Free The Stone Wife by Peter Lovesey Page A

ask me how they can tell it was fired from a Webley and not some other weapon.”
    Now Halliwell grinned. “No I’m not. It’s the striations.”
    Diamond was impressed. He knew the basics, but he had never bothered much with the terminology.
    “The grooves on the side of the bullet,” Halliwell went on. “All the makes have their own pattern so that when the bullet passes through the barrel it gets marked. You’ll find six grooves when it was fired from a Colt and seven with a Webley. A Colt has a left-hand twist and a Webley a right. Now, a Browning—”
    “Enough said,” Diamond interrupted the lecture. “It wasa Webley. If ballistics are convinced, so am I. My point was that this is an out-of-date weapon.”
    Halliwell nodded. “But it doesn’t have to be the latest model. If it works, it can kill. Obviously this one did. In a way it’s fitting that an obsolete firearm was used at an antiques auction. At least it wasn’t a duelling pistol.”
    “Does it tell us anything about the hitmen?”
    “Only that they didn’t have state-of-the-art guns.”
    “Cut-price hitmen.”
    “They messed up badly, that’s true.”
    “The email goes on about making a check of the records. It’s not going to be a licensed gun, is it?”
    “Definitely not,” Halliwell said. “But there are still plenty of old Webleys knocking around. Thousands of servicemen never handed them in. I expect what they mean is that they’re comparing the, em’—pause for a smile—’striations with ammunition recovered from other firearms incidents. We may discover the gun was fired in some other raid.”
    “We could use some help like that. But let’s not get our hopes up. It may have been sitting in someone’s sock drawer since 1963.”

7
    One of the items they had brought back in Halliwell’s car was John Gildersleeve’s book, Chaucer: The Bawdy Tales . Diamond took it home to read. A spot of bawdiness would go down well, and he might get a clue as to why the Wife of Bath was worth at least twenty-four grand to the professor. His chance to impress the academic world? Or was the man obsessed, in thrall to one of Chaucer’s best known creations? As a policeman who had seen a lot in his time, Diamond couldn’t accept that the weather-beaten piece of stone had anything remarkable about it. He wasn’t impressed. The experience of being evicted from his own office had left him only with negative thoughts, a suspicion that this thing was trouble. If nothing else, the book ought to act as a corrective.
    In his small house in Weston, with Raffles perched on the arm of the chair—and purring—he turned to the chapter entitled “As Help Me God, I Was a Lusty Oon: The Much-Married Wife of Bath.” It was not the hot stuff he expected. It opened with a statement that this would be a “deconstructive study of certain assumptions, avoiding the twin snares of reductivity and indeterminacy.” Even Raffles turned his head away in disappointment. Two pages in, Raffles was yawning. Diamond dropped the book on the floor and reached for the modern English version of The Canterbury Tales Paloma had given him.
    Generations of schoolchildren had reason to be grateful to Nevill Coghill and now so was Peter Diamond. Here was the Wife in language he could understand and enjoy, with some mild bawdiness thrown in regarding her “chamber of Venus,”the pleasures of love-making and the demands she made in bed. Fair enough, he thought, this isn’t roll-in-the-aisles stuff, but it does the job with style and zip, written in rhyming verse that apparently uses the same metre as the original.
    The General Prologue gave him some background. Alison was a bold-faced, healthy-looking character who queened it over all the other women in her parish, insisting on being first to make the offering in church and furious if anyone challenged her right.
    This he found easy to believe.
    She spun her own clothes and dressed on Sundays in a flowing cloak, red,