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 an old kid’s toy. A mangled horse with a rider.”
“I think it’s a tin soldier, Guv,” said Patterson, reaching into the pit and taking it from Jackson.
“Lead, I would say,” said Bliss, feeling the weight as he took it from the sergeant. “Where was it, Jackson?”
“Don’t rightly know, Sir – under the duvet, I s’pose. I never noticed it ’til you mentioned it.”
“It was probably dropped by one of the kids that play in here,” suggested the vicar. “They’re a bit of a nuisance to be honest. Or a grieving parent may have placed it in a child’s coffin – favourite toy, that sort of thing.”
“Why was it flattened then?”
“Jackson and his clumsy boots probably did that,” said Patterson.
“Possibly,” mused Bliss. “Anyway, this doesn’t help us. Where on earth is the Major’s body?”
Chapter Two
The press officer at Headquarters was on the phone when Bliss and Patterson arrived back at the station. Pat Patterson picked up the call then, realising Bliss had strolled into the office, smiled in relief. Sticking his hand over the mouthpiece he held it out like a gift. “Just in time, Guv, the press are fishing for some sort of statement – want to know how come we solved this one so quickly.”
“You tell me,” said Bliss slinging his wet macintosh over a chair and flopping down, making it clear he wasn’t anxious to seize the phone.
“It was pure bloody luck to be honest.”
“I’m not sure we should say that,” Bliss frowned with disapproval. “We wouldn’t want to dispel the public perception that we actually know what we’re doing.”
Daphne, rounding up dirty mugs, grunted, “You might know what you’re doing, Chief Inspector, but this lot couldn’t detect a bad smell in a sewage works.”
Patterson ignored the quip and held the phone away from him as if it were venomous. “Will you give a statement, Guv?”
Bliss shrank back into the chair, waffling about insufficient local knowledge; lack of information; inadequate material data, leaving Patterson no option other than to release his hand from the mouthpiece and shape his mouth ready to reply.
“Wait,” said Bliss, leaping forward, clamping his hand over the instrument. “I’d rather you didn’t mention my name either.”
“If that’s what you want,” Patterson said, his face clearly struggling with the intrigue of an ex-metropolitan police officer shunning publicity.
“Yeah, just stick to a few basic facts – suspect in custody – enquiries continuing – no names, no pack drill – you know the score.”
Feigning disinterest, Bliss wandered across the room and busied himself with a large-scale wall map of the area. The sergeant gave a series of carefully crafted “no comment” type remarks, then put down the phone, joined him and explained the strategy. “We’re concentrating on the woods and fields around the Dauntsey place ... here,” he said, stabbing a finger at a spot on the outskirts of the town. “The Black Horse is just off the Market Square ... here, and the cemetery’s about halfway between the two. The men we pulled off the search for the cemetery were doing the stables and outbuildings at Dauntsey’s house but they’d been at it since six o’clock this morning and were pretty much finished.”
“I’m a bit concerned we might be putting too much focus on Dauntsey’s place,” said Bliss, trying to keep his tone uncritical. “What makes you think he took the body back to his place? Surely it would make sense to get rid of it as far away as possible.”
“It would – but the Super figured it might be a question of familiarity. On the assumption it wasn’t premeditated murder, he would have had to act quickly and take the body to the first place that came to mind; somewhere local; somewhere on or near his own turf probably.”
Bliss was nodding, “There’s a degree of sense in that.”
“Even more so,” continued the sergeant, “Now we know where he took the duvet. The cemetery’s on the flight path from the Black Horse to his place – he must have dropped it off en-route.”
“That would have taken him awhile, to stop, find the open grave, throw in the duvet, scoop a load of dirt back in – it all takes time – and he still had to get rid of the body.”
Patterson shrugged, “He probably knew