Skeleton Hill (3 page)

3

T
he next morning a woman called Miss Hibbert walked into Manvers Street Police Station with three greyhounds and a large bone. ‘I’ve always obeyed the law,’ she told the desk sergeant, ‘and I want to know if I can keep this.’

Sergeant Austin, with eighteen years’ experience, had seen some shocking things across this desk. He eyed the bone without much interest. ‘You want to keep it?’

‘For these chaps. They’re rescue dogs. Life hasn’t given them much in the way of treats. Do you have any idea of the disgraceful way so-called sportsmen treat greyhounds when they can’t race any more?’

Sergeant Austin sidestepped the question with one of his own. ‘Where did you get the bone, ma’am?’

‘Up on Lansdown. I give them a good run whenever I can. It’s the ideal place to take them. I thought it was a piece of wood at first, and then I saw it had the shape of a bone and I thought I’d better check with you in case it’s human.’

‘Human? Let’s hope not,’ Sergeant Austin said, turning the thing over in his hands.

Catching sight of the bone again, one of the dogs reared up and tried to take it back.

‘Get down, you brute!’

‘Who are you calling a brute? There’s no need for that,’ Miss Hibbert said. ‘He’s muzzled. He can’t bite you. Down, Hector.’ Sergeant Austin rubbed the back of his hand. ‘He got me with his claw.’

‘Your own fault. You shouldn’t have shown him the bone. Has he drawn blood?’

‘If you really want to know, he has.’

‘Then I’m sorry, and I’m speaking for Hector as well. It wasn’t intentional. We kept within the law by wearing the muzzle.’

‘It’s a claw mark, not a bite,’ the sergeant said, rubbing at the spot. ‘He needs restraining.’

‘I hope you’re not suggesting I tie up his paws as well as his jaw.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Let me see, sergeant.’ The speaker was the police doctor, who happened to be on his way into the police station to carry out more medicals. ‘One of these dogs attacked you?’

Miss Hibbert, outraged, said, ‘Absolutely not. Hector was being playful.’

To his credit Sergeant Austin said it wasn’t a problem.

The doctor said, ‘Let’s see. Just a scratch, then. Are you up to date with your tetanus jabs?’

A silence.

‘I’ll see to that shortly. I have some antitoxin on the premises.’

‘It’s nothing. I don’t need a jab.’

‘Sorry, sergeant, I must insist for your own safety.’

‘Okay, thanks,’ the sergeant said without any gratitude at all.

‘And what are you doing with that femur?’ the doctor said. ‘It looks human to me.’

The bone was taken into the CID office and shown to Peter Diamond. He had no training in forensic anthropology, but if the doctor thought the thing looked human it had to be taken seriously. He went downstairs to speak to Miss Hibbert, who by this time had taken the dogs outside to the car park. Silver-haired and sturdy, with a pale full moon of a face, she was in a Bavarian hat, tweed suit and brogues.

‘What I’d like to do,’ Diamond said, when he’d heard her story, ‘is go up to Lansdown with you and see exactly where you found the bone.’

‘I just walked all the way into town,’ she said. ‘That was downhill. If you think I’m tramping all the way up again, you’ve got another think coming.’

He offered to drive.

‘With the dogs? I’m not leaving them here.’

‘Are they all right in a car?’

‘They’re angels . . . if you treat them right.’

With the angels on the back seat, he managed the drive without anything worse than a damp nose prodding the back of his neck. True, in the excitement when he stopped the car he felt a drumbeat on his shoulders, but no permanent damage was done.

Lansdown was at its most enchanting under a cloudless sky.

Miss Hibbert said, ‘To hell with the law. I’m going to take off the muzzles.’

Diamond said, ‘I didn’t hear that.’

‘The muzzles,’ she said, as if to a deaf man. ‘There’s no one in sight except us, so I’m taking them off.’ And while he was locking the car she released the dogs altogether. They raced away across the open down.

The cool air at this altitude was as good as champagne after the humidity of the city. ‘I should come here more often,’ he said, filling his lungs. ‘Is this their regular walk?’

‘Every day, rain or shine. Thanks to you, they’re getting it twice over.’

He asked to be shown where the bone had been found. She led him across a field and down a steep incline towards a fallen oak tree much covered in lichen. It must have been down for some years. The fine parts of the root system had long since succumbed to the weather and children at play, leaving only the major roots exposed in a display reminding him of the Gorgon’s head in the Roman Baths Museum.

‘Here?’

‘I didn’t see precisely where they got it from,’ Miss Hibbert said, ‘but they were fighting over it when I caught up with them, so I think it was hidden here somewhere.’

On cue, Hector raced in and started burrowing in the soil below the roots. He was joined by the others. The ground looked soft. ‘Stop them doing that, will you?’ Diamond said. ‘This could be a crime scene for all I know.’

Miss Hibbert produced a rubber ball from her handbag. ‘Try throwing this down the hill.’

‘Me?’

‘They like you, I can tell. Besides, men are better at throwing.’ ‘I’m supposed to be working,’ he said, secretly pleased to win the dogs’ approval. He flung the ball as far down the slope as he could and the dogs chased after it. Gratifying. He’d never thought keeping a dog was worth the trouble of exercising it. Now he wasn’t so sure. His cat didn’t chase anything except birds and mice. Try throwing a ball for Raffles and you’d end up fetching it yourself, watched with disdain by a superior being.

He paced the area, studying the ground, thinking back to his lunchtime conversation with Wigfull about the missing cavalier. The re-enactment of the battle must have happened here or hereabouts. But he couldn’t imagine the femur having anything to do with the lost lecturer, Rupert Hope. The stained off-white appearance suggested it had been in the ground for years. Miss Hibbert’s greyhounds hadn’t had a meal from it.

His search produced nothing more suspicious than some cigarette-ends, a flattened beer can and an empty Smarties tube. ‘Have you ever seen anyone acting suspiciously here?’

‘Doing what?’ Miss Hibbert asked.

‘I don’t know. I’m asking you.’

‘I’ve seen children climbing on the trunk and running up and down, but I wouldn’t call that suspicious.’

‘How long has the tree been down?’

‘Years and years. As long as I can remember.’

The dogs returned with the ball and dropped it at Diamond’s feet and gazed up at him with confidence. ‘You win,’ he said, stooping. The ball was damp to the touch. He threw it downhill again. ‘I can’t keep doing this. Do you live nearby, Miss Hibbert?’

‘Only a short way off, in Upper Langridge. I gave my address to that policeman I first spoke to, the one who went for a tetanus injection.’

‘Anti-tetanus, I hope.’

‘I’m not going to get that bone for my dogs to chew on, am I?’

He smiled, admiring her nerve. Staunch single women like this, used to standing up for their rights, had his respect. ‘Not now we’re treating it as human.’

‘You don’t know for certain.’

‘That’s true. A fair number of the bones brought in to the police turn out to be animal. If that’s the case, you could get it back.’

‘If I’d been less public-spirited, no one would have known.’

‘True, but if it was your leg bone, or mine, we wouldn’t want it thrown to the dogs, even charming dogs like Hector, would we?’ She appeared to agree, but was looking thoughtful. ‘Do you think there could be more bones under here?’

He put up both hands. ‘Don’t go there. Don’t even think about letting the dogs do any more digging.’

By the end of the day the area around the tree was marked off with crime scene tape and a luckless constable was posted to guard the scene overnight.

In the morning, a forensic anthropologist confirmed the femur as human, probably from an adult of average height. Further tests would yield more information. In theory that single bone could reveal its owner’s sex, age at death, body weight, ethnic origin and how long ago death had occurred. ‘Bloody marvellous,’ Diamond said, to encourage even more co-operation. ‘I don’t know how you people do it.’

He was told they’d do it even better if he provided more bones from the same individual.

He returned to Lansdown with two of his team, DC Ingeborg Smith and DI Keith Halliwell, and watched the white-suited crime scene investigators slowly sift the earth below the upended root system.

Diamond told his colleagues about the mass of information an anthropologist could get from a single bone. ‘As a first step we want an estimate of the length of time since death. Carbon dating should establish that much.’

‘Do you think it’s ancient?’ Halliwell said.

‘It didn’t look fresh to me. There was a Civil War battle up here three or four hundred years ago. I expect some bodies were buried in haste.’

‘There were Iron Age settlements long before that,’ Ingeborg said in one of those demonstrations of learning that didn’t always go down well. ‘The bone could be two thousand years old.’

‘How can they tell if it’s male or female?’ Halliwell asked, getting back to the wonders of anthropology.

Diamond shrugged.

‘Not obvious from a femur,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Much easier with a skull or a pelvis.’

Halliwell rolled his eyes upwards.

Halliwell rolled his eyes ‘You did ask,’ she said.

‘I’m in awe,’ he said.

‘Liar.’

Diamond stepped in. ‘Look, I didn’t bring you two up here to knock spots off each other. Just enjoy the scenery. It beats sitting in front of a computer.’

The excavation was slow. After another hour, all the searchers had found was a ringpull and bits of broken root. The man in charge, a cantankerous character called Duckett, reported that they’d reached a level where the earth was more compacted.

‘You mean it hasn’t been disturbed?’ Diamond said.

‘Listen up, will you? I didn’t say that. The section we’ve just cleared was extra loose, as if someone had dug here in the past few weeks.’

‘Like Miss Hibbert’s dogs?’

‘More than that. It’s too much for animal activity alone.’

‘Why would anyone come digging here?’

‘Maybe it was something to do with the re-enactment of the Battle of Lansdown, troops digging themselves in and using the tree as a shield.’

‘Good thought. Did any of you watch this event?’

Nobody had.

The digging resumed.

Twenty minutes later, one of the team in the trench said, ‘There’s something here.’ She had exposed a patch of off-white.

‘Another bone?’ Diamond said. ‘Hook it out and we’ll see.’

Duckett glared at him as if he was a vandal. ‘If you don’t mind, superintendent, we’ll do this the approved way, leaving everything in situ.’

Soon enough, the outlines of the object were revealed.

‘It
is
a bone,’ Diamond said.

‘A tibia,’ Ingeborg said.

Soon some foot bones were unearthed at the lower end of the tibia.

‘Can we get someone else clearing at the top end where the skull is?’ Diamond asked. The painstaking progress frustrated him.

‘We’ll do this in our own good time,’ Duckett said. ‘In all probability it’s been here for hundreds of years. An hour or two more isn’t going to make much difference.’

Almost as if it was done to provoke the police, the excavation slowed. Brushes, rather than trowels, were being used. At regular intervals photos were taken.

‘What time is it?’ Duckett eventually asked.

‘Three thirty, just gone,’ Diamond said.

‘Is it, by Jove? Take a break, people. We’ve been going two hours.’

‘You’re on a job,’ Diamond said.

‘Yes, and it’s back-breaking work. You should try it.’

‘All right, then.’

‘I didn’t mean that literally.’

The police were forced to watch the CSI team sit down, open their flasks and look at newspapers. Suspicion hung in the air that the break was being prolonged just to spite Diamond. ‘At this rate, we’ll be here all night,’ he said to Halliwell.

‘I heard that,’ Duckett said, looking up from his crossword. ‘You don’t have to worry. We stop at five.’

‘
Five?
’

‘Terms and conditions of employment. We’re a private firm. Will you be guarding the site overnight?’

‘He’s winding you up, guv,’ Halliwell said.

‘I think he means it,’ Ingeborg said.

Duckett hadn’t finished. ‘Now that we’ve located remains, we’ll need to put up a tent to screen off the trench.’

‘How long will that take?’ Diamond asked.

‘Half an hour, no more.’

‘We can do that, me and my officers.’

‘No, thanks. Not while we’re at work in the trench.’

‘But you’re not in the trench now.’

‘It’s a specialised job.’

‘What – putting up a bloody tent? Ridiculous.’

‘This isn’t one of your boy scout tents, officer. This is a metal-framed inflatable job, property of the firm. I can’t allow any untrained person to handle it.’

Diamond was about to erupt, but Halliwell said, ‘Leave it, guv. He’s going to have the last word whatever you say.’

‘How do they find these people?’

The break came to an end about four. Ingeborg phoned the station to get a man out to guard the site.

‘I was expecting answers by now,’ Diamond said, pacing the turf. ‘All I’m getting is high blood pressure.’

After another twenty minutes there was a clicking sound from the trench. Duckett was snapping his fingers.

Ingeborg said, ‘I think he’s asking for you.’

‘He’s asking for something, that’s for sure,’ Diamond muttered.

He went over. More of the skeleton had been revealed, enough to see that the leg bones were at an angle, as if the body had lain on its side in a foetal position.

Work on the dig was about to stop for the day. More photographs were being taken and one of the CSI team was unloading the protective tent from the van.