Waxwork by Peter Lovesey

Author:Peter Lovesey [Lovesey, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical, Mystery, ebook
ISBN: 9781569476468
Google: QITdHAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1854969005
Barnesnoble: 1854969005
Goodreads: 9871920
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks
Published: 1977-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

WEDNESDAY, 20th JUNE

INSPECTOR MOSER WAS NOT easily convinced. He believed he had a responsibility to safeguard fellow officers from corruption. The pictures he confiscated were not kept in his office at the Yard. He locked them in despatch-boxes and delivered them in person to a store in the vaults of the Home Office. It was constantly manned by a store-keeper of unrelenting vigilance and failing eyesight. Moser escorted Cribb there and introduced him. This was at ten. It had taken three-quarters of an hour to win the concession.

Cribb was not shocked by the photographs the storekeeper brought out in the locked boxes. As he had patiently explained to Moser, twenty years in the force had removed any ignorance he had in the realm of sexual behaviour. Rather he found that the sheer mass of material oppressed him. Concentration was difficult as he worked steadily through everything retrieved from Holywell Street in the last twelve months. In front of him he placed the picture of Miriam Cromer. Each time he glanced at it to check whether there was the least resemblance to something from Moser’s collection, he saw only her reproach.

After two and a half hours he had completed the chore. His head ached, his mouth and hands were dry with dust and he had found nothing.

He was ready to bet that the first part of that confession was a fabrication. But he had no proof. His findings were all negative. Howard Cromer had not been in Brighton on the morning of the murder. Brodski had not traced the source of the photographic plates. There was not one picture of Miriam Cromer in all Inspector Moser’s haul from Holywell Street. Nothing conclusive.

From the Home Office he went directly to the public baths in Great Smith Street and took a shower. He followed it with the usual pint and pie at the Prince of Wales in Tothill Street and by 1.15 p.m. he was boarding a yellow bus in Victoria Street. It took him to Highgate.

There was nobody he knew in the police station. The sergeant on duty was busy with a complaint about damage to property, so after a word with a constable barely old enough to shave, Cribb picked up the local gazetteer and leafed through it. Among the clubs and societies he found no reference to the Highgate Literary and Artistic Society. Another negative.

He asked the constable if he had any knowledge of such an organisation. He had not. But across the room, the sergeant had caught the end of Cribb’s question. ‘Hold on, will you? I can tell you a bit about that lot when I’ve dealt with this.’

Cribb waited twenty minutes, powerless to point out that in Newgate the minutes of a woman’s life were numbered. The breaking of a few windows in Southwood Lane took precedence here.

‘There was a society of that name,’ he learned at last. ‘They stopped meeting two or three years ago over some disagreement among the members. A group of them formed another society, but it didn’t last more than a month or two.

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