A Shroud of Leaves Page 5
‘I thought you were with pathology?’
‘Forensic archaeology. I’m thinking of specialising in crime investigation.’
The officer smiled at her. ‘I would have thought proper archaeology would be fascinating. Time Team and all that.’
She smiled but shook her head. ‘It doesn’t fit in very well with a baby. Forensic archaeology is mostly lab work, in office hours.’
‘Except for the evidence retrieval.’
‘In my old job I had to do planning permission for extensions, roadworks, that sort of thing. A lot of site visits. This will be a couple of days in the field and six weeks writing up reports. I might even do some of it at home.’
Stewart crouched down next to something in the rough grass. ‘I saw this on the way over. What do you think it is?’
Sage leaned down to look. It was a block of stone half buried at the edge of a moss-covered path, draped with the long stems of a neglected rose bush.
‘I don’t know. Some sort of marker, a pet grave maybe.’ She reached in her pocket for a trowel. ‘Hang on – ouch.’ The thorns latched into the skin on the back of her thumb, and she had to retreat gently to stop it cutting further. With more care, she scraped away at the moss and grass growing halfway up the stone. ‘In Memoriam…’ She squinted in the shadow until the officer handed her a torch. She knelt beside it, scrabbling along the base of the marker. It had sagged into the soil around it. ‘It’s angled down, I don’t know if there’s any more.’ She scratched around the base. The young officer bounced to his feet as if coming to attention and Sage looked up to see Lenham.
DCI Lenham nodded to the officer. ‘Stewart. We’re ready to search the house,’ he said. He looked at Sage. ‘What have you got?’
‘A memorial stone, I think. It’s old, more than fifty years, I would guess. It has sunk into the grass.’
He crouched down to look. ‘It’s too old for our investigations. Leave it.’
‘What about this old case Felix was involved in?’ Sage said, scratching at the edge under the soil level.
‘I said, leave it. You said it was old.’ He walked away, leaving Sage to stare up at Stewart.
He shrugged. ‘We ought to focus on this girl,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re here for. There’s coffee in the van.’
‘Great,’ she said. Sage got to her feet and followed him to a police vehicle with the back doors open. Trent was already there, bundled into a ski jacket and warming his hands on a paper cup.
The pathologist joined them to shelter from the wind. The traffic had been stopped down the country road with crime-scene tape, and Sage could hear questions shouted out from the press beyond the barrier.
Sage wrapped her fingers around the hot paper cup. ‘So, at least we’re certain who she is.’
‘River Sloane, aged fifteen and a half.’ Trent stirred sugar into his coffee. ‘She’s been missing since Saturday afternoon, her mother called it in about half-two.’
‘The actual time of death is very provisional but I think it’s late Saturday evening,’ Megan said. ‘We’ll get her back to the mortuary and have a closer look to establish it. Scenes of crime are doing a fingertip search of the grounds to go with your drone footage.’
Trent sipped his coffee. ‘We don’t want to get in the way of the SOCOs. We should have a complete site map by this evening. I’m going to get a look at the barrows when I get a chance, too.’
Sage smiled. ‘Let me know what you find.’ She turned to Megan. ‘An archaeologist’s dream find: Bronze Age barrows that haven’t been properly surveyed before, on private land.’
Megan nodded. ‘Meanwhile, we’ll be collecting evidence. Hopefully the meteorological information will be ready for me when we get back. We need to know temperature, rainfall, that sort of thing.’
DCI Lenham appeared, poured himself a cup of coffee from the large urn. ‘I have to get back to the interviews, but I came to look around the house first.’
Trent looked at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘For anything particular?’
‘Spade, wheelbarrow, anything used to dig the grave. Her clothes and other belongings would be crucial, obviously. But Chorleigh basically camps in the kitchen; the rest of the house is filled with rubbish. I don’t know what we’re supposed to find, especially as we’re also looking for evidence of the disappearance in 1992 as well.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘The family contacted Guichard – we used him on the original case. He’s an anthropologist, studies human weirdness. They knew he’d been looking into the animal attacks.’
Sage stared at him, trying to read his tense face. ‘What was Felix’s involvement?’
‘He was consulted by my senior officer to look into some stabbings of ponies and cattle across the forest. He got called back when Lara disappeared because he’d said the animal attacks could escalate to humans. The investigation was redirected back to Alistair Chorleigh.’
‘But you don’t know for sure that she died.’
‘Exactly,’ Lenham said, and drained his cup. ‘It wasn’t a murder investigation but we did have enough to question Chorleigh. If his father hadn’t employed the best lawyers he would probably have been charged with lying repeatedly to the police. He came up with several stories, none of which made sense and all of which declared him innocent, even though we didn’t have a crime. He’d just come out of hospital after a head injury at the time we spoke to him; he was confused and we couldn’t hold him. We also couldn’t get a warrant fast enough to search the grounds properly. He could have moved her anywhere, even if she was killed here. It’s a huge forest and it was still a missing person investigation.’
‘But not like this case,’ Sage reminded him. ‘This is different. River’s not missing and she’s definitely dead. Why half bury River in Chorleigh’s garden?’
He grimaced at her. ‘If I wanted to deflect attention from my involvement in a murder, I’d stick it in Alistair Chorleigh’s garden too.’
* * *
Sage grabbed a handful of evidence bags and headed back to the grave site. Trent was her supervisor, he could be exploring the barrows, but she had to concentrate on the murder investigation. She knelt on the plastic beside the grave site. The body was gone but the depression it had been laid in was a mirror for its shape with a raised border around. The killer – no, not necessarily the killer – the person who concealed the body, she reminded herself, had carefully dug the shape of the girl’s shoulders and hips into the ground. Scraped was actually more accurate – the hole was barely deep enough to hide her. Thirty-seven centimetres at its deepest, she noted, measuring and marking on the diagram. The turf around the edge created a border a few centimetres higher. The scanning equipment would come back with more accurate measurements. The compacted soil held the impression of the tool used to cut into it. A curved blade, blunt, some fourteen centimetres in length. Garden trowel? She took more pictures with a scale marker.
Megan had left the outside layers of debris on a tarpaulin for Sage to record. She lifted another stack of leaves from adjacent to the grave, as compacted as a deck of cards. The ones on the bottom were more degraded than those on the top, suggesting the leaf drifts had been undisturbed as they slowly rotted away under the trees. She consulted an online identification guide to classify them. The decayed skeletons of birch, curling beech in good condition, field maple and hazel, and many blackened holly leaves. There was also crisp ivy, some oak, and a few gnawed acorns still in their cups. It should be easy enough to find where he took the leaves from.
Sage started clearing the loose debris from the bottom of the grave, centimetre by centimetre, recording as she went down to compacted soil. She was surprised to find a piece of bone under the hip area, especially as it was dark brown and looked ancient. More brushing revealed gravel, several tiny fragments of bone and a tooth that looked like it belonged to a dog or fox. The grave itself was dug into long-established grass, she decided; the layers hadn’t been disturbed for decades. But there weren’t any tr
ee or shrub roots. Turf developed its own profile, and this looked like park. She looked out of the doorway of the tent. There was about an acre of grass in what had been a lawn in front of the house, with the remains of borders. This secondary area at the side wouldn’t even be visible from the front of the house, and the path around it into the trees looked well established.
She started finding more pebble-sized pieces of something – pottery. They almost looked like clay that had been shaped by ploughing and harrowing on the surface of a field, but they were smoother. She held one up to the light, rubbed off the earth with her thumb. They looked old, like Bronze Age pottery. One piece was unusual with a twin inscribed line on the outside. They were worn smooth in places, by the action of a mower perhaps.
She was so involved in collecting more fragments that she didn’t notice PC Stewart enter the tent. ‘We found something,’ he said. ‘DCI Lenham told me to show you.’
She looked up with a start; he was holding something flat against his body, like a small picture.
She hesitated before answering. ‘I’ve found something too. Some old bone fragments, maybe animal, and there’s pottery here, probably from the Bronze Age. Trent showed me the barrows in the woodland, which were excavated a hundred years ago. The pottery and bone might come from there.’
‘Is that where Trent’s gone? He seemed pretty excited.’
She showed him the tiny piece of pot she was holding. ‘This looks very old to me. There are quite a few bits of it with a few fragments of bone. I can’t tell if they’re animal or human.’
Stewart peered at it. ‘OK. How does that relate to the murder?’
She wrapped the piece carefully in a square of bubble wrap and tucked it into the box. ‘I don’t think it does. It just means he – or she – didn’t dig very deep. They only took the top layer off, the turf and a bit of soil. They laid it around the edge to frame her. Then they covered her with a thick layer of leaves. It seems very ritualised and deliberate. I’m just a bit puzzled about this ground. It looks like lawn in section but it’s stuck on the side of the house.’
He held the picture out for her to take. ‘I found this on the wall inside the house. It shows the grounds with the side of the building behind.’
She looked closely at the old photograph, lining up the outhouse, the corner of the big house. ‘This bit used to be a tennis court?’ That made sense: the incessant rolling and mowing would have compacted it and smoothed off any loose clay or bone.
PC Stewart took it back. ‘There are several old photographs of the gardens from the beginning of the twentieth century. This bit was a grass court.’
‘This soil is typical lawn, not vegetable patch or shrubbery, or flower border. It hasn’t been dug over recently but the grass is preserved even though it’s been neglected for a long time.’
He crouched down to look at the edge of the grave. ‘None of this makes much sense. If someone killed her because they like to hurt young girls, I would have thought she would vanish altogether or be laid out, displayed to taunt the police.’
‘Have you been involved with many murders?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve studied some, obviously. We’re trained to look for anything that’s unusual.’
‘And this?’
‘They say deliberate burials like this one suggest remorse, a personal relationship with the victim. DCI Lenham would love to prove this was Chorleigh. It would be neat, simple, especially as they never found the other girl, Lara.’
Sage sat back and rolled her shoulders to ease the stiffness. ‘Was that his case too?’
‘Years ago, when he was my age. If we could find Lara Black we could build a profile of a man who likes to attack young girls. Maybe he did kill her, sobered up, put her in the ground without really thinking about the consequences. His alcohol level was eye-wateringly high when we breathalysed him; they had to wait until he sobered up to talk to him.’ Stewart sighed. ‘Do you know if there’s any evidence of sexual assault?’
She shook her head. ‘None so far but we’re waiting for the post-mortem results.’
He nodded. ‘At the briefing DCI Lenham said Lara Black disappeared right here on September ninth, 1992, after she was seen talking to Alistair Chorleigh at the bus stop along the road. Lenham concluded she just ran off with someone. She was estranged from her parents, into all sorts of illegal stuff, as well as animal rights like River. Both girls had a connection to Chorleigh House, which would be a bit of a coincidence.’
Sage stood, eased her back. ‘There’s another coincidence.’
‘Oh?’
‘The archaeologist who dug up the barrows went missing here, too.’
That caught his attention. ‘When was this?’
‘That’s the odd thing,’ said Sage. ‘More than a hundred years ago.’
Stewart relaxed. ‘I think we can assume we don’t have to solve that disappearance.’
Sage knelt back down to carry on scraping. ‘Well, I think it’s strange that two people disappeared on the same land. Felix Guichard was consulted back in 1992. Do you know what he said about Lara Black at the time?’
‘It came up at the first briefing. I don’t think the DCI liked him very much,’ he said. ‘He was interviewing some of the animal rights nuts, people protesting outside fur farms, animal testing labs, that sort of thing. People who were hassling us to solve the animal abuse case, anti-hunt campaigners, pagan groups, travellers living rough in the forest. I wasn’t even born then.’ He smiled at her. ‘Guichard believed Lara was still here, buried somewhere. He thought there was some connection between the abused animals and the girl. His report didn’t do DCI Lenham’s career any good, by the sound of it.’
Sage brushed loose soil away from a tree root. ‘Who else did they talk to back then?’
‘Parents, siblings, friends, teachers, boyfriends, neighbours, just like River’s inquiry. I think they’re considering reopening the Lara Black case. Maybe if we give it some publicity she’ll come forward – if she’s still alive.’
6
‘Sepulchral tumuli are not uncommon but as the usual form of earthwork in Hampshire is round, the Hound Butt mounds are different. One is intact and therefore most worthy of study.’
Journal of Edwin Masters, 24th June 1913
I finished inking up my pencil sketches of the complete barrow this evening. It is unusual in shape, being somewhere between oval and rectangular, but the edges may have been ploughed away over the centuries. I sketched a plan to measurements with Peter’s help, although he was more interested in showing me where he and Molly used to slide down the sloping side on an old carpet. He is a dear friend, he makes me feel welcome. I like Molly too, she is very like him and kind to me.
Peter’s father was good enough to give us a number of pieces of pottery the gardeners have dug up in the flower beds. They look ancient to me, although smoothed over years in the elements. I have asked Professor Conway to take a look at them; he has always said I may send him finds, although I have previously been reluctant to disturb him. Mr Chorleigh also had a small Roman coin, picked up along the river foreshore, although I am unsure as to its date. There appears to be an emperor inscribed upon it. It’s such a shame they all look so similar.
Peter is much liked in the village, and it is easy to see he has the same affection for everyone. His family have hopes that he will marry a local girl – the daughter of a retired admiral with his own marine engineering company – but he tells me that they were raised as brother and sister. Her name is Beatrice Marchmont, and they call her Trixie. They have been unofficially engaged these last four years but Peter speaks of her as an old friend.
We have laid out strings in a lattice pattern, ready to dig the barrow. Beside it is the ruined earthwork, watching over us. We used the slope to put a little shade up, where we can leave a basket of provisions and our bags of tools while we explore the complete mound. Molly has started drawing from the stony summit, as it is the highest point nearby. T
here appears to be animal workings on the field side; perhaps it was undermined generations ago by rabbits or badgers and collapsed, or the earth was washed away. There is certainly evidence of water carving out the facing stones and running into the boggy ground beyond. Water has created a channel under the fence into the field ditch, fully two yards across. Peter tells me the water table is high here; he has seen the mud flooded a foot deep before it flows into the field. I wondered if there might be finds in the soft soil, but he is eager to mark up the main barrow to establish the best place to dig our trench.
Peter has taken some photographs and we are waiting for them to be developed and printed by the chemist in Lyndhurst. He got a few snaps of Molly and me, for posterity. It helped him use up the roll, as he thinks there might be a picture of his younger sister Claire in the camera too. I hope so – it would be a nice memento for Mrs Chorleigh, as I believe Claire was not photographed in the last year of her life. Peter has said nothing to his mother in case she is disappointed. I have only caught glimpses of Mrs Chorleigh, sat on a sofa in the library with a book she never seems to read. Molly says she would like to meet me when she feels stronger, but she sounds doubtful. Poor lady, she apparently suffered a complete collapse after her daughter died, and Peter says she has never been strong. Mr Chorleigh hardly looks at me either, and rarely speaks directly to me. I think he has little patience with Peter’s interest in history.
* * *
Letter to Professor Robert Conway, 22nd June 1913, Balliol College, Oxford
Dear Professor,
I would be most obliged if you could give me your opinion on the pottery fragments enclosed. They belong to one of my friends, P. Chorleigh (Balliol, History), who lives in Fairfield in the New Forest. I believe they may be early, and the site includes an undisturbed barrow from, if I am not mistaken, the Bronze Age. The pottery looked, to my inexperienced eye, to be crudely made and unevenly fired. There is a single finger impression, as you will observe, which I took to be decoration. There is another mound, perhaps of ancient provenance, beside the barrow. It is unusual, being comprised of two upright hewn slabs, parallel, each perhaps of thirty-eight or nine inches average width, with a massive stone perched on top, leaving a gap like a letterbox (see my sketch, apologies for its crudeness). Water can be seen dribbling down the gap between the middle of the uprights and I wondered if this natural spring may have excavated the earthwork over the millennia, leaving just the internal architecture remaining. I also enclose a coin, Romano-British I believe, which is much worn but may be of interest. I should value your opinion.