Skeleton Hill (28 page)

33

I
ngeborg was waiting to see Diamond when he arrived next morning, her eyes bright as sword blades.

‘Something happened?’ he asked.

‘It’s Saturday, guv.’

‘Even I can work that out,’ he said.

‘Farleigh Hungerford Castle. The muster this afternoon. I’m wondering if I can leave early.’

‘Your performance. Right.’ With the focus shifting to the missing racehorse, he had nudged Inge’s frolic to the back of his thoughts. ‘What time?’

‘Well, as soon as possible. They want us on parade at one p.m. – that’s in full uniform, us and our horses.’

‘You’ve had only one rehearsal, haven’t you?’

She gave him a pained look. ‘Drill, guv. We call it drill. Yes, I’m making up the numbers, one of the extras, but I still have to look the part.’

‘Like a bloke, you mean? They didn’t really have women in the cavalry, did they?’

‘Do you mind? I expect they did. Only I’m not trying to pass myself off as a guy.’

‘Before you go, did you find out anything last night?’

‘About Hang-glider?’

‘No, I cleared that up. Anything on Rupert?’

She shook her head, a fraction too fast for Diamond’s liking.

‘You forgot?’ His eyes continued to read her face. ‘There’s something, isn’t there?’

A sigh, blaming him. ‘I tried to tell you this last night. The surprise was the officer in charge, our drill instructor. I must have done a double take when he rode up in his buff coat and feathered hat. It was Dave.’

‘Dave who?’

‘You know. Dave Barton, the man who was with Rupert when they found the femur.’

He paused, taking this in.

‘Inge, are you sure?’

‘Hundred per cent.’

‘He’s a foot soldier, not cavalry,’ Diamond said. ‘He shouldn’t be on a horse.’ Even as he spoke, he recalled Keith Halliwell telling him Dave liked the outdoor life and went out riding.

Ingeborg flushed scarlet. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. Believe me, Dave could teach Butch Cassidy a trick or two. I don’t know what he was doing the day of the re-enactment, but he’s a cavalry officer, and a good one. I’m not kidding, guv.’

‘He’s not the officer type.’

She clicked her tongue in annoyance. ‘It’s not the real army. You don’t have to go through Sandhurst to do the job.’

Fair point, he thought. These people were playing at soldiers. He’d been caught making assumptions.

‘He’s just your average guy, except he’s a top horsemen,’ she said to soften her petulance. ‘He makes it all seem simple.’

‘I believe you. I’m surprised, that’s all.’

‘Maybe his horse was injured when they had the muster. He’d still want to take part, wouldn’t he?’

‘ Did he recognise you as CID?’

‘I don’t think so. I saw him the day he came in, but we didn’t speak. He’s okay. No side to him.’

He allowed her to leave directly. Much else was on his mind.

John Wigfull was the next to look in and he, too, appeared uncommonly cheerful. ‘I hear there was a very good response to my press release. I expect you’ve solved your case now, or you’re on the point of doing so.’

‘It’s not the number of calls. It’s the quality of the information.’

‘The story was on the late news on television. You’ll get more take-up this morning, I guarantee.’

‘I’ll let you know, John.’

For the next few precious minutes he was not interrupted.

The previous night’s conversation with Sir Colin Tipping had almost persuaded him that the theft of Hang-glider in 1993 was the key to the case. Up to then he’d been assuming Nadia’s murder was connected to the re-enactment, that she’d been killed during or shortly after the battle and buried hurriedly. The discovery that the race meeting took place four days later and a serious crime was committed opened a new possibility. Could she have witnessed the theft of the horse and been shot simply because she was there? They could have bundled her body into a car or van and driven her a short way up the road and buried her.

Wouldn’t it be marvellous if Wigfull’s publicity had produced an eye-witness who remembered seeing Nadia at the race meeting? He stepped back into the incident room and asked the receiver for the latest batch of notes from callers.

Wigfull had been right about one thing. Enough people had phoned to raise expectations. A glance through the material was less encouraging. He found the usual mix of guesswork, wishful thinking and imprecision. Any foreign woman of almost any age was liable to have been reported. Some callers were under the illusion that Nadia was still alive and working in a shop. There was another sighting from Sunday Mass in August, 1993, but otherwise the result was negative.

He picked up the phone and asked the operator to get a line to the Lambourn trainer of racehorses, Percy McDart. She called back to say McDart wasn’t listed under his own name and could Diamond kindly supply the name of the stables he worked for?

A job for young Paul Gilbert. ‘What’s that paper the punters buy – the
Racing Post.
They’re sure to know. And when you reach McDart, make an appointment for later this morning, say about noon. You can say who we are, but not what it’s about. I want to see his reaction for myself.’

‘Will you need directions, guv?’

‘You will. You’re doing the driving.’

From across the incident room, Septimus called out, ‘Something you should know, boss.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Remember the lager that was buried before the battle?’

‘By Dave Barton?’

‘We finally caught up with the guy who nicked it.’

He shimmied around the desks to hear more. ‘Nice work. Who is he?’

‘A parliamentarian, he calls himself, named Bert Pope. He was exercising his horse on the battlefield an hour before the fighting started and he saw this soldier in royalist red burying a six-pack by the fallen tree. As he tells it, this was one of the enemy, so he thought it was fair game to return there later and help himself and that’s what he did. But seeing as it was a hot day and everyone knows how thirsty you get, whichever army you’re in, he left two of the cans. He said he read about the skeleton being found there later but he didn’t come forward because he couldn’t see that the lager had anything to do with it, and anyway he felt a bit mean for what he’d done.’

‘How did you find him?’

‘He shared the drink with some of his friends in the roundhead army and told them where it came from. At the time, they enjoyed the joke. When one of them saw the stuff in the paper, he told Pope he’d better fess up. And he did, eventually.’

‘Good. It chimes in nicely with Dave Barton’s statement.’

‘It doesn’t mean Barton is in the clear,’ Septimus said at once. His suspicions of the blacksmith had not gone away. ‘He was in no hurry to come forward himself.’

‘So don’t you believe the rest of his story – that the last time he saw Rupert was after they finished the lager and returned to the fighting?’

The only response was a tightening of the lips.

‘What’s your take on it?’ Diamond said.

He remained edgy. ‘It’s one of those things you can’t prove. He comes across as an okay guy.’

‘Inge agrees with you. He’s her cavalry officer.’

Septimus blinked and drew himself up. ‘That didn’t come out at the interview.’

‘If I recall it right, when you asked if he was a regular pikeman, he said not always, or something similar.’

‘Evasive.’

‘Perhaps he’d been demoted for some misdemeanour. He’s a captain of horse according to Ingeborg.’

‘That makes sense now. When I asked him about the cavalryman who saw him burying the lager, he said he’d know the horse if he saw it again.’

Diamond nodded. ‘A white stallion.’

‘A pale horse.’

‘Same thing.’

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Septimus gave him a gaze burnished with zeal. ‘The Book of Revelation. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.”’

For much of the trip along the motorway, those words resonated in Diamond’s head. The Bible wasn’t often quoted in Bath CID. Was it stereotyping to suppose Septimus, as a member of the black community, was a churchgoer, used to hearing high-flown texts from the pulpit? Some of the Pentecostal churches in Bristol were well known for the power of their preachers and the involvement of their congregations. He could picture Septimus, a man with a solemn presence, letting go as he joined in the responses. Had the phrase about the pale horse come to him automatically, or did it give voice to a genuine apprehension?

To do the man justice, he had been consistent in his suspicion of Dave Barton. He’d worked out that ingenious theory that it had been Rupert who had hidden the six-pack, chancing on the very place where Dave (the supposed killer of Nadia) had buried the body all those years before. Dave (the theory went) had been compelled to silence Rupert by murdering him. The tough interrogation, when Dave had brought along his lawyer, Miss Tower, had been insisted on and carried out by Septimus. The truth should have emerged. Either Dave was very smart or Septimus was barking up the wrong tree. Nothing conclusive had come from it.

And now new witness Bert Pope had torpedoed the theory. Dave had been seen in the act of burying the lager. His story was corroborated.

Septimus was reduced to quoting doom-laden stuff from the Bible.

Unsettling, even so.

Paul Gilbert said suddenly, ‘If you don’t mind me asking, guv, I’m not too clear how this racehorse trainer fits in.’

‘Right. I’ll tell you.’ It was a relief to talk about something else. He hadn’t briefed the team since his meeting with Tipping and his daughter. Taking his time, he told Gilbert precisely why it had become necessary to get the trainer’s version of what had happened the evening Hang-glider had been stolen.

Before he’d finished, they ended the steady climb into the Cotswolds and joined the motorway. Stone buildings gave way to vast stretches of pasture covering Wiltshire’s chalk downs. Nowhere in the south offered longer views, or such a sense of the past. Gilbert was driving at a speed Diamond approved, content to use the slow lane along with the Saturday traffic of caravans and campers returning from holidays in Cornwall.

It wasn’t long before they passed Swindon and started looking for their exit. Gilbert had the Sat-Nav working – just one more gadget Diamond had resolved he didn’t need in his own car.

‘We’re close now,’ Gilbert said as they made the fourth prompted turn in under a minute and started up a narrow lane rutted with mud and cow manure.

‘I’ve heard that before. You couldn’t bring a horsebox up here.’

‘It’s the direct route for us.’

Sure enough, it opened into a wider, better maintained road and only a short way along they had to pull in for a string of horses on their way to the gallops. Gilbert pulled down his window to ask and the leading rider pointed behind him.

In two minutes they were driving towards a complex of stables and outbuildings. Security, Diamond noted, was all around them: CCTV, high walls topped with razor wire, double sets of gates. They had to speak into an entry-phone to gain admission.

‘They call this a yard?’ Gilbert said, marvelling.

‘A yard and then some. It’s a multimillion business.’

Inside, they drew up outside the brick-built admin section, two storeys high. Mr McDart, they learned from a high-heeled, white-suited receptionist, was at the main stable block.

‘Mucking out, I expect,’ Diamond said to Gilbert.

His eyes widened. ‘Do you think so?’

‘No.’

Even so, they found the trainer seated on a bale of hay at one end of the block, short, silver-haired and in a padded waistcoat and flat cap. His brown eyes assessed them as they approached. The hay was his throne and they were expected to show deference, if not actually to bow.

‘You must be the long arm of the law.’

‘Something like that,’ Diamond said, showing his ID.

‘Is this another complaint about my horses holding up the traffic?’

‘Actually, no. It’s about Hang-glider.’ Diamond watched for the reaction.

It wasn’t panic. Not even concern. Expectation best described it. ‘Have you found him after all these years?’

‘Unfortunately, no,’ Diamond said. ‘But we want the facts about his disappearance. It’s possible a murder was committed at the same time.’

‘Murder? I know nothing about that.’ McDart was still in control, unfazed, heels kicking idly against the hay.

‘But you were there for the races?’

‘I was. Hang-glider wasn’t. He’d popped a tendon and retired. He was the star guest, making a final appearance in front of his fans. They regarded him as a local. He had his first outing on Lansdown.’

‘Trained here?’

‘From the beginning. The owner, Sir Colin Tipping, paid a small fortune for him as a yearling. That’s a gamble, you know. Some of them never race, they’re so useless. This colt was the real deal from the start. Full of pluck and class.’ He looked away, remembering, and there was pride in his voice. ‘In his short career, he was ahead of everything. He took the Irish 2000 Guineas by four lengths and the Prince of Wales’s Stakes and he could have done much, much more.’ He gave Diamond another gimlet gaze with the brown eyes. ‘Murder, you said?’

‘That’s our suspicion. Would you mind telling us your mem-or ies of that day?’

‘Nothing I can say. I didn’t see anything. I drove the horse here myself with my son Charles, who was learning the business in those days, as a stable lad, like I did.’

‘You drove what – a horsebox?’

‘You drove what He nodded.

‘Was that safe – driving an injured horse?’

A frown. ‘What are you suggesting? He was three months over the injury. He’d had ultrasound. You wouldn’t have known there was anything amiss except that he’d have torn it again if he was raced. All we did that evening was walk him in front of the grandstands.’

‘You said “we”.’

‘Charles, actually. I watched from a box in the stands with the owner. It was rather moving. Cheering all the way.’

‘So did your son return the horse to the box?’

‘That’s right. Locked him in securely and joined some of his friends.’