Peter Lovesey - Skeleton Hill

The Ukraine was notorious as a source of cheap labour and worse. Young people from the former Soviet bloc had started coming to the west in numbers after the wall came down and temporary work for cash had always been easy to get in Britain, with no questions asked about visas and work permits. Unscrupulous employers were only too pleased to cash in.

Some illegal immigrants undoubtedly were murdered and weren’t heard of again. If you don’t officially exist, there isn’t much of a hue and cry when you go missing.

He called Ingeborg to the office. ‘You were a journalist. You know the local scene as well as any of us. Is there a Ukrainian community in Bath?’

‘Not that I’ve heard of,’ she said.

‘Bristol?’

‘Possibly. They do band together in places and keep up the old customs and religion. Ukrainians have always had a strong sense of identity. There’s a national association, isn’t there? I know there are several thousand in Manchester and they organise events and meet socially.’

‘In London, too,’ he said, and he could speak from experience after his years in the Met. ‘I think the first to settle here in numbers were displaced soldiers after the second world war. The Ukraine has had various political upheavals since and each one saw more of them moving here. I think they have their own cathedral somewhere in London. But Bath…? I haven’t heard of it and neither have you, it seems.’

‘You’re trying to find someone who knew the dead woman?’ she said.

‘When she first came here, she would surely have looked for some of her fellow countrymen.’

‘Unless she was trafficked and had no choice,’ Ingeborg said.

He might have expected Ingeborg to think of this. As a socially aware young woman she was well informed about the trade in human beings and keen to see it stopped. ‘When did trafficking first become a problem?’

‘It started when perestroika came to the old Soviet Union and travel restrictions were eased.’

‘When Gorbachev was leader?’

‘The late eighties. Young people were looking for an escape and there were crooks only too pleased to take advantage.’

‘In Russia?’

‘And here.’

‘But we know from the logo on the zip that she came in the early nineties.’

Ingeborg nodded. ‘Yes and by then they were leaving their country in big numbers, women in particular. Life was hard there. Something like eighty per cent of the unemployed were women. They couldn’t earn much at home.’

‘So did she land up in Bristol?’

‘On the game? Who knows? Montpelier and St Paul’s have always had a reputation. You could talk to Septimus.’

‘And I will,’ he said, ‘but I’m still hopeful that she made contact with some Ukrainians here. Common sense tells me she came to London first and we know they have a big presence there. I’m going to call an old friend from the Met. He may throw some light.’

Louis Voss had retired from Fulham CID some time after Diamond left, but still worked in the same nick as a civilian.

‘Forgive my ignorance,’ Diamond said to him after they’d exchanged greetings and small talk about how their lives had moved on. ‘Would you know the part of London where most Ukrainians hang out?’

‘Holland Park,’ Louis said at once. ‘Didn’t you get to know it when you worked here?’

‘No mate, ’Olland Park was up the posh end,’ he said in his cod version of cockney. ‘I was stuck down the North End Road. Remember?’

‘It’s all around that part of town,’ Louis said, ‘restaurants, clubs, churches, the embassy. You could be forgiven for thinking you’re in Odessa. They even have a Ukrainian statue in Holland Park Avenue. Their patron saint, St Volodymyr. They’re well dug in.’

‘Holland Park,’ Diamond said, more to himself than Louis.

‘Why? Are you looking for a cheap plumber?’

‘Plumber?’

‘Lighten up, Peter.’

Diamond explained about the skeleton and the Ukrainian connection. ‘I can’t think why she ended up dead and buried in Bath. I’m hoping to tap into her movements before she got here and London seems the best place to start.’

‘You want me to put out some feelers?’

‘More than that. I want to meet people.’

‘Will any old Ivan do?’

‘Preferably one who knows what was happening about 1992.’

‘Can you drink seven straight vodkas?’

‘Never actually tried.’

‘There’s always a first time. I’ll see what I can set up for you. Whether any of them will talk to a Zummerzet plod I can’t say.’

‘Septimus had a brilliant thought,’ Ingeborg told Diamond towards the end of the afternoon.

S ‘Oh, yes?’ He didn’t want to stifle her enthusiasm, but he’d learned to be wary of brilliant thoughts. There was usually a hidden agenda.

‘He says if there’s a link between our skeleton girl and the killing of Rupert Hope it’s got to be that big muster they had in 1993, the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary.’

‘“Got to be”? I question that.’

‘We know she died about then.’

‘Give or take a year or two.’

‘It was a huge event, guv, much bigger than the one they put on in July. I read the press reports when I was doing that list for Keith. Sponsored by the Round Table. Plenty of publicity. Oceans of coverage in the Chronicle. They staged it over two days in August and ten thousand turned up to watch. Extra police were called in to control them.’

‘I believe you, Inge. You don’t need to go on.’

‘Listen, though. The spectators were all kept behind a rope barrier along the top edge of the field where the main road is. But the fallen tree where the girl was buried is on the far side, on a steep slope.’

‘I know this.’

‘I’m giving you the picture. You weren’t there on the day and neither was I. Whatever went on in the area of the tree was out of sight of most people, right?’

He nodded, beginning to see where this was going. ‘That’s why Dave Barton hid his six-pack there.’

‘Let’s stay with 1993 for a moment. What I’m saying – well, what Septimus said to me – is that if a fatal incident happened on one of those two days in front of ten thousand people the obvious place to take the body was down the hill out of sight.’

‘But no one was seriously hurt. We know that.’

‘How?’ she said, her eyes alight with the force of her argument. ‘How do we know?’

‘It would have made the news, that’s why.’

‘Guv, it was a battlefield. There were skirmishes taking place, pikemen fighting, cavalry charges. People were pretending to be dead all over the hill. Who’s going to notice if one of the bodies really is dead?’ She had a point there and she hammered it home. ‘You could kill a person in front of a mass audience and get away with it. Before the end of the show you drag the body out of sight and you can bury it later.’

‘Is this Septimus’s brilliant idea?’ he said.

‘Give me a chance. I haven’t finished.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘There were women on the battlefield. I’ve seen the colour supplement. They dressed the part. Some of them were supposed to be tending the wounded.’

‘Camp followers,’ he said, recalling what Augusta White had told him.

She snapped back at him, ‘That’s a pejorative term.’

‘Not at all. It’s what they’re known as.’

‘I call them angels of mercy.’

‘Call them what you like, Inge. I’m quoting the Sealed Knot. I don’t think it’s meant to insult women. And since your feminist hackles are rising you may like to know that about a third of the cavalry are women. And your more adventurous sisters sometimes join the gun crews.’