The Lost Shrine

by Nicola Ford

  He looked at her doubtfully.

  ‘Look, if you don’t believe me ask Professor’ – she corrected herself – ‘Dame Margaret Bockford. She was with me when I met the dealer. She can corroborate what I’m saying.’

  He hesitated for a moment and then his expression hardened. He looked as if he was about to dismiss her again when a thought suddenly struck her. She reached into her bag and, producing her mobile, she found the note she’d made of the GPS coordinates of the finds and the registration number of the van.

  She turned the screen around to face him. ‘These are the coordinates I jotted down. They were on the photos of the finds being removed from the site – I checked them out, they’re all spot on for the holes we found on our dig. And that’ – she pointed at the screen – ‘is the registration number of the van the seller turned up in when we met him.’

  She was expecting another scornful rebuke. But to her surprise he returned the phone to her and said, ‘Can you email these to me?’

  She nodded eagerly. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  ‘Do you think you can remember what the person you met with looked like?’

  ‘I think so. I’ll certainly give it a go.’

  He picked up his phone and dialled. ‘Sergeant Hughes. I’ve got a young lady here in my office I’d like you to take a statement from.’

  When the sergeant arrived, Stone said, ‘Whatever you may think, Mrs Hills, we do take heritage crime seriously. But we don’t have means without end.’

  As she turned to go he smiled and said, ‘Oh, and Clare, I wouldn’t give too much credence to what Mr Crabbs has to say if I were you. I think he inhabits a different world to the rest of us.’

  Somehow events had conspired to ensure that Sally had once again ended up in the smallest interview room in the station. The tiny window high up in the wall provided the only natural daylight, and rain battered its frosted surface. A recent overhaul had resulted in the walls being given a fresh lick of paint, the results of which could be seen splattered across the floor.

  She had spent more of her working life behind this and a host of similar time-worn Formica tabletops than she cared to remember. She flattered herself that she was good at reading people. So when she’d first joined CID she’d assumed that interviewing suspects would come easily to her. It didn’t take long for it to become painfully apparent that she was anything but a natural when it came to extracting information from recalcitrant interviewees. Some people seemed to have a gift for it. But not her.

  It was a lippy kid she’d picked up for dealing in Gloucester that had changed it all. Despite three solid hours of coaxing, cajoling and questioning he’d stubbornly refused to utter a word. That is, until he’d stood up and hurled the word ‘Motherfucker!’ and a scalding hot cup of tea at her, swiftly followed by the table it had been standing on. She’d just about managed to stop herself from bursting into tears, but she’d been the butt of the station canteen jokes for weeks. Couldn’t handle a kid. No way she was going to make it. She’d decided there and then there was no way she was going to let it happen again. So she’d read every psychology textbook she could lay her hands on and sat in on endless interviews with senior colleagues, pestering them for tips and hints until they’d become sick of it.

  But it had paid off. And now here she was about to question her first suspect in her very own murder inquiry. A uniformed constable stood in the corner of the room and across the table from her sat Damian Kelly. Six feet plus with a thick head of jet-black hair and two days’ growth of stubble, he didn’t look like a man you’d want to cross. She could see why he’d had no trouble hauling Jack Tyler to his feet.

  She took a sip of water from the plastic cup and glanced down at the Manila folder that lay open in front of her.

  ‘Well, Mr Kelly, thank you for coming in to speak to us.’

  ‘It seemed to me I didn’t have very much choice in the matter, now did I?’

  Was it the surname that was doing it or did she detect an almost imperceptible hint of an Irish accent? Sally’s eyes flicked down to the paperwork in front of her. An Irish national. But it looked as if his parents had moved here when he was a kid.

  ‘You’re here voluntarily, Mr Kelly. But you are being interviewed under caution. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

  For the first time he looked agitated. ‘Jesus, what is this? The sergeant said you just wanted to have a word about where Jack was the night before he died. Now you’re arresting me!’ His face was the colour of strawberry ice cream but he looked anything but cool. He was sweating profusely, and his breathing was coming in short bursts.

  Sally said, ‘Calm down, Mr Kelly. You’re not under arrest. It’s just part of the process we’re required to go through when we interview someone. I’m sure you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re simply here to answer a few questions.’

  With shaking hands, he picked up the plastic cup in front of him and took a sip of water. Then, drawing in a deep breath, he puffed out his cheeks and seemed to relax a little.

  Sally asked, ‘Am I right in thinking you were with Jack the evening before he died?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s right. I bumped into Jack down at The Lamb. I was surprised to see him. He hadn’t been out and about for a few weeks.’

  ‘Would you have described yourself as a close friend of Mr Tyler’s?’

  He said, ‘Not especially. We knocked around together sometimes. Both enjoyed a good craic, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘And was Jack up for the craic when you saw him that night?’

  He shook his head. ‘He was sitting in the corner on his own with a face as long as a clock.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘He said bugger all until I’d poured a pint or two inside him. That loosened him up a bit.’

  Sally said, ‘That was very generous of you, Mr Kelly.’

  ‘Well, he was a mate. I’d been down to Salisbury and won a few quid in the afternoon. No point in having good fortune if you don’t share it around, now, is there?’

  ‘A mate’. Not exactly how he’d described him a moment ago. She tucked the comment away for now.

  Sally asked, ‘What did Jack have to say for himself when he loosened up?’

  ‘He was on a bit of a downer.’

  ‘Did he say why that was exactly?’

  ‘He’d lost his job a few weeks before.’

  Sally said, ‘That’s rather odd, Mr Kelly. According to our records Jack Tyler hadn’t worked in over a year.’

  Damian Kelly paused, and Sally watched as he stared down at his hands, clasped tightly together in front of him. After a few seconds he looked up at her. ‘I don’t suppose it matters now the poor bastard’s dead. Jack did a bit of cash-in-hand work.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  He said, ‘All sorts of odds and sods. He did a bit of groundwork on building sites, the odd bit of gardening. He took on anything as long as it was outside. You couldn’t fault the lad for trying. He’s had a go at most things since he was first laid off by Western.’

  There was only one ‘Western’ everybody had heard of in these parts. ‘Western. Western Archaeology.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s right. He was doing OK for himself until a couple of years back. Then when the building industry ground to a halt, the digging did too. Jack and a whole bunch of his mates were laid off at the same time. Poor bastards. I ask you, what use is an out-of-work archaeologist to the world?’

  She had some sympathy with Damian Kelly’s view, though she doubted David would have agreed. And if the Hart Unit was in as perilous a state as David had suggested, she hoped to God she wasn’t going to have to find out any time soon.

  ‘So since then he’d been working cash-in-hand. Just picking up the odd labouring job.’

  He said, ‘That’s right. Though he had a stroke o
f luck four or five months ago. Bumped into some bloke he was at university with who put him onto a bit of digging work up Stroud way.’

  Sally said, ‘A building job.’

  Kelly shook his head. ‘Nah. On a dig up there somewhere. He was made up about it.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  He shook his head again. ‘I don’t rightly know. Though if I had to take a guess I’d say it was probably the drink. Jack knew how to put it away when he had the chance, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been let go for turning up to work the worse for wear after he’d tied one on the night before. All I know for sure is he got fired. Like I said, we just knocked around a bit. But what I do know is that night in the pub he’d had a skinful. And by the end of the night he was telling everyone who’d listen what a cow the woman in charge was.’

  Sally couldn’t believe it. This was starting to have a horribly familiar ring to it. How many women were there running digs in the Cotswolds?

  ‘Did he happen to mention her name?’

  ‘No, but everyone knew who he meant.’

  Sally almost didn’t want to ask. ‘Oh? Why was that?’

  ‘It was that mad bitch who hung herself. Some of the lads were talking about it just after it happened – when it was all over the news. And Jack was in here shouting his mouth off, saying he reckoned she’d got what she deserved.’

  Sally leant in towards him. ‘And Jack Tyler actually said that, did he, Mr Kelly? He said Beth Kinsella “got what she deserved”.’ It might mean nothing, but it was a strange turn of phrase for someone talking about a suicide.

  ‘If that’s what her name was, he did. I remember because Toby – the barman – said he thought it was a bit harsh. And I told him to ignore Jack because it was just the drink talking.’

  Sally took a sip of her water and leant back. Her backside was beginning to feel numb on the hard plastic chair. She looked up at the clock. They’d only been going twenty minutes. She skimmed through her notes until she found the section she was looking for.

  ‘Right, I think that’s enough chit-chat, don’t you, Mr Kelly? Let’s cut to the chase. When was the last time you saw Jack Tyler alive?’

  He stared down intently at the tabletop. ‘I just told you. I saw him in The Lamb the night before he died.’

  ‘So you did, Mr Kelly. But when was the last time you actually saw him?’

  He glanced up at her, his gaze flitting round the room distractedly. ‘I told you, it was when Jack left the pub that night.’ He straightened himself up in his chair. ‘Look, I don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

  Sally stood up, walked away from him and turned. Returning to the table she folded her arms, but this time stayed standing. Reaching into the wad of papers she withdrew the still of Damian Kelly looking up at the CCTV camera and tossed it down in front of him. ‘Recognise that?’

  Damian Kelly drew the image towards him. His face drained of all colour. He didn’t say a word.

  ‘Well, to me that looks very much like a photo of you, Mr Kelly.’

  ‘I can explain.’

  ‘For your sake, Mr Kelly, I hope so. Because I’d very much like an explanation of why you claim to have last seen Jack Tyler when he left The Lamb that night – which other witnesses put at just before eleven – when we have you on camera in Snuff Street with Jack at’ – she picked up the photo and made a show of reading off the time from the bottom right-hand corner – ‘eleven forty-six. Three quarters of an hour later.’

  Her visit to see Mark Stone might have been an unmitigated disaster as far as getting him to take her seriously about Beth’s death was concerned, but work on-site was going like a dream. Not only had they found the ditch surrounding what seemed to be a group of offering pits, but by the time she’d got back from Stroud, Malcolm – who was proving to be worth his weight in gold – had spotted what appeared to be a ring ditch, though this one looked as if it was considerably smaller in its proportions than the first. She’d phoned David to tell him last night and he’d suggested bringing Jason Dempsey up from the department to get some aerial shots with the department’s drone. Clare had jumped at the chance.

  Now Jason – universally known as Flyboy to his colleagues – and David were standing on the side of the trench inspecting the equipment. Looking at David, head bent over the miniature aircraft, Clare thought he looked like nothing so much as an overexcited ten-year-old who’d just woken up to the best Christmas present ever.

  ‘So how high can it go?’ asked David.

  Flyboy chortled. ‘Way higher than the CAA regs will let us take it. So you’d better hope we never find out.’

  Clare strolled towards them. ‘Is this a boys-only thing or can anyone join in?’

  David waved her over. ‘You’ve got to come and see this. Look, it’s got a fully functional digital SLR and you can change the settings remotely when it’s flying.’

  This was Clare’s sort of aerial photography. A world away from her traumatic experiences on the second-hand scaffolding tower at Hungerbourne. The only good thing about her near-death experience on the forty-year-old piece of junk was that it had convinced David they should never use it again. And that was just fine by her. Any device that could take shots of the site from fifty metres up while the photographer kept their feet firmly planted on the ground was the type of kit she had every intention of becoming better acquainted with. And some of the drone shots from other archaeological sites she’d seen online were truly spectacular.

  She asked, ‘Can I have a go?’

  David said, ‘Sure, Flyboy will show you how.’

  Flyboy shook his head. ‘No can do on this one, Dave old chum.’ David winced. Clare smiled. He’d always hated having his name shortened. And, looking at the grin on Flyboy’s face, she suspected he was just as well aware of the fact as she was. ‘CAA regs again, I’m afraid. You need to do the training first. We can arrange that when you’re back in the department. But there’s nothing to stop me from showing you how it works.’

  He picked up the drone and held it out towards her. When he handed it to her she nearly dropped it, the thing was so heavy.

  ‘Bloody hell. It weighs a tonne.’

  ‘Not quite a tonne. But it is pretty hefty. It’s all of the kit that’s strapped to it. It has to be pretty robust.’

  David smiled. ‘Shall we put it to the test?’

  Thirty minutes later Clare and David were standing staring at a laptop screen in the back of David’s Land Rover. Changes in the pitch of the thrumming that was coming from overhead were the result of Flyboy’s acrobatic manoeuvring of the drone above the now empty cuttings.

  Clare said, ‘It’s difficult to see from this angle with the light on the screen.’

  David said, ‘Don’t be a half-wit all your life, Clare. Come and stand here in front of me. Then we can both see it.’

  She shuffled awkwardly into position.

  One hand on the mouse, David half turned to yell, ‘Hey, Flyboy, can you adjust the focus on that thing?’ his arm drawing her closer to him in the process.

  She suddenly became uncomfortably aware of the rise and fall of his chest as they both struggled to pick out the image on the screen in front of them.

  He adjusted the angle of the screen. ‘That’s better. There it is.’ He pointed with the cursor. ‘Do you see, Clare?’

  She leant forward, peering at the image, grateful to have something that demanded her attention. ‘Yes. Yes. It’s as clear as day.’

  David said, ‘It’s wheels within wheels.’

  ‘A wheel within a square to be absolutely accurate,’ Clare corrected him.

  He laughed. ‘Pedant! But there’s no doubt in my mind now. That thin, circular feature looks like a foundation trench for a wall of some kind. And the square ditch around it is much larger in scale and proportion. It’s exactly like the one they found on Hayling Island. Even down to the pits with the votive deposits in the temenos.’

  ‘The teme what?’


  ‘The temenos. The precinct that surrounded the holy of holies. When this thing was in use no one but the priest or Druid would have been allowed inside the inner part.’

  ‘It still makes me shudder to think about what happened to those children.’

  ‘You’ve got to remember it was a different world then. Their values weren’t our values. And human sacrifice wasn’t common. As far as we can tell it only seems to have been practised in the most dire of circumstances. Given the radio carbon dates we’ve got for the infant burials, there’s every possibility that our infants met their fate when the Romans were first making their presence felt in these parts. Can you imagine what it must have been like when the Iron Age people round here first saw the legions marching towards them? The local population must have been scared witless. Perhaps they felt their only way out was a triple death.’

  Clare said, ‘You think that’s why there were three infants sacrificed?’

  ‘And all at the same time, remember. Those radio carbon dates are pretty much identical. But there was more to it than that. They were all killed in different ways.’

  ‘Well, two of them were,’ Clare corrected him. ‘Jo said she couldn’t find the cause of death for the third one. It could have died of natural causes. The infant mortality rate must have been sky high in the Iron Age.’

  ‘True enough, but there is another explanation. Do you remember that chap they found in a peat bog in Cheshire in the eighties, Lindow Man?’ Clare nodded. ‘Well, he’d been hit on the head, garrotted and then had his throat cut. And we know from later written sources that sometimes the third mode of sacrifice was poison or drowning. They may have thought that the three deaths together somehow boosted the value of their offering to the gods.’ David shook his head. ‘Didn’t do the poor sods any bloody good though. Within four years of Claudius invading there was a legionary fortress up the road in Gloucester.’