The Vault by Peter Lovesey Read Free Book Online

before the owner of the hand was born. You don't want me on this job. You want an anthropologist."
    A DAY as discouraging as this should have ended with a couple of beers. Instead, he found himself in the Victoria Gallery looking at a carafe of water. He was seated at a long table between the Head of CID Operations, John Wigfull, and a woman with a wheezy chest. It was five to seven and the meeting of the PCCG was shortly to begin.
    Diamond casually asked Wigfull, "Have you, em, had an invitation from Georgina?"
    "Georgina?"
    "Dallymore."
    "The new ACC." Wigfull blinked nervously several times. "No. Have you?"
    "I expect she's doing it alphabetically," Diamond said. "It's an 'At Home'. Thursday. I suppose I'll turn up."
    An extraordinary stillness came over Wigfull.
    Diamond said, "I won't have any evenings to myself at this rate."
    Eventually Wigfull managed to think of a comeback. "Heard about your skull."
    "Oh, yes?"
    "Couldn't they estimate the time of death, then?"
    "I knew it was old."
    "But not prehistoric?"
    "Prehistoric, my arse."
    "How old is it, then?"
    "Medieval, Middleton says."
    "Oh—a mere five hundred years or so?"
    Diamond turned his back and introduced himself to the wheezing woman. She said she was from Victim Support and he told her she couldn't have chosen a more suitable person to sit beside. She eyed him warily.
    The meeting got under way. As the senior policeman present, he was forced to defend the latest crime figures. Violent crime was on the increase, and Councillor Sturr, across the table, wanted an explanation. "I'm a forthright man, Superintendent, and I don't mind telling you these figures are deplorable. We employ you to keep our streets safe, and look at the result. It's getting steadily worse."
    Diamond was tempted to give the forthright man a forthright riposte, but this was not the occasion. "If you're worried about the streets, Councillor," he said in as measured a way as he could at the end of a trying day, "you need not be. Most of this increase is domestic violence."
    "Is that supposed to be good news?"
    "It's my answer to your concern about our streets. They're relatively safe."
    "Our homes aren't."
    "They never were. Someone in your family is more likely to attack you than a stranger."
    "What a world we live in now."
    "The figures are rising because people are reporting it more, thanks to the better climate of opinion."
    The last phrase was totally misunderstood by one of the delegates, who interrupted to say he was sure Mr Diamond was right about global warming. He had noticed riots always happened on hot summer nights.
    The aptly-named Councillor Sturr returned to the attack. The name was familiar; he was a millionaire who had made his money out of stone-cleaning, washing the fronts of old buildings, a profitable business in Bath. He was probably still under forty, slim, in a tailored grey suit, with brown eyes that missed nothing, and dark hair slicked back. He was always in the local press, giving away the prizes at flower shows and school speech days. This combative stuff was another side to the man. "So what are you saying, Mr Diamond? That this increase is down to people attacking each other in the privacy of their own homes?"
    "Not entirely, but broadly, it's true."
    "Weasel words, Superintendent."
    "Yours, sir, or mine?"
    Diamond heard Wigfull's sharp intake of breath.
    The Councillor bulldozed some more. "Look here, I was brought up in Bath. I know this city as well as anyone sitting around this table, and I tell you it's turned into a dangerous place. What with drugs and beggars and barmy people who ought to be locked up, it's no wonder these figures are so shocking. When I was a boy it was safe for kids to go out to play on a warm evening like this. Now, I think twice about going out myself."
    Diamond nodded, as if to confirm the dismal truth. "You're speaking of the nineteen-sixties, I would guess."
    "I was born in 1963, the year sexual intercourse began, according to