Upon A Dark Night

by Peter Lovesey

  ‘At Dyrham, it says?’

  ‘A mile or so south-west of Tormarton, actually. “The West Saxons, under the command of their king, Ceawlin, cut the Bath to Cirencester Road, the A46, as it is now, and camped a little to the west, at Hinton Hill Fort.”’

  ‘Hinton, I’ve heard of.’

  ‘“The Britons had assembled three armies, two from the north and the other from the south, and they sensibly combined forces, but this required strenuous manoeuvres to avoid being picked off separately by the Saxons. It is likely that their fighters were exhausted and dispirited before the battle. Moreover, they made the tactical error of trying to attack the well-defended Saxon army by pushing up the hill. They suffered a massive defeat. Wessex was established in the south-west, and the Britons retreated to Cornwall and Wales.”’

  ‘Stirring stuff,’ said Diamond. ‘So what can you tell me about the Tormarton sword? Was that thrown down by some unlucky fellow who copped his lot?’

  ‘I doubt if it was ever used in battle. I think it was partly made of silver, with some precious stones inlaid in the hilt, the kind of sword a nobleman owned as a symbol of his power. I guess it belonged to an important Saxon. Let’s see if there’s anything about it in these other books. Anglo-Saxon Artefacts should mention it.’ He took another book off the stand and turned to the index.

  ‘It’s here. With a picture.’ He found the page and handed Diamond the book.

  It was a colour photograph of a short, single-bladed sword with its scabbard displayed beside it. ‘The Tormarton Seax, unearthed on farmland in North-West Wiltshire in 1943,’

  the caption read. ‘This Frankish design came into use in England during the seventh century. The pommel is decorated with garnets set in silver, probably worked by a Frankish silversmith. The scabbard is also of silver. Acquired by the British Museum.’

  ‘Handsome,’ said Diamond.

  ‘But seventh century,’ Paternoster pointed out. ‘Well after the Battle of Dyrham. By then Tormarton was firmly in Saxon hands.’

  ‘So what do you reckon, Gary? How did it get in the ground?’

  ‘Difficult to say. Sometimes when people were being invaded or attacked, they buried valuable things to keep them safe, meaning to dig them up again later. If that was what happened, the sword should have been declared Treasure Trove, and the British Museum would have paid the farmer its market value. If it was buried in a grave, it belonged to the landowner. He might sell it to the Museum, but he could bargain for a better price than the valuation.’

  ‘Either way, he makes some money.’

  ‘Unless he decided to keep the treasure. If it isn’t Treasure Trove, he’s entitled to hang onto it.’

  ‘How do they decide?’

  ‘By inquest, so it’s up to the coroner and his jury. They have to try and work out why it was buried. If it’s found in a situation that is obviously a grave, there’s no argument. It belongs to the landowner.’

  ‘How can anyone tell? I suppose if it’s lying beside a skeleton.’

  ‘Archaeologists can usually tell. The difficulty comes with isolated finds.’

  ‘Was this an isolated find?’

  Paternoster shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard of anything else turning up there. But to my knowledge the farm has never been searched or excavated. If the owner doesn’t want you there, there’s nothing you can do, and he’s said to be dead against us. He’s been asked many times. People like me can’t wait to get up there with our detectors.’

  ‘How does it work?’ Diamond asked.

  ‘Detectoring?’

  ‘I understand the principle, but what do you do exactly?’

  The young man started to speak with genuine authority. ‘First you have to get the farmer’s permission, and like I say that isn’t so easy. I offer fifty-fifty on any finds, but we’re still just a nuisance to some of them. Obviously I wouldn’t ask if the field has just been sown. And a freshly ploughed field isn’t ideal because of the furrows, you see. It’s better when the soil is flatter, because more coins lie within range of your detector. So I like a harrowed field to work in.’

  ‘Do you find much in fields?’

  ‘Not so much as in parks or commons where people go more often, but what you find is more interesting.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Silver medieval coins. My average is one every two or three hours. I’ve also found ring-brooches, buckles and bits of horse-harness.’

  ‘In bare fields?’

  ‘You’ve got to remember that in centuries past hundreds of people worked those fields. It was far more labour-intensive then than it is these days, with so much farm machinery.’

  Diamond picked up one of the detectors and felt its weight. ‘What’s your most powerful model?’

  ‘The two-box. This one over here. It’s designed for people searching for hoards, rather than small items like single coins.’ He picked up a contraption with two sensors separated by a metre-length bar. ‘It can signal substantial amounts of metal at some depth, say six feet. The trouble is, you have to be prepared to do an awful lot of digging and possibly find something no more exciting than a buried oil-drum or a tractor-part.’

  The two-box was a source of much interest for Diamond. He could see a plausible explanation for the digging at the farm. If some treasure-hunter had ambitions of finding a hoard, the most promising site, surely, would be one that had already yielded a famous find, and the best machine for the job was the two-box. And if the site-owner was a stubborn old farmer who steadfastly refused to allow anyone on his land, the first opportunity would have come after his death.

  Was it, he wondered, sufficient motive for murder?

  ‘Have you sold any of these things in the last year or so?’

  ‘Two-boxes? No. This hasn’t been in the shop long.’

  ‘Can people hire them?’

  ‘I suppose we might come to an agreement, but we haven’t up to now.’

  ‘You just have, Gary. I’ll send someone to collect it.’

  Twenty-five

  ‘Up and running,’ Keith Halliwell announced with some pride.

  Nobody was quicker than Halliwell at furnishing an incident room. Phones, radio-communications, computers and filing cabinets were in place. The photos and maps from the briefing session were rearranged on an end wall. Two civilian computer operators were keying information into the system. Having ordered all this, Diamond could not allow himself to be intimidated by it, even though he was a computer-illiterate. He mumbled some words of appreciation to Halliwell and even dredged up a joke about hardware: he hadn’t seen so much since his last visit to the ironmonger’s. The younger people didn’t seem to know what an ironmonger’s was, so it fell flat. Then he spotted Julie sitting with a phone against her ear. He went over. Telephones he could understand.

  ‘Who are you on to?’

  She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Acton Turville Post Office. Gladstone used to collect his pension from there. They’re checking dates.’

  ‘When you come off…’

  She nodded, and started speaking into the phone again.

  In the act of moving towards the sergeant who was handling press liaison, Diamond caught his foot under a cable and cut off the power supply to the computers.

  ‘Who the blazes did that?’ said one of the civilian women when her screen whistled and went blank. She was new to the murder squad.

  ‘I did, madam,’ he told her. ‘I almost fell into your lap. Next time lucky.’

  ‘You great oaf.’ Clearly she had no idea who she was addressing.

  Halliwell zoomed over to prevent a dust-up. ‘I should have warned you, sir.’

  ‘About this abusive woman?’

  ‘About the cable. It needs a strip of gaffer tape.’

  ‘Bugger the cable,’ said Diamond. ‘She thinks you should tape the gaffer.’

  ‘His mouth, for starters,’ said the woman, before it dawned on her who this great oaf was.

  With timing th
at just prevented mayhem, Julie finished on the phone and called across, ‘He last drew his pension on September 18th.’

  ‘In cash?’

  ‘He used to cycle in to Acton Turville once a week. He’d do some shopping and then cycle back.’

  Stepping more carefully than before, he moved between the desks to where Julie was. ‘Didn’t anyone notice when he stopped coming in?’

  ‘Sometimes he would let it mount up for two or three weeks. People do.’

  ‘How would he manage for shopping?’

  ‘Tinned food, I suppose. The chickens supplied him with eggs. And another thing, Mr Diamond. I’ve called all the local banks and building societies and none of them had any record of him as an account-holder.’

  He glanced up at the clock. ‘What time is my press conference?’

  ‘Two-fifteen, sir,’ the press liaison sergeant told him. ‘The hand-outs are ready if you want to see them. Everyone gets a head-and-shoulders of Rose.’

  He scanned the press release. ‘Fine.’ He turned back to Julie. ‘There’s time for you to drive me out to Westbury. A pub lunch with the double-barrels.’

  ‘The who?’

  ‘Dunkley-something. The people who ran into Rose on the A46. Oh, and there will be another passenger, a scene of crime officer.’

  The ex-mayor and his lady were, as Diamond anticipated, having a liquid lunch at the Westbury Hotel. The barmaid pointed them out at one of the tables under the Spy cartoons, a grinning, gnome-ish man opposite a dark-haired woman wearing enough mascara for a chorus-line.

  ‘We’ll leave you here at the bar,’ Diamond said quietly to Jim Marsh, the SOCO he had recruited for this exercise. ‘What are you drinking?’

  ‘It had better be a grapefruit juice, sir.’

  ‘God help us. What are you – a blood-pressure case?’

  ‘I’m working, sir.’

  The affable mood at the table changed dramatically when Diamond announced who he was and introduced Julie.

  The gnome, Ned Dunkley-Brown, reddened and said, ‘I told you we hadn’t heard the last of it, Pippa. All that malarkey about things spoken in confidence.’

  His wife said, ‘Ned, I think we should hear what they have to say.’ She gave Diamond a patronising stare. ‘My husband is an ex-mayor of Bradford on Avon. He served on the police committee.’

  ‘But that was Wiltshire County,’ said Dunkley-Brown. ‘These officers are from Bath.’

  ‘Avon and Somerset,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Now we’ve got that straight,’ Diamond said, under some strain to stay civil with this couple, ‘I’d like to hear about the evening you had the accident on the A46. That’s inside our boundary, by the way.’

  ‘Accident?’ shrilled Pippa Dunkley-Brown, folding her thin arms.

  ‘Don’t say another word,’ Dunkley-Brown commanded his wife. ‘No comment.’

  Diamond took a long, therapeutic swig of beer. ‘We’re not from Traffic Division, sir. We’re CID. People’s mistakes at the wheel are someone else’s pigeon.’

  The Dunkley-Browns exchanged looks.

  ‘We’re investigating the young woman you met that evening. Called herself Rose.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Dunkley-Brown in a faraway tone.

  ‘She’s a mystery all round. Lost her memory, or so she claimed. And now she’s missing.’

  Pippa Dunkley-Brown was still coming to terms with an earlier statement. ‘What do you mean – “mistakes at the wheel”? There was no question of a mistake.’

  ‘Leave it,’ said Dunkley-Brown through his teeth. The training in local politics took over as he diverted along the safer avenue. ‘Missing, you say. But she was in here speaking to us, with a large woman.’

  ‘Ada Shaftsbury, yes. Rose hasn’t been seen since the day you spoke to them.’

  Julie put in quickly, ‘We’re not accusing you of anything.’

  ‘I should damned well hope not!’ said the wife.

  Indifferent to the mood of mild hysteria, Diamond explained patiently, ‘We’re retracing Rose’s movements, as far as they’re known. It all started with you meeting her on the road and transporting her to the hospital. We don’t know anything about her before that evening.’

  ‘Nor do we,’ said Dunkley-Brown. ‘She was unconscious.’

  ‘Unconscious when she walked into the road?’

  ‘Not then, but after. We didn’t get a word out of her. We took her to the nearest hospital.’

  ‘Hospital car park.’ In spite of his efforts Diamond was getting increasingly irritated with this couple.

  Julie said, ‘Did she appear to be waving you down?’

  ‘She put up her arms,’ said Dunkley-Brown, ‘but she was out in the road by then.’

  ‘Lunacy,’ said his wife.

  He added, ‘Anyone would raise an arm if a car was bearing down on them.’

  ‘We weren’t speeding,’ said she.

  ‘It’s dark along that stretch,’ said he.

  ‘So you slammed on the brakes,’ said Diamond.

  ‘And tried to avoid her,’ said the husband. ‘We skidded a bit to the right. By the time we hit her, the car was virtually at a standstill. It nudged her off balance and I suppose she took a bump on the head.’ He made it sound like an incident in a bouncy-castle.

  ‘She was unconscious,’ Diamond reminded him.

  ‘Yes, so we did our best to revive her at the side of the road, and when it was obvious that we weren’t going to be successful, we lifted her into the car-’

  ‘The back seat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lying across the seat?’

  ‘Propped up against one corner really.’

  Diamond sat forward, interested. ‘Which side was her head? The nearside?’

  ‘The left, yes. After that we drove her to the Hinton Clinic. She was very soon taken in, I understand.’

  ‘But you’d already pissed off out of it.’

  ‘That’s offensive,’ said Pippa.

  ‘Pippa phoned a day or so later to enquire about her,’ Dunkley-Brown was anxious to stress. ‘The people at the hospital said she was so much better that she’d been discharged. We assumed she’d made a full recovery.’

  ‘Very reassuring.’

  ‘We didn’t know about her loss of memory.’

  Diamond finished his beer. ‘We’d like to look at your car. Is it back at the house?’

  The colour drained from Dunkley-Brown’s face. ‘But you said you weren’t here to inquire into the accident.’

  ‘As a traffic offence, it doesn’t concern me, sir. As an incident involving a missing person, it does. Do you see the tall man at the bar drinking fruit juice? He’s trained to look for evidence. He can back up your story by examining the car.’

  ‘But we’ve been perfectly frank.’

  ‘No problem, then. Shall we go?’

  ‘Do you use it much, Mr Dunkley-Brown?’ Diamond asked after the Bentley had been backed out of the garage for inspection.

  ‘Not a great deal these days. If we go to the pub, we tend to walk. It’s exercise, which is good at our age, and we can enjoy a couple of drinks without being breathalysed.’

  ‘Shopping?’

  ‘We do use the car for that, but it’s only a trip to the local supermarket.’

  ‘We’ll join you presently, then,’ Diamond said. ‘DI Hargreaves wouldn’t mind a coffee if your wife would oblige.’ When Dunkley-Brown was out of earshot he told the SOCO. ‘If nothing else, find me some long, dark hairs on the nearside of the back seat and you’re on for a double Scotch.’

  When Jim Marsh came in to report that he’d finished his examination of the car, he didn’t have the look of a man who has just earned a double Scotch.

  ‘No joy?’ said Diamond.

  ‘It’s been vacuumed inside,’ said the SOCO, ‘and very thoroughly.’

  Diamond turned to look at Dunkley-Brown. ‘Is that a fact?’

  A shrug and a smile. ‘There’s no law against Hoo
vering one’s car, is there?’

  ‘I know why you did it.’

  ‘You may well be right, Mr Diamond. We’d have been fools to have left any evidence of the girl there.’

  ‘May we see your Hoover?’

  ‘Certainly, only at the risk of upsetting you I’d better admit that we emptied the dust-bag right away. It was collected by the dustmen the same week.’

  Diamond was not at his best during the drive back to Bath. Not a word was said about the abortive search of the Bentley’s interior. Nothing much at all was said. Each of them knew how essential it was to find a sample of Rose’s hair. Diamond’s far-from-convincing theory linking her to Gladstone’s murder could only be taken seriously if the hairs found at the farmhouse were proved to be hers. The idea behind the trip to Westbury had been an inspiration, but unhappily inspirations sometimes come to nothing.

  He rallied his spirits for the press conference, held in a briefing room downstairs at Manvers Street. He needed to be sharp. His purpose in talking to the media was simply to step up the hunt for Rose. He didn’t intend to link her disappearance to any other crime. However, he was meeting a pack of journalists, and the modern generation of hacks were all too quick to make connections. Their first reaction would be that the head of the murder squad wouldn’t waste time on a missing woman unless he expected her to be found dead. From there, it was a short step to questioning him about other recent deaths: Daniel Gladstone and possibly Hildegarde Henkel. These same press people had reported the finding of the bodies. It was all too fresh in their memories.

  He handled the session adeptly, keeping Rose steadily in the frame. It was obvious from the questions that Social Services would be in for some stick. They were used to being in the front line. Poor buggers, they came in for more criticism than any other organisation.

  He was about to wrap up when the inevitable question came, from a young, angelic-featured woman with a ring through her right nostril. Nothing made him feel the generation-gap more than this craze for body piercing. ‘Would you comment on the possible connection with the death of the German woman, Hildegarde Henkel, at the Royal Crescent?’

  He was ready. ‘I’d rather not. That case is being handled by another officer.’