Peter Lovesey - Skeleton Hill

‘Didn’t she know he was in the Knot?’

‘He trained in Bristol. The muster in August was his first appearance on the battlefield.’

‘And his last.’ She coiled a strand of blonde hair around her finger. ‘This is just a thought, guv. Everyone in the Knot takes the soldiering seriously. If Rupert was misbehaving, he was letting down the regiment.’

‘So he was cracked over the head? Since when has petty theft been a capital offence? Besides, the military have other ways of dealing with misconduct.’

Still she seemed reluctant to leave his office. ‘I don’t know if you heard at the drill. My officer said he thought I might get a place in the cavalry.’

There it was, then, out in the open. Nothing to do with emails or forensics. She fancied herself as a cavalry officer.

‘Because you can wave a sword realistically?’

‘I’ve done it before.’

‘I saw. You’re bloody good, but-’

‘And I can ride,’ she added. ‘I used to have a pony.’

‘Don’t you need your own horse for this?’

‘They said they’d find one for me. Some of the cavalry have stables and several horses.’ Her eagerness was transparent.

Women and horses, he grumbled to himself: you didn’t have to think much about it to understand the appeal. ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this for your own pleasure.’

‘I can do my job and enjoy it as well,’ she said, still pressing.

‘The idea is that you lie low and find out what really happened.’ ‘I know, guv, but-’

‘Listen, Inge. You don’t have the full picture yet. Mrs Jarvie, this old lady I just saw, has helped in a major way. We’re now certain that Nadia came to Bath at the end of July, 1993, shortly after Mrs Jarvie’s eightieth birthday on July twenty-third, and she disappeared off the radar shortly after. Let’s say two weeks. When do you make that?’

‘Early August.’

‘Right. Over the weekend of August seventh and eighth, the Sealed Knot held its major muster, the big one, the re-enactment of the Battle of Lansdown.’

‘Yikes!’

‘This year, Rupert Hope, a new member of the Knot, takes part in another re-enactment and happens to unearth part of Nadia’s skeleton.’

‘And is murdered.’ Her eyes ignited like the blue flame of a gas-ring.

‘Do you see why your role as a recruit could be so useful?’

For once she was lost for words.

‘It’s why I don’t want you prancing around on horseback. The best spies keep a low profile.’

In the incident room he called for silence and gave the team the latest bulletin on Keith Halliwell and then announced that he’d taken over Keith’s role as SIO. The whole investigation had a sharper focus now, he said, briefing them on the crucial dates in the summer of 1993. They listened keenly. Even the Bristol contingent left their computers and joined in.

‘I’ve handed Nadia’s picture to John Wigfull, our publicity guru,’ he told them, ‘and he reckons it’s sharp enough to make a good enlargement. We’ll plaster the town with it, papers, local TV. There’s a good chance someone will remember her.’

‘The church?’ John Leaman suggested. ‘That’s where she went first.’

Paul Gilbert said, ‘The priest who met her is dead.’

‘The congregation aren’t,’ Leaman said. ‘Not all of them, anyway. People turn out Sunday after Sunday for years. What you do is this. Ask the priest to mention it at Sunday mass when he’s giving his church notices and then have someone ready with a poster and flyers when they all come out.’

He’d walked into it, as usual.

‘Good thinking, John,’ Diamond said. ‘Take care of it, would you?’ And more than one of the team mouthed the words along with him.

Septimus spoke in his deadpan tone. ‘What’s the thinking here? What do you hope to get out of this?’

‘Now that we have a narrower time frame, just those few days in the summer of 1993,’ Diamond said, ‘we’re on a similar exercise to the one you’ve been carrying out for Rupert, reconstructing the days leading up to the murder. Have you made any headway with that?’

‘Actually, yes.’ Septimus had a way of delivering words to maximum effect. Part of it was his use of the pause. He insisted that his listeners waited, and they generally did. ‘Altogether we’ve traced eleven people who remember seeing Rupert on Lansdown and they all agree that he was behaving in a confused way, turning up at various locations on Lansdown and making a nuisance of himself. I wouldn’t put it any stronger than that. He wasn’t aggressive.’

‘He was hungry,’ Ingeborg said.

‘Correct. And that was what got him into trouble at the racecourse car park and in the car boot sale. He had no money on him, but he needed to eat. Someone was going through bins at the rear of the Blathwayt restaurant and one night they spotted this figure. We’re pretty sure it was him. He ran off.’

‘Poor guy,’ Ingeborg said.

‘It’s hard to assess his state of mind,’ Septimus continued. ‘From what we know he was concussed or brain-damaged from the first attack. He had the power of speech, but he didn’t know who he was. Someone called him Noddy and he accepted it. He seems to have hung about on Lansdown the whole time – which we assume lasted twenty-two days, from the day of the mock battle to the morning he was found dead in the churchyard.’

‘Living off scraps?’ Leaman said.

‘Apparently. Until yesterday we were uncertain where he slept. The theory was that he picked anywhere he happened to be when night came, but we found a new witness.’ Cue another pause.

‘Who was that?’

‘A postman who delivers along Lansdown Road. He’d noticed this man early on several mornings near Beckford’s Tower.’

‘Where he was murdered,’ Leaman said.

Septimus gave him the disdainful look that such an obvious remark warranted. ‘They didn’t speak. It was just a series of sightings, but it was enough for us to order another search. We’d been over the churchyard already, looking for the weapon. Now we wanted to find if he had a base there, somewhere in the dry.’

‘The tower?’ Leaman said.

‘No, that’s got a security system. Valuable items are on exhibition there.’

‘A burial vault?’

‘Are you into horror films?’

There were some sniggers at Leaman’s expense.

Septimus added, ‘We’d have noticed when we cleared the grass from round the graves.’ With eyebrows raised, inviting more suggestions, he looked around the room.

Diamond said, ‘I told you my theory when we first went there. He used the front gate as his bedroom.’

‘The gate ?’ Leaman said.

‘Have you been there?’ Septimus asked him.

‘Not lately.’

‘If you had, you’d know what I’m saying. I’m not talking itsy-bitsy garden gates. This is a building, man, massive, like the gate to a city.’

Diamond nodded. ‘I’d call it a gatehouse. Roman in style, I think.’

‘Byzantine,’ Ingeborg said.

She probably knew for certain, so Diamond didn’t contest it. ‘Thanks, Inge. That was on the tip of my tongue. A Byzantine gate by the same guy who built the tower; a big solid structure facing the street.’

‘Okay, it’s a gatehouse,’ Septimus went on. ‘Behind the front gate is this covered-in part, big, like a room, and with stone seats. Under one of the seats we found a folded blanket.’

‘Where would he have got that?’ Leaman said.

‘Nicked from somebody’s car,’ Paul Gilbert said.

‘Have you sent it for tests?’ Diamond asked.

‘You bet. There was a plastic water bottle, empty, and some food wrappers. This place is protected from the weather, quiet at night and private. I wouldn’t call it a comfortable hideaway, but it was dry. Someone used it recently, for sure.’