Worthless Remains

by Peter Helton

  ‘Kids?’ asked Guy.

  ‘We have a busload of kids from a school in Bath turning up tomorrow; they’ll get a tour of the place in exchange for an afternoon of washing the finds. Educational remit and all that.’

  I saw Stoneking rolling his eyes theatrically as if about to faint from the shock of the news. A minute later, when everyone but me had left, he grinned. ‘Ghostly whisperings and now a real skellington. Tarmford Hall really does deliver, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not to mention people getting shot and having their heads staved in with shovels.’

  ‘That was the damn nighthawks, nothing to do with us.’

  ‘Paul’s shovel-over-the-head, maybe. I don’t think the ballista dart was shot by a nighthawk.’

  Stoneking shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘Wait a second, this skeleton, it couldn’t be one of Olive’s relatives, could it?’

  ‘No, there’s only the mad grandmother under the fig tree and some other ancestor of Olive’s but he’s on the other side of the house and he has a slab of granite on top of him.’

  ‘To make sure he stays down.’

  ‘I just hope this doesn’t mean the archaeologists need to hang around even longer. Honestly, I can hardly wait for them all to go away again. I have had enough entertainment to last me. To top it all, yesterday I got arrested by a chap half my age because of a few marijuana plants in the greenhouse. He treated me like I’m an international drug dealer or something. I’m here, in my own house, on bail, would you believe?’

  ‘Did you know about the cannabis plants?’

  ‘I knew Sam smoked the odd joint and as long as he didn’t do it in the house why should I care? But I didn’t know he grew his own. But surely it must be better than giving money to drug dealers? Growing your own, I mean. What harm can it do?’

  ‘I’ve been reliably informed that the prevailing view is: if it’s against the law then it’s against the law, and that’s the end of the story.’

  ‘Bah humbug. Let’s go and look at human remains.’

  The police had returned, or were still there, it was hard to tell. They were taking photographs of everything and walked about with sticks, poking hedges and shrubs, looking for anything out of the ordinary that might be connected to the attack on Paul, and were scratching their heads at the half a million boot prints left all over the area. The consensus was that any intruders had probably come in across the fields below the lake.

  Two of the fresh holes the nighthawks had dug were located close to the area where Paul had been attacked, but the one the archaeologists clustered about was more than thirty yards further on, closer to the lake near a solitary pollarded oak tree. Everyone was there: even Olive stood nearby, dressed in black, leaning on her stick and glowering. When we got closer I noticed that it was different from the other holes, larger and much deeper. We stood at a respectful distance until Keith changed camera angles and Emms gave us the nod. Mark and I peered down into the hole which was at least three feet deep. Visible at the bottom was the unmistakable eye socket and nose cavity of a human skull. Julie, Adam and Andrea were all on their knees, working frantically with their trowels.

  ‘This is going to take ages,’ Guy complained. ‘Why don’t you use the digger or at least a shovel?’

  ‘Because we’re not here to lay sewage pipes, Guy,’ Andrea said without looking up.

  Dan, the digger driver, turned up with a large, state-of-the-art metal detector and swept the area with it. It gave a loud, annoying yowl when he came close to the burial site. ‘That’s a meaty signal; that’s why they kept digging so deep, I guess,’ he said.

  ‘That makes sense, then,’ Julie said.

  ‘Yeah, and when they came down on a human skull they got the heebie-jeebies,’ Adam agreed.

  ‘Not cut out to be tomb raiders,’ Andrea said. ‘Just run-of-the-mill petty thieves.’

  ‘But vicious enough to hit Paul over the head,’ I reminded them.

  Andrea straightened up and stopped her scraping. ‘That’s what puzzles me. It isn’t as though this place is known to have yielded treasure or anything.’

  I had thought about that too. ‘As far as you know,’ I said. ‘What if they did find something very valuable in one of the first holes they dug and are now looking for more of the same?’

  She flicked at a bit of soil with her trowel, thinking. ‘You know, that’s a possibility. And every time they do dig a hole they seem to leave things like coins or brooch pins behind as though it was beneath them. They’re not that valuable but it’s the best a realistic metal detectorist would expect to find. I mean they’d think finding a coin is a good reward for a weekend’s sweeping. Mostly it’s buttons and bits of barbed wire, you know.’

  ‘With a signal this strong there could be interesting grave goods down there,’ Emms said.

  ‘I’m glad this is a one-week special, otherwise we’d have already been and gone,’ said Andrea.

  ‘How long will it take you to get down to the level of the bones?’ I asked.

  ‘If you let us get on with it, about an hour,’ Andrea said.

  Mark and I took the hint and walked back to the Hall while the sun made an appearance again after the night of rain. Annis was also just making an appearance on the terrace, coffee cup in one hand, a slim book in the other. She waved it at us. ‘Look what I found,’ she beamed.

  I took it from her. It was an old paperback, so old the price was marked on the front page as 1/6d. Two ghostly black and white figures on the cover held a dagger and a gun, respectively. ‘Peril at End House. By Agatha Christie,’ I read. ‘Crime club, one and six. What’s so good about it? I hate Agatha Christie. You hate Agatha Christie.’

  ‘Everyone hates Agatha Christie. No one reads this stuff; it’s utter piffle. But the twist in Peril at End House is interesting.’

  ‘How do you know if you don’t read Agatha Christie?’ Mark asked reasonably.

  ‘I had to sit through a telly version of it at my mum’s a couple of Christmases back. In this one a woman gets threatening letters and several attempts are made on her life. Then she lends someone a distinctive cardie of hers who promptly gets murdered and everyone thinks the murderer mistook her for the woman who had been threatened. Turns out she staged the attempts on herself so she could kill the woman in the cardie. Follow me?’

  ‘Are you saying Guy Middleton wrote himself threatening letters and poisoned his own whisky so he could bash the cameraman’s brains in, first making him wear his hat?’

  She shrugged. ‘I told you Agatha Christie was piffle,’ she said and walked off, no doubt to find more coffee.

  ‘Interesting theory though,’ Mark said, taking the book from me.

  ‘Seen that before?’ I asked.

  Mark pulled a face. ‘Told you, if it’s from before the Sixties it ain’t mine.’ He opened it at random, squinted at the print and rolled his eyes. ‘Did people really talk like that?’

  ‘No, never.’

  He let the book fall shut. ‘But why would Middleton want to kill the cameraman?’

  ‘Don’t know. Let’s find out. Have the police searched Paul’s room?’

  ‘Last night and again this morning.’

  ‘Did they take anything away?’

  ‘Not that I noticed.’

  ‘Then let’s go.’ Mark led the way up the stairs from the central gallery. ‘Does anyone ever use the grand staircase at the front?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not really. I think it was just there to impress your guests and make sure they walk past the portraits of your ancestors and paintings of your horses, you know, so they understood how important you were.’

  ‘Does anyone ever use the little stone staircase in the north tower?’

  The flicker of a smile. ‘How did you find that? No one uses that, and for good reason. There’s no light and nothing to hold on to. If you fall you’ll go arse-over-tit all the way down. There we are; that’s Paul’s room.’

  It was the third door on t
he long corridor that had Mark’s master bedroom at the very end of it. ‘No police tape, so I suppose we’re free to enter,’ I said.

  The room was quite messy, but whether as a result of two police searches or because Paul liked to drop his stuff all over the place was hard to tell. There were a few magazines, clipboards with schedules, lists and stills of the dig printed out on cheap paper. There was a lightweight travel printer on top of a chest of drawers; on the bed stood a camera bag with an SLR and long lens. I switched on the camera; the display told me ‘No SD’. ‘They took the SD card out, I suppose. Also there’s no sign of his laptop. He had a snazzy one, too, so they probably took that.’

  Mark looked unenthusiastic. ‘What can we find that they haven’t?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘But they’re looking for things and find what they’re looking for. We’re just looking, so we might see things. Unlooked-for things, as it were.’

  ‘Very deep, I’m sure.’

  ‘Zen and the Art of Rummaging.’ I picked up an aluminium briefcase. It was empty apart from sheets of paper relating to his work, an empty crisp packet, a mint humbug covered in fluff and a model boat magazine called . . . wait for it . . . Model Boat. I held it up. ‘Getting there.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Never mind. Can’t tell you what it’s about yet.’

  ‘In that case I’ll leave you to it and go and watch Annis paint. Much more fun.’ He left, allowing me to step up my search a bit. I looked under the bed, under the mattress, inside the pillows, opened all the drawers and chucked everything on the floor, then heaved it back in. Then I took the camera out again and unscrewed the lens – nothing inside. I dropped the camera on the bed and felt the foam rubber lining of the camera bag. There was a lump, a tiny hard-edged bump, barely noticeable; the bump I had been looking for yet I did not know it. The lining came out without putting up much of a struggle and the unlooked-for thing dropped on to the bed sheet. A tiny black micro SD card. Anyone could feel like 007 these days. Anything worth hiding was surely worth finding, as long as it hadn’t just slipped under the lining by accident. All I needed now was somewhere to stick it. I took out my mobile phone, opened the back, fiddled the SD card out and inserted Paul’s.

  From the moment I had found the model boat magazine I was pretty sure that it was Paul who had used a toy boat to collect the money he extorted from Guy. When I found the SD card I was pretty sure what I would find on that, too, and I was not disappointed. The pictures were large in size and good quality. These had not been taken on a mobile but on a very nice SLR with a long lens, the one now lying on the bed in front of me. They were, as Middleton had indicated, pornographic enough to prove without doubt that he had more than just held hands with an underage schoolgirl. I looked at Middleton and his little ponytail, I looked at the girl, who was attractive and fresh-faced, and wondered what made her roll around in the grass with a guy three times her age. The power of television and the pull of celebrity, I supposed.

  I turned my mobile off and pocketed it. On the way downstairs I contemplated my dilemma. I now had pretty good evidence that Paul was blackmailing Guy Middleton, which was a serious crime, while the photographs and the place where I had found them were pretty good circumstantial evidence. Unfortunately I had not found the money. More unfortunate still was the fact that I had also promised Guy to keep the fact that he was being blackmailed secret. Rash words. Then again I didn’t like Guy much and he was not, strictly speaking, my client. It was the production company that had hired me. And I liked them even less.

  Back on the ground floor I stood irresolute in the open French doors to the terrace. I could see a lot of people crowded around the burial site, which probably meant they had managed to reach the level of the skeleton.

  What if I did hand the pictures over to the police? Even Superintendent Needham would surely jump to conclusions. And he would jump a bit like this: Paul blackmails Guy. Guy finds out it’s him and decides it’s time to get rid of him. Guy groans in bed all day pretending he still feels rubbish after the food poisoning. He somehow gets Paul to meet him outside in the middle of the night and hits him over the head. Case closed. Before you could say News at Six Guy Middleton would find himself in a police cell, arrested on suspicion of having had sex with a minor as well as attempted murder. I could see Guy from here, standing by the excavation, minus his hat since the police had taken it away – not the fashion police but the forensics people – and wondered whether it was my job to arrange that particular nightmare for him or whether I should leave Needham to figure it out for himself. And I came to a Honeysett kind of conclusion: I decided to do nothing and let things take their course. Everyone can make a mistake.

  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 beyon
d 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.’