Stick in the Mud: A riveting murder mystery

by Leo McNeir

  “What’s that all about?” Marnie muttered.

  Before Anne could comment, the pleading man took off his hard hat in a gesture of exasperation and ran a hand over his head. While he did this, the first man opened the door and went into the hut. Moments later the two silent men followed him, leaving the bare-headed man outside, fuming.

  “Oh.”

  Anne’s utterance made Marnie turn to look at her.

  “What is it?”

  Anne pointed. “That man.”

  “What about him?”

  “Don’t you see? Don’t you recognise him?”

  Marnie turned back and stared into the compound. The bare-headed man seemed to be uncertain of his next move.

  “Now that you mention it, there is something familiar about him …”

  “It’s that archaeologist. He was at Glebe Farm last summer. You know, Marnie … the one with the name like a highwayman or a … pirate.” Anne was wringing her hands in frustration. “A dashing sort of name.”

  “Dashwood?” Marnie murmured. “Or was it …”

  “Blackwood!” Anne exclaimed. “Dick Blackwood!” She felt like adding, special agent.

  “I do believe you’re right,” said Marnie.”

  Without warning, Anne called out, “Dick!” and waved her arms.

  The man’s head snapped round. Anne shouted again. He looked in their direction and after a few seconds began walking towards them. He quickened his pace, reached the fence and peered through.

  He was a little taller than Marnie, slim, in his twenties, with a brown crew cut and intense brown eyes. He looked from one to the other.

  “Marnie …” He grinned at them in recognition. “Anne … with an ‘e’, if I’m not mistaken.” He gave a roguish laugh.

  Marnie, beamed. “Well, this is a surprise.”

  “For me too.” Dick looked delighted to see them. “What brings you here?”

  “We’re involved in this project.” Marnie indicated the building site.

  “Interior design consultants, no less,” Anne added.

  Dick’s eyes narrowed. “You’re with Philip Everett’s team?”

  “That’s us,” said Marnie.

  “Well I wish he was here now. I’d get more sense out of Philip than I do from those clowns.” He gave a nod over his shoulder towards the huts. His tone was bitter.

  “What’s going on?” Marnie asked.

  Dick hesitated. He seemed to be wrestling internally with some sort of dilemma.

  “Look, Dick, if it’s something you can’t –”

  “No, it’s just … well, it’s supposed to be confidential, but … oh, what the hell.” He gestured towards the site entrance. “Since you’re part of the project anyway, come on in. I’ll show you.”

  Once he had padlocked the entrance behind them, Dick led the way to a hut bearing the sign STAFF ONLY. Inside, he ferreted in a cupboard and produced two packs wrapped in cellophane. Marnie and Anne pulled them open and slipped on the yellow jackets. He showed them how to adjust the light blue hard hats to fit and handed each of them a lantern.

  As he turned to leave the hut, Anne said, “What about our feet?”

  Dick looked down. “They’re very nice feet.” He grinned.

  “But aren’t we supposed to wear steel-capped boots?”

  “They have to be ordered in your sizes. Don’t worry for now. You’ll be better in sandals today. The boots take some getting used to, and we’ll be climbing ladders.”

  *

  They were standing in the shade on sopping wet ground several metres below street level, where the sounds of the outside world barely reached. They had descended two tall ladders, with Dick leading the way. He had insisted that only one of them should be on each ladder at a time. The rungs were slippery with mud, and the ladders swayed gently with every step.

  With lanterns switched on, they scanned the excavation around them in the gloom.

  “What’s that smell?” Anne asked. “Is it some kind of gas?”

  Marnie sniffed the air. It was suffused with a damp odour combining rotting vegetation with wet soil. Dick looked initially as if he had not understood the question.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said eventually. “Soon you won’t even notice it.”

  “But what is it?” Anne persisted.

  “That …” Dick said, pausing for effect, or as if seeking the right words, “is the smell of history.”

  “What do you mean?” said Marnie.

  “Where we’re standing would’ve been the bank of the river fifteen hundred years ago.”

  Marnie stared towards the top of the upper ladder, high above them.

  “Surely we’re below river level down here.”

  “It’s low tide, otherwise this section would be flooded out,” Dick said. “All the ground from here up to the present-day surface has been deposited over the centuries. Fallen leaves, dead vegetation like trees and bushes, silt from the movement of the river, all of these have made ground level rise to where it is now. That’s what you can smell, now it’s been exposed for the first time in a millennium and a half.”

  “It’s quite … what’s the word? … quite fetid,” said Marnie.

  “I love it,” Dick said simply.

  “You seemed to be arguing with those men,” Anne said. “What was that about?”

  “That was the point.” Dick stared at her, his gaze intense. “That’s why I’m here on my day off instead of tucked up in bed with … never mind.”

  “But what is the point?” Marnie prodded. “I don’t get it.”

  “Let me show you.” Dick walked a few yards away and held up his lantern. “What do you see?”

  Marnie and Anne raised their lamps and looked around them.

  “Mud,” said Marnie. She noticed Dick frowning. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be obtuse. I realise this … whatever it is … means a lot to you, but you’re going to have to give us a clue. We don’t know what we’re looking for.”

  Anne squatted down swinging her lantern from side to side in an arc. She duck-walked closer to where Dick was standing and pointed at the slimy surface.

  “Is it this?” she asked, looking up at him.

  “What can you see?” said Marnie.

  “Anne’s got it!” Dick’s tone was triumphant. “That’s it.”

  Marnie advanced a few steps to stand beside Anne, who got to her feet. She bent forward and guided Anne’s arm to concentrate the light of both lamps together.

  “All I can see is what looks like … some sticks, lodged in the mud.”

  “Precisely,” Dick said, as if they had corroborated his findings.

  “The argument was about these sticks?” Anne said. “I’m none the wiser.”

  “Look closer.” Dick squatted down. “I don’t want to touch them, but can you see how they’re located?” He pointed. “Here … here … and here.”

  The sticks were evenly spaced out, protruding from the soil with a distance between them of less than an inch. They emerged from the ground at an oblique angle, rising just a fraction above the surface, each one about the thickness of a thumb.

  “Are they … ribs?” Marnie asked quietly.

  “Oh yes,” Anne murmured.

  They looked at Dick, who nodded, a smile spreading across his features in the dim half-light.

  *

  Back in the staff hut it was time for explanations. Dick took their hard hats and put them in a steel locker, but told Marnie and Anne to keep the yellow jackets for future use. He apologised that he was unable to offer them coffee or tea as they sat round a table at one end of the hut.

  The interior walls were hung with site plans and architects’ drawings. From the felt-tip notes added to some of the plans, it looked as if the first phase of ground works sought to identify and divert underground services, electricity cables, water and sewage pipes.

  Marnie recalled one project handled by Everett Parker Associates where a pile driver had struck the national
grid in the east end of London. It had knocked out a connection to Deptford power station and put part of the London Underground system out of action for half a day. It transpired that someone years before had removed and failed to return a service plan from County Hall. The contractor had no idea he was piling down through an old street under which the cables were running.

  There was no danger of that happening here. Every inch of space was plotted on the site map. Marnie asked Dick to show her where they had been looking at the ribs, and he took up position in front of the plans like a teacher in a classroom. Running a finger down one edge of the works, he indicated the course of the river. On Friday while making a routine check of the exposed surface below ground, he and a colleague had spotted what appeared to be a change of colour in the sub-soil. At that depth and in poor light they were unable to be sure exactly what they had seen. In dry conditions and at surface level Dick would probably have recognised a grave site immediately. Something about this discovery was different.

  Dick had spent all of Saturday poring over maps of early London. A medieval specialist himself, he had spent hours phoning friends and colleagues who were experts in the history of that great city. No-one had been able to clarify what he had uncovered. From earliest pre-history, through Iron Age to post-Roman periods, no explanation made sense. The most likely scenario was that he had stumbled upon a one-off burial or the site of an accidental death.

  Unable to rest and burning with curiosity, Dick had checked the tide charts and realised the river would reach its lowest level early on Sunday morning. As one of the archaeological site directors, he had keys to the compound and had let himself in before London was stirring. He had returned to the bones in the depths of the excavation. They seemed to be taunting him.

  “Why?” Marnie asked. “This is London. People have lived here for thousands of years.”

  Dick shook his head. “It’s a question of levels. Where we are now is post-Roman. There’s never been a graveyard on this site.”

  “Didn’t they hang river pirates here?” Anne asked, grimacing, thinking of Daring Jake Pepper. “Couldn’t they just be bones that had been left hanging in chains?”

  “Too deep for that,” Dick said.

  “How deep is it, then?” said Marnie. “I mean in terms of timescale.”

  “Post-Roman, pre-Norman. I’d put it roughly between the sixth and tenth centuries.”

  “Anglo-Saxon times?” Marnie suggested.

  “Exactly,” Dick said firmly. “London had been a city for centuries by then, so you wouldn’t expect to find isolated graves, not here in such a central position. These people were Christians. We know where they buried their dead.”

  For several minutes they discussed the possibilities, and Dick set out the reasons for dismissing each one. The Saxons did not locate burial sites in residential areas; no recorded battles had been fought on that spot; isolated burials were not unknown but not in areas of heavy population; if the dead person had been of major importance, thereby meriting an individual burial site, the experts would have known about it. The discovery made no sense.

  There it was again. Watching Dick as he spoke, Marnie and Anne saw that glint in his eyes, that spark of enthusiasm that bordered on the fanatical, that they had seen before when Dick had been leading the excavations at Glebe Farm. Faced with an impenetrable mystery like this, Dick Blackwood was in his element.

  Sensing that they had exhausted all the potential for discussion of the bones, Marnie steered Dick back to his argument with the other men that morning. She guessed they were annoyed at the find because it would hold up progress with the construction works. To her surprise, she was wrong. It was just the opposite. The site agent was not only pleased with the uncovering of the remains, he wanted to announce it publicly.

  “This has got to be a first,” Marnie said in bewilderment. “In my experience, builders usually go ballistic when they hit an archaeological find. They start screaming about delays, loss of earnings, disruption of the sequence of operations, cash-flow problems, you name it. Why should this job be different?”

  “You left out the archaeologists’ worries,” said Dick. “We’re more concerned about intruders, treasure-hunters, metal detectorists and the like. The last thing we want is a load of amateurs trampling all over our finds, disturbing the ground, destroying evidence.”

  Marnie looked thoughtful. “That’s right. And surely the contractor wouldn’t want that either. Imagine what would happen if someone unauthorised was injured … or worse.”

  “That’s the line I’m taking,” said Dick, “apart from the fact that we don’t yet know what we’ve found.”

  “Could they be animal bones?” Anne asked, “a wild boar or a wolf or something?”

  Dick shook his head. “These are human. No doubt about it. But there may be a possibility that we haven’t considered. We just don’t know what this is, and until we do …”

  Marnie broke the ensuing silence. “I still don’t see why the contractor would welcome the find and want to go public. It defies logic.”

  “I know what he’s thinking,” said Dick. “A find like that on a site in this location would justify delays, which would mean compensation. Not only that, it would give him something to blame for running late.”

  “Is the job running late?” said Marnie.

  “They nearly always run late. You know the score, Marnie. Builders are terrified of liquidated and ascertained damages. They want to cover their backs.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why they want to make a public announcement.”

  “It’s the same thing,” said Dick. “If the discovery becomes public knowledge, it underlines the problem and helps his case. Everyone knows about it, so it can’t be denied later. QED.”

  “So you’re trapped,” said Marnie.

  “I wish I’d never brought it up.” Dick sighed. “I didn’t think they’d react like this. I should’ve thought about it before telling the site agent. I just didn’t want builders’ boots treading all over my find when they started work on Monday morning.”

  When they climbed out of the excavation Dick was dismayed to find the site office locked. The agent and the other suits had left the compound. Dick was sure their first job on Monday would be to draft a press release. By the time the early editions of the London papers went on sale at lunchtime, the find would be public knowledge. Then the problems would begin.

  Marnie scanned the site. On all sides it was securely fenced in, but with chain link that was meant to be more public-friendly, giving visibility all round. At little more than two metres high, the fencing presented scant protection against determined intruders. The find would be blown up in the public imagination. Could it be the grave of a Saxon king or queen with a buried hoard of silver or gold?

  Dick must have been sharing the same thought. “If the word gets out, we’ll be sitting ducks here. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Marnie imagined every nut-case with a metal detector for miles around being drawn to Horselydown. She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out her mobile. Dick shot her a questioning glance.

  “I’m not sure you’re right about that,” she said, pressing buttons.

  Beside her, Anne had already taken out a notebook, and her pencil was poised.

  *

  Having booked the table only that morning, there was no chance of getting a view out over the river, but none of them cared. Marnie and Anne spent their lives beside water, and Beth and Paul were glad just to be invited.

  Marnie looked over the top of her menu and asked if everyone had chosen. For Beth, it had to be the Sunday roast. Paul followed suit. Anne, the herbivore of the party, opted for asparagus tart. Marnie signalled to the waiter that they were ready to order and, when it came to her turn, chose baked salmon. She asked the wine waiter for a spritzer, and Anne followed her lead, while Paul suggested a robust red Navarra for the beef-eaters.

  While waiting for the food to arrive, Marn
ie noticed Beth looking at her in a speculative way.

  “It’s good to see you relaxing like this,” Beth said.

  “Why wouldn’t I be relaxing? It is Sunday, after all.”

  “I know, but I’m always worrying that you never let up, never take time off.”

  “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?” said Marnie. “We’re having a nice restful Sunday.”

  Paul laughed. “Beth was saying on the way here she was convinced you’d have a last-minute excuse for crying off. She was sure some urgent business matter would crop up to take you away.”

  Marnie stared at her sister in mock indignation. “Shame on you! I don’t know how you could think –”

  “Marnie,” Anne interrupted. “Sorry to break in, but I think the waiter wants you.”

  Marnie turned to find a waiter hovering at her shoulder.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked.

  The waiter bent forward and spoke quietly. “Mrs Walker? Marnie Walker?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a telephone call for you, madam.”

  “For me? How would anyone know …? Ah, yes.”

  “Would you like to come this way, madam.”

  Marnie arrived back at the table as the first course was being served. As they focused on plates of avocado with mushrooms, Beth noticed Anne glancing enquiringly at Marnie. Marnie studiously avoided eye contact.

  “Mm, this is good,” Marnie said.

  “Is everything all right?” Beth asked.

  “The avocado’s just right. Sometimes they can be rather too firm and –”

  “Marnie, you know what I meant.” Beth spoke softly, but her voice had an edge to it.

  “Everything’s fine,” Marnie insisted calmly.

  “Then why did Anne look at you like that?”

  Marnie sipped the spritzer. “Am I a mind-reader?”

  Paul chuckled. “Come on, Marnie, out with it. Amaze us. Tell us they’ve found a dead body in your building site.”

  “So Anne told you about that?” Marnie said.

  At adjacent tables several heads turned momentarily as Beth dropped her fork onto the plate with a clatter.