It had the feel of a sudden, spontaneous killing by a stranger – the hardest of all to investigate. In such cases, the best hope was that someone had witnessed something. His thoughts returned to those self-appointed snoops, the Lansdown Society.
He drained his coffee and went upstairs for a session with their police representative, Georgina.
The traffic light system on her door showed amber. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes, he decided.
No one came out. She was probably on the phone. He put his ear to the door and it opened and he fell into the arms of John Wigfull, who just about held him upright.
‘Cheers, mate,’ Diamond said.
‘What the hell…?’
‘We can’t go on meeting like this.’
‘What?’
From behind her desk, Georgina called, ‘Are you unwell, Peter?’
‘Not at all.’ He sidestepped the startled Wigfull. ‘No harm done. I was thrown by the entry system. Thought it was changing to green.’
She wasn’t getting into a debate about her entry system. ‘We were discussing the publicity budget. Mr Wigfull is going to need a slice of your cake if you continue to demand poster campaigns at the rate of two or three a week.’
An exaggeration he ignored. ‘He’s welcome to whatever’s on offer. I just had a chocolate muffin downstairs.’
She didn’t cotton on.
‘Slice of the cake,’ he said.
His attempts at wit never softened her. ‘What are you here for? I’m expected in Headquarters in half an hour.’
‘This won’t take long, ma’am.’ He looked over his shoulder and waited for Wigfull to close the door behind him. ‘It’s about the Lansdown Society. I see you and your fellow members as potential witnesses, invaluable to the enquiry.’
‘You made that clear a while ago and you seem to have spoken to each of us now.’
‘Actually, no.’
‘Come on, Peter. I know for a fact that you questioned Sir Colin Tipping, Major Swithin and Augusta White.’
‘There’s another.’
‘Me?’ She clapped a hand to her chest. ‘If I noticed anything I’d volunteer it. You wouldn’t have to ask. I don’t know what else you hope to discover. We’re mere mortals, you know, not all-seeing.’
‘Not you. There’s somebody else. He’s not all-seeing, but he may be halfway there. The sky pilot.’
‘The what?’
‘The reverend gentleman.’
‘Charlie Smart? You’ve no need to talk to him. He wasn’t a member in 1993. He was initiated after me, less than three years ago, when the previous vicar retired.’
Initiated. He was tempted to ask about that. Unfortunately more pressing matters had priority. ‘I expect he’s still an active member, just as you are? Goes for walks and keeps his eyes open and reports back on anything untoward?’
‘We all do that.’
‘He may be the witness I’m looking for.’
‘I can’t think what he could have witnessed.’
‘Rupert Hope in the last hours of his life and possibly his murderer as well. Will I find Charlie Smart at St Stephen’s?’
‘No, you won’t. He’s not the vicar of Lansdown. His parish is higher up the hill, at St Vincent’s on Granville Road, not far from the tower.’
‘I don’t think I know it.’
‘Well, you’re not renowned for your piety.’ She smiled, pleased to have got in a dig of her own. ‘It’s tucked in among the government offices. It doesn’t have a tower. In fact it looks more like a Nissen hut than a church.’
‘Does he live nearby?’
‘The vicarage is next door, but you’ll be wasting your time. I’m sure if he’d seen anything suspicious, he would have informed us.’
‘People can’t always tell what’s suspicious from what is not.’
‘A vicar should.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ll phone him and see if he’s there.’
The ‘government offices’ Georgina had mentioned were the squat brick buildings known in Whitehall jargon as ‘hutments’, originally erected during the Second World War by the Ministry of Works to house a section of the Admiralty evacuated from London. Quite what the present buildings housed apart from civil servants was a mystery to Diamond, except that it had to do with the Ministry of Defence. Yet another Lansdown secret, but not one he needed to unravel. What interested him more was the proximity of the cemetery where Rupert’s body had been found, just across the main road. Charlie Smart, living so close, was well placed to have seen something.
Georgina’s description of the church hadn’t been strictly accurate. A Nissen hut was a tunnel-shaped structure of corrugated iron. St Vincent’s was modest in size, but brick built, and looked inseparable from the offices. Diamond would never have identified it until he found a board at the front listing the times of services. The vicarage next door was a similar hutment, fronted by a garden so overgrown that he had to part the foliage to get to the door.
‘It’s open,’ a voice called from within.
He gave the door a push and found himself in the living room greeted by a short, blond man in jeans and a T-shirt with a butterfly motif. ‘You must be the myrmidon of the law,’ he said, offering his hand.
‘I’m not sure what that means,’ Diamond said, ‘but it sounds roughly right.’ He introduced himself.
‘Charlie Smart, incumbent,’ his host said. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Thank you, but not on duty.’
‘Dandelion and burdock cordial won’t compromise you,’ Charlie Smart said, ‘and I speak not only as a man of the cloth but the one who distilled the same. Try.’ He picked up a jug and poured some into two tumblers.
In the cause of good policing, Diamond sipped some and found it marginally easier to swallow than Ukrainian kvas. ‘Tasty.’
‘As a society we impoverish ourselves by ignoring the so-called weeds,’ the vicar said. ‘Speaking of the humble dandelion, did you know that it’s a source of rubber?’
‘To be honest, no.’ He remembered Mrs White the magistrate telling him the vicar was a wildlife enthusiast.
‘Nip the stem of one and you get that whitish milk on your fingers. Allow it to thicken and you can rub it into a ball. The plant produces latex, you see.’
‘Remarkable,’ Diamond said, hoping to close down the botany lecture.
Charlie Smart wasn’t finished. ‘I have it on good authority that there’s an Asian variety of dandelion that was cultivated on an enormous scale by the Russians during the war when their supplies of regular rubber were interrupted. The roots are up to two metres long and produce ten per cent of latex. It’s still grown commercially in the Ukraine.’
Diamond became genuinely interested. ‘Did you say the Ukraine?’
‘I did. It was part of the old Russia.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘No. Plants are my thing. Preaching and plants – and when the two are combined, watch out. You’d better stop me if you want to talk about anything else.’
‘People, actually, as distinct from plants.’
‘I shouldn’t say this as a man of the cloth, but they’re not nearly so interesting. Any particular people?’
‘Have you noticed anyone recently hanging about the cemetery across the road?’
‘Apart from the people in paper suits, do you mean?’
‘Before they arrived.’
‘You want to know if I spotted the poor fellow who was murdered?’
‘Him, or, better still, his killer.’
‘Sorry, but no.’
‘Do you get over there at all?’
‘Quite often, in my pastoral capacity, conducting funerals on the declivity towards this end where the more recent graves are located. Also, wearing my botanical hat, studying the vegetation. The Victorian section near the tower was a wildlife sanctuary until your levellers arrived and hacked it down.’