Peter Lovesey - Skeleton Hill

‘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.’

Changes had been made in the incident room. More work stations and computers were in place and one of the boards had been cleared of data and moved to the far end. But the big change was in Keith Halliwell. He had the face of a lottery winner and his team clearly shared the excitement. He came to meet Diamond, zigzagging between computers like a wing three-quarter making a run for the line. ‘Guv, it paid off,’ he said, and he was waving a transparent evidence bag. ‘Just like you said it might.’

‘What’s this – the zip?’ Diamond said, taking the bag to inspect it.

‘Back from the lab this morning. Have a look under the tab. You can move it now.’

Diamond held the bag and its contents under a strip light and saw the silver glint of some of the teeth of the zip. The cleaning had made an appreciable difference, but it had also shown up some damage. ‘Am I allowed to take it out?’

‘Better not,’ Halliwell said. ‘They said it’s corroded badly and could fall apart.’

He passed the bag back. He’d never been noted for delicate handling of anything. ‘Show me.’

Through the plastic, Halliwell manipulated the tiny tab on the slider to reveal the underside. ‘There. It’s been preserved quite well because it was folded down.’

Diamond squinted at the tiny metal surface. He could just about make out a symbol of some kind.

‘Try this,’ Halliwell said, handing him a magnifying glass that made him feel like Sherlock Holmes.

He put his face close to the lens and saw a better image. Maybe as a law and order man he was preconditioned, but the figure seemed to him like the upright and crosspiece of a gibbet:

‘What is it? A logo?’

‘I thought it was just a symbol at first. I’ve been on it all morning, talking to various experts. It’s Cyrillic, their equivalent of a capital G.’

‘Doesn’t look anything like a G.’ He knew he was being grouchy again, but some devil inside him had to challenge Halliwell’s boyish enthusiasm.

‘I’m sorry, but that’s Russian for you.’

‘Cyrillic – the Russian alphabet?’

‘Right.’ Halliwell sounded quite emotional over his findings. ‘We’ve made a huge leap forward. If the jeans came from Russia – or one of the old Soviet Union countries – there’s a good chance our young lady wasn’t from Britain at all.’

‘Unless we imported them.’

‘We’re talking about twenty-odd years ago, guv. The Cold War was still on. We weren’t doing business with Russia. When did the Berlin Wall come down?’

Ingeborg said, ‘November, 1989. Inside our time span. The boss is right. She could have bought them in Oxford Street.’

‘No chance,’ Halliwell said, so fired up that he wouldn’t be persuaded. ‘The wall came down and the borders were open and East Europeans flooded into the west. She’s a young Russian who ended up in Britain and got into bad company and was murdered. It’s not surprising she doesn’t feature on the missing persons index.’

‘Hold on, Keith,’ Diamond said. ‘This is all fascinating stuff, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Cheap Russian jeans with zips like this may well have retailed in our high street shops in the early nineties.’