The Stone Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

locked away for the rest of their undeserving lives.”
    She went off in search of the auctioneer. Diamond watched the red and green streaks until they were lost to view behindan oak sideboard. “This is shaping up as one of the wackiest cases I’ve been involved in,” he said to Paul Gilbert. “The Wife of Bath. A glass lady. A gunman with a moon crater on the back of his neck. A guy afraid to speak the name of the British Museum. What next?”

4
    No one was under any illusion that the three hitmen were Chaucer scholars. Everything pointed to professionals, even though the job had been botched. But finding them wouldn’t be easy. Basically, the only description Diamond had was that the first robber had longish dark hair, a scar on the back of his neck and no ear lobes.
    “This will be tough,” he warned the team at the first briefing. “I don’t need to tell you snouts go silent when the crime is murder. We’ll try. We bloody have to. But we may need a better way.”
    “ Crimewatch ?” Paul Gilbert said, ever eager to contribute.
    Everyone except Gilbert saw the glint in the boss’s eyes that said Crimewatch was a non-starter, but the youngest, greenest member of CID pressed on. “It would make great television, reconstructing the auction.”
    “No question.”
    “It’s a massive audience.”
    Diamond was patient with him. “But there’s only so much information Joe Public can provide. We interviewed everyone who was there.”
    “All we’d end up with,” Ingeborg added, “would be a list of suspicious characters from other auctions.”
    “A thousand other auctions,” John Leaman said.
    “A few hundred, anyway,” Ingeborg said.
    Gilbert’s shoulders sank. “It was only a thought.”
    “Don’t take it personally,” Diamond said. “I’m always open to suggestions.”
    A few looks were exchanged. Everyone else in the team had been cut to shreds at some point in the past for coming up with a half-baked idea.
    “The way I look at it,” Leaman said, “we don’t just want to find the three who held up the auction. We’re looking for the guy who hired them.”
    “Too right we are.”
    “Whoever he is,” Keith Halliwell said, “he’s not a happy bunny.”
    Gilbert returned to the fray like a boxer bouncing off the ropes. “What was he hoping to get out of it? Even if the hold-up had succeeded, all he’d end up with would be a lump of stone.”
    “An antique lump of stone,” Ingeborg said in a measured, bored voice, “linked to one of the most famous poems in the language and valued at over twenty grand by the British Museum.”
    Everyone except Gilbert felt the force of the putdown.
    John Leaman repeated his mantra: “We need to find the guy behind all this.”
    “Agreed,” Diamond said. “So who would have an interest in acquiring a carving of the Wife of Bath?”
    “Another museum?” Gilbert said.
    “Get real,” Halliwell said. “Museums don’t hire armed robbers.”
    “Some nutty professor, then.”
    “Another? We already have one and he’s dead.”
    “Well, it has to be some weirdo.”
    “There’s a question that always comes up when a well-known work of art is stolen, and we need to ask it, too,” Ingeborg said. “Why do they do it?”
    “To sell on to a third party?” Halliwell said.
    “Or demand a ransom?” Leaman said.
    “An insurance scam?” Gilbert said.
    “Was the stone insured? I doubt it,” Leaman said.
    “Never mind,” Diamond said. “This is good. Brainstorming. Keep it rolling.”
    “The best scheme I ever heard of was the Mona Lisa theft from the Louvre,” Leaman said.
    Gilbert screwed up his face. “Is this a joke?”
    “No. It’s a fact.”
    “When was this?”
    “About a hundred years ago,” Ingeborg said. “It couldn’t happen these days.”
    “It was still the cleverest art scam there’s ever been,” Leaman said. “The main thief was an Italian glazier who helped construct the protective glass box it was housed in, so he