The Hidden Bones

by Nicola Ford

  Upslope, on the other side of the field, Clare was cocooned in something resembling a giant, ill-constructed kite. He smiled as he watched her wind herself further and further into the clutches of the clinging green nylon as it was whipped by the gusting south-westerly. The sky was grey and overcast. He rubbed his hands on the arms of his old army jacket in an attempt to dispel the soggy chill that made it feel more like autumn than early summer. They’d been lucky that the torrential rain of the last month had abated long enough for them to set up base camp.

  He squished his way across the field towards Clare. ‘You could have given Wilbur and Orville a run for their money with that thing.’

  ‘Ha bloody ha. I thought these dome things were meant to be easier to put up than the old ridge tents.’

  He stood back a few paces, the better to admire her courageous but ill-fated attempts to tame the flysheet. ‘Depends who’s putting them up. I think you’re meant to start with the poles.’

  ‘This isn’t an anthropology field study. You are allowed to get involved with the participants.’

  ‘And spoil the entertainment.’

  Clare’s expression told him he’d pushed his luck too far.

  ‘Alright, mardy, let’s see if we can’t sort it out. We haven’t got time to bugger about. The students are due to start arriving any minute and I want to have at least some of the more rudimentary elements of civilisation in place.’

  ‘Worried some of the little darlings won’t fancy it?’

  ‘It’s not them I’m worried about, it’s their parents.’

  Clare’s eyes widened. She disentangled herself from the flysheet, snapped together one of the long metal poles and handed it to him. ‘Parents. I wouldn’t have been caught dead letting Mum drop me off at a dig.’

  ‘It’s all changed since our day. Mummy and Daddy want to know where all of their hard-earned cash is going now they have to fork out for little Johnnie’s education. God only knows what some of them would do if they found out what life on a dig was really like.’

  Holding two corners of the flysheet between her outstretched arms, Clare inclined her head backwards in the direction of the building that stood at the foot of the slope. ‘So was it really the brightest move to pitch camp within spitting distance of the pub?’

  David grinned. ‘Some elements of fieldwork are a necessity; besides, Tony offered us a good rate on his field.’

  ‘I bet you could see the pound signs light up in his eyes.’

  ‘Never hurts to keep the locals on side.’ He threaded a pole carefully into its nylon sleeve and gestured to Clare to pass him the mallet.

  She tossed it to him and turned to pick up a metal tent peg from a pile behind her. Straightening up, she pointed her thumb in the direction of the Lamb and Flag.

  ‘Looks like our first parent.’

  He looked up from where he was crouching, trying to secure one of the pegs, to see a small, neat figure striding purposefully towards them. ‘Oh, Christ!’

  ‘Trouble?’

  He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. ‘Margaret Bockford.’

  What was she doing here? As Margaret drew closer, he straightened up, mallet in hand, and waved.

  Margaret pointed at the mallet. ‘In some societies that would be construed as a threatening gesture.’

  He hurriedly dropped the hand holding the offending implement to his side.

  Margaret’s face cracked an unexpected smile. ‘I hope I haven’t come at an inopportune moment.’

  ‘We’re just setting up. We don’t really start until tomorrow,’ he offered apologetically.

  ‘And you’re wondering how on earth you’re going to get everything finished in time when this old duffer has turned up for the grand tour of the site before the excavation has even begun?’

  He racked his brain for something politic to say, but to no avail. Clare and Margaret exchanged a knowing look. He had the uncomfortable feeling something was going on that he didn’t quite understand. He looked from the older to the younger woman in search of an explanation.

  It was Margaret who finally took pity on him. ‘Will you explain, Clare, or shall I?’

  He experienced a feeling of impending doom that he normally associated with preparing for exam boards.

  Clare said, ‘When Margaret heard about the inquest, she phoned me to find out how we were getting on with our search for the sun disc. I mentioned we were starting work out here this week and she offered to lend a hand.’

  ‘All kitted out and ready for action.’ Margaret swept her hands down from her chest to her knees, indicating her apparel: serviceable brown cords, a green polo neck sweater and a somewhat baggy but matching woollen cardigan. A pair of well-worn but still obviously purple Doc Martens added a dissonant note to the ensemble.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me barging in like this, David. But when Clare said you were using volunteers as well as students, I couldn’t resist.’

  ‘You know you’re always welcome, Margaret.’ Had he sounded convincing? He’d been so looking forward to this. The last thing he needed was Margaret second-guessing his every decision.

  ‘Right, young man, we women are perfectly capable of erecting a tent. Why don’t you go and deal with that?’ Margaret inclined her head in the direction of a large flatbed trailer that was just pulling in to the pub car park carrying a battered excuse for a Portakabin.

  Resigned to the inevitability of the new regime, David started off across the field, the gusting wind dragging the words of the women’s conversation towards him as he walked.

  ‘He’s not a good liar, is he?’ Margaret said.

  ‘No,’ Clare said. ‘He never has been.’

  ‘A good sign in a man, I always think. Pass me that mallet.’

  David was sitting, back pressed against the wooden slats of the tea hut, a lukewarm mug of almost undrinkable tea in his hand, surveying his team. They had more than a little in common with the Brew Crew of the original excavations. Jo had returned to London to see out the last few weeks of her contract at the institute. But in addition to Clare, Margaret and the students, their ranks had been swelled by Ed and his wife, Pat. Somewhat to David’s surprise they had also been joined by Tony, the landlord of the Lamb and Flag, who, when he could escape the eye of the ever-vigilant Shirl, had proven to be more than proficient in wielding a trowel.

  To his enormous relief, Margaret had settled into the role of humble digger without a murmur of dissent and hadn’t once tried to gainsay him about his direction of the excavations. And when he’d drawn upon her expertise, her knowledge of the site and the earlier excavation had proven invaluable. She was apparently never happier than when trowelling alongside her somewhat younger companions. With few of the pretensions he’d observed among some of the other eminent professors of his acquaintance, her undisguised love of Irish whiskey had resulted in her quickly developing an almost mythic status amongst the student workforce.

  David glanced across at Clare, who was sitting cross-legged in front of Margaret like some latter-day devotee at the feet of the be-cardiganed guru. Things hadn’t been all plain sailing since Clare had joined the team. But he knew it had been his fault as much as hers. He should never have assumed they could just fall back into their old pattern of shared confidences and easy companionship.

  He’d been a damned fool to have hoped, however fleetingly, that because Stephen was dead she might feel anything more than friendship for him. It was a chapter best left closed, and now with Sally maybe he had the chance to put it behind him once and for all. He took a last slug of the tepid brown liquid in his mug, upending the remainder of its contents onto the still-damp grass. He picked up his faithful old trowel, feeling the familiar bumps of the small wooden head that had been carved on its handle so many years ago, and stood up. ‘Right, you lot, off your backsides!’

  A chorus of groans and widespread muttering ensued as the ragtag workforce hauled themselves to their feet.

  Taking a folded shee
t of paper from his pocket, he turned to Margaret, who remained seated in the carefully positioned wheelbarrow that she’d adopted as an impromptu armchair. ‘How good’s your surveying? Do you reckon you and Clare can spot the trench over the geophysics survey and bring us down here?’ He pointed to a rectangle marked out over a fuzzy grey image of a round barrow lying just downhill from David’s own trench.

  ‘Despite appearances to the contrary, Dr Barbrook, this old bird is something of a dab hand with modern technology. Have total station, will survey.’

  ‘Bet you a double you can’t find the edge of the ditch and the grave cut first time.’

  ‘You’re on.’

  Clare proffered her hand to assist Margaret in rising and cast a sideways glance to where the bright orange plastic case containing the twenty-first century version of a theodolite lay and grimaced. ‘Maybe I should’ve mentioned I’ve never used one of these. Things were a bit more low-tech when I was last in the field.’

  Margaret leant towards the younger woman and lowered her voice to a stage whisper. ‘I never engage in a bet that isn’t a racing certainty. I was walking these fields before David was born.’

  Feigning ignorance of his role as stooge, David trudged upslope to inspect the trench he’d been labouring over for the last fortnight. In front of him, a rectangular area ten metres across had been stripped of its turf covering. In the centre, a ring of dark soil, the remnants of a narrow ditch, described a circle around a barely perceptible black-brown swell in the ground. Slightly to one side of the centre of this mound, and stretching out to the right, a second smaller trench had been cut as broad as David was tall. Within the trench, a small hole was visible. A lanky youth was crouching uncomfortably over the hole, about to resume trowelling.

  David peered over his shoulder into the hole. ‘Bottomed that thing out yet?’

  The youth unbent from his tortured posture, looked at him nervously and shrugged his shoulders.

  David motioned him aside. ‘Let’s have a look.’ Kneeling down, he leant forward cutting his way expertly through the light sandy layer at the base of the hole with his trowel. There was a reassuring feeling of familiarity to the slight resistance of the soil as it encountered the worn steel of his trowel blade and transferred itself almost instantaneously to his fingers.

  ‘Looks like that’s it. A pit cut into the body of the mound. Organic silty fill. There was that large area of plough disturbance at the top, wasn’t there?’

  The youth nodded, looking down anxiously at the hole.

  ‘What about the finds?’ David asked.

  The youth passed him a mud-splattered black plastic seed tray. Sitting back on his haunches, David picked his way through an assortment of burnt bone and coarsely made pottery. He rubbed his fingertips gently over the tiny fragments of burnt flint that some unknown potter had carefully kneaded into the clay almost thirty-five centuries before.

  ‘The plough’s pretty much mangled it, but it looks like a disturbed cremation deposit. I’d say you’ve found what’s left of the pit the Jevons sun disc came from. The trench Gerald dug must have missed it by inches.’ He stood up, wiped the soil from his trowel on his moleskins and took a step up onto the grass in front of them. ‘If our GPS is right, the pit Gerald’s sun disc was found in lies just here.’

  ‘Are we going to open it up?’

  David nodded. ‘You bet. We need to tie the recorded position of Gerald’s trenches in with ours.’

  A broad grin animated the youth’s previously inert features. This one might do alright, after all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Is that thing safe?’ David headed downhill towards Ed, bracing himself against the familiar nagging pain in his knees.

  Ed was standing on a small, flat plateau, halfway between the trench where David was digging at the top of the field and the cutting Margaret and Clare were laying out over the remnants of the second, as yet untouched, burial mound downslope. Around him the damp grass was littered with galvanised metal tubes as if some careless giant had been scattering toothpicks. To one side, a pile of wooden scaffolding boards had been neatly stacked.

  Ed smiled. ‘It’s in better shape than you are by the look of it.’

  David emitted a harrumph. ‘Too much digging.’

  ‘And too much rugby, from what Peter tells me.’

  David nodded in the direction of the disarticulated skeleton of the photographic tower lying at Ed’s feet. ‘Have you checked this lot?’

  Ed nodded. ‘It looks pretty sound to me.’

  ‘No offence, Ed, but I’d like to give it the once-over myself before it goes up.’

  ‘None taken, old man. This thing looks like its seen some action in its time and that was a while back.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘Peter found it in the manor outbuildings.’

  He could take some comfort from that, at least. If Peter was willing to lend them this after everything they’d subjected him to over the last few months, he couldn’t be feeling too badly disposed towards them.

  ‘It was Gerald’s. I tried to persuade him that he should sell off the old kit he had hanging around the place. But he wouldn’t hear of it. Peter and I never could understand why.’

  Maybe they couldn’t, but David could. Getting rid of it would have meant admitting that he would never dig again. David couldn’t even begin to imagine how he’d feel the day he had to hang up his trowel.

  Picking a plank up from the pile, David flipped it over, running his hand across the rough grain of the pine. He looked up to see Ed trying to secure two pieces of steel together with an Allen key.

  David said, ‘You must have known Gerald pretty well.’

  ‘As well as anyone round here.’

  ‘Anyone except Peter.’

  ‘He wasn’t always around to keep an eye on the old boy.’

  ‘Did he need keeping an eye on?’

  ‘Oh, Gerald was all there with his cough drops, if that’s what you mean. But he was pretty frail towards the end. I used to pop him round one of Pat’s casseroles now and then.’

  ‘That was good of you.’

  ‘It wasn’t much, really. Sometimes I’d stay for a chat. He liked to talk about the past – his work, I mean.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about the excavation here?’

  Ed shook his head forcefully. ‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘Peter asked him about the dig once. It was the only time I can ever recall Gerald losing his temper. And now we know why.’

  David returned the plank to the pile of timber beside Ed, thrust his hands into the pockets of his moleskins and turned to face him square on. ‘How did Estelle take it when Jim disappeared?’

  ‘Peter would know more about that than me.’

  ‘I don’t like to ask – under the circumstances.’

  Ed hesitated. He seemed to be making up his mind about something. ‘Peter’s a pal, and I’m not one to tell tales.’

  ‘But?’

  Ed sighed. ‘I don’t suppose it makes much difference now. Estelle wasn’t exactly the grieving widow.’

  ‘Should she have been? According to Peter, Jim was a thorough going bastard.’

  ‘That’s only half the story.’ Ed laid the two pieces of galvanised steel tubing he’d been holding on the ground. ‘There’s no way of putting this delicately. At the time, there was talk about Gerald and Estelle.’

  David struggled to disguise his surprise. ‘They were having an affair?’

  ‘Let’s just say they were very fond of one another. It was common knowledge that Gerald spent more time with Estelle than Jim ever did.’

  ‘Are you suggesting Gerald killed Jim because he wanted Estelle for himself?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything. Jim deserved everything he got. Maybe Gerald had enough of the way Jim treated Estelle, maybe he didn’t. Either way, I don’t see what good it’ll do dredging it all up now.’

  The more David learnt about Hungerbourne, the more he began to get
the uncomfortable feeling that there was something going on that he didn’t understand.

  Ed flipped his hands dismissively. ‘Look, forget what I said. Nobody will ever know what really happened. And whatever Gerald did or didn’t do, he’s gone to meet his maker and Estelle is an old lady living in a nursing home. There’s no sense in stirring up trouble.’ Looking over David’s shoulder, Ed nodded his head in the direction of the bottom of the field. ‘If I’m not mistaken, there’s someone else who thinks we’re better off letting sleeping dogs lie.’

  David turned to see Sally’s car pull up in front of their makeshift office. Sally stepped gingerly out of the vehicle onto the rain-soaked turf. She waved, and he walked down to meet her. What with one thing and another, he’d hardly seen her since they’d started digging. Something he very much wanted to remedy, but this wasn’t the sort of meeting he’d had in mind. She greeted him with a peck on the cheek.

  ‘This is a surprise.’

  ‘The chief insisted we take a stab at finding that missing disc of yours.’

  ‘Refreshing to hear someone in the constabulary takes heritage crime seriously.’

  Sally laughed. ‘Not a chance. After the coroner’s comments about the disc at the inquest, he’s nervous the media will get hold of it. He wants us to make a show of it. So I thought I’d better at least see where the damn thing came from.’

  David managed a weak smile. His social life had been colliding ever more frequently with his work in recent weeks and he wasn’t altogether enjoying the experience.

  ‘Well. Are you going to show me what you mudlarks get up to when you’re not in your ivory towers?’

  He swept his arm across the field in front of her in a gesture of welcome that belied his uneasiness. ‘Step this way.’

  She smiled and thrust her arm through his as he led her towards the open trench. He spent some minutes explaining the minutiae of their discoveries to date. ‘So this is almost certainly where the plough cut through the pit that the Jevons sun disc came from.’