by V Clifford
He grinned, drained his coffee, and wandered through to the kitchen. ‘Dishwasher yet?’
‘You’re looking at her. Just leave it on the top.’
But he rinsed it under the tap and set it on the draining board.
‘Very domestic!’
‘I’ll pick you up at half four, five.’ He dried his hands with a towel on the rail of the Aga. ‘Nice heat.’
Viv nodded and guided him towards the door. ‘See you later then.’
Chapter Two
She spent the next hour sorting through emails, responding where necessary, before hauling as much wood as she could manage into a log sack. Despite straining her trapezius in the process, she stacked the logs neatly along the wall of the conservatory. She knew she should have washed the blankets from the dog’s bed, but relished the reassuring smell of wet dog lingering in the room, besides ‘should’ was super-ego shit, so instead she scrolled the internet again for archaeological digs in the Central Belt. The only piece that she could find was by the local newspaper, and referred to a council application, which had been rejected then appealed, and finally got permission to go ahead. The first spade had only gone in on the Tuesday of that week.
The archaeologists, from Sheffield University, had a specific interest in spurs. Viv smiled, thinking of the football club, but doubting academics would even have heard of them. How many of the soldiers in the eighteenth century had been on horseback? Surely most of them were on foot? Returning to the article, Sheffield Uni had requested to do a survey of Sheriffmuir battle site with metal detectors and some local official had deemed such equipment ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unprofessional’. Viv chuckled, knowing that someone had had to swallow a gut load of pride and allow the work to go ahead.
Was that a good enough reason for a local to want to throw a proverbial spanner in the archaeologists’ work? She thought not, but made a note of the people from the article, just in case. After checking out their names on Google and finding nothing of interest, she realized she’d wasted enough time and decided to give Moll a quick walk before Mac picked her up. She yanked on wellies and a dry jacket, and strode off towards the Quarry Park, the dog not far from her heels.
As forecast, the rain had stopped and the sun sneaked out intermittently from behind clouds that, although higher and lighter, didn’t engender complete confidence. She crossed the stile, and pulled up a special door built for Moll. The dog had once jumped the fence and caught her belly on a strip of barbed wire. All barbed wire had since been removed, but Sal wasn’t one for taking chances, and the doggy door was added, eliminating all possibility of another accident.
Viv skirted the perimeter of the field in front of the cottage. The imposing edifice of Doune Castle sat high and proud on her right. The Ardoch Burn roared and tumbled over boulders at the base of the castle rock. Cries from a pair of buzzards were drowned out by a cawing rookery that they’d disturbed. The ground, still poached by last season’s cattle, made walking hard going. Sal had mentioned that the livestock wouldn’t arrive until the end of the month, so Viv was free to wander without fear of disturbing pregnant cows, or worse, cows protecting young calves. Lush grass stood well above her ankles, and with each step the smell of late spring tickled her nostrils and began to irritate her.
A townie to the core, she drew in a breath, making an effort to enjoy it. She told herself how impressive it was to have such rich pasture on the doorstep, but immediately countered this with the fact that she was becoming overwhelmed by such bounty. The dog trotted ahead, never quite pulling out the full reach of the extending lead, and snuffled along the edge of a stock fence, which, to Viv’s relief, prevented Moll from getting to the burn.
Viv jumped onto a huge square concrete plinth, a solid reminder of the army’s presence during and after the Second World War. The estate, requisitioned by the MOD and used as a prisoner of war camp, had lots of concrete bases where Nissen huts had been erected and could still be found if you cared to scrape back the nettles. From the plinth it was an easy leap over the fence and into the next field, known as the River Park, for obvious reasons since the Ardoch and the Teith, a wide, menacingly choppy salmon river, acted as its boundaries. Not desperate to go far, since Mac had hiking in mind, she continued to the beach, an area that wasn’t so much a beach as a breach in the old bank wall which had silted up, creating a sheltered area. On previous days she’d sat there out of the wind and watched the odd fish display. Not today, though. She about turned and headed across the paddock, the most direct route back to the cottage.
Half way back she stopped, her eyes transfixed on a heron as it struggled to take to the sky, its harrowing call as close as you’d get to a pterodactyl. Buzzards, heron, salmon, and even Moll − she’d seen more animals in her few days here than she’d see in as many months in town.
By the time she opened the door to the cottage, discomfort of all things country oozed from her pores. She blew out her breath trying to rid herself of the desire to escape, to return to town, her natural comfort zone where carbon monoxide in palatable doses, high buildings and the endless footfall of people on pavements pock-marked by gum, satisfied her craving for anonymity. She hadn’t heard a single siren since she’d arrived. The quiet was too disconcerting for words.
She dried off Moll’s paws, gathered essentials into a rucksack, then nipped to the loo. She’d just finished ruffling her hair and rubbing Vaseline onto her lips when she heard Mac’s car on the gravel outside. ‘Shit!’, definitely too late now to pin a note to the porch and take off. With the clunk of his car door, she knocked on the bedroom window and gestured for him to come in. They met at the bottom of the stairs.
She heaved a frustrated sigh.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You okay?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Resigned. ‘I’m nearly there. Just have to leave Moll some food then we’re off.
Chapter Three
Mac’s Audi 4x4 looked and smelled as if it had just left the showroom.
Viv, conscious that she had grubby boots on for the walk said, ‘You okay with me getting in with these?’ She held up her foot.
‘Sure. Someone has to christen it.’
Viv rearranged a stiff, foot-well shaped cardboard sheet designed to protect the carpet from the mucky soles of an unsuspecting test driver. She stamped her feet to clean the thick treads before jumping in, but she’d only loosened old dirt. Hundreds of little cakes of mud escaped from her soles and tipped off the edges of the cardboard onto immaculate black carpet. She winced. ‘Oh God. Sorry about that.’
Mac grinned. ‘Honestly, don’t fret. It’ll give me something to do this weekend.’
‘It is the weekend. I thought you were going to work on your cottage.’ Viv had never been to Mac’s country retreat and knew nothing about it other than what he’d said earlier. ‘I’ll give you a hand if you like. Sal has a super vacuum that’ll sort that in a jiff.’
He nodded, ‘I said, don’t fret. It’ll be a whole lot worse by the time we’ve trampled over Sheriffmuir.’
They drove the three miles from Doune, through Dunblane, Viv fighting a sense of imprisonment. The countryside glistened as rays of sunlight broke through high, scudding cloud. They turned onto a steep winding road, sign-posted to Sheriffmuir. High walls or tight evergreen hedges camouflaged grand residences, originally the country retreats of Stirling and Glasgow merchants, upgraded now, with electric gates to keep out the proletariat. Further on, these posh suburbs gave way to open fields and eventually to rough moorland. Mac pulled over at a field gate with couch grass growing over its base. It hadn’t been opened any time recently. Viv raised her eyebrows in a question.
Mac grinned, ‘We won’t be long.’
A large stone monument stood at the edge of a conifer wood a short distance ahead. Mac locked the car and while he sorted out the zip of his jacket, Viv wandered over to read the detail on the plaque at the monument’s base. Erected to commemorate those lost in the battle, it had dates and names embos
sed on metal. She knew the history of the battle was unclear, that it hadn’t been as simple as Scots against English, or Government troops against Jacobites. The Scots were a fickle lot and she’d read that lots of families, as with other famous Scottish conflicts, had sons on both sides.
They walked north over rough ground, some of it boggy with thick tussocks, which forced them to take high steps. Land that looked flat enough from the safety of the car was a completely different story when walking it. Deep undulations meant that there wasn’t a clear view, but Mac seemed to know where he was going, and eventually the dig came into sight. A group of people stood beneath a large but flimsy white tent that was flapping in the breeze. Most of them were dressed in Goretex, a wise precaution for spending hours on a Scottish moor.
Mac knew the DI from Central and it took a few minutes of banter before he introduced Viv as a friend and forensic specialist. She smiled at this suitably vague label. Increasingly Viv was employed as a cyber analyst, but having a PhD on Freud and psychoanalysis had certainly made her a useful unofficial profiler for Mac and his specialist team, not to mention a sounding board for Sal who was official.
They were both handed a sealed bag containing overalls, a sign that they’d accepted Viv as one of them. She and Mac skirted round the edge of the nearest trench until a female introduced herself as an osteoarchaeologist and pointed to a few ochre sticks poking out from the peat. Mac lay on the ground and stretched over to get a better look. The heavy rain earlier had left the bones standing proud in the mud.
‘Mac, I may be stating the obvious . . .’ Viv shrugged. ‘But I suppose someone has to. That bone.’ She pointed to the one furthest away. ‘Is it much paler than the others, or is it just me?’
‘D’you think?’ He moved towards the item she was pointing at. ‘Yeah, from this angle you could be right. What are you thinking? Newer body?’
‘Too early to speculate, it just caught my eye. The others seem much darker and thinner.’
Viv stepped round to the other side of the trench and said, ‘Yeah, it’s definitely different from the other bones. Maybe it hasn’t been in the ground as long as the others? Or maybe it’s a different kind of bone?’
At this another archaeologist stepped forward. ‘We’ve already ascertained that some of the bones are newer than others. The point is how new. And whether we’re talking archaeology or forensic.’
Mac turned his head up, ‘Well, that’s why we’re here. Let’s take a look at what you’ve already got out of the ground.’
The DI interrupted. ‘Too late. It’s gone off for testing.’ He sidled up close enough to Viv for her to smell alcohol on his breath. He continued. ‘We were eager to get results and the lab was about to close for the holiday weekend.’ He smirked. ‘Not any more they’re not. Said they’ll do what they can asap.’
‘How much has been recovered of that paler bone?’ Mac pointed into the mud. The DI shrugged, turned to the archaeologist and nodded.
‘There’s quite a bit of all the different shades. Peat is usually quite kind to bodies and leaves them relatively intact, but these poor souls look as if they were left exposed to the elements, not actually buried.’ He shrugged. ‘At first I wondered if they’d been ploughed up, but if they had they’d have been spread over a wider area. Then I thought that perhaps they’d been collected and dumped. As you see, nothing is that far beneath the surface.’
‘That’s why we called you guys immediately. At first we thought it could be a midden, but sadly not. So far they’re all human. There are a few animal bones but they are further over and probably recent, a dead sheep perhaps?’ He pointed beyond the tent.
Mac said, ‘So the bones were brought here from elsewhere and unceremoniously dumped?’ He furrowed his brow. ‘Weird.’
The archaeologist shrugged, ‘Too early to say. If they are old enough, we’ll have to remove every one of them and reassemble what we can before we’ll know how they died. Then maybe we can work out the where. But at this depth, they’re certainly not ancient and there’s no evidence of anything ceremonial.’
‘I thought bodies were preserved in peat?’ Mac scratched his head.
‘They are. The skin, hair, internal organs are all . . . pickled so to speak. But bones are often the first to perish. I mean they still take a while to decompose, but those,’ he pointed at the little bits sticking through the mud, ‘can’t have been there all that long in archaeological terms.’
‘Ah, but how long is “that long”? Are we talking decades, or even hundreds of years?’
‘I’d guess they’ve been in there for decades at least.’
Then Mac turned to the DI. ‘So we’ve still no idea whether this is an incident for you guys or . . .?’ He left his question hanging.
While Mac was engaged with the DI, Viv wandered round to the next trench, which hadn’t been so well covered and now contained a deep dark muddy pool. At the water’s edge she noticed a tiny fleck of what appeared like dark red plastic sticking out of the wall of the trench. She knelt down and with gloved hands prodded at the mud around it.
To her dismay the object slipped out and into the water. ‘Shit!’
The guy that seemed to be the senior archaeologist shouted, ‘What’s she doing? This is still our dig.’
Viv stood up. ‘Sorry, I just saw a . . .’
He shouted to one of the others. ‘Get her out of there and find what she’s dislodged.’
A young woman in charcoal grey waterproofs and oversized heavy boots made an ignore-him-face and trudged straight into the trench following the direction that Viv was pointing. She rooted around in the puddle with a sieve and after three dips she retrieved the small object that had fallen into the water. Viv, relieved, blew out a breath that she’d been unaware of holding. The woman climbed back out and poked at the article.
No idea what she was looking at, Viv shook her head, but felt compelled to ask. ‘Any idea what it could be?’
The woman smiled. ‘I’m guessing we’ve got a button, still attached to a piece of something, could be leather or . . . Here, hold this and I’ll mark the exact spot on the ground and on the map.’ Viv held the sieve containing the muddy, rusty thing and felt a wave of satisfaction. Freud believed that psychoanalysis was the archaeology of the mind, and she felt as pleased now as she had at her first psychological revelation. She tried to get Mac’s attention but he was occupied with his colleague.
The woman returned and put in a stake with a small yellow flag where Viv had prodded. ‘Lucky you.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve been on my knees in that trench for five days now and found two old McEwan’s Export tins. You come along and barely glance into it and find . . .’ She stopped and poked at the item in the sieve again. ‘Could be the button off a garment.’ She grinned. ‘Better not speculate.’
Viv raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh, my God. You must hate me.’
‘Nah, you’re all right. We’d have found it once we’d drained this anyway. But I’ll get it cleaned up and see if we can get an idea of how long it has been in the ground. No point in guessing.’ She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and smiled at Viv. ‘It’s exciting whoever finds it.’
Viv nodded, grateful for the woman’s generosity. ‘Suppose so.’
She and the woman with her sieve sauntered over to the tent where a trestle table was set up with basins of water, and a selection of tooth and nail brushes. Viv watched as she began loosening cakes of mud from the object, first dipping it into the water and then rubbing it gently with her finger; a painstaking operation. Viv looked round and saw that Mac was crouched by the bones again.
As she approached him he jumped back to his feet and brushed off his gloved hands. ‘You know anything about peat bog bodies?’
She shrugged. ‘A little. I read a bit about Tollund Man, and a couple of others found recently in Ireland. But these aren’t bog bodies.’ She pointed to the bones. ‘Bog bodies were usually sacrificial. They wouldn’t have been all lumped together like
that. That’s more like a mass grave. We are on a battlefield after all.’
‘Yes, but Dr . . . you’re never going to believe this, Crippen, over there, said that he doesn’t think they’ve been here for millennia; centuries perhaps, maybe even decades, but they’re not ancient. Until the dates are clear, recent foul play is still an option.’ Mac’s phone rang, and he wandered away with his finger in one ear as he answered it.
He closed the call and said, ‘So much for a holiday weekend. I’ve got to take a look at another site. Coming with me?’
‘Yeah, but what about . . .’
Mac was already stripping off his overalls and heading back in the direction of his car.
Viv shouted after his retreating back. ‘You pretending I have a choice? I’d have a serious walk to find transport back to Doune.’
He grinned and threw over his shoulder, ‘Don’t worry, I can drop you off. But I think you’ll be interested in coming with me. There’s another grave find. This time on the Lake of Menteith.’
Viv’s eyes brightened and she grinned, tripping as she stepped out of her own overalls, then trotting to catch up with him.
‘So what’s going on there?’ He gestured towards the tent.
Viv looked back over her shoulder at the woman with the button, and shrugged and changed the subject.
‘So, more bones. Can’t be a coincidence, can it? Two archaeological digs get the go ahead in the same week, and both expose piles of bone. Me? I don’t think so.’
Chapter Four
Viv’s interest was definitely piqued and she continued skipping to keep up with him. ‘Was it just me or did you think that some of that bone looked brand new?’
Mac nodded. ‘I thought so, but Crippen . . .’ He shook his head. ‘You’d think he’d change that by deed poll. Anyway, he said that bone’s colour is influenced by many things, including the age of the skeleton when it went into the ground, as well as the length of time it has been in the ground. If it belonged to a teenager it’s likely to be less porous than an older one. The more porous the more . . .’