‘What do you think?’
‘You’re not even switched on.’
‘I’m switched on. The computer isn’t.’
She smiled. ‘Don’t you look at your in-box routinely?’
Sarcasm, he thought. This young lady needs reining in. ‘I was in London on police business.’
‘And of course you don’t have a laptop.’
‘I’m a detective, not a freak.’
‘I think you mean geek. You can access your email from any other computer,’ she informed him ‘You could have logged on from London.’
‘I had slightly more urgent things to deal with, like Keith being shot and almost killed. What did you really want to say to me, Inge?’
‘It’s high time we heard from the lab about the hair we sent for analysis, the one found under the tab of Nadia’s zip.’
She was right. More dramatic events had put the hair to the back of his mind. He would deal with it shortly. He wasn’t going to let Ingeborg think she’d caught him out. ‘The men in white coats always take an age. They phone if there’s anything startling. It’s academic now, anyway. We’re ninety-nine per cent sure who she was.’
‘Just thought I’d remind you,’ she said. ‘Did you get any DNA from the cottage where she stayed?’
‘How would we have got that?’
‘Particles of hair or skin.’
Now it was his turn to give a smile, remembering the state of Mrs Jarvie’s cottage. ‘You’re optimistic. Sixteen years have gone by and numerous house guests have gone through that cottage.’
‘The girl left unexpectedly. Didn’t the house owner keep her property?’
‘Nadia arrived with nothing and walked out with nothing.’
‘It was only a thought.’ She lingered and it was obvious that her real reason for coming in had yet to be aired. ‘Did I catch a glimpse of you when I was at pike drill last night?’
He nodded. ‘I told you I might look in. You seem to be handling the weapons all right, but are you picking up information?’
‘It’s a case of softly, softly, guv. I want to get their confidence, so I haven’t gone in there firing questions at everyone.’
‘I met one of the camp followers,’ he said.
‘Mrs Swithin? Nothing gets past her.’
‘I didn’t try. I said straight out that I’m from CID. Of course I didn’t let on that you’re one of my team. Mustn’t blow your cover.’
‘She mentioned you later.’
‘Favourably, I hope?’
‘She was a bit freaked that our local unit of the Sealed Knot is under police surveillance.’
‘I told her why.’
‘Yes, but the members are proud of what they do and they don’t think Rupert’s death has any connection with them.’
‘You mean Mrs Swithin thinks they’re in the clear. She can’t know everything that goes on.’
‘She has a bloody good try.’
‘You know who she is?’ he said. ‘The wife of Major Swithin, golfer and leading light of the Lansdown Society. The Swithins were the people who reported Rupert trying to break into cars.’
‘Didn’t she know he was in the Knot?’
‘He trained in Bristol. The muster in August was his first appearance on the battlefield.’
‘And his last.’ She coiled a strand of blonde hair around her finger. ‘This is just a thought, guv. Everyone in the Knot takes the soldiering seriously. If Rupert was misbehaving, he was letting down the regiment.’
‘So he was cracked over the head? Since when has petty theft been a capital offence? Besides, the military have other ways of dealing with misconduct.’
Still she seemed reluctant to leave his office. ‘I don’t know if you heard at the drill. My officer said he thought I might get a place in the cavalry.’
There it was, then, out in the open. Nothing to do with emails or forensics. She fancied herself as a cavalry officer.
‘Because you can wave a sword realistically?’
‘I’ve done it before.’
‘I saw. You’re bloody good, but-’
‘And I can ride,’ she added. ‘I used to have a pony.’
‘Don’t you need your own horse for this?’
‘They said they’d find one for me. Some of the cavalry have stables and several horses.’ Her eagerness was transparent.
Women and horses, he grumbled to himself: you didn’t have to think much about it to understand the appeal. ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this for your own pleasure.’
‘I can do my job and enjoy it as well,’ she said, still pressing.
‘The idea is that you lie low and find out what really happened.’ ‘I know, guv, but-’
‘Listen, Inge. You don’t have the full picture yet. Mrs Jarvie, this old lady I just saw, has helped in a major way. We’re now certain that Nadia came to Bath at the end of July, 1993, shortly after Mrs Jarvie’s eightieth birthday on July twenty-third, and she disappeared off the radar shortly after. Let’s say two weeks. When do you make that?’
‘Early August.’
‘Right. Over the weekend of August seventh and eighth, the Sealed Knot held its major muster, the big one, the re-enactment of the Battle of Lansdown.’
‘Yikes!’
‘This year, Rupert Hope, a new member of the Knot, takes part in another re-enactment and happens to unearth part of Nadia’s skeleton.’
‘And is murdered.’ Her eyes ignited like the blue flame of a gas-ring.
‘Do you see why your role as a recruit could be so useful?’
For once she was lost for words.
‘It’s why I don’t want you prancing around on horseback. The best spies keep a low profile.’
In the incident room he called for silence and gave the team the latest bulletin on Keith Halliwell and then announced that he’d taken over Keith’s role as SIO. The whole investigation had a sharper focus now, he said, briefing them on the crucial dates in the summer of 1993. They listened keenly. Even the Bristol contingent left their computers and joined in.
‘I’ve handed Nadia’s picture to John Wigfull, our publicity guru,’ he told them, ‘and he reckons it’s sharp enough to make a good enlargement. We’ll plaster the town with it, papers, local TV. There’s a good chance someone will remember her.’
‘The church?’ John Leaman suggested. ‘That’s where she went first.’
Paul Gilbert said, ‘The priest who met her is dead.’
‘The congregation aren’t,’ Leaman said. ‘Not all of them, anyway. People turn out Sunday after Sunday for years. What you do is this. Ask the priest to mention it at Sunday mass when he’s giving his church notices and then have someone ready with a poster and flyers when they all come out.’
He’d walked into it, as usual.
‘Good thinking, John,’ Diamond said. ‘Take care of it, would you?’ And more than one of the team mouthed the words along with him.
Septimus spoke in his deadpan tone. ‘What’s the thinking here? What do you hope to get out of this?’
‘Now that we have a narrower time frame, just those few days in the summer of 1993,’ Diamond said, ‘we’re on a similar exercise to the one you’ve been carrying out for Rupert, reconstructing the days leading up to the murder. Have you made any headway with that?’
‘Actually, yes.’ Septimus had a way of delivering words to maximum effect. Part of it was his use of the pause. He insisted that his listeners waited, and they generally did. ‘Altogether we’ve traced eleven people who remember seeing Rupert on Lansdown and they all agree that he was behaving in a confused way, turning up at various locations on Lansdown and making a nuisance of himself. I wouldn’t put it any stronger than that. He wasn’t aggressive.’
‘He was hungry,’ Ingeborg said.
‘Correct. And that was what got him into trouble at the racecourse car park and in the car boot sale. He had no money on him, but he needed to eat. Someone was going through bins at the rear of the Blathwayt restaurant and one night they spotted this figure. We’re pretty sure it was him. He ran off.’