Digging Up Dirt

by Pamela Hart

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PAMELA HART is an award-winning, bestselling author of more than 35 books. She writes the Poppy McGowan mystery series and also historical novels; The Charleston Scandal is her most recent historical story, set in 1920s London.

  As Pamela Freeman, she is well-known as a beloved children’s author and fantasy writer. Her most recent children’s book is a non-fiction picture book, Dry to Dry: The Seasons of Kakadu. Her adult fantasy series, The Castings Trilogy, ended with the award-winning Ember and Ash.

  To be kept up to date about the next Poppy McGowan story, you can subscribe to her newsletter at pamela-hart.com/newsletter; you even get a free story!

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  For Ron,

  whose idea this was,

  with much love

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monday

  ‘Hello, miss?’ It was Boris, my carpenter, and he sounded worried. ‘Miss, I found something.’

  ‘Something? What? Where?’

  ‘I dug the hole for the post. I found …’ His voice dropped. ‘… body.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A body, miss.’

  ‘What kind of body?’ I was thinking, for some reason, of an old car body—a Valiant or a Ford or something, and wondering how they’d got it in the door.

  ‘You know, bones. Skellington.’

  ‘A skeleton?’ I almost dropped the phone. And I’m ashamed to admit it, but my first thought was, This is going to completely stuff up my renovations.

  The day had started like almost every day did, with me at my little house, talking to a tradie about their day’s work on my renovations. All I wanted to do was get agreement on the task for the day and head off to my own work. But no.

  ‘They’re all so far away, miss …’

  My carpenter was telling me the story of his life. Of course.

  Boris was bemoaning the fact that all his family were thousands of kilometres away in Croatia and he missed them so much and there was this girl … I nodded and smiled sympathetically, but in the meantime, I had a chipboard floor that needed to be pulled up before the electricians could come in and rewire.

  Why not tell him to get back to business, you ask? It just doesn’t work that way. Trust me, I’ve been through this before.

  Boris is short and stocky, but his face has the long lines and the deep, sad eyes of a hound dog, and he was never sadder than when he was talking about his family. With other people, he has a reputation for never saying more than two words at a time. With me, he rambles.

  Don’t ask me why it happens. Maybe it’s my face. Maybe my background in interviewing makes me put on an interested look automatically. Me, I think that character is destiny, and my fate is to go through life having people tell me their problems, their sorrows, their disappointments—and sometimes their triumphs. And I admit—it is interesting. People always are, if you listen long enough.

  ‘So, maybe, I get permanent residency …’ Boris concluded hopefully. I patted him on the shoulder.

  ‘I’m sure you will.’ I shifted my gaze to the floor. The plasterers had finished, thank God, which meant the chipboard, already a bit damp and mouldy, was now festooned with drying lumps of plaster. Next to my beautiful clean walls it looked even more disgusting than it had before.

  ‘The electricians will be here on Thursday to do the power points,’ I said, slightly plaintive. My big brother the builder says that the best way to get help from tradesmen is to simply state the problem and let them come up with the solution. They don’t like amateurs telling them what to do. This is true of female tradies as well.

  Boris patted my shoulder.

  ‘Don’t you worry about that, miss,’ he said. ‘Them floors’ll be gone by then. I’ll pull ’em up and put in the newel post.’

  The freestanding staircase in one corner was held up structurally by a square metal column underneath the halflanding, but the balustrade needed a newel post at the bottom to hold it steady. The old one had simply rested on top of the chipboard floors, but Boris was going to put in a proper post that went down to ground level and had a solid concrete footing.

  He hefted a big crowbar and grinned, showing one gold tooth and one gap among otherwise blindingly white teeth. I grinned back. I like Boris. He’s a good carpenter, and I could trust him to look after my house. I felt it needed looking after, even though there’s nothing there yet, except the bricks and, now, the beautiful old-fashioned proper plaster walls. My tiny little worker’s cottage, only twelve feet wide, had been emptied out completely—plaster scraped from the walls, carpet gone, new damp course, new ceilings, and soon the floors themselves would go, at least on the ground floor. I was redoing that from the dirt up, because it had been really disgusting when I bought it (only reason I could afford it). The only snag was that I had to live with my parents for the duration.

  I looked around, at the morning sunlight coming in through the back window, the high ceilings complete with ceiling roses and rose-patterned cornices, the Victorian mouldings around the doors, and sighed. It was worth it. I loved this house. It was the kind of house I’d walked by as a uni student, when I lived in a block of flats around the corner, and imagined living in one day.

  I left Boris to it and drove to work, past the statues of World War One soldiers on Anzac Bridge, past the Fish Market where the tourists were taking pictures of the fishing fleet, over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and up the freeway to Artarmon. I technically work at the Children’s and Education Department of the ABC in the city, in Ultimo, but my day-to-day work is at Artarmon.

  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is what an American friend of mine calls ‘PBS on steroids’ but it’s probably more accurate to compare it to the BBC. We don’t have the BBC’s budget, but we are government funded and apolitical. ‘Innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services’ is our charter, and we use TV, radio and the digital universe to deliver them.

  The program I was currently a researcher for was what is known in the trade as a ‘co-production’, which means that we worked with an outside contractor, Star Shots, who had the rights to sell the show overseas, and that was where I was based. I had to organise the week’s shooting schedule and make sure I had delivered all the recce information the camera crews needed to find and shoot the footage we wanted.

  The show was called Stage 1: Launchpad, and was an education program aimed at littlies in the first three years of school. Heavily linked to the curriculum, we made programs about things like ‘Where does milk come from?’ and ‘How do fish come from the sea to the table?’ and ‘What happens at the zoo after closing time?’

  I was the researcher and scriptwriter, which meant I was given a topic by the director/producer, Jennifer Jay, and then I found the information, locations, people
to interview, anything we needed, really, and put it into a script.

  By the time I got to Star Shots in Artarmon it was raining hard. Not one of those Sydney squalls which dumps buckets on you and passes in a few moments, but a solid, long-lasting rain that would probably go on all day. So much for my camera shoot at Luna Park. We were making a show about what happens at the amusement park behind the scenes.

  As I walked in, shaking off my umbrella and my unruly mop of hair, Jennifer Jay hurried out of the office. Jennifer Jay (everyone uses her full name, like a character in a picture book) hurries everywhere. She’s a slight woman with the nervous mannerisms of an ex-smoker trying not to reach for a fag. Sharp brown eyes, pale skin, dull brown hair that always seems to be showing a strip of grey at her centre parting—and how is that possible, unless she does it deliberately, which I wouldn’t put past her? You don’t much notice how she looks because she is very intense, very concentrated on you or the job or both.

  ‘So,’ she said as I walked in, ‘which tradesman have you been charming this morning?’

  This was what she always asked if she thought I’d been wasting time on the house. I wasn’t technically late. I work public service hours, because I’m an ABC employee. Jennifer Jay was, too. But the other people at Star Shots were private contractors, which means they worked all the hours God sent, so they’d been here since before breakfast. Jennifer Jay liked to work along with them, clocking up flexi hours which she never took. I don’t think she has a life outside the show. She’s divorced with no children and the only reason she goes home is to feed her cat and swap her library books. Which makes her sound pitiful, and that is so wrong.

  ‘The carpenter wanted to tell me the story of his life,’ I said defensively.

  She laughed, and so did the receptionist, Cherie. It was an ongoing joke. Mind you, both Jennifer Jay and Cherie had told me the story of their lives on different occasions, so I didn’t feel they should laugh too loud. Particularly as Cherie’s story about how and why she got her many piercings had needed a very strong stomach to listen to.

  Jennifer Jay looked out the window to the parking lot.

  ‘That shoot at Luna Park has been called off. Weather Bureau says this’ll go on all day.’ She scowled. She resents wasting camera time. ‘Do we have anything else we can send them to? Indoors?’

  I went through my to-do list in my head, but couldn’t think of anything. We’d done the indoors shooting at Luna Park last week, on another wet day.

  ‘Not on this program,’ I said. ‘I could have a try at setting something up for the next one.’

  ‘The archaeology one?’

  ‘No, the one on recycling. Archaeology’s the one after that. There are sections of the recycling centre that are under cover.’

  Jennifer Jay nodded.

  ‘Have a try.’

  She walked off to Editing and I went to the production office, which was, as always, full of people, whiteboards, old digital tapes, paper, and fraying posters from past productions sticky-taped to the walls.

  People always think that working in television is glamorous. Maybe if you’re interviewing starlets on the red carpet at the Oscars, but not in our production office, and not when you’re knee deep in cow dung in the middle of a milking yard at five o’clock on a cold morning, trying to write down the exact sequence of moves the dairy farmer makes so the camera crew will film everything they need to. Not glamorous. But quite a lot of fun, all the same.

  And I like the fact I learn stuff—the behind closed doors stuff, the trade secret stuff. It’s surprising, the amount of information I have tucked away. I started out writing video scripts for the Museum of New South Wales, so all in all I’ve learnt some esoteric facts in the last few years.

  On that particular morning, I had dumped my bag on the desk and was looking at my emails when my mobile rang.

  ‘Hello, miss? Miss, I found something,’ said Boris.

  And that’s when it all went pear-shaped.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘A skeleton?’

  While I clutched my phone, I also clutched at the faint hope that Boris might be wrong. When I worked at the museum, people were always calling up to say they’d found ancient Aboriginal remains, but when the archaeologists got there it was usually dog or sheep bones. Once, it had been a kangaroo and they’d got all excited about pre-European settlement middens until they did the carbon dating and found that the bones were from the 1950s, when the owner’s father used to go spotlighting in his ute. So I was hoping that Boris’s ‘skellington’ was some long-ago family pet, buried in the garden of the big house down the road, whose grounds had been subdivided into building lots in 1894, when my house was built.

  So, ‘Are you sure it’s a person?’ I asked.

  Terry, the camera operator, looked up from his fishing magazine. I tried to pretend nothing exciting was going on. Terry used to be a news cameraman until he got a bit too old and a bit too stout to run away from riots and fires, but he can still smell a story. He nudged Dave, the sound guy, and they began collecting their equipment. Terry and Dave look like your standard Australian blokes, and cultivate a ‘nothing to see here’ demeanour, but they’re both as sharp as needles.

  ‘Just some bones, sticking out of the ground,’ Boris said. ‘Looks like a leg.’

  One of the esoteric things I know from my time at the museum is that the long bones of the leg are in fact a good way to identify humans, but also that a lot of mammal leg bones look alike. It might just be a cow or something. I pushed away the question of why someone would bury a cow under my house.

  ‘I’ll be right there,’ I said soothingly. ‘Go make yourself a cup of tea.’

  ‘I call the police, miss?’

  ‘No!’ I said quickly. ‘Not until we’re sure it’s a human body. I’ll—I’ll get an expert in.’

  ‘Okey dokey, miss.’ Boris sounded more cheerful.

  Jennifer Jay also has an unerring instinct for news from her days as a current affairs producer. She perched on the edge of my desk. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Boris has found bones under the house.’

  That took even her aback. ‘Human bones?’

  ‘Not sure. So …’ I thought fast. It was imperative that I got this sorted out in time for the electricians on Thursday. Booking an electrician was like arranging an audience with the Pope: miss it and I’d never get another.

  I’d done a lot of the work on the archaeology program already. ‘Why don’t we kill two birds with one stone? I’ll see if Annie can scare up an archaeologist to check out the bones, and the boys can come and film him—her, them—working. Then at least we won’t have wasted a shooting day, and we’ll have some footage up our sleeve for the archaeology program.’

  Jennifer Jay nodded. ‘Okay.’

  My friend Annie Southey was the reason we were doing the archaeology program in the first place. She was Director of Gallery Operations at the Museum of New South Wales and she had run a very successful open dig at a site in The Rocks all through the previous school holidays. So successful that Jennifer Jay had heard about it. She knew that Annie and I were friends, so she’d announced that archaeology fitted in with the curriculum theme ‘people who help us’ and we would do a program. I personally thought it was stretching the curriculum a bit, but it looked like being an interesting show, so what the hell.

  I rang Annie in a bit of a fluster. ‘Need your help. Need your help now.’

  ‘Okay, calm down.’ Annie was always calm. Very matter of fact, full of common sense. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Bones under my house. Boris took the floor up and there are bones.’

  ‘Human bones?’ Oh, yes, now she’s interested. She loves crime novels.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen them, I’m in Artarmon. But I don’t want the police involved unless they really are human. So I thought—’ I outlined the plan to her.

  She was silent for a minute, thinking. ‘I’d have to send Julieanne.’
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  ‘Noooo!’ I wailed. ‘Not Psycho Woman.’

  ‘She’s the only one here, apart from that contractor she’s sleeping with. The good-looking one.’

  ‘How does she do that?’ I asked, momentarily distracted.

  ‘I guess they’re too busy looking at her tits to notice the madness in her eyes,’ Annie said.

  I debated with myself. Julieanne versus the police. Julieanne and I had a history, and not a pleasant one. It was a close call, and if I hadn’t promised Jennifer Jay a shoot, I’d have gone for the police as the lesser of two evils.

  ‘Oh, send her,’ I said. ‘I’m putting the camera crew in, too, so we’ll get some footage for the show out of it.’

  ‘And our agreement is in place?’ Annie asked, suddenly businesslike. ‘We get to use the footage as we choose in our exhibitions?’

  ‘All signed and agreed to. What time could Julieanne meet me?’

  ‘You know her. A bone to chew on? She’ll get straight on her broomstick and fly.’

  So I collected the camera crew—Terry, Dave and the production assistant Mirha—and followed their huge Ford V8 back over the Harbour Bridge (most of the ABC’s cars are old). Sydney Harbour looked fabulous as always, even on this grey day, giving a sense of space and air and light to the middle of the city. Outside of peak hour, just five minutes off the bridge and you’re turning into Johnston St, the main road that cuts right through Annandale. Seven minutes and you’re pulling up at my place. I love how close it is to the city.

  Annandale was built in the second half of the nineteenth century for the new professional and merchant classes that had arisen in Australia after the gold rush. It was a mix of large two-storey houses with lots of wrought-iron lacework on the balconies, beautiful plasterwork and fireplaces and lovely staircases, and tiny plain workers’ cottages in narrow laneways where the labour force had lived. Guess which kind I could afford?

  There’s a long and complicated story attached to how I could even think about buying a house in Annandale, one of the nice inner-city suburbs. It involves my grandparents dying, my parents moving into their house in Annandale, then redeveloping their own big block in Western Sydney and putting townhouses on it, and then giving a townhouse each to me and my siblings. I sold mine. With that money, and the sale of the little flat I had, I had just enough money to buy the most run-down, tiny house in the worst street in the suburb.