Peter Lovesey - Skeleton Hill

‘So he may have been brain-damaged, but he was smart enough to find this,’ Ingeborg said.

‘If a stone bed in a cemetery on a hill is smart,’ Septimus said. ‘Personally I would have looked for a Salvation Army hostel.’

‘He’d have to go down into Bath for that,’ she said. ‘I get the feeling he wanted to remain on the hill.’

‘God knows why.’

Diamond’s thoughts had moved on. ‘If the postman noticed him, it’s possible his murderer saw him in the area as well. The body was found among the graves – how far from the gateway?’

‘Thirty yards, or less.’

‘All right. Let’s think what may have happened. Rupert makes his way there one evening and his killer is waiting. The blanket was folded, you say, so he didn’t get a chance to lie down. He was attacked on his way across the churchyard. Is that the way you see it, Septimus?’

‘Pretty much. Or the killer was waiting in the gateway and Rupert ran off and was caught. It seems to have been an ambush, and it happened late. The pathologist said he was killed overnight. He couldn’t say what time.’

‘Do they ever?’ But Diamond wasn’t discouraged. He raised a thumb to the Bristol team and then spoke to everyone. ‘The more I hear about this Rupert, the sorrier I feel for him. For three weeks he was living rough on Lansdown, not even knowing who he was, and no one understood the trouble he was in or what was going on.’

‘What was going on?’ Ingeborg said.

‘With Rupert?’

‘With his killer.’

Diamond looked towards Septimus, who shook his head, unable to supply an answer.

‘We know this,’ Diamond said. ‘It wasn’t some drunken brawl. He had two goes at killing him. The motive was strong.’

‘And are we still assuming a link between Rupert’s killing and Nadia’s, in 1993?’ Ingeborg asked in her journo mode, pinning him down.

‘We are.’

‘The Battle of Lansdown?’

‘Right on.’

‘We don’t know for sure if Nadia went to the re-enactment, do we?’

‘In the next few days we should find out,’ Diamond said. ‘We do know that the timing was right.’

With that, he drew the meeting to a close and there was a buzz of energy in the room. Nadia was named and pictured. Septimus and his team had moved the Rupert investigation on. As for the link, he’d sounded confident. He had to.

Alone in his office, out of conscience more than confidence, he switched on his under-used computer. Ingeborg had been right to mention emails. He preferred to ignore them and his regular contacts understood and used the phone. But it was possible someone at the forensics lab had tried to reach him that way.

Yawning, he waited for the screen to light up.

He clicked on the mailbox icon, never a move that brought much encouragement. Masses of unwanted stuff appeared that he would have highlighted and deleted at a stroke if he could only have remembered the trick.

Scrolling down, looking at the senders, he spotted one from FSS Chepstow and almost passed it by, thinking he didn’t know anyone of that name. Initial letters were a blind-spot with him. But Chepstow was a place, wasn’t it, where one of the Home Office labs was located?

FSS.

Forensic Science Service.

The subject title was Test Report.

When he opened the email and read it, he scratched his head and said, ‘Oh, bugger.’

This required a rethink.

Ten minutes later, he called Ingeborg in.

‘You were right,’ he told her. ‘The lab report came as an email late yesterday. They had to repeat the test and that’s why it took so long. This’ll pin your ears back. The hair doesn’t belong to Nadia.’

‘Her killer?’

‘No.’

‘How do they know that?’ she said, stung into petulance. ‘They’ve got nothing to compare it with.’

‘Because it isn’t a human hair. It’s animal. It comes from a horse.’

‘Get away!’

‘True.’ He handed across the sheet he’d printed. ‘They reckon it was clipped. Horses get trimmed sometimes, don’t they?’

‘Yes, but…’ She read the report right through. ‘Incredible. Can you feature that?’

‘There was I thinking we might have got lucky,’ he said. ‘We end up with a bloody horse.’

‘I’m at a loss, guv.’

‘So was I when I first read it. But I’ve remembered something I was told in London by Vikki, the madam at the brothel. She was Ukrainian herself and she knew Nadia. She said she always thought Nadia came from Cossack stock and she justified it by saying she spent a lot of time watching the racing on TV, not for the betting, but the horses. I don’t know a lot about Cossacks except they’re fierce warriors and they ride horses.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Cool.’

‘So it’s not impossible that when she came here and was looking for a job she thought about working with horses.’

‘I guess.’ She sounded unconvinced.

‘If she heard of an upcoming event involving horses she could well have thought she’d go there in hopes of chatting up some owners and getting work as a stable girl.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying, guv, there’s some heavy speculation here.’

‘Sure. I’m trying to link a horse hair to Nadia.’

‘Okay. And what was the upcoming event?’

‘The re-enactment.’

She took a sharp breath. ‘Of course. Plenty of horses there.’

‘As you say, Inge, it’s all speculation, but we have to work something out and this is the best I can think of. I just wanted you to know I’ve had a rethink about you joining the cavalry.’

‘I can do it?’ She gave a scream of excitement and for one alarming moment he thought she was going to fling her arms around his neck.

Did Lansdown itself hold the solution to this mystery? In Diamond’s thoughts the great limestone hill loomed larger than any suspect. From inside the bowl of the city it appeared disarmingly scenic, a pale green backdrop to the undulating ribbons of cream-coloured buildings. He knew its real character. Up there were places of death, the graveyard and the battlefield, bleak, windswept locations even on a summer day. The battleground had yielded up a bone, and then a skeleton, to set this investigation in motion. Nadia had come to Bath for sanctuary, and been slaughtered and buried on the hill. For three weeks poor confused Rupert Hope had roamed the fields and tracks and slept in the Victorian cemetery until, just as cruelly, his life had been stopped. This was an unforgiving place.

He’d never set much store on intuition, so why was he nagged by this conviction that the down held another, larger secret and it was his duty to reveal the truth? The standard method of probing motive, means and opportunity would not be enough. A bigger, bolder vision was called for. Lansdown both repelled him and tugged at him.

He told Septimus he was going to drive up to the cemetery for another look at the entrance gate where Rupert was thought to have slept.

‘There isn’t much to see now,’ Septimus said. ‘Everything we found was bagged up and sent to forensics. We’ll know more if they can tell us for sure if he used that blanket.’

‘For now, I’m assuming he did,’ Diamond said. ‘Can you tear yourself away from that computer and join me?’

On the drive up the hill, Septimus seemed to feel he ought to speak up for his team. ‘We haven’t just been looking for witnesses. We spent a lot of time on Rupert and his life in Bristol. He comes out of it as the kind of guy nobody could hate or feel threatened by. Liked his lecturing and did it well. Always thinking of ways of bringing history to life. Popular with students.’

‘Not so popular in the senior common room.’