As another exit sign came up, he forced his thoughts to the challenges still to come, primarily his next skirmish with Georgina. She was certain to hold him responsible for the shooting of Keith and she might well think an enquiry was required. Diversionary tactics were called for.
At Membury services he stopped to fill up and let the team know he was returning. Ingeborg took the call. She ought to have been impressed that he was using the mobile. It merited at least a ‘cool’. But no, she was completely focused on Keith.
‘He’s still in the world of the living,’ he told her and then the demon inside made him say, ‘I saw him this morning, happy as a pig in shit.’
‘No kidding?’
‘We’ll have to drag him out of there if you want to see him again. The nurses are real babes.’
‘Swell,’ she said flatly, her concern for Halliwell on the wane. ‘Last night you sounded seriously worried.’
‘Tired, I expect. The good news is that we have a name to work with.’ He told her about Nadia Berezan. ‘Do what you can on that miraculous computer of yours to see if there was ever a woman of that name in Bath or Bristol.’
‘Wouldn’t she have changed her name?’ Ingeborg said. ‘I would, if I was on the run from the mob.’
‘Not so simple as you think, Inge. She’d need proof of identity if she was applying for benefits, as she’d surely need to. A false passport is expensive and takes time to acquire, even if you know where to go for one.’
‘I guess.’
‘We have to work with what we’ve got. Or rather you have to work with what I’ve got.’
‘Can’t argue with that, boss.’
‘How’s it going in the incident room? The Bristol boys behaving themselves?’
‘They’re trying to reconstruct Rupert’s last few days on Lansdown, looking for more witnesses.’
‘It sounds the way to go. And you? Have you successfully infiltrated the Sealed Knot?’
‘I don’t know about that, guv. I’ve started my basic training as a foot soldier. So far it’s as exciting as the girl guides. Learning the rules and how to carry a pike. Lesson Three is tonight. We’ve been promised some swordplay.’
‘Where do you meet? I’m tempted to sneak in and have a peek.’ ‘I’m not telling.’
‘I must get on the road again. By the way,’ he threw in casually, ‘is Georgina on the premises?’
‘She was here at the crack of dawn this morning, extremely uptight about Keith. She said she was going to phone the hospital. She thought it best if all of us didn’t pester them with calls.’
‘Sensible.’
‘She’ll be over the moon to hear he’s recovering so well. I’ll tell her as soon as I’m off the phone.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
There was a pause. He could almost hear her trying to work it out. ‘Don’t you want her to know?’
‘Keep her guessing a bit longer. Sympathy sits better with Georgina than good news.’
He resumed his sedate drive and eventually left the motorway at Junction 18, south on the A46, the busy route over the rump of the Cotswolds and down into Bath. Only he wasn’t ready for the city. After Dyrham Park he detoured right, onto a road known as Gorse Lane that links to Lansdown. All the intensity of London and the Ukrainians had left him needing to reacquaint himself with the source of the mystery.
This was a grey, bleak morning and the place names fitted the conditions. Somewhere to his left was Cold Ashton. Looming on the right, Freezing Hill, where the royalists had unwisely formed their battle array in 1643. Ahead were Hanging Hill and Slaughter Lane. He chugged up the steep north scarp of Lansdown and pulled in at the potholed stopping point for the Grenvile Monument. He had it to himself.
Outside, a keen north-easterly chilled the flesh. He wouldn’t linger long, just enough to stretch his limbs and remind himself of the terrain that had hosted two unexplained murders. The monument didn’t interest him. He wanted the view of the vast limestone plateau. In the foreground lay the battlefield where two great armies had clashed; and where, centuries later, ten thousand had come to watch the first big re-enactment. On the other side the ground plunged into a partly wooded area where the skeleton had been buried. Away in the distance, two miles along the road, the gilt lantern top of William Beckford’s Tower marked the graveyard where Rupert Hope had been found.
Between the murder sites lay all those places for recreation: the racecourse, the golf club, sports pitches and the setting for Lansdown Fair and its modern incarnation, the car boot sale. The down didn’t have bad associations for everyone. For some it held good memories, outsiders coming in at fifty to one, match-winning goals, holes in one, bargain buys, conquests of every sort. For Peter Diamond it was an adversary; dispiriting, tormenting, defying his attempts to get a rational explanation of two violent killings. He was convinced that the truth of the mystery was here, waiting to be discovered.
Beginning to shiver from the cold, he took a long look at the panorama from the battlefield to the tower. Mainly turf, but with clumps of trees, and the occasional building, the ground was un -remarkable, the sort of country you drove through unthinkingly. Yet it had endured since the Jurassic period some 150 million years ago, when a warm, shallow sea covered all of this and deposited the limestone, the source of Bath’s prosperity. This ancient hill was the silent witness he couldn’t question. He’d hoped that being here would inspire him with a sudden crystal clear revelation, but there was none.
‘Bugger you, Lansdown,’ he said out loud.
Georgina awaited.
Instead of calling at the incident room he trudged upstairs to her office, bent on getting the worst over first.
‘Come.’
The door was open and she was standing in front of her desk with her arms folded. As if that wasn’t intimidating enough, the Queen on the wall looked over her right shoulder.
‘You’re back.’
‘That’s the size of it,’ he admitted.
‘What on earth happened to result in Keith Halliwell being shot?’
He gave her his version.
‘Didn’t anyone know it was a house of ill fame?’
A phrase he hadn’t heard in many years. Where had she got that? In the dorm at her posh girls’ school secretly reading the News of the World? ‘We were operating alone at that stage. We didn’t have the local police to ask.’
‘You used to be in the Met. Wasn’t Barnes a part of your old beat?’
‘Many years ago, ma’am. It was probably a respectable house in those days. We were given the address by a churchwoman.’
‘Who’d been duped, as you were.’
Stung by that, he said, ‘Even if we’d known it was a – er – house of ill fame, I wouldn’t have expected anyone to pull a gun on Keith. No way could we have predicted anything like that.’
‘How is he now? Have you seen him?’
He was more reserved than he’d been with Ingeborg. ‘He’s off the critical list.’
‘That much I found out myself by phoning the hospital. They seem to think he’ll be unable to work for several weeks.’
‘With a bullet through his middle, I expect so.’ He added, making it sound like a throwaway line, ‘Good thing we can cover for him.’
Georgina seized on it at once. ‘I don’t know how. He was one of your SIOs, a key person in the investigation. How can you possibly replace him?’
‘I’ll do it myself.’
She took a sharp, audible breath. ‘I don’t think so, Peter.’
He waited for the broadside.
‘We agreed you were CIO, an executive role. You don’t seem to appreciate what it is to be a senior policeman. You shouldn’t have gone to London at all. Your place is here, at headquarters, supervising both arms of the investigation.’