BURY ME DEEP an utterly gripping crime thriller with an epic twist (Detective Rozlyn Priest Book 1)

by Jane Adams

  In the centre of the open area she could see deep trenches, some of them covering quite an expanse of land and, seen from above, their positioning gave her a sense of the layout of the place as it must have been. Two corners and a section of wall had been defined of the main building. Others pegged and marked with red striped tape some way behind. Smaller trenches, ranging from a few feet long, right down to squares that could be little more than a foot wide showed her the locations of other sites of interest. The outbuildings, perhaps? To her unpractised eye they looked a little random and oddly placed for that.

  “Over there,” PC Mills was pointing to an area half hidden by an outgrowth of rowan trees, planted in a line, straight and defined as though to act as a deliberate screen or as boundary markers. Bright ruby berries glowed against leaves just touched with gold. “That’s the grave site.”

  “Ah.” That part of the scene at least she understood. Blue-and-white tape marked out the police line. Uniformed police in shirt sleeves stood around drinking tea and waiting for the white clad figures of the forensic team to finish so that they could have the body moved and take possession of the site. A small knot of people — staff from the dig, she assumed — stood or sat in front of a portacabin. She wondered briefly how they’d got it through the bullock field and felt a momentary surge of irritation that there might have been a cleaner, easier way of getting here that no one had told her about. From time to time the civilians who’d had their workplace so disrupted glanced across at the other group. She was too far away to see their faces but their body language spoke of anxiety and deep resentment and the usual upset that came with finding a freshly dead person where you had no reason to expect one to be.

  “You say the body was found in an old grave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone had a sense of the appropriate.”

  “Sure did. It’s really pissed the diggers off though.”

  “Murderers are not the most considerate of social groups.”

  “No, I guess they’re not. It isn’t just that though. I mean, they’re all upset by it, of course. I guess digging up old bones doesn’t prepare you for having a corpse dumped in your back yard so to speak. One or two asked to leave the site but DCI Brook wouldn’t have it, not ’til they’d all been interviewed. Wanted them around so they could explain exactly how and when the body was found.”

  “Brook?” Rozlyn interrupted her. “It was Martyn that called me. I thought he was the SIO.”

  “No. It’s Brook.” The PC flashed her a curious look.

  Brook, Rozlyn thought. Her suspicion about there being an easier route began to gnaw again. Brook was the type who’d find it funny to see her gored by a ruddy bull. Not, she admitted, that their horns had been very much in evidence. Her companion, realising no doubt that her curiosity was not about to be satisfied, had continued with her train of thought as though Rozlyn had not interrupted.

  “Originally it was rescue archaeology, you see.” She spoke the words with the air of one who has discovered a new buzzword. “They’d only got a limited time to excavate before the work started. Apparently they’ve had two seasons here,” she frowned. “They can’t dig all year round, I suppose — just late spring into autumn and the dig leader called that a season. Anyway, there’ve been objections to the plans so he reckons they might even get another season after this and they’ve been able to extend their trenches. Though with a murder investigation going on . . . I think he’s worried it’s going to really slow things down.”

  “What are they planning? Another road?”

  She shook her head. “The whole valley’s going to be flooded. New reservoir.”

  Rozlyn looked at her in surprise. For some reason she had thought that sort of thing didn’t happen anymore. She turned back to look down into the valley. Country lover that she wasn’t, she still felt an unexpected and equally sharp stab of pain at the thought, and the sudden overwhelming sense of loss completely caught her off guard.

  “That’s a shame,” she said softly, noting uncomfortably that her voice seemed to shake a little. “A real shame.”

  * * *

  Brook hauled himself up from the side of the trench. At five feet seven, he was a good few inches shorter than Rozlyn, but he made up for the deficit in width and attitude. Rozlyn had never met another man with Brook’s ability to make her seem so much smaller than she was.

  “Someone’s taken a dislike to one of your snouts,” Brook said. “Go on, don’t be shy, take a good look.”

  He stepped aside to allow Rozlyn access to the trench and then leaned over her shoulder, breathing heavily as Rozlyn crouched down.

  “Charlie Higgins.” Rozlyn said. “Yes, he’s one of mine. What the hell’s he doing out here?”

  The dead man lay upon his back with his arms outstretched on either side. His position reminded Rozlyn of a game she used to play with her friends when they were all just little kids. Standing on the end of her mother’s bed, they let themselves fall straight back, no hands, nothing to break their fall but the spring of the mattress and a puffy green quilt.

  It was harder than it sounded, trusting yourself and the softness of the bed just to fall back straight and flat and not panic and bend in the middle before you hit bottom. If you managed to do it right, then you fell flat out like Charlie Higgins. On your back with your toes turned up and your limp arms straight out to either side.

  His eyes were open and his mouth just slightly gaping. He looked shocked, Rozlyn thought. Death had taken Charlie Higgins by surprise.

  “A single stab wound,” the young woman in the white coverall told her. “We’ve not turned him yet, but we don’t think there’s more.”

  Rozlyn nodded. Charlie was dressed as he always was, in a cheap pinstriped suit and a white poly-cotton shirt. The cuffs were worn. Charlie’s cuffs were always worn. The front of the shirt was drenched with blood.

  Rozlyn bent closer, leaning down into the trench, examining the sides and what section of the base was visible around the body. The surrounding area was clean of blood.

  “There are blood spots there and there.” The SOCO pointed to where two of her colleagues cast about the open ground, carefully pegging any trace.

  “So killed, then brought here?”

  “That’s what it looks like so far.”

  “But the body wasn’t wrapped in anything. Just left here.”

  “Just as you see it. It was dry too and there was heavy dew this morning according to the diggers. Most likely scenario is someone came in here while they were all at breakfast, dumped him in the grave and then left.”

  Rozlyn raised an eyebrow.

  “Cool customer,” Brook said, from close beside her ear. “OK, let’s take a look at the back of him, now Detective Inspector Priest has given him his last rites.”

  Rozlyn stepped back, watching as two of the SOCO eased the body over onto his side. The ground beneath was damp, bearing out the heavy dew fall. Blood had drizzled down the sides of Charlie Higgins’ chest, seeping through the jacket, but there were no further wounds visible on the dead man’s back.

  “OK. He’s all yours,” Brook told the SOCO. “Your snitches often end up dead, don’t they?” he commented, turning to Rozlyn. “There was that one a few months back, decided to top herself from what I remember.”

  Rozlyn ignored him. Jennis Morgan had been an addict. Heroin. A user since the age of seventeen, she’d died not of an overdose, as Brook well knew, but because some bastard had cut her drug of choice with rat poison.

  “But why would anyone want to kill the likes of Charlie Higgins? He was such a harmless little man.”

  Brook shrugged. “Being harmless doesn’t keep you out of harm’s way, does it?”

  “No,” she agreed reluctantly. “I suppose not.” She stared down at the body, trying to make some sense of it being here.

  Charlie was a listener; he had ears that twitched like radar for a niblet of juicy gossip and a memory like an elephant’s when it came
to trivia. If there had been exams in useless facts, Charlie would have had a PhD. He’d been feeding Rozlyn dribs and drabs of information since just after she joined the force and Rozlyn kept him on more from habit than for the world-shattering importance of anything Charlie had revealed. Habit, and the memory of how once or twice Charlie had, in all innocence, provided the missing piece that linked two facts together. She could think of nothing Charlie could have done or known that would have made him worth killing and certainly not worth the effort of his body being shifted way out here. Charlie was the sort of man for whom a casual death in a back alley had been a possibility for years, but this was of a different order. It made no sense, Rozlyn thought as she watched them bag the body and lay it on a folding gurney ready to be wheeled away. She watched too in growing irritation as a mortuary ambulance drove into the site from a gate she could just see in the far corner of the field.

  She scowled at Brook, who grinned back at her. “You made me come all the way through that field full of bloody cows when there was a way in from the road?”

  “Just thought you might enjoy the country air,” Brook said.

  CHAPTER 2

  From the writings of Abbot Kendryk of Storton Abbey:

  Treven was a man who knew how to touch the earth and read what was written there. He knew how strong could be the memory of the land. He felt it often and knew in his heart that whatever new gods might be brought into a place, the blood and fear and love poured out for centuries into the blessed earth was still held captive, ready to feed the harvest, to nurture hope or to nourish much darker urges. And so it was that he recognised a certain wrongness in that place. A memory, a hunger buried deep and never assuaged. Evil that waited for the man without pure purpose to fall down into its grasp.

  * * *

  THEADINGFORD. YEAR OF GRACE 878

  At the foot of a low, tree-crowned hill, where the road was crossed by a shepherd’s trail, there stood two indicators that people still lived here.

  Treven was hard pressed to say which disturbed him more.

  The first was a wheel-headed cross. Carved of ash, the roots of the tree from which it had been created still reached into the earth. A thing at once natural and made, Treven thought, as though the man that had formed it wished somehow to bridge that gap between the living and the dead.

  It was crudely engraved with the image of a hanging man, his arms outstretched but uplifted and fastened to the arms of a cross. He was clothed like a warrior, a sword hanging from his side and a shield lying beneath his feet. A spear was being thrust by a second warrior to pierce just below his heart. The spear had been reddened with ochre, as had wounds on his hands and feet. But for that, Treven would have thought that it depicted Odin suffering for knowledge on the world tree, a thought borne out by the fact that the hanging figure only possessed a single eye. Wotan, All Father, had given an eye to Mimir in exchange for wisdom.

  A loose and crudely wrought pattern of threads and knots decorated the cross’s wheel and beneath the feet of the spear carrier stood an arc-backed boar, head down as though ready for the charge.

  At the foot of the cross lay an offering of flowers and berries. Placed recently, Treven thought, for the fruit had not spoiled, despite the unexpected heat of the autumn sun. But beside that, its wings outstretched and pegged firmly to the hard-baked ground, lay a large black crow.

  He had the strongest feeling, looking at the position of the creature, that it had been living when someone pinned it there. Blood on the ground gave testimony to its struggles and Treven was oddly sickened by it, almost more than by the nauseous odour emanating from the second thing that stood upon the rise.

  He was not afraid of either death or the sight of it. He had seen too many fall, then pecked by battle scavengers and flesh bitten and wrenched by the carrion eaters, for death to evoke feelings other than that of pity and, when he could spare time for it, of loss. He had lived too long by the sword to have any doubt that one day he would die that way and had long since discovered that a man cannot live forever fearful. Dread is a life-destroying, strength-sapping emotion and cannot be sustained by those who are tired and hungry and exist in anticipation of the next sword blow, the next clash of shields. So it was not the sight of the hanging tree or what was left of a man after the crows had taken their fill that brought such a feeling of wrongness into Treven’s thoughts. Rather it was something about the positioning of the cross and the gibbet, and the man and the great black bird. The corpse stank, poisoning the air, the stench settling in the sheltered stillness of a pathway trapped between rising land on either side. The corpse’s belly swelled fit to burst with the rot and putrefaction the bag of skin contained. Maggots writhed beneath the muscles of his face as though they sought to create some last vestige of human expression before they spilled from the tongue-choked, partly opened mouth.

  The sight and scent made their horses skittish, battle-trained beasts though they were and well used to the caustic stink of death. Their unease added to Treven’s sense of wrongness, to his fleeting but insistent impression that there was something evil here, beyond what his eye could see, or which choked the breath from him. But what it was he could not say, only recall that he had felt this way before and that the consequences of such a feeling had not been good.

  “Some rule of law exists here still,” Hugh commented wryly, jerking Treven from his reverie.

  “It would seem so. Though I would wish to know if the man’s crime had been great enough to be deserving of death, or if it were only that he lacked wealth to pay the wergild.”

  “Or had not been strung up by some thief after the contents of his purse,” Hugh shrugged. “To know that, you must ask the steward and the tythingmen.”

  “If such men still exist here.” Treven paused a moment longer, half inclined to give the order to his servants to cut the man down. He disliked this practice of leaving the corpse to hang, as though death were not sufficient punishment. And in these days when the shire courts were so often bypassed and common law gave way to the wishes of the mob, it was not so strange to see the freshly dead strung up beside those whose flesh dropped from the bones.

  These were brutal times, Treven thought. Though truthfully neither he nor his father or his grandsire could have recalled a place in memory when times had not been brutal. War and death seemed to cry out for more death until the ways of justice seemed often to be forgotten and swift vengeance the only thing that mattered. Treven gestured towards the cross. “The bird,” he said. “Release it.” Then as an afterthought, one that seemed to come from another’s wishes and not his own, “Burn it.”

  “And then what, sir?”

  Treven sighed, the impulse, the other voice having fled his mind as swiftly as it had come. He gestured impatiently at his servant. “Whatever seems fit to do,” he said, then wheeled his horse and rode on, aware of the look his servants and even Hugh exchanged as he passed them by.

  * * *

  Treven had been told that his hall at Theadingford was some two miles from the village of Theading and that his new home was in need of some repair. However Treven’s first sight of the ramshackle building brought to mind a saying of his grandfather’s. “Beware the gifts of kings,” the old man would say. “More often than not, they turn and bite.”

  “In times of war,” Hugh observed, “I expect to sleep where sleep finds me. But when my old friend promises me a bed in his house, I expect there at least to be a house.”

  “There is a house . . . of sorts,” Treven shrugged. “If you’d prefer a good hard bed in a Kentish Abbey I’m certain your sire would welcome you with joy.”

  Hugh grimaced. A younger son, destined for the church, his father had not been pleased when he chose a life of battle rather than one of contemplation. ”I’ll settle for your hovel,” he said. “For tonight, anyway. There might be some young wifmann, lonely for company, who’ll offer me a bed elsewhere. Favours from a Shire Reeve are not to be gainsaid lightly after all.”
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br />   Treven snorted. “You’re not yet Shire Reeve,” he reminded Hugh. “There seems little yet to be Reeve of. And you’d do well to mend your thoughts. I recall the last time you sought a woman’s favours you neglected to enquire how long her weaponmann would be from home.”

  He sniffed, the scent of wood smoke rising to them from the valley and with it the rich odour of roasting meat. “There is food at least,” he said. “Pig, if I’m not mistook.”

  “Well, the Lord be blessed for his favours,” Hugh replied. “Let’s go down.”

  Theadingford lay in a sheltered valley. The manor had been surrounded by farmland, but the forest was encroaching once again after years of neglect, saplings of sycamore and birch marching past the line of rowan at the boundary and across strip-cultivated fields. It would need clearing before any crop was sown. Sheep — small, black-faced creatures, their fleeces almost re-grown ready for the coming winter — cropped amongst the dips and hollows and what looked like the remains of an apple orchard, overcrowded but well laden, stood to the west side of the Manor.

  The house itself showed a generation of neglect. It had been close on a decade since its last habitation and Treven had known that he should have expected the worst, but after years of fighting and the loss of his father’s land, he had hoped perhaps for something more. When the King had given him charter for Theadingford he had accepted gratefully, despite the fact that this was an effective frontier, the Great Heathen Army less than a day’s march north. He had been pledged in battle to serve his lord and now that Aelfred was safely throned, he had pledged to keep the king’s peace. If his somewhat dubious reward for this was to become master of Theadingford, then so be it.