Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  Once he was back in his room in the B&B, Bill spread his large scale map out across the bed once more and poured over it. Yet even with a map on this scale, he couldn’t see anywhere obvious to start looking. Large commercial orchards had their own symbols on the map, but the kind of places where the three known victims had been found weren’t big enough to show up, and of course technically, where Damien had died was more of a plant nursery than an orchard.

  There’s only one thing for it, he decided, I’m going to have to go out to where Damien was found and see if I can find something that links that place to the others.

  In the meantime, when he was in the next day, he made a point of finding time to read up on the farmer. Thomas Mulligrew was a different sort altogether. Elderly and reclusive, at first Bill couldn’t see anything which would tie him to the others. Then as he got deeper into the file, he found himself in very different territory. Attached to the notes pertaining to the finding of Thomas’ body were copies of some much older reports, going back into the 1980s and 90s. Thomas, it seemed, had been prone to knocking his wife about, but worse than that, there had been two daughters whom he’d described to social workers as ‘simple’.

  Quite what that meant in medical terms was harder to discover since they never seemed to have gone near a doctor, much less a hospital. Thomas had been born in 1953 and had married young in 1970. The first daughter, Grace, had been born the year after, and the other one, Hannah, two years later in 1973; but in the seventies there had been far less social awareness of abuse within families, so nothing had been reported in connection with the girls, and it hadn’t helped that the Mulligrews’ tiny sheep farm was out in the wilds south of Clun, down a long track that went to nowhere else. The only reason Thomas’ body had been found as fast as it had, was due to the fact that he’d ordered some more coal for the ancient range he still cooked on and used for heating, and the delivery man had spotted him as he’d been turning his wagon around to leave.

  As soon as they could, both girls had left school, and that had been pretty much the end of them being seen in public. Again it was Lucinda who had made the sharp observance that the fact that nobody seemed able to trace either woman – as they were now, being in their mid thirties – did not necessarily mean that they had escaped and gone off to live better lives. However, with there being no reason to think that Thomas had died of anything other than natural causes, there was nothing to cause either Wally, as the leading investigator on this case, or Lucinda, to waste manpower looking for something untoward.

  Yet those two young women bothered Bill from the moment he read about them. Had they been kept as virtual prisoners up at Thomas Mulligrew’s farm? And what of his wife? When Bill delved deeper into the file and found that she had died in a hospice, with a note from the head nurse there, who had remembered Maureen Mulligrew and saying that she had not once had a visit from any member of her family in the year and a bit she’d been in there, he could feel the hairs on his neck standing up. The poor woman had collapsed in the Co-op and an ambulance called, and that had been the first time that anyone had been aware of how ill Maureen was, which had Bill wondering whether Thomas would have bothered calling for one if she had done that at home. Or had she already, and just been ignored? Social workers had called around to see the family when it was decided that Maureen was incapable of being returned home – especially once the social workers had seen the state of the house – but of course the daughters had both been adults by then, and with them saying that they wanted to stay at the farm, there wasn’t a lot to be done about it. They weren’t obviously mentally disabled, and despite the social workers contriving to get them alone and ask again if they wanted to leave, whatever hold Thomas had over them was enough that they still professed that they wanted to stay.

  But why wouldn’t the girls have come to visit their mother? Even if Thomas had been a brute of a husband and father – given that the police reports catalogued her multiple beatings, which had heavily contributed to the Parkinson’s Disease she had died of – Bill couldn’t imagine why the girls wouldn’t have felt some sympathy for their mother. Maybe she hadn’t been able to stop their father mistreating them, but she certainly hadn’t got away scot-free herself, and had suffered badly at his hands, so why wouldn’t there be some feeling of solidarity between her and her daughters? And given that Maureen had died eight years ago, both daughters would have been well into their twenties by then, so not kids at home who couldn’t get away from Thomas to go and visit had they wanted to – unless they couldn’t because they were his captives. Yet when it had come to Maureen’s funeral, after much pestering by the much frustrated social worker assigned to the family, Thomas had gone for the cheapest possible option, which had been a non-attendance cremation, so the sisters hadn’t been seen out in public for that either, and Bill was now wondering when had been the last time they had left the farm. Had they declined to leave because by now the outside world was so alien and scary that they preferred the devil they knew to the totally unknown?

  At that point Bill thought to look for a National Insurance number for either Grace or Hannah Mulligrew, but realised that Lucinda had beaten him to that.

  You had a bad feeling about this too, didn’t you, Lucinda? No National Insurance number for either girl. That means that they never went out to work, and if they couldn’t get work, how would they have got the money to leave home? The only thing the poor wretches could have done was start walking and hope that they found a refuge somewhere. And would girls who’d been kept that cloistered even know about such things as women’s refuges?

  Bill noticed that Lucinda had also checked to see if the Mulligrews had ever had a TV license, and there was a handwritten note in the margin when she hadn’t found one, saying that the girls could have known very little of the outside world. Despite being on the Welsh border, and in an area at least heavily populated with small hill farms, this was still as remote a place as you could get without heading into the mountains of central Wales or much further north into the Scottish mountains. And then he saw it on the map. Caer Caradoc – the old Iron Age hill fort which dominated the highest hill in this part of Shropshire.

  He thought back to the people he’d met while over here, who’d been connected to the double homicide he’d worked not long after arriving. What had the one man said about Caer Caradoc? Something about a native chieftain called Caractacus by the Romans, and Caradoc by his native Welsh, who had fought a great battle with the Romans there. Then looked at the map harder, and saw that the houses he’d gone to then were literally across the deep river valley from where the Mulligrew’s farm was.

  “Oh shit!” he muttered, remembering the strange element to that case. “Is there something in this ancient landscape that’s significant?” He looked to where he’d pencilled in the sites on post-its where Justin and Sanay had been found, and now noticed that down by the river by where Sanay had died, there were the remains of ancient tumuli. “More really old sites,” he sighed. “Hmph, can’t get away from it, there’s some relevance to them dying so close to these old places, though what that might be is beyond me at the moment. Oh hang on, though, there’s nothing like that around where Damien died. Or is that just because whatever it was hasn’t survived?”

  Feeling that he needed some clarification on this, he picked up the phone and rang Dr Nick Robbins.

  “Hi Nick, how are you?”

  “Not bad. Yourself?”

  “Ha! Stuck in Shropshire until the end of the week, but that’s why I’ve rung you in work time. Nick, I’ve got three suspicious deaths all with connections to – or rather, all deposition sites close by – ancient monuments. I can’t call them murders as yet, but there’s something very odd going on. The trouble is, I’ve got a fourth body, but I can’t see any ancient site on the map, and that’s got me wondering. Is it possible that there was once something like tumuli or standing stones, or even a hill fort, there that hasn’t survived? And if so, how easy would it
be for an average member of the public to find out about that?”

  He heard Nick huff on the other end of the phone. “That there are lost sites? Absolutely! God knows how many standing stones and stone circles have got pulled out by farmers in the last three or four centuries, mostly because they were in the way of their ploughs and nobody told them they couldn’t. It doesn’t bear thinking about. So you could say with a reasonable degree of certainty that there would have been many, many times the numbers that survive nowadays. You only have to look at what an undisturbed landscape like Orkney looks like to get an idea of that.

  “But even archaeologists like me have trouble identifying those potential sites. Occasionally we get lucky when someone flies over a site in a drought, and the parch-marks show it up, but that’s a rarity, too. There are surveys for some places, but they tend to be pretty dry reading unless you know all the technical terms. I can’t imagine that many members of the public would wade through them.”

  Bill sighed. “You’ve pretty much confirmed what I’d been thinking. Damn.”

  “Does that muck up your theory?”

  Bill laughed. “I think calling it a theory is being a bit grand. It’s more this nasty itch in the back of my mind that I’m missing something. But every time I try to find a unifying element, there’s always something that sticks out as an oddity. God knows I could never go to my boss with any of this. It’s beyond fuzzy. So I’m hardly breaking any rules if I tell you that all four seem to have died from heart-attacks rather than being obvious murders, but if you want the low-down on that, have a chat with Carol.”

  “Oh!” Bill could practically hear Nick’s mind making the connections. “That kind of ‘odd’, eh? Hmm. I might just do that. I owe them a social call anyway. Look, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go – there’s a bunch of school kids coming in for a talk in ten minutes – but why don’t we meet up for a pint sometime?”

  “As soon as I’m back in Worcester, you’re on!” Bill promised, letting his friend go.

  But what the hell am I going to do about these cases, he wondered morosely, as he tried to focus on more ordinary and down to earth cases. I don’t want to let them go, not least because I’m getting seriously worried that they might be someone developing a habit of killing. How many more would we need before a Serious Crime Squad started looking at them with real interest? There isn’t a scrap of forensic evidence which points to foul play, and if Carol and Jeff can’t find it, then I’m bloody sure that nobody else would. And yet I’m as certain as I’ve ever been over something that all of these cases connect.

  So what am I going to do? Once I hand back over to the regular guys over here, it’s really up to them how much they follow these cases up. And if Si is even half as accepting as Wally, they’ve neither of them got the imagination to make the kind of weird connections these cases have got. If Lucinda was coming back any time soon it might be different. She, at least, seems alert and curious, even if she hasn’t had my experience of the strange and peculiar.

  Hmph, there’s only one thing for it. You’re going to have to go back and then ask for some leave. God knows you’ve got enough backed up. So why not ask for a fortnight off after doing this? Then you can come back over here on your own and do a bit of walking around the various sites and see if anything leaps out at you.

  Chapter 10

  BY THE TIME BILL GOT back to his own desk, he was determined that he would take leave as soon as possible, and so he made a point of going and speaking to his chief inspector as soon as he got back in on the Monday.

  “You want leave?” Suzanna asked in amazement. Normally she had to badger Bill into taking the leave he was owed. “Oh, I’m not complaining! And now that the schools have gone back, there are fewer people clamouring for leave, so it’s a good time for you to take it, and before we get into the mayhem of Christmas. When do you want to take it?”

  “Would next week be too soon to start a fortnight?” Bill asked, trying not to sound too desperate. The new moon was coming up on the Tuesday, and he was feeling a building urgency to get back out to the area around then.

  “No, perfect,” Suzanna agreed, though with a perplexed frown. “Is everything alright, Bill? You’re not sick or anything, are you?”

  “No,” he laughed. “It’s just that all that tearing around between places has left me more than a bit knackered. And going out there reminded me just how long it’s been since I got my walking boots on and went for a good walk without any other agenda other than enjoying it.”

  Now Suzanne smiled. “Oh I understand that! I went home to my mum and dad’s farm over the weekend. God, but it was good to wake up and go outside and hear nothing more than the sheep and cows.”

  “Exactly! I feel I need some time to recharge.” And he blessed the fact that Suzanne was a proper country girl who would understand the need for some quiet time.

  He got some teasing off his mates when he said he was off on leave.

  “Bloody part-timer!” Sean declared, while Jason mock-protested,

  “Leave? You’ve only just got back! What about us poor sods who’ve been slaving away while you’ve been gadding about over the hills doing your Sound of Music impersonations?”

  “Naah,” Clara, Jason’s DS, said with a shake of her head. “He doesn’t look anything like Julie Andrews. He’d never get into that frock.”

  “Oh thanks very much,” Bill said, feigning a huff, “some mates you are! You’ve no idea how I suffered over there.”

  “Not a decent pint of Banks’ to be had, I suppose,” sympathised Sean, who despite Bill’s best efforts to get him to try some of the local craft beers, still stuck religiously to one of the main beers of the West Midlands, and mockingly shook his head.

  “The beer was fine,” Bill declared firmly. “But let’s just say that there are some folks over there who really need to get out more!”

  “Welcome back to the big bad city,” Clara laughed, all of them knowing that Worcester might be a city in name, but was hardly the hotbed of vice the urban centres just up the motorway were.

  The only thing which might then have put a block on Bill’s leave was a new, big case coming up, but his luck held, and on the Friday he headed back to his flat, relishing the prospect of being able to dig around at his own pace for a week or so, and wherever his inclinations led him. And with that in mind, he decided that the first thing he would do would be to book in at the hotel which the Farrahs had stayed at. Hawthorn House Hotel was fully booked for a wedding that night and Saturday, but could accommodate him from Sunday onwards, and Bill gladly read out his credit card details to secure the room for three nights. He was also glad that Lucinda had had enough of an eye for detail to include which room Damien had stayed in, and so he had been able to ask for Offa’s View by name – all of the rooms having their own names rather than a number.

  Even so, there was a part of him that was relieved that he’d have a couple more nights in his own familiar bed after so long in the B&B, but he would still be over there for the new moon on Tuesday. And it also gave him the chance to get out and have a drink with Nick on the Saturday.

  “You’ve caught me on a free weekend,” Nick told him. “I was going up to Edinburgh every other weekend, but it’s just getting too costly to keep on doing that. So I’ve had to cut it back to once a month from now on.”

  “I can imagine,” Bill sympathised. “How’s Richard getting on up there?”

  Richard was Nick’s husband, who had gone from being a paramedic in Worcester to training to be a doctor up at Edinburgh Medical School. For his part, Bill had always worried about the strain that was going to put on the relationship, because archaeology jobs were perennially in short supply, meaning that the chances of Nick being able to move up there to be with Richard were inevitably going to be few and far between. Now he was looking at Nick and thinking that the strain was starting to show. He didn’t dare ask how many times Richard had been back home to see Nick, knowing that he wouldn’t be abl
e to disguise his dismay if his fears that it had been nothing like the times Nick had flown up north were true.

  “Oh Richard’s loving it!” Nick said with forced cheerfulness, which didn’t fool Bill for one moment, but all he could do was change the subject to something less contentious as soon as possible.

  And so as soon as he could, he moved on to the cases, regaling Nick with his fears of what they might mean, and knowing that having accompanied Bill on the hunt for his missing colleague Danny – which had turned out to be stranger than anyone could have anticipated – that at least Nick would understand his misgivings.

  “So what do you think?” he asked Nick, having been to the bar and brought back two more pints of Wye Valley HPA. Luckily they were sitting in the window seat of Bill’s local pub, which had a glorious view out over the River Severn on a good day, but today there was a steady drizzle which even that view struggled with to make appealing. Most of the regulars were around the corner in the main seating area watching the football and cheering noisily, or propping up the bar, and so Bill wasn’t worried about anyone overhearing them. If it had been rugby, he’d have been in there cheering with the best of them, but this was a meat-grinder of a match between a small regional team against the top club in the Premier League, and there was never much doubt about who was going to win, meaning that for Bill there wasn’t much of what he’d call ‘sport’ to watch.

  Nick gratefully accepted the pint and took a long drink from it, before saying, “I have no idea! I don’t doubt you. I think you’ve picked up on something very odd, but if you were hoping that I would say, ‘oh, that relates to so-an-so,’ then I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

  “Nothing that yells Anglo-Saxon to you, for instance?” Bill asked with his last dregs of hope.

  But Nick shook his head. “No, unlike the last time, I’m afraid there’s nothing that leaps out at me as being from a specific time period. I get what you’re saying about them all having taken place in an ancient landscape, but you have to appreciate that you’re looking at a huge spread of time. In rough terms, the Iron Age starts around 800BC, so centuries before even the Romans come to Britain in 43AD – or Current Era if you want to be politically correct. And if you look it up on the internet, while the simple answer will say that the Iron Age ended with the arrival of the Romans, archaeologically it’s not so clear cut. The Roman impact on England was very much at the top tier of society, and was also very much an urban shift. The average man, taking his team of oxen up and down his strip field alongside his neighbours in the village, wouldn’t have seen much of a change until much later than that.