?’
‘It was roughly circular and concave, like a little crater on the moon, if you follow me. I expect he’d had a carbuncle removed at one time.’
‘How big?’
‘No more than that.’ She made a shape with her thumb and forefinger about the size of a penny. ‘Most people wouldn’t notice, but I have an eye for detail. It’s my business, you see.’
‘Do you remember anything else about him?’
‘I only had the back view.’
‘Try to remember.’
‘Now you’re asking. The hair was dark and straight and starting to go grey, quite long, almost covering his ears, but I could see where the lobes should have been. There weren’t any. I’m always wary of men without lobes. There’s an old superstition that murderers have no ear lobes.’
‘He wasn’t the killer. He didn’t fire the shot,’ Gilbert said.
‘He’s one of the gang, so he’s just as culpable,’ the glass lady said and turned to Diamond for support. ‘Isn’t that so?’
‘We could charge him, yes. What about the others?’
‘I couldn’t see their ears under the balaclavas, could I? They came in wearing them.’
‘I was interested to know if you spotted any other detail.’
She shook her head. ‘As soon as they appeared, I ducked behind that harpsichord over there.’
‘You go to all the sales, you said. Have you ever seen anything like the lump of stone they were after?’
‘Anything and everything,’ she said.
‘Stone objects?’
‘Bird baths, statues, even a headstone once. If it’s old, it has a value and a price. Personally, I only buy glass. It’s prettier and easier to get home. Have you finished with me, because I’d like to pick up my dish and get on the road?’
‘We may contact you later to identify the scar if we make an arrest.’
‘I hope you will, and soon. I’d like to see them locked away for the rest of their undeserving lives.’
She went off in search of the auctioneer. Diamond watched the red and green streaks until they were lost to view behind an oak sideboard. ‘This is shaping up as one of the wackiest cases I’ve been involved in,’ he said to Paul Gilbert. ‘The Wife of Bath. A glass lady. A gunman with a moon crater on the back of his neck. A guy afraid to speak the name of the British Museum. What next?’
4
No one was under any illusion that the three hitmen were Chaucer scholars. Everything pointed to professionals, even though the job had been botched. But finding them wouldn’t be easy. Basically, the only description Diamond had was that the first robber had longish dark hair, a scar on the back of his neck and no ear lobes.
‘This will be tough,’ he warned the team at the first briefing. ‘I don’t need to tell you snouts go silent when the crime is murder. We’ll try. We bloody have to. But we may need a better way.’
‘Crimewatch?’ Paul Gilbert said, ever eager to contribute.
Everyone except Gilbert saw the glint in the boss’s eyes that said Crimewatch was a non-starter, but the youngest, greenest member of CID pressed on. ‘It would make great television, reconstructing the auction.’
‘No question.’
‘It’s a massive audience.’
Diamond was patient with him. ‘But there’s only so much information Joe Public can provide. We interviewed everyone who was there.’
‘All we’d end up with,’ Ingeborg added, ‘would be a list of suspicious characters from other auctions.’
‘A thousand other auctions,’ John Leaman said.
‘A few hundred, anyway,’ Ingeborg said.
Gilbert’s shoulders sank. ‘It was only a thought.’
‘Don’t take it personally,’ Diamond said. ‘I’m always open to suggestions.’
A few looks were exchanged. Everyone else in the team had been cut to shreds at some point in the past for coming up with a half-baked idea.
‘The way I look at it,’ Leaman said, ‘we don’t just want to find the three who held up the auction. We’re looking for the guy who hired them.’
‘Too right we are.’
‘Whoever he is,’ Keith Halliwell said, ‘he’s not a happy bunny.’
Gilbert returned to the fray like a boxer bouncing off the ropes. ‘What was he hoping to get out of it? Even if the hold-up had succeeded, all he’d end up with would be a lump of stone.’
‘An antique lump of stone,’ Ingeborg said in a measured, bored voice, ‘linked to one of the most famous poems in the language and valued at over twenty grand by the British Museum.’
Everyone except Gilbert felt the force of the putdown.
John Leaman repeated his mantra: ‘We need to find the guy behind all this.’
‘Agreed,’ Diamond said. ‘So who would have an interest in acquiring a carving of the Wife of Bath?’
‘Another museum?’ Gilbert said.
‘Get real,’ Halliwell said. ‘Museums don’t hire armed robbers.’
‘Some nutty professor, then.’
‘Another? We already have one and he’s dead.’
‘Well, it has to be some weirdo.’
‘There’s a question that always comes up when a well-known work of art is stolen, and we need to ask it, too,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Why do they do it?’
‘To sell on to a third party?’ Halliwell said.
‘Or demand a ransom?’ Leaman said.
‘An insurance scam?’ Gilbert said.
‘Was the stone insured? I doubt it,’ Leaman said.
‘Never mind,’ Diamond said. ‘This is good. Brainstorming. Keep it rolling.’
‘The best scheme I ever heard of was the Mona Lisa theft from the Louvre,’ Leaman said.
Gilbert screwed up his face. ‘Is this a joke?’
‘No. It’s a fact.’
‘When was this?’
‘About a hundred years ago,’ Ingeborg said. ‘It couldn’t happen these days.’
‘It was still the cleverest art scam there’s ever been,’ Leaman said. ‘The main thief was an Italian glazier who helped construct the protective glass box it was housed in, so he knew exactly how to beat the security. This heist was three years in the planning. They stole other works from the Louvre before they went for the big one. The glazier went in with two accomplices dressed in workmen’s clothes on a day the gallery was closed for cleaning, hid in a storeroom and walked out next morning with the painting.’
Ingeborg shrugged. ‘The cleverest ever? I dispute that. Anyway, it wouldn’t be possible in the twenty-first century with modern security.’
‘But do you know the motive?’ Leaman said. ‘That was the brilliant part.’
‘Give it to us, then,’ Ingeborg said in a bored voice, well used to being trumped by the team know-all.
‘The whole thing was masterminded by a crook called Valfierno who’d worked out this method. He’d used it before in Argentina and Mexico. He would hire an insider — in this case, the glazier — to steal the original. News of the theft would get into the papers. Then — this is the brilliant part — he would sell copies to rich collectors who believed they were buying the real thing. They were clever forgeries painted by his accomplice, a skilful artist called Chaudron. In the two years the Leonardo was missing, Valfierno sold six Mona Lisa forgeries to rich American collectors at three hundred thousand dollars a go. Big money in 1911. The fall guys each believed they secretly owned the most famous painting in the world.’
‘How was it detected?’ Gilbert asked.
‘All this time the glazier had kept the original rolled up under his bed. Stupidly he tried to cash in by offering it to an art dealer in Florence. He was caught and jailed and the painting was returned to the Louvre, putting an end to Valfierno’s clever scam. They could have gone on indefinitely selling fake Mona Lisas to rich mugs.’