Two Feet Under (Lindenshaw Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  “Sorry about that,” he said in a deep Welsh accent as he ended the call. “Pru, you don’t age, do you?”

  “Got a picture in the attic.” Pru’s voice reflected its roots more than normal. “Chief Inspector Bright wants to know all about what you found.”

  “Not me who found it. One of the diggers, poor girl.” Howarth—what sort of a Welsh name was that?—winced. “I was going to send her home but thought you might want to interview her.”

  “Quite right.” Robin nodded. “Tell us what you can.”

  “We started digging the area this morning. Just by hand, nothing mechanical. This is supposed to be a virgin bit of the site, excavation-wise, so we had no idea what we’d turn up.”

  “Why here in particular?” Robin asked.

  “The university got a grant to do a geophysical survey of the whole area. Do you know what that is?”

  “Of course,” Robin snapped. “We’re the Time Team generation. Did you think you’d found a plunge pool?”

  Howarth inclined his head. “Sorry. I was being patronising.”

  “Apology accepted.” Robin could be gracious when required.

  “We weren’t sure what we’d found, to be honest, only that there were signs of underlying structures. Unlike the people on Time Team, we don’t make assumptions until we’ve exposed the archaeology.”

  “So what did the digger expose?”

  “Part of a mosaic to start with. Bit of a small panel, with some sort of substrate for the tesserae to be embedded in, just lying in the topsoil.” Howarth indicated the size of the thing with his hands. “Very unusual, which is what got Kirsty—that’s the digger I mentioned—so puzzled in the first place. She’d barely raked off anything else when she found black plastic. A sheet or a large strong bag. It was slightly ripped, and hair was protruding through the tear.”

  “We’ll get her to supply the details.” Robin couldn’t shake off an instant, and uncharacteristically unprofessional, dislike he’d taken to this witness. “You said this was virgin ground, but if somebody buried a body, then the area must have been disturbed. Did nobody notice?”

  Howarth shrugged. “That bit of ground’s been used for all sorts of things over the years, because people didn’t think it was important. There used to be a children’s play area there, but it was taken out. Health and Safety.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s been a right mess since then, so if somebody was careful enough, they could cover their tracks.”

  “Hm. How easy is it to get into this place out of hours?”

  “The main building’s locked and alarmed.” That made sense, given that the mosaics and hypocaust ruins were in great condition. Culford wasn’t Fishbourne, but it remained impressive. “The rest of the site just has a fence. We weren’t aware of anything that needed protecting.” Howarth gave Pru a rueful smile.

  She returned the smile, then adopted her most professional air. “You’ll appreciate there are questions we’ll have to ask you, and statements to be taken, both now and as the details emerge. For a start, are you aware of anyone associated with the site going missing?”

  Howarth shook his head. “No, all women accounted for.”

  “How do you know it’s a woman we’re concerned with?” Robin interjected.

  “Oh, sorry. Kirsty said she reckoned the corpse was female, from what she could see of the hair. Have I spoken out of turn?”

  Robin narrowed his eyes. “We don’t make any assumptions about identifying the victim until we hear from our experts.”

  “I apologise once more. Thing is, our staff here is predominantly female. We only have one paid employee, Clare, who runs the administration and just about everything else. She gets helped by volunteers so we can have the site open as much as possible.”

  “I’ll get a full list of names from Clare, thank you. In the interim, I’d like to talk to the student who found the body. Kirsty, did you say?”

  “That’s right. She’ll be up in the staffroom, which is our posh term for that Portakabin.” Howarth pointed towards a dingy green building. “Do you want to talk to her now?”

  “After we check in at the scene. Thanks,” Robin added, remembering his manners.

  “Shall I take you . . .?”

  “No thanks, Charlie.” Pru cuffed his arm. “You’ll be busy enough putting off the school trips and the public. This place needs to be shut to everyone for the time being.”

  Howarth’s face dropped. “Hell. I never thought. I’ll get onto it.”

  As Robin and his sergeant made their way from the car park to where a white tent indicated the victim’s last resting place, he cast a glance over his shoulder. Howarth was on his phone, talking animatedly. “Is he always like that?”

  “Like what, sir?”

  “Gets up people’s noses and they can’t work out why.”

  Pru laughed. “Yeah, that’s him. Or at least it is if you’re a bloke. They find him a bit smarmy.”

  “And what’s he like with women?”

  “A charmer. No harm in him, though. He’s always struck me as happily married.” They halted at the point where they’d have to slip on at least gloves and overshoes if they wanted to get closer to the shallow grave. “I suspect if a woman misread the charm and made him an offer, he’d run a mile.”

  “Hmm.”

  The appearance of Grace, emerging from the tent with a cheery wave, focussed their attention away from smarmy site directors towards the gruesome minutiae. “Coming over for a look, sir?”

  “When we’re kitted up. Want us in bunny suits?”

  “Please. Whole kit and caboodle. This isn’t Midsomer.” Grace had no time for television crime dramas and the way they played fast and loose with crime scenes and forensic matters. Shoddy procedures and the depiction of seemingly limitless budgets; both riled her. “The doctor has been, to say that she’s definitely dead. He’ll do the postmortem tomorrow.”

  “How long has the body been there?” Robin asked once they were inside the tent and had their first glimpse of the corpse. The dismal sight of somebody’s child, somebody’s loved one, cut off in their prime was one Robin would never get used to.

  Grace wrinkled her nose. “She’s been there months, rather than days. I’ll be able to give you a better answer when all the tests are done.”

  “Definitely a she?” Pru clarified. She waited for Grace’s nod before continuing. “Any idea how old she was?”

  “About twenties or thirties, from what I can see of the body and clothes. Although what I can expose has been restricted by the plastic she was wrapped in. We’ll confirm everything as soon as we can, along with cause of death and all the rest of it. I suspect she’s had blunt trauma to the forehead, but she’s in a pretty bad way. The doctor didn’t like the state of the bit of her face that’s visible.”

  “Series of blows?”

  Grace shrugged. “Can’t tell as yet. Maybe something that happened postmortem. When I know, you will.”

  Robin, with a quickly hidden shudder, glanced at the dead woman again. “Do we have a name for her?”

  “Not that I’ve found yet. But it’s going to be a slow process. Don’t want to miss anything by rushing.” Grace sighed. “Poor lass.”

  “Poor lass, indeed.” Robin forced a rueful smile. “Get all the information you can. She deserves it.”

  “I’ll do my best. And then we’ll see what Greg and his pals can make of it.”

  “We’ll leave you to it.” The sooner Grace could collect the samples, the sooner they’d be off to the lab for examination.

  Once they’d left the CSI to get on with her job and were heading off to find the digger who’d uncovered the body, Pru—pale faced—rubbed her hands as though ridding the grave dirt from them.

  “First corpse?” Robin asked, not unkindly. Death took some getting used to.

  “First murder, assuming it is a murder. Seen a couple of RTAs.” Thank God that was still the most likely way the local police came across dead bodies. “I imag
ined it would be the same.”

  “But it isn’t?”

  “No, and I can’t work out why.” She halted. “Ditch me if I’m being a sea anchor, sir. There must be some of the Abbotston team who’ve got more experience than I have.”

  “There are. And they’ll have plenty to exercise that experience on, especially if there’s no ID on our victim. At least you didn’t puke all over your shoes, like Anderson did.”

  “Did he?”

  “Do you think I’m lying?” He was, but it wouldn’t hurt for her to believe the story for a while. “Fancy a cuppa? Your pal must be able to rustle us up one.”

  “No, thanks.” They’d reached the Portakabin door. “He’d only try to find somebody with two X chromosomes to do it. He wouldn’t know one end of a kettle from another.”

  Robin grinned, then immediately changed his expression for one suitably serious for interviewing a witness.

  Kirsty—they guessed it was her from the name emblazoned on the back of her sweatshirt—was sitting at a table with what appeared to be a colleague. Both had their hands clenched around mugs which somehow looked far too large for them. The Portakabin was comfortably enough decked out, having—apart from the table and chairs—several more comfy armchairs, a sagging sofa, a tiny kitchenette, and another section which appeared to be set aside for the cleaning and sorting of artefacts. A couple of PCs, surprisingly modern, completed the contents. The windows provided a scenic view of the car park, which could be blocked out by blinds when the sight of school coaches and snotty pupils became overwhelming.

  The inevitably edgy introductions were made, and Kirsty’s colleague, Abby, offered to make them all a fresh brew, which Robin readily accepted.

  “Nothing like this has ever happened before,” Kirsty said, without being asked. “I mean, I’m used to turning up burials or cremations, especially on the edges of Roman sites, but I knew as soon as I saw it that this wasn’t old.”

  “Can we take this from the beginning, please? Assume we don’t know a thing,” Robin said in what he hoped were soothing tones. The girl was clearly nervous, and some important element might be lost if they didn’t go through things logically.

  “Okay.” Kirsty gave a little background to the dig, which matched what Howarth had said. She and Abby had arrived that morning as the advance guard of a team from Kinechester University, and they’d barely got a couple of inches down when they’d come to the mosaic.

  “Where’s that now?” Pru enquired.

  “In a finds tray, up by the trench. We lifted it whole, didn’t we, Abby?” she called across to where her colleague was doling teabags into a pot.

  “We did.” Abby gestured with her teaspoon, miming the procedure. “After we’d recorded it and everything. It was obvious it wasn’t in situ, so we thought it must have been backfill from some previous dig we didn’t know anything about, or maybe from when they put the play park in.”

  “Yes”—Kirsty nodded—“we knew before we started that the ground had been disturbed time and again, and who knows how careless people had been.”

  Robin wasn’t sure that the contractors who put in or took out the play equipment would have been allowed to be so gung-ho with any artefacts they turned up, but he let it ride. “And then?”

  “And then we cleared back a bit more and found the plastic. I wondered at first if it was from landscaping. You know, people put down black plastic to inhibit weeds. I made some stupid joke about how it wasn’t typically Anglo-Saxon or anything like that, and then I called Abby over. She spotted the tear in the bag and the hair sticking through, so she said we should leave everything as it was.”

  “Quite right.” Pru smiled encouragingly. “Did you turn up any other finds before you shut digging down for the day?”

  “No. We weren’t expecting to, given how little we’d got down into the soil. If the archaeology is at the same level as the villa, we’d have expected to go down another three feet.”

  “Why didn’t you use a mechanical digger to take off the top layers?” Robin had seen that on Time Team too.

  “Because we knew the top layers were likely to have already been disturbed and didn’t want to risk missing artefacts in the topsoil.” Abby brought over the steaming mugs of tea, to a chorus of gratitude. “Just as well, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed.” Robin blew on his tea, then risked a semi-scalding sip. “Why didn’t you ring us? Protocol?”

  “Lack of phone signal. You know what it’s like round here.” Kirsty, taking a draught, didn’t seem to notice how hot the tea was. Maybe she had it milky enough to counteract the heat. “I came down to the office, where Charlie was. Mr. Howarth. He came up to double-check, then went to ring you. You can get signal in here.”

  “What did he double-check?” Pru asked.

  The students rolled their eyes. “That we hadn’t made a mistake and misidentified a body that was too old to be of interest to you. As though the Romans used plastic.”

  “I thought you had to report all bodies, unless they were found properly interred in a burial ground.” Pru looked to Robin, who both shrugged and nodded.

  “Always best to call us in.” He took another sip of tea. “Have you any idea of who the dead woman might be?”

  Abby and Kirsty shared a How the hell are we supposed to know? glance before shaking their heads.

  “I know, it sounds a daft question.” Robin smiled. “But you’d be surprised. People hear things, about somebody who’s gone missing but not been reported to the police, or rumours about odd happenings. Office gossip that turns out to have a basis in truth.”

  “Sorry.” Kirsty shook her head again. “Nothing.”

  “That mosaic’s a bit off, though,” Abby remarked. “I took a picture of it to send to my tutor. She reckons it’s totally the wrong design and era for this site. She said it looked like a Victorian antiquarian might have hacked it out of somewhere else.”

  “Seems fishy,” Robin agreed. “It was definitely on top of the sheeting? The dead woman couldn’t have been holding it in her hands or anything?”

  “I doubt it.” Kirsty frowned. “Not unless the plastic had all been disturbed already.”

  “Thank you.” Robin took another swig of tea. He’d never be able to manage the entire mug. “We’ll get a constable up here to take formal statements from you both, as well as anybody else who’s on-site. You’d think somebody would have seen or heard something suspicious.”

  Abby snorted. “Don’t count on it. I can think of people in my department who’d notice a flint flake three metres away but not spot a bollard until they walked into it.”

  “Let’s hope you’re wrong.” Robin had an awful feeling she wouldn’t be.

  Adam had just put the house phone down as Robin trudged through the front door. Campbell must have heard the approach of his “other” master well before Adam did, as he was ready and waiting to pounce.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to be home so early,” Adam said, then gave his partner a kiss.

  “Sorry about that. You’d better tell your sugar daddy to skedaddle.” Robin, dog in tow, edged towards the kitchen. “Was that him on the phone?”

  “No. The usual ‘We’re from Microsoft and there’s something wrong with your computer.’ I always say, ‘Microsoft? That’s very interesting,’ then clam up. They panic and put the phone down.”

  “Good tactic.” Robin yawned. “I told the team to make the most of this evening. Once we have an identification of the dead woman, it’ll be all hands to the deck.”

  “Dinner won’t be long. Saturday’s chilli con carne from the freezer.”

  “Sounds like heaven.” Robin kicked off his shoes. He’d texted earlier, from the site, to warn Adam a new investigation was afoot, although Adam had already guessed that was the case, as the incident had been on the local news feed. Once the folks from Culford villa had cancelled the school trip which was due the next day, and the characteristic blue-and-white police tape had appeared, word had sprea
d.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not a lot to say at present.” Robin stroked Campbell’s ears.

  “What’s that on your sleeve?”

  “Where?” Robin twisted about.

  “Left elbow. Looks like oil. Or rust. Or both.”

  “That’s because it is oil. Sod.”

  “Take it off and I’ll put something on it. There’s a can of Stain Devil under the sink.”

  Robin slid the jacket off, grimacing at the smear on what he’d always described as one of his favourite items of clothing. “This cost me a small fortune. Got it in a little shop down an alley in Bath.”

  “No wonder it cost so much.” Adam started work on the stain. Little domestic tasks such as this formed part of the process of bringing them closer and keeping them together. It was like being a married couple, only not quite.

  “That jacket’s almost as precious to me as Campbell, even if it’s never saved my life.” Robin peered over Adam’s shoulder. “I rubbed up against some rust bucket of a truck in Culford car park. Must have done it then.”

  “No wonder the people on Time Team always look like they’ve borrowed their outfits off the local scarecrows. Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard.”

  “Don’t you start. I feel like I’ve spent all day fending off daft ‘of course you’ve found a mosaic at a Roman site’ type quips.”

  “Mosaic? There wasn’t anything about that on the news.” Adam, having performed first aid on the jacket, opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer and one of sparkling water.

  “Just the water, please. I’ll keep the beer for when I really need it. Thanks.” Robin took the bottle. “And yes, we’ve kept the mosaic quiet for the moment.”

  He gave a résumé of what they’d found out about that morning: the ground-penetrating survey, the possible bathhouse, the university students beginning to dig.

  Adam winced when he reached the part about finding the body. “Poor girls. Do you think it’s worse to find a fresh corpse or an old one? Or are they equally gruesome?”

  “You should ask Pru Davis that. I thought she was going to lose her breakfast, although she held it together in the end. Anyway, this bit of mosaic was on top of the body, a whole section of it embedded in whatever Romans used to hold their tesserae. I suspect the archaeology mob is more puzzled about that than about the dead woman. Wrong era, wrong place, wrong everything.”