by Phil Rickman
‘Francis, it’s something I saw once, by lamplight in the middle of a storm. Yes, it could be, but then it might not be. The central fracture to the cranium roughly corresponds, as far as I can remember, and it’s obviously come out of the earth. But I can’t be certain. Didn’t even get to examine it before it vanished. Why are we talking about this… now?’
Bliss exchanged a glance with Vaynor who was standing in the window recess.
‘All right, let me ask you another question, Neil. Tristram Greenaway. Could he have taken it?’
‘The picture?’
‘The skull.’
‘Why…?’ Cooper shook his head, mouth open, not getting it. ‘Why would Tris take the skull?’
‘I’m asking, could he have? On the night.’
‘Well, obviously he could have. He was there, and I’d hardly be supervising him.’
‘He have anything with him he could’ve put it in?’
‘He had a… a small backpack, I think. Which he often carried. Kept a trowel, maps, gloves…’ He looked up at Bliss. ‘Where exactly did you find this skull?’
‘We didn’t. We’ve just found a picture of a skull on Tristram Greenaway’s laptop. Attached to an email he’d sent out, quite recently.’
‘Who to?’
‘What does that suggest to you, Neil?’
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.’
Bliss leaned back, an arm around a step ladder.
‘I’ll be honest with you. I think there are things you’re not telling us. I thought that the other night when we met on the Castle Green. I’m not an archaeologist, but it seemed to me that your reaction to the disappearance of the skull… I mean, yeh, I realized that was not what you’d want to happen, but it did strike me as just a bit extreme. You must’ve been tripping over flamin’ bones for years around the Cathedral and Castle Green.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘But you know what I’m saying.’
‘Not sure I do, Francis. All skeletons, all graves, are examined and logged and—’
‘What use would some old feller’s skull be to Tristram Greenaway?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘It was a feller, was it? Not a woman.’
‘We’re pretty sure it’s male.’
‘All right. Think about it. Y’see, recalling your… state of agitation, the other night, I’m also wondering how important would it be to you to… gerrit back.’
‘What?’
Bliss said nothing. Vaynor moved a little closer. He was a big lad.
Cooper had gone pale.
‘What are you suggesting?’
Bliss shrugged. Cooper half rose then sank back down again. Nobody stayed cool in the moment of realization that a policeman was one question short of asking him if he’d done a murder.
Bliss sighed.
‘Just doing me job, Neil.’
‘This is insane. All of this is fucking insane.’
‘Murders often appear insane, to everybody except the killer.’
‘All this pales into insignificance now, anyway. The skull.’
‘What does?’ Bliss said. ‘What was clearly significant to you before and now isn’t?’
Cooper leaned back on his box, closed his eyes momentarily, breathing in hissily through his teeth.
‘All right. Let’s deal with this.’
Bliss leaned forward over clasped hands.
Cooper said, ‘Do you know what a deviant burial is?’
‘I have an idea,’ Vaynor said.
Bliss shot him a glance. Problem with these Oxbridge bastards was that sometimes they knew too much about everything, didn’t ask enough really stupid questions.
‘Deviant burial, you said?’
‘It usually relates,’ Cooper said, ‘to medieval funerary customs, and it can mean a number of things. In this case, the head not being where you would normally expect to find it.’
‘Like connected to the neck?’
‘In this case, it had been separated from the body and placed between the legs. The thigh bones.’
‘So assuming this was not the remains of either a seriously deformed human being or a medieval yogi…’
‘Then it was deliberately put there by a third party. As there was a very large old tree on top of it, we have to assume it had not been excavated and carelessly replaced. Hence, it appears to have been buried that way, thus deviating from the norm.’
‘And this is a bit special, is it, Neil?’
‘Certainly fairly unusual in this part of the world. It’s more common in parts of eastern Europe, although it has been found elsewhere in Britain and Ireland.’
‘What’s it mean?’
‘Normally seen as a religious or ritual thing. To contain the spirit of the dead person. Prevent it coming back from the grave. From this, we might speculate that the body was that of someone who had inspired fear during his lifetime. Someone whom the living might’ve been glad to see the last of.’
‘A bad guy.’
Cooper shrugged.
‘And the night of October the thirtieth, this was the last time you saw it?’
‘This was the last time I saw a skull which may or may not have been the one in the image you’ve just shown me.’
Bliss snatched up his phone, tapped the screen.
‘Have another look, Neil. Have a closer look. Let’s try and blow it up a bit, shall—’
‘All right!’ Cooper almost squirming away. ‘Yes, I think it is. I think it is.’
‘Because?’
‘Because… because it looks as if it has a stone in its mouth. You see?’
‘Like a mint?’
‘Sometimes they put a stone in the mouth to… There was apparently a persistent belief that people determined to return from the dead could… chew through their shrouds and… escape. So a stone, or sometimes a bone would be wedged in the mouth to prevent them… chewing.’
Bliss said nothing. Not a lot you could say.
‘I realize how stupid that sounds,’ Cooper said, ‘but it was done for that purpose. Apparently.’
‘Right. Well, thank you for that, Neil.’
Sporadic raindrops sounded on the window. This was going to need a bit of thinking about. Bliss shifted on his box.
‘All right. Going back to the Castle Green burial, is it fair to say that when you saw it, you were excited?’
‘I suppose I was.’
‘Bit of a coup, then, a deviant burial?’
‘Yes. Not exactly a common phenomenon. Anywhere. Especially here.’
‘Does all this mean the skull’s worth something?’
‘In archaeological terms, as part of an otherwise intact skeleton in a grave, it’s extremely interesting. As a skull on its own, its archaeological – and monetary – value has to be minimal. It’s the burial that’s significant. I’ve taken pictures of what’s left which suggest the skull was not in its usual place but…’
‘It doesn’t count for much without one.’
‘Probably not.’
‘So the theft of the skull kind of robs you of your moment of fame. Makes you look a bit daft. And if Tristram Greenaway—’
‘No, that—’
‘If Tristram Greenaway nicked the skull, he would’ve known that.’
‘Francis, this is insane.’
Bliss looked up at Vaynor.
‘Darth, remind me, did we ask Neil where he was last night?’
‘Oh, now, look, this is—’ Cooper scrambled to his feet. ‘Last night, for several hours, as I may have told you, I was making trips between here and Hampton Bishop.’
‘Your new home.’
‘Sometimes with my wife… and children, until it was their bedtime. To convey furniture and clothing to our new home. It’s a straight road from here to Hampton Bishop and I never deviated from it. Don’t you have CCTV or something to confirm that?’
‘After bedtime, were you on your own?’
Cooper thought for a m
oment, tonguing his upper lip.
‘My wife’s sister was also at Hampton Bishop, and she will remember how many times I appeared with… things. Look, it… it never entered my head that the skull might have been taken by Tristram Greenaway, with whom I was always on very friendly terms and whom I regarded as a serious and able archaeologist. And I still… I still find it hard to come to terms with him being dead, let alone murdered. This… is… a… nightmare.’
Bliss nodded.
‘Thank you, Neil. We might wanna talk to you again. So, don’t, as they say, leave town.’
They’d come in the car this time, Vaynor driving, so it took longer to get back to Gaol Street. Waiting at the lights near the block a funeral parlour shared with a tattoo bar, Bliss leaned back, stretched his legs. Had a sense of getting somewhere, and in record time. Not sure where, exactly, but causing a bit of stress would very often be productive.
‘You don’t really think he did it?’ Vaynor said.
‘I’ve had stranger results. Though it’ll probably turn out to be entirely unconnected with the missing skull.’
‘But if Greenaway did have it, where is it now?’
‘I’m not dismissing it as a connection, but let’s not get carried away and overlook something more definitively Plascarreg.’ Bliss peered at Vaynor. ‘So where’d you learn about deviant burials, Darth?’
‘TV, actually, boss. A documentary. Nothing too academic. I think it was on Channel Five.’
‘Bloody hell, Darth. Feller like you, from the halls of academe, watches Channel Five?’
‘My girlfriend wanted to see it. It was about, er… vampires.’
‘Vampires.’
‘Real vampires. Or rather, real suspected vampires. It involved superstitions from the Dark Ages and beyond. A fear of vampires seems to have been one of the principal reasons for a deviant burial. Like Cooper said, they were found in places like Bulgaria and Romania, where you’d cut the head off a suspected vampire – post-mortem, presumably – as a way of preventing it from coming out of the grave and… doing whatever they were supposed to do.’
‘I thought you drove a stake through the… or is that just a Hammer Horror thing?’
‘I think there was some evidence of that, but mainly they seem to have cut off the head.’
‘Cleaner job, on the whole.’
‘Quite.’
The lights greened-up. Vaynor took the hairpin left into Bath Street. The rain was coming down steadily now.
‘Vampires.’ Bliss shaking his head. ‘Be the first one in the playground to dig up a vampire in Hereford. Gerra learned paper out of it.’
Vaynor coughed.
‘The first to unearth human remains attesting to the possibility of a suspected sanguinary predator, boss.’
‘Yeh, that, too,’ Bliss said.
22
Believe it happened
PERHAPS IT HAD been coming on for years, but the worst happened very quickly.
‘You’d be talking to him,’ Dennis Kellow said, ‘and there’d be a point where you were simply not on the same page.’
He walked over to the workbench, picked up a chunky old wood-plane, caressing it.
‘Maybe I’d been turning a blind eye to it – I didn’t want him to have to leave here. And therefore me, too. I’ve worked in far grander places, but nowhere I’d felt more involved. More… connected. Then the housekeeper got replaced by a full-time nurse because he’d become a danger to himself. He’d wander around at night without lights.’
‘How old was he?’
‘Not that old. Probably not much older than I am now. He refused to accept he was losing it. For a long time. Threatening to clobber the doc. And then he suddenly just gave up, went quietly. Into a home.’
‘That must’ve been awful, especially for a man who… lived by his mind.’
Dennis didn’t reply, just stood there stiffly in his overalls, and she wondered if she’d said the wrong thing.
‘What happened to… did you say Caroline?’
He grunted.
‘She’d come and go. And then she just went. She was still a young woman – was to me, anyway. You look like a child.’
‘Ha.’
‘Wasn’t like they were married. She just wasn’t there one day.’
‘And he’s in a home.’
‘Lyme Farm, up beyond Leominster. Very expensive place. More like a hotel, but with medical and nursing care. Proper food. I don’t supposed he even notices, poor old bugger. Went to see him once. He didn’t seem to know me. Frightening.’ He paused. ‘Casey wouldn’t come. Already giving me little memory tests. But that wasn’t quite how it went, was it?’
‘OK, let me get this right. Even though he’d been here for years before it came on, Casey thinks Mr Kindley-Pryce’s dementia might’ve been caused by something in the house?’
He sat down on one of the stools, hunched against the blade of light.
‘Casey doesn’t know what she thinks.’
‘Who was living here before Kindley-Pryce?’
‘Nobody. Not for a long, long time. Derelict for years when Selwyn bought it. Owned for decades by a big farmer from a few miles away, who’d just wanted it for the land. I think he died and whoever inherited it was advised to sell the land and the house and the castle… the whole package. It was on the market for the first time in maybe decades when Selwyn was alerted to it. Outbid some crazy pop star.’
‘And he ended up selling it to you?’
‘Not initially. He thought his friend Jim Turner was having it. The film producer?’
She shook her head. All these names she vaguely knew…
‘Turner was making drama-documentaries for television at the time. Moody stuff, bit like those old Ken Russell biopics. And then, like Russell, he was lured into drama – movies, much more money. Kindley-Pryce… I don’t think he was actually a scriptwriter for Turner, but he was certainly some sort of consultant, and Turner would come to the events here and he fell under the spell of Cwmarrow. Agreed to buy it from Kindley-Pryce and maintain it just as he wanted, and Kindley-Pryce could visit whenever he liked. And, best of all, Turner would pay me to carry on with the work. Which I was more than delighted to do. Onwards and upwards.’
Dennis turned to Merrily.
‘Sale never went through. Bloody Hollywood. Turner got his chance and couldn’t afford not to take it. Place had become a bit of a mess again by then. An old house doesn’t have to be empty for long before things start to seize up. Hector Pryce asked me if I knew anybody who might be interested. Might be a Philistine, Hector, but he’s not a fool. Knew that when prospective buyers got surveyors in and learned how much it was going to take to put it right…’
So Dennis had put in a bid. Silly amount but it was all he could afford at the time, even with selling his own house.
‘Turned down, of course. Even I would’ve turned it down. Hector left it on the market a couple of months, during which metal thieves plundered it. Starting to look derelict again, well on the way to becoming a picturesque ruin like the castle. He came back, offering me a chance to rent, peppercorn if I continued with repairs, and an open opportunity to buy.’
The turning point had come with an offer for Dennis’s business.
‘I was employing about a dozen chaps – working all over southern Britain by then, chasing contracts – National Trust, English Heritage, Cadw in Wales. I didn’t want to retire, as such – just tired of endless travelling around. Then Adam and Nadya needed somewhere. Casey was dubious, but it looked like fate to me. I sold the business. We bought Cwmarrow. Realization of a dream. Whoopee.’ He glanced at Merrily once and then turned away to peer into a dark corner. ‘Maybe it went to my head.’
She followed his gaze into the shadows.
‘The stroke.’ He sank his hands into the slanting side pockets of his overalls, blew out a loud breath. ‘I was so angry.’
‘Dennis, we can go back down if you like. If you’d rather not talk about it
here. I don’t want to cause you any—’
‘No.’ He sprang up and strode across to the door, rammed it shut behind him with a heel. ‘Talk about it here.’ Advancing on the two stools, picking up one with each hand, setting them down next to the workbench. ‘When I’m in here, I can believe it all happened.’
The door, despite its weight, didn’t fully close. It slid back out of its frame, perhaps because of the obviously warped and tilting floorboards.
‘Were there any old stories about this house, Dennis? Anything to suggest… disturbance?’
‘I never paid much attention. You can accept things might exist without becoming obsessed by them. Whole valley was haunted, Selwyn used to say. Haunted by its past. Past was alive. He’d lie here – over there – and…’
‘This was his bedroom?’
‘Oh, yeah. If you stood on a ladder and looked through the slit you’d see it directly faces the castle. He called it the Castle Room. Slept in a massive old bed where he claimed he’d often wake up to the sounds of the village. The village that wasn’t there any more. Wake up at first light, hear the village waking up around him.’ Dennis snorted. ‘The chink, chink of the blacksmith’s hammer, all this.’
‘You didn’t believe him?’
‘He was a storyteller, Merrily. Never stopped telling stories. Couldn’t separate reality from whimsy. Especially towards the end.’ He sat down again. ‘Although I’m starting to believe them.’
He nodded to the second stool and she sat down. The only light was from that slit high in the apex stones and the crack left by the door that wouldn’t quite close.
‘How did you work in here without lights? After the dormer window had gone.’
‘There were lights. They kept going out. Bulbs would blow, within minutes sometimes. I stopped replacing them.’
‘Was this before you were living here? When Selwyn was here and you were working for him?’
‘I didn’t work in here after the dormer went until he left. He’d brought his enormous bed and slept here. Not always alone. The lovely Caroline Goddard. Anyway, years later, I finally got round to this room. Working up here one night, resetting some of the floorboards, being careful because of the wires under there. Had a floodlight on an extension from the landing. And it… well, it went out. The lamp that was plugged in outside. Wasn’t the bulb. Tested it afterwards. Fine. Just wouldn’t work in here.’
