A Shroud of Leaves Page 3

  Sage filled a spoon for the baby and retrieved bits of chewed toast from the floor. Five-second rule, she decided, and put a couple of the least fluffy ones back on his tray. ‘Porridge, Maxie.’ The baby was adorable; Sage’s whole body seemed to relax when he looked at her. ‘We’re OK living where we are at the moment; we can manage a bit longer. You’re happy at Banstock and I’m finishing my training. Maybe we should move a few things around to make the flat more comfortable. Let me get back to work properly, get the job situation sorted out.’

  Yana exchanged looks with Sage and walked out into the hall. Oh. It’s going to be one of those talks. Sage took a gulp of tea to fortify herself.

  ‘Spending two nights a week in a one-bedroom flat?’ Nick said. ‘Making love on a sofa bed because the baby shares the only bedroom? You visiting the vicarage a few times a month?’

  It had all been said before. Sage leaned forward. ‘I love you, you love me. That’s all we have room for at the moment. It’s Max’s home and I have a mortgage. I can’t afford to buy anything bigger and you earn peanuts as a vicar. I still have to find a new career I can fit around a baby. Hopefully, forensic archaeology will work for me and I can look for a permanent job on the mainland. Then we can move in together.’

  ‘How about Maxie, Sage?’ He sat next to her, looking down at the baby. ‘He’s nearly eleven months old. How does he know who I am if I only visit?’

  ‘He doesn’t need to see you every day to love you—’

  Nick looked down, his face sad. ‘I want to see you every day. And I want to be Max’s dad. I miss you both in the week.’

  ‘I miss you too—’ Her mobile phone rang. ‘I’m sorry, I need to get this, it’s Trent.’

  ‘Sage?’ The signal wasn’t good. ‘I need to do the survey at Chorleigh House before the dew goes. Will you be there?’

  ‘On my way, should be half an hour.’

  Nick silently handed her the phone charger and her work lanyard. She wolfed down the last of her porridge. It had gone cold.

  He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m still not sure that working on a murder won’t bring back stuff from last year. Flashbacks.’

  Just the word felt like a cup of cold water down her spine. ‘I know,’ she said, stalled. ‘I’ve been studying forensics to get it out of my system. I think this will help, I really do. It’s sad but it’s someone else’s child, you know?’

  He reached his arms around her, holding her until she curved into him and hugged him back. ‘I remember how you were when you found the body in the well last year. It’s bound to remind you.’

  She smiled at him, having to tilt her chin up as he was a little taller. ‘It might be a good thing. Then I’ll have something to tell that counsellor you’re always telling me to see.’ He smelled like the sea, fresh scents coming off his clean jumper. ‘I’ll be careful, and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  He kissed her. ‘I love you, Sage.’ He let go slowly, leaving her a bit puzzled.

  ‘I love you too. Are you OK?’

  ‘Just not looking forward to the long drive. I’ll be in Cambridge tonight seeing my parents, then I’ll do the rest tomorrow.’

  She couldn’t even remember where he was driving to, and didn’t want him to think she didn’t care. God, I’ve become so selfish. ‘Well, I hope you have a great time. I better go, I don’t want to be late.’ She kissed Max on the top of his head, the only part of him that didn’t look sticky. ‘Love you, Maxie Bean. Be good for Nana.’

  * * *

  The New Forest looked lovely in the early morning light. Leaves were just starting to unfurl from some of the saplings at the edge of the road, and there were catkins everywhere. Sage could feel the tension building as she turned towards Fairfield then into the lane where Chorleigh House was set in the forest. A dozen cars were pulled up on the grass verges along the road and a line of police tape held back people with cameras, some even snapping a few pictures of her as she was waved through and pulled into the drive.

  The property had a paling fence held together with wire and a wide drive with two brick gateposts, both in poor repair. The five-bar gate was pulled partly across, narrowing the gap onto a large expanse of gravel. The area was full of weeds and brambles encroaching from the edges. To the left was a raised bed built of the same stone as the house, rampant with the frost-blackened skeletons of bracken. On the right the house was grey, the windows dark.

  As she walked in the low light she realised how fresh the air was, the breeze cold on her neck. A tall, thin man was pacing across the drive, counting each step aloud. ‘Trent!’

  He grinned at her through a dark beard. ‘There you are. How did the grave site work go?’

  ‘It’s still going on. We got most of the leaves last night and they are hoping to retrieve the body this morning. What are you doing – have you started the survey?’

  ‘No, I’m getting ready to attempt an aerial assessment before the frost melts and the dew dries. They are highlighting the footprints into the woods.’ He squinted up through his glasses. ‘The sun’s starting to come over the hill, these shadows won’t last much longer.’

  ‘Drones. We didn’t use them in my training,’ Sage said as they moved onto the grass. She looked along Trent’s arm, pointing into the woodland. A number of footprint trails converged on the area of the body, clearly visible in the frost. There was a flattened path leading between the bare trees.

  ‘There are about thirty-eight acres of woodland associated with the property,’ he said, pulling a map out of his backpack. He shook it open and folded it so she could see the area better. ‘All of this belongs to Chorleigh House.’ His finger circled the irregular shape, then pointed at two star shapes. ‘These are the historical barrows, probably Bronze Age. They were excavated a hundred years ago. I’ve been trying to get to see them.’

  ‘Wow. How much is left?’

  Trent grinned at her. ‘Quite a lot. Back in the early nineteen hundreds an archaeology student dug up a burial in the complete earthwork. They “restored” the mound afterwards, which probably means they just chucked the soil back.’

  Sage looked back at him. ‘I’m guessing this was not a permitted excavation?’

  ‘No, but they hadn’t even identified it as a scheduled monument at that time. But there’s a real legend around the barrows.’ He looked up at the house, which looked like it was leaning over the garden. ‘The archaeologist in charge of the dig vanished. The locals call the place haunted; they claim he disturbed an ancient curse.’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t believe in curses, ancient or otherwise. The earthworks look like they are right on the boundary of the adjoining farmland. There could be banks and ditches associated with the barrows. I wonder how much has been ploughed away. Do we know if they found anything on the original dig?’

  ‘That’s the strange thing,’ Trent answered. ‘I haven’t found many records yet. And the family was cursed in a way. Alistair Chorleigh’s having a tough time of it; he’s been interviewed all night but they have to release him later or apply for an extension. They just don’t have enough evidence yet, which is where we come in.’ He looked up. ‘Do you see where the leaves came from?’

  She turned around, looking for evergreen trees that weren’t just covered in ivy. ‘None nearby but it’s dark in the woodland. There’s been a lot of foot traffic in and out along that path. Oh, DCI Lenham.’

  Lenham stepped onto the pad behind her. ‘Good morning. The old lady who found the body said she only went as far as the grave to get her dog.’

  Sage looked back across the long grass and bracken. ‘Did her dog touch the body? There are scratches on one of the hands.’

  ‘Yes, the owner said it ran off and wouldn’t come back.’ Lenham shivered, shrugged his coat around his ears. ‘She didn’t like to trespass because Chorleigh has got a bit of a nasty reputation locally. When she couldn’t get it to come back to the road, she had to go in to get it. The animal had taken the leaves off part o
f the girl’s hand.’

  Sage surveyed the woodland. It was dense and didn’t look well managed. Brambles had filled in most of the undergrowth and she could see rabbit and deer droppings on the slight path. There were definitely discrete areas of flattening in the shimmering white over the grass.

  ‘Are those the footprints you saw last night?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Trent pointed up to the sky. ‘I’ll get the drone up and we’ll get some footage. Can Megan spare you for half an hour?’

  Sage looked around the garden. ‘I’m sure she can, I came early just to help you.’ Apart from islands of overgrown shrubs in the bracken and grass, there was little evidence it had been cultivated recently. The trees gathered into a wall of shadows. ‘I can see how a view from above will show features you can’t see from the ground.’

  Trent grinned at her. ‘The police love our aerial shots. I want to get some before they start exploring the grounds.’ He turned to DCI Lenham. ‘If you could get your officers to stand back, I can get the drone up.’

  ‘No problem.’ Lenham hunched his shoulders up. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’ He walked towards the front of the house, waving at three officers who followed him.

  The long grass and bracken were covered with a shimmering lace of spiders’ webs hung with droplets as the frost melted. A few lime-green buds were just unfolding. Sage could see some areas were flattened in ovals in a staggered line of prints, still visible in the light frost. Trent started to set the drone up in the centre of the lawn.

  He waved at Sage. ‘Stand well back. I’m taking off.’

  The drone whined and started hovering over the grass where he had placed it. The grave site itself was still covered with the forensic tent. As the machine rose Trent showed her the white tent in the green of the grounds on his tablet. ‘Look.’

  Greener areas had less frost, and as the image sharpened Sage could see footprints criss-crossing the shaded grass into gaps between the trees. They were roughly oval and the flattened grass distorted the shape.

  Sage pointed at the screen. ‘How do we know they aren’t animal prints?’

  Trent brought the drone down until it hovered a few metres over the edge of the woodland. He zoomed in on one of the marks. ‘There are heel and toe impressions on a few of them. Not to mention there’s just one pair of prints, no back feet. Although you’re right, that doesn’t always mean a biped; deer often walk in their own prints. They are fuzzy – they’ve been here at least eighteen hours and possibly from the night before, they are just rough shapes. Quite a long stride. Hopefully the ground will give us a better impression if we can find a muddy patch and we might find a trace.’

  Sage bounced on her heels, rubbed her hands down her arms to warm herself up. ‘Maybe they went into the wood to gather the leaves?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ Trent manoeuvred the drone so it swooped over the ground towards the drive. ‘My guess is they drove here, parked maybe on the drive or the verge along the road. The gravel wouldn’t leave the same prints as flattened grass and the gate’s always open but it would make a lot of noise.’

  ‘They then carried the body across the garden? Anyone driving past could have seen them. And what about the homeowner?’

  ‘I suspect it was dark, in the middle of the night, and a quiet road because that’s how most people dispose of victims. And the homeowner is a suspect himself. But look what I found yesterday.’

  The drone swerved along the drive over the road, absent of cars as it was still closed off, the press kept behind police tape. It slid east along the grass verge, then turned back and covered the area to the west. There were multiple tyre lines diagonal to the grass verges but only one parallel to the road. They showed patches of white, like paint.

  Trent pointed it out. ‘The police made a cast of these tracks. We’ll check to make sure these aren’t from the press or the dog walker, but I think the perp could have parked outside, carried her in. She didn’t look heavy.’

  ‘Chorleigh wouldn’t have needed to park on the verge. He could have pulled onto the drive.’

  ‘Yes, and anyone could have driven onto the grass since we last had heavy rain. Walkers, or someone who stopped to look at a map or got a puncture. But they look fresh.’ He swung the drone around again, letting it alight gently on the lawn. ‘You don’t fancy Chorleigh for it, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. It seems stupid, to bury the body in your own garden and just a foot deep.’

  ‘Stupid, yes. Unlikely – I don’t know. Murderers are stupid, in my experience. He might not have been thinking straight, he’s a drunk. Who knows what he was thinking? The leaves could have been laid on with remorse.’

  Sage looked back at the white tent. ‘She was found by a dog walker, you said. Why not by Chorleigh’s own dog? Surely he would have smelled a stranger, let alone a body.’

  ‘According to Lenham, Chorleigh says he doesn’t let his dog off the lead at night because the gate is always open, apparently it’s stuck. The walker couldn’t get her collie to come back so she came in to get it. When she saw what her dog had uncovered she panicked, flagged down an elderly motorist. She was in such distress he called an ambulance and the police, in case her story was true.’

  ‘It’s a good job the dog didn’t disturb the burial too much.’

  Trent raised the drone high above the trees to get a wider view. ‘We see animal damage a lot. Foxes and badgers can disarticulate a body quite fast in the summer.’

  She felt queasy again. ‘Enough information. Do we know when they can remove the body?’

  ‘It won’t be long. Forensics want another look at the grave in daylight before we start excavating the cut itself, the digging.’

  ‘Do we need to be involved in that?’ Two more people were walking down the drive, dressed in forensic suits. She looked back at the dark windows of the house.

  ‘They look at it primarily as a source of trace evidence, so no, they won’t want us. They’ll look for clothing fibres, as she was undressed, and anything the murderer might have dropped. We’ll look at the wider scene, how the hole was dug, where the spoil was dropped, how the hole was filled in.’

  ‘In this case, where did they get the leaves from?’ Sage said. ‘I don’t see many evergreens.’

  He looked around. ‘Not from this area, anyway. We’ll search the whole grounds. We will also look into whether they left any more footmarks or evidence, and do the wider survey to create an accurate site plan.’ The drone’s engine, hovering overhead, hummed like a large bee. The machine lifted high above the trees, and Trent flew it a few hundred yards south of the drive. He held the tablet out to Sage. ‘Watch this.’

  The trees looked odd from above, the branches reaching for the drone. It disturbed a blackbird which took off with angry screeching. A jay flew under the camera in a flap of black, white and peach feathers, a flash of blue. She watched as the drone slowly moved along the boundary of the woodland and the field beyond. ‘Are those – the barrows?’ There were two raised areas, one classically a round-ended, elongated rectangle, and the other about half the size with an oval end. The smaller one had a few small shrubs leaning from one end and a large flat area on the surface.

  ‘Yes,’ Trent said. ‘The site’s called Hound Butt on Victorian surveys. It was pretty well vandalised in the early nineteen hundreds, by modern standards anyway.’

  ‘Vandalised? Do you mean when the archaeologist who went missing dug it up?’ Sage followed the view as the drone swooped over the intact one.

  ‘The family who owned the land excavated it with a few volunteers, that archaeologist and an Oxford history professor. They made a bit of a mess of it.’ He swung the drone around to the east of the long barrow. ‘There’s what looks like the second one. Or what’s left of it, it looks like it’s been hacked in half. You can see the internal architecture.’

  The eastern end of the feature was a stone wall of two parallel slabs, green with algae and moss. A narrow stream dribbled
around the bottom of the cut edge into a brown patch of what looked like mud, which trickled under the wire fence and into a ditch. The other side was a gentle slope running almost to the edge of the other feature, dotted with scrubby gorse and bracken.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, unable to make out the details. ‘There’s no idea of height from above. Can we go and see them?’

  ‘We must stay strictly within the warrant but yes, we should be able to get to it. There are a number of possible places where there could be evidence. We can also do this.’

  He brought the drone down through a space in the canopy over the smaller feature and Sage leaned in to see the screen as it hovered a couple of metres off the top. ‘The barrows look barely fifteen, twenty metres apart,’ she said. ‘They could have been part of the same feature originally.’

  ‘Scale is misleading with this thing.’ The stones that covered the top were thick with mounds of velvety moss. ‘We need to look on the ground, I don’t want to risk my drone on these trees.’

  She watched as he flew it back up. ‘That’s amazing detail on the footage. Do you know anything more about the dig?’

  ‘There were a few mentions in the local paper, a local investigation into the man that went missing, that’s all.’ He landed the machine on the lawn before he looked at her. ‘It started OK. They dug it over the summer of 1913, uncovered a few finds – bones, bronze wire, that sort of thing. Then the family lost interest in the excavation and threw the spoil back over the burial chamber.’

  ‘I’d love to find out more,’ Sage said. ‘Are there any recorded remains, bones in the local museum maybe?’

  ‘I don’t know. But the whole family was cursed, according to the legend. It’s local history, you can look it up online.’ He started the drone again, and it lifted to about three metres off the ground. Sage fell into step with him as he followed the machine. He halted at the edge of the woodland, and positioned the drone over the narrow path. ‘I’ve been trying to get permission to see the barrows since they showed up on a LiDAR scan of the area. Look, more footprints, back and forward along that rabbit path.’