The Stone Wife Read Free Page A

fake.”
    “A fake?” Diamond’s eyes widened. “Faking never crossed my mind.”
    “It happens all the time. We’re trained to watch out for it. Reputations can be ruined if you get taken in.”
    “Difficult to fake a block of old stone.”
    “But well worth it if the artist does a good job. They’re still artists, even if the work is fraudulent.”
    “But this, you say, must be genuine?”
    Doggart nodded. “The provenance. Stradling knew what he was doing. His pieces came from centuries-old buildings.”
    “You knew there would be a lot of interest?”
    “It’s always difficult to predict, but as I told you we had plenty of enquiries.”
    Diamond gave the matter some thought. There was more to this auction business than he’d first appreciated. “Anyone keen enough to bid would want to see the thing ahead of the auction, I expect.”
    “Anyone able to get here. We’re open for viewing six days a week.”
    “I’m thinking one or more of the gunmen may have come here to case the place, posing as a possible buyer.”
    “Conceivably.” Doggart plainly didn’t enjoy the suggestion.
    “We’ll need to talk to your staff.”
    “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
    “They would have been hired thugs—the crooks, I mean, not your staff. We can assume they were acting for someone else, someone with a good eye for an antique sculpture.”
    “Not necessarily.”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s not a Dresden shepherdess,” Doggart said.
    “Come again.”
    “A unique item such as this is difficult to classify and even more difficult to dispose of.”
    “I get you now. Like trying to unload the Mona Lisa .”
    The auctioneer wasn’t impressed with Diamond’s example. “One of the Elgin marbles might be a better comparison.”
    “True,” Diamond said. “Unique and a bugger to move. Who would have dreamed up something like this?”
    “Don’t ask me,” Doggart said.
    “You’re in the trade. Better placed than I am.”
    “I can’t think of anyone.”
    Ingeborg had been busy with what Diamond liked to call her pocket computer. “This sounds as if it could be the dead man, a John Gildersleeve, author of a book called Chaucer: The Bawdy Tales .”
    “I hope we’re not getting into something my mother wouldn’t have approved of,” Diamond said with a wink at Doggart. “How did you find this out?”
    “Googled the name.”
    “You Googled Gildersleeve.” He turned back to Doggart, who was more his age. “Sounds like something out of The Goon Show .”
    “Professor of Medieval English Literature at Reading University,” Ingeborg added, still using her iPhone. “Here’s a picture of him.”
    Modern technology regularly ambushed Peter Diamond, but he tried not to show it. He glanced at the tiny head and shoulders photo. “That’s the victim, I’ll grant you. Now it’s falling into place. He must have lectured on Chaucer. Not surprising he was a bidder.”
    “As an expert, he may well have been consulted when the piece was identified earlier this year,” Doggart said. “Until then, it was a miscellaneous stone tablet of the medieval period of no particular interest. It was in storage in the Bridgwater museum for at least half a century. The story is that one of the staff took another look one day and worked out what the lettering was and where the quote came from. Some Chaucer experts confirmed that he was right. The museum committee had a meeting. Some were in favour of keeping the thing, but the majority voted to cash in on the discovery and do a modest upgrade of the museum. Theyhad their exhibits crowded into a few Victorian showcases. So the piece was put up for auction.”
    “The news must have travelled fast in academic circles,” Ingeborg said.
    “We publicised it quite widely,” Doggart said. “It got into The Times and History Today , which would explain the telephone bidding. America and Japan are quickly onto anything like this. Even so, I couldn’t see it making much over