Hill of Bones (47 page)

He began to run after it, calling out wildly, ‘Turn the pressure down. Turn the pressure down.’

Houghton could not or would not hear him, and the Flyer gathered speed. The engine on the rear of the carriage gave a mighty groan like some ancient beast risen from the depths of Solsbury Hill. Smallbone cried out, and threw himself to the ground. Malinferno and the other pursuers instinctively did the same. With a second great shudder, and an infernal hissing, the Trevithick steam engine blew up, tossing Houghton forwards into the air like a rag doll. The carriage, still rolling under its own momentum, crushed him under its wheels, before tipping sideways on the steep slope and coming to an abrupt and noisy halt. With the shattered engine still hissing gently, Malinferno and Doll cautiously approached the wreck. There was nothing to be done about Lieutenant Houghton. His neck was broken and he gazed sightlessly into the grey and louring sky.

It was a subdued party that gathered in the Duchess of Avon’s house in Bath later that day. Queen Caroline, still in her guise of Hattie Vaughan, sat beside the fire, clutching her stomach. The pain she was suffering may have been only a symptom of her fears over the impending confrontation with the House of Lords, but it was intense nevertheless, and she thought she might die from it. But even that was a better fate than being divorced, or worse, still being excluded from her husband’s coronation, as had been threatened.

Joe Malinferno and Doll Pocket had hoped for at least a share in any great treasure they may have found on Solsbury Hill. Instead, they were left with the three guineas’ fee from the duchess, and two hobnails to give to Augustus Bromhead when they returned to London. They were the only visible return from the Hawkins map the antiquarian had possessed. The Queen would have liked to reward them for preventing the death of her equerry Guido Sacchi from tainting her already sullied reputation, but, as would be revealed not too much later, the Queen was bankrupt. A pall of silence hung over the three of them.

Finally, Daniel Orford entered the room, bowing courteously at Mrs Vaughan.

‘It is done. The body has been discreetly moved to the duchess’s country estate, where it will appear that some roving gypsy band cut Sacchi’s throat for his money. His death will not reflect on . . . Mrs Vaughan, and he will receive a decent Christian burial.’

Malinferno ground his teeth. ‘As will Houghton, which is more than he deserves, being Sacchi’s murderer. And all because he felt the man was betraying his mistress’s reputation. To slit a man’s throat over such a matter – he must have been insane.’

Doll might have agreed with him normally. But, deluded as he may have been, Houghton had been concerned for the reputation of a queen. She glanced over at the shrunken figure by the fire. Hattie was ignoring the conversation, deep in her own thoughts. Doll touched Joe’s arm.

‘Yes, but as there was no murder on Solsbury Hill, then there cannot have been a murderer. The lieutenant will be remembered as the unfortunate victim of a horseless carriage accident – perhaps its first victim – and there’s an end to it.’

She looked across again at the figure by the fire. It was dark, and for a moment she thought she saw the veil of death hanging over poor Caroline. She shivered and pulled Joe into an embrace.

Queen Caroline survived the Bill of Pains and Penalties, for though it got a majority in the House of Lords, the vote was so slender that Lord Liverpool abandoned the Bill. However, her attempts to attend her husband’s coronation were thwarted. She was turned away from Westminster Abbey on the pretext that she didn’t have a ticket. She went home and succumbed to an intense stomach upset. Not long afterwards, she died, removing one more embarrassing burden from those of an unpopular King.

Summer 2010

‘This is getting bloody ridiculous!’ muttered John Bolitho.

The detective superintendent looked around the top of Solsbury Hill and saw a scene that resembled a military operation.

However, instead of the holes in the ground being gun emplacements, they were meticulously organised excavations, replete with banded measuring sticks and yards of coloured tape marking off grids in the soil. A dozen sweating constables from the Avon and Somerset Constabulary were scraping and sieving, alongside a few press-ganged archeology students. Instead of army officers directing the operations, a couple of straw-hatted and baseball-capped academics were strutting around, clutching clipboards and peering down the holes.

Bolitho’s colleague DCI Bob Bryant mopped his sweating forehead with a handkerchief, for so far this was the hottest day this year.

‘I reckon that nutter has been leading us up the garden path!’ he grumbled. He was not referring to the senior archeologist, even though he thought Roger Humbolt was a pain in the arse. The nutter in question was a serial killer currently banged up on remand in Bristol’s Horfield Prison. While awaiting trial for the murder three years earlier of two women whose bodies had been discovered buried elsewhere in the West Country, he had recently confessed to the killing of another girl, known to have gone missing at the same period, and claimed to have buried her on Solsbury Hill.

‘Bloody Albanians!’ growled the superintendent. ‘You’re probably right, he’s been leading us up the garden path, just to cause us trouble.’

‘And expense!’ replied Bryant, waving a hand at the scene around them. ‘I’ll bet this circus has cost at least a few hundred grand. Think of all the police overtime, the forensic lab fees, the equipment hire, the pathologist and the dentist – and those archeologists are no doubt charging us a bomb!’

John Bolitho agreed gloomily. ‘Three weeks’ work and all they’ve turned up is a collection of junk, none of it remotely connected to Bierta Reka.’ This was the name of the third illegal immigrant who had vanished from the Bristol brothel within a week of the other two.

They walked slowly across the flat area to the top of the grassy bank and ditch, from where, through the heat haze, Bath was visible in the distance. Below them, a burly police sergeant and a constable were scraping soil out of the bank. Bolitho called down to them from above.

‘Anything else in there, Edwards? That was where they found that old knife, wasn’t it?’

The sergeant, stripped to the waist in the heat, straightened up and then shook his head. ‘Damn all, sir! We’ve gone a couple of feet deeper to where those boffins were scratching around, but there’s nothing more in there.’

The two senior officers wandered around several more of the scattered excavations, speaking to the people working there, but nothing new had been discovered.

‘I reckon we’ve got all there is to find now,’ grunted Bolitho.

‘I hope to hell the Chief will call this off now before we make even bigger fools of ourselves. The press is starting to get sarcastic and is muttering about the cost to the ratepayers or whatever they are called these days.’

The DCI shrugged. ‘What else could we do when that bastard claimed he’d buried her up here one night? He knew her name and had the right date, when she vanished from that knocking-shop in St Paul’s.’

Bolitho nodded gloomily. ‘Then said he couldn’t remember exactly where he’d dug the hole, because it was dark! Lying swine, I’ll bet he’s never set foot here.’

They made their way, slowly and reluctantly, towards a large fabric shelter made of white plastic stretched on a metal frame, which stood on the north side of the enclosure. As they approached, the two scientists with the clipboards vanished inside.

‘At least they’ve found three skeletons and a lot of spare bones, even if they have damn all to do with our case,’ observed Bob Bryant. ‘It beats me what’s been going on up here over the years. One skeleton had the bones of a whacking great dog lying alongside it.’

‘Yes, it’s a cross between a cemetery and a bloody junk shop up here!’ replied Bolitho, derisively. ‘Those two fellows in there are at each other’s throat over what it all might mean.’ He waved a hand at the white tent, which was the size of a double garage.

‘Thank God that butch woman is there to keep the peace, as best she can,’ said Bryant. ‘Otherwise we might have another murder up here!’

As they neared the exhibits tent, the entrance guarded by a uniformed PC, they heard voices from inside raised in querulous argument. Bolitho stopped with a sigh.

‘I’m not getting involved in another shouting match now,’ he groaned. ‘Let’s go over to the refreshment trailer and get a drink. It’s too bloody hot to listen to a pair of academics screaming abuse at each other.’

Inside the tent, two rows of Formica-topped trestle tables ran down its length to hold the bizarre collection of finds from Solsbury Hill. Another pair of tables were cluttered with papers, a couple of laptops, a microscope and a collection of surgical and scientific implements.

A tall, thin man strode agitatedly up and down between the tables, his straw boater now removed to reveal a shock of frizzy ginger hair. Prominent pale blue eyes bulged behind his rimless spectacles as he peered erratically at various objects lying on the white Formica.

‘I tell you again, Fortescue, until we get a radio-carbon dating on these, we can’t be sure. Why are you being so damned stubborn?’

The other man was sitting in a plastic picnic chair alongside the microscope. Peter Fortescue was middle-aged, short and stocky, still wearing his peaked baseball cap on his totally bald head. He had a pugnacious face, like a bad-tempered bull terrier, and was scowling at Roger Humbolt as he paraded past the exhibits.

One row of tables was devoted to a ragged collection of bones, some being roughly assembled into three human skeletons, though many of the brown or blackened parts were fragmentary, with some sections missing altogether. The trestles opposite had a motley assortment of objects, dominated by a dirty, but obviously valuable golden cup. Nearby was a large collection of tarnished silver coins, arranged carefully into piles of equal height. A small knife with an intricate handle, a part of an ancient mirror, several badly rusted buckles and part of a metal helmet sat amongst random coins, bits of iron, a few brass shot-gun cartridge bases and other detritus accumulated over more than a millennium.

Fortescue scowled at the other expert. ‘The police are not going to pay for your carbon dating, are they? Now that they know that none of this stuff is relevant to their investigation, they’re going to pull the plug on us.’

He was Director of Field Studies for the Southern Counties Archeology Trust, based in Dorchester, and had been retained as one of the boffins needed to evaluate what had been found during the police investigation. The carrot-haired man was a Senior Lecturer in Archeology at Wessex University, specialising in Dark Age Studies.

Apart from these two, there was also Dr Shirley Wagstaff, an assistant County Archeologist, whose main function had become acting as peacemaker between the other two, whose professional and personal animosity had increased with every day that passed.

Distinctive with her cropped grey hair and rugged, scrubbed face, as well as her man’s shirt and trousers, she stood now with a hand on the aluminium door, ready to go out for a respite from her tiresome colleagues.

‘Give it a rest, chaps!’ she snapped impatiently. ‘The police don’t give a damn about dating anything, now that the Home Office people have confirmed that nothing we’ve found is recent!’

Peter Fortescue agreed with her, as he glared at Humbolt with evil satisfaction.

‘If you want dating done, you’ll have to find the money yourself, Roger. Even the coroner says he’s not interested in any human remains more than a century old. He’s only concerned with holding a treasure-trove inquest on that gold and silver.’

Before they could embroil her again in their disputes, Shirley stepped smartly outside and with a nod to the constable, made her way over towards the police trailer, which had a tea and coffee machine, together with a supply of cold drinks and sandwiches. Inside the spartan vehicle, furnished with a few folding chairs and a spindly table, she found the two senior CID officers, one with a cardboard cup of what the machine claimed was coffee, the other with a can of Fanta. The archeologist had got on well with both men during their frequent visits to the site over past weeks and preferred their company to the two prima donnas she had left back in the tent.

Getting a Diet Coke for herself, she dropped into a spare chair alongside the table at which they were sitting.

‘Too damned hot for digging holes in the ground!’ she declared.

Bolitho nodded his agreement. ‘With a bit of luck, you won’t be doing much more. I suspect that we’ll call it off tomorrow.’

Bob Bryant asked her what would happen to all the excavations that had been made.

‘The county will have to fill them in and restore the whole place, or English Heritage will play hell with us, as it’s a Scheduled Site,’ she replied. ‘The hill has been explored several times before, going right back to Victorian times. There are records about what’s been found, mainly to do with this Iron Age camp.’

‘A wonder they didn’t turn up some of the stuff you’ve managed to unearth this time,’ said the superintendent.

Shirley Wagstaff shrugged. ‘A few trenches can miss most of the stuff. They didn’t have the fancy equipment we’ve got now – metal detectors, ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry gadgets.’

‘I reckon those two police dogs were better than the electronic gizmos,’ observed Bolitho, with a grin. ‘They found all the bones, which I suppose is what you’d expect a dog to do!’

Shirley agreed, but still defended her own technology. ‘Sure, but they were specially trained to sniff out human remains. The gadgets, as you call them, found the places where the soil had been disturbed or where there was metal under the ground.’

The DI was more interested in personalities than objects. ‘What’s the problem with your two colleagues?’ he asked. ‘They always seem to be slagging each other off!’

The woman rolled her eyes upwards in exasperation. ‘They’re like two kids fighting over a football! It all started a couple of years ago when Pete Fortescue wrote a review of a book Roger Humbolt had published about the Saxon invasions. He criticised parts of it and since then, they’ve been sworn enemies.’