‘Does it have a name, guv?’ Septimus asked.
‘Does what have a name?’
‘This operation. We’ll get more respect if we give it a name.’
He’d heard before about Bristol giving names to everything. ‘You can call it what you like as long as you do a good job.’
‘Operation Cavalier?’
‘If you like. Cavalier it is.’
‘Do you want to be out and about yourself, guv?’
A loaded question. Talk about respect. He could earn some for himself by leading from the front. In time, he remembered his bad back. ‘No, someone has to get this place up and running. And I’ll need an office manager.’
Silence.
Some heads turned. They were looking at the beefy owner of the earring. He said, ‘Fair cop. You’ve got me bang to rights.’
This caused amusement.
‘What’s your name?’ Diamond asked, uncertain where he was going with this. He suspected he was being set up.
‘Chaz… guv.’
‘Can you take this on, Chaz?’
‘Sure.’
After the rest of them had quit the room Diamond asked Chaz his rank and learned that he’d made it to sergeant, indicating that somebody rated him. ‘Do you know what this involves, Chaz?’
‘Common sense, isn’t it? We need staff. Someone to take calls, two or three computer operators to file the statements, an indexer, an action allocator and probably an admin officer as well.’
Encouraging.
‘And can you get them?’
‘We’re high priority, aren’t we?’
‘You bet we are.’
In the first hour, Chaz not only conjured up the equipment, the phones and computers, but the civilian staff as well. He saw them as they arrived and told them precisely what their duties were.
‘You’ve done this before,’ Diamond said.
‘No, guv. I’m learning as I go along.’
‘A fast learner?’
‘Born organiser.’ Chaz spoke without vanity, simply stating a fact.
Before noon, the first call came in from Rupert Hope’s flat, broadcast to all on an amplifier. The search team had found an address book and a diary and they’d started up his computer and begun looking at recent emails. If they expected praise from the management they didn’t get it. ‘Fuck that for a bowl of cherries,’ Chaz said into the phone. ‘I’ll have a patrol car pick up the tower unit and bring it here. Use your time looking through his drawers.’
Soon a second person was brought in to help with the incoming calls. Steadily a picture of the murdered man was taking shape. He’d been passionate about his subject and an inspiring teacher, regularly taking his students on field trips. History in his eyes wasn’t about dead people and forgotten battles, it was the key to enlightenment and the hope for a better society.
‘Good at his job,’ Chaz said with approval.
‘So it seems,’ Diamond said. ‘We could be looking at jealousy as a motive if he was that special.’
‘Some other lecturer?’
‘Maybe. As you’ve probably discovered, Chaz, you can make yourself unpopular by being one of life’s achievers.’
‘Is that a fact, guv?’
‘It’s one of those laws, regrettable, but true.’
The team at the flat reported that Rupert Hope must have been keen on personal hygiene, for his bathroom had an impressive array of aftershaves and deodorants. The towels were clean and every surface was immaculate. It was evident that he hadn’t been back there while he was living rough. His bedroom, too, was in good order. He’d been reading about the Civil War and left several bookmarks in pages with references to the Battle of Lansdown.
Septimus phoned in from the university with some background on Hope’s student days more than twenty years ago. He’d been active in the rag committee and got into trouble for going to Bath with a group and removing a sedan chair from the Pump Room complex and trying to hold it to ransom. They’d achieved what they wanted and got some publicity for the rag at the cost of a roasting from their own Vice-Chancellor. They’d returned the chair the next day, but with a nice refinement thought up by Rupert – a skeleton seated inside.
Diamond’s heart rate stepped up by several beats when he heard this from Chaz. He called back to Septimus. ‘The skeleton in the sedan chair? When exactly was this?’
‘1989, guv, when he was in his last year as a student.’
‘Where did the skeleton come from?’
‘I don’t know. A medical student?’
‘You think so?’ It sounded reasonable. He’d read somewhere that all medical students had to possess a skeleton. ‘Do we know if it was male or female?’
‘There’s no way of telling.’
‘I’m sorry, but there is,’ Diamond said from his sure knowledge of forensic anthropology.
‘What I mean, guv,’ Septimus was at pains to explain, ‘is that we don’t have the skeleton to look at. All we have is a note in the file that Hope was reprimanded by the Vice-Chancellor for – and I quote – compounding the offence. There’s nothing else. Do you really need to know?’
‘I suppose not.’ Better leave it, he thought. If the skeleton buried on Lansdown was a medical student’s study specimen, some people including himself were going to look silly. Anyway, didn’t they use plastic skeletons these days? ‘The main thing here is that he was one of the lads.’
‘It’s a Bristol tradition, raiding Bath Uni’s territory and getting one over them,’ Chaz said. ‘One year they kidnapped Jane Austen.’ ‘How did they do that?’
‘The dummy outside the Jane Austen centre in Gay Street.’
‘Not the biggest heist ever, then?’
‘I don’t suppose it was reported to Bath CID,’ Chaz said.
‘Mercifully, no.’
More information came in from some of the current history students. Rupert Hope’s inventive brain had been put to more constructive use when he returned to Bristol as a lecturer. He was always looking for ways to bring history to life for his students. He’d taken them to St Mary Redcliffe Church to see the monument to Sir William Penn, the admiral who had captured Jamaica for the British in 1655, and this had led to a project on Penn’s son, William. The second year history group had linked up with Penn State University to examine the documentation for Penn’s voyage of 1682 when Charles II granted him a lease of land in the New World and he took possession of Pennsylvania.
‘This is all good stuff,’ Diamond said to Chaz, ‘but I’d like to find someone he treated badly.’
‘We don’t have anything on his love life yet.’
‘Did he have one?’
‘The emails might tell us.’
‘If it was love on email it couldn’t have been much.’
The computer tower arrived soon after and one of the civilian staff was given the task of extracting everything of possible use. The dossier on the dead man was growing appreciably without yet providing much for a murder investigation.
‘You saw the body at the scene, did you, guv?’ Chaz asked.
‘I did.’
‘Did they find the murder weapon?’
‘Not when I was there, and not since. I’d have been told. They’ve had time to search the entire cemetery by now.’
‘Do you know what it was?’
‘Something heavy and blunt, more like a cosh than an axe. I doubt if we’ll find it now. There’s too much on TV these days about DNA and forensics. Any killer with a glimmer of intelligence is going to get rid of the weapon somewhere else.’
Septimus phoned in again. They’d found some photos of Rupert and his students studying the mosaics at Fishbourne Roman Palace.
‘Nice work,’ Diamond said down the phone. ‘You’re still in the history department, are you?’