The Vault Read Online Free Page A

head.
    "Plenty of people would be interested."
    "It would increase the tourism significantly," said Anne-Lise.
    "Quite possibly."
    "So will you be visiting the Mayor of Bath to suggest it?" asked Anne-Lise.
    Donna said, "Anne-Lise, my dear, don't put ideas in his head. I don't want my entire trip taken over by Frankenstein."
    "Let's go in to dinner, shall we?" said Joe.
    "The only good suggestion I heard from you all day," said Donna.

five
    TWO DAYS ON, AND there were compensations for Peter Diamond. The Pump Room had definite advantages over the police canteen as an eating place. This room with its tall windows and Corinthian columns, its chandelier and musicians' gallery, was surely one of the finest in Europe. Kate, the winsome, long-legged, black-stockinged waitress Diamond had cultivated as an ally from the beginning, saw that he got the pick of the menu. The trio played I'm a Stranger in Paradise and Keith Halliwell was too over-awed to step inside and interrupt the idyll.
    Down in the vault, the working party was under instructions from Diamond not to rush the job. "We're in no hurry, lads. This poor sod has been lying under the floor for up to twenty years. A week or two more will make no difference."
    The complexity of the case was underlined when the list of building contracts was presented to Diamond.
    "As many as this?"
    "You asked for them all, and that's what you've got," said boss-man with a smirk.
    "Half of these must have gone out of business by now."His finger moved up the page. "Why so many here?"
    "That would have been prior to the opening of the extension. Much of the temple precinct was uncovered then."
    "In nineteen-eighty-two to three?"
    "And for quite a bit before. What you're looking at now is a record of the construction work, not the excavation. We opened to the public at Easter, 1983. Substantial electrical and building work had to be carried out in the weeks before."
    "Making it accessible?"
    "Yes. And safe. Proper walkways and so forth."
    "You can see the way my mind is working. The vault where the bones were found is on the same side."
    He took the lists back to Manvers Street and gave Halliwell the task of calling contractors to extract lists of their workforces.
    "Just as long as you don't expect a miracle, sir," Halliwell said. "At this distance in time ..."
    "I know, Keith, it's a pain and I'm a slave-driver."
    "You're assuming that whoever buried the hand in the vault was a builder?"
    "I can't think of anyone else with a reason for doing cement work down there."
    "So do you think the victim was working on the site as well?"
    "We'll see what we uncover."
    "Have they found anything else?"
    "Not yet."
    Halliwell screwed up his face. "Wasn't the hand attached to the rest of the body ?"
    "Apparently not."
    A CALL from the front desk. "Sir, someone wants to speak to you about the Roman Bath inquiry."
    "To me personally?"
    "Yes."
    "Who is he?"
    "She. She, em, says you may remember her. A Miss Smith."
    Amusement in the voice is easy to detect on the phone. "Are you having me on?"
    "Ingeborg Smith."
    "Ah." An image snapped into place. A crowded room. Microphones heaped in front of him like horse-droppings. The press conference he'd called last autumn at a difficult stage in the Bloodhounds inquiry. And this pale-faced young woman with a stud in her nose—or was it a ring?—hitting him with a volley of penetrating questions.
    "I do remember now," he told them downstairs. "She's press. A freelance." His first instinct was to duck this. Then he remembered the tenacious way Ingeborg Smith had questioned him in front of the press corps, just this side of civility. It might not be wise to give her the elbow.
    He- saw her in an interview room downstairs. "I hope you have something amazing to impart, Miss Smith," he remarked as he walked in. "It's a busy old week."
    "I'm glad to hear it," she said. The nose decoration was a silver ring through the right nostril. Since the last time another had been added