The Hidden Bones

by Nicola Ford

  ‘That’s the one that’s missing.’ She looked up at him.

  He nodded.

  ‘I’ve got a bit of a personal interest in this, then.’ She shifted her gaze from the bottom of the pit to his face.

  David looked down at her bemused. ‘Why?’

  She reached up and batted the back of his head playfully with the palm of her hand. ‘Because, dopey, if it hadn’t been for this hole and its contents …’

  ‘Pit,’ David corrected her. ‘It’s not a hole, it’s a pit.’

  ‘Hole, pit, whatever. If it hadn’t been for this thing and its contents I wouldn’t have met you.’ She raised herself onto the tips of her toes and kissed him insistently on the lips. Despite David’s embarrassment, he couldn’t help his response as he drew her towards him and returned the kiss.

  Out of the corner of his eye, David caught the amused expression of the lanky youth who was standing beside the pit, committing the details of its dimensions to paper. David scowled and the youth returned his attention to his clipboard. David held Sally at arm’s length and looked down on her with a broad grin on his face.

  She said, ‘As I’ve used up my precious time to come and see this extravaganza, are you going to show me the rest of the place?’

  ‘Sure.’ His response was instantaneous. But he hoped this wasn’t going to be a habit. He liked his life neat, ordered and separate. Play was play and work was his life. Things were getting confused and if there was one thing he hated, it was confusion.

  Margaret poked at the glowing embers of the campfire with a broken length of hazel and watched the sparks dance against the star-speckled blackness of the night sky. Laying the improvised poker aside, she picked up the half-empty bottle of Jameson’s from beside the log she was sitting on and poured another tot into her enamel mug.

  The last of the students had retired to their beds in the campsite below almost an hour ago. She knew she’d regret it in the morning if she didn’t do the same, but she found herself reluctant to follow suit. Lifting the mug into the chill night air, she silently mouthed the words, ‘To you, Gerald.’ Before she had a chance to place her lips on the metal rim, she heard a rustling behind her.

  Craning her neck round, she strained her eyes into the darkness. ‘Hello. Is someone there?’

  There was no reply. Must be the wind. She took a long slug of whiskey. Being back here where it all started had made her realise how much she craved being out in the field again. Her chair at Oxford was the pinnacle of her career, but sometimes it felt more like a straitjacket than an accolade.

  The embers of the fire glowed suddenly red as a gust deposited a blanket of sparks at her feet.

  ‘Woe Waters.’ The words drifted towards her on the wind.

  She was imagining things. She rose unsteadily to her feet. Maybe it was time to find her bed.

  ‘Woe Waters!’ There it was again, louder this time.

  She swung around, bottle in one hand, mug in the other. ‘Who’s there?’ Silence. ‘Speak up, do you hear me!’

  The noise of muffled laughter drifted towards her from further down the hill. Probably kids from the village. She made her way downslope, swaying unsteadily. No bunch of yobs was going to make a fool of Professor Margaret Bockford.

  ‘Clear off! Do you hear me? You’ve no business being here.’ Her words fell into empty night.

  She shuffled forward, unable to make out anything distinctly as she moved further away from the firelight. As her eyes adjusted she could make out the outline of a pile of planks near the foot of the photo tower.

  More confident now, she strode forward. A sudden crack on her shins brought her crashing to the ground. The tin mug rolled away, but the Jameson’s bottle shattered, depositing jagged shards of glass all about her. For several seconds she lay face down on the ground, listening to the rise and fall of her own breathing. Tentatively, she manoeuvred herself into a sitting position and put her hand to her face. No glasses.

  What had she been thinking? Chasing apparitions in the middle of the night. Feeling around her, she retrieved her spectacles, but not without first cutting the palm of her hand on broken bottle glass. She reached into the pocket of her cardigan, pulled out her handkerchief and wrapped it round her bleeding hand. Rubbing her bruised shin with her good hand, she stood up.

  What on earth would David and the others think if they could see her now? There was nothing for it – she would just have to set her alarm and come back to clear up the broken bottle before anyone found it. There was no way on God’s earth she was going to let them know what a stupid, drunken old fool she’d been.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  From the moment she left Morgan’s office, Sally had known the DCI was sending her on a wild goose chase. And nothing about the journey from Devizes to Whitby had changed her mind.

  She also knew that the odds against solving a forty-year-old murder were astronomically high. The obvious suspect was Gerald Hart. The cremation had been found in his attic, and he seemed to have had sole control of the finds from the dig after it ended. But all of the evidence was circumstantial and Morgan, who had his eye firmly on the top slot, needed to keep the assistant chief constable off his back if he wanted to continue climbing the greasy pole.

  They’d been lucky with the press so far. Thanks to an unlikely combination of royal baby fever, the cold-blooded murder of a serving British soldier and the Lords voting for gay marriage, the reporting on the coroner’s inquiry had largely been confined to a few local papers. But she knew it couldn’t last. Murder at the manor, ancient gold and a forty-year-old cold case – it was a tabloid editor’s dream.

  She’d already interviewed Jim Hart’s widow and gotten precisely nowhere. Estelle had insisted the discovery of Jim’s remains in the attic of the manor was as much of a shock to her as to everyone else. And, on balance, she was inclined to believe Estelle’s claim that she’d thought Jim had done a runner with Joyce Clifford.

  Sally had planned to spend this weekend with David. The wine she’d bought to go with the meal he’d promised to cook was still sitting in its carrier bag on her kitchen table. But Morgan was the boss; and in the force, when the boss ordered you to jump, you asked what over – a nugget of wisdom that seemed somehow to have escaped Tom West. Her sergeant had made his displeasure at having to drive the three hundred miles from Wiltshire to the North York Moors obvious in every conceivable way.

  She’d encountered his type before. Every station had one: a tatty-suited, baggy-overcoated, fifty-something force lifer who knew everything and everyone. He’d been bloody-minded and difficult ever since she’d arrived in her new post. A word or two around the staff canteen confirmed what she’d suspected: he’d had an easy ride from her predecessor. But he was just going to have to learn to knuckle down and do things her way.

  West reached the door of Captain Cook’s B & B ahead of her. Three brisk raps with the lion-head knocker were eventually rewarded with the sound of heels clacking along a tile-clad floor.

  The door opened and Sally thrust her warrant card forward, brushing past West. ‘Mrs Joyce Clifford?’

  The woman in front of them nodded warily.

  ‘DI Treen and DS West, Wiltshire Constabulary. Can we have a word?’

  Joyce glanced down at the card and looked the two strangers standing on her doorstep up and down. ‘If you’ve come all this way, I don’t suppose you’ll be happy if I say no.’

  West smiled. ‘A cuppa wouldn’t go amiss either.’

  Sally shot him a warning glare.

  ‘Come through. I don’t want to disturb my guests.’

  She followed Joyce down the Minton-tiled hallway. A half-glazed door to their right bearing the words RESIDENTS’ LOUNGE in italic gold letters stood ajar. As far as Sally could make out, the guests Joyce had mentioned seemed to consist of one elderly gent warming himself by the gas fire.

  At the end of the hallway, Joyce opened a solid Victorian door to reveal a light and airy kitchen. Sally could see,
even at a distance, that the wooden units that lined the wall down the left-hand side of the room were handmade. To the right stood a scrubbed pine table and chairs, and a Welsh dresser bedecked with blue-and-white ware. Immediately in front of them, French windows gave onto a stone-flagged patio overlooking a good-sized garden. The room reeked of cash.

  West pressed his nose against the French windows and looked out onto a neatly tended lawn and tastefully planted borders. ‘Someone likes gardening.’

  Joyce turned to face him from her position filling the kettle at the sink. ‘I have someone in to give me a hand. But I like to potter during my quiet spells.’

  Sally said, ‘Like now, you mean?’

  Joyce’s face hardened. You could almost see the cracks in her pancake-thick make-up. ‘You’ve caught us in a quiet patch – what with the bad weather.’

  ‘Must be a worry. Financially, I mean.’ She drew out a chair and, without waiting for an invitation, sat down at the opposite end of the table from where Joyce had seated herself.

  Joyce had placed her chair at forty-five degrees to the table, as if to avoid facing her directly. West sat midway between them.

  Arms folded, Joyce looked at Sally. ‘I assume there’s a point to all this. You’re not here because you’re concerned about the state of the tourist industry, and I haven’t been to Wiltshire in nearly forty years.’

  ‘When exactly did you leave, Mrs Clifford?’ Sally asked.

  ‘Summer 1973.’

  ‘At the time of Gerald Hart’s dig,’ Sally said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You worked on the excavation?’ Sally asked.

  ‘I helped out.’

  ‘Didn’t you find some of the goldwork? You made the national press. I thought some of the pictures were rather good,’ West said.

  Despite Sally’s instinctive dislike of the man, she had to admit he knew what he was doing. Joyce sat upright in her chair, smoothed the flats of her hands down the front of her blouse and tucked a stray strand of her peroxide-blonde locks behind one ear. She smiled at West. ‘I didn’t take a bad picture in those days.’

  ‘Jim Hart obviously didn’t think so,’ Sally said.

  Joyce opened her mouth, but to her apparent relief the kettle boiled. She got up, filled a teapot and set it, mugs, spoons, sugar and a jug of milk on a green plastic tray. She waited until she’d finished placing the tray on the table and had retaken her seat before she spoke. ‘Is that why you’re here? Because of Jim.’

  ‘You don’t deny knowing Jim Hart?’

  ‘Of course I knew him.’

  West asked, ‘In the biblical sense?’

  Joyce twisted her head round to face him. ‘What?’

  Sally cast a warning look at him. ‘What Sergeant West is trying to ask is whether you were involved in a relationship with Jim Hart.’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’

  West leant forward and picked up a mug from the tray. ‘Since James Hart’s cremated remains were found in the attic of Hungerbourne Manor, it’s become very much our business.’

  Joyce had the countenance of a woman whose world had just imploded. For a moment, Sally thought the older woman would faint.

  ‘Would you like some water?’ Sally nodded her head in the direction of the tap, and West duly obliged. She watched as Joyce took a couple of sips from the glass before resuming her questioning. ‘Were you in a relationship with Jim Hart?’

  ‘I was. He wasn’t.’ Her hands were shaking, but there could be no mistaking the anger in her voice. Sally and West exchanged bemused looks. Joyce said, ‘Jim Hart only wanted me for what he could get.’

  ‘And what was that, exactly?’ Sally asked.

  ‘What all men want – to get his leg over.’

  West looked down at the table, apparently embarrassed by the universal guilt of his gender.

  Joyce looked at Sally. ‘I was young enough and stupid enough to think he wanted more. But I was just another one in a long line he’d used his flannel on.’

  ‘And what did your husband make of all this, Mrs Clifford?’ Sally placed the emphasis firmly on the ‘Mrs’.

  Joyce’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t think George killed him?’

  Sally said, ‘We didn’t say anyone had killed him.’

  Joyce drained the rest of her water and placed the glass on the table. ‘People don’t cremate themselves, do they?’

  She was beginning to think she might have misjudged Joyce Clifford. She obviously had her wits about her.

  She said, ‘I understand you spoke to a Mrs Clare Hills a few weeks ago?’

  Joyce looked puzzled. Her reply came slowly. ‘That’s right.’

  West said, ‘Would you like to tell us what she came to see you about?’

  ‘She was trying to track down some goldwork she said had gone missing from the dig.’

  West looked at the small black notebook open in his hand. ‘And you told Mrs Hills you didn’t know the whereabouts of the missing artefact?’

  Joyce nodded.

  Sally said, ‘But you told her something else as well, didn’t you?’

  Joyce looked from Sally to West and back again.

  Sally said, ‘You told her you were in one of the dig huts early one morning when Gerald Hart unexpectedly turned up on-site.’

  She studied Joyce Clifford. Her face was devoid of colour, her body rigid against the chair back – as if braced against some impending disaster.

  Joyce said, ‘It was his site.’

  West asked, ‘You wouldn’t happen to remember the date, would you, Mrs Clifford?’

  Joyce snapped her head round to look at him. ‘The date?’

  Sally said, ‘Oh, come on. You think you’d remember a day like that – one that was going to make you for the rest of your life.’

  Joyce swung her head back to face Sally. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Like I told Mrs Hills, I was in that hut because I had nowhere to go. I needed to get away from George, while I figured out what to do.’

  Sally said, ‘We know that, Mrs Clifford. And I don’t imagine you had any idea how lucky you were going to be when you bedded down for the night, did you?’

  ‘Lucky! Are you mad? I was at my wits’ end.’

  Sally said, ‘And then Gerald Hart turned up. Your knight in shining armour.’

  ‘Pssh! None of the Harts were ever that.’

  Sally looked at West. He read from his notebook, ‘Saturday 30th August.’

  Sally returned her attention to Joyce. ‘The day your luck was in. The day you saw Gerald Hart doing something he didn’t want anyone else to know about. The day you saw him burning his brother’s corpse.’

  The choice of the final word had been deliberate. It had the desired effect. Joyce slumped in her chair. Her shoulders heaved and she began to sob. She gulped in breath, struggling to keep herself under control. Eventually, after seconds that seemed to Sally like minutes, she regained her composure.

  ‘How did you know?’

  West said, ‘Gerald kept a journal. He recorded all of the details of the pyre preparation in it.’

  In Sally’s opinion, it had been a lucky guess on West’s part that what Joyce had told Clare about Gerald’s visit to the site tied in with the date of the pyre burning.

  West said, ‘In your own time, Mrs Clifford. Just tell us exactly what happened that morning.’

  Joyce got up and poured herself another glass of water. Standing at the sink, she drank it and poured herself a second before sitting back down. ‘Like I said, I went up to the site to get away from George when he found out about me and Jim. I tried to sleep. It was perishing. But I must have dropped off eventually. Because next thing I knew, I heard a car. At first, I thought I was imagining it. But it got louder, and when I opened the door a crack to look out I could see Gerald’s Volvo.’

  She looked at Sally defiantly, almost as if she were daring her to contradict her. But Sally said nothing.

  ‘Do you remember what happen
ed next?’ West asked.

  Joyce turned to face him. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you forget. However hard you try …’ She sat quietly, hands clasped together in her lap. Then, drawing in a deep breath, she straightened up in her chair. ‘Gerald got out of the car, went over to the tool shed and got out a wheelbarrow. He pushed it over to the back of the Volvo. He had his back to me so I couldn’t see what he was doing. But I could hear him huffing and puffing like he was shifting something heavy. Then he closed the boot and started wheeling the barrow up towards where all the wood was piled near the top of the ridge, above where we’d been digging.’

  West asked, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I followed him.’

  Sally said, ‘Wasn’t that a bit foolhardy, Mrs Clifford?’

  ‘If I’d known what he was up to I wouldn’t have done it, would I.’ She turned away from Sally to face West. ‘I got as far as the tool shed. If I’d have gone any further, he’d have been able to see me out in the open.’

  ‘How far away were you from Hart?’ Sally asked.

  ‘Thirty or forty yards, maybe.’

  ‘What was he doing?’ Sally asked.

  ‘Once he’d got the barrow up to where the wood was, he tipped it out on the ground. It rolled down the slope a little way. It was wrapped up in a curtain. It was the same material as the ones from the drawing room in the manor.’

  West looked at her as if unable to believe she should have concerned herself with drapery at such a moment.

  Joyce turned to Sally to explain. ‘I’d been up to the manor a time or two with Jim. I remembered them because I’d always thought they were such a pretty cream colour. But now there was a big rusty-coloured splodge all over the top half of them. I knew it was blood. Gerald had a terrible time trying to heave the thing onto the top of the wood. Eventually, he managed to get it over his shoulder and then sort of flopped it onto the top. It wasn’t till then that I noticed he’d pitched a jerry can out of the wheelbarrow too. He tore a bit off the end of the curtain material that was flapping about. Then he doused the lot in petrol, lit the end of the material and chucked it on top. It went up with a hell of a whoosh.’