in when the shots were taken, so the muscles were slack, giving an appearance that wouldn’t be seen in the living.
‘Come and look at these, Keith.’
Halliwell crossed the room. ‘I saw the face when you lifted the head.’
‘Well, I didn’t,’ Diamond said. ‘Not from the angle of the camera. Something is familiar. Don’t know what.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘No, I don’t. Never met the guy.’ He scratched the patch of hair above his right ear. ‘Even so…’
‘Do you want them on a board where we can see them?’
‘Good thinking. Excellent pictures, aren’t they? I bet the poor sod never had a snapshot of this quality taken when he was alive.’
‘Shall I set up another incident room?’ Halliwell was excited. A much more promising investigation was in prospect.
Diamond hesitated. They already had an adjoining room where information on the skeleton death was being processed. He thought about Georgina’s likely reaction to two incident rooms. ‘Not yet, Keith. Let’s see how we go.’
‘Up at the graveyard you seemed certain he was murdered.’
‘I’m inclined now to soft-pedal on that. It could be manslaughter – the result of a brawl – or even an accident.’
‘But you said a second person was involved and tried to cover it up.’
‘The drop of blood? Yes.’
‘That was good spotting, guv.’
‘Bad.’
‘Bad?’
‘But it was good that it was bad.’
‘You’ve lost me now.’
‘The spotting. By the perpetrator, not noticing the blade of grass.’
Halliwell tried humouring the boss by smiling, a forced smile, leaving him vulnerable.
‘Make some calls to all the local refuges, the Sally Army, and so on,’ Diamond said. ‘See if they can throw any light on this. There’s a bush telegraph among homeless men.’
‘Are you going to attend the PM?’
A casual enquiry, but both men knew what was behind it. Diamond didn’t have the stomach for post mortems. Halliwell was inured to them by now, always the police presence there. After years of standing in for the boss, watching a pathologist at work was no ordeal.
‘Tomorrow morning, I expect,’ Diamond said, as if mentally consulting his diary. ‘Pity.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ve got to be here in case of developments. Could you stand in for me on this one, Keith?’
‘I was thinking about visiting a refuge.’
Diamond’s eyebrows popped up. ‘Am I that difficult to work with?’
‘A refuge for the homeless, following up on the phone calls.’ ‘True.’ Diamond frowned and then raised a finger as inspiration dawned. ‘Ingeborg can do the refuges.’
‘Leaving me free.’
‘Free to go to the ball, Cinderella.’
Raffles the cat, who had taken to sleeping at the end of Diamond’s bed, was roused unusually early next morning. To add insult to injury, his wrong-headed owner then went to the garage instead of the shelf where the cat food was stored and started sorting through the old newspapers stacked for the refuse collection. Ten minutes of leafing through copies of the
‘That’s my baby, Raffles,’ he said. ‘And now we’ll celebrate by opening a new tin of chicken in jelly.’
True, the portrait of Rupert Hope was just a mugshot, probably taken for some university ID, but there was a distinct resemblance to the dead man. He read the text again. The age was about right. On consideration, the relatively healthy state of the skin and hands made sense. He’d not been a vagrant for long. From cavalier to corpse in how long? Two to three weeks? The days between took on a new importance.
Raffles was standing beside his empty bowl giving Diamond the glare usually reserved for next door’s pampered Persian.
John Wigfull kept to the civilised hours of a civilian and arrived at his office soon after nine. His moustache twitched in annoyance when he saw Peter Diamond seated on the corner of his desk.
‘Something the matter?’ Wigfull asked.
‘Far from it,’ Diamond said. ‘I’ve solved your puzzle. I’m here to claim my reward. Was it a brand new BMW or three weeks in the Bahamas?’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’
He held up the newspaper. ‘The missing cavalier.’ With an air of triumph he produced one of the glossy photos of the dead man and held it beside the pictures in the paper. ‘If it’s all the same to you, I’ll take the BMW.’
Wigfull gave the picture a squint. ‘Who’s this, then?’
‘Rupert.’
‘Rupert who?’
‘Rupert Bear, and I’m Bill Badger. Come on, John. I know it’s early in the day, but you can see it’s the same guy as the one in the paper.’
‘He doesn’t look the same.’
‘He’s dead, that’s why.’ He was tempted to go into the Monty Python dead parrot routine, which he knew by heart, but it would be wasted on Wigfull. ‘We found him yesterday in the graveyard up at Beckford’s Tower.’
‘You think this is Rupert Hope?’
‘I’m sure of it.’
‘Dead?’
‘Were you hoping for a happy ending? Is that what this is about? Compare the pictures. Look at the hairline, the eyebrows, the mouth.’
‘I suppose it could be him,’ Wigfull said finally. ‘How long has he been dead?’
‘Yesterday, or the night before. No longer.’
‘Where was he all this time?’
‘He wasn’t in any condition to tell me. I’m telling you as much as I know. He looked as if he’d been living rough for some days, but it was obvious he wasn’t a long-term homeless man.’
‘What did he die of?’
‘I don’t want to anticipate the post mortem, which is happening as we speak, but my money is on the three- inch wound at the back of his head.’
‘A violent death, then?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Pity. I thought he’d turn up alive.’
‘Thanks to your press release? You can’t win them all, John. What I need to know from you is where the story came from. Who reported it?’
‘The university people. The last anyone saw of him was on the day of the battle re-enactment.’
‘So he went missing for – what? – two and a half weeks and ended up dead, probably murdered. I’m going to have to find out a whole lot more about this guy. Did you speak to anyone from the Civil War Society, or whatever they call themselves?’
Wigfull shook his head. ‘I’m the media relations manager, not a detective. However…’ He cleared his throat and turned a shade more pink. ‘I did speak to a couple of people who responded to the newspaper appeal. They were claiming to have spotted the man up at Lansdown.’
‘When was this?’
‘One woman said she’d seen him at the car boot sale on Sunday. He helped himself to a meat pie she had for sale and wouldn’t or couldn’t pay for it. She described him as a down-and-out, scruffy, in a hooded jacket and jeans, but said he had a posh accent. The other witness saw a similar man apparently trying to break into cars.’
