A Shroud of Leaves
Page 22
He frowned. ‘I still think he knows something about Lara.’
‘I’ll be fine. I’ll make sure the police know I’m going.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I’m quite capable of managing one drunk. But first I have a load of mouldy leaves to examine.’
* * *
After several more hours of sorting leaves, Jazz was happy to continue the laborious searching by herself. She was young, and looking for lab hours to bolster her profile with the department. Sage managed to get a gruff agreement from Chorleigh when she phoned to ask to see the pottery he had mentioned. She drove through the forest just as the light began to fail.
She banged on the door. ‘Mr Chorleigh?’ It swung open and the dog barked and jumped up to her knees.
‘Hi, Hamish,’ she said, bending to stroke him. ‘Where’s your dad gone? Mr Chorleigh! It’s Sage Westfield, the archaeologist.’
He clattered down the stairs to the hallway. ‘Oh. It is you, good. I thought it was those bastards back to question me again. How many people do they think I’ve killed?’
‘I’m so sorry to bother you again.’ She patted the dog one last time. ‘I was wondering about the finds your grandfather made in 1913 when they excavated the barrow. You said you’d got something I could look at when I phoned.’
He shook his head as if trying to clear it. ‘It’s in here, I remembered where it was. I put it in the kitchen years ago, after the old man died. It’s in an old biscuit tin with horses on the front, somewhere in the dresser cupboard.’
She looked past him. The hall was cluttered, heaps of coats on the newel post of once-elegant stairs that swept up the centre of the lobby, then divided. ‘Wow. Lovely stairs.’
‘Draughty,’ he said, but he pulled back so she could pass. ‘Bloody freezing in the winter. One of the windows on the landing is cracked.’
Sage waited for him to lead the way through the passageway towards the back of the house. They passed open doors either side, with boxes and piles of magazines and books sliding onto the floor in places.
‘The police searched everything, smashing stuff, throwing it about.’ Chorleigh shuffled past the side of the stairs, pushing open a smaller door at the back of the corridor. ‘They left the biscuit tin though.’
Searching the house must have taken days, and the police had left the place upside down. Looking around at the dust, the grime on the wall up the stairs, Sage wondered what it had looked like before the search. Chorleigh didn’t look capable of sorting it out, not in his present state.
‘Great. It will help with the old bones your ancestor buried outside the house,’ she prompted. ‘We’ve confirmed the bones are thousands of years old, and most likely have come out of the barrow.’
Chorleigh led the way into a surprisingly large and comfortable kitchen. The draining board was piled high with clean plates and cutlery, a few clothes were draped over an airer near a radiator. The floor was filthy, dark patches where the dog was fed and came in from the garden, Sage supposed.
He waved at the dresser, a whole wall of cupboards and shelves. At the end of the room were double doors in the middle of a pair of windows. The house was on a rise; it looked down over shrubs to the sloping land running to the river.
‘Wow.’ Sage walked over to check out the view. Even through the smeared and dusty windows it was stunning, the silver ribbon of water weaving in lazy loops along the valley floor. ‘That is beautiful.’
Chorleigh stood next to her. He had a sour, unwashed smell. ‘It’s the main reason I haven’t sold the place,’ he said. ‘We don’t own the land right down to the river, just a hundred yards of the slope. But that view – my mother loved it.’ She could see the edge of a dirty plastic sheet that must be the pool cover, just at the corner of the house.
He pointed along what she realised was a mossy and grass-covered terrace. ‘I put seeds out for the birds. We get all sorts in the garden. We had a goldcrest last summer, and a lesser spotted woodpecker. Look!’ His excitement was infectious, despite the wave of unpleasant scent as he raised his arm to point at one of the feeders, hung from a sapling. ‘Treecreeper. We get them in the spring sometimes.’ The creature slithered around the trunk of the tree like a feathered rat.
She smiled. ‘You must get squirrels and deer as well.’
‘I put pony nuts out for them.’ He looked away, pulled his arm back as if to protect himself. ‘The police asked me about the horses, why I didn’t go for help when Dad left them to die… I tried to get to them, make sure they were fed and watered. He went nuts, hit me. I don’t remember much else. When I got back I found them dead, in the stable. He said he’d put them out of their misery once they were too weak to fight back. It was horrible; it was supposed to teach me a lesson. I’ve never been near them since. The police questioned me for hours but I would never have hurt them. Not our own animals.’
‘That must have been awful,’ Sage said. There were tears just balanced on his eyelashes. She turned to the kettle. ‘Can I put some tea on, if that’s OK?’
Chorleigh nodded, staring at Sage. ‘I haven’t killed anyone.’ Sage opened her mouth to say something but found she couldn’t. She didn’t trust him that much and wasn’t sure how much he was allowed to know.
‘It must be really difficult for you,’ she said eventually. He nodded, and walked over to get a couple of cups from a cupboard. ‘We’ve already ruled out your involvement with the bones in the garden. We’re just trying to find the truth.’
He pointed out teabags and the fridge to Sage, and walked over to the dresser. Someone had obviously gone through it and stacked everything back inside. It didn’t take him long to pull out a pile of books and an old biscuit tin.
‘Here we go,’ he said, hefting the box, which rattled. ‘I remember my mum showing this to me and Carol, my sister. We used to play with the bits of pot when we were kids.’
‘When did your mother leave?’ She was curious about him. He wasn’t as old as she had thought; if he was a teenager in 1992 he could only be in his mid-forties, but he looked sixty at least. Only his bushy hair was youthful, just streaked with grey.
‘Before Lara disappeared. She lives in Spain now with her second husband. She took my younger sister when she left and the old bastard said she didn’t want me. Later he told me she’d passed away. I found out the truth when he died in 1995. Carol went to university in the UK; she got in contact a couple of times but we lost touch again.’
He struggled to get the top off the tin; it looked as if it had been rusted shut. Clearly the police hadn’t been too bothered. Inside were a number of old plastic bags and bits of newspaper. When he pulled one open to reveal a piece of pottery about half the size of his palm, he dropped it into her hand.
‘Wow. We have to be careful though,’ she said. ‘That could be four thousand years old or so. Someone rolled the clay into a pot, fired it and probably cooked in it for years so it’s going to be brittle.’
It was typical early Bronze Age, in that it was crude but defied simple classification. Each potter group would have had their own preferred clay and style. It was thick, and the edges were sharp, despite the hundred years of being handled.
Chorleigh unwrapped another and handed it to Sage.
‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘Have you got any plain paper?’
‘I can take some from the printer.’
Sage noticed that he had a modern-enough computer on a battered desk in the corner, beside a sofa with a sleeping bag on it. The dog’s bed was at the head end. This beautiful house has given him nothing; he’s camping in this one room.
He cleared the end of a table and laid a couple of pieces of paper down. She started arranging the pieces of pot, seventeen in all. There were a few pieces of fragile corroded wire in what looked like a copper alloy, and two fragments of carved animal bone. ‘This is the rim of a cooking pot,’ she said, lifting it carefully and placing it on his palm. ‘That smooth indentation? That’s from the potter’s thumb when they were making it.’
‘Isn’t it?’ She walked back to the kettle. ‘That’s what got me into archaeology.’ She filled the cups and added a splash of milk to each. ‘No sugar, is that all right?’
‘I don’t think I have any.’ Chorleigh prodded another sherd. ‘I always thought this was the same pot as the one with the thumbprint.’
‘It’s quite likely. They may have included whole pots in the grave goods with the bodies. For the dead to take to the next world with them, or to honour them in some way.’
She lifted one of the pieces of bone. It looked like a bit of sheep rib and when she smoothed it gently, she could see it was pierced in a lacy pattern. ‘This is great.’
‘They did find that in 1913,’ Chorleigh said, dropping the other fragment into her hand.
‘How do you know that?’ Sage looked up at him.
‘I don’t know. I must have been told.’
Sage tried her most reassuring voice. ‘When you were little, you were probably around your grandparents discussing it. You might know a lot more than you think. Do you mind telling me?’
He sat heavily, curving his hand around his mug. ‘I’d probably remember a lot more with a drink inside me.’
‘I’d hate you to start drinking because of something I said.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, his eyes intense. ‘I’m going to drink anyway.’
Sage lifted one of the pieces of pot. ‘When was the first time you remember seeing this, for example?’
Alistair held his hand out and she dropped it gently into his fingers. ‘As I said, it was with Carol and Mum. We looked at it because my dad was away.’ He looked around. ‘She showed us the book and the drawings as well.’
‘Book?’ Sage’s heart did a little loop in her chest.
‘A little leather book like a diary. And some folded sketches. Grandpa Peter found them after his father died.’
‘Do you still have them?’
‘I don’t know. They were just bits of paper, I’m not sure where they are now.’ He pushed the finds roughly towards her. ‘Here, take them. I’m tired.’
Sage sipped her tea, then carefully wrapped up the finds in the original plastic. ‘I shouldn’t take them. They belong to you. If you want to donate them to the local museum, I know they would be grateful.’ It almost hurt her to say it.
‘I may as well chuck them away.’ His attitude had changed the second he mentioned the book.
‘Please don’t. I’ll look after them and get them photographed, and bring them back to you. Maybe you will find the notes and this book, they might be pivotal to understanding the excavation.’
He seemed to stare right through her, like there was someone else in the room to look at. One of his painful memories, she guessed.
Eventually, he nodded. ‘I’ll have a proper look tomorrow. I’m going down the pub to get some food and a few pints.’
‘OK. Thank you for lending me the pottery, it’s an amazing collection.’ There must be more, God knows where it all went; the fragments were from more than one large pot. But she could already see the same reddish brown as the pottery in the grave site, from under River Sloane’s body.
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‘Readers will recall the strange case of the spectral hound of Fairfield, when visitors to the Forest suffered an attack on their cottage by an unknown, ghostly hound. We have received reports of an excavation on private land of the burial of such a great dog, and eagerly await the scholarly explanations of several visitors from the University of Oxford.’
Fairfield Recorder dated 8th July 1913, cutting pasted into the journal of Edwin Masters
Yesterday, on the ninth, our mentor and friend Professor Conway arrived in the early evening in the same trap I had. He is a man of medium height and he has a bad knee, giving him a limp. He will never explain the injury but I suspect he was a soldier at one time. He never talks about the Boer campaign, yet he knows a great deal about it. He wears his hair longer than is customary and has a fine beard, and I thought neither would find favour with Mr Chorleigh, who is clean-shaven and has iron-grey hair so short you can see his scalp. But Professor Conway soon charmed Mr Chorleigh, and his knowledge of the New Forest impressed the whole family. Indeed, he entertained us with the latest theory about the round barrows at Fairfield Common, just recently described in the journal of the Society of Historians and Antiquaries, of which he is a fellow.
The two older men sat up talking the first night over a decanter of port, while we were sent off like children to play cards in the parlour. They seemed to reach an understanding, and the very next morning, Prof Conway was ready to see the barrows.
He approached the dig very slowly, checking alignments with his compass, framing the barrows in his hands, and standing with his back to the excavation to look at the forest background. Finally, he took off his jacket and looked at the hole itself, nodding at our care in sieving the spoil and keeping it well back from the excavation. Finally, he walked to the grass beside the barrows, crouched low, then laid down flat to observe the land around the earthworks.
I offered him a hand up when he had finished, and he struggled onto his good leg. He looked over at the half-barrow. ‘I think you have something quite interesting here,’ he said, pushing his hat back on his forehead. ‘If you look at the large mound, you can see the other feature would have overlapped it, had it been the same shape and size. Also, I fancy it is on a slightly, slightly I must emphasise, different alignment.’
We nodded; we had already remarked on the length of the first barrow compared to the second. Had it matched the second feature, it would have overlaid it by some ten yards or more. We had also discovered it lay at a slightly different angle, which his expert eye had seen at once.
‘Were they built at different times?’ I asked.
‘I suggest that this,’ he said, walking briskly up the slope of the second barrow with the aid of his stick, ‘was always something entirely different, it was never a complete barrow.’
Peter, who had only a slight acquaintance with Prof Conway, having studied mostly modern history in his degree, was diffident in putting our theory forward.
‘We did wonder if this was a well head, over a natural spring.’ Peter had been a little subdued since his letter had arrived, but he had laughed off my concerns.
Prof Conway clambered down and walked around to the cut end of the feature. ‘No, I think it was always like this. It provides an excellent lookout point, don’t you think?’ He walked to the base of the wall of stone, moving with care between the muddy spots, and laid his hands upon the two upright slabs. They were covered with green and yellow lichens and mosses. ‘Is it possible?’ he said, as if to himself. ‘I wonder. I have seen something a little like it, in Poland. Or was it Lithuania? I forget, but I certainly recall sketching something similar.’ He turned to me. ‘Show me the bones, Mr Masters. Let us interrogate them.’
‘Please,’ I stammered, ‘call me Edwin, sir.’ Indeed he had in his letters.
‘Only if you will call me Robert,’ he answered, smiling at first me and then Peter. ‘At least away from college, we are just three antiquarians digging into Britain’s past.’
We showed him the bones. The man’s skeleton lay in situ as we had been removing the animal skeleton. Peter showed Prof Conway – I will never be able to call him Robert – the sketches Molly and I had done, and called her over from the trees where she was observing. He admired the drawings, suggested ways to make them more scientific and to annotate them, then turned his attention to the head of the great hound.
He smoothed the great skull as if stroking a dog. ‘A large beast.’
‘I’ve never seen a dog as huge,’ I said. ‘Unless it was a mastiff or some other such breed.’
‘A mastiff or a Great Dane, perhaps,’ he said, ‘but these muscle attachments are particularly impressive. I’m no zoologist, but y
ou should seek an opinion from one. If you don’t mind, I should be happy to send a sketch up to a fellow I know at Magdalen.’
Molly was immediately asked to do another drawing from the side, and since she was the best artist among us, we set her up in the shade with the skull. ‘Only,’ she whispered to me, ‘don’t leave me alone with it. It scares me.’ I laughed at her but without malice; I could hardly judge when I had been nervous in the forest myself only a day before.
Prof Conway was keen to see the other finds, declaring himself no expert on the Bronze Age then astounding us with his scholarship. He was knowledgeable about the two hundred or more sherds of pottery, and was able to discern a spiral of copper wire in a lump of corrosion. But his respect for the burial made us all stop and think about the fellow whose bones were laid to rest under his hound.
‘I have no doubt he was a prominent fellow,’ the professor said, gently scraping at the edge of the burial with his own trowel. ‘Look at his size. He was well fed and exercised, and his bones show no sign of deficiency in his growth during childhood. Observe this shoulder muscle attachment on the right side. This was a man who trained with a heavy weapon, perhaps every day. I see the scratches on the bones; certainly it looks as if an animal attacked him.’
I peered into the hole. ‘We wondered if we might find a sword in the grave, or a shield boss.’
‘Perhaps, but they are usually laid across the body.’ He stared acutely at the skull, as if he could see the face of the dead man. Perhaps he could, perhaps he could look at the shapes of the bones and the hollows where tendons, ligaments and muscles once lay, and could divine the man’s physiognomy. ‘No, I am wondering about the hound, as you call it.’