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to arrive. “The fire service, you said? They’d better treat the place with respect. I don’t want anything destroyed. I’ve got personal things in there, the photo of my wife, my coffee mug, my cactus.”
    “Not sure about the cactus,” Leaman said, still exerting his authority. “It may have to go.”
    “It’s on the filing cabinet, well out of range.”
    “Plants absorb things from the air. It could wilt.”
    “I brought that cactus with me from London. I had it when I was in the Met.”
    “Difficult to clean.”
    Keith Halliwell said, “We may need to have a whip round and get you a replacement. The least we could do, really.”
    Ingeborg said, “There’s one good thing about this.”
    “What’s that?” Diamond asked.
    “The Wife of Bath will benefit. A good cleaning can only improve her.”

5
    Paloma treated Peter Diamond to a superintendent-sized ham and pineapple pizza and several beers at her house the same evening and listened in sympathy. She offered to smear arnica ointment on his bruises, but he was quick to thank her and say the soreness was just a memory now. He didn’t want her getting the idea he was too damaged to go to bed with her. She’d learned about the shooting and said it was hard to understand how people could get so violent. From all she’d read in the papers, Professor Gildersleeve had been respected in academic circles.
    “Yes, it’s hard to understand,” he said. “If he’d stayed calm he’d still be alive. He lost his cool when the robbers tried to grab the piece of so-called sculpture he was bidding for. Obviously he’d set his heart on buying it.”
    “What’s it like?”
    “The Wife of Bath ? Unappealing.”
    “There speaks the man who tripped over her.”
    “Truly. It’s a chunk of dirty old limestone with some carving you can barely make out. A figure on horseback and some broken lettering underneath that they say identifies her.”
    “And now she’s sitting in your office?”
    “She’s taken it over.”
    “Smart gal, not moving until her case is solved.”
    His jaw jutted. “We’ll see about that.”
    “Better not let it get personal, Peter.”
    “Don’t you worry about that. My feet are firmly on the ground.”
    A ripple of laughter greeted the second statement and presently he remembered why and joined in the amusement.
    “Like her or not,” he said, trying to sound impartial, “my job is to find out more. If I’m going to understand the professor’s reaction I’ll need to brush up on my Chaucer.”
    Paloma rose from her armchair and looked along her shelves of books.
    “Don’t tell me you have a copy.”
    “I once did the costumes for a revival of the musical.”
    “A Wife of Bath musical?” he said in disbelief.
    “ The Canterbury Tales . You must have seen it.”
    “Theatre-going isn’t my thing, if you remember.”
    “Gotcha,” she said, picking out a paperback and handing it to him. “This is the Nevill Coghill modern English version, much easier to follow than Chaucer’s original. Coghill also wrote the lyrics for the show. He was an Oxford professor.”
    He opened the book at random and read a few lines. “I recognise this. We used it at school. Even a peasant like me can follow it.”
    “Keep it. I doubt if I’ll need it again. The musical was a romp, quite naughty by the standards of the time, not long after censorship ended. Before that, everything had to be vetted by the Lord Chamberlain’s office.”
    “Naughty in what way?”
    “Simulated sex, four-letter words.”
    “Which ones?”
    “Read your translation. They used three or four of the tales in the show, including the Wife of Bath’s. It’s about one of King Arthur’s knights—a right bastard he is—who rapes an innocent girl and is condemned to death. But the queen, who should have known better in my opinion, asks for him to be spared and sends him on a quest for a year and a day to discover what it is that women most desire.”
    “Some