Skeleton Hill

28

‘Have you checked your emails today, boss?’ Ingeborg asked, breezing into Diamond’s office soon after he’d ended the call to Louis.

‘What do you think?’

‘You’re not even switched on.’

‘I’m switched on. The computer isn’t.’

She smiled. ‘Don’t you look at your in-box routinely?’

Sarcasm, he thought. This young lady needs reining in. ‘I was in London on police business.’

‘And of course you don’t have a laptop.’

‘I’m a detective, not a freak.’

‘I think you mean geek. You can access your email from any other computer,’ she informed him ‘You could have logged on from London.’

‘I had slightly more urgent things to deal with, like Keith being shot and almost killed. What did you really want to say to me, Inge?’

‘It’s high time we heard from the lab about the hair we sent for analysis, the one found under the tab of Nadia’s zip.’

She was right. More dramatic events had put the hair to the back of his mind. He would deal with it shortly. He wasn’t going to let Ingeborg think she’d caught him out. ‘The men in white coats always take an age. They phone if there’s anything startling. It’s academic now, anyway. We’re ninety-nine per cent sure who she was.’

‘Just thought I’d remind you,’ she said. ‘Did you get any DNA from the cottage where she stayed?’

‘How would we have got that?’

‘Particles of hair or skin.’

Now it was his turn to give a smile, remembering the state of Mrs Jarvie’s cottage. ‘You’re optimistic. Sixteen years have gone by and numerous house guests have gone through that cottage.’

‘The girl left unexpectedly. Didn’t the house owner keep her property?’

‘Nadia arrived with nothing and walked out with nothing.’

‘It was only a thought.’ She lingered and it was obvious that her real reason for coming in had yet to be aired. ‘Did I catch a glimpse of you when I was at pike drill last night?’

He nodded. ‘I told you I might look in. You seem to be handling the weapons all right, but are you picking up information?’

‘It’s a case of softly, softly, guv. I want to get their confidence, so I haven’t gone in there firing questions at everyone.’

‘I met one of the camp followers,’ he said.

‘Mrs Swithin? Nothing gets past her.’

‘I didn’t try. I said straight out that I’m from CID. Of course I didn’t let on that you’re one of my team. Mustn’t blow your cover.’

‘She mentioned you later.’

‘Favourably, I hope?’

‘She was a bit freaked that our local unit of the Sealed Knot is under police surveillance.’

‘I told her why.’

‘Yes, but the members are proud of what they do and they don’t think Rupert’s death has any connection with them.’

‘You mean Mrs Swithin thinks they’re in the clear. She can’t know everything that goes on.’

‘She has a bloody good try.’

‘You know who she is?’ he said. ‘The wife of Major Swithin, golfer and leading light of the Lansdown Society. The Swithins were the people who reported Rupert trying to break into cars.’

‘Didn’t she know he was in the Knot?’

‘He trained in Bristol. The muster in August was his first appearance on the battlefield.’

‘And his last.’ She coiled a strand of blonde hair around her finger. ‘This is just a thought, guv. Everyone in the Knot takes the soldiering seriously. If Rupert was misbehaving, he was letting down the regiment.’

‘So he was cracked over the head? Since when has petty theft been a capital offence? Besides, the military have other ways of dealing with misconduct.’

Still she seemed reluctant to leave his office. ‘I don’t know if you heard at the drill. My officer said he thought I might get a place in the cavalry.’

There it was, then, out in the open. Nothing to do with emails or forensics. She fancied herself as a cavalry officer.

‘Because you can wave a sword realistically?’

‘I’ve done it before.’

‘I saw. You’re bloody good, but-’

‘And I can ride,’ she added. ‘I used to have a pony.’

‘Don’t you need your own horse for this?’

‘They said they’d find one for me. Some of the cavalry have stables and several horses.’ Her eagerness was transparent.

Women and horses, he grumbled to himself: you didn’t have to think much about it to understand the appeal. ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this for your own pleasure.’

‘I can do my job and enjoy it as well,’ she said, still pressing.

‘The idea is that you lie low and find out what really happened.’ ‘I know, guv, but-’

‘Listen, Inge. You don’t have the full picture yet. Mrs Jarvie, this old lady I just saw, has helped in a major way. We’re now certain that Nadia came to Bath at the end of July, 1993, shortly after Mrs Jarvie’s eightieth birthday on July twenty-third, and she disappeared off the radar shortly after. Let’s say two weeks. When do you make that?’

‘Early August.’

‘Right. Over the weekend of August seventh and eighth, the Sealed Knot held its major muster, the big one, the re-enactment of the Battle of Lansdown.’

‘Yikes!’

‘This year, Rupert Hope, a new member of the Knot, takes part in another re-enactment and happens to unearth part of Nadia’s skeleton.’

‘And is murdered.’ Her eyes ignited like the blue flame of a gas-ring.

‘Do you see why your role as a recruit could be so useful?’

For once she was lost for words.

‘It’s why I don’t want you prancing around on horseback. The best spies keep a low profile.’

In the incident room he called for silence and gave the team the latest bulletin on Keith Halliwell and then announced that he’d taken over Keith’s role as SIO. The whole investigation had a sharper focus now, he said, briefing them on the crucial dates in the summer of 1993. They listened keenly. Even the Bristol contingent left their computers and joined in.

‘I’ve handed Nadia’s picture to John Wigfull, our publicity guru,’ he told them, ‘and he reckons it’s sharp enough to make a good enlargement. We’ll plaster the town with it, papers, local TV. There’s a good chance someone will remember her.’

‘The church?’ John Leaman suggested. ‘That’s where she went first.’

Paul Gilbert said, ‘The priest who met her is dead.’

‘The congregation aren’t,’ Leaman said. ‘Not all of them, anyway. People turn out Sunday after Sunday for years. What you do is this. Ask the priest to mention it at Sunday mass when he’s giving his church notices and then have someone ready with a poster and flyers when they all come out.’

He’d walked into it, as usual.

‘Good thinking, John,’ Diamond said. ‘Take care of it, would you?’ And more than one of the team mouthed the words along with him.

Septimus spoke in his deadpan tone. ‘What’s the thinking here? What do you hope to get out of this?’

‘Now that we have a narrower time frame, just those few days in the summer of 1993,’ Diamond said, ‘we’re on a similar exercise to the one you’ve been carrying out for Rupert, reconstructing the days leading up to the murder. Have you made any headway with that?’

‘Actually, yes.’ Septimus had a way of delivering words to maximum effect. Part of it was his use of the pause. He insisted that his listeners waited, and they generally did. ‘Altogether we’ve traced eleven people who remember seeing Rupert on Lansdown and they all agree that he was behaving in a confused way, turning up at various locations on Lansdown and making a nuisance of himself. I wouldn’t put it any stronger than that. He wasn’t aggressive.’

‘He was hungry,’ Ingeborg said.

‘Correct. And that was what got him into trouble at the racecourse car park and in the car boot sale. He had no money on him, but he needed to eat. Someone was going through bins at the rear of the Blathwayt restaurant and one night they spotted this figure. We’re pretty sure it was him. He ran off.’

‘Poor guy,’ Ingeborg said.

‘It’s hard to assess his state of mind,’ Septimus continued. ‘From what we know he was concussed or brain-damaged from the first attack. He had the power of speech, but he didn’t know who he was. Someone called him Noddy and he accepted it. He seems to have hung about on Lansdown the whole time – which we assume lasted twenty-two days, from the day of the mock battle to the morning he was found dead in the churchyard.’

‘Living off scraps?’ Leaman said.

‘Apparently. Until yesterday we were uncertain where he slept. The theory was that he picked anywhere he happened to be when night came, but we found a new witness.’ Cue another pause.

‘Who was that?’

‘A postman who delivers along Lansdown Road. He’d noticed this man early on several mornings near Beckford’s Tower.’

‘Where he was murdered,’ Leaman said.

Septimus gave him the disdainful look that such an obvious remark warranted. ‘They didn’t speak. It was just a series of sightings, but it was enough for us to order another search. We’d been over the churchyard already, looking for the weapon. Now we wanted to find if he had a base there, somewhere in the dry.’

‘The tower?’ Leaman said.

‘No, that’s got a security system. Valuable items are on exhibition there.’

‘A burial vault?’

‘Are you into horror films?’

There were some sniggers at Leaman’s expense.

Septimus added, ‘We’d have noticed when we cleared the grass from round the graves.’ With eyebrows raised, inviting more suggestions, he looked around the room.

Diamond said, ‘I told you my theory when we first went there. He used the front gate as his bedroom.’

‘The gate?’ Leaman said.

‘Have you been there?’ Septimus asked him.

‘Not lately.’

‘If you had, you’d know what I’m saying. I’m not talking itsy-bitsy garden gates. This is a building, man, massive, like the gate to a city.’

Diamond nodded. ‘I’d call it a gatehouse. Roman in style, I think.’

‘Byzantine,’ Ingeborg said.

She probably knew for certain, so Diamond didn’t contest it. ‘Thanks, Inge. That was on the tip of my tongue. A Byzantine gate by the same guy who built the tower; a big solid structure facing the street.’

‘Okay, it’s a gatehouse,’ Septimus went on. ‘Behind the front gate is this covered-in part, big, like a room, and with stone seats. Under one of the seats we found a folded blanket.’

‘Where would he have got that?’ Leaman said.

‘Nicked from somebody’s car,’ Paul Gilbert said.

‘Have you sent it for tests?’ Diamond asked.

‘You bet. There was a plastic water bottle, empty, and some food wrappers. This place is protected from the weather, quiet at night and private. I wouldn’t call it a comfortable hideaway, but it was dry. Someone used it recently, for sure.’

‘So he may have been brain-damaged, but he was smart enough to find this,’ Ingeborg said.

‘If a stone bed in a cemetery on a hill is smart,’ Septimus said. ‘Personally I would have looked for a Salvation Army hostel.’

‘He’d have to go down into Bath for that,’ she said. ‘I get the feeling he wanted to remain on the hill.’

‘God knows why.’

Diamond’s thoughts had moved on. ‘If the postman noticed him, it’s possible his murderer saw him in the area as well. The body was found among the graves – how far from the gateway?’

‘Thirty yards, or less.’

‘All right. Let’s think what may have happened. Rupert makes his way there one evening and his killer is waiting. The blanket was folded, you say, so he didn’t get a chance to lie down. He was attacked on his way across the churchyard. Is that the way you see it, Septimus?’

‘Pretty much. Or the killer was waiting in the gateway and Rupert ran off and was caught. It seems to have been an ambush, and it happened late. The pathologist said he was killed overnight. He couldn’t say what time.’

‘Do they ever?’ But Diamond wasn’t discouraged. He raised a thumb to the Bristol team and then spoke to everyone. ‘The more I hear about this Rupert, the sorrier I feel for him. For three weeks he was living rough on Lansdown, not even knowing who he was, and no one understood the trouble he was in or what was going on.’

‘What was going on?’ Ingeborg said.

‘With Rupert?’

‘With his killer.’

Diamond looked towards Septimus, who shook his head, unable to supply an answer.

‘We know this,’ Diamond said. ‘It wasn’t some drunken brawl. He had two goes at killing him. The motive was strong.’

‘And are we still assuming a link between Rupert’s killing and Nadia’s, in 1993?’ Ingeborg asked in her journo mode, pinning him down.

‘We are.’

‘The Battle of Lansdown?’

‘Right on.’

‘We don’t know for sure if Nadia went to the re-enactment, do we?’

‘In the next few days we should find out,’ Diamond said. ‘We do know that the timing was right.’

With that, he drew the meeting to a close and there was a buzz of energy in the room. Nadia was named and pictured. Septimus and his team had moved the Rupert investigation on. As for the link, he’d sounded confident. He had to.

Alone in his office, out of conscience more than confidence, he switched on his under-used computer. Ingeborg had been right to mention emails. He preferred to ignore them and his regular contacts understood and used the phone. But it was possible someone at the forensics lab had tried to reach him that way.

Yawning, he waited for the screen to light up.

He clicked on the mailbox icon, never a move that brought much encouragement. Masses of unwanted stuff appeared that he would have highlighted and deleted at a stroke if he could only have remembered the trick.

Scrolling down, looking at the senders, he spotted one from FSS Chepstow and almost passed it by, thinking he didn’t know anyone of that name. Initial letters were a blind-spot with him. But Chepstow was a place, wasn’t it, where one of the Home Office labs was located?

FSS.

Forensic Science Service.

The subject title was Test Report.

When he opened the email and read it, he scratched his head and said, ‘Oh, bugger.’

This required a rethink.

Ten minutes later, he called Ingeborg in.

‘You were right,’ he told her. ‘The lab report came as an email late yesterday. They had to repeat the test and that’s why it took so long. This’ll pin your ears back. The hair doesn’t belong to Nadia.’

‘Her killer?’

‘No.’

‘How do they know that?’ she said, stung into petulance. ‘They’ve got nothing to compare it with.’

‘Because it isn’t a human hair. It’s animal. It comes from a horse.’

‘Get away!’

‘True.’ He handed across the sheet he’d printed. ‘They reckon it was clipped. Horses get trimmed sometimes, don’t they?’

‘Yes, but…’ She read the report right through. ‘Incredible. Can you feature that?’

‘There was I thinking we might have got lucky,’ he said. ‘We end up with a bloody horse.’

‘I’m at a loss, guv.’

‘So was I when I first read it. But I’ve remembered something I was told in London by Vikki, the madam at the brothel. She was Ukrainian herself and she knew Nadia. She said she always thought Nadia came from Cossack stock and she justified it by saying she spent a lot of time watching the racing on TV, not for the betting, but the horses. I don’t know a lot about Cossacks except they’re fierce warriors and they ride horses.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Cool.’

‘So it’s not impossible that when she came here and was looking for a job she thought about working with horses.’

‘I guess.’ She sounded unconvinced.

‘If she heard of an upcoming event involving horses she could well have thought she’d go there in hopes of chatting up some owners and getting work as a stable girl.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying, guv, there’s some heavy speculation here.’

‘Sure. I’m trying to link a horse hair to Nadia.’

‘Okay. And what was the upcoming event?’

‘The re-enactment.’

She took a sharp breath. ‘Of course. Plenty of horses there.’

‘As you say, Inge, it’s all speculation, but we have to work something out and this is the best I can think of. I just wanted you to know I’ve had a rethink about you joining the cavalry.’

‘I can do it?’ She gave a scream of excitement and for one alarming moment he thought she was going to fling her arms around his neck.