by Rebecca Tope
The police gave their usual warnings about nobody disturbing the scene, the need for more forensic examination, and official statements to be made by Jeffrey and the others. Drew was aware of a strange insouciance in himself and the police officers, rare when dead bodies were involved. He supposed it was partly because the body was so very dead, it was no longer human in any real sense. Besides that, the numbness caused by the school bus crash was still very much in operation. The whole community was walking about in a state of shock from that catastrophe. A single mysterious old woman could hardly evoke much emotion after that. And yet, the reality appeared to be that this unknown woman was a murder victim, or if not that, then the subject of a criminal act, who had been secretly buried sometime during the past year or so. Sooner or later, Drew was sure, he would be forced to care very much who and how and why and when.
Jeffrey, however, was anxious to have his role recognised. He began to prattle nervously, as the whole group moved awkwardly down the field towards the van. ‘Her flesh is all black,’ he remembered. ‘Like a sheep been dead in a ditch for half a year. And the bone sticking out, funny whitey-grey colour. Don’t smell much, though. Not as bad as a sheep. No maggots, see. Flies can’t get down that deep. Those dentures, though, grinning at nothing – gave me a shock, they did. All pink – not natural.’
‘OK,’ Drew tried to interrupt him. ‘I think we’ve got the picture.’
‘Must’ve been an old lady – white hair and false teeth.’ Jeffrey cocked his head at the police, who were preparing to depart. ‘Have to be a postmortem now, eh?’
‘That’s right, sir,’ said an officer flatly. ‘And an inquest,’ he added.
Drew rubbed two fingers hard across his brow, aware of a subtle pain developing. ‘What a business,’ he said.
‘Mmm,’ agreed the policeman. ‘Can’t recall anyone reporting their old Mum missing – nothing nice and easy like that.’ He adopted a gloomy expression. ‘I hate these “identity unknown” cases. She’s probably some Wino Winnie, got herself bumped off in an argument over a bottle of meths.’
Now Drew had another part of the answer to his earlier self-questioning. Just an old woman who nobody cared about. Nobody had been searching for her, worrying about her. And maybe she hadn’t been murdered after all. Maybe she’d died somehow, out in the open last summer, and as an act of unthinking sensibility someone had buried her in the new cemetery. It had a neat touch, a nice thoughtfulness which Drew found appealing, but he knew, inescapably, that it didn’t ring true. Pity, Drew said to himself. It’s a pity she couldn’t have just lain there undisturbed. And he cast a look of such venom at Jeffrey that the gravedigger flinched in bewildered alarm.
* * *
Drew lingered after the body had been delivered to the Path Lab at the big Royal Victoria Hospital. The Coroner’s Officer, Stanley Sharples, met him in the corridor outside and clapped him on the upper arm. He looked weary and drawn.
‘What’s all this then?’ he said. ‘Someone jumping the gun in your new cemetery?’
Drew forced an answering grin. ‘Something like that,’ he nodded. ‘An elderly woman – the police seem to think she’s probably a vagrant.’
‘Funny vagrant – wearing jewellery, I gather,’ Stanley demurred.
‘You must have come across it before,’ Drew said. ‘Most people, even tramps, hang on to one special possession. It’s human nature, isn’t it? Even if you’re living rough, hooked on drugs, as deep in the pit as you can get, you need something special to call your own. Especially women. Some lover probably gave it her fifty years ago.’
Stanley was only half-attending. Drew was irritated. Never mind that the man was in the middle of the worst disaster of his career, it was still his job to give this new case his full concentration.
‘Or maybe it wasn’t hers. Perhaps it’s a parting gift from whoever buried her?’ he went on. ‘Somebody cared enough to lay her out properly, wrap her up, and bring her to my field. Maybe they wanted her to have something nice in there with her.’ Drew had seen countless instances of the modern version of grave goods. Families put a bizarre assortment of objects in the coffin with their dead relatives.
‘Don’t get complicated about it,’ the Coroner’s Officer begged. ‘In any case, this one’s going to have to wait. We haven’t got time for it now. God knows, Drew, we’re stretched to the limit here at the moment. I’ve just been talking to the mother of two boys, both killed in the back of that bus. She hasn’t got any other kids. Can you imagine what that’s like?’ There were tears in Stanley’s eyes. Drew accepted defeat.
‘OK,’ he said, a heavy knot of pain and fear collecting in his chest. He didn’t want to imagine what it was like to lose your family in a ghastly accident. He didn’t want to listen to Stanley any more. ‘OK,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll just wait to hear from you, then. In a week or two.’
‘Don’t worry, son,’ Stanley told him. ‘We’ll get around to her eventually. She isn’t going to go anywhere, is she? And I can tell you already, we’re not likely to find much of any use. It’s going to be one that gets away – lack of sufficient evidence. Death by person or persons unknown. Usual platitudes. Even if we’d had nothing else to do, it’d come to the same thing in the end.’ He eyed Drew ruminatively for a moment, remembering his past reputation. ‘So – don’t you go stirring things up, there’s a good chap. None of your romantic amateur detecting on this one.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Tell you what – I’ll put in a word with Fiona at the Council – make sure you get the funeral when it happens. How’s that?’
‘Thanks,’ muttered Drew. ‘But I shouldn’t hold my breath – right?’
‘Right,’ said Stanley.
CHAPTER TWO
There was a police presence of one sort or another at the field for the next three days. Every atom of material from the dead woman was carefully removed from the shallow grave. ‘If it hadn’t been for that necklace, we might never have found her,’ said Jeffrey thoughtfully. ‘I was all set to give this patch a miss, as it happens. Didn’t fancy being stung by the nettles.’
‘What changed your mind?’ Drew asked him.
Jeffery cocked his head. ‘Just one of those things,’ he offered non-committally.
‘And why were you out there with a metal detector in the first place?’ Drew enquired belatedly. ‘What’s the idea?’
Jeffrey met his gaze. The strong shoulders and stalwart neck betrayed a life spent as a labourer. Drew had poached him from North Staverton Farm, despite not being able to offer steady work. So far he had dug five graves in the field and trimmed back the hedges on three sides. The railway line formed the upper boundary, with a wire fence maintained by the rail operators to augment the somewhat patchy hedge on that side. The Planning Officer had stipulated a stout boundary wall or fence, but had been persuaded that the six-foot-high hedge of mixed thorn, holly, bramble and briar was thick and prickly enough to keep intruders at bay and conceal the field’s contents from over-sensitive passers-by.
At sixty-three, Jeffery was apparently philosophical about almost everything. He lived simply, in a stone cottage with few facilities, on a quiet road half a mile out of the village. ‘My granddad was a gravedigger,’ he said, on his first encounter with Drew. ‘Don’t much hold with cremation myself. Burial’s got to be decent, mind. Dignified.’ As far as Drew could now recall, that had been sufficient reference and the post had been offered and accepted with scarcely any further discussion.
‘I got thinking,’ Jeffrey explained slowly. ‘It’s the law, you know – once a bit of ground is used as a grave, it mustn’t ever be disturbed again. So it seemed to me, I should just make sure we weren’t missing any treasure. Old coins and the like. See?’
Den blinked dubiously. ‘But wouldn’t you find any precious objects anyway, when you were digging the graves?’
Jeffrey cast his gaze over the ten acres, and smiled wryly. ‘Won’t be here to see the whole field filled up,’ he said. ‘It’s a hobby of mine, anyhow,
’ he added.
Drew didn’t pursue it: he was just then trying to concentrate on recovering some of the momentum he felt he’d lost with the WI ladies by sending them a packet of carefully worded leaflets.
In the following days, only moderate local interest was kindled by the finding of the body. The weekly newspaper that morning devoted almost all its space to stories about the dead and injured schoolchildren, but they found a few inches for the Peaceful Repose find at the bottom of an inside page. ‘This has to be good for business,’ Drew commented over breakfast, feeling rather gratified, until Karen pointed something out that made his blood congeal.
‘People’ll think it’s all a publicity stunt,’ she said idly. ‘They’ll think you put that body there and then staged a dramatic discovery.’
He stared at her in horror. ‘They wouldn’t!’ he gasped. ‘That would be ridiculous.’ Scanning the report, he read aloud: Peaceful Repose Funerals opened their “environmental” cemetery three months ago, with a view to offering burials in a natural setting, with little of the ritual or trappings of modern funerals. Funerals cost approximately half the price of more traditional versions. To date, it is understood that five burials have taken place in the cemetery. That’s pretty positive, don’t you think? Nothing to imply devious practices.’ He wiped a dramatic hand across his brow. ‘You had me worried there.’
‘Well, they wouldn’t say it, would they?’ she laughed scornfully. ‘But there’ll be jokes going round – you see. If nothing else, Daphne Plant’ll have a go at spreading the poison.’
‘Then we’ll have to do all we can to identify this woman, won’t we? If they could work out how she died and where those dentures and the necklace came from, they’d stand a better chance of matching her with someone from the Missing Persons file. Though I can’t think quite how—’
‘Read that bit again – about who they think she might be,’ Karen interrupted.
Drew readily complied, pleased that his wife was taking an interest, despite her unsettling suspicions. ‘OK. Let’s see – A police spokesman revealed that the body is that of an elderly woman, approximately five feet eight inches tall, with long white hair and a complete set of false teeth. She was wearing a summer dress, and had been wrapped in a patterned cotton sheet. There are no obvious signs of violence, and a full postmortem examination will be required before a cause of death can be established. In the light of the terrible tragedy at the weekend, this will not take place for some days. Meanwhile, the police would very much like to hear from anybody who might be able to assist in identifying the woman.’
‘In other words, they’re completely stuck,’ Karen summarised. ‘I’m not asking for gory details, but I assume there’s not much left of her face?’
‘Nothing you’d want to take photos of for public consumption,’ Drew agreed. ‘And they’re not going to go to much effort or expense to reconstruct it either. It sounds to me as if they’ve already decided she’s just a homeless old dropout – or some mental patient let loose in the community, with no friends or family to report her missing.’
‘Poor old girl,’ Karen sympathised. ‘Not a very dignified end – left anonymously in a field. Even a lovely field like yours,’ she added hastily.
‘It’s not that simple, though,’ Drew persisted. ‘She didn’t bury herself, did she? There’s a mystery here, however you look at it.’
‘And we all know how much Drew Slocombe loves a mystery,’ Karen sighed. ‘Why do I get the feeling that this is only just beginning?’
‘I can’t imagine,’ he said, widening his eyes in mock innocence. ‘But I have the same feeling myself.’
Karen’s answering smile was cynical. ‘Oh drat!’ she sighed, as from upstairs a familiar wail announced that their small daughter was ready for her second meal of the day.
‘I’ll get her,’ Drew offered, already halfway out of the room. ‘Where’s that girl?’ he chirruped as he mounted the stairs. ‘Where’s that Stephanie Slocombe?’
It was with a familiar sense of unease that he saw the image of the decomposing body found in the field transposed onto that of his little girl, as she stood red-faced and wobbly, clutching the bars of her cot. It was an inevitable concomitant of his job that this happened regularly – death pushing life to the outer edges of his mind, casting its pall like a shadow. Usually he managed to thrust it away, or to put it to positive use, as a reminder to enjoy and celebrate each moment, but all too often he found himself acutely aware of the skull beneath the skin.
Which was, perhaps, another reason why he was going to have to find out who and how and why the dead woman was in his field. Until he did, he feared that she was going to haunt him.
Stanley’s plea to leave well alone rang in his ears, as another irritant. Drew’s relationship with the police was uneasy at best, now he had set up in business on his own. When he’d left his secure job at Plant & Son Funeral Directors, rocking the boat by becoming a competitor, a lot of people had been concerned – or worse. Even if he only attracted twenty funerals a year away from his former employer, it would make quite a hole in her profits. The conventional Coroner’s Officer was firmly on Daphne Plant’s side, missing no opportunity to have a dig at Drew Slocombe and his Peaceful Repose Funerals. Drew’s youth only made it worse. At barely thirty, he had time and energy to change hearts and minds on a substantial scale, and the reactionary funeral industry was uneasy at what the future might hold. So far, the American influence was dominant, adding a steady stream of expensive trappings to already blatantly prodigal ceremonies. Cardboard coffins and willow baskets remained the choice of a tiny minority. But everyone could sense the seesaw tipping inexorably the other way, the fickle public poised to embrace the plainer simpler style. And everyone knew that Drew was doing his best to shift that balance.
The newspaper reported little progress the following week. Much of the relevant article merely repeated, with a few embellishments, the original facts.
Police efforts to discover the identity of the dead woman found in the new burial ground at North Staverton have so far proved unsuccessful. Three Missing Persons reports have been investigated, but none of them matches the details of the dead woman. Forensic investigations indicate that she was aged between sixty-eight and seventy-five, about five feet eight inches tall, of slender build and in good health. She probably died in August or September last year. She was dressed in a knee-length cotton garment and leather sandals. She wore a very distinctive necklace (pictured) which has been traced to Egypt, where jewellery of this sort is commonly sold in souvenir shops. It is made of bronze and is the reason why the body was found – Mr Jeffrey Chanter was using a metal detector in the field when he stumbled upon the remains. It is of no great monetary value. The police would like to hear from anyone who recognises this necklace, or who can offer any assistance in the identification of this woman.
There was a follow-up piece on the television local news that same evening, with the photograph of the necklace included.
‘They’ve still no idea of how she died then?’ Karen queried.
Drew shook his head. ‘Nobody’s told me anything. They all see me as an outsider these days. I don’t get the gossip like I used to at Plant’s. They’ve given up digging for more clues in the field, thank God. Have you seen the mess they’ve made?’
‘Only from the window. I haven’t been in the field lately. Accidentally on purpose, I suppose? The mess, I mean.’
‘Probably. They do seem quite keen to get up my nose.’
Karen was knitting, a practice which Drew found amusing, and over which he teased her repeatedly. For Karen, it required considerable concentration, and none of the relaxed ease he remembered from his grandmother’s endless productions. ‘Will she ever wear it?’ he asked dubiously, every time Karen held up her effort for inspection. It was a vivid kingfisher blue and grew agonisingly slowly. ‘Isn’t she going to be too big for it?’
His wife pursed her lips and embarked on another row. ‘Yo
u could ask Maggs to finish it for you,’ he added now, incautiously. ‘Knitting’s another of her endless talents.’
‘She should get out more,’ was Karen’s only comment.
* * *
Maggs did indeed possess innumerable skills and Drew openly marvelled at her. Eighteen years old, dark-skinned and generously proportioned, she was a person with an undeniable vocation. Officially named Marigold, she solemnly informed every new person she met that she would kill them if she ever heard herself addressed in that way. It was her firm intention to change it by deed poll, when she could decide on a new appellation. Having somehow blundered into Plant and Son Funeral Directors for a week’s work experience at the age of sixteen, she had been instantly hooked. Fascinated by the arcane details of mortuary work, deft with coffin linings, sensitive and understanding with the families, she had almost immediately announced to anyone who would listen that she was going to be an undertaker. To reinforce the point, she left school after GCSEs and begged Daphne to employ her on a permanent fulltime basis – only to meet with implacable refusal. Drew had assumed that his boss was unnerved at the prospect of a young and charismatic protégée at such close quarters; a new Queen Bee stealing her secrets and wooing her customers. Maggs had gone to another local company for six months, before Drew had made her an offer he thought she’d never accept.
‘Work for me for two years, on a very small salary, and I promise to give you a quarter share in the business at the end of that time.’ Maggs, typically, had demanded forty per cent, and when Drew agreed, had accepted his offer with no further hesitation.
‘She must be in love with you,’ said Karen sourly. She’d been nine months pregnant at the time and in no mood to tackle rivals.
‘She’s too ambitious to worry about love,’ he said. ‘This is the New Woman – haven’t you noticed? They’ll be ruling the world in ten years’ time.’
