by Ellis Peters
Weaver, very large of eye and solemn of face, looked into the pit, looked at George. He said, breathing gustily: “How long do you suppose it—she—” he looked again, and made up his mind “—she’s been down there?”
There was still perceptible cloth, shoes, a handbag; and incomprehensibly there were two large suitcases, burst and gnawed and showing soiled colors of clothes. But the rest was bone. George said: “A few years. Not above ten, I’d say.” For the skirt had a traceable length, the shoes a dateable fashion.
“But this is a skeleton,” said Weaver. He was chalky-white, too shocked to reason very closely. George didn’t like to remind him that the workings were alive with rats. “It must be longer than ten years. I don’t know of anyone going missing, as far back as I can remember. She must have fallen down.”
“Fallen down and taken her luggage with her?” said the manager.
“Then she must have committed suicide—wanted to vanish, I suppose. People do funny things.”
“They have funny things done to them, too,” said George. “Do you see what I see round her neck? Quite a determined suicide, if she strangled herself with a twist of wire, and then carried her cases to a pit-shaft, and jumped down it.”
“My God!” said the sunshine miner blankly. “That’s right! You mean we been and found a new murder?”
“You dug up an old one,” said George. By now he even knew the date of it. Noon sun on covered places brings out a lot of facts in a very little time, and queer things happen when men begin making the rough places plain. There she lay, a short, tumbled skeleton, falling apart here and there in the dirty folds of cloth which had now only slight variations from the universal dirt-color of buried things, among the soil and gravel and brick, jostled by the moldering cases. A few fragments of skin still adhering to the skull, and masses of matted hair. Front teeth touched with distinctive goldwork standing forward in the jaw; and two things round her neck, a necklet of carved imitation stones and a twisted wire. Loose enough now, but once it must have been tight round a plump, soft throat.
“Plenty of identifiable stuff there to hang half a dozen men,” said the sunshine miner, in displeased but deeply interested contemplation.
“Yes,” said George, “but it never will.”
For he’d got the hang of it at last. The cases had jolted him, but it was the necklet of stones that made everything click into place. He’d seen it before, not so long ago, round a soft, plump throat in a photograph. It was all very, very simple once one had the missing bit. A house without servants after six o’clock in the evening, a son away in North Africa, nobody home but a wife with a fair amount of money in jewels and securities, and a husband with his affairs in bad shape, and a position and reputation which rated well above other people’s lives with him. A situation in which she could easily be persuaded to turn everything into cash, and a plethora of pit-shafts round the house, into which she could vanish some night when she had done it, with enough of her personal belongings to give color to the story of her exit in quite another direction. A letter of farewell which didn’t even have to exist, a lover who never had existed except in one proficient imagination. One man’s word for everything, and an ingenious arrangement of circumstances which made it indelicate to probe too deeply. And then a broken, ageing, but reestablished demigod, who touched nothing he did not turn to profit.
Fill in the shafts, in a burst of local benevolence, and what have you left to fear? The war distracts attention from village events which might otherwise arouse too much interest; and Charles, the dumb, worthy Charles, comes home to swallow the story whole, and feel sorry for his father. What can you possibly have to fear?
Except, perhaps, red-and-yellow excavators ripping the bowels out of the secret places of the earth, laying bare the treasures of the mine, turning the soil traitor. For the land turned out to be neutral, after all. That was the one thing you hadn’t bargained for. You were aware of ownership; but the land was not aware of being owned. And you had to fight some unexpected rearguard actions; and there were casualties—a tool that turned in your hand, and a son who innocently went over to the enemy. But you’d gone too far then to turn back or to hesitate. And as for small, inquisitive boys, they should be kept out of the battle area; total war is not selective.
“I always had a feeling,” said George, “that the motive as we knew it was a little thin to account for Charles. Well, now we know! I’m afraid we’ll have to stop your operations here for a few hours. Go down and phone the inspector, Weaver, will you? Tell him we’ve found what’s left of Selwyn Blunden’s wife.”
—«»—«»—«»—
[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[A 3S Release— v1, html]
[July 06, 2007]
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Ellis Peters
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