Worthless Remains (28 page)

Oh, OK, everyone can make two. I sauntered across the lawn towards the dig. The new camera operator was busy pointing his camera and everyone else was taking pictures on their mobiles, so it was probably worth having a look, though generally I'm not desperately keen on dead people, fresh or dried. When I got there I could not get near the trench; everyone was talking at once, Cy was talking on his mobile, Emms was having some sort of argument with Andrea while Julie was rattling on about something to Guy from which I only caught the words ‘spanner in the works'. Stoneking was there, enjoying himself.

‘Everyone seems very excited,' I said.

‘Yes, it's the grave goods that got them all worked up,' he said.

That was more like it. ‘What kind of grave goods?'

‘A tin of Huntley & Palmers biscuit assortment.'

I opened my mouth and closed it and opened it again. When my goldfish impression was done the implications had sunk in. I fought my way to the edge of the trench. The skeleton was now partially exposed, lying on its back. The body had been arranged with hands on its chest, as in a Christian burial. By its left side lay a round, six-inch mud-encrusted rusty biscuit tin on which the brand name Huntley & Palmer was still faintly visible in faded pink. A heated discussion was under way.

‘We can't open it,' Andrea said firmly. ‘We can't even lift it out of position. Not until the police have looked at it.'

‘Are you mad?' Cy nearly shouted. ‘It'll be the best take of the entire shoot! At last a bit of mystery! Looking for a Roman villa where you think there's a Roman villa and then finding a Roman villa is utterly boring, but this is Tales of the Unexpected. Right, if you won't do it, I will.' He turned to the new camera operator. ‘And you make sure to get a close-up of the reveal. Don't mess this up.'

I looked around for the police officers who had earlier been in evidence, poking around in bushes. Never one around when you need one. I dialled Needham's mobile number. Blackmail was one thing; actual dead bodies, even only vaguely contemporary ones, were quite another. I could already feel the roasting I'd get if I stood idly by while Cy messed about with the finds. As soon as Needham answered I launched into my explanation. ‘The diggers have uncovered contemporary human remains and the producer is about to mess around with them.'

The camera was rolling. Cy knelt down and reached for the tin. Without comment Andrea stabbed his hand with the point of her trowel. Cy jerked it back and drew it across his mouth. ‘Ow! Are you mad, woman? Look at my hand. I don't believe it, you actually drew blood! I could get blood poisoning. I'll probably get tetanus! I'll . . .'

‘Phone for you,' I said and handed him my mobile.

I couldn't distinguish the actual words but I could tell they were delivered into Cy Shovlin's ear with something like storm force eight. He never said a word in return, just handed the phone back to me as he stood up. ‘Just . . . make sure no one touches anything until the police give their permission,' he said quietly and walked away towards the house. Even from behind I could tell he was talking to himself, throwing up his head and waving his arms about. When I turned back towards the deposition site of the body and the hubbub of people, all speculating as to the nature of their surprise find, my eyes travelled beyond them and to the still figure of Olive Cunningham, standing twenty yards away under a chestnut tree. She was leaning on her stick as though she really needed it today. I pulled out my mobile and took a picture of the skeleton and tin. When I looked up again Olive Cunningham was gone. Neither on the lawn towards the house nor on the path beside the greenhouse was there any sign of her. After nearly a week at this place I would not have put it past her to have a secret tunnel with a concealed entrance through which she could pop whenever she felt like weirding me out. The truth was more prosaic. When I dived through the gap in the overgrown hedge below the trench I could see her walking away slowly beside the lake, her back bent, her head bowed.

Once more the gate to the grounds opened wide to let in first a trickle, then a flood of police vehicles. This time Needham was the first to arrive at the graveside. ‘You did well,' he said, looking down at the partially exposed remains. ‘Huntley & Palmer biscuits, I remember those from when I was a kid. This body is probably pretty ancient.'

‘Perhaps in your terms,' Andrea said. ‘To us it's modern.'

‘Are those boots, at the bottom?' he asked.

‘Could be, looks like decayed leather. And there are a few fibres left, probably of clothes. The soil here close to the lake is quite damp and it's acidic, so that's why there is very little clothing left.'

‘You'd make a pretty good forensic investigator,' Needham said.

‘Ha!' Andrea gave an ironic laugh. ‘Most of what they know they learned from us, Inspector.'

‘Superintendent. Want to hazard a guess as to the age of it?'

‘What, the deceased? Yeah, I might.'

‘Actually, I meant the burial, but go on.'

‘Well, it's a male and I'd say he was in his twenties. As for the burial, I'd say fifty, sixty years ago.'

‘Please make that sixty, then I don't have to investigate it.'

‘Are we sure it's murder yet?' I objected.

‘No, not certain,' Needham said. ‘But it's the wrong depth for an official burial and there's no coffin. That says to me “shovels at midnight”.'

Andrea agreed.

‘Amazing that a biscuit tin lasts that long,' I mused.

‘Not that much oxygen down there,' she said. ‘If you left it above ground it would all but disappear after twenty years or so.'

Soon the forensics people turned up and shooed us all away. ‘Do you mean to say,' I needled Needham, ‘that if forensics say he was murdered but that it was sixty years ago, you won't look into it?'

‘Absolutely. Brilliant, isn't it? If he's sixty years dead I get to go home since the killer is likely to be dead as well. Work it out. If your killer was thirty then he'd be ninety today. No point. Let the Almighty have a go.'

‘So if you do kill someone then it really is worth digging a deep enough hole.'

‘Oh, definitely,' Needham agreed. ‘That's where a lot of murderers go wrong. They go to all that trouble of killing someone and then they can't be arsed to dig a decent hole. Of course, if you bury someone in your own back garden there's always a chance that someone'll come along and dig him up. Laying a pipe, digging a drainage ditch or hunting for treasure. We will have to have a word with Mrs Cunningham in a minute, since it obviously happened while she was living here, and I'll need some convincing that she had nothing to do with it.'

‘It's a big place. It doesn't necessarily follow that she knew about it.' But even while I was saying it Olive Cunningham's vehement opposition to the
Time Lines
dig seemed to take on a more sinister motive.

One of the SOCO team stood up and waved. ‘Superintendent?' Needham went across, had a five-minute conversation with the officers, then came back.

‘Definitely murder. Shot through the head, in one end, out the other.'

‘Any clues in the tin?'

‘None at all. They lifted it and the bottom had rusted away and the content eaten by mice or whatever, though they think it may have contained papers, letters, perhaps.'

‘Superintendent?' The SOCO called Needham back once more. He jogged over, looked into the grave, nodded and came back.

‘They found a weapon as well, a World War Two Webley .38. I seem to remember you keeping one.
Illegally.
'

‘Told you, it dropped into the sea in Cornwall.'

‘I wouldn't believe that if I'd heard the splash. Now where do you think we might find Mrs Cunningham?'

I led the way along the right shore of the reed-fringed lake where I had last seen Olive Cunningham walk away pensively into the less-explored corners of the Stone King's realm, a realm that for most of her life of course had been her own. I imagined the life she would have led, growing up here during the war, playing pirates perhaps on the little island, and still here today, powerless to stop the place being invaded, surveyed, changed or dug up. It was a pleasant walk along the lake, with trees on the right, the water on our left where reed beds alternated with grassy banks and rocky outcrops that looked too picturesque to be real.

We found Olive at the western end of the lake, looking across the water, sitting on a large willow trunk placed near the water's edge for just that purpose. Both her hands rested on top of her walking stick, the other end forming an equilateral triangle with her feet, firmly planted on the ground in their sensible black shoes. We sat down either side of her and for a while no one spoke, until Olive said: ‘Why couldn't they just leave things alone?'

‘I can imagine you would rather the body had not been found,' Needham said.

‘All of it! I mean all of it. The Roman villa, what difference does it make? This is the twenty-first century, what does it matter? The beastly Romans with their hideous square houses, their war machine, their right angles and their fussy food.'

I felt I should try and defend the Romans at least a little. ‘They had a tremendous influence on British culture, for instance . . .'

‘Poppycock. As soon as they left we went back to our own ways. We dismantled their houses and used them to repair our sheds. We didn't even make pots for a few hundred years. We didn't start cooking like the Romans again for another twelve hundred years and half of us still don't have central heating. They were only here for the tin, gold and silver and if they could have done they'd have taken everything they brought here with them when they left. And if they had, then people wouldn't go and dig up hundred-year-old lawns to gawp at their old bathroom tiles.'

Needham was getting impatient with this chat. ‘I've not really come to discuss the Roman legacy in Britain, Mrs Cunningham.'

‘No, you've come to talk about Bertie.'

‘You are referring to the remains found today?'

‘That's Bertie. I knew he was around there somewhere, but the hedges have changed and the statuary got moved about and I forgot. And grass is marvellous of course but it does all look the same. Did you know that each blade of grass is a separate plant?'

‘Can't say I've given it much thought. Who was Bertie?'

‘Herbert Brush. He was a farm worker on the estate. We were lovers, for a very, very short time.' Olive spoke without great emotion. Her voice was saying:
it was a very short time and it was a very long time ago, so why are you bothering me with it?

‘What happened?'

‘It was the summer of 1957. My husband was away on business in New York, my idiot brother Charles was in the house, to keep me company. Chaperoning me, I imagine. Didn't do too good a job. He surprised Bertie one night as he was leaving after making love to me, thought he was a burglar and fired at him with Daddy's army revolver. He said he never meant to actually hit him but it was quite dark. He was quite dead by the time I came down into the drawing room.'

‘And you didn't report it?' Needham said incredulously.

‘Of course not – what would have been the point in that? Even then shooting people through the head because you happened to find them in your sister's drawing room wasn't considered the done thing. It would all have come out about me having an affair, my husband would have divorced me, I would have lost the house, I couldn't have kept it up without him, and I might have seen my brother go to prison.'

‘And your brother played along with it.'

‘Didn't need much persuading. There was only one domestic here at the time who witnessed the aftermath. My brother bought him off.'

‘Did no one miss your dead lover?' I asked. ‘Didn't people wonder what had happened to him?'

‘No. As it happened some money had gone missing on the farm. People assumed he had taken it and run away. That's what the police and the papers assumed then.'

‘And you buried him in the garden.'

‘My brother did. Did I mention he was an idiot? I expected him to bury Bertie in the woods but the wheelbarrows were locked away. He had to carry him and when his arms gave out he buried him where he had dropped him. He did quite a good job in the end. When my husband came back three months later you couldn't tell.'

‘What was in the tin?' I asked.

‘Just a few notes and the few letters we had exchanged. Sentimental things. Nothing of earth-shattering importance.'

‘Is your brother Charles alive?'

‘Died in 1980.'

‘Your husband?'

‘Died in '86.'

‘The domestic?'

‘No idea, Inspector; he would be in his nineties now.'

‘It's Superintendent, actually.'

There was a long pause while we were all busy thinking it through.

‘Well?' she finally asked. ‘Are you going to arrest me now?'

‘I'd certainly like you to come down to Manvers Street police station and make a statement.'

‘Isn't that what I have just done?'

‘A proper statement; we'll record it and get you to sign it afterwards.'

She stood up. ‘Very well, then.'

‘It was quite understandable, then,' I said as we walked slowly back, ‘that you weren't happy about the excavation going on around here.'

‘I just knew they would dig Bertie up. For a while it looked as though he might be safe but then those treasure hunters started digging holes all over the place. It was only a matter of time.'

‘And you began sabotaging the dig.'

‘Just a little bit,' she said, wrinkling her nose with pleasure.

‘The digger?'

‘I remembered my husband telling me about putting sugar in the German's petrol tanks. Ruined their engines. I didn't want to ruin them. So I used water. Quite spectacular, all that smoke, I never expected that.'