Peter Lovesey - Skeleton Hill

This was a grey, bleak morning and the place names fitted the conditions. Somewhere to his left was Cold Ashton. Looming on the right, Freezing Hill, where the royalists had unwisely formed their battle array in 1643. Ahead were Hanging Hill and Slaughter Lane. He chugged up the steep north scarp of Lansdown and pulled in at the potholed stopping point for the Grenvile Monument. He had it to himself.

Outside, a keen north-easterly chilled the flesh. He wouldn’t linger long, just enough to stretch his limbs and remind himself of the terrain that had hosted two unexplained murders. The monument didn’t interest him. He wanted the view of the vast limestone plateau. In the foreground lay the battlefield where two great armies had clashed; and where, centuries later, ten thousand had come to watch the first big re-enactment. On the other side the ground plunged into a partly wooded area where the skeleton had been buried. Away in the distance, two miles along the road, the gilt lantern top of William Beckford’s Tower marked the graveyard where Rupert Hope had been found.

Between the murder sites lay all those places for recreation: the racecourse, the golf club, sports pitches and the setting for Lansdown Fair and its modern incarnation, the car boot sale. The down didn’t have bad associations for everyone. For some it held good memories, outsiders coming in at fifty to one, match-winning goals, holes in one, bargain buys, conquests of every sort. For Peter Diamond it was an adversary; dispiriting, tormenting, defying his attempts to get a rational explanation of two violent killings. He was convinced that the truth of the mystery was here, waiting to be discovered.

Beginning to shiver from the cold, he took a long look at the panorama from the battlefield to the tower. Mainly turf, but with clumps of trees, and the occasional building, the ground was un -remarkable, the sort of country you drove through unthinkingly. Yet it had endured since the Jurassic period some 150 million years ago, when a warm, shallow sea covered all of this and deposited the limestone, the source of Bath’s prosperity. This ancient hill was the silent witness he couldn’t question. He’d hoped that being here would inspire him with a sudden crystal clear revelation, but there was none.

‘Bugger you, Lansdown,’ he said out loud.

Georgina awaited.

Instead of calling at the incident room he trudged upstairs to her office, bent on getting the worst over first.

‘Come.’

The door was open and she was standing in front of her desk with her arms folded. As if that wasn’t intimidating enough, the Queen on the wall looked over her right shoulder.

‘You’re back.’

‘That’s the size of it,’ he admitted.

‘What on earth happened to result in Keith Halliwell being shot?’

He gave her his version.

‘Didn’t anyone know it was a house of ill fame?’

A phrase he hadn’t heard in many years. Where had she got that? In the dorm at her posh girls’ school secretly reading the News of the World ? ‘We were operating alone at that stage. We didn’t have the local police to ask.’

‘You used to be in the Met. Wasn’t Barnes a part of your old beat?’

‘Many years ago, ma’am. It was probably a respectable house in those days. We were given the address by a churchwoman.’

‘Who’d been duped, as you were.’

Stung by that, he said, ‘Even if we’d known it was a – er – house of ill fame, I wouldn’t have expected anyone to pull a gun on Keith. No way could we have predicted anything like that.’

‘How is he now? Have you seen him?’

He was more reserved than he’d been with Ingeborg. ‘He’s off the critical list.’

‘That much I found out myself by phoning the hospital. They seem to think he’ll be unable to work for several weeks.’

‘With a bullet through his middle, I expect so.’ He added, making it sound like a throwaway line, ‘Good thing we can cover for him.’

Georgina seized on it at once. ‘I don’t know how. He was one of your SIOs, a key person in the investigation. How can you possibly replace him?’

‘I’ll do it myself.’

She took a sharp, audible breath. ‘I don’t think so, Peter.’

He waited for the broadside.

‘We agreed you were CIO, an executive role. You don’t seem to appreciate what it is to be a senior policeman. You shouldn’t have gone to London at all. Your place is here, at headquarters, supervising both arms of the investigation.’

‘The trip was arranged through a contact of mine. I had to be there.’

She ignored that. ‘This has all worked out very conveniently for you, hasn’t it? From the beginning you wanted to run both inquiries yourself. You managed to get the Rupert Hope case brought back from Bristol on very dubious grounds.’

‘With your blessing,’ he put in.

‘With my compliance. You shoehorned our Bristol colleagues into the same incident room as the skeleton inquiry.’

‘Only because you wouldn’t provide a second room.’

‘And now you want carte blanche to roll up your sleeves and go to work on the case.’

‘Someone has to do it, ma’am.’

‘What about John Leaman?’

‘He’s needed to take care of all the other stuff that comes up, knife crime, drugs, domestics.’

‘You’ve got an answer for everything.’

He nodded, and he’d let Georgina have the last word. All in all, he’d come out of it better than he expected.

Downstairs, the team were excited at the possibility that the skeleton had an identity at last. Ingeborg was checking every database she could think of. Others were on the phone trying to prise information from the benefits office, medical practices and women’s refuges. Each hoped to be the one who shouted, ‘Found her!’

All this energy lifted Diamond’s spirits. ‘Ukrainians are strong church-goers,’ he said, airing his new-found knowledge. ‘She may have gone to one of the churches here and asked for help.’

‘But which?’ Ingeborg said. ‘There’s no Ukrainian Orthodox church in Bath that I know of.’

‘Catholicism is strong over there. She might have looked for a Catholic church.’

DC Paul Gilbert, the rookie in the team, piped up, ‘St John’s in South Parade, or St Mary’s in Julian Road.’

‘Are you a Bible-basher?’

‘No, guv. I just happen to know.’

‘Your job, then. Seek and ye may find.’

From across the room one of the Bristol detectives said out of the side of his mouth, ‘Thus spake the Lord.’

Diamond didn’t hear. He was looking over Ingeborg’s shoulder, trying to make sense of what was on the screen.

‘Just thought I’d check the churches,’ she said. ‘He’s right. St John’s and St Mary’s.’

‘Worth a go,’ he said. ‘You’re a young woman. Put yourself in her situation. She manages to escape from a vice ring in London. She’s unlikely to have much money. Gets on a train at Paddington and ends up here. The first question is why – what’s the attraction?’ ‘Why did any of us end up here? It’s a nice place to live.’

‘She was desperate. I doubt if she was making that kind of choice.’

‘She knew someone, then. She planned to join them, thinking they might help her get a new start.’

‘That’s more like it.’

‘But I’ve tried looking for Ukrainians in Bath, and found nobody. I expect some came, but there’s no record of it.’

‘This is where the computer lets you down,’ he said. ‘It stores all those gigabytes of data, but if someone hasn’t kept a record of what you want, it’s no help. People who stay with friends don’t get on computers.’

She laughed. ‘Good thing. It would lead to no end of trouble.’