The Stone Wife by Peter Lovesey Read Free Book Online

surpassed the cloth-makers of France and made all her own clothes, which were beautifully spun. So she’s a Bathonian by residence and occupation.”
    “You know a lot about this.”
    “I had to, for the costumes. I could tell you more about what she wore than you’ll ever want to know.”
    “Yet you still say Chaucer didn’t live in Bath?”
    “That wouldn’t stop him knowing the place. People like him, in the service of the king, travelled more than you might suppose. He spent time in France and Italy, so Bath wasn’t any distance at all.”
    His thoughts were already moving on. “The carving is a West Country piece, apparently, in the local stone. I wonder if it’s a relic from one of Bath’s medieval buildings.”
    “Could be. There aren’t many left apart from churches.”
    “The carving wouldn’t be from a church. You can’t call the Wife of Bath a religious subject.”
    “She was on a pilgrimage,” Paloma pointed out.
    “True.”
    “A pious woman. Worldly and down-to-earth, but God-fearing.”
    “But she was fiction. Would a church want a piece of carving that wasn’t a Bible story? If it’s fourteenth century, as they seem to think, the church authorities would have to be very open-minded to adopt a character from a modern poem, a fruity one, too.”
    “Put like that, you may be right,” Paloma said. “The carving could have been part of a private dwelling. I don’t know of any in Bath that are old enough. But some fragments of stone from old houses will have survived.”
    “I’m thinking Gildersleeve knew something we don’t, something that ramped up the value.”
    “Maybe he discovered where it came from.”
    “Some old guy in Chilton Polden owned it in the eighteen hundreds, but I don’t think anyone knows its history before that.”
    “Provenance is hugely important in the buying and selling of works of art. And you said the British Museum was bidding, so they must have done some research of their own and decided it was worth a bit.”
    “Yes, I’ll be speaking to them.”
    “And obviously the robbers were also well informed.”
    “Or whoever hired them.”
    Paloma was looking thoughtful. “Have you examined the back and sides of your lump of stone?”
    “What for?”
    “Mortar—to see if there’s any evidence it was once attached to a building.”
    He liked that. “When I’m allowed back in my own office, that’s the first thing I’ll check. I can picture it built in, maybe with other carvings from the poem.”
    “A frieze? But do you know of any other pieces that survived?”
    “None that I’ve heard of. I’m no expert.”
    “You will be before you’re through.”
    He nodded. “I’m already working on it. Do I get that other beer?”
    “In a mo.” She got up. “Or should it be ‘In a mo, sire?’ ”
    “The ‘sire’ sounds good to me.”
    “Let’s have some courtly grovelling, then, and we’ll see.”
    He decided as he opened the can that it was a good thing no one in CID had ever heard Peter Diamond spoken to like that.
    Next morning he made a detour to Weston to feed the cat. Raffles had been his late wife’s cat and always treated him with disdain after being left alone for the night. They say animals aren’t capable of judging people’s conduct, but this old tabby could give him a guilt complex with one look and a flick of the tail. He was relieved to leave the house and drive in to work.
    Manvers Street, the home of Bath police, was definitely “beside Bath,” on the wrong side of the walls. In all his time there, Diamond had never had reason to think about theoriginal layout of the city, but this morning it dawned on him that the Roman heart of the place had once been enclosed by Upper Borough Walls to the north and Lower Borough Walls to the south; street names he’d heard a thousand times without ever realising the significance.
    For all its tawdry appearance, a block of lemon-yellow reconstituted stone masquerading as the real