Skeleton Hill

17

Keith Halliwell would be heartbroken. His first chance as SIO snatched away just when he’d got everything up and running. Diamond was known to be ruthless in pursuit of the truth, a bruiser who let nothing stand in his way, but Halliwell was the nearest he had to a friend in the team. The first news of the decision shouldn’t come from anyone else. Straight from his session upstairs he went to the incident room and asked Halliwell to drive him to the Mercedes garage to collect Georgina’s car.

‘Guv, I wish I could spare the time, but I can’t,’ Halliwell said, adding with a companionable smile, ‘I’m running a murder case, and you know what that’s like.’

‘Sorry, Keith, but I do know what it’s like and John Leaman can take over for twenty minutes. We need to talk.’

The smile turned to tight-lipped concern.

In the privacy of the car Diamond went over the logic of drawing the two enquiries into one, just as he had with Georgina. Through focusing so exclusively on the skeleton case, Halliwell, too, had missed the significance of Dave Barton’s statement.

‘As I see it now,’ Diamond summed up, ‘neither you nor I will get a result working in isolation.’

‘You’re telling me you’re taking over again,’ Halliwell said, his voice drained of warmth.

‘I’m telling you there has to be co-operation. I’m not knocking you, Keith. You’ve done a fine job already. But it’s necessary for me to move back to Bath.’

‘And I have to step aside.’

Diamond saw the look and heard the despair. Fortunately the deal he’d done with Georgina had a sweetener. ‘Nothing as daft as that. You were appointed SIO for the skeleton enquiry and that’s what you remain, running the show.’

A suspicious frown came with Halliwell’s next question. ‘So how will you fit in?’

‘Not the way you think. There’s going to be a new SIO for the Rupert Hope case, an inspector from Bristol called Septimus Ward.’

‘I know Septimus,’ he said. ‘Met him on a firearms course.’

‘Like him?’

‘He’s okay.’ But the frown remained.

‘Good. He’s going to be transferred here with the pick of the Bristol lot. The investigation is under one roof now.’

‘Two incident rooms in Manvers Street?’

‘Just the one.’

Halliwell shook his head. ‘You’re joking.’

‘I’m afraid that means some rearranging. You’ll need to transfer some of the display material to computer.’

‘Am I hearing right? Computers have their uses after all?’

A little irony from Halliwell was forgivable. ‘You can decide how much of the material needs storing.’

‘I prefer it where I can see it.’

‘Visual. I noticed.’

‘Mine is the hard case to crack, going back twenty years. I’m dealing with masses of information.’

‘Yes, and quite properly you’re defending your territory. You’ll get your share of resources, Keith, I guarantee.’

‘So what’s your part in this?’

‘Me?’ Diamond said, striking the first false note, as if he hadn’t thought about himself. ‘I’m the CIO.’

‘C is for chief?’

‘Seeing fair play.’

‘Keeping your distance?’

‘Exactly. At one remove from all the action. You and Septimus are the hands-on leaders.’ But even as he spoke, he could see the faint smile playing on Halliwell’s lips. Both knew it would go against nature for the big man to keep his distance.

He’d sold the deal as honestly as he was able.

They reached the garage and Halliwell asked, ‘Do you want me to wait while you see if the job is done?’

‘No need. Wish me luck driving the Merc back to Manvers Street. I’ve done enough damage for one day.’

Septimus Ward and three others from Bristol CID arrived at Bath Central in the morning looking about as comfortable as the Burghers of Calais. Diamond took them to the canteen for a coffee and explained the new set-up. Their spirits improved when they understood that they’d be heading the Rupert Hope side of what was now a major investigation. ‘Presently we’ll all drive up to Lansdown and look at the graveyard where he was found, and the other site,’ he told them. ‘I want you fully in the picture.’

The Lansdown visit had an extra purpose. It gave Halliwell time to clear space in the incident room.

One of the police minibuses had been booked for this and Diamond – sexist when it suited – had invited Ingeborg along as a morale-booster for the newcomers. She was already telling them animatedly about Bath’s nightspots.

He injected a more sombre note as they were being driven up the hill. ‘You may find this weird,’ he told everyone. ‘The terrain of Lansdown could be as crucial to this enquiry as the people in the case. I keep asking myself why two bodies should have been found up there. The hill has its own character, aloof from the city, seven hundred feet above sea level, windswept, a place most people drive over without stopping, unless they’re golfers, race-goers or boot-sale addicts. What is it about Lansdown that made it suitable for murder? Keep this in mind as we look at the two sites.’

The bus parked in the lay-by closest to the battlefield and the team strolled across the field and down the scarp where the fallen tree was. Septimus appeared at Diamond’s side, looking earnest, wanting to confide. ‘I heard what you were saying just now, about the landscape.’

‘And?’

‘We know Rupert was a Civil War junkie. We found masses of stuff he’d downloaded from the internet, maps and battle charts and descriptions of the fighting. It seems to me he must have walked the battlefield a few times.’

‘Sounds likely, yes.’

‘He was here for some days after he got the head injury.’

‘That’s correct, but I don’t think he was doing the battlefield walk then.’

‘He knew the territory, right? You asked us why his killer chose Lansdown. Could the Civil War be the reason?’

‘Go on. I’m listening.’

‘Maybe his killer was another re-enactment freak. I don’t know how seriously they take this rivalry between the armies,’ Septimus went on. ‘They try to stage the battle as it actually was, as near as they can, but they can’t rehearse. Rupert was new to the game. What if he got excited in the heat of battle and did something that wasn’t in the script? One of the enemy may have got angry and hunted him down after it was over.’

‘Roundhead versus cavalier?’

‘Except what it comes down to is more basic. One of their lot taking out one of ours.’

Diamond took stock of what he’d heard. There was some logic to it. Tribal hostilities accounted for a lot of modern violence.

‘Are we investigating these Civil War societies?’ Septimus asked.

‘That’s definitely on the agenda.’ He liked the new man’s thinking.

They’d reached the fallen oak. The crime scene tape had been removed. The only signs of recent activity were the discoloured turf trampled by many feet and the excavated soil in the burial pit below the roots, sieved to a fineness any gardener would have admired.

‘The tree blew down in the great gale of 1987,’ Diamond told everyone. ‘Most of the ground up here is rock hard, has never been cultivated, drains quickly and gets the full force of sun and wind, but the uprooting of the tree left a large hole and some loose earth where the rain sank in. Some time after, a killer made use of it to bury the body of a young woman, but hacked off the head and disposed of it somewhere else. I can tell you very little about the victim or how she was killed. Under twenty, average height and reasonably healthy so far as you can discover from a bunch of bones. We think she was clothed because we found a zip fly, probably from her jeans. The rest of her clothes had rotted away in twenty years. We don’t even know the colour of her hair. We checked missing persons from that time and nobody fits.’

‘How can you say that?’ Septimus asked. ‘Thousands go missing all the time.’

‘The local index.’

Ingeborg spoke up. ‘Actually, I had the job. It just isn’t practical to check the national figures for a five year span.’

‘So she could have been a visitor?’

‘That’s possible. You know how many tourists come through Bath?’

Diamond picked up his thread again. ‘Last month, the Battle of Lansdown was re-enacted here and one of the cavaliers called Dave who seems to have been an old soldier in every sense decided to bury a six-pack of lager here. Foot soldiers get thirsty. He says he invited Rupert to join him after they were both supposed to be dead in battle. They’d never met before then.’ He turned and pointed. ‘They crept away from the fighting up there and found the first two tins and swallowed the lager. But it seemed someone else had helped himself to the other four. Dave was pissed off, as any of us would be. He burrowed up to his elbows in the earth and came up not with his lager, but the femur that belonged to our victim. After some discussion these two decided the bone could very well have belonged to a proper soldier, a victim of the real Civil War. They buried it again and rejoined the action on the battlefield. That’s the gist of the witness statement we just had in.’

‘Is he telling the truth?’ one of the newcomers asked.

‘I can’t be a hundred per cent sure, but if Dave is the killer he’s an idiot to come forward.’

‘Why now, and no earlier?’

‘He doesn’t follow the news. Heard someone talking in a pub. Simple as that.’

‘I’ll buy that,’ Septimus said. ‘Plenty of people don’t look at a paper.’

Ingeborg said, ‘And some papers don’t bother with real news.’

‘But do you see the point?’ Diamond said. ‘Soon after this, Rupert was cracked on the back of the head and in a matter of days he was hit again and murdered. Two victims linked by this spot where we’re standing. This is why we’re combining the two enquiries.’

Septimus spoke again. ‘Could be coincidence.’

‘Could be, yes.’ He was about to say more, but Septimus hadn’t finished.

‘After all, these killings are twenty years apart and don’t have much in common. The MO was different in each.’

Keen and intelligent as this new SIO was, he could have used more tact. Best make light of it, Diamond decided. ‘If you’re right, I’m wasting my time and yours, but you’ll find I’m like that, cranky and ready to believe anything. Let’s look at the place where Rupert was found.’

Subdued, they retraced their steps and climbed aboard the bus for the short trip to the graveyard.

The terrain around Beckford’s Tower had been transformed from when Diamond was last there. All of that swaying vegetation had been scythed and cleared by the search team. Close-packed headstones unseen before stood starkly among the stubble. After such an effort of clearance it was a pity nothing had been found except a few lumps of wood and rock that had no trace of blood or hair.

The immediate site was still taped. ‘You can see some staining on the ground where his head was,’ Diamond told them. ‘We believe he was attacked late in the evening or during the night.’

‘What was he doing here at all?’ one of the party asked.

‘Very likely looking for a place to sleep.’

‘Strange choice.’ Another note of scepticism Diamond didn’t care for. Septimus had set a negative tone.

‘He’d been living rough for some days. He could have slept in the dry in the gateway we just came through.’ This thought had come to Diamond when he saw the stone benches in the section behind the façade.

The same fault-finder added, ‘It doesn’t chime in with all we’ve been finding out about the guy. Here’s a bright, outgoing lecturer interested in his subject and suddenly he wants to sleep in a cemetery.’

Ingeborg had heard enough from the Bristol contingent. ‘If you’d been cracked on the head so hard you had an open wound in your skull you might behave out of character.’

Diamond nodded. ‘I couldn’t put it better, Inge, but I didn’t explain everything. You and I have been working on this for longer than our new colleagues. All the evidence suggests Rupert was suffering from loss of memory following the first attack.’ Exercising tact was almost as uncomfortable for him as getting on and off the bus.

‘What’s the story of the tower?’ Septimus asked in an obvious attempt to lighten the mood, looking across the graveyard to its tall Italianate centrepiece. ‘It isn’t like your average church.’

‘It isn’t a church,’ Ingeborg said. ‘It wasn’t built as one, anyway.’ She glanced at Diamond. ‘Mind if I explain?’

He gave a shrug. ‘Go ahead.’ He’d got Paloma’s book on Beckford beside his bed at home, still unopened.

‘There was this millionaire called William Beckford who lived halfway up the hill in Lansdown Crescent. He had the tower built here in the eighteen-thirties and filled it with his treasures and then bought up all the land in between and created his own private walk. Landscaped it specially, like they did in those days, on a massive scale.’ ‘Capability Brown,’ the talkative Bristolian said.

‘He’s the landscaper everyone’s heard of,’ Ingeborg said, and then added, ‘Dead by then.’

There were smiles all round.

Ingeborg resumed. ‘Beckford drew up his own plan. There were little buildings along the way made to look like a mosque or a castle gateway, and so much else to catch the eye: ornamental gardens, a fishpond, archways, an underground grotto, a shrubbery with sweet-smelling plants, an orchard. It was over a mile and he used to do the walk up the hill each morning.’

‘And ended up in the cemetery?’ Septimus said, and got a laugh, even from Ingeborg.

She capped it with, ‘Dead right.’ And then added, ‘In point of fact it didn’t become a cemetery until a few years after his death. When Beckford was alive it was a fabulous garden with shrubs from all over the world.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I was a journalist before I joined the police.’

‘An investigative journalist,’ Diamond added. ‘Gave us a hard time until we stopped all that by recruiting her.’

‘Anyway,’ Ingeborg went on, ‘Beckford’s daughter was a duchess and she inherited the tower and decided to sell it but she was horrified when she found that the buyer was about to turn these grounds into a beer garden. She bought it back at a loss and gave it to the Church of England as a cemetery on condition that her father was dug up from the churchyard in Ralph Allen Drive and reburied here. He’s in that pink granite tomb behind you, the one on a mound with the ditch around it. As you can see, hundreds of others have been buried since. Beckford’s drawing room became the funeral chapel.’

‘Instead of a pub,’ Diamond said. ‘Depressing, isn’t it?’

Septimus had other things on his mind. He was looking around him. ‘I don’t see any recent graves. Isn’t the cemetery used any more?’

‘Not this part. Not for the past forty years,’ Ingeborg said. ‘The Church Commissioners sold the ground and the new owners restored the tower and turned it into a museum. It’s now owned by the Preservation Trust and left as a wild garden.’

‘All done?’ Diamond said. ‘I’d like to get back to our grubby little murder. As you see, the wild garden was cleared. A fingertip search was made for the weapon and nothing was found. I’m not surprised. This is a crafty killer. Some attempt was made to pass off the death as an accident.’ He showed them the bloodstain on the adjacent grave and explained about the blade of grass, which he said was in an evidence bag by now.

‘Cool,’ Septimus said, and he seemed to be praising the killer rather than the detective work. ‘Did he leave any shoeprints?’

‘None we could link to the killing.’

‘The crime itself looks more like a mugging than a planned murder. They’re often the hardest to solve. Was anything of value taken?’

‘He had no wallet or cards when he was found. From the way he behaved at the boot sale he was skint.’

‘And we don’t know where the first attack took place?’

‘Unless you have a theory.’

‘Somewhere on this hill, I guess.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. His car was still in the racecourse car park. When it was found, his cavalier costume was inside, so we can be pretty sure he returned with the others after the battle and changed.’

‘And got clobbered after that? What do these toy soldiers do at the end of the day?’

‘From what I can make out, they hang out among the camper vans and cars. There’s a beer tent and a mobile kitchen and Portaloos. The play-acting goes out of the window. The costumes are sweaty, so they’re glad to get them off.’

‘If his car was still there,’ Septimus said, ‘it seems the first attack came that evening.’

‘That’s my reading of it,’ Diamond said.

‘It can’t have happened in full view of everyone. He must have wandered away when it got dark. My best bet is still on one of the roundheads. Could any of their weapons have made the kind of wound he had?’

‘Possibly. We’re in blunt instrument territory here. But equally it could have been a car tool or a lump of wood. What’s that?’

A beeping sound.

‘Sorry,’ Ingeborg said, taking her phone from her pocket. She stepped a short way from the group to take the call and then said, ‘It’s Keith Halliwell. He wants to know if we’re on our way back. There’s a breakthrough in the skeleton case.’