Dead People. Ewart Hutton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      He shook his head gravely. ‘Only to brush the surface debris off. To confirm what it was. Then we stopped everything and called you people.’

      ‘Can I speak to the digger driver?’

      ‘That was me. I was excavating this base.’ He reacted to my surprise. ‘We’re short-handed, we were working on a Sunday to try to keep up to schedule.’ He looked sheepish. I expect he was breaking some sort of local by-law or clause in the planning permission. I decided not to arrest him.

      ‘Did you see the skull?’

      ‘No. But I might have picked that up in the cut before.’ He nodded at the pile of excavated material. ‘It could be in there. We didn’t think we should touch anything.’

      I nodded my appreciation. ‘It was the right decision. And you did well not to do any more damage.’

      ‘It was luck. The light was right for me, I just managed to see it before I crushed it.’

      I looked around carefully, but it was useless, the entire periphery resembled an opencast mine. ‘Tell me something. I know it’s difficult, but I want you to think back to just before you uncovered this section. Was there anything on the surface? Mounding? A depression? Any kind of marker?’

      He thought hard, his face tight with concentration. When he eventually shook his head it was like a small spring being released. ‘No. I’m sorry. If there was anything out of the ordinary, I didn’t notice it,’ he said apologetically.

      ‘You said you stopped when you realized what it was.’

      ‘That’s right.’

      I looked down at the remains again. I was still getting a huge insect’s carapace. ‘It’s hard to tell.’

      He looked puzzled. Wondering what I was getting at.

      ‘That it’s human,’ I clarified.

      ‘I just saw bones at first. I wasn’t sure whether they were animal or human, but I knew they would have to be checked out. Tessa confirmed that they were human.’

      I looked at the woman. She smiled, amused at my expression of surprise.

      ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Jeff said, flustered, ‘I should have introduced you. This is Dr MacLean.’

      ‘Doctor.’ I nodded at her, trying to pull back my composure.

      She grinned. ‘Don’t get too excited, Sergeant. I’m not a medical doctor. I won’t be able to help you out on any forensic technicalities.’ She was Scottish, a touch of east-coast inflexion in the accent.

      ‘Dr MacLean’s an archaeologist,’ Jeff explained, ‘she’s working on a dig farther up on the ridge of the hill. I asked her to come down. In case this was in any way connected to what she’s working on.’

      ‘We’ve discovered a medieval grave site,’ she elaborated. ‘Jeff wondered whether this body could have anything to do with ours.’

      ‘Does it?’ I asked. ‘Can you tell whether this is medieval?’

      She hunkered down close to the remains. I dropped down beside her, our splayed-out knees almost touching. She took out a pen and used it as a pointer. ‘Can you see that?’ she asked, directing my eyes down to a point close to the elbow of the one uncovered arm.

      I caught it. A scrap of something with a dirty-brown sheen to it, damp, a surface-texture like kelp. ‘What is it?’

      She turned her face to mine. ‘Whatever variation on polyethylene sheet it turns out to be, Sergeant, I don’t think they were making it six hundred years ago.’

      ‘Could it have got here independently?’

      ‘I’m not the detective, but the material does appear to be under the remains.’ She smiled again, sympathetically, I thought, but before I could confirm it, she stood up. I joined her and heard Emrys Hughes smother a snort of laughter. He wouldn’t have known polyethylene if it turned up on his breakfast plate, but he obviously thought that I had just had my nose caught in a hinge.

      ‘So the plastic could have been used as a wrapping?’ I asked.

      She shrugged. It wasn’t her business. It didn’t matter. I was airing the questions for my own benefit. ‘Or as a carrier? Something to stop the fluids leaking?’ I turned to Jeff. ‘What was here before your started your operation?’

      ‘Nothing. Just open hill.’

      ‘No track?’

      ‘A pretty rudimentary one.’ He pointed out a track that was little more than twin wheel ruts that ran up to the shoulder of the hill. ‘That’s a continuation of it. It goes up to Tessa’s … Dr MacLean’s dig.’

      ‘So you could have got a vehicle up here?’

      ‘It would have to have been a four-wheel drive.’

      The wind gusted. I felt it cold in my face. ‘It’s going to rain. Have you got a tarpaulin we can use to cover the body and the excavated material?’

      ‘Sure. Are we going to be able to carry on and work round you while you do what you have to do?’

      So that’s why he was looking so worried. ‘Not immediately, I’m afraid,’ I said sympathetically, ‘and then it’s going to depend on what we find before we can release the site back to you.’

      ‘Jeff …’

      We all looked round at the man at the open door of one of the site huts who had just shouted. ‘There’s a call come in for the cops.’

      I looked at Jeff quizzically. ‘There’s no cellular reception up here,’ he explained, ‘we had to put our own landline in.’

      ‘Jeff …’ Tessa put a hand on his arm. ‘I’m going to go back up the hill now. I’ll catch you soon.’

      ‘I’ll come over.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It looks like I’m going to have time on my hands.’

      She bobbed her head at me. ‘’Bye, Sergeant.’

      ‘Goodbye, doctor,’ I replied, feeling the formal distance. I felt an irrational twinge of loneliness and wished that I was playing in the same movie as she and Jeff.

      They left me to take the call in a partitioned-off area of the hut, with topographical-survey plans on the walls. The long table was home to a cluster of tannin-lined mugs and a bottle of tomato ketchup with a crust around the top like a botched circumcision. On the wall above it, an ironical placement if there ever was one, a calendar promoting drill bits featured a heavy-breasted, naked woman with rosy nipples and a blue hard hat.

      DCI Bryn Jones’s steady deep voice came down the line. ‘Glyn, can you tell us what you’ve got there?’

      I described it, sticking purely to the observational facts. The line emitted soft static. He had put his hand over the receiver. I knew exactly who he was relaying my information to.

      ‘Glyn, СКАЧАТЬ