‘Forgive my ignorance,’ Diamond said to him after they’d exchanged greetings and small talk about how their lives had moved on. ‘Would you know the part of London where most Ukrainians hang out?’
‘Holland Park,’ Louis said at once. ‘Didn’t you get to know it when you worked here?’
‘No mate, ’Olland Park was up the posh end,’ he said in his cod version of cockney. ‘I was stuck down the North End Road. Remember?’
‘It’s all around that part of town,’ Louis said, ‘restaurants, clubs, churches, the embassy. You could be forgiven for thinking you’re in Odessa. They even have a Ukrainian statue in Holland Park Avenue. Their patron saint, St Volodymyr. They’re well dug in.’
‘Holland Park,’ Diamond said, more to himself than Louis.
‘Why? Are you looking for a cheap plumber?’
‘Plumber?’
‘Lighten up, Peter.’
Diamond explained about the skeleton and the Ukrainian connection. ‘I can’t think why she ended up dead and buried in Bath. I’m hoping to tap into her movements before she got here and London seems the best place to start.’
‘You want me to put out some feelers?’
‘More than that. I want to meet people.’
‘Will any old Ivan do?’
‘Preferably one who knows what was happening about 1992.’
‘Can you drink seven straight vodkas?’
‘Never actually tried.’
‘There’s always a first time. I’ll see what I can set up for you. Whether any of them will talk to a Zummerzet plod I can’t say.’
‘Septimus had a brilliant thought,’ Ingeborg told Diamond towards the end of the afternoon.
S ‘Oh, yes?’ He didn’t want to stifle her enthusiasm, but he’d learned to be wary of brilliant thoughts. There was usually a hidden agenda.
‘He says if there’s a link between our skeleton girl and the killing of Rupert Hope it’s got to be that big muster they had in 1993, the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary.’
‘“Got to be”? I question that.’
‘We know she died about then.’
‘Give or take a year or two.’
‘It was a huge event, guv, much bigger than the one they put on in July. I read the press reports when I was doing that list for Keith. Sponsored by the Round Table. Plenty of publicity. Oceans of coverage in the Chronicle. They staged it over two days in August and ten thousand turned up to watch. Extra police were called in to control them.’
‘I believe you, Inge. You don’t need to go on.’
‘Listen, though. The spectators were all kept behind a rope barrier along the top edge of the field where the main road is. But the fallen tree where the girl was buried is on the far side, on a steep slope.’
‘I know this.’
‘I’m giving you the picture. You weren’t there on the day and neither was I. Whatever went on in the area of the tree was out of sight of most people, right?’
He nodded, beginning to see where this was going. ‘That’s why Dave Barton hid his six-pack there.’
‘Let’s stay with 1993 for a moment. What I’m saying – well, what Septimus said to me – is that if a fatal incident happened on one of those two days in front of ten thousand people the obvious place to take the body was down the hill out of sight.’
‘But no one was seriously hurt. We know that.’
‘How?’ she said, her eyes alight with the force of her argument. ‘How do we know?’
‘It would have made the news, that’s why.’
‘Guv, it was a battlefield. There were skirmishes taking place, pikemen fighting, cavalry charges. People were pretending to be dead all over the hill. Who’s going to notice if one of the bodies really is dead?’ She had a point there and she hammered it home. ‘You could kill a person in front of a mass audience and get away with it. Before the end of the show you drag the body out of sight and you can bury it later.’
‘Is this Septimus’s brilliant idea?’ he said.
‘Give me a chance. I haven’t finished.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘There were women on the battlefield. I’ve seen the colour supplement. They dressed the part. Some of them were supposed to be tending the wounded.’
‘Camp followers,’ he said, recalling what Augusta White had told him.
She snapped back at him, ‘That’s a pejorative term.’
‘Not at all. It’s what they’re known as.’
‘I call them angels of mercy.’
‘Call them what you like, Inge. I’m quoting the Sealed Knot. I don’t think it’s meant to insult women. And since your feminist hackles are rising you may like to know that about a third of the cavalry are women. And your more adventurous sisters sometimes join the gun crews.’
She frowned and went cherry red. ‘How do you know this?’
‘Like you, I’m finding out as I go along. But I can see where you’re going with this. Our young woman may have died in the battle.’
‘Yes, and what a blow it would have been to the whole event – to events like this all over the country. A real fatality, and a woman at that. Would it be it so surprising if she was dragged out of sight and buried?’
‘Now you’re stretching it, Inge,’ he said. ‘Asking me to believe the Knot connived at the illegal disposal of a body to save their reputation.’
‘It needn’t have been official,’ she said. ‘Probably wasn’t. A couple of people could have moved the corpse unknown to the organisers.’
‘All right. Let’s pursue this for a moment. You’re suggesting she was killed during the battle. How? By accident?’
‘That’s only one scenario.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘There’s a more sinister one, isn’t there? One of the soldiers had murder in mind from the beginning.’
‘A premeditated killing. It’s a possibility. How many took part?’ ‘The paper said two and a half thousand.’
‘As many as that? Inge, you’re depressing me.’
‘But not so many are women and there’s a better chance of them being remembered, particularly if one was from the Ukraine.’ He’d become so involved in her version of the battle that he’d pushed the victim’s nationality to the back of his mind. ‘Now there’s a thing. What in the name of sanity would a Ukrainian woman be doing in an English Civil War re-enactment?’
‘Exactly.’
She made him think again. He played his own words back to himself.
‘If she was there, someone will know,’ Ingeborg said, spreading her hands as if she’d just solved the riddle of the sphinx.
It was a whopping assumption, but he was intrigued. ‘So?’
‘So Septimus had his brilliant thought.’ She waited for him to react. She wasn’t going to say another word until he asked.
‘And what’s that?’
‘Why don’t I enlist in the Sealed Knot and see what I can find out?’
‘Crazy.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re a policewoman, that’s why.’
‘They’ve all got jobs. They do it in the evenings and at weekends. It’s a free country. I can join if I want.’
‘The first thing they’ll ask is what your day job is and you’re sunk.’
‘All right, I can say I’m a journalist, like I was.’
‘That won’t relax anybody.’
‘I’ll go undercover, then.’
She was not to be dissuaded. She really wanted to do this.
‘What do you hope to achieve?’
‘Finding people who remember 1993, women in particular. When we’re in a small minority, we get to know each other. If there’s anything to be learned about the murder victim, I’ll root it out.’
‘I’m sure you’re capable,’ he said. ‘But there’s a downside, isn’t there? Someone murdered Rupert Hope, presumably because he was a threat. You’re going down the same route and you’ll be in real danger.’
‘I’ll watch my back.’