‘She’s the best thing in your life, and don’t you forget it.’
‘I know that. Just don’t let her know what I just said. Life’s good with her, not so much with this murder.’
‘Are we certain that it is?’
‘What else can it be? Do you think the man dug a hole, put himself in it, then backfilled the soil, and patted down the earth so no one would see that he was there?’
‘He could have died under unusual circumstances, and his disappearance, rather than his death, was beneficial to all parties.’
‘Inheritance laws, death duties, questions someone didn’t want answering.’
‘I’m just raising the possibility.’
‘I’ve got my money on murder. The pathologist will open him up tomorrow. We should start to get some answers then. In the meantime, I’m going back to the office.’
‘I’ll stay here,’ Clare said, ‘although I could do with something to eat. Pub lunch?’
‘The most sense you’ve made all day,’ Tremayne said.
There were others who didn’t understand the relationship that existed between the two: a great deal of respect, a lot of sarcasm. Clare gave as good as she got. And Tremayne liked people who could be feisty. Jean was feisty, that was why he loved her, and Clare, not that he would ever admit to it, was the daughter that he never had.
Chapter 2
Jim Hughes, the senior crime scene investigator, didn’t like the crime scene, although for once there was no blood to deal with, only mud. He wasn’t sure which was worse, and to be alongside a burial mound with his team, slowly excavating the soil, careful not to disturb the archaeological dig, was proving difficult.
Clare, who had remained at the site, thought that the retrieval of the body was slow. Horsley and his team, in frustration, had moved to another burial mound close by. The tourists continued to arrive in the area in droves, lured by Stonehenge, the most prominent ancient site in England. But as she knew, there were other interesting places nearby: Avebury with its stone circles, the present-day village built in and around it, and then there was Salisbury Cathedral, the spire over four hundred feet high. Wherever you travelled, there was history to be found. Clare had to admit to being interested in taking part in an archaeological dig, but she knew it was just a thought, for when would she have the time.
Seventy miles from London, it appeared that for all its quiet charm, Salisbury and its environs had more murders than Homicide could handle, and invariably it was the villages that supplied the majority of them. She wondered if this was to be another village investigation. Tremayne would have said it was a certainty, but he was an unemotional sort of man, always expressing a negative outlook on life, or trying to convince others that that was his natural demeanour. Clare knew it was not, so did Jean, both having seen him when his guard was down. He had even shed a tear when he had made a speech at his second marriage to Jean, regretting the time that they had spent apart, the happiness that he felt.
Clare had chuckled to herself when he had said it, knowing that happy and Tremayne were two words that were not mutually compatible. Yet he had said them, and Jean had been delighted, so had Clare. Her relationship with her father was fine; her mother not so. They lived in Norfolk, hopeful that she would join them and take over the running of the hotel that they owned. She had tried it for a few months after the love of her life, Harry Holchester, had died for her – not before he had killed others, though. It was a bitter-sweet memory for her, and still the man remained in her mind, complicating her ability to move on, to find another man, to settle down and have children. To her, it seemed as though the police force was to be her partner in life.
It left her melancholy at times, especially when at home in her cottage in Stratford sub Castle, a small village not far from Salisbury, close to where a woman that she had regarded as a friend had died. Her death, the reason for it mysterious, and with a shade of the macabre about it, had left her saddened. Up the hill from her cottage, a pleasant walk of an afternoon, was the Anglo-Saxon fort of Old Sarum. There wasn’t much left up there now, but it was an attractive place, although it had been the scene of another murder.
Wherever she looked, Clare could see misery and despair, yet she had not become inured to it, and she agreed with Tremayne on one thing – life was what you made of it.
However, she knew that he had wanted to make chief inspector, but hadn’t. Not so much for himself, as he wasn’t the most ambitious of men, but for Jean. She deserved better than the house he owned in Wilton, three miles from Salisbury. A two-storey red-brick house, it had no redeeming features, not even a pleasant outlook. It was circa 1950, a housing estate, where every house had the same look; the only apparent differences were the paint colour on the windows and the doors, the attic conversions, the garages added on later.
All in all, Tremayne regarded the house as suitable for him, but not for his wife. Clare would have to agree. It was a charmless house, but Jean had been over the place, cleaning here, painting there, buying new furniture, throwing out Tremayne’s old clothes, buying him new ones.
‘Over here,’ Hughes shouted. ‘You might want to have a look at this.’
Clare, already kitted out in coveralls, walked over to where the crime scene team were at work.
‘You can’t see anything from down there, can you?’
Hughes, not much older than she was, was an enthusiastic, eager man; a man she admired, as did Tremayne. The relationship that Hughes had engendered with the detective inspector was based initially on standing up to Tremayne, giving as good as he got in a verbal debate. However, Tremayne, always critical of someone wet behind the ears flashing their university degree, their professional qualifications, had to agree that Jim Hughes was a smart man, knew what he was talking about, could conduct a top-rate investigation, and there were no long-winded words when he spoke to you, although there were when he wrote up his report. And what Tremayne and Clare wanted was up at the top of the mound, slippery to negotiate, muddy underfoot, and altogether unpleasant.
‘Any easy way up?’ Clare said.
‘We left the red carpet back at Bemerton Road Police Station, unfortunately.’
Tremayne’s type of sarcasm from the mouth of the senior crime scene investigator. Not that Clare minded. A murder scene always affected those involved in investigating it, and humour helped to bring the tensions into context.
‘We’ve rigged up a rope on the far side,’ one of the other CSIs said. ‘You can pull yourself up.’
Clare walked around and followed instructions. It was good that Tremayne was back at Bemerton Road – no doubt warming himself on the radiator in his office, attempting to put in place the paperwork for the investigation, shouting at others to get on with it. She knew what his reaction would have been if he had been asked to pull himself up a slippery bank with a rope – negative in the extreme – and she doubted if he could have managed it. Jean had done a great job in looking after him, but he was looking older by the month, and sometimes by the day. Clare was sure there was more to it than age: a hitherto unrevealed illness, mortality that would defy his staying until the official retirement bell was sounded, the reality that he was dying before his time.
***
Clare stood at the top of the mound. Around her, a panoramic view, Stonehenge over to the east, no more than a mile, its purpose obscured by time. And the mystery of why bluestone had been used in its construction, the larger stones over four tonnes in weight, brought from Wales, a distance of nearly two hundred miles. Some saw it as a sacred burial site, some as a site for celestial or astronomical alignments, a way to mark the seasons, and others as a place for healing. The truth was that no one was sure, not totally. It was the same with the mounds. Who were the people buried inside them? Were they the leaders of their society, warriors of note? The druids claimed Stonehenge as their own, but they weren’t there when it was built – they had missed out on that by two thousand years.
Jim Hughes did not con
cern himself with such matters. He had a job to do, and it was down a shaft that had now got wood supports lining its sides. Clare knew that Horsley would be distressed at the desecration of England’s heritage, but it was a crime scene, as Tremayne had said.
‘We’ve uncovered more of the body,’ Hughes said. ‘It’s male, as you had surmised.’
‘The wristwatch and the shirt sleeve were good indicators,’ Clare said.
‘No cross-dressing back then?’
‘It depends on how long we’re talking about.’
‘That’s the point, isn’t it? Forensics will do their work, and Pathology will probably be able to tell you what the man’s diet was, ailments he may have had. Dentistry is always a good indicator, so are any operations that the man may have had, broken legs, that sort of thing. The procedures have changed over the years.’
‘A guess?’
‘I’m not keen to,’ Hughes said. ‘So far, we’ve cleared around the man’s arm, up as far as his shoulder. We’ve also found a leg, dark-coloured trousers.’
‘Shoes?’
‘Leather, look expensive.’
‘Any more?’
‘The problem is that we’ll collapse the mound if we pull him out. We’ll be accused of vandalism, lambasted in the local press, and Horsley’s got influence.’
‘Murder?’
‘The circumstances lead us to that conclusion. What do you suggest we do?’
‘I’ll check with DI Tremayne, but the body’s been here a long time. Any chance of a tentative identification?’
‘We can try and find a clothing label, and if the shoes are expensive, then that may help.’
Clare phoned Tremayne, put her plan forward, finding him to be in agreement. After that, she and Hughes left the mound and walked over to where Horsley was hard at work. ‘A deal,’ she said.
‘You can’t imagine what you could be destroying,’ Horsley said.
‘Fortunately, we can,’ Hughes said. ‘Sergeant Yarwood has a compromise. I suggest that you listen to what she has to say.’
‘Very well, Sergeant, what is it?’ Horsley responded. He was a man with few social graces, an obsession with the past, little care for the modern world. His vehicle, parked twenty-five yards away, was a pre-sixties Land Rover, and with his anorak removed, it was clear that fashion didn’t interest him either. He was wearing a pair of jeans, the knees no longer present, not as a fashion statement, purely worn away through use. The shirt that he wore had a frayed collar, and even discounting the surroundings and the work being conducted, it had not been washed for some time. He also, once the three of them had distanced themselves from the dig, smoked a pipe. The type of man they would have assumed not to be married, the type of man who would prefer his books and his antiques and his history to the joy of a woman by his side, but he did have a wife, Clare knew that. In fact, she had met her on more than one occasion, and she was a delightful woman in her fifties, prim and proper, and very clean.
‘It’s been there for that long, we can wait a few more days. We want to give you a chance to examine the Bronze Age skeleton, alongside the crime scene investigators. It’s unusual that we’d agree to this, but it seems the only option,’ Clare said.
‘We’d get precedence?’ Horsley asked.
‘Whoever you nominate, no more than two people. They would need to be kitted up: coveralls, nitrile gloves, overshoes.’
‘You’ll make the entrance secure?’
‘We’ll do our best. We’ll bring up some additional equipment, whatever will help.’
‘I agree. When can we start?’
‘It’s unstable, so you’ll need to take the lead from us. We could get our body out easily enough; yours is more of a challenge.’
‘Understood. I’ll be one, and I’ve got a good person who’ll work with me.’
‘The mound you moved to?’ Clare asked.
‘A lot of them were ransacked in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It’s one of those, I’m afraid. We can’t explain why this one hasn’t, but it looks intact.’
***
An archaeological dig was not big news in the Salisbury area. There were always at least two or three, sometimes more in the summer, peopled by eager university students, local school children bored by long holidays or raked in as part of a school project. Then there were the elderly, enjoying every moment of being down in the dirt and uncovering past histories, complaining about their sore backs and their calloused hands later. And at the centre, a core group of professionals taking advantage of the extra manpower, but worried that the enthusiastic amateurs would miss something, or go in too aggressively with the trowel, and break something fragile. Horsley remembered such an occurrence, two summers past. A twenty-five-year-old university student, bleary after a night at the pub, had prodded something difficult to remove, a stone he thought, breaking it in two. Not realising until later that the brooch, a perfect example of first-century Roman jewellery, had gone from unique to damaged. Not that the value of the piece had concerned Horsley, but it was vandalism, and he had allowed the person onto the site. Since then, he had instigated stricter controls on who was allowed on and who wasn’t, who was to be given a trowel, and who was to be offered the job of sifting through the debris removed. Numbers of assistants were down as a result, and now he had a pristine site with two bodies, one of interest, the other of no concern to him.
It wasn’t that a murdered man didn’t deserve more respect; Horsley knew that he did, but he was a pragmatist. A man who was thousands of years old, his name long forgotten, his occupation unclear unless there was armour with his body, was significant in that he represented a link with the past; a modern man did not.
And now he had a lifeline from the police, a chance to successfully search the mound, with the additional skills of a police crime scene investigation team, professionals every one of them.
Clare did not tell Horsley that Tremayne had been reluctant to comply with her compromise, and he had run it past Superintendent Moulton, his superior. Moulton – a man who hankered after Tremayne’s retirement, a degree-educated and younger police force his primary objective. The two were combatants over the retirement issue, respectful of each other otherwise.
Common sense had prevailed, a better outcome than Clare had expected, and now Horsley intended to take advantage of the situation. They would still have to attempt to avoid the detritus of years gone by, making sure not to get an insect inside their clothing, a cobweb in the face, and hopefully not to disturb a badger, cute and cuddly when wandering around at night, not so when there were young in the sett. A new word for Clare; she had always assumed that a badger had a den, but it appeared that there was a more correct term.
Hughes brought up more people from Salisbury, including a mining engineer on contract to advise on the best approach to protect both teams’ best interests. The senior crime scene investigator was delighted. He, like Clare, was interested in local history, and the chance to be on site when important discoveries could occur excited him.
Clare was also keen, and even though there was other work she could be doing, in the comfort of her car if necessary, she was glued to the spot. The weather was inclement, not unusual for the time of the year. The mud was not so bad after a brief interlude of sun, and the CSIs had brought up metal stepping stone-style plates, ensuring a common approach path, with the crime scene manager charged with ensuring that anyone entering or leaving the crime scene was logged.
The crime scene manager, if asked, would have stated that it was one thing to have trained professionals to deal with, it was another matter with keen amateurs. Clare knew him to be a man with an attitude, and she had not asked whether he approved or not, only telling Jim Hughes and the manager that the decision had been made by Superintendent Moulton and Detective Inspector Tremayne, and what they said was what was going to happen.
The manager, a miserable man from near the Scottish border, not popular at Bemerton Road due to his surly nature and his i
nability to smile, would do his job, Clare knew that. He was a consummate professional, and affability or lack of it meant very little. There would be no contamination of the site, that was for sure.
Horsley was pleased to see two crime scene tents being erected, one of them over the shaft entrance into the mound. For once, he was sure that the area would not be devalued after thousands of years by an unfortunate and ill-timed thunderstorm.
Floodlights were brought up close, a generator set twenty yards back, the cables carefully laid in position.
It was six in the evening, and the light had faded, the temperature was dropping, and there was a light drizzle. Jim Hughes called his team around him. Horsley and Clare, along with Sue Boswell, a local historian and Horsley’s nominated assistant, attended as well.
‘Tomorrow, seven in the morning sharp,’ he said. ‘We’ve got time to conduct this correctly, and as long as we have our body out by tomorrow night, then there’s no need to work through the night.’
Horsley wanted to protest, but Hughes was right, there was no need. If the man had died recently, then there would have been no discussion, no bringing the team’s day to an end. It would have been to carry on until the body was out and with Pathology.
Clare phoned Tremayne who phoned the pathologist to tell him one more day before the body was with him. Stuart Collins was not disappointed with the delay. He’d had twelve hours straight on his feet, and he didn’t want another day like the current one.
Chapter 3
Clare was glad of the early night, the chance to catch up on some sleep and to spend time by herself, her cat by her side – not that it did much, old as it was – and the chance to finish the book she had been reading. A whodunnit, but she had figured it out after the first chapter, or she thought she had. It didn’t matter either way, whether it was the butler or the doctor or the ex-wife; it was after all a substitute for her life, devoid of a man. When she was out of her cottage, it didn’t worry her; inside, it did. Not a lot, she would have to admit, and there were benefits, no one to argue with, an easy maintenance life, sufficient money to pay the bills, the mortgage, to indulge in the occasional luxury. She still missed Harry, the man who had moved her more than any other. She had met him at the pub that Tremayne frequented – he had been the licensee – and it hadn’t been long before they were lovers, planning their future together. Then came the night in Avon Hill when she found out that his family were steeped in ancient history and ritual, and that violence in the pursuit of a belief – not something that she could ever understand – had caused Harry and others to commit terrible acts, murder even.
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