The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

ONCE UPON A TIME by Peter Turnbull

Tuesday Forenoon

It was, he thought, all too human. He was not a man who was medically qualified, but he had seen bones before, actual human bones, often in shallow graves, and much, much older than this bone, sitting there looking quite content in a curious sort of way, looked all too human. It had aged a little, he thought, it was certainly not as old as the bones he was used to examining but it was not recent either. It had a greyness about it, and had been chewed upon by his “friends.” The man pondered what to do. He didn’t want to appear alarmist but he also knew the value of over-reacting rather than under-reacting; and, after all, were they not told to report anything suspicious? He took the plastic bag he was carrying and walked further into the wood and emptied the contents well away from the bone. He then left the wood and walked back down the lane to the village, and to the red phone box, of the old-fashioned design because the village of Meltham was designated a conservation area, and dialled the police. Not 999; it was not an emergency, no longer life or limb – if indeed the bone ever did represent a life or limb crisis. His call was answered, eventually, by a recording of a female voice telling him that his call was “placed in a queue” and “would be answered shortly”. The recording then reminded him that if his call was an emergency he should phone 999 or 112. He was then treated to a tinny recording of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. Eventually, his call was answered by a stressed out and tired sounding officer who took details and asked him to wait by the phone box. This he did, wrapping his duffel coat around him and stamping his feet against the cold. It was the twelfth month of the year and the Wolds are cold, cold, cold during the winter months. It was a windless day, not a cloud in a blue sky, but cold. Very cold.

“It may be only an animal bone,” he said eagerly and apologetically at the same time as the officer opened the door of the police car and stepped out.

“Take your time, sir,” the officer said, calmly, but with authority as he reached for his notebook and pen.

“It’s in the copse.”

“Let me ask the questions, please.”

The man fell silent.

“You are…?”

“Coleman.” The man was short, bespectacled, a mop of wild grey hair, “Clifford Coleman.”

“And your address, Mr Coleman?”

“The Old Rectory, here in Meltham.” He pointed. “That’s my house, just there… well, the roof… you can see from here.”

“You didn’t phone from home, Mr Coleman?”

“I didn’t, did I.” Clifford Coleman scratched his head. “Now isn’t that strange, I could have kept warm and had a cup of tea… why didn’t I do that? That will puzzle me for some time.”

“You found a bone, you say?” The officer interrupted Coleman’s musing.

“In the small wood.”

“The small wood?”

“Is the name by which it is known round here, to differentiate from another larger wood just beyond it which is known as the ‘large wood’. That’s the ‘small wood’.” Coleman turned and pointed down the pasty grey road to a copse approximately quarter of a mile distant.

“Can I ask your age and occupation, sir?”

“Why?”

“Just procedure, sir.”

“Fifty-four… a teacher… at the university… history… I am a medievalist. I often see human bones in old graves that are being excavated. There is an overlap between history and archaeology, you see, and the bone I saw in the small wood looked to me to be human. There is much medieval in the village… the street pattern is medieval… though the oldest building dates only from the seventeenth century.”

“Yes, yes… thank you, sir. Shall we walk to the wood?”

They walked to the wood. The constable taking long, effortless, energy-preserving strides, Coleman taking short, rapid steps, but of the two it was Coleman who had to keep pace with the constable. In the wood, Coleman led the constable to where the bone lay.

“I think you were correct to call us, Mr Coleman.” The constable knelt down and looked closely at the bone. “I am no doctor, but I have attended post-mortems and seen skeletons… certainly looks human to me. Not recently buried… it seems to be aged. Can I ask what you were doing in the wood? You have no dog that you were exercising, for example?”

“Feeding my friends.”

“Your friends?”

“Oh, yes… foxes… badgers… creatures of the night. Animals enjoy foraging for their food and I never throw anything meaty away. Bones, fat, bacon rind… I bring it all to the wood and scatter it. I come at various times of the day, depending on my timetable. I’m teaching at 4.00 p.m. today and then have an evening class of mature students… many older than I am, doing something with their retirement. Good for them, I say… better than vegetating in front of day time television, I say, and their brains… sharp as tacks… get a better class of degree than many twenty-year-olds, and also…”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I’ll get back home too late this evening to walk up to the wood, so I came now… dropped the bone I had brought well away from the bone I had found… then phoned you. Should have phoned from my house, though… funny…”

“Not noticed it before, sir?”

“No. It has probably worked its way to the surface and one of my friends pulled it into the open. Probably a badger. Foxes are too lazy to do that – they prefer to scavenge… but old brock will claw anything up. Well, do you need me any more? I have some preparation to do.”

“No, thank you, sir.” The constable reached for the radio attached to his lapel and pressed the “send” button.

“Human, male.” Louise D’Acre looked at the bone. She was clad in a green coverall, disposable hat… latex gloves. “Well, male is an educated guess. If it was female the lady would be very tall indeed. It’s a femur, leg bone… and the person would be at least six feet tall in life… as female femurs go, it’s very long.”

“A six footer.” D.C.I. Hennessey ran his liver-spotted hand through his silver hair.

“At least.” Louise D’Acre knelt down and picked up the bone and placed it in a productions bag. “Well, there’s more than one bone in the human skeleton,” she said. “The rest might be around here somewhere. I’ll take this to York City.” She smiled a rare smile. She wore her hair short with just a trace of lipstick as her only make-up. Aged mid-forties, she was, thought D.C.I. Hennessey, a lady who knew how to grow old gracefully. “You can bring the rest along if and when you find them.”

The “small wood” was, thought D.C.I. Hennessey, about one and a half acres in area of broad leafed woodland. A team of constables began to sweep across the wood, and just ten minutes into the sweep one constable stopped, held up his hand and said “Sergeant.” He had found disturbed soil, and what appeared to be a bone protruding. It was about one hundred yards from where Clifford Coleman had found the bone. Hennessey looked at the disturbed soil, at the bone, and said, “Better get Scene of Crime People here… photograph it as you dig it up… bone by bone.”

“Very good, sir.”

Friday Afternoon

“Hard to determine age.” Dr Louise D’Acre studied the bones which had been laid out in order on the dissecting table of the pathology laboratory of the City of York Hospital. “Not young, not elderly either… middle-aged. I’ll cut a tooth in cross section and determine the age that way, but at a glance I’d say that this is the skeleton of a middle-aged person of the male sex… white European… there is no obvious cause of death… no trauma… almost all the bones are here, just a few very small bones of the feet are missing, but it has been sawn up… quite neatly.”

“They were found neatly too.” D.C.I. Hennessey stood at the edge of the pathology lab, observing for the police. “Stacked one on top of the other, occupied a very small place about the dimensions of a cardboard box that one person would take both arms to lift.”

“That’s interesting.” Louise D’Acre tapped the stainless steel table with the tip of a long finger. “That means that they were completely skeletal when they were buried. The corpse was not merely sawn up, it was filleted as well. All tissue, all organs were removed. Couldn’t stack bones neatly otherwise.”

“Or the corpse buried and then dug up some time later when the flesh had decomposed and the bones reburied?”

“It’s possible, but the interval between burial and reburial would be measured in years. The other thing that occurs to me is that if a skeleton was dug up it would hardly be to rebury it. I would be inclined to throw it into the Ouse one dark night, bone by bone. But it does tell you one thing, though: this is your territory, not mine.”

“Oh, please.” Hennessey smiled. “All help gratefully accepted.”

“Well, it tells you that the person or persons who did this had a lot of space… some means of filleting a corpse without the risk of being disturbed… can’t do that in a little terrace house… some means of disposing of the tissue, such as a bonfire. Human tissue gives off a very sickly sweet smell when burned. Anyone who has smelled it will recognize the smell again, and be suspicious. Or alternatively, the space to bury it.”

“A farmer?”

“Farm workers, farm labourers… again, the risk of a witnesses. I would be inclined to think of someone who lives alone in a large house or a smallholding. Enough space to do this without the risk of being chanced upon.” Louise D’Acre stretched a tape measure along the spine. “It’s been chopped up, as you see, but in life he would have been about six feet tall… and,” she added softly, “he walked with a limp.”

“He did?”

“Or he wore shoes, one of which, the left of the pair, was built up. His left femur is shorter than the right.”

“That will narrow the field down, a lot.”

“This is murder,” Dr D’Acre said. “It can only be murder, but it’s strange… the cause of death must have been quite mild, but the disposal of the corpse, very messy indeed. I have rarely come across anything quite like it”

“Nor I,” Hennessey said. “It’s usually the other way round.”

“Indeed.” D’Acre paused. “Well, I’ll trawl for poisons, doubt I’ll find any cyanide, belonged to the Victorians, and I’ll determine his age by tooth extraction.”

Wednesday Afternoon and Evening

George Hennessey sat at his desk and glanced out of the window of his office at a group of tourists, well wrapped up, who were walking the ancient walls of the city. That’s York, he thought, a booming tourist industry year end to year end; even on cold winter days the walls will have tourists upon them. He felt satisfied. A good morning’s work had been done. He had then walked the walls into the city and lunched at a pub with a wood fire and had sat underneath a reprint of an ancient map which showed “The West Ridinge of Yorkshyre, the most famous and Faire Citie Yorke described – 1610”. Back at his desk, he read the report submitted by Sergeant Yellich about the man who had walked into Micklegate Bar Police Station the day previous and said to the constable on the enquiry desk, “I’m fed up of waiting to be caught. It was me that did all those burglaries.” At first the man was thought to be a candidate for detention under the Mental Health Act, but then began to reveal details only the perpetrator could know. He had reached the end of Yellich’s report when his phone rang. He let it ring twice before answering it. “Detective Chief Inspector Hennessey.”

“Dr D’Acre, York City Hospital. I have the lab results back.”

“So soon?”

“Quiet period. The deceased was fifty-three, or-four, or-five, when he died. And poisoned.”

“Poisoned!”

“Self-inflicted. He was an alcoholic. It probably didn’t kill him – well it would have done had he lived long enough… but it wasn’t the murder weapon as such. But he was a very serious alcoholic in life and had been for years. It would take very heavy drinking over a long period to leave traces of alcohol in his long bones, but it’s there. It’s offered as an aid to identification.”

Hennessey and Yellich drove out to Meltham. Neither officer had been to the village before. The turn off to Meltham, they found, could easily be missed; a narrow lane, it drove vertically between thick woodland. Upon arriving at the village they saw it to be small, nestling in a fold in the landscape. Yellich parked the car in the centre of the village, in the square which was more of a triangle in terms of its shape. The square had an ancient and preserved pair of stocks and a memorial to the three sons of the village who had given their lives for King and Country in the 1914-18 war. There was, Hennessey noted with some relief, no mention of any loss of life from the village in the 1939-45 conflict. A woman carrying a shopping bag glared at them as she walked, quite content to let the two officers see her staring at them. A burly, well-set man glanced at them suspiciously.

“This village don’t like strangers,” Hennessey remarked, as he nodded to the man.

“Don’t, do it, boss?” Yellich locked the car.

“Well, where now?” Hennessey asked Yellich. “Where do you think?”

“Me, boss… tell you the honest truth, I’d try at the post office. Post mistresses in places like this know everything… in fact it was once my experience when I was a lad to knock on the post mistress’s door at 8.00 p.m. one evening to tell her someone had died. She wasn’t a relation, not even a friend of the family, but I was fourteen and the adults who were running round like headless chickens thought the best way to get the news into the community was to send me running up the lane to tell the post mistress that Mr Battie, my great uncle, had died.” Yellich laughed. “Classic… classic… but it actually happened.”

Hennessey laughed. “All right,” he said. “Sounds good to me.”

The Post Office in Meltham was located next to a small, very small, mini market and a hardware shop. It was quiet inside the shop, which had a sense of timelessness, with old-fashioned posters which had never been taken down and which advertised products priced in Imperial, not decimal currency. A youthful, very youthful, looking post mistress emerged from the gloom of the back of the shop in response to the jangling door bell.

“You’ll be the police,” she said pleasantly. “We thought you’d come. It’ll be about the bones.”

“The bones?” Hennessey raised an eyebrow.

“The bones that were found in the small wood yesterday by Mr Coleman. Mrs Innes ‘does’ for Coleman – he’s a bachelor, you see, and Mr Coleman told her what he’d found and she told me. So we thought you’d come.”

The woman seemed to be in her mid-twenties and Hennessey thought that, in terms of attitude and temperament, she had the makings of an excellent village post mistress. He asked if she had lived in the village for long.

“All my life,” she replied with pride. “My husband didn’t want to live here, but if he wanted me, he had to live in Meltham. He’s been here nearly five years now and is beginning to get accepted.”

“Lucky he.”

“Well, it means he gets a game of darts in the Beggar now. For the first few years he had to stand alone at the bar.”

“The Beggar?”

“The Fortunate Beggar.” The woman smiled. “It’s the pub, the only one in Meltham.”

“I see. Well, you’re right, we are here about the bones. We believe the person who was buried to have been quite tall, probably walked with a limp and had a very bad drink problem. If he was local to this area and not brought here from afar, then someone might recognize him. Our mis per records haven’t shown anything.”

“Mis per?”

“Missing Persons.”

“Oh… but yes, I have heard of him. He still gets mentioned from time to time… the limping landlord, he disappeared… but that was before I was born. I’m twenty-six now.”

“No wonder he’s not in our records.” Hennessey turned to Yellich. “If he had lived, he’d be pushing eighty now.”

“He had the Beggar,” the post mistress added. “Well, wait till I tell my mum. We took over the post office from her and dad when they retired. She’s at the coast now, Bridlington, in a home. Your best bet now would be to try at the Beggar.”

“Only by reputation.” The landlord appeared to Hennessey and Yellich to be a man close to his retirement and who also subscribed to the Meltham culture of “strangers not welcome”. He avoided eye contact with the officers and seemed to begrudge having to give information. “I took over the pub from him when he disappeared. That’s thirty years now – thirty years last July, to be exact. He was not a happy man.”

“No?”

“His flat above the pub-” the landlord looked up at the low beams above his head “- above the bar here… it was like a tramp’s doss. The sheets on the bed hadn’t been changed for months, newspapers covered the floor, empty bottles everywhere… My wife insisted we fumigate it. We threw everything out, stripped it right back to the bare floorboards, then we set up a brazier in the main room.”

“Took a risk.”

“Not really. We mounted the brazier on a bed of bricks and burned wood and damp vegetation, left all the doors open, but shut all the windows except one. Filled the flat with smoke, and crawling things began to come out of cracks in the wall and from between the floorboards; they found the open window and didn’t return. Then we moved in. The lingering smell of wood smoke was better than the lingering smell of Reddick.”

“A lonely man, then?”

“Yes… Carl Reddick, the limping, lonely landlord. Never did like that name, Carl… too close to ‘cruel’, but in this case it was apt by all accounts. Cruel Carl Reddick, not the right sort of man to be in charge of a pub.”

“Irresponsible, you mean? Let youths drink too much?”

“No… not from what I heard. He was a soak himself, two bottles a day, and I don’t mean beer.”

“I get the picture.”

“Apparently, so my customers told me, he used to sit on the stool at the end of the bar and be rude to everybody and anybody, customers and staff alike… very personally offensive.”

“They didn’t vote with their feet?”

“The staff did. Nobody stayed very long, but the work round here can be hard to come by, so they were easily replaced. And the customers, where could they go? The next nearest pub is in Ossley St Mary, about two and a half miles away. That could be a pleasant walk on a summer’s evening if you are young and fit, but if you’re getting on in years, and if it’s a cold winter… well, it’s the Beggar or nothing. So Reddick had a captive audience and he knew it… so he was described as spending each evening sitting there and snarling at anything that moved, with a breath so hot it was said it could ignite paper… then he disappeared. Here one day, gone the next. Then me and Betty took over, cleaned the place up and it became a village pub again in the truest sense of the word. I like to hear the thud of darts and the rattle of dominoes and folk laughing as they relax at the end of their day.”

“Any rumours about his disappearance?”

The landlord smiled. “He got under the skin of a lot of people; a lot of people had cause to do him harm. I bet a lot of people dreamed of doing him in.” The landlord broke off the conversation to serve a pint of mild to an elderly man who shuffled up to the bar with an empty glass. The landlord put the man’s money in the till and returned to the officers. “So those were his bones they found in the small wood? It was all the talk in here last night.”

“We believe they might be. Tell me, did anything happen over and above his abusive nature that might make someone want to murder him?”

“Well…” The landlord pondered. “There was the death of the lad Burgess, so I heard tell. It wasn’t just that, but the attitude he was said to have taken to the incident… but I believe that was some years before he disappeared. Best person to talk to about that is the Reverend Price.”

“Where do we find him?”

“The next village, where the nearest pub is, Ossley St Mary. His parish covers three villages, this one, Ossley St Mary and Much Haddle on Ouse. His rectory is at Ossley St Mary, large house next to the church.”

“The church moves you onwards and upwards or it leaves you alone, keeps you in one place. Me it kept in one place.” The Reverend Price sipped his tea. Hennessey saw him as being late middle aged, grey hair cut neat and short. A large poster showing York Minster hung on his study wall; outside his window rooks gathered in the leafless branches of an oak tree cawing loudly. “But yes, I remember Carl Reddick’s disappearance, remember it well. It was one of the first incidents in the parish of any note since my incumbency began. I’ve been a minister of this parish for thirty-three years now… and yes, I remember the sad death of young David Burgess. Now that was the first incident of any note since beginning my incumbency. Bad affair that. I met the Burgess family – good people, gentle-natured people, would have liked to have seen them become parishioners – but… well…”

“What happened to David Burgess?” Hennessey put his cup of tea down. The tea had been served too cold to drink by the reverend’s wife who was carelessly dressed and who muttered to herself as if suffering from the onset of dementia.

“He was knocked off his bike by Reddick, who was driving his car while well under the influence.”

“I see.”

“Killed outright, poor lad, just fifteen years old… his whole life ahead of him. Reddick was fined quite heavily, and banned from driving for life, but he escaped a gaol sentence. Probably fortunate in a way because one of my parishioners is a medical man and he told me that if people have a long term and excessive drink problem, they have to be weaned off the stuff – a sudden and permanent withdrawal can be fatal – and Reddick, when I knew him, would demolish two bottles of scotch a day and would often make a start on a third. Mind you, I imagine the prisons could have given him medication to prevent death.”

“They do,” said Hennessey. “Massive doses of vitamins and protein given in the form of injections.”

“I see.”

“But what was unacceptable was Reddick’s attitude to the accident. Sitting in the pub in Meltham, ‘The Fortunate Beggar’ – the name apparently refers to a piece of good fortune which befell a beggar in the middle ages – but he would sit in his pub boasting about how he’d got away with killing young Burgess, gloating at his ‘victory’ as he saw it.”

“Not clever.”

“Hardly. David Burgess’s parents didn’t ever go to the ‘Beggar’ again, but Meltham is a strange place; in terms of its character, it’s quite different from the other two villages in my parish. In effect, it’s populated by folk who belong to one of three families, with the odd incomer to make up the numbers. And the families seem to like and understand each other. It isn’t a feuding village, by any means. They may not send each other Christmas cards or even say ‘hello’ when they pass in the street, but they know who each other is and they look after each other. So Reddick’s insensitive boasts would have been heard by David Burgess’s relatives, his cousins, his aunts and uncles and also other folk who knew the Burgesses but were not related to them. Reddick’s trial was in January, almost a year after the accident itself, and he disappeared in the summer after the trial. Six months of drunken gloating and boasting… if what happened is as I think you may suspect what happened, then I have to say that it says much for the restraint of the people of Meltham.”

“We’ll reserve our judgement on that one, Reverend Price. A murder is still a murder. Are David Burgess’s parents still alive?”

“I think his mother is still with us. No longer at home, but in the care of the local authority in York.”

It was a sudden reminder. On the return drive to York they were overtaken by a motorcyclist who was travelling at speed, angling at 45 degrees as he leaned into the bend which lay ahead of them. As always, Hennessey was then reminded of his elder brother, Graham, who had one such machine and who had driven away on it one evening. Later, his father had woken him up and had told him that Graham had ridden his bike to heaven “to save a place for us”. Hennessey had been eight years old at the time and all his life he’d felt a gap where his elder brother should have been. As a reaction to the loss, he never drove unless he had to and was convinced that the motor vehicle was the most dangerous machine ever invented, whether two wheels or four.

Later that day, in the mid-evening, after he had exercised Oscar and had left sufficient food and water to see the brown mongrel comfortably through the night, he drove to Skelton with its quaint eleventh-century church and equally ancient yew tree. He parked his car by the kerb in front of an L-shaped half-timbered house. He walked up to the front door and tapped the brass knocker gently, twice, resisting the pause, then a third tap. That would be the policeman’s knock: tap, tap… tap. Not appropriate in this case.

“Sorry I’m a little late,” he said when the door was opened by a smiling woman.

“No matter.” Louise D’Acre hooked a slender finger round the knot of his tie and gently pulled him over the threshold. “The children are in bed. We can go straight up.”

Thursday Morning

“I thought you’d come. I heard about the bones, you see.” Mrs Burgess was frail, slight. “He’d be nearly fifty years old now, my David, had he lived. Possibly a professional. His father wanted him to be a lawyer – he had that sort of mind, you see – David, I mean. He could build a case for this or for that favour, or treat. So, you’ll be wanting to know what happened to Reddick?”

“Yes.” Hennessey spoke softly. Yellich remained silent.

“Well, Eddie – that was my husband – said we should move on with our lives and not let the tragedy destroy us, that would give Reddick a second victory… but we never went into his pub again.”

“So I believe. The Reverend Price told us.”

“Nice man. He buried both my son and my husband.” Mrs Burgess smiled, briefly. “Nice man.” Then she paused. Hennessey thought the heat in the nursing home to be turned up too high to be healthy. “But, you see, that’s sometimes the way of it… you are often more angry about an injustice done to a loved one than about an injustice done to yourself.”

“I have experienced that feeling,” Hennessey said, thinking of his dear wife, who had died suddenly when she was just twenty-three years old.

“Well, Reddick’s boasts and what he said about my David not being any good anyway…”

“He said that?”

“So I was told.”

“So what happened?”

“Eddie had two brothers, Ernest and Edwin: They never married. They kept pigs on a small holding, just outside Meltham. They, went to the Beggar one morning, just as Reddick was opening up for the day’s trade. They were gentlemen in every sense but they had had enough of Reddick by then, as many folk had. They bundled him into a van and drove him to the small holding. They didn’t mean to kill him. They wanted to sober him up – that was their intention, to keep him off the drink so he’d listen when they gave him a piece of their mind.”

Hennessey groaned. He knew what was coming.

“He had food and water and it was warm where they kept him, but one morning they found he’d died. Just went in his sleep, it seemed.”

“How long was that after they had abducted him?”

“I think it was about three days.”

“Do you know how they disposed of the body?”

“I don’t. But they butchered their own meat. They would have known how to butcher a human body.”

“Are Ernest and Edwin still alive?”

“No… both gone before now. They kept what they did from Eddie, then Ernest went. Edwin knew he was dying and so he came to see me and told me what they had done. There’s just me left now.”

He wasn’t angry. Hennessey walked into Easingwold, had a pint of mild at the Dove Inn and walked home. It had all happened thirty years ago, all players, save one, deceased. It was an incident which had happened in a strange, inward looking village once upon a time. And what had happened to Reddick didn’t make him angry, unlawful as it may have been. It was a cloudless sky and he glanced up at the Great Bear and followed the pointers to the North Star. Then he noticed for the first time that one of the seven stars of the Great Bear had begun to flicker. It was dying, and he was witness to the ending of a celestial age.