Dry Bones

by Sally Spencer

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  The Jennie Redhead Mysteries

  THE SHIVERING TURN

  DRY BONES

  The Monika Paniatowski Mysteries

  ECHOES OF THE DEAD

  BACKLASH

  LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

  A WALK WITH THE DEAD

  DEATH’S DARK SHADOW

  SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL

  BEST SERVED COLD

  THICKER THAN WATER

  DEATH IN DISGUISE

  THE HIDDEN

  The Inspector Woodend Mysteries

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  DEATH WATCH

  A DYING FALL

  FATAL QUEST

  The Inspector Sam Blackstone Series

  BLACKSTONE AND THE NEW WORLD

  BLACKSTONE AND THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

  BLACKSTONE AND THE GREAT WAR

  BLACKSTONE AND THE ENDGAME

  DRY BONES

  Sally Spencer

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  This eBook edition first published in 2017 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2017 by Lanna Rustage.

  The right of Lanna Rustage to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8754-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-870-5 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-933-6 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  PROLOGUE

  5 October 1974

  The cellar, which lay beneath the De Courcey Quad, was dark and damp. It was also cold – not cold enough to cause problems for brass monkeys, it must be admitted, but chilly enough.

  But it was not the damp, nor the dark, nor even the cold, that anyone entering the cellar noticed first – it was the smell.

  It was difficult to isolate quite what kind of smell it was. The odour of rotting eggs was certainly present, and there was also a delicate hint of untreated sewage, with perhaps a soupçon of decayed vegetation added for good measure. But whatever the constituent parts, there could be no arguing that it was both nauseating and overpowering.

  The college porters should, by rights, have been the first ones to notice it, but they claimed not have been down to the cellars for weeks – so it was left to the superintendent of buildings, out on a bi-annual tour of inspection, to walk into the olfactory ambush. The superintendent took decisive action, first tracing the smell to what he thought was its source, and then summoning one of the stonemasons to do something about it, while he went off and had a substantial lunch on expenses.

  There were two men (or, perhaps more accurately, a man and a youth) standing in the cellar and looking at the brick structure, which could best be described as a semi-circular chute, built flush to the cellar wall and running from floor to ceiling.

  ‘What is it?’ asked the youth, whose name was Tony Roberts.

  ‘It’s an experimental ventilation shaft, designed by Hubert of Ashby, way back before Adam was a lad,’ said the man, Jim Withnell, who was a qualified stonemason, but knew quite a lot about bricks as well, so understood these things. ‘As far as I know, it’s the only one of its kind in the world. Now, why do you think that might be, young Tony?’ he asked his apprentice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Roberts admitted.

  ‘What possible reason could there be for other people not to have copied it?’ Withnell asked, still patient, but with a warning edge to his voice that this patience had its limits.

  ‘Is it because it didn’t work properly?’ Tony Roberts asked.

  ‘Nearly right,’ Withnell conceded. ‘The truth of the matter is that, while it might have looked good on paper – or parchment as it must have been in them days – it didn’t work at all.’

  ‘So why didn’t they take it down again?’

  ‘Ah, the impetuousness of youth,’ Withnell said, in a voice which managed to combine philosophical acceptance of the novice’s naiveté, with a teacher’s natural exasperation that his pupil was not making more rapid progress.

  ‘You what?’ Tony Roberts asked.

  ‘“It’s not right, so why not just take it down again?” Isn’t that what you just said?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Well, for a start, young Tony, the men who built this knew what they were doing and took pride in their work, so demolishing it would probably have been a real bugger of a job. Besides, for all they knew then (or we know now), Hubert might have integrated it into the stress structure. In other words, if we take it away, the whole bloody place might fall down.’

  ‘I don’t see any ventilation holes in it,’ Roberts said, seeking to divert the conversation away from his failure to spot the bleeding obvious.

  ‘That’s right, you don’t see any ventilation holes,’ Withnell agreed. ‘That’s because there aren’t any. They’ve been blocked up for as long as anyone can remember.’

  ‘Then it’s virtually a sealed unit.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So why do we think that it’s the source of the stink?’ Tony Roberts wondered.

  ‘We don’t – but Mr Crock, our superintendent of buildings, does,’ Withnell said. ‘And it doesn’t matter that Mr Crock has no real experience of buildings like this, because he has paper qualifications. That’s why his word is law, as far as us mere mortals are concerned, and why he has the right to sleep with our fiancées the night before the wedding.’

  ‘You what?’ Roberts said.

  ‘I’m only joking,’ Withnell assured him.


  ‘Good, because …’

  ‘He’s usually willing to wait until they come back from the honeymoons before he does them.’

  ‘But that’s …’

  ‘I’m still joking,’ Withnell said. ‘Listen, lad, we’ll be working together until you finish your apprenticeship, which, God knows, is years and years away, so one of two things has got to happen – either I’ve got to lose my sense of humour or you’ve got to find one – and, given that I’m the stonemason and you’re only the apprentice, which one do you think it should be?’

  ‘I’ve got to find a sense of humour,’ Roberts said. He paused. ‘Should I laugh now?’

  ‘No, the moment’s gone,’ Withnell said. ‘Maybe, to make it easier for you, I should tap myself gently on the head with a hammer before I say anything remotely funny.’

  ‘That would help,’ Roberts agreed.

  Withnell sighed. ‘It’s going to be a long few years,’ he said. He turned to face the shaft again. ‘Now, shall we set about the job, so we can get out of this stinky place?’

  ‘All right,’ Roberts agreed.

  ‘What I propose to do,’ Withnell said, ‘is to take a few bricks out of the centre of the column – just enough for you to be able to stick your head and shoulders inside, and establish what we already know – which is that wherever the smell is coming from, it isn’t coming from there. Once we’ve done that, we can bring the almighty superintendent of buildings back down here, let him see it for himself, and then close things up again.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything funny in that, was there?’ Tony Roberts asked tentatively.

  Withnell sighed again. ‘No, there wasn’t,’ he admitted. He walked over to the wall and pointed to one of the bricks. ‘You can start by chipping away the mortar on that one,’ he continued.

  ‘Won’t you be doing it?’ Tony asked.

  ‘I will not,’ Withnell told him. ‘You’re the apprentice, you need the practice. I’ll nip upstairs to have a quiet smoke outside, where the air isn’t quite so poisonous, and then I’ll come back and supervise you.’

  ‘You’re too kind,’ Tony said, very much under his breath.

  It was not an easy task to chip away the mortar and ease out the bricks, and Tony Roberts told himself he would be heartily glad when the job was over. Even so, he was quite surprised when, having only removed less than a dozen bricks, he heard his boss – who had recently returned from his smoke – say, ‘That’s enough.’

  Tony Roberts stepped back to look at the hole he’d created.

  ‘I’ll never get my head and shoulders through that, Mr Withnell,’ he protested.

  ‘I know that, lad, but I’m sick to my back teeth of being down here, and I reckon that hole’s big enough for you to just about squeeze your head through,’ Withnell replied.

  ‘It’ll be dark in there, so I’ll need a torch, and how can I hold a torch if I can’t get my hand through?’ Tony wondered. And then, because he really was very pissed off at having been left to do all the donkeywork, he added (though he knew he shouldn’t have), ‘You hadn’t thought about that, had you, Mr Withnell?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I had,’ Withnell countered, ‘and it seems to me that if that mouth of yours is big enough to cheek me, it should be big enough to hold a small torch.’

  He held out the torch.

  Tony hesitated, then switched it on, put it into his mouth, and turned towards the opening.

  The hole was wide enough for a man with a torch in his mouth to get his head through, but there was not much clearance at the sides, and Tony Roberts eased himself in gingerly.

  Withnell watched him with something almost bordering on affection. The lad was not the sharpest pencil in the box, he thought, but he had a feeling for stone and, given time, would make a fair mason.

  It was once Tony’s head was completely inside that something seemed to go wrong. The first sign was that his body started to twitch, the second that he made the sort of gagging noise that any man who wanted to scream – but was prevented by having a torch in his mouth – might make. Not that the torch remained in his mouth for long. Withnell heard the sound of it falling at the same moment as Tony – his former regard for caution now completely abandoned – pulled his head rapidly out of the hole.

  ‘What’s the matter, lad?’ Withnell asked. ‘What’s in there?’

  But Tony was too busy throwing up his lunch to give any clear answer.

  ONE

  7 October 1974

  Since the only window in my office looks straight onto a window in the building on the opposite side of the alley, it would seem reasonable to assume that my lack of a view is compensated for by the fact that I am at least sheltered from most of the elements. After all, the wind likes to have a clear run at things, doesn’t it – hence the phrase ‘wind tunnel’.

  All well and good, except that the normal laws of meteorology don’t seem to apply here, and my current client and I are being periodically distracted by this particular wind – a harbinger of the chill winter to come – rattling away at the window frame.

  I dread a cold winter, as would anyone having to run – and heat – a business and an apartment in the historic city of Oxford.

  I turn to my client and …

  Actually, before we go any further, a few words of clarification might be necessary. When I say an ‘apartment’, what I mean is a bedsit with an attached bathroom which is so small that even the mice are starting to feel hemmed in. And when I say a ‘business’, I mean a one-roomed office (upstairs from a company with a flashy purple logo, which imports dubious exotic goods from the Far East) located at the unfashionable end of the Iffley Road – an office, furthermore, which is being warmed this October by a paraffin heater, because, as expensive as heating oil is, it is nothing like as ruinous as the amount the robber baron who owns this building would charge me for access to his central heating system.

  I’m not complaining about my lot in life, you must understand. I like living in Oxford, and I generally enjoy my work – when I have any work to enjoy. I’m even almost reconciled to the fact that I’m a redhead called Jennie Redhead (my late father always insisted it was genetics, rather than malice on his part, which was responsible for that particular predicament).

  But that’s all by-the-by. What’s bothering me more than the wind and the fuel bills – and this really is bothering me – is the man sitting on the opposite side of my second-hand desk. And the reason that he bothers me is that he wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t in deep trouble.

  Of course, all the people who come to see me are in trouble – tear-stained women who suspect their husbands of unfaithfulness, anxious shopkeepers who have no idea which of their ‘trusted’ employees is stealing the stock – but what makes him different to the rest is that he is no stranger to me.

  His name is Charles Edward George Withington Danby Swift. He is a genuine peer of the realm, the greatly respected bursar of St Luke’s College, and absolutely my best friend in the whole wide world.

  We met during my first week as a student at St Luke’s, at a reception in the Master’s Garden. I was standing in the middle of the throng – but I was not a part of it. How could I be? They (the rest) were predominantly southern and expensively educated, and when they spoke, it was with an almost lazy – and very confident – drawl. I was northern, state-educated, and with an only semi-refined regional accent.

  And then there was the way we were dressed. We were all wearing subfusc (a strict requirement whenever the Master is present), which meant that I had on a dark jacket, white blouse, black bow tie, dark skirt, dark stockings, black shoes and commoners’ gown. In other words, I was in the same uniform as every other girl there, and so should have blended in.

  Right?

  Wrong!

  Because all the other girls’ outfits had been purchased from top London stores (and no doubt charged to Daddy’s account), whereas mine had only been bought from a discount warehouse in Whitebridge, for cash. />
  Standing there, I felt like a white nag of doubtful lineage which had been painted with black stripes, but didn’t fool any of the surrounding thoroughbred zebras for a minute. I felt lonely and alone, and was just about to slip away when someone tapped me lightly on the right shoulder and I heard a plummy voice say,

  ‘Hello, you seem to be a little down in the mouth. What’s the matter, my dear – won’t the other children play with you?’

  I swung around, furious at being so openly ridiculed, and prepared to address the posh boy in language that I assumed he would never have heard before – an assumption which, I was to learn later, was about as far from the truth as it is possible to be.

  Charlie was in his early forties then – a tall, stately-looking man with hair the colour of pale straw – and what struck me immediately was that despite his words, the expression on his face was completely free of malice.

  ‘I’d ignore them, if I were you,’ he continued. ‘They’re so terribly cliquish. But then, the nouveau riche always are.’

  ‘The nouveau riche!’ I’d repeated incredulously.

  ‘That’s right,’ Charlie had confirmed. ‘Take that chap over there.’ He pointed to a typical Hooray Henry. ‘I happen to know that only a couple of centuries ago, his family hadn’t even got a pot to piss in.’

  ‘Only a couple of centuries ago!’ I’d repeated. ‘Is that meant to be some kind of joke that only people already in the know would really understand?’

  Charlie had assured me it was not a joke, then looked down at the glass of white wine he was holding in his hand.

  ‘This Pinot Gris is perhaps a little too fussy for my taste. What do you think of it?’

  What I’d thought was that it was only the third glass of wine I’d ever drunk in my life, and I was in no position to judge.

  ‘I’ve tasted better,’ I’d said, casually.

  Charlie had just grinned.

  ‘Have I said something funny?’ I’d asked.

  ‘No. I’m smiling because I’m embarrassed.’

  ‘Embarrassed? What about?’

  ‘About putting you in a rather difficult position.’