Free The Vault by Peter Lovesey Page B

charge of this case concerning the dismembered bodies."
    "What are you on about?" Diamond hedged, wondering what was in this for a national Sunday.
    "The bodies in the vault. A couple of hands. A skull. Have you found anything else yet?"
    " 'Dismembered bodies' is laying it on thick."
    "It's only one body? The same victim?"
    " 'Victim' isn't a word I'm using."
    "Why not?"
    "Look, we found some human bones in a cellar, a skull and a pair of hands, as you said. The cellar happens to be built over a churchyard. We believe the skull is several hundred years old. I wouldn't think this has any news value for a paper like yours."
    "Parts of a body under the cellar of the house where Frankenstein was written? You're joking, Mr Diamond. It's going to make front pages all over the world."

nine
    AFTER YEARS OF STEEPING himself in the story, he felt driven, not precisely as Frankenstein had been, nor with the same objective, but just as powerfully. "My Umbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless and almost frantic impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit."
    Driven towards the final killing.
    "The road of excess," wrote the poet, "leads to the palace of wisdom."
    Shortly he would find out.

ten
    CAMDEN CRESCENT, WHERE PEG Redbird arrived to carry out the valuation, is a flawed masterpiece. In 1788, the architect John Eveleigh sought to emulate John Wood's most famous building with a crescent of his own. The position above Hedgemead was arguably superior to the Royal Crescent, with sensational views to the east across the Avon Valley towards Bathwick Hill. The style was to be classical, the concept more ornate than Wood's. Building got under way at each end and the first houses were in place when problems were revealed at the eastern end. The foundation was unsafe. The exposed strata that had appeared to be sound for building had hidden faults, and slippage occurred. Four of the houses had to be abandoned. Poor Eveleigh was committed to the project and obliged to build the rest of his crescent, leaving an unsightly gap like an old fighter's grin, with the extreme eastern house standing alone for many years, mocking his grandiose ambition.
    The rest of the truncated Crescent has survived two centuries of surveyors' reports, and is regarded as tolerably safe and one of the best addresses in Bath. Peg had hopes of some good finds in old Simon Minchendon's home.
    The nephew who opened the door professed to know nothing about old furniture, but Peg was wary. The death of a relative often brings out the worst in people. She was pretty sure he would have his own ideas which items were the gems. Anything he talked up would get a high valuation.
    His name was Ralph Pennycook, he told her, and he had come up from Brighton for the funeral.
    "Some good antique shops there," Peg commented, trying him out.
    "In the Lanes, you mean? I don't bother with all that crap," he said of the corner of Brighton everyone in the trade found irresistible. "If I go into town, I head for the computer shops." True, he looked custom-built for staring at a screen, with a slight curvature of the spine and deep-set brown eyes behind thick plastic lenses. A young man who neglected to look after himself, Peg decided. He was definitely under-nourished. Possibly that was why he was dressed in the black pinstripe jacket that looked like the top of a suit and made an odd combination with his blue corduroy trousers; he needed to wrap himself up, even in this hot summer.
    "I hope you don't mind me asking. Are you the executor?" Peg enquired. These things need to be established at the outset. Private sellers sometimes offer goods that don't belong to them.
    "What gives you that idea?" he said.
    "Well, how exactly ... ?"
    "I'm the lucky bugger who inherited this lot, aren't I? Poor old Si ran out of family. Uncle Tod and Aunt Nell were mentioned in the will, but they snuffed it before he