The Stone Wife (8 page)

Diamond ignored him and spoke to Halliwell. “How far south of Bridgwater?”

“Only two or three miles. Strange that the
Wife of Bath
should end up in the museum there.”

“Correction,” Diamond said. “She ended up in my office.”

“There’s something else about the place,” Poke said, pressing a hand to his forehead. “Something far more interesting. It’ll come to me presently.”

“Petherton Park?”

“North Petherton. I’m trying to think. It has associations with Anglo-Saxon studies. Would it be the church, I wonder?
No, I have it now.” He clasped his hands in triumph. “North Petherton is where one of the great Anglo-Saxon treasures was found—the Alfred Jewel, a spectacular piece from the ninth century, unearthed by a ploughman over three hundred years ago, filigreed gold enclosing a highly polished piece of clear rock crystal, now in the Ashmolean at Oxford. The lettering round the side provides evidence that it was made for King Alfred.”

“All I know about Alfred is that he burnt the cakes.”

Dr. Poke’s tongue clicked in contempt. “Supposedly at Athelney, where he took refuge from the Vikings. Such stories must be treated with reserve. However, Athelney is a mere four miles from North Petherton. This is my period. I can tell you a lot about Alfred.”

“We’ll pass on that, unless it ties in with Chaucer,” Diamond said.

“Hardly. Chaucer came five hundred years later.”

Halliwell spoke up. “Well, what if the jewel was presented to Chaucer in thanks for all the services he performed for the king? It may have been a gift from the royal family.”

“And then he loses the thing?” Diamond said. “Unlikely. I think we can safely forget about the Alfred Jewel. I’m interested in the link with Chaucer. It’s safe to say Professor Gildersleeve thought there was good evidence, even if he failed to find it.”

“We can make a search online,” Halliwell said.

Seated in front of the computer, Diamond could hardly refuse. Never comfortable with technology, he grasped the mouse and stared at the screen.

Halliwell said, “It’s one of the icons at the bottom.”

“I know, I know.” He found the Google icon and typed in
PETHERTON PARK
.

“Put in Chaucer’s name while you’re at it,” Dr. Poke said. “See what you get.”

Up came a welter of results. The one that caught Diamond’s attention was towards the bottom of the screen. In bold blue letters:
CHAUCER CLOSE, NORTH PETHERTON
.

“Promising.”

The other two moved to his side to look. He pointed to the name and immediately the list of websites was replaced by an estate agent’s website with a list of houses.

“How did that happen?”

“It’s touch-sensitive,” Poke said.

“You see?” Halliwell touched the screen and restored the list of hits. “But this is good news. North Petherton must be the right place.”

“I wouldn’t get too excited. We’ve got a Chaucer Close in Reading,” Poke said.

“There’s a Chaucer Road in Bath,” Diamond said.

Halliwell leaned over Diamond and brought up a map that showed the location of North Petherton. “Well, I wasn’t wrong about where it is, just down the road from Bridgwater.”

“I saw another hit mentioning Petherton Park,” Diamond said.

They returned to it and Halliwell was proved correct. Petherton Park, North Petherton, was, indeed, a one-time forest, and Geoffrey Chaucer had been the deputy forester from 1391. After his death in 1400, his son, Thomas, had succeeded him with the title of forester and had lived in the Park House in Park House Field, currently known as Parker’s Field.

“This is getting better,” Diamond said. “We have a house.” He was starting to enjoy the hunt for evidence. He could even see some pleasure in using the internet.

“It tells us the son lived there,” Poke said, “not necessarily the father.”

“But we now know that being the forester was more than—what was your word?”

“A sinecure.”

“Yes, Thomas Chaucer must have taken the job seriously, so why shouldn’t his father have lived in Petherton Park before him? Nothing says he did, but nothing says he didn’t. And if there was a house, it wouldn’t be remarkable if somewhere in the structure they commemorated
The Canterbury Tales
with a piece of sculpture. Does Park House still exist?”

“You’re an optimist,” Poke said. “Just as poor Gildersleeve was.”

Notes from a website called British History Online revealed that Park House had been in place as early as 1336 and may have been renamed The Lodge about 1400. Most of it was dismantled during Queen Elizabeth’s reign.

“Pieces may have been preserved,” Halliwell said, “particularly anything associated with Chaucer himself.”

“All of this is tenuous, to say the least,” Poke said.

Diamond nodded. “But at the end of the day, I have a chunk of masonry in my office that no one disputes is the
Wife of Bath
. And she must have come from somewhere.”

With the computer and other items from Professor Gildersleeve’s office stacked into the boot of Halliwell’s car, the two detectives drove home. They agreed on one thing: Dr. Poke was a jealous man as well as a pompous twit.

“He thought he should have been the professor,” Halliwell said.

“With Gildersleeve dead, he may get his wish,” Diamond said. “But in case you’re about to say it gives him a motive for murder, let’s keep a grip on what really happened. The professor was shot because he tried to take on the hold-up men. Everyone who was there agrees on that. The mystery is why he was so possessive about the
Wife of Bath
.”

“And who hired the robbers.”

“Exactly. I can’t picture Dr. Poke staging a hold-up himself, even if he thought it would upset his rival to this extent.”

“He’d be obvious, with a voice like his, and that hair.”

“They were wearing balaclavas, remember.”

“Well, he isn’t the gun-toting type,” Halliwell said.

“Agreed. But I didn’t ask him where he was on the day of the auction. Slipped up, there.”

“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that, guv.”

“One thing he said gave me a bit of a turn. About the curse of the
Wife of Bath
. I’m sharing an office with her.”

“He was on about Tutankhamun’s curse, the old story about
people dying during the excavations, supposedly because they disturbed the tomb. Load of balls dreamed up to sell newspapers.”

They checked in at the incident room at the end of the afternoon and found an email printout from the CSI team. Diamond read it, frowning, and jerked back in disbelief.

“Something the matter?” Halliwell asked.

He handed the paper across. “The bullet that killed the professor was more than fifty years old. It was a thirty-eight calibre designed to be used with a Webley Mark IV revolver.”

Halliwell looked it through. “That’s a name from the past. Webley. The army were using them as standard sidearms in the war.”

“Both wars.”

“Long time ago. It says here the Mark IV remained in service until 1963.”

“When sexual intercourse began.”

From Halliwell’s dropjaw reaction, it was obvious he missed the reference.

In a lofty tone, Diamond said, “The Larkin poem. Do I have to quote the lines? And you thought I was just a Chaucer expert.”

Halliwell was lost for words.

“Don’t look like that. Let’s stay with guns. You’re going to 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 was
a 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, tight-gartered stockings and tightly laced shoes, and a hat as large as a shield and weighing as much as ten pounds. He could understand Paloma’s delight in dressing an actress like that. Upon her amblere—which he discovered was an ambling horse—the wife was a much-travelled pilgrim. Impressively for a fourteenth century woman, she’d been to Jerusalem three times and other religious sites in France and Italy. She was chatty and quick to laugh, displaying a gap in her teeth which was said to be a sure sign of a lustful nature.

Cue the five husbands.

He turned to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue for her own account—and what an extraordinary piece of self-justification it was, running to thousands of words. After wading through all the Biblical arguments for serial marriage (King Solomon’s thousand wives among them), he learned that three of the husbands had been good, the others bad. The first three—the good ones—were rich and old, but were given a hard time once they married her, required to be energetic lovers and regularly scolded and put in the wrong, accused of being drunk and unfaithful, ‘innocent as they were’. Presumably they died of exhaustion.

Husband number four, a younger man, made the mistake of having a mistress. The wife got her own back by ‘frying him in his own grease’ and flirting with others, making him jealous. When she returned from her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he died and she was glad to see him buried.

She was still a lively forty when she married for the fifth time—to a handsome twenty-year-old called John, whom she had been ‘toying and dallying’ with while husband four was in London during Lent. ‘I think I loved him best, I’ll tell no lie.’ She’d been turned on by the sight of his sturdy legs at her latest husband’s funeral. They married inside a month and she handed over all the land and property she’d inherited from the earlier marriages. But there was an early crisis. With lamentable want of tact for a newlywed, Johnny made it his habit to read to her about the misdeeds of all the wicked women of history from Eve onwards. One evening Alison was so enraged by this that she grabbed the book and ripped three pages from it and hit him in the face, causing him to fall back into the fire. He got up and struck her so hard that she became permanently deaf. But she made him pay dearly. At first she alarmed him by pretending she was at the point of death. He begged her to forgive him and promised never to hit her again. For good measure she smacked his face a second time and said they were now even. But she’d won the prize of sovereignty. She made him burn the book. In future she ruled the roost in the marriage. She became kindness personified, faithful and loving, and so, she insisted, was Johnny.

Diamond’s reading was done. He couldn’t say he was enchanted by Alison, but her spirit was undeniable. She had come alive for him, a recognizable human being from seven centuries ago. Anyone reading her life history would warm to the robust humour and her brand of feminism. Whatever you thought about her, she wasn’t repressed. You had to feel sorry for the men in her life.