‘That isn’t in dispute.’
She still hadn’t cottoned on.
He was forced to spell it out for her. ‘Ma’am, I need an operational decision from you. We can’t go on treating these cases as separate incidents. They have to be brought together. I’m asking you to centralise both investigations in Bath from one major incident room.’
He didn’t say who should be in charge. She may have worked that out for herself.
Keith Halliwell would be heartbroken. His first chance as SIO snatched away just when he’d got everything up and running. Diamond was known to be ruthless in pursuit of the truth, a bruiser who let nothing stand in his way, but Halliwell was the nearest he had to a friend in the team. The first news of the decision shouldn’t come from anyone else. Straight from his session upstairs he went to the incident room and asked Halliwell to drive him to the Mercedes garage to collect Georgina’s car.
‘Guv, I wish I could spare the time, but I can’t,’ Halliwell said, adding with a companionable smile, ‘I’m running a murder case, and you know what that’s like.’
‘Sorry, Keith, but I do know what it’s like and John Leaman can take over for twenty minutes. We need to talk.’
The smile turned to tight-lipped concern.
In the privacy of the car Diamond went over the logic of drawing the two enquiries into one, just as he had with Georgina. Through focusing so exclusively on the skeleton case, Halliwell, too, had missed the significance of Dave Barton’s statement.
‘As I see it now,’ Diamond summed up, ‘neither you nor I will get a result working in isolation.’
‘You’re telling me you’re taking over again,’ Halliwell said, his voice drained of warmth.
‘I’m telling you there has to be co-operation. I’m not knocking you, Keith. You’ve done a fine job already. But it’s necessary for me to move back to Bath.’
‘And I have to step aside.’
Diamond saw the look and heard the despair. Fortunately the deal he’d done with Georgina had a sweetener. ‘Nothing as daft as that. You were appointed SIO for the skeleton enquiry and that’s what you remain, running the show.’
A suspicious frown came with Halliwell’s next question. ‘So how will you fit in?’
‘Not the way you think. There’s going to be a new SIO for the Rupert Hope case, an inspector from Bristol called Septimus Ward.’
‘I know Septimus,’ he said. ‘Met him on a firearms course.’
‘Like him?’
‘He’s okay.’ But the frown remained.
‘Good. He’s going to be transferred here with the pick of the Bristol lot. The investigation is under one roof now.’
‘Two incident rooms in Manvers Street?’
‘Just the one.’
Halliwell shook his head. ‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m afraid that means some rearranging. You’ll need to transfer some of the display material to computer.’
‘Am I hearing right? Computers have their uses after all?’
A little irony from Halliwell was forgivable. ‘You can decide how much of the material needs storing.’
‘I prefer it where I can see it.’
‘Visual. I noticed.’
‘Mine is the hard case to crack, going back twenty years. I’m dealing with masses of information.’
‘Yes, and quite properly you’re defending your territory. You’ll get your share of resources, Keith, I guarantee.’
‘So what’s your part in this?’
‘Me?’ Diamond said, striking the first false note, as if he hadn’t thought about himself. ‘I’m the CIO.’
‘C is for chief?’
‘Seeing fair play.’
‘Keeping your distance?’
‘Exactly. At one remove from all the action. You and Septimus are the hands-on leaders.’ But even as he spoke, he could see the faint smile playing on Halliwell’s lips. Both knew it would go against nature for the big man to keep his distance.
He’d sold the deal as honestly as he was able.
They reached the garage and Halliwell asked, ‘Do you want me to wait while you see if the job is done?’
‘No need. Wish me luck driving the Merc back to Manvers Street. I’ve done enough damage for one day.’
Septimus Ward and three others from Bristol CID arrived at Bath Central in the morning looking about as comfortable as the Burghers of Calais. Diamond took them to the canteen for a coffee and explained the new set-up. Their spirits improved when they understood that they’d be heading the Rupert Hope side of what was now a major investigation. ‘Presently we’ll all drive up to Lansdown and look at the graveyard where he was found, and the other site,’ he told them. ‘I want you fully in the picture.’
The Lansdown visit had an extra purpose. It gave Halliwell time to clear space in the incident room.
One of the police minibuses had been booked for this and Diamond – sexist when it suited – had invited Ingeborg along as a morale-booster for the newcomers. She was already telling them animatedly about Bath’s nightspots.
He injected a more sombre note as they were being driven up the hill. ‘You may find this weird,’ he told everyone. ‘The terrain of Lansdown could be as crucial to this enquiry as the people in the case. I keep asking myself why two bodies should have been found up there. The hill has its own character, aloof from the city, seven hundred feet above sea level, windswept, a place most people drive over without stopping, unless they’re golfers, race-goers or boot-sale addicts. What is it about Lansdown that made it suitable for murder? Keep this in mind as we look at the two sites.’
The bus parked in the lay-by closest to the battlefield and the team strolled across the field and down the scarp where the fallen tree was. Septimus appeared at Diamond’s side, looking earnest, wanting to confide. ‘I heard what you were saying just now, about the landscape.’
‘And?’
‘We know Rupert was a Civil War junkie. We found masses of stuff he’d downloaded from the internet, maps and battle charts and descriptions of the fighting. It seems to me he must have walked the battlefield a few times.’
‘Sounds likely, yes.’
‘He was here for some days after he got the head injury.’
‘That’s correct, but I don’t think he was doing the battlefield walk then.’
‘He knew the territory, right? You asked us why his killer chose Lansdown. Could the Civil War be the reason?’
‘Go on. I’m listening.’
‘Maybe his killer was another re-enactment freak. I don’t know how seriously they take this rivalry between the armies,’ Septimus went on. ‘They try to stage the battle as it actually was, as near as they can, but they can’t rehearse. Rupert was new to the game. What if he got excited in the heat of battle and did something that wasn’t in the script? One of the enemy may have got angry and hunted him down after it was over.’
‘Roundhead versus cavalier?’
‘Except what it comes down to is more basic. One of their lot taking out one of ours.’
Diamond took stock of what he’d heard. There was some logic to it. Tribal hostilities accounted for a lot of modern violence.
‘Are we investigating these Civil War societies?’ Septimus asked.
‘That’s definitely on the agenda.’ He liked the new man’s thinking.
They’d reached the fallen oak. The crime scene tape had been removed. The only signs of recent activity were the discoloured turf trampled by many feet and the excavated soil in the burial pit below the roots, sieved to a fineness any gardener would have admired.
‘The tree blew down in the great gale of 1987,’ Diamond told everyone. ‘Most of the ground up here is rock hard, has never been cultivated, drains quickly and gets the full force of sun and wind, but the uprooting of the tree left a large hole and some loose earth where the rain sank in. Some time after, a killer made use of it to bury the body of a young woman, but hacked off the head and disposed of it somewhere else. I can tell you very little about the victim or how she was killed. Under twenty, average height and reasonably healthy so far as you can discover from a bunch of bones. We think she was clothed because we found a zip fly, probably from her jeans. The rest of her clothes had rotted away in twenty years. We don’t even know the colour of her hair. We checked missing persons from that time and nobody fits.’