Bones in the Barrow (10 page)

“Did Mollie tell you that?”

“Well, yes. But I knew it apart from Mollie.”

Joe's sister, who worked at the vicarage, had been very full of the parson's book when it was in preparation. Later, he had seen copies of it at the Post Office, and had bought one to read. The excavations had been cleared during the previous autumn, except for one barrow, where an experimental dig had shown merely that the place had been rifled before.

“You mean there wasn't anything there for him to find?”

“I dunno. You'd better ask Mollie, or I'll lend you the book.”

Daisy walked on in silence, but she could not keep her mind free from thoughts of Mr. Hilton. Spiteful thoughts. Thoughts of revenge.

As Joe was serving in the bar at his own place that night, she was back early at the White Hart. She was not on duty, but she thought she could safely draw Mr. Hilton's curtains and turn back his bedspread. The other chambermaid lived out and was often late on the job.

But Daisy's services were not needed. Mr. Hilton's bed was already stripped, the room was neat and bare. The books and suitcase had gone, but in the waste-paper basket, lying where she had put them the night before, and mercifully neglected by her that morning, were two small fragments of the broken vase. Mr. Hilton had evidently removed the rest. These were stuck in the wickerwork sides of the basket, and must have escaped his notice.

She took them out and laid them on the table. And it was then, she told Joe later, with imperfect accuracy, for the main idea had come to her before, that the sinister notion took hold of her, creeping over her brain like an icy stream. If it was not these bits of jug he really valued—and if he had he wouldn't have left them behind—was the whole thing phony? Had he really been digging to find something buried years and years ago, or had he been digging to bury something he had to get rid of now? Running back to her room, she put on her coat again and went over to the Royal Arms.

“You know the old man doesn't like you coming here while I'm serving.”

“Go on! Don't be so jittery. He can't eat you.”

“I can lose the job. And have to leave Duckington.”

“I won't be half a tick. Give me a small ‘light.' Listen. I think the bones Mr. Hilton had, he brought with him.”

“What's this? Twenty questions?”

“No. Do listen. I think he may have buried some and not found room for the rest. So he had to take them away again.”

“Are you crazy? Why did he display them, then?”

“To take off suspicion. The old vase was there for that. He pretended to be ever so upset I broke it, but he left two bits of it in the waste-paper basket.”

“Did he leave the nails? Or the other bits of crockery?”

“No. That might have been for effect, see.”

“The imagination the kid has! What about this? If he brought the bones down to bury them—that's what you're hinting, isn't it?—a possible murder or something of the sort, disposing of the remains— Well, if he did, where were they on the night he arrived?”

“In his haversack. Slung on the hook behind the door.”

“Did you see them?”

“No. But I felt them. It swung into the doorway when I was shutting the door and I pulled it back and felt these long things. I never gave it a thought at the time. But now it gives me the willies.”

“Don't work yourself up! You better push along back. Mrs. Norbury wouldn't like you over here, and you know it. Let me have the bits of pot tomorrow. Mollie'll see what the vicar has to say.”

Joe's sister, Mollie, had worked at the vicarage for nearly ten years, ever since, in fact, she had been rejected for the women's services in the war, on account of her spinal trouble, contracted in childhood. She lived with her parents, going to her work daily, and since Mr. Symonds, the parson, was gentle and kind, and Mrs. Symonds lively and chatty, she enjoyed her work and had no wish to change it. She had come to regard the vicar's family as an offshoot of her own. This feudal outlook sometimes annoyed Joe, who affected a revolutionary attitude among his friends, while remaining cautiously conservative in his ways. But he found Mollie's position very useful when he told her about Daisy's discoveries and suspicions.

Mollie confided first in Mrs. Symonds, who, while pleasantly shocked by the implications, and inclined to make light of them, was sufficiently interested to tell her husband at lunch.

“I must hear about this, Mollie,” the vicar said, after the meal. “Come to my study when you have done the washing-up. And bring that specimen with you,” he added.

Later, sitting at his broad desk, with the untidy piles of books and papers pushed on one side, Mr. Symonds turned the two small fragments over and over.

“These are very suggestive,” he said. “The glaze and the hint of a pattern. Did Daisy get a good view of the crock before she broke it?”

“I don't know, sir. Would you like to see her about it?”

“Yes, I think I should. The story came to you from your brother, who got it from Daisy. Twice retelling usually alters a tale quite considerably.”

The twinkle in the vicar's eye took all offence out of this remark. Mollie smiled happily.

“You're right, sir. And Daisy wouldn't be one to make light of a thing. She's a great hand at working herself up, if you know what I mean. Ten to one she only thought of the bones in the bag after she'd seen the ones out on the table.”

“I agree.”

“All the same, Mr. Hilton doesn't usually go back to London so early. And Daisy says Mrs. Norbury was quite worried by his manner when he paid his bill, and he hardly spoke to Norah, which was most unlike him. Just left half a crown on his table in the dining room and not a word of thanks or goodbye or anything. Daisy heard Mrs. Norbury say to Norah she thought he was in for a nervous breakdown.”

“That again may be Daisy's weakness for exaggeration,” said Mr. Symonds.

He got up from the desk to knock his pipe out in the fireplace. “On second thoughts, I'll just wait a bit,” he said quietly. “Leave these with me, Mollie. I'll do what I think best.”

With this vague reassurance Mollie, and later her brother Joe, and Daisy herself, had to be content.

“It's rather odd,” said Mr. Symonds that evening to his wife, “that Hilton did not come in to see me.”

“Did you know he would be down this week end?” she answered.

“Not precisely. He wrote to ask permission to have another go at the site, which I gave him without calling a committee meeting, as we have closed our excavations there. This was several weeks ago. He said he would come down last week end or the one before, but he did not write again to say which.”

“You'd think he would be all cock-a-hoop when he found a skeleton and some pottery in a place you had given up.”

“Exactly. That's what I find so strange.”

There was a pause, during which the vicar stared at the fire, and his wife went on with her knitting. Finally she broke the silence.

“Why did you leave that last barrow without opening it properly?”

“It was opened at one end. There were definite signs of its having been broken into, probably in the Middle Ages, we thought, from a few much later remains of tools we found there. Looking for gold, as usual. We left it and decided there was nothing of sufficient interest left on the site. It was about the time young Chambers discovered the Saxon farmhouse in the woods over at Flitton Marsh. The society had tumbled on something really thrilling, and Duckington Barrows have been out of fashion ever since.”

“But Mr. Hilton would not know that.”

“He would not.”

The second pause was longer than the first. This time the vicar ended it, speaking more to himself than to his wife.

“I shall send these bits of pottery to Jackson for an opinion. If they are genuine I will bring the report up at our next meeting. In the meantime I think we might go for a walk on the downs tomorrow and see how much damage Hilton has wrought on our site. Because we might have to go over it again.”

“Not tomorrow,” said Mrs. Symonds briskly. “I've got Miss Wills giving a special demonstration of glovemaking at the Institute. It was hard enough to get her at all, and tomorrow is her only free date for months. Everyone has been warned to turn up. So I can't possibly miss it just to go for a walk with you, can I?”

She looked at him lovingly, and the vicar reached for her hand across the gap between their two armchairs.

“I suppose not. Then I will put off my walk until later in the week. I should like to have you with me.”

“I should like to come. But I won't have you digging by yourself and straining another muscle. Let's wait till Saturday and get Robin to come along and some of the others.”

Thanks to the vicar's enthusiasm and Mrs. Symonds's voluble persistence the whole of Duckington heard of the project, and a considerable number of amateur archaeologists mustered at the week end outside the vicarage and tramped up the down to the formerly abandoned site. They were followed by a small crowd of interested onlookers, and by a reporter from the local Press who had listened to Joe's description at the Royal Arms of this sequel to his girl friend's misadventure with a piece of pottery.

The dig was handsomely rewarding. Mr. Hilton's neatly replaced turfs were once more taken off, and his excavation continued down the length of the barrow. Former diggings, including the original desecration, had destroyed the lay-out of the grave. But there were finds, in the shape of an ulna and radius from a left arm, and a breast bone with rib cartilages attached. Besides these human relics Mr. Symonds himself sifted out two more fragments of pottery.

If Hilton had found these, the vicar thought, perhaps his jug would have been complete, and his loss in consequence the greater. But a few days later the vicar read a letter from Jackson, the expert to whom he had forwarded the later finds as well as Daisy's fragments. And he then decided that if Hilton had indeed found them, he would not have left any of the valuable material standing about on a small hotel bedroom table, under a window. For the jug was genuine and rather rare. A pity, Jackson wrote, that it had been broken in getting it out. This was an implied criticism of the local society that made Mr. Symonds smile ruefully. There was a similar specimen in the British Museum, the expert said, but he knew of none other found in this particular type of burial. He suggested that the bones found at the same time as the later fragments be sent to a friend of his called Wilson, who would be particularly interested to see them. He pointed out that the jug was of a period several thousand years later than finds dug out of the neighbouring barrows; this suggested a later use of the same site. It was strange that they had not been discovered before, as they must have been nearer the surface all the time.

Mr. Symonds, on receiving this letter, again used his own initiative as secretary of the local club. Without risking an argument in committee, that might thwart his purpose, he packed up the bones and sent them off.

Meanwhile the local Press, which was short of news for the next issue, gave a spirited account of the proceedings of the local Archaeological Society. This was copied briefly in some of the London dailies. And a man who read the newspapers daily, and had already once before been fatally misled by them, was duped again. He began to work out a move, designed for his completer protection, which was destined to lead him one step further along the road to disaster.

The second expert report arrived in a matter of days. There was a covering letter from Jackson.

When Mrs. Symonds saw the handwriting she asked at once for news of Bob Jackson, hoping, since he had given none in his first letter, that this one would prove more interesting. But the vicar, rather pale, waved a distracted hand.

“But Francis, read it out to me!” she said airily. “Heather never writes, but I'm sure there's a message from her this time. If only about the Siamese. They were having no luck with the kittens if you remember. Skip the vase—no, it was the bones this time. I'm sure the other man's report is very long-winded and dull.”

“You're wrong,” said Mr. Symonds grimly, folding up the letter.

“As you rightly assume, Bob encloses this man Wilson's report. They are leaving it to me to take action.”

“Take action,” said Mrs. Symonds helplessly. “What about?”

“The bones we dug up,” her husband told her, “were not prehistoric at all. Oh, I know they were dry and brown and all the rest of it. But there are tests for the age of bones, as you know. These are recent. Quite recent.”

“You mean—Middle Ages or something—when the barrow was opened before?”

“I mean that they belong to modern times—to someone who has died within the last year.”

“Good gracious!” said Mrs. Symonds. And then she sat speechless, while her face became as pale and alarmed as that of her husband.

Mr. Symonds, anxious to avoid gossip, did not report his curious news to the local police at Duckington, but went with it to the Chief Constable, a Colonel Wetherall, whom he had known in the First World War, when he, as a young chaplain, had sat in a shell-hole in No Man's Land, holding on to a tall youth's brachial artery to stop hemorrhage from a severe wound in the forearm; and at the same time enlarging his profane vocabulary from the stream issuing from the young man's greyish lips. His action saved the life and the forearm of his companion, whose career after an interval continued uninterrupted. For some time they saw nothing of each other, but much later the colonel was appointed a chief constable, and Mr. Symonds, working on behalf of a particularly useless but attractive young offender in his parish, met him again, and recognized his former friend more by his language than by his now altered appearance. They visited from time to time; they called each other by their Christian names, a thing they had never done when young; their wives were tolerant of each other.