‘Poor guy,’ Ingeborg said.
‘It’s hard to assess his state of mind,’ Septimus continued. ‘From what we know he was concussed or brain-damaged from the first attack. He had the power of speech, but he didn’t know who he was. Someone called him Noddy and he accepted it. He seems to have hung about on Lansdown the whole time – which we assume lasted twenty-two days, from the day of the mock battle to the morning he was found dead in the churchyard.’
‘Living off scraps?’ Leaman said.
‘Apparently. Until yesterday we were uncertain where he slept. The theory was that he picked anywhere he happened to be when night came, but we found a new witness.’ Cue another pause.
‘Who was that?’
‘A postman who delivers along Lansdown Road. He’d noticed this man early on several mornings near Beckford’s Tower.’
‘Where he was murdered,’ Leaman said.
Septimus gave him the disdainful look that such an obvious remark warranted. ‘They didn’t speak. It was just a series of sightings, but it was enough for us to order another search. We’d been over the churchyard already, looking for the weapon. Now we wanted to find if he had a base there, somewhere in the dry.’
‘The tower?’ Leaman said.
‘No, that’s got a security system. Valuable items are on exhibition there.’
‘A burial vault?’
‘Are you into horror films?’
There were some sniggers at Leaman’s expense.
Septimus added, ‘We’d have noticed when we cleared the grass from round the graves.’ With eyebrows raised, inviting more suggestions, he looked around the room.
Diamond said, ‘I told you my theory when we first went there. He used the front gate as his bedroom.’
‘The gate?’ Leaman said.
‘Have you been there?’ Septimus asked him.
‘Not lately.’
‘If you had, you’d know what I’m saying. I’m not talking itsy-bitsy garden gates. This is a building, man, massive, like the gate to a city.’
Diamond nodded. ‘I’d call it a gatehouse. Roman in style, I think.’
‘Byzantine,’ Ingeborg said.
She probably knew for certain, so Diamond didn’t contest it. ‘Thanks, Inge. That was on the tip of my tongue. A Byzantine gate by the same guy who built the tower; a big solid structure facing the street.’
‘Okay, it’s a gatehouse,’ Septimus went on. ‘Behind the front gate is this covered-in part, big, like a room, and with stone seats. Under one of the seats we found a folded blanket.’
‘Where would he have got that?’ Leaman said.
‘Nicked from somebody’s car,’ Paul Gilbert said.
‘Have you sent it for tests?’ Diamond asked.
‘You bet. There was a plastic water bottle, empty, and some food wrappers. This place is protected from the weather, quiet at night and private. I wouldn’t call it a comfortable hideaway, but it was dry. Someone used it recently, for sure.’
‘So he may have been brain-damaged, but he was smart enough to find this,’ Ingeborg said.
‘If a stone bed in a cemetery on a hill is smart,’ Septimus said. ‘Personally I would have looked for a Salvation Army hostel.’
‘He’d have to go down into Bath for that,’ she said. ‘I get the feeling he wanted to remain on the hill.’
‘God knows why.’
Diamond’s thoughts had moved on. ‘If the postman noticed him, it’s possible his murderer saw him in the area as well. The body was found among the graves – how far from the gateway?’
‘Thirty yards, or less.’
‘All right. Let’s think what may have happened. Rupert makes his way there one evening and his killer is waiting. The blanket was folded, you say, so he didn’t get a chance to lie down. He was attacked on his way across the churchyard. Is that the way you see it, Septimus?’
‘Pretty much. Or the killer was waiting in the gateway and Rupert ran off and was caught. It seems to have been an ambush, and it happened late. The pathologist said he was killed overnight. He couldn’t say what time.’
‘Do they ever?’ But Diamond wasn’t discouraged. He raised a thumb to the Bristol team and then spoke to everyone. ‘The more I hear about this Rupert, the sorrier I feel for him. For three weeks he was living rough on Lansdown, not even knowing who he was, and no one understood the trouble he was in or what was going on.’
‘What was going on?’ Ingeborg said.
‘With Rupert?’
‘With his killer.’
Diamond looked towards Septimus, who shook his head, unable to supply an answer.
‘We know this,’ Diamond said. ‘It wasn’t some drunken brawl. He had two goes at killing him. The motive was strong.’
‘And are we still assuming a link between Rupert’s killing and Nadia’s, in 1993?’ Ingeborg asked in her journo mode, pinning him down.
‘We are.’
‘The Battle of Lansdown?’
‘Right on.’
‘We don’t know for sure if Nadia went to the re-enactment, do we?’
‘In the next few days we should find out,’ Diamond said. ‘We do know that the timing was right.’
With that, he drew the meeting to a close and there was a buzz of energy in the room. Nadia was named and pictured. Septimus and his team had moved the Rupert investigation on. As for the link, he’d sounded confident. He had to.
Alone in his office, out of conscience more than confidence, he switched on his under-used computer. Ingeborg had been right to mention emails. He preferred to ignore them and his regular contacts understood and used the phone. But it was possible someone at the forensics lab had tried to reach him that way.
Yawning, he waited for the screen to light up.
He clicked on the mailbox icon, never a move that brought much encouragement. Masses of unwanted stuff appeared that he would have highlighted and deleted at a stroke if he could only have remembered the trick.
Scrolling down, looking at the senders, he spotted one from FSS Chepstow and almost passed it by, thinking he didn’t know anyone of that name. Initial letters were a blind-spot with him. But Chepstow was a place, wasn’t it, where one of the Home Office labs was located?
FSS.
Forensic Science Service.
The subject title was Test Report.
When he opened the email and read it, he scratched his head and said, ‘Oh, bugger.’
This required a rethink.
Ten minutes later, he called Ingeborg in.
‘You were right,’ he told her. ‘The lab report came as an email late yesterday. They had to repeat the test and that’s why it took so long. This’ll pin your ears back. The hair doesn’t belong to Nadia.’
‘Her killer?’
‘No.’
‘How do they know that?’ she said, stung into petulance. ‘They’ve got nothing to compare it with.’
‘Because it isn’t a human hair. It’s animal. It comes from a horse.’
‘Get away!’
‘True.’ He handed across the sheet he’d printed. ‘They reckon it was clipped. Horses get trimmed sometimes, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but…’ She read the report right through. ‘Incredible. Can you feature that?’
‘There was I thinking we might have got lucky,’ he said. ‘We end up with a bloody horse.’
‘I’m at a loss, guv.’
‘So was I when I first read it. But I’ve remembered something I was told in London by Vikki, the madam at the brothel. She was Ukrainian herself and she knew Nadia. She said she always thought Nadia came from Cossack stock and she justified it by saying she spent a lot of time watching the racing on TV, not for the betting, but the horses. I don’t know a lot about Cossacks except they’re fierce warriors and they ride horses.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Cool.’
‘So it’s not impossible that when she came here and was looking for a job she thought about working with horses.’
‘I guess.’ She sounded unconvinced.
‘If she heard of an upcoming event involving horses she could well have thought she’d go there in hopes of chatting up some owners and getting work as a stable girl.’