Hill of Bones

Epilogue

Summer 2010

‘This is getting bloody ridiculous!’ muttered John Bolitho.

The detective superintendent looked around the top of Solsbury Hill and saw a scene that resembled a military operation.

However, instead of the holes in the ground being gun emplacements, they were meticulously organised excavations, replete with banded measuring sticks and yards of coloured tape marking off grids in the soil. A dozen sweating constables from the Avon and Somerset Constabulary were scraping and sieving, alongside a few press-ganged archeology students. Instead of army officers directing the operations, a couple of straw-hatted and baseball-capped academics were strutting around, clutching clipboards and peering down the holes.

Bolitho’s colleague DCI Bob Bryant mopped his sweating forehead with a handkerchief, for so far this was the hottest day this year.

‘I reckon that nutter has been leading us up the garden path!’ he grumbled. He was not referring to the senior archeologist, even though he thought Roger Humbolt was a pain in the arse. The nutter in question was a serial killer currently banged up on remand in Bristol’s Horfield Prison. While awaiting trial for the murder three years earlier of two women whose bodies had been discovered buried elsewhere in the West Country, he had recently confessed to the killing of another girl, known to have gone missing at the same period, and claimed to have buried her on Solsbury Hill.

‘Bloody Albanians!’ growled the superintendent. ‘You’re probably right, he’s been leading us up the garden path, just to cause us trouble.’

‘And expense!’ replied Bryant, waving a hand at the scene around them. ‘I’ll bet this circus has cost at least a few hundred grand. Think of all the police overtime, the forensic lab fees, the equipment hire, the pathologist and the dentist – and those archeologists are no doubt charging us a bomb!’

John Bolitho agreed gloomily. ‘Three weeks’ work and all they’ve turned up is a collection of junk, none of it remotely connected to Bierta Reka.’ This was the name of the third illegal immigrant who had vanished from the Bristol brothel within a week of the other two.

They walked slowly across the flat area to the top of the grassy bank and ditch, from where, through the heat haze, Bath was visible in the distance. Below them, a burly police sergeant and a constable were scraping soil out of the bank. Bolitho called down to them from above.

‘Anything else in there, Edwards? That was where they found that old knife, wasn’t it?’

The sergeant, stripped to the waist in the heat, straightened up and then shook his head. ‘Damn all, sir! We’ve gone a couple of feet deeper to where those boffins were scratching around, but there’s nothing more in there.’

The two senior officers wandered around several more of the scattered excavations, speaking to the people working there, but nothing new had been discovered.

‘I reckon we’ve got all there is to find now,’ grunted Bolitho.

‘I hope to hell the Chief will call this off now before we make even bigger fools of ourselves. The press is starting to get sarcastic and is muttering about the cost to the ratepayers or whatever they are called these days.’

The DCI shrugged. ‘What else could we do when that bastard claimed he’d buried her up here one night? He knew her name and had the right date, when she vanished from that knocking-shop in St Paul’s.’

Bolitho nodded gloomily. ‘Then said he couldn’t remember exactly where he’d dug the hole, because it was dark! Lying swine, I’ll bet he’s never set foot here.’

They made their way, slowly and reluctantly, towards a large fabric shelter made of white plastic stretched on a metal frame, which stood on the north side of the enclosure. As they approached, the two scientists with the clipboards vanished inside.

‘At least they’ve found three skeletons and a lot of spare bones, even if they have damn all to do with our case,’ observed Bob Bryant. ‘It beats me what’s been going on up here over the years. One skeleton had the bones of a whacking great dog lying alongside it.’

‘Yes, it’s a cross between a cemetery and a bloody junk shop up here!’ replied Bolitho, derisively. ‘Those two fellows in there are at each other’s throat over what it all might mean.’ He waved a hand at the white tent, which was the size of a double garage.

‘Thank God that butch woman is there to keep the peace, as best she can,’ said Bryant. ‘Otherwise we might have another murder up here!’

As they neared the exhibits tent, the entrance guarded by a uniformed PC, they heard voices from inside raised in querulous argument. Bolitho stopped with a sigh.

‘I’m not getting involved in another shouting match now,’ he groaned. ‘Let’s go over to the refreshment trailer and get a drink. It’s too bloody hot to listen to a pair of academics screaming abuse at each other.’

Inside the tent, two rows of Formica-topped trestle tables ran down its length to hold the bizarre collection of finds from Solsbury Hill. Another pair of tables were cluttered with papers, a couple of laptops, a microscope and a collection of surgical and scientific implements.

A tall, thin man strode agitatedly up and down between the tables, his straw boater now removed to reveal a shock of frizzy ginger hair. Prominent pale blue eyes bulged behind his rimless spectacles as he peered erratically at various objects lying on the white Formica.

‘I tell you again, Fortescue, until we get a radio-carbon dating on these, we can’t be sure. Why are you being so damned stubborn?’

The other man was sitting in a plastic picnic chair alongside the microscope. Peter Fortescue was middle-aged, short and stocky, still wearing his peaked baseball cap on his totally bald head. He had a pugnacious face, like a bad-tempered bull terrier, and was scowling at Roger Humbolt as he paraded past the exhibits.

One row of tables was devoted to a ragged collection of bones, some being roughly assembled into three human skeletons, though many of the brown or blackened parts were fragmentary, with some sections missing altogether. The trestles opposite had a motley assortment of objects, dominated by a dirty, but obviously valuable golden cup. Nearby was a large collection of tarnished silver coins, arranged carefully into piles of equal height. A small knife with an intricate handle, a part of an ancient mirror, several badly rusted buckles and part of a metal helmet sat amongst random coins, bits of iron, a few brass shot-gun cartridge bases and other detritus accumulated over more than a millennium.

Fortescue scowled at the other expert. ‘The police are not going to pay for your carbon dating, are they? Now that they know that none of this stuff is relevant to their investigation, they’re going to pull the plug on us.’

He was Director of Field Studies for the Southern Counties Archeology Trust, based in Dorchester, and had been retained as one of the boffins needed to evaluate what had been found during the police investigation. The carrot-haired man was a Senior Lecturer in Archeology at Wessex University, specialising in Dark Age Studies.

Apart from these two, there was also Dr Shirley Wagstaff, an assistant County Archeologist, whose main function had become acting as peacemaker between the other two, whose professional and personal animosity had increased with every day that passed.

Distinctive with her cropped grey hair and rugged, scrubbed face, as well as her man’s shirt and trousers, she stood now with a hand on the aluminium door, ready to go out for a respite from her tiresome colleagues.

‘Give it a rest, chaps!’ she snapped impatiently. ‘The police don’t give a damn about dating anything, now that the Home Office people have confirmed that nothing we’ve found is recent!’

Peter Fortescue agreed with her, as he glared at Humbolt with evil satisfaction.

‘If you want dating done, you’ll have to find the money yourself, Roger. Even the coroner says he’s not interested in any human remains more than a century old. He’s only concerned with holding a treasure-trove inquest on that gold and silver.’

Before they could embroil her again in their disputes, Shirley stepped smartly outside and with a nod to the constable, made her way over towards the police trailer, which had a tea and coffee machine, together with a supply of cold drinks and sandwiches. Inside the spartan vehicle, furnished with a few folding chairs and a spindly table, she found the two senior CID officers, one with a cardboard cup of what the machine claimed was coffee, the other with a can of Fanta. The archeologist had got on well with both men during their frequent visits to the site over past weeks and preferred their company to the two prima donnas she had left back in the tent.

Getting a Diet Coke for herself, she dropped into a spare chair alongside the table at which they were sitting.

‘Too damned hot for digging holes in the ground!’ she declared.

Bolitho nodded his agreement. ‘With a bit of luck, you won’t be doing much more. I suspect that we’ll call it off tomorrow.’

Bob Bryant asked her what would happen to all the excavations that had been made.

‘The county will have to fill them in and restore the whole place, or English Heritage will play hell with us, as it’s a Scheduled Site,’ she replied. ‘The hill has been explored several times before, going right back to Victorian times. There are records about what’s been found, mainly to do with this Iron Age camp.’

‘A wonder they didn’t turn up some of the stuff you’ve managed to unearth this time,’ said the superintendent.

Shirley Wagstaff shrugged. ‘A few trenches can miss most of the stuff. They didn’t have the fancy equipment we’ve got now – metal detectors, ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry gadgets.’

‘I reckon those two police dogs were better than the electronic gizmos,’ observed Bolitho, with a grin. ‘They found all the bones, which I suppose is what you’d expect a dog to do!’

Shirley agreed, but still defended her own technology. ‘Sure, but they were specially trained to sniff out human remains. The gadgets, as you call them, found the places where the soil had been disturbed or where there was metal under the ground.’

The DI was more interested in personalities than objects. ‘What’s the problem with your two colleagues?’ he asked. ‘They always seem to be slagging each other off!’

The woman rolled her eyes upwards in exasperation. ‘They’re like two kids fighting over a football! It all started a couple of years ago when Pete Fortescue wrote a review of a book Roger Humbolt had published about the Saxon invasions. He criticised parts of it and since then, they’ve been sworn enemies.’

‘What was the dispute about?’ asked John Bolitho.

‘Roger claims to be a leading expert on the Dark Ages, especially the Arthurian campaigns. He maintains that the great battle of Mount Badon, about 500 AD, was fought here on Solsbury. In fact, that’s why he was so keen to come on this dig: to a get a chance to find some confirmation. But Peter rubbished that, saying it must have been up near Swindon.’

‘God help us! To think that intelligent people can get so steamed up about things like that!’ said the DI, in disgust.

‘Having your professional reputation challenged is a fate worse than death to some academics,’ explained Shirley. ‘It can mean the loss of research grants and even affect their chances of promotion.’

The superintendent took the opportunity to ask the more sensible scientist some questions about what had been discovered during the past weeks.

‘I suppose you feel that all these items are just random finds, Doctor? There can be no connection between any of them?’

The archeologist considered this for a moment. ‘Always dangerous to be too dogmatic, so I suppose the best answer is that we’ll never know. We’ve got three skeletons and a lot of old bones, so who can say that one of those folk didn’t hide the gold cup there or bury that strange knife?’

‘Except that you can exclude the remains of that mummy!’ said Bryant. ‘The guy must have died centuries before he was brought to Britain, so he couldn’t have buried anything, including himself.’

‘What about that treasure?’ asked Bolitho. ‘It was all together in the side of the rampart wall. Any ideas about that?’

‘From the compact mass in which it was found, I suspect it was originally in some kind of bag, which has long rotted away. It’s odd, because the chalice is typically Saxon, the pyx is probably late eleventh century, yet the silver coins are Henry the Second, Richard the Lionheart and a couple of King John. So they must have been hidden in the early thirteenth century.’

‘Any idea where they may have come from?’

Shirley took a swig from her tin, then shrugged. ‘That communion cup is really valuable. Together with the pyx, it must have come from a rich ecclesiastical establishment. Of course, the nearest is Bath Abbey down there, but there’s no way of proving it.’

‘Are there no records that would help?’ asked Bolitho. ‘It must have been stolen, to end up in the ground here.’

‘The problem is that the abbey went downhill in a big way after those dates. It fell into ruin and most of the records were lost. I’m afraid the present abbey doesn’t have much hope of claiming them back.’

‘What about the mummy? How long do you reckon that’s been up here?’

‘That’s bizarre, isn’t it? An Egyptian mummy on top of a Somerset hill!’ Shirley put her empty tin on the table. ‘About two hundred years ago, possessing a mummy was a fad amongst the idle rich, so perhaps it was hidden around that time. That forensic anthropology lady did a good job in spotting what it was – the embalming had allowed some bits of skin to survive on the bones.’

She stood up and took her tin over to a waste bin. ‘I’d better get back, I suppose. There’s nothing new to examine, but maybe I can stop Tweedledum and Tweedledee from coming to blows.’

The two detectives rose as well.

‘We were going over there anyway, so we’ll come with you,’ said Bolitho. ‘I’d better tell them that I’m recommending to Headquarters that we wrap up this operation tomorrow.’

They ambled across the enclosure towards the tent, sensing that a lethargy had descended on the remaining scrapers and sievers, who had slowed down their efforts in the knowledge that the search was virtually at an end. Inside the stifling warmth of the exhibits store, they found Peter Fortescue glaring into his laptop on the desk table, baseball cap still firmly on his head. His more eccentric colleague was in the aisle between the tables, his lips moving silently as he checked the identifying labels tied to the items on display. For once, there was peace and quiet, as the two men appeared to be ignoring each other.

Bob Bryant walked over to Humbolt, who had picked up a blackened object. ‘Any more ideas on what that might be, Doctor?’ he asked. He was not that interested, but felt he should be civil to the man.

‘It’s part of a hand mirror, of course,’ grunted the expert. ‘Badly damaged and seems to have been in a fire as well. Not surprising, as it was recovered from a pile of ashes.’

‘Are those some kind of jewels on the back?’

‘Yes, but I doubt they have much value now. Most are missing and the couple that are left are cracked and scorched. The mirror itself is silver and what remains of the enamel on the back suggests it was a costly piece. It needs a real specialist to evaluate it, but I suspect it must be very old.’

‘Perhaps it belonged to Queen Guinevere!’ called Fortescue from his place at the desk. The provocative remark triggered a furious response from Roger Humbolt.

‘Mock as much you want, you moron!’ he shouted. ‘When I’m proved right about Badon, you’ll have to eat your words.’

He snatched up another object from a table, a dented piece of rusted metal with no obvious shape, as far as the police officers could tell.

‘This is part of a helmet; it could have been Saxon or Celtic. It all adds to the burden of proof that there was a battle on this hill!’

Fortescue rose from his chair and sauntered over to where the others were standing.

‘With so little left, it could be from any period! Probably late medieval, could even be Tudor.’

Humbolt thrust his face towards his antagonist, his features now almost as red as his hair. ‘Nonsense, it’s much earlier than that!’ Then he swung round to the other row of tables and jabbed a finger at the pile of darkened, crumbling bones. ‘Look at this lot! Obvious battle casualties! On that skeleton over there, the pathologist pointed out a clear knife-cut on a rib and the edge of the breastbone.’

Fortescue’s reply was scathing. ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer and one stab wound doesn’t make a battle! Where are all the victims from your Badon, eh? Arthur is supposed to have slain nine hundred himself!’

The other man was now almost purple with rage. ‘You know damned well that wasn’t meant literally! And if we could dig up the whole hill, there’d be hundreds more like this, even after fifteen centuries!’

Shirley Wagstaff tried to cool the argument, but Humbolt was now in full flow. He snatched up another find from the first table and held it up in a shaking hand. ‘And what about this! A knife that I’d stake my life came from the Dark Ages.’

Bolitho felt he should say something to cool their passions. ‘Wouldn’t that blade have more rust on it after all that time?’

The older archeologist glared at the detective with his bulging eyes. ‘You obviously know little about it, Officer. There were smiths in those days who could make rustless iron, like the Pillars of Delhi and Dhar!’

‘Come off it, Roger, they were in India, not Celtic Britain!’ countered Fortescue, derisively.

In angry response, Humbolt jabbed his other forefinger at the handle. ‘Look at that carving, will you? Do you deny that is a bear carved in ivory, the symbol of Arthur the Great Bear?’

‘Plenty of performing bears around until well past Shakespeare’s time, chum!’ sneered Fortescue. ‘And where the hell would they get ivory from in the fifth century?’

‘You ignoramus!’ shrieked the red-headed disciple of the Once and Future King. ‘I know this knife must have belonged to Arthur himself. I feel it in my very soul!’

Before the astounded policemen could stop him, Roger Humbolt had plunged the blade into the chest of the man who had been baiting him.

Bolitho and Bryant watched while the helicopter took off and whirred its way towards Frenchay Hospital, Shirley Wagstaff being on board to comfort Peter Fortescue.

‘The paramedic seemed happy enough about him,’ observed the superintendent. ‘He said that little knife didn’t damage any organs, but caused a pneumothorax, whatever that it is.’

‘He’s not going to snuff it, thank God,’ said Bryant. ‘Are we going to charge the mad fellow with attempted murder or just GBH? I suppose the CPS will choose the easiest option, as usual.’

Bolitho shrugged as they started to walk back to the tent, which was now a crime scene, though the miscreant was still sitting crying in the picnic chair, guarded by the PC from the door.

‘Ironic, really!’ said the superintendent. ‘We come up trying to sort out a murder and almost end up with a totally different one. That bloody Arthur has a lot to answer for; he’s been causing trouble for the past fifteen hundred years!’

His assistant agreed. ‘Solsbury Hill, indeed! Damned place must be cursed!’