And yet…
The repeated trips up the hill to one crime scene or the other kept reinforcing his hunch that these cases were linked. Over the years he’d often driven along the great limestone ridge and got the idea that it was isolated, a suitable place to commit murder and dump a body. Only in recent days had he become aware that the down buzzed with activity at weekends, not just occasional horse-racing, but golf, football, kites and model aircraft, car boot sales, dog walking and rambling. All this on a site with a proven history dating back to the Iron Age. Maybe the Lansdown Society had a point. Someone needed to keep an eye on things.
Towards the end of the afternoon two nervous-looking constables in uniform were ushered into his office by Ingeborg.
‘You’re the pair who spoke to the man whose body has been found?’
The male constable was holding his cap in front of him, twisting it like the steering wheel he would rather have been behind. ‘I’m Andy Sullivan, sir, and this is PC Beal.’
‘Doesn’t she have a name?’
‘Pardon?’
‘You want me to call you Andy and your sidekick PC Beal.’
The young woman at Sullivan’s side said, ‘Denise, sir.’ She looked straight out of school, with fine, blonde hair pinned up and pale skin of the kind that obviously coloured at the slightest personal remark.
‘You were sent to deal with an incident up at the racecourse, right?’
Andy Sullivan asserted his seniority as spokesman. ‘Two incidents on different days, in point of fact. It just happened that we got the job both times. The first was suspicious behaviour, tampering with car doors. We met the complainants, a Major Swithin and his wife, but the suspect had already left when we arrived. He was seen heading for the enclosure area. We conducted a search and unfortunately didn’t find him.’
Denise Beal cleared her throat. She’d turned beetroot red this time. ‘Actually, I did find him.’
Sullivan swung to face her.
‘Behind one of the grandstands,’ she said.
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘No. I kept it to myself.’
‘Why was that?’ Diamond asked before Sullivan waded in.
‘I, um, thought he was simple.’
‘The suspect – or Andy Sullivan.’
The joke fell flat. Neither smiled. Diamond wished he hadn’t spoken. ‘You spoke to the man whose body has been found?’ he said to get Denise started again.
‘I didn’t know who he was.’
Sullivan said, ‘This is totally new to me.’
She said, ‘You were a long way off at the time.’
‘You’d gone different ways?’ Diamond said.
Sullivan said, ‘I was checking the stables.’
‘You sent her round the enclosure area while you took a stroll along the racecourse? How long have you been in the police, Denise?’
‘Six weeks, sir.’
Diamond gave Sullivan a look and passed no comment. There were bigger issues here. ‘So what did you say to the guy?’
‘I asked him what he was doing there and who he was. I was trying to keep him talking until Andy arrived.’
‘Did he identify himself?’
She bit her lower lip and looked even more the nervous schoolgirl. ‘He said he was known as Noddy.’
‘Are you sure?’ The troubling image returned of the man at the races he’d taken for a drunk. ‘Did you ask for a proper name?’
‘I tried. He didn’t seem to have an answer. That’s why I thought he was simple. I couldn’t smell drink on his breath. He was smelly from living rough, not boozing. I asked if he’d just come from the car park and he didn’t seem to know. In the end I let him walk away. I didn’t tell Andy – PC Sullivan – because he’d told me to keep the suspect talking if I met him and I’d failed.’
The hell with Andy Sullivan’s hurt feelings. ‘Did you notice anything about his speech?’
‘Yes. He had quite a nice voice. Educated.’
Definitely the same man. ‘But some aftershave would have improved him?’
She smiled. ‘Or a shower.’
‘So how did you deal with him?’
‘I told him to keep away from the car park.’
‘Because the major and his wife were still there?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘You felt sorry for him?’
‘He didn’t act like a villain.’
‘All right,’ Diamond said, and brought Sullivan back into the discussion. ‘The second time you were called to deal with this man was when?’
‘Sunday morning, sir. We were told he’d been nicking food at the car boot sale.’
‘I know a bit about this,’ Diamond said, to keep it brief. ‘This was the hot meat pie.’
‘The woman said she’d made a citizen’s arrest, but I thought we could deal with it on the spot,’ Andy Sullivan said. ‘I asked him his name and got the same answer.’
‘Noddy?’
‘It wasn’t as cheeky as it sounds,’ Denise piped up. ‘He did do a lot of nodding while he was talking to us. I can understand someone calling him that.’
‘And you?’ Diamond asked Sullivan. ‘Did you think he was taking the piss?’
He swallowed hard. ‘It didn’t come across like that. He was serious. He didn’t seem to know much about himself apart from the name. I tried to find out where he lived and didn’t get a proper answer.’
Denise confirmed it. ‘He said he slept anywhere he could find that was dry.’
‘Like a refuge?’
‘I don’t think he knew,’ Sullivan said. ‘You know how you can tell from someone’s eyes that they’re not all there?’
‘What else did you discover?’
‘That was about it, sir. Unfortunately, it got out of hand after that because the pie lady attacked another woman and we had to separate them.’
‘Both of you?’
‘I asked PC Beal to do it, being a woman, handling another woman, like. And when we’d sorted that -’
‘When Denise had sorted it.’
‘Yes. The suspect had gone.’
‘Which saved you a lot of paperwork.’
‘We didn’t let him go on purpose, sir.’
‘I’m not suggesting it. You must have heard by now that your man Noddy has been identified as Rupert Hope, a university lecturer who has been missing for a couple of weeks. His picture was in the
‘I haven’t seen it,’ Sullivan said.
‘I haven’t seen it,’ Sullivan ‘Nor me,’ Denise added.
‘You want to listen to what your sergeant tells you at morning parade. This was the man who was murdered in Lansdown cemetery. He was probably suffering from memory loss when you spoke to him. The post mortem showed he took a heavy blow to the head about two weeks before he was killed.’
Shock was written plainly on their faces.
‘That’s awful,’ Denise said. ‘He was gentle, no threat to anyone. If we’d arrested him, it couldn’t have happened.’
‘Don’t lose any sleep over that,’ Diamond said. ‘You did your job. I wouldn’t have done any different and neither
