Mrs. Richards crumpled in a gush of weeping, and the family led her to a corner couch and poured more gin into her.
“At least it was quick,” said Mandy’s serious-faced intended, still not fully grasping the fact that he was attending his fiancée’s funeral on the same day he’d planned to marry her.
“Yes. It was quick,” agreed young Constable Bliss, and he found himself repeating the old joke about a Scotsman who’d drowned in a whisky vat. “Was it quick?” the mythical coroner asked the investigating officer hoping to allay the relatives fears that their loved one lingered in agony. “Och no,” replied the policeman. “He got out twice for a pee.”
“I don’t get it.” Mandy’s ex-fiancé had said, leaving Bliss praying for an earthquake or other calamitous event to cover his embarrassment.
“Sorry,” he said when it became obvious that God was not on his side. “Bad joke – tasteless ... I need another drink.”
Sergeant Patterson was back, a straggly line of uniform and civvy raincoats snaking along behind him. “Better rope off that area with the footprints and tyre tracks first,” he called.
The line stopped, and Bliss felt the piercing stares as the men checked him out. Patterson’s told them who I am, he realised, and quickly pulled himself upright and straightened his thoughts.
The first of the men dropped, uninvited into the pit as soon as the ladder was lowered. “Throw me a shovel,” he shouted, with the enthusiasm of a treasure seeker – but wasn’t that what it was, thought Bliss, treasure – to a policeman. He won’t be so bloody keen when he’s seen as many mutilated bodies as me.
“Somebody give me hand,” called the man in the grave.
One look down into the slab-sided pit was enough for most of the men, and a dissenting jeer spread through the crush as some inched away. Sergeant Patterson volunteered a six-foot two-inch hulk who unwittingly drew his attention by attempting to disappear inside a five-foot ten-inch overcoat. Murmurs of derision, coupled with relief, rippled back through the crush.
“Good ol’ Jacko ... Shall I ’old yer coat?”
“Get stuffed.”
“At least Dauntsey gave his old man a decent funeral – more than most murderers do,” said Patterson as soggy clods of earth started to land with wet thuds at their feet. “Almost seems a shame to dig him up; we could just leave the poor old beggar in peace.”
Bliss stepped back, pretending to avoid the flying dirt while trying to get the memory of Mandy Richards out of his mind. You’ve hardly thought of her for years, he remonstrated with himself, forget it. “Messy business ... murder,” he mumbled, attempting to keep the conversation alive. “Thought I’d be getting away from all this down here.”
“Tell me to mind me own business if you like, Guv, but is that why you’re here – to get away from summat?”
Bliss stared back into the grave looking as if he might divulge his reasons, but a shout from the grave saved Bliss from answering, not that he had an answer – not a particularly plausible one anyway.
“I think there’s something down here,” called one of the men in the pit, and D.C. Jackson took it as a sign to quit.
“Keep diggin’, Jackson; what’s up wiv ya?” shouted the sergeant.
“It’s me back, Serg. You remember,” he said, with a poorly executed expression of pain.
Sergeant Patterson chuckled. “Yeah, I remember Jacko, but I heard it got better after the Chief Super’s visit last week.”
Poorly stifled laughter animated the bystanders. Jackson turned pink and bent to his shovel.
“What’s that about?” Bliss whispered to the sergeant.
“I’ll tell you later, Guv,” said Patterson, hearing the approaching vicar.
“Those men shouldn’t be trampling over ...” the vicar was whining, but was cut off by an excited voice from the grave.
“Got it!” shouted one of the diggers.
“Got what?” asked the vicar, his voice lost in the press of men straining to peer into the pit.
“Get back,” shouted Bliss, shouldering a couple of constables aside for a clearer view. “What is it? What’ve you found?”
The vicar’s scrawny body slipped easily through the gap and he tugged at Bliss’s sleeve. “What exactly did you expect to find, Inspector?”
Bliss, feeling exonerated, shot back confidently. “What else would you expect to find in a grave, Sir, but a body?”
“A body?” breathed the vicar, then he had a revelation. “Do you mean the Major’s body?”
“Precisely, Vicar – no wonder Jonathan Dauntsey was so cocksure we’d never find his father. He figured that if he put it under ...”
“Sir, Sir,” Jackson’s voice was calling him urgently from the grave. “It ain’t the Major, Sir. It’s just some old bones.”
“How old? Show me.”
Jackson used the discovery as a means of escaping the pit and quickly clambered up the ladder with a handful of bone shards. “There’s a load of ’em,” he said, handing Bliss the fragments that had aged to a dark sepia.
“Ancient burials,” said the vicar, dismissing the human remains with little more than a glance. “The church was erected in 1145 on the site of a Saxon burial site. The Normans commonly built on sacred ground.” His eyes glazed and he took on a faraway look as if in personal remembrance of medieval Britain. “Do you know, Inspector, the Normans gave us some of our most magnificent Cathedrals and ...”
“You were saying about the ancient burials?” Bliss butted in gently, steering the vicar’s historical sermon toward more relevant matters.
“Oh ... Yes. Well, people have been buried on this site for centuries, and bones have a habit of migrating under the ground. I sometimes think it is because they are unhappy where they have been placed – like uneasy spirits always wandering …” Seemingly realising that he, too, was wandering again he paused and succinctly explained. “We clear the gravestones every few hundred years and start all over again, so wherever you dig you will probably find some remains. It’s wonderful to think that all the ground we are standing on was once the mortal bodies of parishioners – the wonder of God, eh, Inspector? – dust to dust.”
“Wonderful,” repeated Bliss, fearing he might retch.
“There’s something else,” called the other digger still hard at work.
Jackson slipped back down the ladder, keener now, and two minutes later a blood stained duvet had been dredged out of the mud in the bottom of the grave and hauled to the surface.
“Any bets that this is the one from the Black Horse,” said Patterson.
“Nobody will bet against it,” said Bliss peering expectantly into the hole, waiting to see the Major’s body emerge.
“That’s it, Guv,” Jackson called a few minutes later. “We’ve hit rock bottom. He ain’t here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“What’s that?” called Bliss, pointing, having noticed a small blob with an unnatural shape.
“Just a lump of rock,” said Jackson slamming his shovel into it.
The “rock” sheared in two with a dull thud and took him by surprise. “It’s soft, he said, bending. “It’s metal I think, Guv,” he added brushing away some of the mud. “It’s