Skeleton Hill

30

He called the lab and asked to speak to the chief scientist.

The voice on the line was urbane, well used to dealing with awkward policemen. ‘Good of you to call back, Mr Diamond. No doubt there’s a rational explanation of our findings and I’m suggesting it must come from your end, not ours.’

‘Why is that?’

A definite chuckle was audible. ‘Because we’re scrupulous in our procedures. We don’t confuse samples.’

Diamond held himself in check. ‘Before I comment, let’s clarify what’s in your report, shall we?’

‘We haven’t made one yet. This was a courtesy call to let you double-check what’s been happening.’

‘A chance to redeem ourselves?’

‘I’m not playing the blame game, Mr Diamond. I’m a scientist looking for an explanation of an improbable result. The horse rug your people sent us contains hair clippings genetically identical to the one you submitted previously. We were led to believe that particular clipping had been buried for up to twenty years.’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Sixteen, then. And we were told this rug had been used recently by a murder victim sleeping rough. How do you reconcile that?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Well, then. There’s only one explanation I can think of, and that’s that you muddled the clippings in some way.’

If this wasn’t the blame game it sounded remarkably like it. ‘You’d better think again because that’s not possible,’ Diamond said, ready to trade blow for blow. ‘Your own scientists found the first hair trapped under the tab.’

‘Ah, but how many people handled the zip before it reached here?’

‘One only, and he was the crime scene investigator. It was put straight into an evidence bag. We followed correct procedures throughout and I don’t much care for these inferences you’re making. There’s no chance it could have been contaminated.’

‘Easy to say, harder to prove, superintendent.’

He was increasingly riled by the man. ‘Explain this, then. The zip was sent to you at least ten days ago. The rug wasn’t even found until the end of last week. How could there be cross-contamination at our end?’

‘You must answer that. It didn’t happen here. We’d be sacked for incompetence if it did.’

How tempting was that? He bit back the comment he wanted to make. Instead, he changed tack. ‘What’s your basis for saying that the hairs came from the same horse?’

‘DNA analysis.’

‘DNA from a horse hair?’

‘Yes, why not?’

‘I know about DNA in humans.’

‘Animals have their unique profiles, just the same.’

‘I’m interested in the science here,’ Diamond said. ‘Genetic profiling in people is well known. How much data is there on horses?’

‘My dear man, it’s been going on for years. There’s a huge database. All the top racing thoroughbreds have their DNA on record and it can be analysed from hair samples just the same as yours or mine.’

‘And you’re totally sure the hairs matched?’

‘We routinely back up every test and I ordered more when this unaccountable result was reported to me. They came back identical to the first batch.’

Diamond felt as if he needed a cigarette, and he’d given up years ago. ‘I’d like to speak to my colleagues about this. I’ll get back to you later.’

‘Good thinking, Mr Diamond. It’s sound science to recheck every damned thing. We do, and we have in this case.’

His blood pressure rocketing, he slammed down the phone. He got up and circled the small office, taking deep breaths to get control of himself. Then he asked Septimus back into the office.

Was the Bristol man blushing under his black skin? He had an uneasy look, for sure.

‘You’ve had time to think while I’ve been on the phone,’ Diamond said. ‘How could this have happened?’

‘Not our fault.’ To the point, and no excuse offered. This was the way Septimus operated. If you wanted alibis, go to someone else.

‘Are you certain?’

‘We bagged up the blanket – sorry, horse rug – where we found it, in the gatehouse, sealed and labelled it and sent it off directly.’

‘If that was handled right, then what about the zip?’

‘Not for me to say. If you recall, the zip was already at the lab being cleaned before I came to Bath.’

Back of the net. Septimus was in the clear.

‘I can’t argue with that.’ Diamond hesitated, casting his thoughts back. ‘Keith Halliwell sent them the zip at my suggestion. He’s ultra-careful. He knows all about the chain of custody and the legal pitfalls if you do anything wrong.’

Septimus gave a shrug. ‘Keith was in London with you when the rug was found. It makes no sense.’

But it had to. Diamond leaned on his elbows and buried his face in his hands, locked in thought. After some while he looked up and said, ‘How long do horses live?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘I’m sure they get to twenty or thirty. It’s not impossible that the horse Nadia came into contact with is still alive. Say it was a three year old in 1993. It could be under twenty now.’

‘So Rupert happened to find the rug used for the same horse?’ Septimus said on a disbelieving note. ‘That’s stretching it.’

‘No, it could be one more link between the cases. You say “happened to”. There could be a logical reason.’

‘I’m not following you.’

‘Rupert the historian had an interest in the Civil War. That’s why he joined the Sealed Knot. Agreed?’

‘Okay.’

‘He was given a pike to carry, but he must have taken an interest in every aspect of the battle, including the cavalry. The horses have got to be battle-trained. What with cannon fire and smoke and all the rest, it’s no place for a nervous animal. I reckon they use the same horses again and again. You’d rather have an expe-ri enced mount than one that’s going to take fright. This was some old warhorse that featured in both re-enactments.’

‘Where does the rug come in?’

‘Left on Lansdown after everyone went home. Rupert found it and used it for bedding.’

‘It must have been left in the dry, then.’

A better idea struck him. ‘How about this? The horse is local and kept on Lansdown. I’ve seen them in fields there. On cold nights they’re covered with a horse rug.’

‘We’re not in winter yet.’

‘At that height it’s cold most nights. By day the rug is going to be stored somewhere. A shed. The place where they keep the fodder. Rupert breaks in and helps himself.’

Septimus digested this and said nothing.

‘Something for Ingeborg to check on tonight,’ Diamond said. ‘She can take an interest in the horses, find out if there’s a veteran among them and where it’s stabled.’

Now that the focus was shifting to someone else, Septimus asked, ‘Do you need me any more?’

A shake of the head. Diamond was planning the next move. Septimus stepped outside and left him to it.

Presently Diamond reached for the phone and called the lab again. He was put through to the supreme boffin and outlined his new theory. Even as he spoke, his confidence ebbed. He hoped it wasn’t showing in his voice.

‘The same horse?’ the scientist said. ‘Each of your victims came into contact with it?’

‘We’re working on the theory that both of them were involved with battle re-enactments on Lansdown.’

‘That’s the explanation and you’re satisfied?’

‘It will do for now. There was no negligence on our part.’

‘In that case we’ll report to you in the usual way. Mind, it would be helpful if you could find the horse.’

‘That’s the next step. And it would help me to know some more about the rug.’

‘It’s an under-rug. Do you know what that is?’

‘I can hazard a guess.’

‘And you’d be right. It’s made of soft material to protect the animal from friction from the heavyweight rug. They tend to get rub marks and bald shoulders, so they need this softer layer underneath. There’s a label. The manufacturer was a firm called Phil Drake.’

‘Cheapo?’

‘Quite the opposite. Top of the range. Unfortunately the firm over-expanded and went bust eleven years ago. This rug was an expensive product in its time.’

‘So if it’s at least eleven years old, it’s not in the best condition?’

‘The original burgundy colour has faded badly and the fabric is disintegrating.’

‘Wear and tear?’

He didn’t answer immediately. ‘Strange you should mention that. There isn’t much wear and tear as such. The deterioration is uniformly spread across the rug. It’s down to the ageing of the fabric more than use. Materials fade and break down in time, as you know.’

‘Not that much,’ Diamond said. ‘I’ve got a twelve-year-old suit I still wear.’

‘And keep in a wardrobe in a warm house, no doubt. Horse rugs tend to be kept in stables and outbuildings where they’re subject to cold and damp.’

‘One other question. We’ve talked about the clippings of horse hair. Did you find anything else?’

‘Why don’t you ask outright if we found any human hairs that match Rupert Hope’s? Actually, we did. We can say for certain that he came into contact with it.’

Finally, something to be pleased about. ‘That confirms one theory, then. We know where he went to have a roof over his head. Anything else I should be told?’

‘If there is, you’ll hear about it.’

Some caffeine-assisted decisions were called for. Diamond went down to the canteen. To top up his blood-sugar he invested in a chocolate chip muffin as well. His thoughts were more positive now.

The horse rug business was intriguing, and made Ingeborg’s assignment with the cavalry unit even more of a challenge. What a good thing he’d given way after first insisting she remained a foot soldier. He’d update her and get her ideas where the horse might be found.

By tonight Nadia’s picture would be on TV and in the Bath Chronicle. If anyone in the city remembered seeing her, the case could be transformed. Had she gone to watch the re-enactment that weekend in August, 1993? Or talked her way into some active role behind the scenes where the cavalry kept their horses?

Encouraging as all this was, the motive for Nadia’s murder still eluded him. He’d rejected the theory that she’d been killed on orders from the London vice ring, but that didn’t mean sex was discounted as a motive. Here was a young, attractive woman alone and looking for work in Bath, a city she didn’t know. She’d needed to meet people. Being experienced in attracting men for paid sex, she may have signalled something she hadn’t intended. It didn’t require much imagination to see one of the re-enactors, high on the experience of the mock battle and tanked up with beer, deciding she was available, discovering she wasn’t, losing control and killing her. An unplanned murder gruesomely covered up and hidden, there on the edge of the battlefield.

The other stock motives didn’t look likely in this case. Nadia had just arrived on the Bath scene, so jealousy, that slow, festering cancer, was out. She was homeless and without funds, so theft or any form of financial gain could be dismissed. She wasn’t being blackmailed or blocking someone’s ambition or giving unreasonable offence. Revenge was unlikely considering she didn’t know anyone here.

It had the feel of a sudden, spontaneous killing by a stranger – the hardest of all to investigate. In such cases, the best hope was that someone had witnessed something. His thoughts returned to those self-appointed snoops, the Lansdown Society.

He drained his coffee and went upstairs for a session with their police representative, Georgina.

The traffic light system on her door showed amber. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes, he decided.

No one came out. She was probably on the phone. He put his ear to the door and it opened and he fell into the arms of John Wigfull, who just about held him upright.

‘Cheers, mate,’ Diamond said.

‘What the hell…?’

‘We can’t go on meeting like this.’

‘What?’

From behind her desk, Georgina called, ‘Are you unwell, Peter?’

‘Not at all.’ He sidestepped the startled Wigfull. ‘No harm done. I was thrown by the entry system. Thought it was changing to green.’

She wasn’t getting into a debate about her entry system. ‘We were discussing the publicity budget. Mr Wigfull is going to need a slice of your cake if you continue to demand poster campaigns at the rate of two or three a week.’

An exaggeration he ignored. ‘He’s welcome to whatever’s on offer. I just had a chocolate muffin downstairs.’

She didn’t cotton on.

‘Slice of the cake,’ he said.

His attempts at wit never softened her. ‘What are you here for? I’m expected in Headquarters in half an hour.’

‘This won’t take long, ma’am.’ He looked over his shoulder and waited for Wigfull to close the door behind him. ‘It’s about the Lansdown Society. I see you and your fellow members as potential witnesses, invaluable to the enquiry.’

‘You made that clear a while ago and you seem to have spoken to each of us now.’

‘Actually, no.’

‘Come on, Peter. I know for a fact that you questioned Sir Colin Tipping, Major Swithin and Augusta White.’

‘There’s another.’

‘Me?’ She clapped a hand to her chest. ‘If I noticed anything I’d volunteer it. You wouldn’t have to ask. I don’t know what else you hope to discover. We’re mere mortals, you know, not all-seeing.’

‘Not you. There’s somebody else. He’s not all-seeing, but he may be halfway there. The sky pilot.’

‘The what?’

‘The reverend gentleman.’

‘Charlie Smart? You’ve no need to talk to him. He wasn’t a member in 1993. He was initiated after me, less than three years ago, when the previous vicar retired.’

Initiated. He was tempted to ask about that. Unfortunately more pressing matters had priority. ‘I expect he’s still an active member, just as you are? Goes for walks and keeps his eyes open and reports back on anything untoward?’

‘We all do that.’

‘He may be the witness I’m looking for.’

‘I can’t think what he could have witnessed.’

‘Rupert Hope in the last hours of his life and possibly his murderer as well. Will I find Charlie Smart at St Stephen’s?’

‘No, you won’t. He’s not the vicar of Lansdown. His parish is higher up the hill, at St Vincent’s on Granville Road, not far from the tower.’

‘I don’t think I know it.’

‘Well, you’re not renowned for your piety.’ She smiled, pleased to have got in a dig of her own. ‘It’s tucked in among the government offices. It doesn’t have a tower. In fact it looks more like a Nissen hut than a church.’

‘Does he live nearby?’

‘The vicarage is next door, but you’ll be wasting your time. I’m sure if he’d seen anything suspicious, he would have informed us.’

‘People can’t always tell what’s suspicious from what is not.’

‘A vicar should.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ll phone him and see if he’s there.’

The ‘government offices’ Georgina had mentioned were the squat brick buildings known in Whitehall jargon as ‘hutments’, originally erected during the Second World War by the Ministry of Works to house a section of the Admiralty evacuated from London. Quite what the present buildings housed apart from civil servants was a mystery to Diamond, except that it had to do with the Ministry of Defence. Yet another Lansdown secret, but not one he needed to unravel. What interested him more was the proximity of the cemetery where Rupert’s body had been found, just across the main road. Charlie Smart, living so close, was well placed to have seen something.

Georgina’s description of the church hadn’t been strictly accurate. A Nissen hut was a tunnel-shaped structure of corrugated iron. St Vincent’s was modest in size, but brick built, and looked inseparable from the offices. Diamond would never have identified it until he found a board at the front listing the times of services. The vicarage next door was a similar hutment, fronted by a garden so overgrown that he had to part the foliage to get to the door.

‘It’s open,’ a voice called from within.

He gave the door a push and found himself in the living room greeted by a short, blond man in jeans and a T-shirt with a butterfly motif. ‘You must be the myrmidon of the law,’ he said, offering his hand.

‘I’m not sure what that means,’ Diamond said, ‘but it sounds roughly right.’ He introduced himself.

‘Charlie Smart, incumbent,’ his host said. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Thank you, but not on duty.’

‘Dandelion and burdock cordial won’t compromise you,’ Charlie Smart said, ‘and I speak not only as a man of the cloth but the one who distilled the same. Try.’ He picked up a jug and poured some into two tumblers.

In the cause of good policing, Diamond sipped some and found it marginally easier to swallow than Ukrainian kvas. ‘Tasty.’

‘As a society we impoverish ourselves by ignoring the so-called weeds,’ the vicar said. ‘Speaking of the humble dandelion, did you know that it’s a source of rubber?’

‘To be honest, no.’ He remembered Mrs White the magistrate telling him the vicar was a wildlife enthusiast.

‘Nip the stem of one and you get that whitish milk on your fingers. Allow it to thicken and you can rub it into a ball. The plant produces latex, you see.’

‘Remarkable,’ Diamond said, hoping to close down the botany lecture.

Charlie Smart wasn’t finished. ‘I have it on good authority that there’s an Asian variety of dandelion that was cultivated on an enormous scale by the Russians during the war when their supplies of regular rubber were interrupted. The roots are up to two metres long and produce ten per cent of latex. It’s still grown commercially in the Ukraine.’

Diamond became genuinely interested. ‘Did you say the Ukraine?’

‘I did. It was part of the old Russia.’

‘Have you been there?’

‘No. Plants are my thing. Preaching and plants – and when the two are combined, watch out. You’d better stop me if you want to talk about anything else.’

‘People, actually, as distinct from plants.’

‘I shouldn’t say this as a man of the cloth, but they’re not nearly so interesting. Any particular people?’

‘Have you noticed anyone recently hanging about the cemetery across the road?’

‘Apart from the people in paper suits, do you mean?’

‘Before they arrived.’

‘You want to know if I spotted the poor fellow who was murdered?’

‘Him, or, better still, his killer.’

‘Sorry, but no.’

‘Do you get over there at all?’

‘Quite often, in my pastoral capacity, conducting funerals on the declivity towards this end where the more recent graves are located. Also, wearing my botanical hat, studying the vegetation. The Victorian section near the tower was a wildlife sanctuary until your levellers arrived and hacked it down.’

‘Searching for the weapon.’

‘Which I understand they didn’t find, so all that destruction of habitats was for nothing.’

‘They had to make the effort,’ Diamond said. ‘Before they arrived, you noticed nobody?’

‘Don’t look so surprised. I wasn’t on a twenty-four hour watch.’

‘We believe the victim was sleeping in the gatehouse for a number of nights before he was killed.’

‘Sensible,’ Charlie Smart said. ‘He’d stay dry there and wouldn’t be disturbed. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I can’t remember seeing anything suspicious. You get the occasional visitor coming to see William Beckford’s grave, but that’s by day. It’s not the sort of place most people would choose to visit at night. Every so often I’ll go there with a lamp to study moths, but not in recent weeks. Have some more cordial.’

‘No, thanks. As a member of the Lansdown Society, you patrol the down regularly?’

‘I wouldn’t put it in those terms. My rambles arise from my interest in the natural world. I’d cover the same ground whether I was in the society or not. However, I support its aims.’

‘Do you get up to the battleground?’

‘Regularly. You’re going to ask me about the skeleton and I’m going to disappoint you again. I know nothing of what went on up there. I’ve lived here only three years.’

‘But you know the fallen tree?’

‘The old oak? Yes. It’s our success story, that tree. The farmer wanted to saw it up and sell the timber, but the Lansdown Society made sure he didn’t. There was a rare variety of lichen growing on it, so they got a conservation order, or whatever you get for trees.’

‘Like bats in your loft? It’s illegal to evict them.’

‘The same principle, yes.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘The lichen? To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Whatever it was, it’s no longer there. The trunk has a nice shaggy jacket of opegrapha corticola, but among the lichens that’s about as rare as the cabbage white butterfly.’

‘So the conservation didn’t work?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘Will it reappear?’

‘I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

‘Could someone have misidentified it?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘I can’t answer that, not having been here at the time.’

‘The others aren’t experts like you.’

‘In their own spheres they are. The major with his military know-how keeps a special eye on the war games.’

‘And the golf.’

‘Yes, indeed, along with Sir Colin, who is a man of the turf and has the racecourse under his wing. Augusta White is our legal eagle. And if Augusta represents law, your esteemed Georgina is the embodiment of order.’

‘None of them wildlifers.’

‘That’s my section of expertise, apart from the obvious.’

‘They’re fortunate to have you. Was the previous vicar a botanist?’

‘Arthur Underhill? No, he was a literary man, a Beckford expert, so he was in his element living here. Beckford wrote books, you know, as well as building towers.’

‘Should I have read any?’

‘I doubt if they’ll assist your investigation. He wrote much about his travels abroad. His novel, called Vathek - in French, would you believe? – was set in some Arab country, and he also wrote a peculiar book called Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, a literary folly, you might say, because none of the painters existed.’

Diamond was losing control of this interview. He’d only asked about Arthur Underhill.

‘Beckford is still a cult figure,’ the vicar went on. ‘People knock on my door asking the way to the tower and some of them know a lot about him. You still get the occasional crank who thinks he squirreled away some of the treasures and masterpieces he stacked in the tower. The auction after his death was a very dubious affair presided over by a crooked auctioneer and his son who absconded soon after.’

‘I don’t know why Lansdown should give rise to so much crime,’ Diamond said. ‘It’s just one large hill, after all.’

‘It’s Bath’s back room,’ Charlie Smart said, ‘stuffed with things people want to forget about.’