The Stone Wife Read Free

with numbers on them. They raise them when they bid.”
    “Does everyone get a paddle, then?”
    “Serious buyers. Everyone intending to bid. All the dealers, certainly.”
    “Can other people get in—without a paddle?”
    Doggart shrugged. “It’s open to all.”
    “I expect you recognise most of them.”
    He hesitated, as if it was a trick question. “The regulars, anyway.”
    “Did you know the robbers?”
    Doggart took a sharp breath between his teeth. “Certainly not.”
    “So, did you notice them as newcomers before the incident happened?”
    “No chance of that. I’m fully occupied looking for bids—watching for numbers, basically. I don’t have the luxury of checking every face in the room.”
    “After they interrupted the auction you must have got a look at them.”
    “They were masked. Balaclavas with holes for eyes. I haven’t a clue who they were.”
    “They couldn’t have arrived wearing balaclavas.”
    “The main man must have pulled his on a moment before he spoke. The others came in after he’d drawn the gun.”
    “You didn’t recognise the voice?”
    “I don’t know if you’re familiar with auctions, inspector.”
    “Superintendent.”
    “The bidding is silent. I’m the only one who speaks.”
    “Yes, I got that much,” Diamond said. “It’s all done with paddles. But he spoke.”
    “I said I’ve no idea who he was.”
    “Do you recall anything about him, what he was wearing, what he looked like?”
    “About your height.”
    “A bit above average, then.”
    “But slimmer, quite a lot slimmer.”
    Diamond didn’t take it personally. He’d heard worse.
    “Black T-shirts and blue jeans,” Doggart added. “All three were dressed the same.”
    “And they all carried guns?”
    “Yes, the one who fired the shot was one of the pair who came in after. A young man, going by the way he moved.”
    “Did you get a look at the guns?”
    “Revolvers, all of them.”
    “You’re sure of that.”
    “I know what a revolver looks like.”
    “What about the victim? Is he a dealer?”
    “Not to my knowledge. It’s the first time I’ve seen him here.”
    “You must have his name from the list of bidders.”
    “We do. We already checked and it’s Gildersleeve.”
    Diamond turned to Ingeborg. “Did you get that? See what you can find out.” He glanced back at lot 129 before asking Doggart, “Was the Wife of Bath the main attraction today?”
    The auctioneer nodded. “Certainly there was a lot of interest. We circulated dealers in advance and there were telephone bidders from America and Japan. As it turned out, the bidding went considerably higher than our valuation.”
    “Is that unusual?”
    “A piece such as this is a challenge. You don’t have anything to compare it with. We settled on three thousand and evidently underestimated the value. Mr. Gildersleeve got into competition with a London dealer and things were getting exciting when the interruption came.”
    “At twenty-four thousand, I heard.”
    “Yes. When the bids outstrip the valuation by as much as that, there’s an element of embarrassment I can’t deny. Did we miss something that certain people in the know discovered? In the trade we call that kind of item a sleeper. Our reputation as experts is called into question.”
    “Twenty-four grand sounds a good whack to me for a carving you can hardly recognise,” Diamond said. “I suppose it was the link to Chaucer that pushed up the bidding.”
    “Yes, and the provenance. The piece was once in the collection of an early nineteenth-century antiquarian called William Stradling who made it his mission to rescue bits of masonry at risk of destruction from modernisers. There was a campaign of so-called restoration going on in the early eighteen hundreds and Stradling’s home at Chilton Polden became a refuge forfragments that would otherwise have been destroyed or discarded. The tablet was listed as one of his finds, so we know it can’t be a modern