by Leo McNeir
“This is … could it be … is it … you know …?”
“Yes. It’s the one you saw that night. You see, it’s just a normal boat.”
“Then why have you hidden it under a tarpaulin?”
Anne smiled, trying to look reassuring. “It’s not hidden. It’s being stored. This is just to keep the elements off.”
“Can I have a look round it?”
It would be a good way of dispelling Danny’s concerns, Anne thought. Then she recalled the interior. Under the darkness of the tarpaulin, the inside would seem more like a U-boat than ever. Then there were the books and all the other German things on board, including the photo of the old racing car with the swastika markings.
“It’s locked.” Anne’s tone was emphatic.
“Your friend didn’t leave you a key?”
“I’d have to check with Marnie. Come on, I thought you wanted a quiet walk.”
Anne was turning to go when her mobile rang. She pulled it out and checked the screen.
“Donovan?” Danny read the name over Anne’s shoulder. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“I’ll ring him later.” Anne turned off the phone.
“Is Donovan the, er, weirdo? Sorry. Out of order. But is that him?”
“Yeah. He’s probably just calling to check the boat’s still nice and spooky.”
Anne moved to step off the deck, but Danny took hold of her arm. “But don’t you think that is kind of … spooky? He should ring like, when we’re actually standing on his boat?”
“I think I’d call that a coincidence, Danny.”
“Will Donovan, your boyfriend, be coming round later? I’d like to meet him.”
“He is not my boyfriend.”
Danny gave Anne an I-wasn’t-born-yesterday look. “If you say so. But is this non-boyfriend coming round?”
“No. He’s injured his foot. He had an accident. Fell downstairs.”
Danny opened her eyes wide. “Down the wall-ladder from your bedroom?”
“No! He had the accident in London, where he lives.”
“So he won’t be coming up here.”
“Correct. Now let’s go for that quiet walk you were so keen on. Okay?”
“What are we doing this evening, then?”
“I thought we’d dress up as witches, pop down to the coven, pull a couple of warlocks.”
Danny rolled her eyes.
Anne grinned. “Sorry. Out of order. We’ve got people coming to dinner.”
“Who is it this time, Archbishop of Canterbury?”
“Just two archaeologists: the one in charge of the excavations and his wife.”
Danny considered this. “The talk won’t be too gruesome, I hope.”
Anne took her friend’s arm and squeezed it.
“Just a friendly social get-together with nice people.”
“Great.”
*
Danny lay on her front on the sunlounger, watching Anne through half-closed eyelids. Her friend was slipping a T-shirt over her bikini and draping a towel over her legs. Her pale skin was turning a light shade of pink.
“You okay?”
Anne smiled. “I’m starting to look like a pork sausage. Get you anything?”
“I’m fine.” Danny shifted onto her back and opened the bottle of suntan oil. She began languidly rubbing it on her arms and shoulders. “You were going to phone your, er, Donovan. Remember?”
“Right.” Anne did not want a discussion about non-boyfriends. Without hesitation she picked up the mobile and pressed buttons.
“Ursula Brandt.”
“Hi, Uschi. It’s Anne.”
“Oh, yes. Hallo. I will fetch Nikki … Donovan. One moment.”
Danny made a face and mouthed Uschi?
Sotto voce. “His cousin. She’s staying to help look after – Oh, hi! How’s your foot coming along?”
“Slowly. I’m trying to get around without crutches as much as I can.”
“Good. And you’ve still got Uschi taking care of you.”
“You could call it that.”
“It was as much as I could do not to call her Mutti.”
“Same goes for me. It’s scary. I tried ringing you this morning.”
“I know. That’s why I’m phoning.” Anne saw Danny perk up. “Were you concerned about the boat?”
“Just thinking of you.”
“Good. Well, the boat’s fine.”
“Somebody with you?”
“I was showing it to my friend Danny. She’s here for the weekend.”
“She came up before, didn’t she?”
“Uh-huh. So how long can Uschi stay?”
“A few more days, then she’ll be going home to Germany.”
“That should see you over the worst.”
“Anne, listen. You will be careful? I don’t like Exodos being there any longer than necessary. I’ll come and collect her as soon as I’m mobile.”
“No need to rush.”
“Try and stop me.”
“I wouldn’t want to.”
After Anne disconnected, Danny grinned at her over the top of her sunglasses and began applying suntan oil to her legs. She hummed quietly to herself.
Anne smiled back. “What?”
*
Danny’s apprehension about intellectual visitors vanished as soon as she met Rosemary Goodchild. Rob’s wife was petite, dark and vivacious, with curly hair, dressed casually in black trousers and a white silk shirt.
While Marnie helped Rosemary try out steering the boat during the tootle, Danny cornered Anne in the galley, assembling the tray of drinks.
“She really is a doctor?”
“She’s got a PhD or a DPhil in archaeology. Dr Rosemary Goodchild. Why d’you ask?”
“She just seems, sort of like, normal.”
“Not weird or scary like most of our friends, you mean?”
“Yeah. No! You know what I mean. Your other friends are somehow, well …”
“But she isn’t.”
“That’s right.”
Neither did she turn out to have much aptitude for steering a narrowboat. Under Rosemary’s guidance, Sally Ann performed a slalom several hundred yards long before she handed the tiller back to Marnie, laughing at her own inadequacy.
Returning from the tootle, they took their places at the table on the bank. Danny found herself seated beside Rosemary. When Ralph came over from Sally Ann carrying bottles and a corkscrew, he paused before putting the wine on the table.
“Good lord, you two could be sisters.”
Danny and Rosemary laughed in harmony.
“That’s just what I’d been thinking,” Danny said.
Rosemary seemed delighted at the comparison. “I think that’s a little unflattering to you, Danny. I must be at least ten years older.”
“But you really do have a doctorate and work at Oxford, at the uni?”
“Yes, I do. That’s how I met Rob.”
Rob was now passing glasses of wine round the table. “We met at a dig in a ruined abbey in the Vale of Evesham.”
“How romantic!” Danny exclaimed.
“It was.” He beamed. “We’d dug up a mass grave and Rosemary – she was working for her doctorate at the time – studies on bone deterioration due to various types of wasting disease – diagnosed that we’d found victims of the Black Death.”
Danny’s radiant smiled faltered. Rosemary put a hand on her arm.
“It was easy, really. It was either that or we’d found a leper colony graveyard, but there was no record of a –”
“Red, white or rosé?” Marnie interjected.
“Oh, red, please. Sorry. Mustn’t talk shop. But you know what we archaeologists are like, once we get going.”
“Still, it must have been a lovely spot.” Danny seemed determined to rally. “The Vale of Evesham sounds beautiful.”
“It was. We were doing rescue archaeology, recording the site before a primary school was built next to i
t.”
Danny was smiling again. “That’s nice. Do you have children, Rosemary?”
Rosemary grinned and winked at Danny. “Working on it.”
The conversation moved easily on throughout the meal, with Anne and Danny talking about their own plans for the future, Marnie and Ralph describing their busy lives, Ralph’s travels, his house in Oxfordshire, Marnie explaining how she came to Knightly St John and her programme for developing Glebe Farm.
“You’re a woman of property, Marnie,” Rob observed. “It must be good to feel settled like that.”
“What about you, Rob? Where do you and Rosemary call home?”
“A small terraced house in Oxford, off Richmond Road. You know that area?”
“Of course.” Ralph was pouring the last of the wine. “Very nice part of town.”
“Rather far for commuting to Cambridge though, isn’t it, Rob?” Marnie asked.
“That’s the academic’s dilemma. You see, Marnie, we aren’t guaranteed security of tenure these days.”
“How d’you mean?”
Rob shrugged. “I’m on a three-year contract at New Melville Hall, and when the project ends in two years’ time, I’m out of a job.”
“And you, Rosemary?”
“Annual contract, renewable. Not a bad arrangement. The lab gets a steady stream of work from outside which keeps us going. Plus we occasionally get involved in things like the grave site here, though that’s coming to an end now, of course.”
“Rosemary’s submitted her report,” Rob added.
“What was it you found, exactly?” Danny asked casually.
Marnie tried to head her off. “I think that’s probably confidential, isn’t it? More wine, Rosemary?”
Rosemary held out her glass. “Well, I expect you’ll hear about it soon enough. You know the remains in Sarah’s grave were those of a man who’d been murdered.”
Marnie was pouring red wine. “Yes, we’ve known that for some time. Help yourself to salad.”
“Thanks. It was interesting. We found tiny traces of morphine, or more accurately metabolites of morphine, in what little preserved tissue there was. This could have been contained in a substance like, say, laudanum. It’s hard to tell. The traces were very small.”
Danny had now given up. Marnie was still trying to follow.
“Metabolites?”
“When a substance has disappeared, it leaves behind something that indicates it had been there. That’s a metabolite.”
“I see, and presumably they would indicate some kind of sedative?”
“Yes.”
“Which means?”
“By itself, not a lot. But if you take into account that the hyoid was fractured, well, the evidence is pretty clear.” Rosemary sipped her wine.
“The hyoid?” Marnie looked baffled. “Sorry, I hadn’t realised I was quite so ignorant.”
Rob pointed at his throat. “Little bone in the shape of a U, roughly here.”
Time to move on, Marnie thought. “I see. Now, whose glass needs topping up?”
Danny was fingering her throat. “So he broke his neck while taking sleeping tablets?”
Rosemary laughed again. “Even Sherlock would have problems proving that!”
“What does it prove, then?”
Rosemary took another sip. “Well, I suppose it looks as if he was drugged then strangled or garrotted.”
Everyone fell silent. Marnie wondered what was the difference between strangling and garrotting, but realised she didn’t really want to know.
“Could there be any other explanation?” Ralph asked quietly. “Could the bone have been damaged during burial or by movement of the skeleton when it was disturbed?”
“Unlikely. The hyoid is well protected, at the base of the tongue. No, I think we have a fair idea of how death occurred here. I’ve seen this kind of thing before.”
“You’ve done a lot of work for the police?”
“No, never. But I’m familiar with such things from sacrificial sites I’ve worked on in Europe and South America.”
“Are you saying these bones could be ancient, that they were already in the ground when Sarah was buried and perhaps just placed back on top of her coffin afterwards?”
“No. We know the bones aren’t very old. That’s not in doubt.”
Marnie was puzzled. “But you said they were like sacrificial remains?”
“It wasn’t uncommon for sacrificial victims to be drugged before they were killed.”
“How horrible!” Danny had found her voice again.
Rosemary touched her arm. “The whole business was horrible. But in an odd kind of way, it also indicates those primitive people weren’t so uncivilised as you might have imagined.”
Danny looked aghast. “They weren’t?”
“Sedating the victims probably made them unaware of what was happening. And strangling can be a very quick death. Joan of Arc, for example, was probably strangled by an executioner who jumped up onto the faggots behind her while others were setting light to them to burn her at the stake. It’s all a question of –”
The table shook as Danny leapt to her feet and raced off towards the spinney, a hand covering her mouth. Anne was the first to react. She pushed back her chair, stumbled over it and set off in pursuit.
*
There was silence in the air as Danny turned over in bed. She blinked and a wall came into focus: varnished pine, tongued and grooved. She took a deep breath, tried to unscramble her brain and yawned.
From near her feet came a gentle warbling sound. She stiffened as something moved on the bed. A furry face peered into her own, black, with long dark whiskers and deep amber eyes. Danny stroked the thick-pile fur and soft velvety ears.
“Dolly,” she croaked. “What are you doing here? Where is here?”
“Hi.”
A quiet, cheerful voice from close by. Anne was standing in her pyjamas, beside the bed in the sleeping cabin.
“You’re on Sally Ann. We put you to bed yesterday evening. You’ve been asleep for ages.”
“What time is it?”
“Gone six. Do you remember what happened?”
“Don’t think I want to, but you’d better tell me.”
Anne sat on the bed. “You, er, threw up, behind one of the trees in the spinney. No way we could hoist you up to the attic, so Ralph carried you back here, gave you some brandy to settle your stomach.”
Danny realised she was only wearing bra and pants. Anne continued.
“Marnie and I got you out of your things. They were a bit messed up. You just fell asleep and that was that. I stayed on board to keep an eye on you.”
Danny groaned. “God, how embarrassing.”
“Don’t worry. We put your clothes in the washing machine and tumble dryer. They’re good as new.”
Danny smiled weakly. “Always so practical. Anne, you can cope with anything. Me, I’m useless.”
“Rubbish! These specialists, they’ve got used to all the horrible details. It’s nothing to them.”
“They do strike me as a bit obsessive. D’you think all academics are like that about their subjects?”
“Ralph isn’t, but then he works in a different field. Hard to get obsessive about theories and statistics, I suppose.”
Danny yawned again. “Got anything planned for today?”
Anne smiled. “No plans at all.”
“No visitors?”
“Nope. We’ll just take it easy. A lazy day.”
*
By the time Anne drove the Mini to the bus station that evening, Danny had recovered her composure. A restful day of sunbathing and reading magazines had done wonders for her tan and her peace of mind. As she turned onto the dual carriageway, Anne glanced at her friend.
“You okay?”
“Great. It’s been really nice.”
Anne laughed. “Not exactly the quiet weekend in the country you’d hoped for.”
“Today’s been lovely, and the r
est of the visit has been really good for my studying.”
“How d’you work that out?”
“Well, as soon as I arrived we practically got arrested by the Highway patrol. Then the high point at dinner was a romantic first meeting in a mass grave from the Black Death or possibly a leper colony. After that it went slightly downhill. I learnt about bones in the neck that break when you get strangled, followed by an explanation of how it was a kindness to be garrotted while being burnt at the stake. At that point I threw up and passed out.”
“And that helps with your studies?” Anne sounded dubious.
“Sure. It’ll be a pleasant relaxation to get back to those boring books.”
Chapter 19
Memorial
On Monday morning Anne used a spare lump of stone from the farmhouse building site to prop the office door wide open. A new week was underway, and the weather forecast promised a scorcher. Marnie arrived just before eight carrying the pedestal fan, which she set up in the kitchen area.
She spent half the morning on the phone ordering paint, wallpaper and curtain material and talking to the decorators and curtain-makers selected for the Knightly Court job. All the boxes on her organisation chart were filled in by the time Anne put the kettle on, and the computer screen looked like a completed crossword puzzle.
She reached for the phone as Anne set a cup down on the desk. Instead of the usual coffee it contained a golden liquid with two slices of lemon floating on the surface. She looked up at Anne.
“Russian tea?”
“Waitrose, actually, but that’s the general idea. Thought it’d make a change in this weather.”
“Good thinking, Batman.”
Marnie dialled a now familiar number and heard Celia’s voice in a rather stilted tone on the answering machine.
We regret we are unavailable at this time. Please leave your name and phone number after the beep and we will return your call at the earliest opportunity.
Marnie complied and hung up. She took a sip of the lemon tea.
“Wonderful. Just what I needed.”
“No joy with Celia?”
“No.” Marnie sounded thoughtful.
“What’s up?”
“I was just wondering what your answerphone message tells the world about you.”
Anne pondered. “Ours just says we’re not here and please leave a message. Businesslike, I suppose. What does Celia say, or is it the butler?” Anne changed to a deeper tone, her enunciation worthy of Noël Coward. “Her ladyship regrets she is unable to grant you audience. Please leave your details and her people will contact your people forthwith.”
