Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  “Well into what’s nominally the Anglo-Saxon era, we’re still finding the post holes of Iron Age-style long-houses in villages away from the affluent areas. And the area you’re looking at is a long way from Gloucestershire, for instance, with its remains of huge Roman villas and Roman towns. You’re very much out in the wilds there in Roman terms. And when it comes to hill forts, you could be looking at anything within the thousand year span from 800BC to at least 200AD.”

  “Oh bugger,” Bill sighed. “I was really hoping you might be able to narrow things down a bit for me.”

  “Sorry. And I’m afraid that when you come on to ‘tumuli’, the date ranges are even wider. You can be talking about anything from the Bronze Age to the early Anglo-Saxon period, so stretch that out to two millennia ...I hope I haven’t shot your theories down in flames too badly?”

  Bill laughed. “I still think you’re being overly generous in calling them theories, but I’m afraid you have well and truly scuppered the one or two tenuous links I was beginning to formulate. For the life of me, Nick, I can’t think what the common factors can be with these cases beyond the victims all being out and out shits, and them all dying beneath apple trees.”

  “How very Sir Orfeo,” Nick laughed.

  Bill looked at him quizzically. “Okay, you’ve got me on that one. I know I should know the reference, but I’m not remembering it right now.”

  “Aaah, well it rather depends on which version of the story you’re talking about,” Nick said, leaning back in his chair in a way that brought a smile to Bill’s face, knowing that it meant that Nick was about to dig deep into his considerable knowledge – something he got less and less chance to do, but was something that he enjoyed. “As a story it goes way back into classical times.”

  “Oh! Orpheus and Eurydice! Of course.”

  “Exactly. There are versions by Virgil and Ovid, but in those it’s very much about the lovely Eurydice dying, and Orpheus going into Hades – the Underworld – to get her back. In those versions Eurydice walks in a forest, and it is just a generic forest, sometimes dancing with nymphs, before she dies. Orpheus plays his lute in his grief, and again the versions vary, but somewhere along the line he attracts the attention of the god Hades. Hades offers Orpheus the chance to lead his wife out of the Underworld, but there’s a condition – he must not look back at her until she is out in the mortal world again. Well you can guess that he fails at that! Gets part way and then can’t resist checking she’s still with him. So Eurydice goes back into the ghost world, and left alone in the world, Orpheus is prostrate with grief and either gets killed by wild beasts, or gets struck down by the gods. So it’s a proper Greek tragedy.

  “But when you get to the Middle English version, written sometime around the late thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, it’s become a bit different. Eurydice is now called Heurodis, and is the wife of the so-called king of England, Orfeo, back in some fictional pseudo-classical era. Heurodis visits an orchard with two of her maidens to sleep beneath a ‘ympe-tre’, which is these days is thought to be best translated as a tree grafted onto another root stock – either an apple or a cherry; both of them having Christian overtones if you think of Eve and the apple, but also of medieval lyrics like the Cherry Tree Carol from not much later. And that apple tree link lingered, by the way, because for example, the carol Jesus Christ the Apple Tree is from much later on, being an American carol of the eighteenth century.

  “But getting back to Orfeo, in this medieval ‘lai’ – most probably originating from Brittany, so you’ve got a nice Celtic connection there to Wales – Heurodis wakes up from her sleep, alarmed that she has been visited in her dream by the king of the Otherworld, who had told her that he will come for her. And please note that we’re talking ‘Otherworld’, i.e. somewhere where abnormal things can take place outside of the normal world, not specifically a Christian Hell. The next day she returns to the orchard as she has been told she must, and despite Orfeo sending many armed knights with her, she vanishes. Well poor old Orfeo is distraught, and he wanders the world for many years looking for her. After ten years of wandering in the wilds, he sees Heurodis riding past in the company of sixty fairy ladies out hawking. And these aren’t your twee little fairies by the way, but something much more like the lordly and powerful elves of Lord of the Rings. These are the fae in all their glory, beautiful, terrible, and not to be trifled with!

  “Orfeo follows them into a cleft in a cliff, and after some miles finds himself in the Otherworld. Heurodis is asleep in a wondrous castle of crystal and glass, along with many others who had been thought to have died in the real world. The king of this magical castle and world is not pleased that Orfeo has found his way in, but offers him a chance to leave with a reward, and Orfeo plays his harp so beautifully that the king is entertained. And so Orfeo gets to leave with his reward, Heurodis. The king isn’t any too pleased to lose Heurodis, but having given his word, sticks to it – because he abides by the courtly conventions of the medieval world where the lai was created, you see. So Orfeo returns with her to Winchester.”

  “That was the old Anglo-Saxon capital of England, wasn’t it?” Bill asked, remembering Nick having told him this before. “We’re talking about the time of Alfred the Great for that, surely?”

  Nick nodded. “And this lai comes from the courts of the fourteenth century who are looking back with nostalgia and through rose tinted spec’s – had they had any – to what they by then saw as a golden age for chivalry. Don’t forget that by this time, anything written in Old English had become pretty much unintelligible, since the English language had developed and moved on during the two centuries since the Norman Conquest. It’s still got a way to go before you get to the English of Chaucer, much less Shakespeare, but it’s also come a very long way from the time of epic poems like Beowulf. Alfred the Great was already five hundred years in the past for those folk, so if you think of how we view the world of Shakespeare, for instance, that’s approximately the same distance through time as those people of the courts of the three King Edwards and Richard the Second were from the age of King Alfred, let alone the slightly later courts during the Wars of the Roses, any of which might be the period when the lai was complied. And in a world when few people could read, you can forgive them getting their classic legends muddled.

  “And it is muddled, because this time you get a ‘happy ever after’ ending. No turning back for this Orfeo! He gets out and takes Heurodis back to Winchester, where his faithful steward has been holding things together for him for over ten years. Which, by the way, would never have happened in the real Winchester of the pre-Conquest era, let alone the London of the lai’s time! And there’s an outbreak of universal joy that their much-loved king and queen have come back to them. There’s no trip to Hades for this queen, much less Orfeo himself. They have their adventure in a fae world, an Otherworld where the normal rules of society don’t apply, but that was a device many medieval writers and composers used.

  “Setting lyrics, poems or lais in a pseudo–classical world was a nifty device which allowed them to talk about things which would otherwise have been frowned upon by the Church, you see. It got around moral censorship. And in this instance the action takes place in an almost classical era, and certainly a pre-Christian conversion one, even though the setting of the court is in a faux-Anglo-Saxon Winchester which was an island of Christianity surrounded by Viking paganism for at least the early part of King Alfred’s reign, allowing for everyone’s credibility and morals to be stretched a bit without causing offence. But you see now what I meant about the apple tree. It became common folk lore – probably already was a folk myth, in fact – that if you fell asleep under an apple tree, then the fairy folk would come and steal you away.”

  “Blimey,” Bill huffed. “Well that was definitely what was niggling away in the back of my mind about apple trees and the lore surrounding them – and I knew it wasn’t anything to do with Eve and the apple, even if I couldn’t remember exa
ctly what. Where it gets me, though, is anyone’s guess, because these men weren’t stolen away. They were left behind.”

  “Hmmm,” Nick mused, “almost like they were a warning – you know, like gamekeepers sticking dead predators up on posts as a sign of what will happen to them. Not that it works with wildlife.”

  “Pour encourage les autres,” Bill quoted sagely. “But as you say, it’s not a tactic that works with wildlife. Doesn’t matter how many crows or pigeons you nail to the farm fence posts, they’ll still come. And if these men were meant as a warning to others, then that warning has singularly failed to deliver its message. None of the five victims I have the records of were in any way aware of the others. I doubt whether even so much as a newspaper article made its way into any of the others’ hands.”

  Nick nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that is an oddity, isn’t it? ...And you’re absolutely positive that there’s no connection at all between any of the victims you’ve found so far, aside from the kind of location they’ve died in, and the fact that aside from this Damien character, that they’ve all died from seemingly natural causes?”

  “Positive!” Bill growled. “That’s one amongst many bloody frustrating things about these cases. There isn’t a shred of evidence I could go to Suzanne with and say, ‘look, gov’, I think we might have a serial killer on our hands here.’ She’d laugh me out of the room when all I’ve got is this growing feeling of dread in my mind that we haven’t heard the last of these yet. And for what it’s worth, Carol feels the same. Like me, she can see that these are almost certainly related, but can’t find a single piece of concrete evidence that she’d want to present in court.”

  “Hmm. Why are you so sure that you haven’t seen the end of this yet?”

  “Oh hell, Nick, it’s just gut instinct again. But I suppose a big part of it is that there’s nothing back before the start of this year, and then they’re cropping up at a rate of pretty much one a month. That screams at me that something acted as a trigger with this person or persons – though if it’s more than one, then that’s even more troubling.”

  “Because even if you catch one, the other one or others could still carry on?”

  “Exactly! As best I can make out, Thomas Mulligrew is where it all starts, and I’d feel a lot better about him if I could work out where those two unfortunate daughters of his got to. It bothers me as much as it bothered Lucinda that they seem to vanish off the face of the earth.”

  “And your lot won’t investigate that?”

  “We would if there was any hint of foul play. But the sad truth is, people vanish all the time. Sometimes it’s a bloke who just can’t handle the pressure anymore. Someone who, when you dig a bit deeper, turns out to have been battling a lot of stresses at work; and then when you turn to the family, what seems to be all lovey-dovey on the surface turns out to be full of stress and tensions there too. So the one person who everyone’s been expecting to sort their lives out for them finally cracks under the strain, drains his bank account and leaves. Quite often, the best you get for a case like that is the person being seen catching a train, but seemingly healthy and not looking like they’re about to throw themselves on the tracks. So what can you do? They’re adults. They have every right to make their own decisions. They might not be good ones, but that’s a far cry from there being any foul play, and people’s mental health isn’t our remit, it’s Social Services’.

  “Or you get a woman who ups and runs. More often than not, that can throw up a long-running history of mental abuse, even if it’s not physical. They see running as their only choice. Sometimes they take the kids, and to be honest, those are the times when we’re more likely to get involved because of the concern for the children’s safety. But if it’s a single woman of adult age, with no medical history of depression or hints that she was about to take her own life, again, there’s not much we can do aside from put her on a missing persons’ list and circulate her photograph. And that’s not much help if they’ve run from Redditch to Redruth in Cornwall, or Kempsey to Kent, and adopted a new name and persona. They’re not going to bring up any warning flags if they take on casual work, because few places are that worried about employees who are only going to be there for a month or two. And as they build up things like references in their new location, there can be nothing to tie them back for us to pick up on.”

  “Yes, but Bill, these girls never worked anywhere. Even with someone on the run, surely they have to give things like their National Insurance number in order to work?”

  Bill sighed. “Yes, they would. But again, we come down to proximity and probably cause. If someone’s just gone missing without a hit of anything criminal going on, we can hardly start throwing up alerts for their National Insurance number. And put yourself in the position of some farmer who just wants pickers for a season. If he gets a woman coming for work who tells him that her husband knocked her about, and that she’s trying to start over, most people are decent enough that they’ll give someone like that the benefit of the doubt. And if she then proves herself to be a good worker, who turns up and does a thorough job, with no sick time or odd absences, are you going to look any further? And from the woman’s point of view, by the time she needs to register to pay National Insurance or tax, she’s already got a believable track record in the new place, and hopefully most people will have given up looking. Don’t forget, if he or she has left part the way through one tax year, having paid all they owe, then does another year below the tax threshold, they’ll start the following year with a new tax code and a fresh slate owing nothing to anybody until they earn it. Their employer only has to register that they’re working, and if no money is going in, do you see some stressed civil servant digging any deeper?”

  “Good grief,” Nick sighed, “that’s actually rather depressing. You know, to think that people can vanish without anyone caring enough to go and find them.”

  Bill grimaced. “I didn’t say that nobody cared. The problem tends more to be that the ones who care actually care for all the wrong reasons ...which of course is why someone will vanish in the first place. So they take great care to go to places where they know nobody would dream of looking for them. And sad to say, quite often, when you talk to those left behind, you get a very incomplete picture of the missing person. All too often, what you hear is the person they were running from saying how they miss so-and-so doing this for them, or not being at home when they get back from work, perhaps. It can be more about what they wanted rather than whom the missing person really was, and that doesn’t help.”

  Nick looked horrified. “So you mean somebody like a business man telling you all about how his wife was great at organising his dinner parties for him, and in fact her just wanting to be going on country walks with the dogs?”

  Bill nodded. “That’s not a bad example. Someone who is perceived nowadays to be very much the city girl, but who if you have cause to dig back right to her school days, for instance, was someone who loved nothing more than getting her wellies on and helping the local farmer out. But if we’re on the lookout for a lady in her fifties, for example, even finding those people who knew her in her school days might take more in time and resources than we can reasonably allocate to finding her than the case warrants. Particularly if she was last seen catching the train up to London, for instance. We can inform the Met’, but that’s no use if she caught the Underground out as far as she could, then went onto local trains to another place where she could pick up an intercity train to Scotland.”

  “Dear God, I see what you mean. If the police were fully staffed and with something resembling a proper budget, you might just be in with a chance, but even then you’d be hard pressed to find them, wouldn’t you?”

  “And sad to say, most often we only find out when a body that we should have been looking turns up four hundred miles away.”

  “And that’s your issue with Mulligrew’s daughters? No bodies?”

  Bill sighed. “No, no bodies. Though I have
this horrible feeling that we might yet find them like that. I had a look at the farm on the estate agents’ sites, because with nobody to inherit it, it’s going to get sold and presumably the money will just get sucked into the government pot.”

  “Is it worth much?”

  “Not really. It’s only Grade two pasture land, and there’s well under thirty acres of fields before you get into the scrubland leading up to a scheduled ancient monument. So it’s up for just over the hundred thousand – nothing at all for a country property normally. It would be different if the house was halfway habitable, but the roof’s in a shocking state by the look of the one photograph I’ve found, and really you’d be wanting to pull it down and completely rebuild. I think that’s why the estate agents have separated the two small woods and are selling them separately. They’ll get about thirty thousand for each of those. But the location of the house doesn’t work in its favour either. It’s hardly a picturesque spot with views, and it’s a long way off the beaten track.”

  Nick grinned at him. “And of course you’re going to find your way over there to have a look at it, aren’t you?”