The Ghosts of Tullybrae House

by Veronica Bale

  “Thank you,” she said. “So do you.”

  “And what am I—chopped liver?” Sophie put in with mock offense.

  “I was getting to you,” Emmie laughed. “I started with Famke first because I already complimented you on your socks.”

  “Smooth.” Sophie grinned, pulling the hem of her printed tee-shirt over her denim mini skirt.

  Famke tisked. “You’re going to freeze in that tee-shirt.”

  “That’s why I’ve got a cardy in the back of the van, isn’t it?—A cardigan, a sweater,” she clarified when Famke gave a confused grimace at the slang term.

  Famke responded with something in Dutch which Emmie fancied was a lament over the butchering of the English language by native speakers.

  They trailed after the boys down a series of clean, modernized hallways. The interior of the building surprised Emmie, given its historic exterior. Pale wood panelling adorned the white and glass walls; the floors were tiled in slate. Classrooms and computer laboratories were still lit up here and there, housing a handful of dedicated students who were choosing to work later than their peers. Her curious gaze met that of a young man within one small study room, and she felt a thrill of nostalgia as she recalled her own days spent in study halls just like this one.

  They proceeded towards a rear staircase, where Famke raced ahead to open the metal door for the guys. Single file, they descended the concrete stairs into a basement that was far more institutional looking than the main floor. Corridors, research laboratories, offices and archive storage rooms tracked outwards from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Let’s get these to Receiving,” Ewan ordered. He, Dean and Adam headed down a corridor to the right, while Famke and Sophie proceeded to another room on the left with Emmie in tow. The room, she saw when they unlocked the door and turned on the fluorescent overhead lights, was a workstation of sorts that the team appeared to be using for an office. Waist-high lab-style desks rimmed the walls, their surfaces scattered with computer monitors, paperwork, microscopes and other technological gadgets. In the middle of the room was a stainless steel examining table. Here, too, textbooks and binders full to brimming were stacked precariously on top. The whole room felt like an afterthought, like a place which advertised that great work was done elsewhere.

  “Sorry about all this.” Famke fanned a strong, slender hand at the mess. “Our department has just gone through a major inventory. The natural history museum at Oxford U was interested in some of our things from Skara Brae for their Neolithic exhibition, so our department head thought it would be a good idea to inventory everything else at the same time.”

  She perched on the edge of a tall metal stool in front of one computer monitor, while Sophie went to another. Flicking three sheets of pink paper off a mouse, she wiggled the black plastic object to wake her computer up, then logged on to check her email.

  “You were at Skara Brae?” Emmie put in.

  “Well, no,” Famke answered. “We collaborated on the project after more recent excavations. Some of the stuff was sent here for identification and analysis, carbon dating, that kind of thing. We also re-evaluated the artefacts that were carbon dated back in the nineteen seventies. Soph was there briefly.”

  “Undergrad year. The Bay of Skaill was unreal,” Sophie confirmed, still glued to her monitor.

  “That’s amazing.”

  Before she could ask anything more about the famous Scottish site, Adam popped his head around the doorframe.

  “You birds just about ready?”

  “Gimme a minute,” Sophie said as she typed furiously.

  “Cor, Soph. Whoever he is, the bloke can wait.”

  “The bloke is Professor Kothari. He wants to know about the black-burnished piece he brought up from storage. So if you don’t mind, mate—”

  “Yeah, awright.”

  “Hey, Em,” Dean said eagerly, stepping from behind Adam. “While Soph’s doing that, wanna come see something cool?”

  “Keep it in your pants, mate. She’s seen one before,” Adam joked.

  “Lord give me strength,” Sophie sighed to her monitor. Dean cuffed Adam’s ear.

  “Sure, I’ll come,” Emmie said. She made a show of shaking her head at Adam as she passed, but could not keep the stern face for long.

  “C’mon.” Dean snatched her hand and led her down the hall.

  The way he was holding her hand, and the fact that he was dragging her away from the others, set her on edge. Dean wasn’t trying to make his move, was he? Leading her to a quiet corner to confess something? Until now, none of his overtures had been serious enough for her to worry about. She prayed he hadn’t plucked up the courage to step up his campaign tonight.

  Her discomfort increased when he let go of her hand, placed his palm onto the small of her back, and guided her into a darkened room. The moment he flipped the light switch, however, she felt a little silly. As she looked into the space, it was clear that Dean had a very good, very thoughtful reason for taking her away.

  On several stainless steel gurneys topped with white linen sheets were laid out the bones of four human skeletons.

  Her eyes absorbed the scene with amazement. A sense of overwhelming sadness, mingled with a sense of awe, settled over her. Four human skeletons, four people that had once been alive, that had once had hopes and dreams, thoughts and feelings.

  “I thought you’d be interested,” Dean explained, suddenly shy. “You know, being a historian and all.”

  “This is absolutely incredible,” she breathed.

  He stepped farther into the room, beckoning her to follow.

  “This is all for the first year criminal forensics students at UWS and Glasgow Caledonian. They come here on field trips to view the bones.”

  “Ah, forensics,” Emmie said, understanding. “Let me guess: There’s something about the bones that will tell you how they all died.”

  “I probably should have asked if you’ve taken forensic archaeology before,” he chuckled. “You haven’t seen this kind of thing already, have you?”

  “No. Forensic archaeology was one elective which I really wanted to take, but it just didn’t fit into my schedule in undergrad.”

  “I’ll give you the condensed curriculum, then.” He inclined his head towards the body in the farthest corner.

  “This gentleman, we call him John Parker.”

  “You call him John Parker?”

  “It’s not his real name. At first we called him Parker, but Irene—one of the graduate studies teachers here—her grandson’s name is Parker, and she was creeped out by it. So we made Parker his last name and added John.”

  “Why Parker?”

  Dean wiggled his eyebrows. “Because he was found beneath a parking lot down in Dorset. See here?” He traced a finger along the bones of the neck. “That there is a clean break between the second and third cervical vertebrae.”

  “Not an accident,” Emmie speculated.

  “Smart girl. Probably not. A fall likely would have resulted in a fractured break, jagged edges. When we see a clean break like this, it usually indicates one thing.

  Emmie stared, mesmerized by the separated vertebrae. “A hanging?”

  “A hanging. And in this case, there was a bit more to substantiate the theory. The parking lot they found him under was behind Dorchester Prison. They were repaving after it closed, and the workers inadvertently uncovered hundreds of remains. All of them had the same clean break in about the same location of the vertebrae. The official conclusion is that the site is the long-forgotten mass grave for condemned criminals.”

  “And someone just paved over it.” She shook her head, knowing too well the disregard of people for historic places.

  “I know, right?” Dean agreed. “But it was first paved back in the nineteen forties. They didn’t think about that kind of stuff as much then.”

  Still captivated by the evidence of the hanging, Emmie let herself be guided to the next body. It was a small frame of bones. A
child.

  “This is Lucy,” he said with surprising tenderness. “Female, between the ages of three and ten.”

  “Not exactly a precise identification, is it?” She traced a finger along a tiny arm bone.

  “Well, Lucy’s Victorian. Malnutrition being what it was, it’s hard to tell a lot of the time. We think it’s malnutrition for a few reasons.” Carefully, he picked up a collarbone, which was fractured in the middle. He pulled the ends apart to show her the bone’s inner composition. “This is far too porous to be considered a well-nourished child. Also, we think she’s somewhere closer to five because of the way the frontal and parietal bones here in the skull have fused. Generally speaking, that’s too fused to be any younger than two, but not fused enough for her to be in the pre-teen range.”

  Emmie nodded thoughtfully, examining the sutures of the skull, and followed Dean to the next body.

  “Now this young lady we know. Her name was Mary Vincent, and she, too, was Victorian. Died in eighteen fifty-nine.”

  “Is that evidence of disease?” Emmie asked, immediately picking out the scarred skull, sunken nasal cavity and deformed jaw.

  “Syphilis,” he confirmed. “The bones make her a dead ringer for a syphilitic prostitute. That, as well as the fact that she was buried in the cemetery at St. Luke’s in London—it’s a famous paupers’ lunatic asylum from the era. Syphilitics went mad by the end of their life, as you probably know.”

  She did know. “I went through an Alcatraz phase once. Al Capone is said to have declined in health and mental state there from his syphilis infection. Sad… not about Capone, specifically, but you know what I mean. Sad for Mary and her lot.”

  “I know. It’s all sad. And what’s even sadder is that Mary was estimated to be about fifteen at the time of death. Now, if you know anything about syphilis, this is an advanced stage we see here. Sufferers of the disease can often go anywhere from ten to twenty years with symptoms coming and going before they’re got in the end. So it’s quite possible that she contracted the disease at the age of at least—”

  “Five,” Emmie finished for him, horrified.

  Dean paused, then said softly, “It was a common thing back then: Children—girls—being pushed into the trade because men were willing to buy them.”

  He led her over to the closest body to the door. This one was much larger.

  “This strapping man we call Arnold.”

  “Arnold?”

  “As in Schwarzenegger,” he laughed. “Look at the size of his upper body. Thick arm bones, thick ribs, ridged shoulder plates. See the deep grooves? That’s what happens when there’s significant and repeated musculature strain. The bone starts to ripple to provide more surface area for the muscles to attach to. You’d probably see that in a competitive body builder today. Now compare the upper body with the legs.”

  Emmie took note. “They look disproportionate.”

  “Significantly disproportionate,” he confirmed. “A common thing to find in knights back in the medieval period. They trained to use their upper bodies, but sat on a horse all day so their lower bodies were a lot weaker—by comparison of course. He’s still a behemoth.”

  “That’s interesting. I mean, I know you can tell a lot from bones, but I never realized how much.”

  “You can tell more from bones than a lot of people think. See here? This dent in his skull?”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yup. Dude probably took a blade to the front of the skull at one point or another. But that’s not what killed him. See? It’s begun to heal. Probably went three or four more years after that.”

  Emmie leaned closer. “So what killed him then?”

  Dean grinned devilishly. Gently, he detached Arnold’s jaw and lifted it for her to see the underside. “Tell me what you see.”

  “They’ve got cut marks on each side.”

  “Mmm hmm. Pretty deep cut marks to be affecting the bone, don’t you think? Evidence that the man had his throat slit.”

  “Really?”

  “Those marks are a surefire way to tell if a person’s had his or her throat slit. If you think about it, someone comes from behind and grabs you by the hair. Then they take their knife and drag it from ear to ear. That’s bound to make a mark on the bones. With that much force and at that angle? More often than not, victims of a throat slitting have that same mark on the jaw.”

  “Hey, you guys just about ready?” Ewan appeared at the door, rapping on the metal frame with a knuckle.

  “Yep, we’re done.” Dean turned to Emmie. “Cool, huh?”

  Emmie laughed in disbelief. “Only to people like us. I think for anyone else, this stuff would be pretty morbid.”

  “Thank God for people like us, then. This stuff is what helps us solve modern day murders.”

  “Did you show her John Parker?” Ewan inquired.

  “Of course I showed her John Parker. First thing—he’s the coolest one in there.”

  The others were waiting eagerly when they returned to the team’s temporary office. As a group, they went back up to ground level and out to their van in high spirits. Emmie tried to show as much enthusiasm as the others. But inside, Dean’s story about Arnold and his slit throat made her feel sick.

  It was a strange thing. She’d been affected by the stories of the other three, of course. But the sadness she felt for them was remote, tempered by the fact that their circumstances were also intriguing.

  The last body, though, was anything but remote. It was inexplicably personal.

  THE FAMOUS DR. Iain Northcott’s home was a three-storey townhouse. It was newly built, no more than a decade old. But careful attention had been paid to neighbourhood aesthetic, with the end result being that it did not look out of place with the older buildings and homes in the area. A small, well-maintained walking park occupied the land directly opposite Dr. Northcott’s row of townhouses, with a working fountain and several large, old oak trees. If the homes themselves weren’t an indication, then the prevalence of expensive automobiles parked in the driveways and on the streets were an unmistakable giveaway of the area’s significant affluence.

  The sky had fallen completely dark by the time they arrived. Mellow interior lights warmed the windows of the homes, and a general air of domestic contentment embraced the street. The crew piled out of the white van and made their way to the most brightly lit house of them all, from which laughter and music could be heard.

  In contrast to what she’d been expecting, Emmie was relieved to discover that the party was tasteful without being stuffy. History buffs, in her experience, tended to throw rather stuffy soirees. It was why her first impression, when Sophie had told her about the gathering, was that the still-youngish Londoner had gotten it wrong when she’d instructed Emmie to dress down. But when they stepped through the tall oak front door, there were enough faded jeans and hoodies mixed in amongst the more professionally dressed people that the crew fit right in.

  Dr. Iain Northcott was near the door. He was engaged in an animated discussion with a well-dressed older woman sporting short, platinum blonde hair, and a middle aged man in a blazer and Buddy Holly spectacles. He, himself, was dressed somewhere in-between, in a button shirt with small blue-and-white stripes, and a clean pair of faded denim jeans. When he saw them enter, he waved enthusiastically, and excused himself to his guests.

  “Hey, guys, glad you could make it,” he called over the crowd in his tempered Scottish brogue. When he reached them, he clapped Ewan on the back, and extended a hand to Dean. “I thought it might be too far.”

  “We knocked off early,” Sophie admitted.

  “As well you should. You lot work far too hard as it is.” He turned his boyish green eyes on Emmie. “And who might this lovely young lady be?”

  “This is Emmie Tunstall,” Dean was quick to answer. “She’s the new curator up at Tullybrae.”

  Dr. Northcott’s eyes lit up. “Oh, is that so? Well, I’m pleased to meet you, Emmie. You’re very welcome. Now p
lease, all of you, help yourselves to drinks. And there’s some fantastic tuck in the kitchen.”

  “Tuck?” Emmie whispered to Sophie.

  “Food.”

  “Ah.”

  They all ventured down a narrow hallway, which had gleaming hardwood floors lit up by track lighting overhead. They had to go single file, and skirt around people who were milling about, taking up much of the already slim space.

  In the kitchen, more people stood around, chatting happily in groups of two and three. The drinks and “tuck” which Dr. Northcott had mentioned were laid out in abundance on the butcher-block centre island. Cheeses, meats, fruit and vegetable trays, a crock pot with saucy meatballs, plates of chicken wings, phyllo-wrapped appetizers and mini sandwiches—the counter was brimming. In a cluster beside the food were several different bottles of red, white and blush wines, pre-made spritzers and all kinds of spirits. On the floor on either side of the island were two coolers packed full with bottles and cans of beer, which were kept cold by crushed ice.

  Some of the people in the kitchen waved to the crew, who waved back. Spotting the beer, Adam went straight for them. He fished a brown bottle of Hoegaarden lager from the ice, cracked the cap off, and took a long swig. “What are you drinking, Em?” he offered once he’d lowered the bottle.

  “Um,” she glanced at her choices. “I’ll have a red wine please.”

  “Cor,” Sophie declared, eyeing the spread with glee. “He’s got that cream cheese salsa dip.”

  She plucked a taco chip from an oversized ceramic bowl and scooped a large chunk of cheesy dip. Her teeth crunched into the morsel with audible satisfaction.

  “Here you are, love.” Adam thrust an etched crystal wine glass into Emmie’s hands. The ruby liquid sloshed inside.

  “Wow, this is a lot,” she laughed.

  Adam winked. “Famke—you’re up. What’ll it be?”

  “White for me, thanks.”

  Once she had her drink, Famke caught Emmie’s eye and inclined her head. “Come on, let’s go exploring. I’ve never seen inside Iain’s house.”