Cavalier Case (18 page)

But to Zena's further fury (although it seemed to Jemima herself not unreasonable in view of the large concourse of strangers present) the doors of the big house were firmly locked. Unlike Lackland Court, Taynford Grange was also remarkably secure so far as its other ground-floor entrances were concerned.

"What a lack of style!" exclaimed Zena, finally accepting that she was to be frustrated. "As if we were all thieves or spying on her. I was longing to show you her bedroom, among other things. Gawain and Jane between them went really quite mad: a sixteenth-century Polish warrior's campaign tent, erected at vast expense to block out all the light in that wonderful bedroom. They say that Max Manfred took one look at it and turned on his heel, saying 'Here I could never sleep.' But then again that may have been the point ... So where does one go to the loo, for instance? Jane thinks of no-one but herself."

All this took some time. Finally, the pair of them returned rather crestfallen to Charlotte Lackland, standing roughly where they had left her—except that she appeared to have lost all three of her children.

"The loo is in that awful tent over there," she observed drily. "I've already taken Dessie three times and now he wants to go to the Gents."

In this way, Jemima, Charlotte and Zena were standing all three of them side by side when that remarkable and—at least to Charlotte— distressing announcement came over the tannoy. A moment later, Nell raced up, even faster than she had departed. She grabbed Zena's hand, ignoring her step-mother (and Jemima).

"Come on, Aunt Zena," she panted. "Come on. You've simply got to see. It's ghoulish. It's grisly. Like a horror movie. And did she get a shock? You'll love it."

The three women, at a pace dictated by Nell, advanced rapidly towards the north side of the house. The first sight which struck Jemima was neither ghoulish nor grisly in the slightest. It was, however, pathetic. Jane Manfred, her shoulders in their liquid green silk cradled by Gawain, was sobbing convulsively. She did not even put that tiny lace handkerchief to her eyes, but something large, plain and masculine-looking, which surely belonged to someone other than the Green Knight—Marcus maybe or even the Home Secretary? Her weeping did not even stop when, after a while, she gulped out some words; as a result it was impossible to tell even what language she was speaking. Gawain on the other hand could be clearly understood.

"But Jane, my angel," he was saying. "Don't be upset, it could be such a
feature
."

Jane Manfred stopped crying. She glared at him.

"Haf you no heart?" she demanded. Her accent—whatever it was—was unusually strong. "You silly little man with your talk of features. There must be a proper burial naturally. For this poor, these poor—" she hesitated and cried a little again.

I think one's first sight of death is so upsetting." Gillian Gibson's intervention—from a distance away, her view blocked by the substan lal form of her husband—was undoubtedly well meant. But it had the effect of turning Jane Manfred's disdainful gaze from Gawain in her direction,

My dear, of what do you talk? I have seen death many times, and not in your comfortable hospices either. But this is not a body, these are bones. Someone is dead here, long ago I think, someone buried here secretly, and it is for this I weep. For these poor bones never found before. And now we have caused them with our clever plan to be disturbed. It is for this I weep. I am a foolish old woman. I should not have made this plan." She put the masculine-looking handkerchief to her eyes again.

It was true. The tannoy had been inaccurate. Lady Manfred had not found a body. She had found a skeleton.

Would Charlotte have been quite so upset, Jemima wondered, if she had known that it was not so much a body that had been discovered as a skeleton that had been dug up? The word "body" conveyed something recently dead—a corpse in fact. But the body in question had been dead long enough to disintegrate into bones, even if these bones had preserved something of their anatomical shape as they lay, so that to an amateur glance, the human nature of the skeleton was not at issue. And the skull, seeming to stare up at them with sightless eyes and large grinning teeth, clinched the matter.

Afterwards, Jemima would recall with a certain embarrassment that she had virtually pushed her way to the edge of the grave—as the open trench before Lady Manfred now proved to be. On second thoughts, it was surely strange how well preserved the bones were: perhaps it was something to do with the soil? Jemima noticed that the soil was surprisingly sandy: but then she realised how close to the river Taynford Grange lay; the lie of the land concealed the fact that the house was in effect built high up on the bank of the river, even if the main facade faced away from it (and south).

Had there been a coffin? There did not seem to be any traces of one. How long ago had the body been buried? Was this another matter for the police and Detective Inspector Mike Spain? All these questions ran through her head as she gazed at the bones. Another surprise at her feet was a sheet of transparent polythene: how on earth had that been provided so quickly?

"It's a man," said an aggressive (male) voice in the little knot of close spectators. The accent was what Jemima privately thought of as working-class public school (or vice versa: that is, the owner of the voice might be socially mobile in any one of two directions). "At least we know that. Been dead for centuries, too. I realised that immediately when I dug the old geezer up this morning, skull and all. " Jemima looked again at the skull: it was a macabre and dominating sight. She felt a pang either of pity or revulsion, she was not quite sure which. Lady Manfred's distress—it later turned out that the skull had been the first object she disinterred—was the more understandable. "Alas poor Yorick," went on the authoritative voice, "and all that. I nearly spouted the whole speech, I can tell you."

"How do you know it's a man?" another (female) voice. It was Nell Meredith, leaning forward over the trench with an expression Jemima could only describe as gloating. For a moment, Jemima even wondered . . . Nell . . . some kind of practical joke . . . she was interrupted by the aggressive male voice.

"Look at the pelvis. Quite different. To say nothing of the skull. I remember my biology from school. Don't they do biology at private schools? Besides, I take an interest in the past, don't I? Bones are part of history, if you like."

It was Zena Meredith who exclaimed: "Dave Smith! For God's sake! What on earth are you doing here?"

"And Cathy?" Charlotte added, rather more politely.

"
And
Cathy!" repeated Zena.

Dave Smith and the young woman next to him who proved to be Cathy, the girl gardener from Lackland Court, were both, unlike the Home Secretary's little party, wearing jeans. They also both had rather loose thin fair hair of about the same length and were roughly the same build and height. But where Dave Smith's expression was a mixture of 'tnpudence and amusement, Cathy looked nervous and rather upset. I was doing the digging, wasn't I? At the request of him," Dave Smith indicated Gawain. "And she's the botanical expert. Cathy. Lady Manfred wanted one. She got one." He nudged his sister. "And now I'm covering the event for the local paper, and other newspapers of even greater renown. I bet this is an important historical event. And I'm here to report it." He laughed. "We Smiths do have a lucky touch! What I mean is, we have quite a talent for stumbling on unexpected corpses, don't we? Ms. Meredith," he added after a pause. The appellation gave the impression of being more cheeky than polite.

From somewhere within his skin-tight jeans, Dave Smith produced a small camera and proceeded, before the eyes of the stunned assembly, to photograph various conjunctions of bones, Home Secretary, Lady Manfred. As a result of this, at least one mystery was cleared up, leaving the greater mystery of the skeleton itself intact. It was now explained, what had just begun to puzzle Jemima, how Lady Manfred's single ceremonial dig of her spade had managed in some way, at once magic and macabre, to turn up an entire corpse—correction, an entire skeleton.

Dave Smith had in fact been deputed by Gawain, with the aid of his sister Cathy, to dig everything necessary for the ceremony carefully in advance; thus Lady Manfred would be able to perform some kind of conjuring trick, turning over a single sod. Now, with the nonchalant confidence of one about to break yet another fascinating aspect of the Cavalier Case to a wider world via the media, Dave Smith outlined what he had in fact done.

He had happened on the first bones by accident, but had subsequently taken much trouble to uncover the entire skeleton in its surprising state of preservation. With the aid of Cathy—sworn to secrecy—he had then mantled the skeleton in clear polythene to protect it from the ceremonial spade. This explained, surely, the extraordinarily neat way in which the bones were laid out, even though Dave himself denied it.

"No, of course I touched nothing, moved nothing. I'm a historian, aren't I? I'm not some kind of ghoul." Zena Meredith gave a little snort. "I thought it would be just great for her Ladyship to uncover it all. Lovely publicity! Lovely pictures! No offense, Lady M, certainly didn't mean to distress you. Not for one minute. I mean, he knew all about it—skull and crossbones and the whole lot—the whole thing would look so adorable, his very words, sort of framed among the floorboards." Once more Dave Smith, a.k.a. D. J. Smith local historian (and gravedigger), jerked his thumb in the direction of Gawain.

"Now, Jane darling, I can explain," began the decorator. "An adorable
memento mori
was what I had in mind." His voice sank to a whisper. Jemima thought: His chief client! He's been in a corner before, no doubt, but not much tighter than this one, I suspect.

"Look here, young man—" began the Home Secretary, suddenly aware that D. J. Smith was not only the centre of attention, reasonably enough, but had also somehow assumed a mantle of authority to which he surely had no right. "Do you realise that this might be a case for the police? Marcus?" But the dutiful P.P.S. was already at his side. "Faraday?" He looked for his detective, who was already in conclave with the bystanding policeman. "What's the procedure here?" he went on, followed by: "What happens about my speech?" And lastly: "What do we tell the Press?" It was the unmistakable voice of the politician.

After that Jemima could hear words like "coroner" and "Coroner's Rules" repeated several times and then "Chief Constable" and "our pathologist"—the latter spoken first doubtfully then with increasing authority—emanating from this particular conversation. Marcus' baritone (his extrovert mood had entirely disappeared in favour of a discreetly helpful stance) could be heard far less than the Home Secretary's bass: quiet enough on private occasions, Stuart Gibson somehow deemed his House of Commons boom to be appropriate to the recent dramatic turn of events. He was definitely booming at Dave Smith, who stood, arms akimbo, in what Jemima supposed was a characteristic attitude when faced with an angry force of authority, ^athy, on the other hand, cowered at his side.

From the other little huddle, as represented by Jane Manfred, ^awain, and, at her own volition, Zena Meredith, very different scraps of conversation emerged. Jane Manfred, recovered from her tfutial shock, tears finally dried, was clearly very angry. The phrase "an adorable
memento mori
" excited her particular disgust, especially wnen she discovered that Gawain had envisaged the skeleton lying displayed on some kind of rich velvet bed, "burgundy I thought", beneath a pane of glass set into the floor of the new conservatory. (As Dave Smith had correctly indicated.)

"Has death no
privacy
?." she asked sternly.

Jemima suddenly remembered visiting some stately home near Cambridge when she had been an undergraduate. She had gone with a party of friends—surely Rupert Durham had been among them.'— and they had been shown a skeleton of a nun, a pre-Reformation inhabitant of the place, which you peered at through a glass window in the wall. She entirely agreed with Jane Manfred. Then as now it had seemed a curious invasion of privacy; although Rupert—yes, he had been there, it was the summer of their romance—Rupert had brushed aside her qualms. He started instead to talk about the social consequences of the Reformation: "That nun, you know, played an important economic role ..." She had still shivered. She shivered just a little now.

The formation of the two rival groups in earnest colloquy left a third group among the little knot of spectators around the grave to create itself. This consisted of Jemima, Nell, Charlotte Lackland, who had by now re-acquired Dessie and was holding him firmly by the hand—and by default the Home Secretary's wife, since neither her husband nor anyone else had seen fit to include Gillian Gibson in the first group. Nell was hopping up and down in an excited state which bordered on the hysterical. Her behaviour was all the more striking since alone of the spectators—unless you counted Gawain before Lady Manfred took him to task—she greeted the discovery with unalloyed, even gleeful, enthusiasm.

"Does it
smell
!" she asked at one point, leaning over the grave to get a better look. "I bet it does, I bet it smells."

"Oh shut up, Nell, for God's sake." Charlotte in contrast still looked rather sick as when the announcement of finding the so-called "body" had come over the tannoy; although she now had the missing Dessie firmly by the hand.

Dessie took up the chant "Nell says it smells" with some delight. This quickly became "Nell smells, Nell smells," until Nell herself lunged at him to shut him up.

"If it smells of anything, it smells of history," threw in Jemima hurriedly, to keep some kind of family peace. Happily the mention of history—that new buzzword in Nell's life—distracted Nell from her step-brother's impertinence. As a matter of fact, there was no smell at all, not even newly turned earth, since Lady Manfred's expensive musky perfume effectively drowned all other scents, including the more delicate lily-of-the-valley perfume Charlotte and Zena held in common.