Skeleton Hill (26 page)

‘I don’t think I know it.’

‘Well, you’re not renowned for your piety.’ She smiled, pleased to have got in a dig of her own. ‘It’s tucked in among the government offices. It doesn’t have a tower. In fact it looks more like a Nissen hut than a church.’

‘Does he live nearby?’

‘The vicarage is next door, but you’ll be wasting your time. I’m sure if he’d seen anything suspicious, he would have informed us.’

‘People can’t always tell what’s suspicious from what is not.’

‘A vicar should.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ll phone him and see if he’s there.’

The ‘government offices’ Georgina had mentioned were the squat brick buildings known in Whitehall jargon as ‘hutments’, originally erected during the Second World War by the Ministry of Works to house a section of the Admiralty evacuated from London. Quite what the present buildings housed apart from civil servants was a mystery to Diamond, except that it had to do with the Ministry of Defence. Yet another Lansdown secret, but not one he needed to unravel. What interested him more was the proximity of the cemetery where Rupert’s body had been found, just across the main road. Charlie Smart, living so close, was well placed to have seen something.

Georgina’s description of the church hadn’t been strictly accurate. A Nissen hut was a tunnel-shaped structure of corrugated iron. St Vincent’s was modest in size, but brick built, and looked inseparable from the offices. Diamond would never have identified it until he found a board at the front listing the times of services. The vicarage next door was a similar hutment, fronted by a garden so overgrown that he had to part the foliage to get to the door.

‘It’s open,’ a voice called from within.

He gave the door a push and found himself in the living room greeted by a short, blond man in jeans and a T-shirt with a butterfly motif. ‘You must be the myrmidon of the law,’ he said, offering his hand.

‘I’m not sure what that means,’ Diamond said, ‘but it sounds roughly right.’ He introduced himself.

‘Charlie Smart, incumbent,’ his host said. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Thank you, but not on duty.’

‘Dandelion and burdock cordial won’t compromise you,’ Charlie Smart said, ‘and I speak not only as a man of the cloth but the one who distilled the same. Try.’ He picked up a jug and poured some into two tumblers.

In the cause of good policing, Diamond sipped some and found it marginally easier to swallow than Ukrainian
kvas
. ‘Tasty.’

‘As a society we impoverish ourselves by ignoring the so-called weeds,’ the vicar said. ‘Speaking of the humble dandelion, did you know that it’s a source of rubber?’

‘To be honest, no.’ He remembered Mrs White the magistrate telling him the vicar was a wildlife enthusiast.

‘Nip the stem of one and you get that whitish milk on your fingers. Allow it to thicken and you can rub it into a ball. The plant produces latex, you see.’

‘Remarkable,’ Diamond said, hoping to close down the botany lecture.

Charlie Smart wasn’t finished. ‘I have it on good authority that there’s an Asian variety of dandelion that was cultivated on an enormous scale by the Russians during the war when their supplies of regular rubber were interrupted. The roots are up to two metres long and produce ten per cent of latex. It’s still grown commercially in the Ukraine.’

Diamond became genuinely interested. ‘Did you say the Ukraine?’

‘I did. It was part of the old Russia.’

‘Have you been there?’

‘No. Plants are my thing. Preaching and plants – and when the two are combined, watch out. You’d better stop me if you want to talk about anything else.’

‘People, actually, as distinct from plants.’

‘I shouldn’t say this as a man of the cloth, but they’re not nearly so interesting. Any particular people?’

‘Have you noticed anyone recently hanging about the cemetery across the road?’

‘Apart from the people in paper suits, do you mean?’

‘Before they arrived.’

‘You want to know if I spotted the poor fellow who was murdered?’

‘Him, or, better still, his killer.’

‘Sorry, but no.’

‘Do you get over there at all?’

‘Quite often, in my pastoral capacity, conducting funerals on the declivity towards this end where the more recent graves are located. Also, wearing my botanical hat, studying the vegetation. The Victorian section near the tower was a wildlife sanctuary until your levellers arrived and hacked it down.’

‘Searching for the weapon.’

‘Which I understand they didn’t find, so all that destruction of habitats was for nothing.’

‘They had to make the effort,’ Diamond said. ‘Before they arrived, you noticed nobody?’

‘Don’t look so surprised. I wasn’t on a twenty-four hour watch.’

‘We believe the victim was sleeping in the gatehouse for a number of nights before he was killed.’

‘Sensible,’ Charlie Smart said. ‘He’d stay dry there and wouldn’t be disturbed. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I can’t remember seeing anything suspicious. You get the occasional visitor coming to see William Beckford’s grave, but that’s by day. It’s not the sort of place most people would choose to visit at night. Every so often I’ll go there with a lamp to study moths, but not in recent weeks. Have some more cordial.’

‘No, thanks. As a member of the Lansdown Society, you patrol the down regularly?’

‘I wouldn’t put it in those terms. My rambles arise from my interest in the natural world. I’d cover the same ground whether I was in the society or not. However, I support its aims.’

‘Do you get up to the battleground?’

‘Regularly. You’re going to ask me about the skeleton and I’m going to disappoint you again. I know nothing of what went on up there. I’ve lived here only three years.’

‘But you know the fallen tree?’

‘The old oak? Yes. It’s our success story, that tree. The farmer wanted to saw it up and sell the timber, but the Lansdown Society made sure he didn’t. There was a rare variety of lichen growing on it, so they got a conservation order, or whatever you get for trees.’

‘Like bats in your loft? It’s illegal to evict them.’

‘The same principle, yes.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘The lichen? To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Whatever it was, it’s no longer there. The trunk has a nice shaggy jacket of
opegrapha corticola
, but among the lichens that’s about as rare as the cabbage white butterfly.’

‘So the conservation didn’t work?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘Will it reappear?’

‘I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

‘Could someone have misidentified it?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘I can’t answer that, not having been here at the time.’

‘The others aren’t experts like you.’

‘In their own spheres they are. The major with his military know-how keeps a special eye on the war games.’

‘And the golf.’

‘Yes, indeed, along with Sir Colin, who is a man of the turf and has the racecourse under his wing. Augusta White is our legal eagle. And if Augusta represents law, your esteemed Georgina is the embodiment of order.’

‘None of them wildlifers.’

‘That’s my section of expertise, apart from the obvious.’

‘They’re fortunate to have you. Was the previous vicar a botanist?’

‘Arthur Underhill? No, he was a literary man, a Beckford expert, so he was in his element living here. Beckford wrote books, you know, as well as building towers.’

‘Should I have read any?’

‘I doubt if they’ll assist your investigation. He wrote much about his travels abroad. His novel, called
Vathek
– in French, would you believe? – was set in some Arab country, and he also wrote a peculiar book called
Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters,
a literary folly, you might say, because none of the painters existed.’

Diamond was losing control of this interview. He’d only asked about Arthur Underhill.

‘Beckford is still a cult figure,’ the vicar went on. ‘People knock on my door asking the way to the tower and some of them know a lot about him. You still get the occasional crank who thinks he squirreled away some of the treasures and masterpieces he stacked in the tower. The auction after his death was a very dubious affair presided over by a crooked auctioneer and his son who absconded soon after.’

‘I don’t know why Lansdown should give rise to so much crime,’ Diamond said. ‘It’s just one large hill, after all.’

‘It’s Bath’s back room,’ Charlie Smart said, ‘stuffed with things people want to forget about.’

31

‘
W
here’s Ingeborg?’ he asked in the incident room.

Septimus looked up from his computer. ‘Somewhere on Lansdown by now, looking for an elderly warhorse. I told her your theory and she got really fired up.’

John Leaman said, ‘Any excuse to get out of this place.’

‘Wishing you’d thought of it?’ Diamond said.

‘I’m not a horse person.’

‘Who’s the old nag in here, then?’

There were grins around the room.

Septimus added, ‘She was on the phone to someone in the Sealed Knot, finding out where they stable the horses they use.’

‘What’s she going to do if she finds the right one – interview it?’ Leaman asked, not done for yet.

‘I expect she’ll get a hair sample.’

‘To see if it’s the same colour?’

‘For the DNA,’ Diamond said, using his freshly acquired knowledge. ‘Didn’t you know horses have DNA?’

Leaman went quiet.

‘Plenty of horses are taken to Lansdown for the race meetings,’ Paul Gilbert said with a charged tone in his voice. He’d been on a high since finding Nadia’s landlady. ‘Maybe we should make a check up there.’

‘Twenty-year-olds, in training?’ Diamond said.

He turned a shade more pink. ‘I guess not.’

But something was stirring in Diamond’s memory. He asked, ‘What happened to that calendar Ingeborg made of events that happened on Lansdown? It was on the display board.’

‘She transferred it to a computer file, sir,’ one of the civilian staff said. ‘Would you like to access it?’

‘I would if you do it for me.’

‘On your computer, or mine?’

‘On your

‘Mine.’

In the quiet of his office, he scrolled through Ingeborg’s listings, most of them commonplace and trivial. Her mind-numbing task had been done at Keith Halliwell’s suggestion and at the time Diamond had thought it a monumental waste of effort, but had refrained from saying so. What possible relevance could club reunions and cross-country races have to a murder enquiry? Now that the time frame had narrowed to a few days in the summer of 1993 – from Nadia’s arrival late in July to the battle re-enactment on August 7th and 8th – the calendar was worth a look.

She had definitely arrived after Mrs Jarvie’s eightieth on July 23rd. He watched the pages roll like film credits and stopped them at the end of July, 1993.

He scrolled on a little.

His phone beeped.

Wigfull’s voice. ‘Just to let you know that your Ukrainian girl is in tonight’s
Bath Chronicle.
I’ve got an early copy if you want to see it. And the story will be on Points West and HTV News tonight, so the phones should start ringing soon. You’d better not go home early.’

His train of thought had derailed. ‘Nice work, John. Do you want to be part of the excitement?’

‘No, thanks. It’s my positive thinking night.’

He didn’t ask.

He took one more look at the screen before stepping into the incident room to see who was willing to do overtime. The practi-calities of managing a team had to be gone through. Paul Gilbert was game and so were a couple of the Bristol team and three civilians. Not Septimus: he’d worked more than his share of late evenings in recent days and wanted a night off.

‘Fair enough. We’ll cope,’ Diamond said.

A high profile appeal to the public always brings in responses. Most are made in good faith, even if a high proportion prove to be mistaken. Wanting to help is a human instinct. Sometimes the offers are driven more by the wish than the reality. It’s easy to convince oneself that certain events took place and fit the facts of the appeal, particularly after a long lapse of time. Additionally there are callers not so altruistic, who see an opportunity of profit. They’ll have heard about payments to informants. Usually their information is worthless. Finally there are the nuisance callers, the equivalent of the idiots who make bogus 999 calls.

Out of all this the police must sift the genuine witnesses. Diamond went over the procedure with his volunteers, stressing the known facts about Nadia: that she was Ukrainian, under twenty, a Roman Catholic, had lived for a time in London as a prostitute and was in lodgings in Lower Swainswick. She spoke good English, had been orphaned, so had no family, and she would have been wearing jeans and a T-shirt. ‘The trick is that you don’t give out any of this. You listen to the information coming in and see if it checks. Be sure to get the contact details of the informant before they tell you their story.’

As if on cue, a call came in, but it was only Ingeborg. ‘I’ve spent the entire afternoon checking on horses, guv.’

‘I was told. Any joy?’

‘Joy? I saw some adorable animals, but none that were old enough. And now it’s got so late I’d better get straight to my evening session with the cavalry, so I won’t come back, if that’s all right.’

‘It’s okay. You don’t want to be late on parade.’

‘God, no.’

‘One thing, Inge.’

‘Guv?’

‘Don’t lose sight of what you’re really there for.’

In the short time Diamond had been speaking to her, the first call had come in about Nadia. Paul Gilbert was taking it. After a few seconds he started shaking his head. He thanked the caller and rang off. ‘Wrong year. They said the Olympics were on in Barcelona. That was 1992.’

‘Good thinking,’ Diamond said. ‘Did you watch it on TV?’

‘I was only two at the time.’

‘There’s a sobering thought. I was working here. Same job, same rank.
Barcelona
. I used to drive up Wellsway singing along with Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé. And you were just a toddler at the time. Unbelievable.’

More calls started coming in. One was a definite sighting, but only at Mass at St John’s and the caller couldn’t recall which Sunday it was. Nadia had covered her head with a dark scarf, but otherwise she was wearing the T-shirt and jeans.

‘Must have borrowed the scarf from Mrs Jarvie,’ Diamond said.

After six, when the local news was screened on HTV, a flurry of calls came in, but none proved to be of obvious help. It seemed everyone had memories of young foreign girls asking directions in Bath or enrolling for English as a Foreign Language at the Tech. The problem was that enrolment didn’t start until September. By then Nadia was almost certainly dead.

‘I’m starting to lose confidence,’ Diamond said. ‘I wish I’d joined John Wigfull for some positive thinking.’

He helped man the phones for another two hours. The results were disappointing. Three would be worth following up, but they appeared to offer little new information. Someone had spoken to a Ukrainian girl at the station on the day she arrived. Two had seen someone who looked like Nadia walking into town from Lower Swainswick.

The evening shift could be left to take any more calls. He thanked the team. ‘You never know,’ he said. ‘Someone may call us tomorrow.’

Before leaving, he made a call of his own, to Paloma, inviting her for a drink and a bite to eat. She said she’d eaten already, but she’d be pleased to join him. He suggested meeting at the Blathwayt. The pub-restaurant was right at the top of the hill, a long-established watering-hole for racegoers, golfers, car-booters and travellers on the South Downs Way.

‘On Lansdown?’ she said. ‘Can’t you leave your work behind?’

‘I’ve heard they have a good chef.’

‘Be honest, Peter,’ she said. ‘You’re not going there for the food.’

‘All right, I’m combining business with pleasure, but the pleasure will be paramount.’

‘Smoothie. I don’t believe a word.’

He’d suggested 9 p.m., and made sure he arrived early enough to walk through the Blathwayt’s several dining areas checking who was there. A chat in this relaxed setting with one of his vigilante friends from the Lansdown Society wouldn’t have come amiss. The bar was doing a brisk trade, but he recognised nobody there or in the restaurant. Outside, under the patio heaters, was a candlelit section he hadn’t seen before – a development pubs everywhere were favouring since the smoking ban came in. Seeing some people leave, he moved smoothly into a seat at the table. He’d ordered his lasagne and the drinks before Paloma drove up.

‘I seem to be losing my aura of mystery,’ she said after they’d kissed. ‘You even know what I want to drink.’

‘Is that bad?’

‘I’ve
got
a drink and it’s the right one, so I’m not going to complain. This is nice, being outside.’

‘I don’t know if you’ve been inside lately,’ he said. ‘It’s had a makeover since I was last here. I remember it as dark and seedy.’ ‘In keeping with its past,’ she said.

He smiled. If there was background on any Bath location, Paloma knew it.

‘Back in the eighteenth century, it was a highwaymen’s pub called the Star. The road to Bath was perfect for hold-ups. They’d rob people at gunpoint and then spend some of the money here before moving on.’

‘There’s no end to the villainy on this bloody hill. Only this afternoon I was hearing about a firm of bent auctioneers.’

‘English and Son. Absolute crooks. How did they come up?’

He told her what he’d learned from Charlie Smart.

‘He’s right,’ she said. ‘It’s all in the book I lent you. The pair of them disappeared owing a fortune in debts and were never traced and neither were some of William Beckford’s treasures. He had one of the finest private art collections in the country, paintings by Raphael and Bellini, Claude and Canaletto. And there were other treasures of gold and silver.’

‘A secret hoard?’ Diamond thought about it as the possible mainspring for two murders. ‘Now you’re confusing me. I was coming round to sex as the motive for Nadia’s death.’

‘It sounds likely,’ Paloma said. ‘She had nothing worth stealing.’ ‘But if she happened to have found a stash of valuables, that could have made her a target.’

‘Beckford’s lost treasures? Don’t you think all the likely places have been checked long ago?’

‘Right. I’m way off beam.’

She thought about it, turning her glass. ‘There have been other finds up here. Have you heard of the Lansdown Sun Disc?’

Amused once again by her fund of local lore, he shook his head. ‘Tell me.’

‘A gilded bronze model of the sun over three thousand years old, excavated in one of the Bronze Age barrows. It’s now in the British Museum. Quite a treasure.’

‘I can cap that,’ he said. ‘What do you say to three tons of gold bullion in ingots so pure you could mould them in your hands?’

‘I say yes, please, if it’s legal.’

‘It isn’t. The trail for the biggest robbery in history went cold on Lansdown.’

‘Get away!’

‘You’ve heard of the Brink’s-Mat heist in 1983? Twenty-six million in gold bullion from a warehouse at Heathrow?’

‘Of course.’

‘There was a local guy, a millionaire, who came under suspicion. He lived in style at the Coach House at Battlefields, the hamlet beside the Civil War site. A snatch squad raided the place and found a smelter, ingot moulds and two gold ingots still warm to the touch. Also shotguns and a rifle.’

‘I do remember reading something now.’

‘The people doing the smelting were minor players. The owner was in Tenerife. Eventually he was deported and put on trial and acquitted on all charges.’

‘Acquitted? How was that?’

‘He claimed the smelting was part of his legitimate business. Among other companies, he owned a Bath jeweller’s. He went on to create the largest timeshare company in Europe, worth many millions. Eventually it was exposed as a scam and he got an eight-year sentence.’