Peter Lovesey - Skeleton Hill

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

He broadened the argument. ‘For the sake of the murdered girl and her family. She has a God-given right to be treated properly as well.’

This worked better. They could see the conflict in Olena’s eyes. Where did her Christian duty lie? She sighed, a deep heart felt sigh. ‘You wait here. I get my address book.’

Now that they were alone, Mr Nice took the opportunity to pour what was left of his kvas into a potted plant.

‘Are you thinking of dividing forces?’ Halliwell said. ‘I don’t mind going to Barnes if you’d do the booze artist.’

‘Sod that. I’m in charge.’ When it suits me, he thought.

‘What I’m thinking, guv, is that you could handle another chorni khlib welcome, but could you handle the kvas as well?’

‘Ah.’ He was wavering. Halliwell had a point.

‘You get the straight vodkas, but as I’m the driver…’

‘You’re a devious bastard, Keith.’

Olena returned and handed them a piece of paper with a Barnes address.

Before they split up, Diamond felt in his pocket. For once, he was carrying the phone Paloma had given him. ‘Just as well to keep in touch,’ he told Halliwell. ‘Do you have my number?’

‘It’s in the memory.’

He blinked. ‘Is it? Then it’s better than my memory. When did I give it to you?’

‘Ingeborg did. She made a note of it last year when she was showing you how to work the thing. She passed it round the office.’

‘That woman! Bloody nerve.’

‘What’s the point of having a phone if you aren’t reachable?’

‘I have an old-fashioned liking for privacy.’

‘Is that why it isn’t switched on?’

‘Isn’t it?’ He fingered the controls in a clumsy way and Halliwell pressed the correct one. They agreed to meet at the car at 6 p.m. unless they’d been in contact before.

A taxi delivered Diamond to Addison Road and the Crimea, an old-style Victorian pub with a field gun as its sign. To most Brits, the Crimea was a war rather than a place. Inside, blue and green tiles and varnished woodwork made it dark. Some kind of plaintive music from a stringed instrument was being piped through the room. A balalaika, Diamond decided from no expert knowledge.

He approached the two men on bar stools, the only customers he could see. They looked about his age and were speaking in a foreign language. He waited for a pause.

‘Excuse me. I’m looking for Andriy.’

‘In what connection, my friend?’ If this was a Ukrainian, he had a better command of English than Olena.

‘I was told if I bought him a drink he might help me find someone.’

‘That’s always possible.’ The speaker had a grey baseball cap pulled well down on his forehead, making his pale blue eyes seem a long way off.

‘You know him?’ Diamond said.

A nod. ‘Two double vodkas would be nice.’

As if by arrangement, a bar girl appeared from nowhere.

‘You heard that?’ Diamond asked her.

She was already filling a glass. ‘And for you, sir?’

He pointed to one of the beer handles. ‘That’ll do. A half.’ He didn’t trust himself drinking vodkas. He paid and turned back to the drinkers. ‘Which of you is Andriy?’

After some hesitation the second man raised a finger and said nothing. His hunched, comfortable position on the bar counter spoke of many hours of practice. A fine head of black curls sagged between broad shoulders.

‘He’s your man,’ his companion said. ‘Knows everyone.’

‘Cheers, then,’ Diamond said, swallowed hard and told them he was from Bath police enquiring into the death of a young woman, apparently Ukrainian, about twenty years ago. ‘She was buried on a hillside a mile or so outside the city. Her skeleton, minus the skull, was dug up last week. It’s possible she was known here in London.’

‘If she was Ukrainian, she probably was,’ the man in the baseball cap said. ‘What do you say, Andriy?’

‘This is all you know?’ Andriy said without looking at Diamond or the other man. ‘A headless skeleton?’

He told them about the zip.

Andriy wasn’t impressed. ‘Hundreds of girls come through London. I don’t know where they all end up.’

‘This one ended up in another city, dead, probably murdered.’

‘So she got in with bad company.’

‘Speaking of which,’ Diamond said, ‘were there any Ukrainian gangs with links to Bath or Bristol twenty years ago?’

Andriy shrugged and looked away.

‘She was from your country,’ Diamond said.

‘He doesn’t have an answer,’ his companion said.

Yet he was supposed to be a gossip, so why so reticent? Diamond dredged deep. ‘Another thought, then. The Cossacks come from the Ukraine, am I right?’

‘Cossacks?’ Andriy locked eyes with him again. ‘What is this talk of Cossacks? Who are you to be speaking about Cossacks?’

‘They have a fierce reputation, don’t they?’

‘What – do you think some Cossack came to Bath and killed this girl?’ He grinned at his friend, then said to Diamond, ‘Do you know anything about history? The time of the Cossacks was nearly four hundred years ago. They revolted against the Polish oppressors. Smashed them. But it was a long time ago.’

‘The 1640s,’ the other man said.

‘Well, how about that?’ Diamond said just to counter the suggestion that he was ignorant about history. ‘We had a civil war of our own going on in the 1640s.’

Andriy wasn’t impressed. ‘I’m telling you the Cossacks are in the past.’

‘What about World War Two? There were Cossack brigades fighting on the German side against the Russians.’

‘Everyone was fighting and everyone suffered,’ Andriy said. ‘Poles, Russians, Jews, Cossacks. There isn’t a family in the Ukraine without painful memories of the war. Don’t lecture me on our history.’

Diamond shook his head. ‘I’m making the point that the Cossacks never went away. You can’t dismiss them as history. Do they sometimes decapitate their enemies?’

There was a moment of silence. He was in dangerous waters here.

‘It’s not unknown,’ Andriy said finally, and added, ‘in past times.’ ‘Ancient times,’ his companion said.

‘Right,’ Andriy said. ‘A long time back. They don’t carry swords any more. If I were you, Mr Policeman, I would forget about Cossacks.’

‘Thanks for that. Any suggestions where I should look, then?’

‘Try the embassy.’

‘We already did – and drew a blank.’

‘Too bad.’

The man with the baseball cap looked at his watch and said something in Ukrainian to Andriy, and then slid off the stool, grinned at Diamond as if to say you’ll be here for ever if you think you’re going to find anything out, and left the pub.

‘ Mafioso ,’ Andriy said.

‘It crossed my mind,’ Diamond said. ‘Difficult to talk freely with someone like that in attendance.’

Andriy showed him an empty glass. Diamond nodded to the bar girl. She poured another double and then returned to the area behind the bar, despatched there by a flap of Andriy’s hand.

‘In the nineties, when your dead woman disappeared,’ he said to Diamond, ‘there were two big groups bringing women to this country. They still operate, and so do others now. He is attached to one such group.’

‘Understood.’

‘At that time, the competition was strong. Deadly. Two pimps were killed. One of the women, too.’

Diamond leaned forward, all ears.

‘But not your woman,’ Andriy said. ‘This one was given a funeral at the Ukrainian Church.’

‘When was this?’

‘The year of independence, 1991.’

‘Was her killer caught?’