An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  “What’s the hurry?” he asked as she approached him.

  “Gladys called. I’m to come up there, only she won’t tell me what for. She says, and I find this hard to imagine, that she is in a tizzy.”

  “Something must be wrong. I’ll come with.” He pounded his metal bucket to get out the last of the ash and then called out for Eleanor, his wife. The screen door squeaked as she pushed it open.

  “Hello, dear,” she said to Lane. “What’s going on?”

  “Something’s happening at the Hughes’. I’m going along to make sure they’re all right.”

  “Robin’s already up there. I heard that tractor of his go up an hour ago, and it hasn’t come down,” Eleanor reasoned.

  “Yeah, he’ll be a lot of use in an emergency,” Kenny said, and then he said to Lane, “Come on.”

  “Emergency, is it? You get up there. I’ll follow in a second,” Eleanor said, disappearing back into the house.

  “Oh, wonderful,” Gladys remarked, seeing Lane at her door with Kenny in tow. She could see Eleanor coming up the path, a little behind them. “That’s just what this situation requires, a mob scene. Someone call Mad Mather and that useless bump, Reginald, and let’s get the Bertolli children up here for good measure. Gwen, you take Lane, by herself, to the root cellar, and I’ll try to cope with the gawkers.”

  Kenny looked longingly toward the root cellar as Lane and Gwen descended, but then thought hopefully that “coping with the gawkers” meant that Gladys would put the kettle on.

  As they descended underground, the first impression the root cellar made on Lane was that it was like a wartime bunker. The light bulb swung gently back and forth when Gwen pulled the chain, illuminating one side then the other. “And to think I buy my vegetables canned from the shops in Nelson! All of this from your garden?”

  “Yes. I can’t abide that canned muck from the store. It’s just back here, see?”

  Lane took the flashlight and leaned in to look closely. The smell of earth, combined with the acidic lingering smell of what Gwen had cleaned up assailed her. There it was—the bones of the four fingers of a small hand protruding from the hollow where the rock had dislodged; feathery scraps of dark cloth lay among the bones.

  “Mother thinks it’s a child,” Gwen said. “It’s too awful if it is.”

  “Could be, or a slight woman. I can’t get over how anyone could be buried here, adult or child.” Lane shone the flashlight around the ceiling of the root cellar. “How thick is this ceiling?”

  “Probably four, maybe five feet. The hill it makes backs on to the chicken run. It’s completely overgrown.”

  Back out in the sunlight, Lane walked around the low hill and looked along the top. A tangle of gooseberry bushes covered the top of the structure, and long grass that had grown up the rise of the sides now lay browning and decomposing after the heavy snows that had billowed over everything that winter. She longed to go up and see, but she knew already from the growth that this was no recent burial. Better leave it to the police. Lord knows, she thought primly, Inspector Darling had told her this often enough in their short acquaintance.

  “Well?” asked Gladys when they came back into the house. The gawkers now sat around the scrubbed pine table with cups of tea in hand. Mabel had brought out some remnants of a tin of Christmas fruitcake to augment the cookies.

  “I think you’d better get whatever provisions you think you’re going to need for the next couple of weeks out of there,” Lane suggested. “Don’t disturb anything too much if you can avoid it.” She hadn’t been party to the exhumation of a body, but she could imagine the place crawling with police, and the disruption that was going to be caused by the cellar roof being dug up. “In fact, I’m wondering if you should just empty the whole thing. Have you someplace else to store things?”

  “We could put them in the garage, I suppose,” Mabel said crossly. “The car will have to be moved out.”

  “We better get cracking!” Kenny said, getting up and rubbing his hands. “Mabel, move the motor, and Robin and I will look at what we can do about some sort of shelving to hold things.”

  “I’ll phone through to the police, then, shall I?” Lane asked.

  “I don’t understand. Who would bury someone on top of our bloody root cellar?” Gladys said.

  “Language, Mother,” Mabel said. “Gwen, where are the bloody car keys?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  INSPECTOR DARLING OF THE NELSON Police was puzzled. Why had a young woman, who was exemplary in every way until the night before, suddenly gone to a local mill to sabotage it? She hadn’t been drinking, but she had put up such a fight with the night watchman, and then the policeman who was dispatched to look into it, that she was now sitting downstairs in their lock-up. His efforts to speak to her that morning had caused her to clamp her lips shut and look firmly away, her red hair obscuring her face. Her parents had demanded that she be released into their care, but he was reluctant to let her go without some guarantee that she wouldn’t do it again. The only time she looked at him was when he asked her if she understood what the consequences could have been for the mill workers if she’d not been discovered. He was going to have to charge her before the day was out if the impasse was not broken.

  He finished writing his sparse notes of the morning’s interview, slipped them into the file, and then went to stand at the window with his hands in his pockets. He had pulled up the window earlier, and the irrepressible springtime air gave him a lift. Maybe people went a bit crazy in the spring after a long, oppressive winter, he thought. The fact remained, however, that the other eighteen-year-old girls in town were not sneaking out at night to jam up the works in local industry. It was a continuum, he decided. His springtime madness found expression in having spent the early morning before coming into work trying to write a note to Lane Winslow, and his young saboteur was way down the other end of the continuum. Perhaps they were both up to the same thing: trying, irrationally, to make something different happen in their lives.

  The phone on his desk rang, and his relief at being pulled away from more dangerous and personal thoughts caused him to sound almost jaunty. “Inspector Darling,” he announced.

  The desk sergeant said, “There’s a Miss Winslow on the phone, sir.”

  Colouring slightly at the coincidence of her being on the line, he cleared his throat. “Miss Winslow.” He moved his inkstand a quarter inch before he continued. “How can I help?”

  Lane hesitated. He sounded very official. What had she hoped for? She was making an official call, after all.

  “Inspector, I’m up at the Hughes house. You remember them, Gladys and her two daughters, Mabel and Gwen? At the top of the road, above the post office.”

  “I do, yes. Has something happened?”

  “Yes. That is, not just now. At a guess I’d say a decade ago at least, or a good deal more. I know nothing about the deterioration of a human body. In any case, Gwen discovered what appears to be part of a human skeleton when a section of the roof of their root cellar collapsed.”

  Repressing with gargantuan effort the desire to say, “You’re seriously telling me you’ve found another body?” he said instead, “What part of a skeleton?”

  “A hand, quite small. It could be that of a child, or perhaps a small woman. There are fragments of some sort of cloth, a blanket possibly? It’s hard to tell as it’s rotting and encrusted in dirt.”

  “Have you moved anything?”

  It was Lane’s turn to colour. Had she made a mistake in asking them to clear the root cellar, a task they were busy at as she was speaking? “The ceiling of the root cellar is possibly four feet thick, and the body is buried in that roof section. The place is full of glass jars and the like, so I’ve asked them to move the contents of the cellar so that you can move about freely. I hope that’s all right?”

  The sudden note of anxiety in her voice caused a warm compression in his chest, which he recognized, but would rather do without. “No, no
, that should be fine. I’ll get Ames and we’ll be out in about an hour and a half. I have a matter I have to conclude here. In the meantime, could I ask you . . . ?”

  “I know, Inspector. Don’t touch anything else.”

  Darling took his hat off the hat-stand and put it on with an air of resignation. His young prisoner was no closer to talking, so he had officially charged her and had asked O’Brien, the desk sergeant, to contact her parents and ask them to bring her some things for her stay. Though he was extremely reluctant to expose a young girl to the rigours of any kind of incarceration, even in the relatively clean and quiet cell she would be occupying, perhaps a night in jail would convince her. By then they no doubt would have consulted a lawyer, so there was no danger of his having to keep her longer. On top of that, he knew Ames would be nearly ungovernable at the news of Miss Winslow being involved in the discovery of another corpse. He pushed open the door to Ames’s little office and said, “Come on, Amesy. Your favourite. We’re off up the lake to see Miss Winslow. She’s found another body.”

  The look of astonished delight on Ames’s face could not, Darling decided, be more irritating.

  THE STEADY PROCESSION of Gladys, her daughters, the Armstrongs, and Lane back and forth from the root cellar to the garage was beginning to yield results. There were only the three boxes of potatoes and apples left to move, and Mabel had been ordered to bring out the wheelbarrow.

  “Okay, you lot, back to the house. Gwen, put on the kettle. We’ve earned another cup of tea. Kenny and Robin can shift these. Close and latch the doors, gentlemen, if you please,” Gladys commanded, shaking her head. “This isn’t ideal. If there’s another frost, which there will be, the stuff will get precious little protection in there. I hope this isn’t going to take long. Oh my God. The bloody bread!”

  “Mother! Language.” Gwen said.

  “You can say ‘language’ at me in that disapproving way, but the week’s bread has now over-proofed. This whole thing is a confounded nuisance.”

  “I’m sure it was a confounded nuisance for that poor creature in there, as well.” Gwen commented. “Mabel, you’ll have to do your trick with the bread, or Mother will have kittens.”

  “I HATE THIS road,” Ames said, steering anxiously along the bumpy, deeply rutted upper road that issued onto the Hughes property. The maroon, four-door Ford was a police vehicle, but Ames felt a strong sense of propriety over it. With a sigh of relief he drove the last section, which was really a path cut through the extensive lawn that surrounded many islands of flower borders, and pulled the car up next to a black motor from the late twenties that seemed to be slowly sinking into antiquity next to a dormant vegetable garden.

  “When was the last time you saw her, sir?” Ames asked, stretching his tall body out of the car and eyeing the house, fully expecting sarcasm or at the very least silence, in response to his patently nosey and mischief-making question.

  “At Christmas. She’d been at some sort of party. Up here, as a matter of fact.”

  Ames shot him a glance. He was surprised, both by the answer, because he could not believe his boss had made no effort whatsoever on the matter of securing the affection, or at least the attention, of the beautiful Englishwoman Miss Winslow, and at the politeness of Darling’s response. Of course, he reasoned, Darling’s evidently matter-of-fact response was to stop any further discussion. Another way of saying, “Nothing to see here. Move along please!” He had no opportunity to marshal an answer to this evasion, as at that moment the screen door swung open with a bang, and the tall, imperious figure of Gladys Hughes stepped out, pulling a sweater around her bony shoulders against the cooling temperature brought on by a build-up of afternoon clouds. Two cocker spaniels trotted up to them and sniffed at their shoes.

  “In here, gentlemen.”

  The policemen wiped their feet on the mat in the mudroom and removed their hats. They stepped into a warm and fragrant kitchen that seemed to Darling to be wall-to-wall people and had an atmosphere that was more party than the solemn gathering he would have expected at the finding of a body.

  “Ah, Inspector, Constable Ames, sorry about the racket. We’ve spent the afternoon clearing the root cellar.” Lane came forward from behind the table, where Mabel was performing an operation on a mass of dough. “Oh, sorry,” said Lane again, wiped her hands on her trousers. “Mabel has been showing me what to do about over-proofed bread.” She shook Darling’s hand first and tried to ignore an acute sense of consciousness about the feel of his hand in hers. Ames shook her hand enthusiastically and produced an enormous, friendly smile.

  “Miss Winslow. So nice to see you again. What have you got for us this time?” he said. An expectant silence fell in the kitchen. Lane was about to answer, but Gladys intervened.

  “A cup of tea before you go out, Inspector?”

  “I think we’ll get on with it, if you don’t mind,” Darling said. Ames had taken his little book and black pencil out. “Who made the discovery?”

  Gwen put her hand up. “I did actually. I was in the root cellar cleaning up because the roof had fallen in and broken some jars. Do you want me to show you?”

  “Yes please. I imagine we’ll need our flashlights. Ames, could you get them from the car?”

  Lane watched them go out, Gwen and Inspector Darling to stand outside the door and wait and Ames to run back to the car. She was a bit crestfallen. Of course, it would have nothing to do with her. She was nobody in this situation. She hadn’t discovered the body and had nothing to offer. She watched Ames come back across the yard with his leather bag over his shoulder. He would have torches, camera equipment, perhaps a magnifying glass, something for fingerprints, though perhaps not. No fingerprints in this ancient burial, she realized. She turned back to the group now seated around the table with the remnants of cold tea in their cups.

  Robin got up and stretched. “I’m going home. No point in hanging about here.” He turned to Kenny and Eleanor. “You should too. Nothing but a nuisance now.”

  Kenny looked longingly at the detectives disappearing around the corner to the root cellar. “I expect you’re right. Lane, you coming?”

  “Hang on a minute. I know none of us is the main discoverer, but I’m not sure if they’ll feel the need to ask any questions of us. I’ll go check,” Lane said. This caused Robin Harris to settle back into his chair with a grumbled exhalation.

  Lane descended the three stairs to the floor of the cellar and accustomed herself to the murky darkness, which was emphasized by the feeble light bulb. She could see the light from the flashlights probing the back wall. Gwen was standing to one side, her arms wrapped around herself. Darling was talking quietly to Ames, who was writing in his book.

  “Inspector? Some of the others are wanting to push off, but I didn’t know if you wanted to ask them anything?”

  Darling turned around, saying to Ames, “Good. We’re done for now I think. We’ll get the crew out tomorrow. Thank you, Miss Winslow. I may have some questions. Let me shut this up and we’ll be along.”

  “How long do you think that’s been there, sir?” Ames asked, when Lane and Gwen had gone back to wait in the kitchen.

  “I’m not a scientist, but let’s reckon at least five years, at minimum in this climate, and any amount longer. Let’s have a quick look outside.” Darling strode out, leaving Ames to turn out the light and close the door tightly. The temperature had dropped considerably, and he wished now he’d brought his coat. When Ames appeared at his side, he handed him the flashlight he was carrying and walked the mounded perimeter of the cellar. It was nearly seven feet from the base where they were standing to what appeared, underneath the deep growth of bushes, to be the peak.

  “They look to have been growing there for aeons,” Ames commented.

  “They do indeed, Amesy, and I’m grateful for the precision. Write that in your report, but only if you can spell it properly with the a.”

  It wasn’t possible to walk all the way around the mound, as t
he rear of the structure sloped all the way back to where the fencing stood for the chicken run. The other side of the cellar was also buried in undergrowth and descended gradually to ground level, to a path that looked to go around the main house.

  Inside the kitchen, Darling held his hat in his hand and pursed his lips, thinking about what he might need to know now. “I’m going to bring a team out tomorrow to extract the remains, and I will need to ensure that no one goes into that area for any reason. I’m afraid that it will wreak havoc on the cellar, but please don’t go try to help, or shore it up, or anything else that might interfere with the scene. I will probably have a much longer list of questions tomorrow, but for starters, when was it built?”

  Gladys frowned. “It was one of the first things we did . . . 1896, 1897? It was somewhat smaller then. In 1910 we expanded it. Daniel, my husband, died that winter. It had been his idea to expand it.”

  “Was anyone else here involved in the building of it?”

  “Lord Armstrong, that’s Kenny’s father, probably helped with the original. All this lot were children in the first build. Kept getting in the way I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “And then for the 1910 rebuild, who was involved?” Darling asked.

  Gladys mused. “All the young men here about at the time, I expect. You two were there, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” exclaimed Gwen, “I remember. Robin and Kenny, you and John helped, and Bob Anscomb was there too. He was the oldest boy in that peculiar family. Bob’s father, Henry, helped as well. Now isn’t that funny. Why do I remember that so clearly? I suppose because that is the year Daddy died. I think we had lunch outside. Isn’t that right, Mabel?”

  “I expect so,” Mabel said, and began to move the tea things toward the enamel sink that fronted the long window facing the garden. She could remember, of course. It was the moment she knew she was in love with Bob Anscomb.

  “Does everyone who was involved in that build still live here?”

  “Good God, no, the Anscombs decamped before the Great War. I shouldn’t imagine Henry is even alive anymore. And poor John died in the that war.” Lane saw Gwen glance at Mabel, who was looking steadfastly out the window.