Skeleton Hill

14

When Diamond looked in, the day shift had gathered for what was known in the trade as morning prayers, but there was nothing worshipful about it. The duty inspector was reporting on an early morning drugs bust in Bedminster. He stopped in mid-sentence, glared at the visitor, and said, ‘Can I help you?’

‘I expect so,’ Diamond said, and introduced himself.

Some of them straightened up. One actually checked his hair.

The inspector’s manner changed from sniffy to servile. ‘Would you like to address the meeting, sir?’

‘What I’d really like to address is the porcelain, before I meet the top brass,’ Diamond said. ‘Which way is it?’

The lower ranks enjoyed that. He was off to a good start.

Twenty minutes later he sat down with a bigger challenge, his CID team, twelve detectives ranging from a muscleman with a silver earring to a veteran with bifocals. He had to be careful here. For all he knew, the owner of the silver earring might be the inspector. You could never be certain in CID. He told them his own name and suggested they started with name and rank when they spoke.

No one did – yet.

He needed an icebreaker. He picked up a set of crime scene photos from the desk in front of him and commented that someone had made a useful start.

A slim black guy gave the slightest of nods.

‘And you are…?’

‘Septimus Ward, DI, sir.’

‘The senior man?’

Septimus Ward nodded a second time. No hint of a smile. It was up to Diamond to win this lot over. Par for the course, he thought. They feel the same way about me as I feel about coming to this place.

‘You’re the experts here, being local, so I’m in your hands. How much can you tell me about the victim, Rupert Hope?’

Some looks were exchanged. No one seemed willing to say anything.

He added, ‘There was nothing found on him. If he possessed a mobile or a wallet or credit cards, they’d long since been nicked. He was a university lecturer, and that’s about all we know.’

This was so different from the briefings he gave in Bath. There, Ingeborg or John Leaman would have waded in by now and offered something, if only to hear the sounds of their own voices. Instead, he was doing all the talking.

‘Does anyone here know any background?’ he asked.

Septimus, the inspector, relented a little. ‘He was from these parts, born in Kingswood and went to Clifton College.’

‘Not one of the Bash Street kids, then.’

Septimus may not have heard of the Beano. He stayed on script. ‘He did his university studies here, took a higher degree at Oxford and then came back as a history lecturer. I don’t think he has any close family left living in Bristol.’

But at least there was communication now. A little of the ice had cracked. ‘The parents are in Australia,’ Diamond said. ‘I do know that much. They were concerned about not hearing from him after he went missing so we can assume he was still on good terms with them. He lived in a flat in Whiteladies Road.’

‘Alone?’ another man asked.

It was such a boost to get another contribution that Diamond ignored his own directive about name and rank. ‘Apparently, yes.’ ‘No relationships?’

‘None that we know about.’

‘Gay?’

‘No one has mentioned it.’ Now he sensed what was going on. They wanted to know where he stood on the issue of homosexuality. Fair enough, he thought, but there wasn’t time for all that. ‘Let’s get digging, then, everything we can get on this man: his life history, family, friends, enemies, daily routine, work habits, night life. As well as staff at the university who worked with him, we’ll be interviewing students, looking in particular for anyone with a reason to dislike him. I gather he was friendly and good at his job, which means anyone with a grudge should stand out. Septimus…’

‘Sir.’

‘Thanks for that, but “guv” will do. You can divvy up the duties. We need statements from his landlord and neighbours. Anything of note about visitors in recent weeks, changes to the routine and so on. Every last thing they know: where he shops, how he gets about, who cuts his hair, the whole bag of tricks. Another team goes through the flat looking for anything about recent contacts: letters, scribbled notes, phones, address book, computer. The third and fourth team do the university, talk to the other lecturers and students, look in his office or locker, or whatever they have. By tonight I want to know this man better than I know myself; his personal history, friends, contacts and potential enemies.’

‘Does it have a name, guv?’ Septimus asked.

‘Does what have a name?’

‘This operation. We’ll get more respect if we give it a name.’

He’d heard before about Bristol giving names to everything. ‘You can call it what you like as long as you do a good job.’

‘Operation Cavalier?’

‘If you like. Cavalier it is.’

‘Do you want to be out and about yourself, guv?’

A loaded question. Talk about respect. He could earn some for himself by leading from the front. In time, he remembered his bad back. ‘No, someone has to get this place up and running. And I’ll need an office manager.’

Silence.

Some heads turned. They were looking at the beefy owner of the earring. He said, ‘Fair cop. You’ve got me bang to rights.’

This caused amusement.

‘What’s your name?’ Diamond asked, uncertain where he was going with this. He suspected he was being set up.

‘Chaz… guv.’

‘Can you take this on, Chaz?’

‘Sure.’

After the rest of them had quit the room Diamond asked Chaz his rank and learned that he’d made it to sergeant, indicating that somebody rated him. ‘Do you know what this involves, Chaz?’

‘Common sense, isn’t it? We need staff. Someone to take calls, two or three computer operators to file the statements, an indexer, an action allocator and probably an admin officer as well.’

Encouraging.

‘And can you get them?’

‘We’re high priority, aren’t we?’

‘You bet we are.’

In the first hour, Chaz not only conjured up the equipment, the phones and computers, but the civilian staff as well. He saw them as they arrived and told them precisely what their duties were.

‘You’ve done this before,’ Diamond said.

‘No, guv. I’m learning as I go along.’

‘A fast learner?’

‘Born organiser.’ Chaz spoke without vanity, simply stating a fact.

Before noon, the first call came in from Rupert Hope’s flat, broadcast to all on an amplifier. The search team had found an address book and a diary and they’d started up his computer and begun looking at recent emails. If they expected praise from the management they didn’t get it. ‘Fuck that for a bowl of cherries,’ Chaz said into the phone. ‘I’ll have a patrol car pick up the tower unit and bring it here. Use your time looking through his drawers.’

Soon a second person was brought in to help with the incoming calls. Steadily a picture of the murdered man was taking shape. He’d been passionate about his subject and an inspiring teacher, regularly taking his students on field trips. History in his eyes wasn’t about dead people and forgotten battles, it was the key to enlightenment and the hope for a better society.

‘Good at his job,’ Chaz said with approval.

‘So it seems,’ Diamond said. ‘We could be looking at jealousy as a motive if he was that special.’

‘Some other lecturer?’

‘Maybe. As you’ve probably discovered, Chaz, you can make yourself unpopular by being one of life’s achievers.’

‘Is that a fact, guv?’

‘It’s one of those laws, regrettable, but true.’

The team at the flat reported that Rupert Hope must have been keen on personal hygiene, for his bathroom had an impressive array of aftershaves and deodorants. The towels were clean and every surface was immaculate. It was evident that he hadn’t been back there while he was living rough. His bedroom, too, was in good order. He’d been reading about the Civil War and left several bookmarks in pages with references to the Battle of Lansdown.

Septimus phoned in from the university with some background on Hope’s student days more than twenty years ago. He’d been active in the rag committee and got into trouble for going to Bath with a group and removing a sedan chair from the Pump Room complex and trying to hold it to ransom. They’d achieved what they wanted and got some publicity for the rag at the cost of a roasting from their own Vice-Chancellor. They’d returned the chair the next day, but with a nice refinement thought up by Rupert – a skeleton seated inside.

Diamond’s heart rate stepped up by several beats when he heard this from Chaz. He called back to Septimus. ‘The skeleton in the sedan chair? When exactly was this?’

‘1989, guv, when he was in his last year as a student.’

‘Where did the skeleton come from?’

‘I don’t know. A medical student?’

‘You think so?’ It sounded reasonable. He’d read somewhere that all medical students had to possess a skeleton. ‘Do we know if it was male or female?’

‘There’s no way of telling.’

‘I’m sorry, but there is,’ Diamond said from his sure knowledge of forensic anthropology.

‘What I mean, guv,’ Septimus was at pains to explain, ‘is that we don’t have the skeleton to look at. All we have is a note in the file that Hope was reprimanded by the Vice-Chancellor for – and I quote – compounding the offence. There’s nothing else. Do you really need to know?’

‘I suppose not.’ Better leave it, he thought. If the skeleton buried on Lansdown was a medical student’s study specimen, some people including himself were going to look silly. Anyway, didn’t they use plastic skeletons these days? ‘The main thing here is that he was one of the lads.’

‘It’s a Bristol tradition, raiding Bath Uni’s territory and getting one over them,’ Chaz said. ‘One year they kidnapped Jane Austen.’ ‘How did they do that?’

‘The dummy outside the Jane Austen centre in Gay Street.’

‘Not the biggest heist ever, then?’

‘I don’t suppose it was reported to Bath CID,’ Chaz said.

‘Mercifully, no.’

More information came in from some of the current history students. Rupert Hope’s inventive brain had been put to more constructive use when he returned to Bristol as a lecturer. He was always looking for ways to bring history to life for his students. He’d taken them to St Mary Redcliffe Church to see the monument to Sir William Penn, the admiral who had captured Jamaica for the British in 1655, and this had led to a project on Penn’s son, William. The second year history group had linked up with Penn State University to examine the documentation for Penn’s voyage of 1682 when Charles II granted him a lease of land in the New World and he took possession of Pennsylvania.

‘This is all good stuff,’ Diamond said to Chaz, ‘but I’d like to find someone he treated badly.’

‘We don’t have anything on his love life yet.’

‘Did he have one?’

‘The emails might tell us.’

‘If it was love on email it couldn’t have been much.’

The computer tower arrived soon after and one of the civilian staff was given the task of extracting everything of possible use. The dossier on the dead man was growing appreciably without yet providing much for a murder investigation.

‘You saw the body at the scene, did you, guv?’ Chaz asked.

‘I did.’

‘Did they find the murder weapon?’

‘Not when I was there, and not since. I’d have been told. They’ve had time to search the entire cemetery by now.’

‘Do you know what it was?’

‘Something heavy and blunt, more like a cosh than an axe. I doubt if we’ll find it now. There’s too much on TV these days about DNA and forensics. Any killer with a glimmer of intelligence is going to get rid of the weapon somewhere else.’

Septimus phoned in again. They’d found some photos of Rupert and his students studying the mosaics at Fishbourne Roman Palace.

‘Nice work,’ Diamond said down the phone. ‘You’re still in the history department, are you?’

‘We are.’

‘And able to talk freely?’

‘Sure.’

‘So you must have met some of the other lecturers. What do they say about him?’

‘They’re shocked at what happened, that’s for sure,’ Septimus said, ‘and there’s a lot of sympathy for him, but no one is saying much. I get the impression he didn’t have any particular friends among them. He wasn’t disliked. They respect what he was doing with his students. He wasn’t looking for close friends among the staff, so far as I can tell.’

‘A loner?’

‘Not really. I’d say reserved.’

‘That could mean secretive.’

‘If you want to see it that way.’

Diamond told him to bring in the photos at the end of the afternoon. He and Chaz leafed through the address book brought in with the computer tower. The lettering was in small, neat capitals, more than two hundred names in all. Where someone had moved house, Hope hadn’t put a line through the address and added the new one on another page, as most people did. He’d gone to all the trouble of covering the entry with a strip of adhesive paper and writing over it. This was a methodical man, if not a perfectionist, and probably a pain to work with.

There was no way of telling who were the close friends. A long trawl was in prospect, comparing these entries with the email address book. It was a pity Hope’s mobile phone had not turned up. Presumably that had been removed at an early stage, after the first attack.

Yet Diamond told the team when they assembled late in the afternoon that Operation Cavalier had brought a good result. ‘Thanks to your efforts we know a whole lot more about this guy and his background and contacts. Chaz has drawn up a profile and each of you gets a copy. No obvious leads have emerged, unfortunately, so it’s my job to study everything overnight and decide on a strategy for tomorrow.’

While they were leaving he overheard someone say, ‘Reading between the lines, he’s up shit creek without a paddle.’