The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (17 page)

“I think you were correct to call us, Mr Coleman.” The constable knelt down and looked closely at the bone. “I am no doctor, but I have attended post-mortems and seen skeletons
. . . certainly looks human to me. Not recently buried . . . it seems to be aged. Can I ask what you were doing in the wood? You have no dog that you were exercising, for example?”

“Feeding my friends.”

“Your friends?”

“Oh, yes . . . foxes . . . badgers . . . creatures of the night. Animals enjoy foraging for their food and I never throw anything meaty away. Bones, fat, bacon rind . . . I bring it all to
the wood and scatter it. I come at various times of the day, depending on my timetable. I’m teaching at 4.00 p.m. today and then have an evening class of mature students . . . many older than
I am, doing something with their retirement. Good for them, I say . . . better than vegetating in front of day time television, I say, and their brains . . . sharp as tacks . . . get a better class
of degree than many twenty-year-olds, and also . . .”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I’ll get back home too late this evening to walk up to the wood, so I came now . . . dropped the bone I had brought well away from the bone I had found . . . then phoned you.
Should have phoned from my house, though . . . funny . . .”

“Not noticed it before, sir?”

“No. It has probably worked its way to the surface and one of my friends pulled it into the open. Probably a badger. Foxes are too lazy to do that – they prefer to scavenge . . . but
old brock will claw anything up. Well, do you need me any more? I have some preparation to do.”

“No, thank you, sir.” The constable reached for the radio attached to his lapel and pressed the “send” button.

“Human, male.” Louise D’Acre looked at the bone. She was clad in a green coverall, disposable hat . . . latex gloves. “Well, male is an educated guess.
If it was female the lady would be very tall indeed. It’s a femur, leg bone . . . and the person would be at least six feet tall in life . . . as female femurs go, it’s very
long.”

“A six footer.” D.C.I. Hennessey ran his liver-spotted hand through his silver hair.

“At least.” Louise D’Acre knelt down and picked up the bone and placed it in a productions bag. “Well, there’s more than one bone in the human skeleton,” she
said. “The rest might be around here somewhere. I’ll take this to York City.” She smiled a rare smile. She wore her hair short with just a trace of lipstick as her only make-up.
Aged mid-forties, she was, thought D.C.I. Hennessey, a lady who knew how to grow old gracefully. “You can bring the rest along if and when you find them.”

The “small wood” was, thought D.C.I. Hennessey, about one and a half acres in area of broad leafed woodland. A team of constables began to sweep across the wood, and just ten minutes
into the sweep one constable stopped, held up his hand and said “Sergeant.” He had found disturbed soil, and what appeared to be a bone protruding. It was about one hundred yards from
where Clifford Coleman had found the bone. Hennessey looked at the disturbed soil, at the bone, and said, “Better get Scene of Crime People here . . . photograph it as you dig it up . . .
bone by bone.”

“Very good, sir.”

Friday Afternoon

“Hard to determine age.” Dr Louise D’Acre studied the bones which had been laid out in order on the dissecting table of the pathology laboratory of the
City of York Hospital. “Not young, not elderly either . . . middle-aged. I’ll cut a tooth in cross section and determine the age that way, but at a glance I’d say that this is the
skeleton of a middle-aged person of the male sex . . . white European . . . there is no obvious cause of death . . . no trauma . . . almost all the bones are here, just a few very small bones of
the feet are missing, but it has been sawn up . . . quite neatly.”

“They were found neatly too.” D.C.I. Hennessey stood at the edge of the pathology lab, observing for the police. “Stacked one on top of the other, occupied a very small place
about the dimensions of a cardboard box that one person would take both arms to lift.”

“That’s interesting.” Louise D’Acre tapped the stainless steel table with the tip of a long finger. “That means that they were completely skeletal when they were
buried. The corpse was not merely sawn up, it was filleted as well. All tissue, all organs were removed. Couldn’t stack bones neatly otherwise.”

“Or the corpse buried and then dug up some time later when the flesh had decomposed and the bones reburied?”

“It’s possible, but the interval between burial and reburial would be measured in years. The other thing that occurs to me is that if a skeleton was dug up it would hardly be to
rebury it. I would be inclined to throw it into the Ouse one dark night, bone by bone. But it does tell you one thing, though: this is your territory, not mine.”

“Oh, please.” Hennessey smiled. “All help gratefully accepted.”

“Well, it tells you that the person or persons who did this had a lot of space . . . some means of filleting a corpse without the risk of being disturbed . . . can’t do that in a
little terrace house . . . some means of disposing of the tissue, such as a bonfire. Human tissue gives off a very sickly sweet smell when burned. Anyone who has smelled it will recognize the smell
again, and be suspicious. Or alternatively, the space to bury it.”

“A farmer?”

“Farm workers, farm labourers . . . again, the risk of a witnesses. I would be inclined to think of someone who lives alone in a large house or a smallholding. Enough space to do this
without the risk of being chanced upon.” Louise D’Acre stretched a tape measure along the spine. “It’s been chopped up, as you see, but in life he would have been about six
feet tall . . . and,” she added softly, “he walked with a limp.”

“He did?”

“Or he wore shoes, one of which, the left of the pair, was built up. His left femur is shorter than the right.”

“That will narrow the field down, a lot.”

“This is murder,” Dr D’Acre said. “It can only be murder, but it’s strange . . . the cause of death must have been quite mild, but the disposal of the corpse, very
messy indeed. I have rarely come across anything quite like it”

“Nor I,” Hennessey said. “It’s usually the other way round.”

“Indeed.” D’Acre paused. “Well, I’ll trawl for poisons, doubt I’ll find any cyanide, belonged to the Victorians, and I’ll determine his age by tooth
extraction.”

Wednesday Afternoon and Evening

George Hennessey sat at his desk and glanced out of the window of his office at a group of tourists, well wrapped up, who were walking the ancient walls of the city.
That’s York, he thought, a booming tourist industry year end to year end; even on cold winter days the walls will have tourists upon them. He felt satisfied. A good morning’s work had
been done. He had then walked the walls into the city and lunched at a pub with a wood fire and had sat underneath a reprint of an ancient map which showed “The West Ridinge of Yorkshyre, the
most famous and Faire Citie Yorke described – 1610”. Back at his desk, he read the report submitted by Sergeant Yellich about the man who had walked into Micklegate Bar Police Station
the day previous and said to the constable on the enquiry desk, “I’m fed up of waiting to be caught. It was me that did all those burglaries.” At first the man was thought to be a
candidate for detention under the Mental Health Act, but then began to reveal details only the perpetrator could know. He had reached the end of Yellich’s report when his phone rang. He let
it ring twice before answering it. “Detective Chief Inspector Hennessey.”

“Dr D’Acre, York City Hospital. I have the lab results back.”

“So soon?”

“Quiet period. The deceased was fifty-three, or-four, or-five, when he died. And poisoned.”

“Poisoned!”

“Self-inflicted. He was an alcoholic. It probably didn’t kill him – well it would have done had he lived long enough . . . but it wasn’t the murder weapon as such. But he
was a very serious alcoholic in life and had been for years. It would take very heavy drinking over a long period to leave traces of alcohol in his long bones, but it’s there. It’s
offered as an aid to identification.”

Hennessey and Yellich drove out to Meltham. Neither officer had been to the village before. The turn off to Meltham, they found, could easily be missed; a narrow lane, it drove
vertically between thick woodland. Upon arriving at the village they saw it to be small, nestling in a fold in the landscape. Yellich parked the car in the centre of the village, in the square
which was more of a triangle in terms of its shape. The square had an ancient and preserved pair of stocks and a memorial to the three sons of the village who had given their lives for King and
Country in the 1914–18 war. There was, Hennessey noted with some relief, no mention of any loss of life from the village in the 1939–45 conflict. A woman carrying a shopping bag glared
at them as she walked, quite content to let the two officers see her staring at them. A burly, well-set man glanced at them suspiciously.

“This village don’t like strangers,” Hennessey remarked, as he nodded to the man.

“Don’t, do it, boss?” Yellich locked the car.

“Well, where now?” Hennessey asked Yellich. “Where do you think?”

“Me, boss . . . tell you the honest truth, I’d try at the post office. Post mistresses in places like this know everything . . . in fact it was once my experience when I was a lad to
knock on the post mistress’s door at 8.00 p.m. one evening to tell her someone had died. She wasn’t a relation, not even a friend of the family, but I was fourteen and the adults who
were running round like headless chickens thought the best way to get the news into the community was to send me running up the lane to tell the post mistress that Mr Battie, my great uncle, had
died.” Yellich laughed. “Classic . . . classic . . . but it actually happened.”

Hennessey laughed. “All right,” he said. “Sounds good to me.”

The Post Office in Meltham was located next to a small, very small, mini market and a hardware shop. It was quiet inside the shop, which had a sense of timelessness, with old-fashioned posters
which had never been taken down and which advertised products priced in Imperial, not decimal currency. A youthful, very youthful, looking post mistress emerged from the gloom of the back of the
shop in response to the jangling door bell.

“You’ll be the police,” she said pleasantly. “We thought you’d come. It’ll be about the bones.”

“The bones?” Hennessey raised an eyebrow.

“The bones that were found in the small wood yesterday by Mr Coleman. Mrs Innes ‘does’ for Coleman – he’s a bachelor, you see, and Mr Coleman told her what
he’d found and she told me. So we thought you’d come.”

The woman seemed to be in her mid-twenties and Hennessey thought that, in terms of attitude and temperament, she had the makings of an excellent village post mistress. He asked if she had lived
in the village for long.

“All my life,” she replied with pride. “My husband didn’t want to live here, but if he wanted me, he had to live in Meltham. He’s been here nearly five years now
and is beginning to get accepted.”

“Lucky he.”

“Well, it means he gets a game of darts in the Beggar now. For the first few years he had to stand alone at the bar.”

“The Beggar?”

“The Fortunate Beggar.” The woman smiled. “It’s the pub, the only one in Meltham.”

“I see. Well, you’re right, we are here about the bones. We believe the person who was buried to have been quite tall, probably walked with a limp and had a very bad drink problem.
If he was local to this area and not brought here from afar, then someone might recognize him. Our mis per records haven’t shown anything.”

“Mis per?”

“Missing Persons.”

“Oh . . . but yes, I have heard of him. He still gets mentioned from time to time . . . the limping landlord, he disappeared . . . but that was before I was born. I’m twenty-six
now.”

“No wonder he’s not in our records.” Hennessey turned to Yellich. “If he had lived, he’d be pushing eighty now.”

“He had the Beggar,” the post mistress added. “Well, wait till I tell my mum. We took over the post office from her and dad when they retired. She’s at the coast now,
Bridlington, in a home. Your best bet now would be to try at the Beggar.”

“Only by reputation.” The landlord appeared to Hennessey and Yellich to be a man close to his retirement and who also subscribed to the Meltham culture of
“strangers not welcome”. He avoided eye contact with the officers and seemed to begrudge having to give information. “I took over the pub from him when he disappeared.
That’s thirty years now – thirty years last July, to be exact. He was not a happy man.”

“No?”

“His flat above the pub—” the landlord looked up at the low beams above his head “– above the bar here . . . it was like a tramp’s doss. The sheets on the
bed hadn’t been changed for months, newspapers covered the floor, empty bottles everywhere . . . My wife insisted we fumigate it. We threw everything out, stripped it right back to the bare
floorboards, then we set up a brazier in the main room.”

“Took a risk.”

“Not really. We mounted the brazier on a bed of bricks and burned wood and damp vegetation, left all the doors open, but shut all the windows except one. Filled the flat with smoke, and
crawling things began to come out of cracks in the wall and from between the floorboards; they found the open window and didn’t return. Then we moved in. The lingering smell of wood smoke was
better than the lingering smell of Reddick.”

“A lonely man, then?”

“Yes . . . Carl Reddick, the limping, lonely landlord. Never did like that name, Carl . . . too close to ‘cruel’, but in this case it was apt by all accounts. Cruel Carl
Reddick, not the right sort of man to be in charge of a pub.”

“Irresponsible, you mean? Let youths drink too much?”

“No . . . not from what I heard. He was a soak himself, two bottles a day, and I don’t mean beer.”

“I get the picture.”

“Apparently, so my customers told me, he used to sit on the stool at the end of the bar and be rude to everybody and anybody, customers and staff alike . . . very personally
offensive.”