The huge skull of the animal has caused some controversy in the household. Perhaps this man was buried with his faithful hunting beast or guardian. They must have made a striking pair, the warrior and his hound. The local area abounds with tales of demonic dogs; I wonder if the name of the barrow, Hound Butt, owes something to the burial as well as the legends.
We have uncovered a number of other finds, including pottery fragments, a couple of what I think are stone axes and a piece of bronze wire twisted into a knot, uncovered by the daughter of the house. It has been a most rewarding dig and I should be very happy to write it up.
I hope you will be able to get away for a few days. The location is most picturesque and the Chorleighs are excellent hosts.
Yours affectionately,
Edwin Masters
The next day at the barrow, or grave site as I should call it, went well, but the intricate mixing of canine and human bones was difficult to sort out. The dog seemed larger than any I had seen before. We measured it as far as we could; the tail bones were lost under the man’s feet. But we estimated that it was almost two yards from head to tail, quite as big as a mastiff.
I laboured over my notes and sketches while Peter scraped and Molly, returned from her shopping trip and pensive, drew. Occasionally, I caught her looking at me. Finally, she brought the drawing of the animal’s head over to me.
I suppose her imagination had made the creature’s skull seem almost alive, as if it were caught in mid snarl, the head thrown back, jaws wide. The empty sockets were shaded deeply, and seemed to stare back at me.
‘Gosh, Molly, this is very good.’
‘It’s the best I can do without my paint box.’
‘No, pencil is better, more scientific.’ She looked upset as she turned to go away. ‘Molly,’ I said, catching her hand. ‘I hate to see you troubled. They’re just a few old bones.’
She looked down at our joined fingers and I let go. ‘It’s not that,’ she said, and walked away.
21
Saturday 23rd March, this year, later that day
By late that afternoon, the burial had been laid out on a metal table in the mortuary. The retrieval team had done an amazing job, bringing the intact canvas bag and capturing some of the soil underneath it.
The door pushed in and a suited-up Megan walked in. ‘Hi, Sage, I’m down the hall working today, shout if you need anything. I need you to be absolutely sure and make certain there’s no trace of Lara Black in there so treat it as possible evidence. Trent’s just getting you both some coffee.’
Sage took a deep breath. The room stank of wet mud. ‘I just don’t want to miss anything significant.’
‘Trent will help, and remember your training. It’s not that different from digging up ancient burials. I’m lending you someone from my department to help.’
What had her tutor said? Treat every burial as a crime scene, even if it’s historical. Gender, age, height, race, trauma, disease, date and individual identity.
‘OK. I’m ready.’
When Megan left, a young woman with a number of piercings and bright pink ends to her ragged hair came in and introduced herself as Jasmine.
‘Call me Jazz. I’ve helped Trent loads of times. I want to train as a SOCO.’
‘Scene of crime officer might be just what I need,’ Sage said. She zipped up her suit and snapped on a glove as Trent came through the door, carrying three paper cups. ‘Great.’
‘I always need more caffeine on the weekends,’ he said. ‘I got you a soya latte, Jazz.’
‘Thanks.’
Jazz and Trent stood back as Sage inspected the tray of instruments she’d been given.
‘Gloves, hood, mask. I don’t want to add any trace fibres or DNA to the remains,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m not going to cut the knots or stitching, they can tell us a lot of information.’ Sage felt a sense of calm fill her as she leaned forward to look at the small hole at the top of the bag. ‘I’ll make an incision in the best-preserved part of the bag. Close the door, will you, Jazz?’ She tented the bag with forceps and ran the scalpel into the body of the fabric, allowing the tension in the fabric to help guide the incision. ‘Here we go.’ There was a shiver of excitement for Sage – this was proper forensic archaeology.
Jazz reached over her to press a switch overhead. ‘If you talk, we’ll have a permanent record and I can use it to type up the report for you.’ She spoke into the microphone a foot over their heads. ‘Doctors Sage Westfield and Trent Reynolds, forensic archaeologists, and Jasmine Thomas, pathology assistant, attending case 34851-AH. Unknown burial at Chorleigh House, retrieved earlier today, 23rd March. So, you’re making a single cut in the fabric? There’s a camera, by the way. Do you want me to photograph and collect specimens?’
Sage breathed a sigh of relief. ‘If you can, that would be brilliant. Just a shot inside the bag, I’ll hold back the edges – oh. Wow.’
‘What?’ Jazz leaned in to get a closer shot, then jumped back. ‘God, what is that?’
Sage smiled at the girl’s reaction. ‘That’s an upside-down canine skull. A very large one. Look at that, Trent.’ She pointed at a pair of fused vertebrae.
‘Not another Labrador,’ he said, leaning in.
‘It looks like it’s going to bite me.’ Jazz snapped another few pictures for different angles. ‘Is it just someone’s dog, buried in the garden?’
Sage used a probe to point to the bones. ‘I’m afraid not. That’s human.’
* * *
Over the next few hours, Sage gently exposed the underside of a human pelvis, caught up with a canine femur and a scattering of tail bones, all packed within the canvas. The bones looked old, but were in good condition, and she knew certain soils could age skeletons quickly. They didn’t make them bigger, though, and she could confirm these weren’t an adolescent female’s remains.
She called Lenham with the news and Trent left her to work, with strict instructions to update him if she found anything unexpected.
She and Jazz worked well together. ‘Definitely not Lara, then,’ Jazz said, laying out more paper sheets to receive individual bones. ‘What about Edwin? Could it be him?’
Sage thought about it. ‘I think this is an older man and that wear pattern on the teeth would be from a much more fibrous diet and a couple more decades. It doesn’t look like someone in his early twenties. I think this is most likely the Bronze Age remains excavated in 1913.’
The pelvis had the remains of a piece of string caught through the bone, from a label perhaps. This reminded her of the old specimens she had studied as a student, bones catalogued in Indian ink on card tags, stored in cardboard boxes labelled with exotic locations like ‘Knossos, December 1902’ in florid script. She managed to free the pelvis in two halves, laying the pieces out for Jazz to wrap up and put in the largest evidence bag she could find. It was a tight fit. She tried to estimate the height but there wasn’t much to go on until they had the long bones. The impression was of a male individual with a heavy skeleton, large by modern standards. The dog was equally large, she guessed about four feet from nose to the pelvis, and probably six feet to the end of the missing tail vertebrae. She arranged those bones on a separate table as she released them, and could see the smaller foot bones were missing as well as the spine. Even allowing for her inexperience with canid remains, the animal had enormous femurs and a correspondingly large head with an underslung lower jaw. She could easily match the remaining top teeth with the scratches on the human radius and ulna.
‘Look at these scratches, there’s no healing visible. Whoever he was, it’s possible he had a violent death. It looks like he was bitten on the arm.’ She held her own arm up to demonstrate. ‘Classic defensive posture against an animal.’
Jazz straightened the human skull. ‘You’re sure it’s a “he”?’
‘Pretty sure by the pelvis alone.’ She brought the front of the skull forward and ran a gloved finger over the brow ridges. ‘The face looks male, too,
although it’s not definitive. I once had a skeleton we could only sex definitively by DNA. There are no fillings, and a high level of wear which could be prehistoric.’
‘I thought you had a werewolf or a circus freak for a moment. You know, Jojo the dog-faced boy.’
‘Two skeletons, two heads. I think we can rule out werewolves, but this could be a wolf skeleton. If this is the Bronze Age remains from the barrow excavation, wolves lived all over this area. It’s unusual though; mixed burials were rare in Europe. It’s possible they were originally buried separately and just reinterred together, but the bones are in the same condition, and look about the same date. I suppose they didn’t know what to do with the remains once they had dug them up, so put them back in the garden.’ Thinking back to the history of archaeology, it didn’t make sense. ‘At this time, they might have given them a Christian burial, put them in a museum or even reinterred them in the barrow. I don’t think an archaeologist would put the bones under the lawn.’
‘I’ll ask DCI Lenham what he wants done with the remains, shall I?’
‘That would be helpful. I just need to finish up here and we can start on the leaf evidence from River Sloane’s grave site.’
Jazz made the call. ‘He’s happy to release the remains to the university, once we confirm it’s more than a hundred years old.’
Sage pulled off her mask. It made her feel claustrophobic, and her face was sweaty. ‘Sure.’
Jazz walked back to the table. ‘I’m sorry it’s not Lara, for her family. They’ve been waiting for news for so long. Every time a body turns up, they come in.’
Sage leaned against the wall. ‘I’m not sure what’s worse, holding onto that last bit of hope or knowing that she’s dead.’
Jazz started wrapping more bones in bags. ‘If she was a bit older she might have started a new life somewhere, but at sixteen?’
‘It does happen, though.’ How would I feel if it was Max? ‘Suppose someone took her and still has her?’
‘That’s how parents think. In real life, most people are dead in the first four hours, almost all in the first twenty-four.’
‘Well, I am a parent.’ Sage looked up at Jazz as she wrapped the dog skull in an evidence bag. ‘I’m sorry we haven’t found Lara. You better tell Megan.’
The pathologist formally concurred that the bones weren’t Lara’s. ‘Dentistry might suggest an era, or isotope dating would tell us if the bones were formed pre nuclear testing in the nineteen fifties,’ she said. ‘The animal bones are odd. I’d say dog but they are enormous.’
‘Canid, definitely,’ Sage said. ‘Remember, the whole area was covered with dense forest. There were wild animals like bears and wolves. The recently domesticated dogs were probably half wolf at that time, and not very tame. Heavy bones for big hunting animals.’ Sage stopped. ‘We’re confident this isn’t Edwin Masters.’
‘If it’s more than a hundred years ago we wouldn’t treat it as a murder, anyway. But until we date it, we can’t confirm, so we’ll hang onto the remains for the moment.’ Megan half smiled. ‘Do your isotope dating, confirm it for us. But I agree, I think it’s prehistoric. Keep the bones bagged up until we can rule them out of any inquiry.’
‘Trent will be thrilled to get his hands on anything from the barrows,’ Sage said. ‘I’ll call him.’ When Megan left she turned back to the table, covered in bones arranged roughly into the shape of two bodies. ‘Let’s pack these away safely. We’ll need to preserve the bag, too, it’s part of the archaeological story.’
Jazz packed the dog skull into a plastic box with other canine bones. ‘Which still leaves Lara. Alistair Chorleigh was seen with her in the bus shelter. She disappeared, leaving her belongings. Sometimes the simplest answer is just the truth. She’s probably still on his land somewhere.’
‘So murder is the most likely explanation for a girl’s disappearance?’
Jazz shrugged. ‘Experience suggests it.’
‘Well, I have to go back there so I hope you’re wrong.’
‘Why do you have to go back?’
Sage looked at the skeleton sheet she had filled in as she went. ‘We’re missing vertebrae, some bones from the left hand and the right clavicle. I want to check they weren’t thrown in around the bag.’ She lifted the lump of corroded metal and held it to the light. ‘I’m pretty sure this is an old military badge or button. It might suggest a date range.’
Jazz looked at the sheet. ‘I’ll put these into storage.’
‘OK, good idea,’ said Sage. ‘What about the leaves? There are thousands of them.’
‘They’re in cold storage. It’s too late to start now – we can do them on Monday once I’ve cleared the lab.’ Jazz reached up to turn the recorder off.
* * *
When Sage got back to Chorleigh House, Alistair Chorleigh was standing next to the hole she’d dug. He looked as dishevelled as ever and the appearance of his clothes suggested he had been wearing them for several days. The dog raced to Sage, jumping up and barking.
Sage bent to stroke Hamish and catch his collar. ‘Mr Chorleigh. I’m glad you got your dog back all right,’ she said. ‘Here, Hamish. You look very smart.’
The little dog was clean; the kennels must have groomed all the knots out too as his coat was ragged but soft.
‘You’re that archaeologist. I heard you found another body.’ He sounded upset; his eyes were watery and red like he’d spent the night awake. Or drunk.
‘We did, but it looks like an old burial. We took it back to the lab and we’ve decided it was the remains of a man, probably over thirty, and a large dog.’ She ducked under the tape around the area, and pulled back the weights they had used to hold the tarpaulin down. ‘I can show you, if you like. The area showed up on a radar scan of the forest, just an odd blip on the map.’
He looked down at the hole. ‘The police weren’t exactly polite – they acted as if I knew all about it, they questioned me all over again.’ He looked straight at Sage. ‘But I didn’t hurt Lara Black, and I’ve never buried anyone, let alone in front of my house.’
‘Were you able to explain that to the police?’ Sage crouched down to stroke the dog again, scratching his back.
Chorleigh grunted. ‘I never tell them anything. They’ll use it against you, I wasn’t risking that. My solicitor told me to shut up, make them prove I did something. But I didn’t do anything to that new girl, and there won’t be any evidence that I did.’
She could see he was curious and something else. Sad, maybe. ‘The bones we found buried here on the edge of the lawn were in some kind of bag, they may be very old.’
He peered over her head at where they had been digging. ‘So who was that? Could that be the archaeologist who went missing in 1913? My grandfather Peter told me about him.’
‘We don’t know. It looks like even older remains, perhaps the ones that came out of the barrow. Come and see.’ He moved towards the excavation and she pulled up the police tape for him to come closer. ‘We think a person and an animal’s bones were interred here in a bag of some sort.’
Chorleigh looked into the hole. ‘I assumed they put the bones back where they found them. That was the family story.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My great-grandfather let his son Peter dig up the barrow. This was before you had to get permission; it was on our land so they thought they could do what they liked. They found a skeleton but then things started to go wrong.’
Sage looked at him. ‘What went wrong?’
‘Well, Peter’s friend, the actual archaeologist, disappeared. He left stuff here, his wallet and clothes, even his glasses.’ He picked up the dog, who was trying to get into the hole. ‘People have always blamed my family. Peter left, he didn’t come home until his father died; he always blamed him for his friend disappearing. And when Lara went they blamed me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He stared at her, then his expression changed and he looked back in the hole. ‘Grandpa
Peter and Edwin found a man buried with his dog, if I remember right,’ he said. ‘My mother showed me sketches of the dig when I was a boy.’
‘I’d love to see anything you have about the original excavation.’ Sage gently put the canvas back over the hole; she couldn’t see any loose bones. ‘I’m an archaeologist, I’d be really interested to see any records you have from back then.’
Chorleigh seemed to be thinking as he gazed over her head. ‘My father kept a few bits and pieces belonging to my grandfather. I think there were some notebooks and letters and so on. No one ever claimed them; we hung on to them and they ended up in the house somewhere. I remember seeing them years ago. There were a few bits of pottery, too, in a tin.’
Sage climbed back onto the path and did her coat up. ‘It would be helpful to see that. Perhaps he made a field sketch of the burial as he found it? That’s what we would do now.’
‘I’ll have a look.’ He paused. ‘Thank you for showing me this. It’s nice to be treated like a human being for a change.’
‘Don’t you get on with your neighbours?’
He looked down at Sage. ‘My neighbours believed I killed Lara Black when I was a teenager. No one speaks to me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Sage said. ‘Why didn’t you sell up and start somewhere else?’
He half smiled at her. ‘Leave Chorleigh? It’s home, it was always home, especially after the old man died.’ The smile faded. ‘I wouldn’t know how to live anywhere else. And the landlord of The Forest Gate still serves me.’
He turned and walked into the house, the dog at his heels. Sage couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. She had arranged to meet Felix at the pub to discuss his progress, so secured the site. She would have to come back and fill it in when she had time.
* * *
The Forest Gate served food and it was only a mile away. Sage parked alongside Felix’s car. He had chosen the warmth and comfort of a fireside chair and waved her to the spare one.
A Shroud of Leaves Page 18