Death of a Burrowing Mole

16

Secondary Burial

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We get Geordies, Irishmen and ex-miners from South Wales,’ said the warden of the working-men’s hostel in answer to a question from Mowbray. ‘Down and outs? Oh, no, we don’t cater for them. Lodging and food are as cheap as we can make them, but they’ve got to be paid for. Yes, we rank as a charity and are non-profit-making, but there’s all the upkeep. Stickle and Stour? They were uncle and nephew-by-marriage. If you’re looking for Stour as Stickle’s killer I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. A more harmless fellow I never knew. They came down here together looking for work because there’s a lot of unemployment up north. I’ve had them since early June. They hitch-hiked down here and have never given the slightest trouble. Got on with the other men as well as with each other. Used to get a bit boozed up on Friday nights when they’d been paid, but never turned awkward. Just used to turn in and sleep it off.’

‘Did you ever hear them talking about the work at Holdy Castle?’

‘They told me they would have liked whole days there instead of mornings only, so I got them some local gardening jobs to do – mowing lawns, clipping hedges, putting down weedkiller, that sort of thing – because I could thoroughly recommend them. There were never any complaints about them and I didn’t expect any.’

‘Is there a time limit for men to stay at the hostel?’

‘There’s supposed to be, so that we can help as many as possible, but the turnover is pretty brisk, so, if I get quiet chaps who genuinely can’t find regular work and somewhere to live, I bend the rules. I would have done it for these two when they had used up their three months, if they had wanted to stay on for a bit. I was amazed and disappointed when they cut their stick without notice, but, of course, what you tell me puts a very different complexion on that. Wasn’t somebody else killed who was working at Holdy Castle? If I were you, I’d look for a dead Stour, not a live one. There has been some funny talk going around about digging for buried treasure, and once people get wind of that sort of thing there is no telling where it will lead them.’

‘When did you realise that these two men were missing?’

The warden replied that it had been when they did not appear at breakfast the morning after the vandalism at the castle. The hostel was a small one and only fifteen men, with three men to each dormitory, could be accommodated at any one time. No tabs were kept on the men, but any bad behaviour was visited with expulsion from the hostel. Lock-up was at eleven-thirty and it was anticipated that, if anybody was not in by that time, either one of his room-mates would report it or, as had happened now and again, somebody would have arranged to leave a downstair window open, although this was strictly against the rules. The warden himself was responsible for making certain that the building was secure, but there was nothing to stop a room-mate slipping downstairs after the last rounds had been made and opening a convenient window.

‘Of course, it’s only the younger fellows who would do that sort of thing for one another,’ the warden explained. ‘The undergraduate mentality, I call it. I turn a blind eye when I can. After all, they are paying guests, not prisoners.’

Mowbray wanted to talk with the third man who had shared the dormitory with Stickle and Stour, but the conversation came to nothing. He was on shift work, he explained, and had been on night duty at the time in question, so had no idea that the other two were also out all night. The last he had seen of them was at hostel supper. When they went out after that, he assumed that they were going to the pub. Nobody else in the hostel had any contribution to make. Most of the men were builders’ labourers and, having done a day’s work and then sunk a jar or two at the local after the seven o’clock hostel supper, were only too ready to turn in.

‘Who runs your organisation?’ Mowbray asked the warden. ‘I mean, who are your sponsors and who pays your salary?’

It appeared that the venture was an ecumenical one sponsored by the local churches and was supposed to be self-supporting. The warden’s own salary was paid monthly by the committee treasurer and the accounts of the hostel were audited every six months. The hostel had been established when unemployment elsewhere had brought men south in search of jobs. The majority were young and unmarried. Stickle was a widower and was one of the few older men who used the hostel as a temporary base.

‘Well,’ said Mowbray to Detective-Sergeant Harrow, as they left the hostel, ‘nobody wasn’t sayin’ nuffink to us, but I bet there are plenty of rumours flying around among those chaps. The warden can think what he likes, but my bet is that those two men sneaked back to the castle at night as soon as they knew that the caravan had been moved away from the site, got busy with pick and shovel to look for this supposed treasure and are responsible for all that damage to the trenches. Then I reckon they had a row. Stour, the younger man, was using the pick and in the heat of the moment he settled the argument while Stickle was grubbing in the loose soil with his hands. There was plenty of dirt under his fingernails when we found the body.’

‘We’ve no clue that they damaged those trenches or that Stickle was killed at the castle, sir.’

‘I know, and that brings me back to my main stumbling-block. Why choose the manor woods for the body and the motorbike? Still, I’ve got to start somewhere. We shall never get any further with Veryan’s death. The only thing we’ve got is the absence of fingerprints on that telescope. With Stickle we’ve got an undisputed case of murder, and it will be very hard if we can’t get somewhere with that.’

‘If it means house-to-house enquiries, it’s going to need all the men we’ve got, sir.’

‘I know, because we shall have to go further afield than Holdy village. Dame Beatrice wants a couple of men on the site to help with restoring those damaged trenches and the Chief Constable has told me that I must let her have them, however little I can spare them. From what that warden said, I have a hunch that I know why she wants policemen present. If he’s right, and Stour’s body turns up, we’re back to square one.’

‘Thanks for the loan of the car,’ said Fiona, handing back its keys to Tom.

‘Hire of the car,’ he said. ‘I was the gainer. Besides, it was much better to keep it moving, rather than let it stand idle for weeks.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘Offer our services to Dame Beatrice. We see ourselves as amateur sleuths.’

‘It’s pretty horrible to think I might have been in those woods with a dead body.’

‘But you weren’t. The body was put there days after that weekend when we all downed tools. What are you two going to do with the rest of the vac?’

‘We offered Nicholas our help with clearing up his trenches, but he said it will be a job for navvies because he is opting out. His work is ruined, he says. Priscilla is going to keep me company while my parents are away and Nicholas said he would let us know if there is anything we can do for him later on, but I’m sure he doesn’t want us on another dig.’

‘And Dr Lochlure?’ asked Tom. Fiona spread out her hands and shrugged her shoulders.

‘That’s French for “I don’t know and I couldn’t care less”,’ she said.

‘She will be with Tynant,’ said Priscilla, ‘and they will go to the garden of the Hesperides.’

‘And I shall eat little green apples,’ said Tom.

‘Poor Tom’s a-cold,’ said Priscilla.

‘He needn’t be. She has finished with Tynant,’ said Fiona. ‘I saw them together. He was dead white and she had a bright red spot on either cheek and I heard her say, “You can’t publish your beastly book now that Malpas is dead.” He said, “Of course I can. False conclusions ought to be challenged, whether the author is dead or alive.” They went off together in Tynant’s car, but I think he was only giving her a lift.’

‘I think he is right to insist on publication,’ said Priscilla. ‘It is quite wrong to let sentiment hold up progress. I wonder what the book is about?’

‘If you two are going to Fiona’s home,’ said Bonamy, ‘you had better let us take you there, unless you’ve fixed up some other form of transport.’

‘We were going to ask the Saltergates. They have decided to go now, but may return later and see what can be done about those foundations that got damaged when the site was vandalised,’ said Fiona. ‘Anyway, thanks for your offer. We’ll be glad of it, and they’ll be glad not to be taken out of their way.’

‘Will your gear need both cars?’

‘Oh, no, it’s only suitcases.’

‘I shall be thankful to get away from this place,’ said Priscilla. ‘We’ve worked like slaves, then all this wretched business with the police after Professor Veryan died, and having to tell all those lies because we were scared and confused, and now one of the workmen has murdered the other one and a lot of the careful work that we’ve all sweated over has been destroyed—’

‘Oh, not destroyed; only badly messed up. It can be put right,’ said Bonamy. ‘Whoever did it hadn’t got time to do any permanent damage. Once people have got over their anger and disappointment, we’ll all be back.’

‘One thing,’ said Fiona, ‘at last we are off the hook. I suppose even the police don’t believe there can be two murderers in a place this size. Whoever killed this workman must have killed Veryan, if anyone did. We’ve never been told why the police were so suspicious about his death. I still don’t see why it couldn’t have been an accident.’

‘Well, we had better be moving,’ said Bonamy, ‘if we’re going to drop these girls at Fiona’s place before we join my godmother at Holdy Bay. I can’t think why she has decided to stay there again, but I shouldn’t think it would be for long.’

Mowbray, under pressure from the Chief Constable, had furnished two young policemen to assist in clearing the ditch. The pickaxe, as the suspected murder weapon, had been impounded, but in any case it was not required for the task in hand. That, as Bonamy observed, involved a mere job of shovelling, so two extra shovels and a spade had been purchased in Holdy Bay. Supervised by Dame Beatrice, the constables began work and Bonamy, Tom and Laura (who had insisted upon joining in) were also toiling away as soon as the coast was clear.

Dame Beatrice directed operations. The policemen, in shirtsleeves and with their official headgear discarded, were told to clear one end of the defensive ditch. Laura worked with the spade to remove debris from around Saltergate’s fortifications and the two young men were bidden to begin clearing the other end of the defensive ditch and work towards the two policemen.

The operation was barely half-an-hour old when a delivery van stopped beside the grass verge below the gatehouse and put out a couple of wheelbarrows which Dame Beatrice had ordered. With the aid of these the work went forward expeditiously until Dame Beatrice called a halt for refreshments.

The very dry soil was light and easy to shift and soon after the break the two policemen, who, like Tom and Bonamy, had taken turns with the shovels and the wheelbarrows, announced that they were ‘getting down to the hard ground, ma’am, at the bottom of the old ditch’.

At this, Dame Beatrice ordered that the wheelbarrows should be abandoned and all four workers were to finish the clearance by dumping the loose earth and spending no more time taking it to shore up Tynant’s outer circle. Laura came over and joined in, but, rather to Dame Beatrice’s relief, it was not she, but the two policemen, who discovered Stour’s body.

This happened about twenty minutes after they had announced that they had cleared their end of the ditch. Dame Beatrice had inspected it and had shaken her head. They had made a wonderfully clean job and the grass and weeds which had been growing on the sides of the ditch before the vandalism had taken place were obviously undisturbed. She pointed this out and added that for the rest of the time a sharp lookout must be kept and a report made if there was any indication that what had been the bottom of the ditch showed any signs of having been dug over.

The policemen had advanced only about a yard into Bonamy’s half when one of them gave a shout. Dame Beatrice looked down into the ditch and said, ‘Go carefully, please, with the pickaxe. I think this is it.’ She then called upon Laura to surrender her spade and sent her off to the village to telephone the police station at Holdy Bay. This served the double purpose of getting Mowbray to the castle as soon as possible and of getting Laura herself out of the way when the body was found. By the time Mowbray, Detective-Sergeant Harrow and the police surgeon, accompanied by a photographer and a fingerprint man arrived, the body, left exactly as it had been found, was lying exposed in the bottom of the ditch, a look of surprised expostulation on its grime-streaked face and with a horrid, suffused, black and purple bruise all down one side of the head.

There was no need for the doctor to give this as the cause of death. ‘Swung round when he heard something behind him, and walked slap into a heavy spade, I think,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Didn’t even have time to be frightened. Dead quite a day or two. Can’t tell you any more until we get him along for a post mortem.’

‘I bet he heard Stickle being struck and killed,’ said Mowbray, when the body had been photographed and removed. ‘Swung round to see what was happening and got the devil of a slosh. Chap who did it must have been a powerful fellow. The bones of the head are like jelly under that badly discoloured skin. Whoever did it meant to kill him all right. You can take him away. There’s nothing more I can do here.’

‘It was Stour,’ said Tom.

‘Lets him out,’ said Mowbray. ‘He could have pickaxed Stickle, but he couldn’t have done that to his own head. What made you think of a body in the ditch, ma’am?’

‘I thought there must have been a reason for dumping all that soil in it, since the rest of the dig was so untidy. It seemed to me that the soil in the ditch could have been put there to hide something. Where the murderer made his mistake was in not realising that the digging up of the weeds and grass in the bottom of the ditch, which he had to do in order to bury the body, must necessarily arouse suspicion in the mind of anybody who had seen the ditch in its original state.’

‘I reckon he’s far enough away by now, ma’am. Most likely been keeping an eye on the operations and knows the second body has been found. The murders must have taken place within seconds of one another, I should think. I wonder whether Stickle and Stour were working with their murderers – were employed by them, I mean.’

‘It is possible. Undoubtedly, before the site was vandalised, careful digging had been done at night.’

‘Well, I hardly suspect either Tynant or Saltergate of killing their workmen with a pickaxe and a spade, and yet somebody knew of those woods and saw the possibilities of the sidecar, and that brings us back to Saltergate and Tynant again. Both of them had been up to the manor to argue the rights and wrongs about priorities at the castle ruins, which means they would have driven past the woods on their way up to the house, and Tynant knew that Stickle and Stour came to work on a motorbike and sidecar.’

‘What do you propose to do now?’

‘Continue our house-to-house enquiries. I can’t arrest Saltergate or Tynant, or both, on the very little we’ve got at present. You thought from the beginning that there was a purpose beyond that of sheer destruction behind the vandalism, didn’t you?’