by Jo Bannister
“Count me in,” said Hazel. “What time should we come over?”
“Actually,” suggested Byrfield, “I wondered if Ash fancied staying here tonight. Unless Fred’s extended my gate lodge without telling me.”
Hazel had been resigned to sleeping on the sofa. But she hadn’t expected to enjoy it, and if Byrfield was offering one of his guest rooms, she wasn’t going to refuse. It would also be nice to have a little time alone with her father. “All right with you, Gabriel?”
“Yes, of course,” said Ash. “If we’re not putting you out?”
“Not a bit,” said Byrfield graciously. “I’ll send Derek down for your bag.” But when Ash was once more talking tumuli with David Sperrin, Byrfield murmured to Hazel, “We?”
She rolled her eyes. “Him and the dog. Get used to it.”
* * *
Around ten o’clock, still early enough to have supper with her father, Hazel excused herself. Sperrin volunteered to walk her to the gate lodge. It was a kind thought—an unexpectedly kind thought—and Hazel refrained from pointing out that (a) she’d been walking up and down this drive, alone and with company, in the daylight and in the dark, since she was a child, and (b) she was a police officer. If there was anyone lurking in the bushes, she could entirely ruin their evening.
She said none of this because she didn’t think David Sperrin was a man to whom gallantry came easily. So she thanked him for the offer, and let him carry the torch, and tried not to notice when he tripped on rough ground and steadied himself against her.
When he’d recovered his poise, Sperrin said, in a half-jocular sort of way that suggested this was better than asking the question outright, “So what is it between you and dog boy?”
Hazel kept a rein on her patience. “He’s a friend. A good friend, but nothing more. All right? And don’t call him that. At least not in his hearing.”
Hazel could hear the cocky grin in his voice. “Why? Do you think he could take me?”
“I doubt it,” she said frankly. “But I’m pretty sure his dog could.”
As the lights of the gate lodge came into view around the sweep of the drive, she steered the conversation back toward something simpler than her relationship with Ash. “What happens if you do unearth a burial tomorrow?”
“Well, if is the critical word. Mostly what you find inside oddly-shaped mounds is oddly-shaped boulders. But if it is a cist, then there are some hoops to jump through. People to inform, approvals to seek, big boys’ toys to whistle up. All the stuff we haven’t got here. The days are long gone when archaeology was a kind of educational hobby for vicars and their daughters.
“There’s only so much of it, you see,” Sperrin continued seriously. “You can’t have people blundering around, confusing or even destroying important sites. All excavation is destruction—the only way you can justify it is by recording meticulously everything you see, everything you find. I couldn’t do that on my own, even with Pete helping. You hope that if you find something significant, you’ll be involved in the excavation, or at least recorded in connection with it. But the important thing is that you’ve contributed to the sum of knowledge. In the end, that may be all the reward you get.”
She looked at him, a dark profile against the white wall of the lodge, in surprise. Talking about his own subject, the combative wit and sharp-honed cynicism that sprinkled his general conversation disappeared. Perhaps he felt sufficiently confident of his abilities in his own field not to need them.
“It was a good choice, then?” said Hazel. “Archaeology. I seem to remember people around here being a bit surprised that was what you wanted to study.”
“I imagine half the people around here had to look the word up in a dictionary,” said Sperrin drily. “The other half don’t own a dictionary.” The cynic was back.
Hazel shrugged. “This is farming country. There are only so many ways you can spell sheep.”
“I’ve never regretted it,” he said, answering her question. “It’s endlessly interesting. Even the small details are interesting. And there’s always the chance of finding something no one has seen for thousands of years. Or something that makes sense of things we’ve been seeing but not understanding. Plus, I don’t need to wear a suit.”
Hazel laughed out loud. “That was the deciding factor, was it?”
In the backwash of the torch she saw him smile. “Not exactly. But … It’s like this. Once you wear a suit, the die is cast. Until then, you still have the luxury of wondering what you’ll do when you grow up.”
They were almost at the gate lodge. Fred had left a lamp burning in the porch. Hazel said, “How long will you be working at Byrfield? Diana must like having you home.”
Sperrin shook his dark head. “I’m not staying at home. There’s more room at the big house.”
Hazel was surprised. She was pretty sure that Diana Sperrin’s cottage was bigger than her father’s. She had room there for her studio.
Her silence seemed to put Sperrin on the defensive. “I stick my head in from time to time. She’s busy, too. And we never were what you’d call a close family.”
There were only the two of them. Diana had raised her son alone while her husband indulged his wanderlust. Hazel wondered if Sperrin’s gypsy father had finally returned home, but didn’t know how to ask without risking offense. “Is she still painting?” Diana Sperrin was a moderately successful artist. She had exhibited in London, and Hazel had read newspaper articles on her work.
“Lord, yes,” said David fervently. “Nothing short of death will stop her. Even then she may manage a quick sketch of the afterlife on the inside of her coffin lid.”
“That must be where you get it from,” Hazel said with a chuckle. “Your creative side.”
He seemed genuinely puzzled. “I’m an archaeologist. A scientist.”
“You’re saying you aren’t moved by the beauty of the things you find as much as by the information they give you?”
He hesitated, as if considering that for the first time. “They are beautiful…” he admitted.
“You see?” said Hazel triumphantly. “The artist speaks!”
“… And so is knowledge.”
They regarded each other levelly in the scant light of the torch. Then, almost simultaneously, they smiled.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” said Hazel.
CHAPTER 4
SATURDAY-MORNING BREAKFAST at Byrfield was a slightly odd affair. As three single men of education and intelligence, with barely ten years between the eldest and the youngest, they should have had more in common than they seemed able to find. Of course, Ash wasn’t single by choice—he was a married man in every way but the one that counted most. Only Sperrin appeared to be single by inclination. Byrfield seemed to be single mainly through lack of initiative. They compared notes on their experiences of university—archaeology at Reading for Sperrin, agricultural college for Byrfield, PPE at Oxford for Ash—and still found nothing in common.
With a hint of desperation Byrfield asked the archaeologist if he liked dogs, and Sperrin looked at him in astonishment and said, “Good God, no.” Under the table Patience rubbed sweetly against him, coating his trouser legs with hair.
They finished eating in silence.
Sperrin had gathered some tools in the courtyard. He distributed the load among them. Byrfield got a spade and a crowbar, Ash a bundle of ranging rods, and Sperrin took the rest: a camera, a nest of buckets filled with sponges, cotton wool, Bubble Wrap and plastic bags of assorted sizes, a large bottle of water, a small bottle of glycerin, some wooden wedges, a sledgehammer, and a GPS position finder. When he saw the smaller man about to tip over backward, Byrfield took some of the heavier items and shared them with Ash. Thus encumbered they set off down the path.
Hazel, leaving the gate lodge at the same time, cut across the meadow and reached the edge of the lake while the men were still laboring through the stable yard. Without hurrying, she made her way around the rushy margin until
she came to the stone igloo of the icehouse and the interesting hump Sperrin wanted to examine. She knew it was the right hump because he’d left one of his stripy rods sticking out of it.
It was years since she’d been here last, but it was no more effort than she remembered to scramble up the curved wall of the icehouse, and the view was as rewarding. She made herself comfortable, sitting cross-legged on the cool stones, and waited for the men to join her.
The dog saw her first, bounded through the sedgy meadow, and joined her on her eminence, curled elegantly, enjoying the June sun on her white flank. Byrfield waved his spade.
Hazel had entirely caught her breath before the men arrived, and she watched in tolerant amusement as they panted up the last bank. Of the three, Byrfield was probably the fittest—a farmer with a title is still a farmer, and it’s a physical job—and Ash the least fit. Not just because he was ten years older than Pete but because he’d spent four of them all but housebound. It was his therapist who talked him into getting a dog, so at least he was out in the fresh air. The indoor pallor that had marked his skin when Hazel first knew him was already less noticeable.
“Well?” she demanded when she thought she’d been patient enough. “Are we going to open this mound or what? I’ve decided it’s a Saxon hoard, incidentally—gold jewelry, armor, weapons, all that. I want my name as cofinder on the plaque at the British Museum.”
Ash was regarding the grassy hummock doubtfully. “Isn’t it a bit small for a ship burial? Unless rather lowlier Saxon chiefs got buried in a dinghy.”
Sperrin took the spade and thrust it at an angle into the turf. “It isn’t a Saxon hoard,” he said, timing his sentences between efforts. “It isn’t a hoard of any kind. I’ve told you what it is. It’s either a Neolithic cist”—the steel blade rang dully on stone under twenty centimeters of grass and earth—“or a bloody great rock. And this,” he added, turning the spade to start removing the turfs, “is where we find out which.”
It was easier than Hazel had expected. She hadn’t much interest in gardening, but she’d planted the odd shrub from time to time and knew that the ground was like iron if you wanted to dig more than a hand’s span into it. The surface of the buried stone, impenetrable to roots, unmoved by the weight of the overburden, must have created a natural weakness, because one after another the turfs peeled away to an identical thickness. Peering into the growing hole, Hazel saw only mud, but as the archaeologist labored, both energetically and with care, she saw a muddy surface appearing.
Byrfield leaned over the hole, too. “Dressed stone rather than a boulder” was his diagnosis. “I think you’ve got your cist, David.”
Only Ash wasn’t jockeying for a better view. He was watching his dog, aware of the tension of her slim, strong body, the way she’d pinned her long ears flat against her neck.
“Jesus, I don’t know,” swore Sperrin in breathless puzzlement. “It’s queer bloody stone. It’s not like stone at all, it’s more like…”
He dropped the spade and groped in his kit for the water bottle and a sponge. On his knees, he reached into the hole and washed the mud away from a portion of the surface. Then he rocked back on his heels, confounded. “More like paving slabs,” he finished lamely.
“Paving slabs!” exclaimed Byrfield. “Why would anybody bury some paving slabs?”
In the silence that followed everyone heard the low, distant machinery rumble that was Patience growling in her throat. Ash said softly, “Because you can get them anywhere, without anyone asking why.”
Hazel looked at him uncomprehendingly, her brows knit. “Gabriel? What do you think it is?”
He considered for a moment. “I think it’s a burial,” he said then.
Sperrin was shaking his dark head impatiently. “Don’t be stupid. They didn’t have garden centers in Neolithic times! If they’re paving slabs, it’s modern. It’s a joke—a hoax.”
“Here?” Byrfield looked around him, taking in the absolute peacefulness of the lakeside scene. “Why bother? We might never have found it.”
“Then whoever did it,” said Sperrin angrily, stabbing at the slabs with the crowbar, seeking a purchase, “had a funny sense of humor.” He straightened up, glaring at Byrfield. “I don’t suppose it was you?”
Pete Byrfield was visibly astonished. “Me? You think I made a pretend burial and then paid you to come and dig it up? You think I’ve nothing better to do with my time and money?”
“It isn’t a pretend burial,” said Ash. His voice was hollow.
In a flood of understanding Hazel realized what he was saying. What he suspected. “Listen,” she said sharply, “I think we should leave this for now—get someone out to have a look at it before we go any further.…”
She might as well have talked to the stones. Sperrin jabbed again at the surface he’d uncovered, and this time he got the crowbar into a gap and threw his weight against it. As something inside the mound shifted, Byrfield added the edge of the spade and between them, sweating and gasping, they managed to lift one slab halfway onto another. A faint earthy smell, earthier than the mud, came out of the void at their feet.
Sperrin reached behind him again, this time for the torch. He and Byrfield, and Hazel, leaned forward.
The dog, still softly growling, backed away.
Slowly, Hazel straightened up. “Okay,” she said carefully, “so now we know what it is. It’s a crime scene. Throw a coat over it. Don’t try to put the slab back, we don’t want to risk it falling in. I’ll call the police.”
CHAPTER 5
IN THE CAREFULLY constructed grave, made of paving slabs and once lined with blankets, was the body of a child—a boy of eight or ten years. It had been in the ground long enough to be entirely skeletonized, making it difficult to judge the sex on initial inspection, but there were things in the little tomb—David Sperrin would have called them grave goods—that made it more than an educated guess. Boys’ toys: a wooden train, a pair of cheap plastic binoculars, a yellow digger, a battered Frisbee. And though at first glance the clothes could have belonged equally to a boy or a girl, when Hazel leaned closer, she saw that both the jeans and the denim jacket fastened left over right.
One might not have been significant, an item passed down from an older sibling; two were suggestive. DNA would prove the matter conclusively, but Hazel had no doubt that she was looking at the remains of a little boy, laid to rest by someone who loved him with as much care and dignity as could be managed without benefit of clergy or churchyard. It was a crime scene because it’s illegal to bury members of your family in the woods without telling anyone. The discovery launched a murder investigation because no one could think why anyone should bury in such a way a child who had died of natural or accidental causes.
The senior investigating officer from the local division was a tired-looking middle-aged man whose Wellingtons had started to leak halfway across the water meadow. “Detective Inspector Edwin Norris,” he said, one slightly rheumy eye settling on Hazel. “You’re Constable Best?”
She nodded. “My father works on the estate.”
He went around the others, establishing who was who, why each of them was there. “Who opened the grave?”
“I did,” said Sperrin.
“Why?”
The archaeologist shrugged. “It’s my job.”
“Digging up children’s graves?”
“Finding unexplained lumps in the landscape and explaining them.”
“I’ll be interested,” rumbled Norris, “to hear your explanation of this.”
“Not exactly my period,” said Sperrin airily. He seemed entirely untroubled by the discovery. Of course, thought Hazel, he’s used to digging up human remains.
“Which is?” asked Norris.
“Well before plastic toys,” said Sperrin.
“Did any of you touch anything inside the grave?”
Hazel shook her head. “We looked in. When we saw what it was, everyone backed off and I called you.”
Byrfield nodded, then turned and pointed. “My house is over there.”
“Where’s the nearest public access?”
“The gate lodge.” Byrfield turned a quadrant, pointed again. “About half a mile.”
As he went through the routine questionnaire, DI Norris recognized that it didn’t apply terribly well to the current circumstances. “How long have you lived here?”
“All my life.”
“It belonged to your parents?”
“It belonged to my ancestors.”
“Since when?”
Byrfield looked slightly embarrassed. “After Bosworth.”
“Who was he, and when did he leave?”
David Sperrin made little attempt to disguise a smirk.
“The Battle of Bosworth Field,” explained Byrfield. “August twenty-second, 1485. When the first Tudor defeated the last Plantagenet, there was a major reallocation of national resources. The first Lord Byrfield had done something useful for Henry Tudor and this was his reward. The land, that is. The current house is the third one on the site.”
Norris looked across at the grave, now covered by a forensics tent, and back at Pete. “So we can safely say that, whenever that child was buried, your family were living here.”
“Yes.”
“Who would have had access to it?”