‘When did you find out?’
‘Only last night when I saw the poster of her. A batch of them were delivered to Bristol Central.’
‘Why didn’t you get in touch last night?’
He lowered his eyes and sighed. ‘I was shocked rigid. Scared, too. I’d kept this secret – about having sex with her – for all these years. I didn’t say anything about it to the security people. I couldn’t see how it affected the theft of the horse. Then, last night, this bombshell. My first instinct was to see if I could ride the storm like I had before. I was asking myself if anyone really needed to know. I decided to sleep on it and come to a decision today.’
This sounded credible, if reprehensible. People in a spot behave like that, trying to convince themselves nothing has changed. ‘Didn’t it occur to you when the skeleton was found on Lansdown that it might be Nadia?’
‘It crossed my mind, but I thought of all kinds of reasons why it could be someone else.’
‘As a serving police officer, you had a duty to speak out.’
‘I know. I should have reported what I knew in case it had a bearing. I’m a bloody disgrace.’
‘You worked with me on the Rupert Hope murder – briefly, I know, but you did.’
‘At the time, I couldn’t see any connection, and since then I’ve been running CID here, covering other cases.’
Diamond wasn’t dishing out blame. There was a bigger agenda here. ‘You heard that a horse rug was found with hairs attached to it that matched the single horse hair discovered with the skeleton? Rupert found this rug, an under-rug with the Phil Drake label. We don’t know where. Do you recall if Hang-glider had such a rug?’
Chaz looked up, his eyes brighter. ‘He did, yes. It was on his back in the horsebox. I put it on him myself. How the hell could it have turned up after all this time?’
‘That was my next question.’
‘God knows. I can’t begin to get my head round that.’
Diamond knew when a witness was going cold on him, and it wouldn’t be allowed to happen here. ‘I need your help on this. You’ve lived with this mystery longer than anyone in the police. What do you think happened that night?’
Chaz glanced towards the glittering expanse of water between the harbour walls. ‘Obviously it happened in that hour or so after I left Nadia standing by the horsebox and when I returned with my father. There must have been more than one person involved, but I doubt if she was part of it. I guess she was killed because she got in the way. They were there to steal a valuable horse and she would have been a witness.’
‘Physically, how do you think it was it done?’
‘The horse-thieves seem to have transferred Hang-glider to a trailer hitched to another vehicle, probably a four by four. There were tyre tracks found by the security team. That way, they would have got on the road before the mass of cars were leaving the racecourse. They could have gone anywhere.’
‘And Nadia?’
‘Must have been taken with them.’
‘She was found on the battlefield, buried,’ Diamond said, as the interrogation became more of a consultation. ‘They couldn’t have buried the horse there without a mechanical digger. Anyway, we’d have found evidence that the earth had been excavated. So the horse was taken elsewhere, sold on to breed secretly on some criminal stud farm, if Sir Colin Tipping’s theory is right. He was the owner. Did he hold you and your father responsible?’
‘He was gutted when Dad told him. He lost a million or more in stud fees. The deal with Sheikh Abdul was all agreed and wasn’t signed.’
‘Was it really worth as much as that?’
‘Dad swore it was. There was going to be money on signing and then a percentage of every stud fee the horse earned.’
‘Did your father take it out on you?’
‘Actually, no. He blamed himself for the lax security. I’d followed his instructions. Of course he knew nothing about Nadia.’
‘How long was it before you quit?’
‘A matter of months. I was through with being treated as a fourteen-year-old. I left home, dropped out for a while, did some part-time jobs and then joined the force. These have been good years. Now that I’ve messed up, I guess I ought to resign before they sack me.’ He was red-eyed.
‘I’d wait and see if I were you,’ Diamond said.
‘We’ll drive back over Lansdown.’
Hearing this from his superior, Paul Gilbert took a sharp breath. He’d had a testing day as Diamond’s chauffeur. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Like I said. Over Lansdown.’
‘Bit out of our way, isn’t it?’
‘Take the A431 and turn off shortly after Bitton. If you don’t trust me, you can use that satellite gadget of yours.’
‘I trust you, guv.’ Said with a faint sigh.
This would add at least twenty minutes to the journey, but it was futile to protest. Much as Gilbert was looking forward to getting home (and out) for Saturday night, he’d learned that the working day wasn’t over.
‘Being driven like this, at a sensible speed, has given me a chance to think,’ Diamond said, deciding after all to say more. ‘We know Rupert found that horse rug somewhere on the hill. I’ve got a new thought where it might have been.’
So instead of the fast route home they took the old Bath Road and diverted up Brewery Hill and through the village of Upton Cheney, swinging along the western side of Hanging Hill to climb the steep western ridge where the royalist army had once fought its way to the top at such a cost in lives.
Gilbert’s little Honda chugged steadily upwards until Lansdown’s battlefield came into view, benign, tinted gold by the evening sun. You wouldn’t have guessed at its savage history.
‘Are you thinking of stopping here?’ he asked.
‘I’ll say when.’ Diamond was preoccupied with a piece of information he’d learned days earlier. Once more it was from the calendar of events Ingeborg had put together for Keith Halliwell when he was briefly in charge of the case. One of the first entries he’d seen scrolling down the screen had not made sense. He hadn’t questioned it at the time because it didn’t have any obvious relevance to the investigation. He was interested now and he could picture it. The date would have been early in 1991, the year he’d first looked at.
Subsidence on Lansdown? He didn’t know of any mining under Lansdown Road. In centuries past, there had been open quarrying for Bath stone towards the top of the hill, but nothing underground. All the local mines below the surface, some of them notorious for caving in and alarming the residents when sudden craters appeared, were on the south-east side of the city at Combe Down and Odd Down and all the way out to Corsham and Bradford on Avon.
They motored in silence past the racecourse where Hang-glider had been paraded and the golf club where Swithin and Tipping outdid each other in bending the rules. A mile or more ahead, the landlocked lighthouse that was William Beckford’s folly appeared on the horizon. The gilded cast-iron columns of the lantern were catching the low sun.
‘That’s where we stop,’ Diamond said.
‘The tower? Will it still be open?’
‘We’re not going inside.’
Considering how productive the day had been, he was subdued, locked into his own thoughts. Paul Gilbert, uncertain how to deal with the man, chose to say the minimum.
They approached the tower and parked in the space in front of the gatehouse where poor Rupert Hope had passed his nights on a concrete bench with the horse rug as his covering.
Diamond spoke again. ‘Do you carry a torch?’
