Peter Lovesey - Skeleton Hill

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.