Skeleton Plot Read online

  He looked up and waved to the two fond, aged faces at the window, then resumed his work like a conscientious employee. He was panting steadily now, but he wasn’t going to stop until the whole plot was double dug and ready for old Joe to work on. He’d be tired when he was finished, but it would be that pleasant fatigue he had felt after a long walk by the Wye or a day climbing in the Brecon Beacons. Exhaustion was good when it carried a sense of achievement with it.

  Nana Pat came out and said he should stop for a cup of tea, but he said he’d have one when he was finished. Half an hour, three quarters at the most, he said; it had become a matter of personal pride to finish the whole plot and leave it brown and welcoming and ready for Granddad’s efforts. Virgin land, old Joe had said. Well, Damon wasn’t defiling it. He was merely presenting it at its best for the expert gardener to have his way with it.

  He was almost at the last trench now, the one Granddad had said at lunchtime that he would never reach. He’d be able to put the sods and the soil he’d dumped ready all those hours earlier into the last trench, and bring the old man out to see it. Joe would be full of approval and gratitude. ‘Job’s a good ’un!’ he’d say. Granddad always said that when some task had been completed.

  There were very few stones in this excellent soil. That was why Damon was surprised when he felt his spade grate on one. Quite a big one, it felt. But it was at the bottom of his spade, at the base of the full spit which Joe had told him to dig. He’d get it out, though, set it on the grass beside the plot to show Granddad what he’d extracted and how diligent he’d been in his work on the new vegetable plot.

  It was at that moment that he saw it.

  The skull lay at the bottom of the trench, staring up at him with sightless eyes as though it was startled to see him, as if it was questioning why its rest had been disturbed.

  Damon went to the back door and called softly inside for Granddad Joe. He didn’t want Nana Pat: this was a sight which was not fitting for a woman, even an old, experienced woman who had always seemed unshockable. He was surprised how light and uncertain his voice sounded as he called for his grandfather. It was almost as if the voice didn’t belong to him, as if this sudden horror in the bright sunlight had affected his power of speech.

  Damon found that he couldn’t tell Joe what he’d discovered. Instead, he led him slowly across the grass of the new paddock to where he’d been digging, scarcely hearing the old man’s compliments on how well he had done. He had half-expected the skull to be gone, vanished back into the ground whence it had come. But it lay exactly where he had left it, at the bottom of his final trench.

  Granddad Joe hadn’t seen it; he was still congratulating his grandson fulsomely on the work he had done. Damon could think of no words which were not banal. He said, ‘I found this.’

  Old Joe looked at the skull without speaking, as if he could not credit the presence of such a thing in his ground. It seemed a long time before he said, ‘You’d best not dig any more, lad. The police will need to know about this.’

  It was confirmation to Damon that it was real, that this awful thing which had thrust itself into the climax of his day was what he’d known it was as soon as he’d seen it. As he gazed down at it, a worm slid out silently through what had once been an eye, then back in through what had once been a mouth. Damon watched as if under hypnosis. Then he turned and vomited up Nana’s lunch into the other end of the trench.

  He stumbled back across the grass with the old man’s arm around his shoulders, their strengths suddenly reversed. Damon felt a compelling need to speak, to say something, anything, to break the silence as they approached the door of the bungalow. ‘You must think I’m a wimp, Granddad Joe!’

  ‘Nay, lad, you’re never a wimp! You’re sixteen, that’s all.’

  Less than half an hour later, two police cars drove into the quiet close.

  TWO

  By the time Detective Chief Superintendent Lambert and Detective Sergeant Hook arrived from Oldford police station, the bones had already been accorded a status they had not enjoyed since their interment.

  The end section of Joe Jackson’s recently erected fence, which had separated his newly acquired paddock from the farmland beyond it, had been carefully removed. The trench where the skull had been found and the area beyond it were being examined with the minute attention required in a case of unexplained death. However old these bones might prove to be, they would be accorded the status of a suspicious death until the full facts of the demise could be ascertained.

  Whether those facts would ever be established was a matter of speculation in these first hours of the investigation. The remains were human, but nothing was yet established beyond that. No one knew how old the skull was or whether the rest of a body was here as well. No one knew whether the victim – it would be treated as a victim until any more innocent explanation could be provided – was male or female. No one knew how long the skull had been here. It hadn’t even got a nickname yet. Policemen who deal with death in all its harshness and finality usually give nicknames; they bring levity and relief to things which can make life very grim. This head had been the operating centre of a human being, the body part which distinguishes a person from the rest of the animal kingdom, but it was too anonymous as yet to prompt even the grim humour of the practised CID officer.

  John Lambert sent DS Hook in to deal with the elderly owners of the bungalow whilst he went down to the area which had already been screened off as a scene of crime. Bert was good with people, adept at calming the shocked and the bewildered. Far better than Lambert was himself; eleven years of working with Hook had taught him that.

  The Jacksons were certainly bewildered. After ten minutes with Bert Hook’s village-bobby persona, they relaxed a little. Hook was far more intelligent than the public face he presented. The criminal fraternity with whom he dealt for much of his time often underestimated him, which brought him and his chief many advantages. Bert decided in his first sixty seconds with the Jacksons that they were entirely innocent of whatever had happened at the edge of their property. And the Jacksons decided that this burly figure with the weather-beaten features was entirely trustworthy and reliable.

  ‘My grandson was double digging a new vegetable plot for me. Going down to almost eighteen inches. He’d almost finished it. He was on the very last trench when he found that – that thing. He’s a good lad, Damon,’ Joe Jackson concluded irrelevantly.

  The grey-haired woman beside him put her hand on his without looking at him. ‘I suppose there’s no doubt that what Damon found out there was human?’ she asked Hook.

  ‘None at all, I’m afraid. That’s one of the very few things we can be sure of at the moment. Had you any reason at all to suspect that there might be anything like that out there?’

  ‘No!’ They chorused the negative in horrified unison.

  ‘I know that seems a silly question, but it’s one we have to ask. You haven’t heard any rumours of mysterious deaths or disappearances in the area?’

  ‘No. We’ve only been here for three years. Our bungalow is the only one in the close. It was the last home to be built; I think the planning permission for the houses said that they had to include one detached bungalow. A gesture to pensioners, I suppose.’ Joe managed the first smile he had produced since he had seen that grim thing at the boundary of his newly extended garden.

  ‘And the ground where you were digging your vegetable plot was not originally part of your property.’

  ‘No. I bought it from the farmer. The purchase wasn’t completed until last week. I wanted to get on with digging the vegetable plot, so that we could have some crops this year. I was going to plant maincrop spuds in most of it. That breaks up the ground, you see; makes it more suitable for brassicas later.’ The facts, relevant and irrelevant, tumbled out of him, as if he needed to divest himself of all of them to prove that he had no involvement in this awful thing.

  Pat Jackson broke in as if it was important to stop her husband ta
lking, to cut the strings on his involvement with what was going on in their garden. ‘Have you found other things? Have you found other bones to go with what our grandson turned up in that trench?’

  ‘The scene of crime team are working on it now, Mrs Jackson. They have to go carefully, you see. It seems slow to us, but they know what they’re about. They will search the earth very carefully. They want to find everything they can, but they can’t rush things because they don’t want to risk destroying evidence.’

  ‘Destroying evidence’. It was that word ‘evidence’, with its legal connotations, which made her appreciate for the first time what was involved here. ‘What they’re turning up out there is evidence, isn’t it? There’s a crime involved, isn’t there, and the people out there are looking for the evidence to find out who put that thing into our land?’

  ‘There might be a crime, yes. We don’t know yet. If there is a crime, it may well be a very serious one.’

  ‘Someone might have killed him, mightn’t they?’ said Joe Jackson. He looked suddenly older, his scant hair thinner and more untidy as he ran a gnarled hand quickly through it.

  Bert Hook noted that Joe had assumed that the skull was male, just as policemen always assumed that a killer was male, until they knew otherwise. The facts supported them: four out of five killers were male. He didn’t know how many skulls found in the ground were male, though. He thought of these two suddenly frailer people holding on to each other in bed, trying to sleep through the night, which was now not far away. ‘There might be a perfectly innocent explanation for this, you know.’ Bert couldn’t think of one at the moment.

  Joe Jackson said defiantly, almost aggressively, ‘It wasn’t our ground. Not when that thing was put there, it wasn’t.’

  Pat Jackson seized on that thought. ‘No. And we’ve no idea how long it’s been there, have we? It could be quite old, couldn’t it? It must date from before these houses were built.’

  Bert hadn’t yet seen the skull. There’d been no hair on it, apparently. He nodded at the two anxious pensioners. ‘That’s almost certainly so.’

  Pat nodded. ‘Could that thing be really old? There were battles fought round here, weren’t there?’

  DS Hook smiled. ‘Yes. Most of them were fought near rivers like the Wye and the Severn. There was a big battle at Tewkesbury, near where I live.’

  ‘Do you think this could be left over from one of those battles?’

  ‘I think that’s very unlikely.’

  ‘They found a multiple grave a few years ago, didn’t they? From the Wars of the Roses, I think. They found skeletons of lots of soldiers who’d been killed in a battle. Do you think this could be something like that?’ She was torn between horror at the thought of there being others out there, multiple deaths near her quiet modern home, and her original idea that distancing this death would make it less sinister and less threatening than something more recent. Pat was seventy now. She didn’t want this to be anything which had occurred in her lifetime.

  Bert Hook said gently, ‘I doubt that this would be a multiple grave, Mrs Jackson. There’s no record of any major engagement in this area. But we shall know more very quickly, I’m sure. Once the experts get to look at whatever is unearthed out there.’

  He looked out through the window at the screen around the plot, wondering exactly what his chief and the scene of crime team were discovering behind it. ‘You won’t be planting vegetables for a little while, Mr Jackson.’

  Hook had been trying to lower the tension. But old Joe said dolefully, ‘I don’t know whether I’ll ever plant vegetables out there now, after that thing Damon turned up. I don’t think Pat would fancy anything I grew in that plot. She’d be thinking of what had been buried there.’

  ‘I expect you’ll feel differently in a few weeks. I’m a vegetable man myself. It looks to me as though you’ve got good ground there. Be a shame not to use it, now you’ve put the work in.’

  ‘Our Damon put the work in. He’s a good lad, our grandson.’ Joe Jackson was clinging to that thought, amidst a welter of much darker ones.

  Hook said, ‘We’ll give you back your ground as soon as we can. I expect in a year’s time this will seem no more than a bad dream to you.’

  He had no real belief that that would be so. This was a new experience to him as well as to them. He left the Jacksons to talk with each other in their living room and walked across their newly acquired paddock to the square in the corner which was now hidden from public view. John Lambert greeted him with a curt nod. Bert said, ‘I’ve never been involved in a death like this before. I don’t suppose you have.’

  Lambert said tersely, ‘Once, when I was a young copper – before I was even CID. They found remains on a Second World War bomb site in Bristol. They went down deep because they were building a tower block. Those bones had been there for forty years. Natural causes, they decided, in the end. If you can call death from one of Hitler’s bombs natural causes. Actually, I think they included something about enemy action.’

  They looked automatically to the other end of the scene of crime area, where someone had set the skull which had prompted all this activity on top of a wooden box. It was only five yards away and it reminded Bert Hook of a scene in Lord of the Flies which had frightened him as a child. The head looked as if it had been set up there as a bizarre object of veneration. He wished someone would put it inside the box and out of his sight.

  The pathologist was totally unconscious of Hook’s reaction. He was all brisk professionalism, as if buried skeletons were something he dealt with every day of his working life. ‘He’s drying off nicely. Not that we want to lose all of the soil around him: it might help us to establish how long he’s been there, the soil. Possibly even give us a clue as to how he got there. We’ll be able to tell you more when we have a few more bones to add to the head.’

  He gestured to where two of his acolytes were on all fours with trowels in hand, sifting the soil in and beyond Damon Jackson’s final trench with infinite care. They looked like archaeologists discovering buried treasure. Hook supposed that within this context they were doing exactly that. The earth they were treating with such respect might reveal more of this mysterious person, might give him or her some sort of identity. It might even reveal how he or she had died, the key question for CID men and for everyone else on the site at this moment.

  There was a plastic sheet beside the two who were working with trowels. It already had bones upon it. Hook recognized a femur, a collar bone, ribs and what looked like fragments of a pelvis. The strange jigsaw of what had once been a living thing, a person who had spoken and moved, who had loved and hated, was being put together after being hidden from human sight for many years.

  It was Chief Superintendent Lambert who voiced the question which was dominating the thoughts of the seven people here at this moment. ‘Any thoughts yet on how long chummy’s been here?’

  The pathologist gave him the supercilious smile of the professional dealing patiently with the amateur. He was a balding man with rimless glasses; neither Lambert nor Hook had seen him before. He had a patronizing air, treating experienced policemen as novices in death, feeling that in this case his presumption was wholly justified. He was used to dealing with corpses who had been killed the hour before or the night before, not a decade or even a century ago. Bert Hook looked at the bones being assembled so meticulously upon the plastic sheet and tried to think of this incomplete assembly as a living, breathing human being, with emotions like love and hate – and fear, perhaps, in the final passage of life which had led to its presence here.

  He sensed that this rather pompous expert wanted to be prompted with questions which would enable him to display his knowledge, so he repeated his chief’s query. ‘How old do you think this is?’

  Dr Patterson smiled at such naivety. ‘We shall know more when we have more complete evidence. The nearer we get to a full skeleton, the more I shall be able to tell you. I shall, of course, need the equipment of my
laboratory to furnish you with any degree of accuracy.’

  Lambert said, with a touch of acid, ‘What we really need for a start is some idea of how long he’s been lying undetected in a shallow grave. We can’t even formulate questions until we have some idea of that.’

  Patterson looked at the soiled collection on the plastic sheet, watching the woman who knelt beside it depositing a slender bit of bone which might once have been a finger. ‘Not centuries.’

  It was a start. Bert wasn’t sure whether he was pleased or disturbed by the thought. A recent interment would need investigation, might lead to the complex operations involved in a murder hunt. The zest for the chase, for the probing of a mystery, stirred within him; such curiosity and excitement are necessities for all successful CID officers. On the other hand, the investigation of a death which had happened many years earlier and been undetected at the time would almost certainly be complex and prolonged, and quite possibly ultimately unsuccessful.

  The awful crimes of Fred and Rose West some thirty years earlier were still vividly present in the minds of all Gloucestershire police officers. Hook was immediately disturbed by the thought of the corpses interred by West which had never been found, despite intensive digging in the areas thought to be relevant. That was ridiculous, he told himself firmly: there had never been any suggestion that the Wests had operated in this area. And these bones might be centuries old. They might even, as Mrs Jackson had suggested, be remains from some much older, long-forgotten conflict.

  But Patterson had said the skull wasn’t centuries old, hadn’t he? Bert looked at the thing on its temporary pedestal. It seemed for a moment to be grinning mockingly at him. He glanced at the impassive Lambert, then repeated to the pathologist, ‘How old is this, do you think? What are your first impressions?’