Upon a Dark Night (29 page)

‘And a team?’

‘The pick of the squad, other than Keith and Julie.’

Thoughtfully Wigfull preened the big moustache. This was an undeniable opportunity.

‘I could have taken on that job,’ said Julie when he told her.

‘I know.’

‘Well, then?’ Her blue eyes fixed him accusingly.

‘I need you on this one.’

‘Nobody would think so.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘You assigned responsibilities to practically everyone else.’

‘I don’t want you tied down. That’s the reason.’

She was unconvinced, certain he was punishing her for speaking out of turn in the meeting. He always expected her to back him, or at least keep quiet. He was so pig-headed that he didn’t know most of the squad agreed he was way off beam when he linked Rose Black to the murder.

Oblivious to all this, he said, ‘These stories that the old man had money tucked away - I’d like to know if there’s any foundation for them. Would you get on to it, Julie? Find out if he had a bank account. He must have received the Old Age Pension. What did he do with it?’

In front of him was the deed-box that Wigfull had removed from the farmhouse. ‘There’s precious little here. His birth certificate. Believe it or not, his mother gave birth to him in that squalid house.’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t so squalid in the nineteen-twenties. Do we know when the parents died?’

‘There’s nothing in here about it. Some Ministry of Agriculture pamphlets he should have slung out years ago. Remember the Colorado Beetle scares? A parish magazine dated August, 1953. Instructions for a vacuum cleaner - much use he made of that. And some out-of-date supermarket offers.’

‘I expect the parents are buried in the churchyard.’

‘Probably. Is that any use to us?’

‘I suppose not. May I see the box?’

Diamond pushed it across to her. ‘Be my guest. I want to put a call through to Chepstow. It’s high time I fired a broadside at forensic.’

While he was on the phone demanding to be put through to the people carrying out the work on the Tormarton samples, Julie sifted through the papers. She took out the old parish magazine and skimmed the contents. The Church was St Mary Magdalene, Tormarton. In a short time she discovered why Daniel Gladstone had kept this copy. Towards the back was a section headed ‘Valete’, a list of recent deaths, and among them appeared Jacob Gladstone, 1881-1953. A few lines recorded his life:

Jacob Gladstone, farmer, of Marton Farm, passed away last January 8th, of pneumonia. A widower, he lived all his life in the parish. For many years he served as sidesman. In September, 1943, Mr Gladstone unearthed the Anglo-Saxon sword known as the Tormarton Seax, and now in the British Museum. He is survived by his beloved son Daniel.’

Julie read it again. She leaned back in her chair, absorbing the information. If Gladstone’s father had made an archaeological find during the war, perhaps it had some bearing on the case. Eager for more information, she scanned the rest of the magazine and found only a piece about the meaning of Easter, written by the vicar, and reports on the Mothers’ Union and the Youth Club.

Diamond was still sounding off to Chepstow about the urgency
of his inquiry. Through sheer bullying he had got through to someone actually at work on the case. He stressed several times that this was now upgraded to a murder, and surely it warranted a higher priority. ‘Can’t you even give me some preliminary findings?’ he appealed to the hapless scientist on the end of the line. ‘Like what? Well, like whether anything so far suggests the presence of someone else in the farmhouse. You don’t have to tell me it was a Welsh-speaking Morris-dancer with size nine shoes and a birthmark on his left buttock. I’ll settle for anyone at all at this stage.’ He rolled his eyes at Julie while listening. ‘Right, now we’re getting somewhere,’ he said presently. ‘Two, you say, definitely not the farmer’s. What colour? …Brown? Well, you could have told me that at the outset. Male or female? …How long? …Yes, I understand …No, we won’t. We’re not exactly new in this game…Thanks. And sooner if you can.’ He slammed down the phone. Julie looked up.

‘They have two hairs from the scene that didn’t belong to the victim,’ he summed up. ‘Brown, three to four inches. They warned me that there’s no way of telling how they got there. They could have come from some visitor weeks before the murder. They’re doing some kind of test that breaks down the elements in the hair.’

‘NAA,’ said Julie.

‘Come again.’

‘Neutron Activation Analysis.’

‘Sorry I asked.’

‘It was part of that course I did at Chepstow last year. You can find up to fourteen elements in a single inch of hair. If you isolate as many as nine, the chance of two people having the same concentration is a million to one.’

‘Could be that,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But it’s the usual story. What it comes down to is that whatever the result it’s bugger-all use without a hair from the suspect to match.’

She shrugged. ‘We can hardly expect them to analyse a hair and tell us the name of the person it came from.’

He grinned. ‘Take all the fun out of the job, wouldn’t it?’

She showed him the piece in the magazine and it was as if the sun had just come out. ‘Good spotting,’ he said when he’d studied it. ‘His old dad had his fifteen minutes of fame, then. The Tormarton Seax.’

Julie said, ‘Thinking about those holes—’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about them. If there was a sword buried on the site, there could have been more stuff. And someone may have done some excavating.’

‘Wouldn’t they have organised a dig in 1943 when it was found? I can’t imagine anything of interest would be left.’

‘Of value, Julie. Bugger the interest.’ He glanced at the page again. ‘Well, this was the middle of the Second World War. People had other things on their minds than Anglo-Saxon swords. I reckon archaeology took a back seat.’

‘But later, when the war ended, wouldn’t they have wanted to explore the site?’

‘Possibly. It seems nothing else was found, or it would have got mentioned here. I just don’t know. What happens if the landowner doesn’t want a bunch of university students scraping at his soil for weeks on end? By all accounts, Daniel Gladstone wasn’t the friendliest farmer in these parts. If his dad was equally obstructive, it’s quite on the cards that nobody ever followed up the find.’

‘Until just recently.’

‘Right.’

‘It could explain the digging.’

‘It could, Julie.’ He closed the magazine and tossed it back into the deed-box. ‘Do you know, I’ve thought of someone who may throw some light on this.’

Down in the reception area, the desk sergeant was under siege.

‘If you won’t let me through,’ Ada Shaftsbury told him, ‘I’ll go straight out to the car park and stand on top of his car. I know which one it is. He’ll soon come running when he looks out the window and sees his roof cave in.’

‘Mr Diamond isn’t dealing with it any more,’ the sergeant explained for the second time. ‘He’s on another case.’

‘Don’t give me that crock of shit.’

‘Madam—’

‘Ada.’

‘Ada, if you’ve got something material to say, I’ll make a note of it. There are other people waiting now.’

‘If gutso isn’t dealing with it, who is?’

‘Another officer in CID.’

‘Well, is it a secret, or something?’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him.’

‘Try me. I know everyone in this cruddy place. I spend half my life here.’

‘I know that, Ada. Chief Inspector Wigfull has taken over. ’

She grimaced. ‘Him with the big tash. God help us!’

‘Now if you’ll kindly move aside…’

‘I’ll have a word with Wigfull, then.’

‘We’ll tell him you called.’

‘You won’t. You’ll take me to see him pronto. I have important information to impart.’

At this sensitive moment the interior door opened and Peter Diamond stepped into the reception area on his way out.

‘Mr Diamond!’ Ada practically embraced him.

‘Can’t see you now, Ada. I’m on an emergency.’

‘Is it true you’re off the case?’

‘What case?’

‘The missing woman, my friend Rose.’

He said with deliberate obtuseness, ‘I’m dealing with a murder. An old man. Right?’

Ada said bitterly, ‘Nobody bloody cares. You’ve written her off, haven’t you? She’s off your list. They moved a new woman in last night. It’s like she never existed. And how about poor little Hilde?’

He crossed the floor and went through the door, leaving Ada still defiantly at the head of the queue. She would presently get upstairs to torment Wigfull, he thought with amusement. Offloading the Royal Crescent case had been a wise decision. But halfway up Manvers Street he grasped the significance of something Ada had said. If they had moved a new woman into Rose’s room at Harmer House, they must have vacuumed it and changed the bed-linen. Any chance of obtaining a sample of Rose’s hair from that source had gone. The smile vanished.

Young Gary Paternoster was alone behind the counter in the shop called the Treasure House when Diamond entered. He dropped the book he was reading and stood up guiltily. He was still wearing the suit, but a yellow tie with a palm tree design held promise that some of the previous day’s man-to-man advice had sunk in.

It was Diamond’s first experience of a detectorists’ shop. They had designed it to excite the customer with murals of gold and silver objects half submerged in sand. There was a real wooden chest open in one corner and filled with fake treasure picked out by a spotlight. But most of the space was taken up with metal detectors with their special selling-points listed. ‘Silent search’, ‘deep penetration’ and ‘accurate discrimination’ were the qualities most touted. You would need to make some major finds to justify the prices, Diamond decided. There was also a stand with books, magazines and maps.

‘Relax, Gary,’ Diamond told the quaking youth. ‘I’m not here to make an arrest. I want to tap your expert knowledge. Have you ever heard of the Tormarton Seax?’

The question took some time to make contact. Mentally, Paternoster was still in the bedroom at the Royal Crescent. ‘It’s a sword, isn’t it? In the British Museum.’

‘Right. I don’t expect you to have its history off pat. It was found in the war by a farmer up at Tormarton, north of where the motorway is now.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s a place where detectorists go.’

‘The farm?’

‘Not the farm. No one’s ever been allowed on the farm. I mean the general area. It was the border between two ancient kingdoms, Mercia and Wessex, so there were skirmishes. And there was the great battle in the sixth century.’

Where had he heard this, about Mercia and Wessex? From the vicar, explaining the derivation of Tormarton’s name. ‘What great battle?’

‘Between the Saxons and the Britons. The Saxon army was fighting its way west for years, across the Berkshire Downs and to the south as well. This was the decisive battle. Hardly anybody knows about it these days, but it was just as important to our history as Hastings. It was the one that made modern England. If you’ve got a minute, there’s a book on the stand.’

Diamond wasn’t sure how much he needed to know of sixth-century history, but he was going to get some. Young Paternoster was fired up.

‘Here it is. “As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, in 577 Cuthwine and Ceawlin fought against the Britons and killed three kings, Conmail, Condidan and Farinmail, at the place called Dyrham, and they captured three of their cities, Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath.”’

‘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,’