A Shroud of Leaves

by Rebecca Alexander

  ‘We’ll see if we can match it to any of our other suspects’ vehicles. Work vans too.’ Lenham turned to Felix. ‘We called Professor Guichard in to investigate attacks on horses and cattle in 1991. He was then consulted when Lara Black disappeared. We are now considering whether the cases of the two girls are linked. Can you summarise your inquiries so far, Professor?’

  Felix stood up. ‘You will see the report from the vet who examined the remains of two horses found in the stables. The distinctive wounds demonstrated a faulty blade, maybe one with a bent-over or damaged end. This matches findings on live and dead animals found in the early nineties, when seventeen horses and cattle suffered sexual abuse that escalated into piquerism and eventual killing. Although the horses at Chorleigh House were killed with a similar knife, they only suffered a single wound each.’

  An officer waved a hand. ‘By piquerism you mean…?’

  ‘Stabbing or cutting for sexual arousal and release. Basically, penetration was more exciting with a knife for this man. I say man because these animal abusers, so far, are always male and usually young.’ He looked down for a moment. ‘My conclusion at the time was this was an adolescent male who was likely to escalate to a human victim.’

  The silence in the room built up, and Sage could see people turn to Lenham. He cleared his throat. ‘One of a number of possible lines of inquiry that we considered at the time was that Lara became that victim. We questioned her family and friends, employer – no one stood out.’ He waved at the pictures on a large board set up with Lara’s name at the top. ‘The main question marks remained over her animal activist friends, some of whom were violent and had been locked up. A new geographical profile on the animal attacks has suggested a focus on an area with Fairfield at its centre as the most likely home of the offender. This also leads us back to Alistair Chorleigh, who was also the last person to see Lara.’

  Sage tentatively put her hand up. When Lenham nodded at her, she cleared her throat. ‘What about Lara’s boyfriend?’

  Lenham turned around and looked at the board. ‘Go on?’

  ‘We were told that she was with someone. His nickname was Badger. Sky and Oliver Parris gave us a photograph of him taken by Lara when Felix and I visited them. They said Badger worked for George Chorleigh but was fired.’

  Felix chimed in. ‘The local vet identified one of the Chorleighs’ employees as someone called Jimmy. I wonder if they are one and the same. I can’t find a name in my files, but if so he had a grudge against the Chorleighs and could have had a personal issue with Lara.’

  Lenham nodded. ‘Work on this with the team, see if you can match this photograph to anyone in her animal groups and friends, there must be pictures. It might be helpful to review the interviews from the time. Anything else?’

  Felix opened a second folder. ‘I’ve been looking for Lara’s name in association with animal rights organisations all over the south. Although young, she was engaged in various activities including demonstrating against hunting in the New Forest. She certainly met Chorleigh’s father on at least one documented occasion, when she was protesting against fox hunting. Also, we’re revisiting Lara’s belongings – her rucksack found at the bus stop and her camera in the woods behind St Aldhelm’s Church, a mile away. The case had been immersed in water at some point, the camera and film canisters were filled with water, but there was no body of water nearby.’

  ‘Right,’ Lenham said. ‘Patel, you’re with the professor. Follow up the animal activist angle, see if you can find any more connections, and have a look at whatever’s left of Lara’s belongings. See if there’s any overlap with River’s affiliations. Dr Westfield, tell us about the new archaeological evidence.’

  Sage presented her evidence, and she felt an increase in tension in the room when she mentioned the anomaly on the LiDAR scan. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said. ‘But it’s distinct and could be some sort of burial.’ There was a buzz as people looked up and started whispering. Trent gave her a thumbs up from the back of the room.

  Lenham shushed his colleagues. ‘Could it be Lara Black? From 1992?’

  ‘Probably not but we do need to rule it out.’

  Lenham nodded. ‘I’ll assign you some help. But make it your first priority, the leaves will have to wait.’

  * * *

  Sage still felt tired as she drove to Chorleigh House to start the dig. Trent had to get back to his other case, so the full responsibility of the new excavation would fall on her shoulders.

  She pulled up alongside a couple of police cars. Lenham had got there ahead of her.

  He met her as she walked over to the edge of the garden, in front of the house. ‘Let’s get on with the new grave.’ He was bouncing on his toes with impatience. ‘From the scans.’

  She was surprised he wasn’t interviewing suspects, and said so.

  ‘I want to know if this is Lara Black. I want to know I didn’t make a mistake twenty-seven years ago.’

  Sage shook her head. ‘I said it was probably not Lara Black. It might not be a burial at all.’

  ‘Well, whatever it is, I can’t see it on the ground. You’ll have to direct me.’

  Sage glanced up at the house. The door was wide open, and Alistair Chorleigh stared down at her. ‘He’s here.’

  ‘Has been for a while, but has stayed away so far. We couldn’t hold him, but if this is Lara…’ Lenham waved at a couple of other officers. ‘We’re going to find this second grave.’

  ‘It probably isn’t even a grave—’

  But Lenham wasn’t listening. He marched off to talk to someone standing nearby in a forensic suit.

  It was hard to see on the ground but Sage could see a slight difference in the foliage of the browned brackens, the rank grass. The young birch almost exactly east of it was a lot bigger than on aerial photos, but was clearly the same tree. Comparing it to the LiDAR scan she estimated that the feature was about eleven metres from the trunk. She crouched down to see the slight rise and waved to a waiting officer. ‘About there,’ she said, pointing at the ground. ‘You need to allow a couple of metres all around because I am guesstimating here.’

  The officer helped Sage mark off an area six or seven metres across and taped it. Sage walked over to the police van to pick up a forensic suit and booties, past the fallen stone marker. Lenham was there, already suited up.

  ‘Do you mind if we dig up that stone as well?’ she asked. ‘It might be related in some way.’ Sage looked at him. ‘Are you helping?’

  ‘Dig up what you want. I’ll help, I know enough not to get in the way, and I can carry buckets.’ He looked down. ‘I’ve been looking for Lara Black for twenty-seven years. I’d like to find her.’ He waved at three officers getting ready. ‘They will do the grunt work.’

  The first, back-breaking task was cutting off the turf, itself a deep layer of bracken, gorse and shrub roots. The officers were handy with shovels and the area was soon cleared between them. It became clear that there was a slight difference in the layer underneath, a lighter rectangle within the rich soil.

  Sage turned a small piece of the fill in and crumbled it in her fingers. ‘This has been disturbed, but quite a while ago. These roots have grown deep into it.’

  ‘How long? Can you estimate?’

  ‘More than twenty years, certainly, and we know it was after the house was built and the garden established in the eighteen eighties,’ Sage said. ‘We need to excavate more carefully now.’

  Having set up an area for the spoil, Sage started trowelling down neatly. The officers helped as far as they could, but left the actual digging to Sage. ‘We could really do with Trent,’ she grumbled. ‘Have you got any idea how long he will be? I don’t have any signal on my phone.’

  ‘He is digging up the whole garden in Southampton,’ said Lenham, lifting a bucket Sage passed him and handing it up to another officer. ‘But I reckon we’ll find something first.’

  * * *

  The work progressed, layer by lay
er. Lenham was soon called away to speak to his officers, but Sage worked systematically, passing the spoil up to be dumped on a tarpaulin to one side. Finally, she reached a lump of corroded iron, attached to a few threads of what looked like canvas. ‘Get DCI Lenham,’ she shouted up, and he arrived in a minute.

  ‘What is it? Is it her?’

  ‘It’s cloth, old cotton or hemp,’ she said, looking at it through her hand magnifier. ‘Hemp, I think. Like an old military kitbag – there’s some sort of insignia too. I saw something like this on a dig in Flanders as a student.’ It was far too rusted to see what it represented but there was a discernible symmetrical pattern. She was able to get a good close-up with the camera. ‘The weave of the fabric has left a pattern in the soil over it,’ she said, snapping a few pictures.

  Lenham crouched down. ‘Could this bag contain the body of Lara Black?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ She worked her trowel around the edge to give her a clear area to lean on beside the bag. ‘These coarse fabrics lasted a hundred years in France, they are still finding them on First World War battlefields. I can’t think it would get to this state in only twenty odd years. There’s something inside.’ The deepest part of her excavation, barely half a metre below the surface, was slowly filling with water. She swept the wet dirt away. A hole in the fabric revealed a familiar curve. ‘Here,’ she said, quietly. She looked up at Lenham, a smear of dirt across his forehead where he’d swept his grey hair aside. ‘This is bone. We need to get this back to the lab.’

  She outlined how to dig around and under the bag in order to keep it intact as they lifted it out. Lenham followed her, taking notes for her as her hands were covered with sticky soil. He was impatient with her reticence to open the bag. She lifted enough of the torn fabric to see what looked like a jumble of bones.

  ‘Are they human?’ His voice was quiet. She wondered if he blamed himself for giving up on the investigation all those years ago.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She eased the small area of disturbed linen up further with the end of a probe. ‘Yes.’ A pen torch lit a dozen jumbled bones inside. ‘Metatarsal, vertebra, looks like a thoracic one, T11, T12 maybe and…’ She tried to visualise the rest of the spine sticking out at an odd angle in the jumble of bones. ‘These must be disarticulated bones – this isn’t a body buried and left to be skeletonised. But I don’t recognise this one.’ She tried to get an image with her phone camera. ‘I think that’s an animal bone. We need to have a good look at them.’ She showed Lenham the image on her phone. ‘I can’t tell if it’s Lara Black. The human remains look quite big to me and we know Lara was short and slight, like River. The texture is crumbly, eroded over many decades if not centuries. I need to get the remains back to the lab. I don’t want to lose any other evidence in the bag.’

  Lenham looked down at the ground, blew out a frustrated huff. ‘This has to be your main priority. Balance of probabilities? Could this be Lara?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, snapping a last picture. ‘I think it’s probably too big and the bones look older. Let’s concentrate on getting the bag out in one piece, if possible. We need the pathologist and the forensic team to take a look and I need to let Trent know.’ She outlined what the forensic team would need to do to preserve the fragile textile.

  He walked up and down a few paces, nervous energy making his movements jerky. ‘It would be a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it, one dead girl, one missing and a skeleton under the lawn? Chorleigh has to be involved in it all somehow.’ He stopped, looked at her. ‘Is this anything to do with that mound of earth at the back of the land?’

  ‘I don’t know. If Alistair Chorleigh is one common thread to this, so are the barrows.’ She hesitated. ‘They could be the remains of the missing archaeologist from 1913. But I think the bones might be even older than the bag – they may be Bronze Age.’

  ‘We have to work from the assumption that they might be Lara until proven otherwise.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sage stretched her trowel hand, flexing the stiff fingers. It had been too long since she had actually excavated anything.

  ‘Trent still wants to have a look at the barrows,’ Lenham said. ‘It’s possible someone buried Lara there. Would he dig?’

  Sage shook her head. ‘We want to do a geophysics examination, non-invasive. It’s a scheduled monument. For an archaeologist, finding something of historical interest and being able to write about it in an academic journal – that’s a career-building move. But you have to have all your paperwork and permissions in order first.’

  Lenham looked back towards the house. ‘Back in 1992 the locals told us about treasure hidden in the barrow. Handed down the family, along with a curse.’

  Sage snorted a laugh. ‘Curses and treasure stories come from the early excavations of Egyptian burials. No, I doubt if there was any treasure, or a curse. If some valuable artefacts were handed down the family, wouldn’t Chorleigh still have them? Or there would be a record of a sale.’

  ‘We didn’t find anything in the house,’ Lenham said. ‘But it’s in chaos, I doubt if he’s thrown anything away for twenty years.’

  Sage looked over at the muddy rectangle that contained the bones. ‘We’ll look at the LiDAR again, see if there are any more burial places, smaller ones.’

  ‘Could you show us non-archaeologists the scans, interpret them for us?’

  ‘I’ll try.’ She dropped her trowel next to the hole and picked up a handful of paper towels to clean her hands. ‘Trent printed off scans of the forest that showed the full extent of the barrows beyond the grounds.’ She brushed her forehead on a hanging branch; it immediately splashed her with water from the recent downpour. She swung her rucksack from her shoulder.

  She pulled out Trent’s scan of the site. ‘Here’s the main earthwork, this big colourful collection of lines. There’s the other one – you can tell the stonework has been exposed for a long time. There are furrows and ridges around the cut edge where it goes into that pond area at that end. The main earthwork was originally much more imposing than it is now. The edges have been ploughed out in the field, and you can see the middle sags a bit, maybe where they excavated.’

  Lenham peered at the map. ‘Or maybe where they buried someone.’

  ‘We just had a quick look to see if there was anything obvious.’ Sage was reluctant to accuse Trent of any impropriety. ‘But it’s possible, remotely so, that there’s a recent burial in the barrow itself.’

  Lenham looked around the garden. ‘It would be a good place to put her, if it’s so difficult to get permission to dig it up.’

  ‘I don’t think we can just dig it up based on a hunch.’ Somehow Edwin Masters, Lara Black and River Sloane were linked through the Chorleigh family and their connection to this ancient landscape.

  She turned to Lenham. ‘Can we have a look at the memorial stone?’

  He nodded. ‘They’ve already turned it over for you, although it’s hard to read.’

  Sage walked over to the stone which had left a deep scar in the ground. It was bigger than she’d expected, the size of a proper grave marker but thicker, like a milestone.

  ‘It’s limestone, expensive, well carved,’ she said as she scraped. ‘“In Memoriam, Edwin George Masters, vanished from this spot, July 12th 1913. Much-loved friend. Requiescat in pace.”’

  Sage couldn’t ignore the coincidence: people were coming to this place and disappearing. She just couldn’t see the connection yet.

  20

  ‘On this day in 1900, my father died of wounds and infections acquired in the Battle of Magersfontein, after a long illness and an arduous journey back to England. Requiescat in pace.’

  Journal of Edwin Masters, 5th July 1913, later that day

  We were so excited by our finds and by Professor Conway’s excellent reply that Peter introduced the topic before dinner, while we had drinks in the library. As a rule I do not partake of strong drink, but I permitted myself a small celebration sherry and secretly toast
ed my father. Mr Chorleigh, though dismissive of me as usual, was much taken with the sketches of the bones.

  At dinner he chastised Peter for not spending more time with Trixie, warning him not to let such a corker of a girl slip through his fingers. Peter bore it in good spirits but allowed his father to understand he did not think of their engagement as binding.

  ‘Well, make it binding, you fool! Put a ring on her finger and secure her future as well as yours.’

  Peter slid a glance at me. ‘Sir, perhaps we should keep this conversation between the family. It must be embarrassing to Edwin.’

  The older man harrumphed; he looked as if he would snap again, but his generation can be appealed to on their manners. He turned to Molly. ‘And you, girl. Your cousin and aunt are going into town tomorrow with the motor. It’s about time you got some new clothes.’

  ‘Oh, Father!’ Molly tried in vain to argue but was overruled.

  ‘We won’t make any momentous discoveries without you, I promise,’ Peter said. I was secretly a little pleased. While I like Molly’s company, it’s good to focus on the dig, just the two of us.

  ‘And you, Mr Masters.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If your professor wishes to visit, we will be very happy to accommodate him for a few days. Get a proper historian to observe, what do you say?’

  I was pleasantly surprised and quick to accept the offer. ‘That is very generous, sir. I will write to him this evening.’

  * * *

  Letter to Professor Robert Conway, Balliol College, Oxford 5th July

  Dear Professor,

  I enclose the latest drawing of the peculiar burial we have exposed. I should very much like your thoughts on the remains.

  Which brings me to an invitation made by Mr James Chorleigh of Chorleigh House, to visit the site for yourself, and perhaps offer your expert opinion as well as establish the likely history of the barrows. It is a large house, and Mr and Mrs Chorleigh would be very pleased to welcome you.