He maintained that beautiful garden which had resulted in so many photographs of his home. Then William died, the house was sold, and new people bought it. The new owners were Leonard and Sally Heaton, proprietors of a fashion shop in nearby Brantsford and their first task was to modernize the house; something they wanted to do without spoiling its charm and beautiful appearance. Their plans included bringing the bathroom and upstairs toilet facilities up-to-date, refurbishing and extending the kitchen, fitting wardrobes into all three bedrooms, incorporating a downstairs toilet, having the timbers protected against woodworm and improving the damp course. They retained their previous house in Brantsford while this work was in progress, thus allowing the contractors to work without having to cope with people living there. The builders responsible for the structural improvements were a small local firm called Hodgkinson Builders, based in Crampton, whose proprietor — Jack Hodgkinson — worked alongside his three employees.
It was a scorching hot August day, at lunchtime, when I heard a frantic knocking on my front door. I was in the garden, enjoying an out of doors lunch with my growing family. I’d enjoyed a morning off duty prior to beginning a late shift, one which entailed working from 2 p.m. until 10 p.m. With the heavy and rather frantic knocking, however, it sounded as if I was going to start work earlier than expected and so I walked around the outside of the house in my shorts and sandals, and with a bare chest to find Jack Hodgkinson standing there with a very anxious expression on his face.
‘Hello, Jack,’ I said. ‘You look all hot and bothered!’
‘So would you, if you’d found what I’ve found!’ He didn’t smile and did not comment on my casual attire. Whatever was on his mind it must be very serious, I realized.
‘So, what have you found?’ I asked.
‘A skeleton,’ he said. ‘A human skeleton. A child by the look of it.’
‘A skeleton?’ My heart sank at the news. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m as sure as I’m standing here, Nick.’ He wiped his brow. ‘That’s why I’m reporting it.’
‘Where is it?’ was my next and most obvious question.
‘South View at Thackerston,’ he said. ‘We’re working there right now, extending the kitchen, and we found it under an outhouse, one we’re demolishing.’
‘I’ll be there right away, Jack,’ I said. ‘Give me five minutes to put my uniform on. Do you want to wait here or shall I see you there?’
‘I’ll wait in my van and follow you down. I don’t fancy going back there by myself. I’ve sent the lads home, by the way, they’ve another job to be getting on with while we get this sorted out.’
Minutes later I escorted him to South View where we parked in the space beside the cottage.
‘Round the back,’ he said, with signs of nervousness, but leading the way nonetheless. He led me to the rear of the cottage where one of the small outbuildings was in the process of being demolished to make way for the extended kitchen.
A pile of dressed stones, tiles and roofing timbers occupied what had been part of the vegetable garden and the only remaining part of the former shed was the concrete floor, partially broken up by a pneumatic drill. ‘There.’ He pointed from a distance.
At first, due to the broken-up nature of the concrete and the rubble beneath it, I could not recognize anything that looked like bones, but when I crouched on my haunches for a closer examination I could see the distinctive shape of a skull among the dry earth and rubble. It was the same colour as the earth in which it lay and almost entirely covered, but as I brushed a small amount of soil away with my fingers I realized that, beyond doubt, this was a human skeleton, much smaller than an adult but a genuine well-preserved skeleton nonetheless. For reasons yet to be established it had been buried under that concrete floor. At this very early stage I could not see whether it was a complete skeleton or whether it comprised only the skull and some vertebrae; some vertebrae were visible among the undisturbed earth.
‘How long’s it been here do you reckon?’ I asked Jack. ‘Any idea when this floor would have been laid?’
‘I wouldn’t have a clue,’ he admitted. ‘It’s not recent, though, that concrete is pretty old, I’d say, not like modern stuff. I’d say that floor was added after the house was built; these old houses had earth floors you know, even until the last war in some cases, and outbuildings especially didn’t have concrete floors until fairly recently.’
‘I wonder why it was concreted over?’ I was thinking aloud now.
‘This is an old house, Nick. That outbuilding we’re knocking down was as old as the house — two hundred years old I’d say — but that concrete floor’s not as old as that. I’d say it was more than twenty or thirty years old but not two hundred years old, if that’s any help.’
‘It’s a wide gap but our experts will be able to tell us something, I’m sure,’ I told him. ‘Well, I’d better call in the cavalry!’
‘Cavalry?’ he smiled anxiously.
‘The troops,’ I smiled. ‘This is something for our experts to investigate, not a job for a mere village constable. Sergeant Blaketon, our Scenes of Crime experts, a pathologist and even forensic scientists could come, I guess, and among them will be someone who can tell us how old the skeleton is, whether it’s male or female, elderly or youthful, whether he or she died naturally or was killed, how long it’s been buried and so on, and then we’ll have to dig up the rest of that concrete, very carefully, to see what else lies under there.’
‘You think there might be more?’
‘Who knows?’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘So, let’s get started.’
‘Shall I stay?’ he asked.
‘I’ll need a written statement from you, Jack, to record how you came to find this. I can catch you later if you’ve things to do, but I could take the statement right now while I’m waiting for my support teams to arrive. It’ll take ten minutes, that’s all. I’ll take it down in my pocket book, and you’ll have to sign it.’
‘Let’s get it over with,’ he said.
‘We can sit in the van,’ I offered, and he agreed.
Before recording Jack’s account of the discovery my first task was to inform Sergeant Blaketon. The moment he received my radio call he began to panic, in case we’d uncovered a murder victim, and he told me not to touch anything until the experts arrived. He would call-out Scenes of Crime, he said, and a pathologist, and I had to guard the scene until their arrival — and he would attend as soon as he could. In the meantime I interviewed Jack Hodgkinson, who told me how he had been operating the pneumatic drill to break up the concrete base and how he’d caught sight of the skull, happily halting his work before any real damage was done to the bones. He’d satisfied himself that it was not a joke, that no one had planted the object there for him to unearth, and that was all. He’d halted work immediately to inform the police and, in the statement, I included his estimate on the age of the concrete floor. Then he signed the statement.
‘What about telling the owners?’ I asked him. ‘Have you done that yet?’
‘I’ll have to tell them,’ he said. ‘They ought to know and it will mean work’s going to be delayed until this is sorted out.’
‘If the telephone is active I can ring them from here,’ I offered. ‘I can’t do it by radio, though!’
‘The phone is live,’ he told me. ‘They did that so they can call me here, or I can ring them.’
Jack offered to remain and help remove the rest of the concrete if that was necessary, but I said our own teams may prefer to do that.
He said he had another job only a ten-minute drive away, and so I suggested he left to attend to that. We could recall him if it was necessary — besides, it might be a long time before our officers wanted the remaining concrete removed. Somewhat relieved, he said he would leave now but left a contact number in case he was required. I then rang Mr Heaton at his shop.
‘It’s PC Rhea,’ I announced myself. ‘I’m ringing from your house at Thackerston.’
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‘South View? Not bad news, Constable, I hope!’ but his voice revealed his concern.
‘In a way, yes,’ and I explained what had happened, adding that police teams were already en route.
‘Oh, my God this is all I need . . . it’s taken me months to get those builders in and now they’ll be off on other job . . . but how serious is this, PC Rhea? Are we talking of murder, or is it some skeleton buried centuries ago?’
‘We won’t know the answer to that until we’ve had the bones examined in a laboratory,’ I said.
‘I won’t come to make a nuisance of myself, PC Rhea, but you will keep me informed of progress, won’t you?’
‘I will,’ I assured him, then settled down to await Sergeant Blaketon. He arrived in the official Ashfordly police car and looked rather flustered as he bustled to the rear of the house where I had waited. I led him to the remains of the concrete floor and showed him the discovery.
‘I hope this is not a murder case, Rhea. I can do without a murder enquiry in my countdown as section commander.’
‘I think it is a child’s skeleton, Sergeant; it’s very small but I’m not sure how much of it there is under the concrete.’
‘Our Scenes of Crime wizards are en route,’ he said. ‘And I was lucky to catch Dr Prescott; he’s already on his way from Scarborough. We’ve about an hour to wait. So, have we any missing children on our records? Missing in the last, what, thirty or forty years or more.’
‘I haven’t done any research into that, Sergeant; not yet.’
‘Give Ventress a call on your radio and get him to search the records as far back as he can go. Children missing from home, that sort of thing, or even a small person missing. This could be a small adult, although I think it is a child. Mind, you can’t really judge a person’s height from only part of a skull, can you? At least, I can’t. Experts might.’
The Force Scenes of Crime officers, comprising Detective Sergeant Gideon and Detective Constable Linford, were first to arrive but after a superficial examination of the discovery said they would await the pathologist. Things surrounding the remains, like pieces of stone, earth or other artefacts might be relevant in determining the age of the skeleton. Within a further half-hour Dr Jim Prescott, the forensic pathologist, arrived eager to begin his examination. After establishing the story of the discovery he knelt beside the remains and began to examine them, first with the naked eye and then through a magnifying glass.
Eventually, he said, ‘We need to remove as much soil as we can, and as much of the remaining concrete as possible.’
‘I can recall the builder,’ I offered. ‘He has the necessary equipment.’
‘I see no harm in using his skills, under our guidance,’ said Prescott. ‘Right, Constable, see if he can help us. We need to break up and remove this concrete blanket piece by piece, very carefully.’
Jack said he would arrive in ten minutes and so extraction of the remains commenced, a curious mixture of gentle archaeological technique and powerful drilling tools. But, as the work progressed, with the remaining concrete being broken into small pieces by Jack’s powerful and noisy drill before being carefully set aside, those of us watching realized that this was a complete skeleton and that it was a child — a young child by the appearance of the bones. Younger than a teenager, we reckoned. But in time, all the concrete and rubble had been removed, and Gideon, aided by Linford, began to scrape away the layers of dry soil.
Slowly, but surely, the skeleton of a small child was revealed, lying in a bed of dry earth. There was no sign of any clothing or coffin and no adornments to the body. Prescott’s gentle hands skimmed the surface of the skull seeking signs of injury, the kind that might result from a blow to the head, but he found none. He looked at the neck bones too, for signs of manual strangulation, and then the vertebrae down the full length of the spine. Ribs, arms and legs were examined too, for this was a complete skeleton, unaffected by the attention of wild animals because it had been securely buried under its concrete covering.
It took over two hours to reach this stage, but Prescott was extremely careful and very patient as he uncovered the remains inch by inch. Finally, he stood up, stretched his back and said, ‘It is the skeleton of a child, gentlemen, I am pretty certain about that. Age? Difficult to say. Four or five at death perhaps. Not a teenager and not a baby, that is certain. This is not a stillborn child. Sex? The bones are female, I know that from the pelvic area. Cause of death? There are no marks of injury on the bones, no signs of strangulation or skull damage, no broken ribs or smaller bones, and so I would say it was death by natural causes although I cannot rule out poison until I have examined the bones in laboratory conditions and had samples analysed. How old are the bones? At this stage, I do not know. I’d hazard a guess by saying they were not buried here during the last fifty years, but they might be considerably older. I shall let you know once I have the results of my laboratory tests.’
‘So, we’re not looking for a murderer?’ smiled Blaketon with some relief.
‘It is very difficult to be sure, Sergeant, but there may be an unauthorized burial, or unrecorded burial. Who was the child? Who has lived in this house — who buried the child and why? And was the concrete floor laid to conceal the grave, or did some later resident put down the concrete, little realizing what lay beneath? You have some puzzles to solve, gentlemen. Meanwhile, I shall ask that the remains be taken to my laboratory so that I can examine them in more detail.’
It took a while to arrange transportation of the remains to the pathology laboratory and, with Jack’s help, we excavated further just to ensure no more skeletons were buried behind South View. There was a suggestion the area could have been a Saxon graveyard or even a more modern Quaker burial ground but no further bones were discovered. We decided the discovery was the only skeleton buried here.
Sergeant Blaketon instructed me to inform the coroner about the discovery and then asked me to investigate the lives of previous owners and occupiers of South View but I decided not to question anyone still living until I had the pathologist’s confirmed opinion about the age of the bones. I had no wish to imply there had been a criminal act by some living person or the deceased relative of some living person until more evidence was available.
It would be some three weeks later when Dr Prescott rang me.
‘I have carried out a very careful study of the South View skeleton,’ he told me. ‘Perhaps the most significant finding is that arsenic is present in the bones. Now, Constable, you may be aware arsenic can be present in soil in which case it might contaminate any skeletal remains covered by it, and in any case, all human bodies contain microscopic amounts of arsenic. The presence of arsenic does not necessarily imply a crime. But in this case there is a substantial amount. I’d say that child — a female — died from arsenic poisoning, Constable, and that she was around four or five years old at the time. Whether the arsenic was ingested accidentally or fed to the girl deliberately is something we shall never know, but arsenic poisoning in England was very prevalent a century ago. Indeed, in 1851, the Arsenic Act was made law to restrict the purchase of arsenic. I’d say it was around that time when she died.’
‘So, we might have a murder victim, Doctor?’
‘Quite possible, Constable, quite possible. But I doubt if you’ll be able to record the crime as solved. Tests on the bones suggest they are at least a century old. As I said, I think this girl died around 1850, give or take a few years either side of that date. I shall send my written report very soon, and you might wish to inform the coroner of this call pending his receipt of my report.’
I told Jack Hodgkinson of this and then the Heatons, with Mrs Heaton now wondering whether she could live in a house under which a body had been buried, and I updated my verbal report to Ashfordly Police Station, saying my written report would follow. Some weeks later, at the subsequent inquest on the bones, the coroner recorded an open verdict and the bones were eventually buried, at public expense, in Thack
erston churchyard.
I did make enquiries into the previous ownership of South View and learned the house had once been called Rose Bower, but the mystery of that dead girl remains unsolved. None of the local papers in the middle of the last century reported a missing girl, the case did not appear in any of our old records and I discovered absolutely nothing suspicious about any of those long-dead occupants. Nor did I find a record of a young girl living there at the material time.
There the matter ends — except that the villagers raised funds for a gravestone for the unfortunate child.
In the absence of a known name, we called her Rose Bower and the inscription said she had passed from this earth aged five, c.1850. Someone produced a nice epitaph for her — it said, ‘Finally at Peace’ and her tombstone can still be seen in a quiet corner of Thackerston churchyard — with South View watching over it. The Heatons decided to sell the house, however, and some people from Hastings bought it. No one told them about the skeleton. They don’t know to this day.
Chapter 5
Some of the houses I visited in the course of my duties were veritable private museums of a small, but very specialized nature. One lady collected blue thimbles, or thimbles with blue adornments upon them, and every suitable shelf in her house was occupied by her collection which seemed to be fashioned from a variety of materials. In spite of her all-consuming passion for such objects I never discovered the reason for her particular interest. Another man collected watercolours by a local artist called Scott Hodgson, but when that man died his collection was dispersed to relatives — but as a sole collection for this under-rated Yorkshire artist, the collection would have been unique had it remained intact. I have no doubt some art gallery would have welcomed that kind of donation and although most of the collections I was shown were fairly mundane there were some which were unusual and probably unique in some particular way, or even valuable from both an artistic, historic and even commercial aspect.
CONSTABLE AROUND THE HOUSES a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain’s best-loved authors Page 10
