Excerpt from The Vault by Peter Lovesey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The penny dropped. "Funny," said the sergeant. "Being paved over, I never think of it as a churchyard. You can use a word a thousand times and never give a thought to its meaning."

The wisdom of this failed to impress Peter Diamond. "Leave it with me. It'll come in useful as a paperweight." Seeing the shocked look this produced, he added, "And Sergeant. . ."

"Sir?"

"Thanks."

"What for?"

"Giving me a hand."

The sergeant's attempt at a laugh was unconvincing.

Diamond leaned back in his chair. He was ready with a dozen more hand jokes. Twenty, no problem, he thought bleakly.

Without a murder to occupy him, he could spend the rest of the afternoon playing word–games. Life at Manvers Street had become a doddle in recent weeks. His murder squad urgently needed some employment. A bony relic from the Roman Baths was unlikely to produce much of that. The most exciting event all summer had been a bomb scare in the Pump room. An abandoned briefcase had been spotted there on Friday morning. The centre of Bath, the Abbey and the roman Baths, was cordoned off, causing maximum disruption. The army bomb disposal squad was summoned from Salisbury. The experts decided on a controlled explosion. A robot trundled across to the suspect briefcase. The blast brought down part of a chandelier and showered the Pump room with cut glass and fragments of Offenbach and Chopin. The briefcase had belonged to one of the Pump Room musicians.

When the desk sergeant had gone, Diamond took another look at the hand. If it was ancient, how had it come to be encased in concrete? Just to be sure, he arranged for the thing to be delivered to the pathologist at the Royal United who generally dealt with unidentified bodies.

Copyright © 1999 by Peter Lovesey. All rights reserved.