Say It With Flowers (Mrs. Bradley) Page 5

  “Perfectly, dear. I would not for one moment hurt his feelings.”

  “That’s splendid, then,” said Phlox. He saw no more of her until he met her at the convent gate after lunch on the following Saturday, when he went with her to the vicarage. They were given the welcome always accorded to guests by Veronica Pierce, whether she liked them or not, were informed that the vicar was “on his rounds” but would be in for tea, and were shown to their separate rooms.

  The talk at tea was vivacious. The Carmichaels were asked their future plans, for the vicar found interest in their multifarious interests and activities and his wife a sardonic amusement.

  “Well, we have not really planned yet,” said Phlox. “After we have finished here and done the cave paintings, I had thought of doing a winter thing in Egypt and the next summer’s one over here.”

  “I’d thought of crop-marks in Wiltshire for the summer one,” said Marigold.

  “Why, so had I, my dear. How very strange!”

  “And the temple at Abu Simbel for this winter.”

  “Oh, the great rock-temple of the nineteenth dynasty! Yes, that would be very nice. I myself had thought of the temple of Khonsu. We had but a very cursory glance at it when we did Karnak, if you remember.”

  “I do remember. Of course we’ll do Khonsu, if you prefer it.”

  “No, no. Abu Simbel is older and more interesting.” He turned to Veronica. “How she does love her Colossi,” he said, with a kind and indulgent smile.

  “And how she does kow-tow to you,” thought Veronica, by whom this attitude in a woman was deeply resented, unaware that it was her own attitude to her husband. “I haven’t been to Egypt, so I can’t arbitrate,” she said aloud. “By the way, as it turned out, you could have come a few days earlier, if we’d known. Our guest went off on Wednesday instead of today. Too bad we couldn’t let you know sooner, but we didn’t know ourselves until Wednesday afternoon, and then it didn’t seem worthwhile to bother you, as you couldn’t have received our letter until Thursday. Even so, I suppose it means you might have had a couple more days down here.”

  Marigold met Phlox’s eye. He gave a slight shake of the head. She sighed almost inaudibly but made no mention of the convent. Phlox smiled approvingly and said:

  “Well, reverting to our little discussion, you know, dear people, I don’t feel that you can have lived if you haven’t seen Egypt. There is something about it that is quite unlike anything else in the world. It is an experience.”

  “So is being in a motor-car smash,” said Veronica.

  “Nevertheless,” said Marigold, rallying to the defence of her senior partner, “you really should go to Egypt, even if only once.”

  “Oh, but you should! Indeed you should,” said Phlox earnestly. The vicar thought it time to steer the conversation into channels nearer home. He suggested that he should get out his car on the Monday and take Phlox and Marigold to the Beaulieu road so that they could attempt to trace from there the course of the Roman road which, he was convinced, ran very near to the village of Wandles Parva.

  “Although, now I come to think of it,” went on Mr. Pierce, “I don’t see why we shouldn’t call upon Dickon—oh, you haven’t seen our local finds!—and begin from where he made his discoveries.”

  “Well, we did go over there, you know, and, really,” said Phlox, “I hardly think that there is anything to be gained, Vicar, by doing that. If you had seen, as we saw, the tremendous excavations which were carried out by the small boys and the tall girls, I cannot believe you would imagine that anything else could be found there.”

  “Nevertheless,” said the vicar; and nevertheless it was. By twelve noon on the Monday he and his guests were surveying the results of the herculean labours of Sysko and Saintso.

  “Well,” said the vicar, “it would not be difficult to dig a little deeper, I imagine. The little fellows have been at it like terriers. Get us a spade and shovel, Dickon. Come, my dear Carmichael, off with your jacket. Perhaps Mrs. Carmichael will hold it for you, as I see that it is of shantung silk. My own vestment will do very well on this bush.”

  The first indication that there was a body buried in the smallholding was when the vicar unearthed the skeleton of a hand. Feverish but careful excavation soon revealed the rest of the body, and by sunset the complete cadaver lay out by the chicken run.

  Excitement was intense, although the vicar, shaking his head, declared that the body could not be that of a Roman.

  “Wrong sort of burial altogether,” he said. Phlox demurred.

  “Have you seen how the skull is split, padre? How about a Saxon raid? We are not so far from the coast. Century six, let us say. The Roman troops have been withdrawn and the Roman coast defences from the Wash round to Porchester left unmanned. Is it far-fetched to postulate a Saxon invasion? What about Hengist and Horsa? They are said to have landed not so far from here. And then, the legendary Arthur? What about him?”

  Reluctantly the vicar conceded the point. It was left to Dickon to introduce the practical note.

  “I do suppose this be a job for the police.”

  “The police?” Phlox looked surprised.

  “This here body,” pursued the smallholder, “be a dead body. A corpse, as you might say. Corpses be the business of the police, if they come by their end suspicious. What be more suspicious than a splitted-open yead? Look you ‘ere.”

  “But, my good chap,” said Phlox, “this body is that of a man who died at least fourteen hundred years ago.”

  “ ‘E be a corpus, beant’e?”

  “In any case,” said Marigold, “the village constable is unlikely to be interested. What do you say, Mr. Pierce?”

  “One thing is clear,” said the vicar. “The poor man, whoever he is, cannot have received Christian burial, and yet, if he lived as late as the sixth century and was a Roman Briton killed by Saxon raiders, he is almost certain to have been a Christian.”

  “Well,” said Dickon, “with best respects, sir, I don’t want him a-laying out all naked and onashamed on my smallholding. Did we ought to put him into a shed or sommat?”

  “An excellent idea,” said the vicar. “Will you—er—can you arrange that?”

  “Ah. I don’t want my wife or the little uns seeing him. Give ‘em a turn, it would. Sooner we gets him stowed away, the better.”

  When the skeleton, singularly intact, although somewhat short of teeth, had been disposed of and the shed door locked, Phlox, slightly hysterically, said that he wanted to wash. Dickon took him towards the house and its primitive conveniences of pump and earth-closet. Marigold, left to make conversation to the vicar, said tentatively:

  “I think there was a good deal in what Phlox said, you know.”

  “About what?” the vicar enquired.

  “Why, that this poor man was killed in a Saxon raid and his things buried with him. I read some time ago about a Saxon cemetery excavated at a place called Marina Drive, in Dunstable. There were pictures in the local paper. There was one skeleton in particular, not unlike this one, from what I remember of the photograph . . .”

  “I don’t really see any connection between a skeleton dug up in a Saxon cemetery at Dunstable and this supposedly Roman-British skeleton here.”

  “Oh, but I meant about the depth and the manner of the burial.”

  “Yes?”

  “I obtained access to the interim report of the Manshead Archæological Society of Dunstable—Phlox and I are so interested in archæology, you know—and it stated that the finds were made along the Icknield Way, one mile to the west of the Watling Street crossing.”*

  “Oh, really?”

  “Oh, yes. And what is more . . .” she lowered her voice dramatically . . . “what is more, Mr. Pierce, a Roman villa had been discovered by the same society in the village of Totternhoe, near enough to be overlooked from the higher ground (as I understood it) occupied by the cemetery.”

  “But there must have been dozens of Roman villas allowed to fall int
o decay after the arrival of the Saxons, dear lady. I find nothing very impressive about what you tell me.”

  “Oh, but, dear Mr. Pierce, what about the rest of the story?”

  “What is the rest of the story?”

  “How these Saxons were buried. Do you know that they were found only about a foot down into the chalk of the Chiltern Hills, with just a few inches of soil on top? Doesn’t that prove what Phlox says? Of course, the particular skeleton which was pictured in the paper happened to be that of a woman, but I don’t really see that it makes very much difference. The society found thirty-five graves and no trace of coffins. It seems to me that everything is proved.”

  “If anything is proved, it seems to be that our skeleton is more likely to be Anglo-Saxon than Roman.”

  “Oh, but, in that case, what becomes of Dickon’s pot and mask that Veronica told us about?”

  The vicar did not reply, except to nod in a ruminating manner, for Phlox rejoined them.

  “Well, now,” he said, “what is your purpose, vicar? Are we to pursue our researches by car?”

  “I believe we had better pursue lunch,” said Mr. Pierce, looking at his watch. “Dear me, I had no idea it was so late. We had better get back at once. Was there,” he enquired of Marigold, “an inquest on those Saxon finds?”

  “I have no idea, but I shouldn’t think so,” she replied.

  “Ah,” said the vicar vaguely. “Well, we must see. Now, the car, and something for the inner man. I believe we are promised sole and a roast.”

  For the space of two nights and a day the vicar of Wandles considered the case of the skeleton. To hold an inquest on it seemed to him rather ridiculous; to give it Christian burial, since nothing could ever be known of its religious convictions, open to grave objection. He consulted his wife. Then he decided to call upon Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley at the Stone House. She, as he very well knew, had had considerable experience of defunct persons and was consulting psychiatrist to the Home Office. Unfortunately, when he called, he was told by the housekeeper that Dame Beatrice had gone to her London clinic and it was not known when she would return to Wandles Parva.

  Unable to obtain guidance, he wondered whether he ought to speak to the Bishop. It might be the wisest course, he decided. Unfortunately the Bishop was on holiday in Madeira. It was with a feeling of considerable relief, therefore, that, upon going back to the smallholding, he learned that the matter had been lifted entirely out of his hands. The skeleton had been loaned by Dickon to the Pelican House Academy and was the pride and joy of that small, select preparatory school. It had been cleaned up, disinfected and placed in the school library, flanked on the left by a tooth reputed to be that of a woolly rhinoceros and on the right by a cast of Rodin’s Thinker.

  In this environment it remained undisturbed (except by some boy or boys unknown who patriotically embellished it with a school cap belonging to a harmless, innocent child who had come from South America that term and could not be held in any way responsible for the purloining of his headgear) until Dame Beatrice and her secretary returned to the Stone House some days later.

  It was Laura who heard the news about the skeleton. She had several friends among the small boys. She met Sysko and Saintso as they returned from an expedition to the Rufus Stone in the New Forest.

  “Hullo,” she said. “What’s the news along the Potomac?”

  “Caesar’s ghost,” said Simon. “We’ve got a sheeted dead.”

  “A how-much?”

  “Oh, you know, Mrs. Gavin. A body.”

  “In what sense?”

  “You mean tense,” said Andrew, giggling. “I say!” He smote Simon delightedly on the back. “Did you hear what I said, Sysko? I said . . .”

  “Yes, I heard you, you funny idiot. All the same, he really does mean that,” he explained to Laura. “You see, it’s a Roman skeleton. It was found on the Roman dig. Mr. Dickon offered it and Mr. Colson bagged it for us. It’s in the library at school. It’s a terrific zoom having it, but everybody is as sick as mud that we didn’t find it ourselves. We easily might have done.”

  “As how?”

  “Well, we dug and scooped and sweated for simply hours and didn’t find a thing, and then Saintso and I went on our own and didn’t find a thing, either. Then that man who put the heel on my shoe dug it up with just simply a flick of the trowel.”

  “Hard cheese.”

  “All we’re hoping now is that it will walk.”

  “Walk?”

  “Old Pragso got into a talking-point with Mr. Brooker for pretending it did, and frightening a kid named Gosport into a fit in the dorm last night. Mr. Brooker threatened to Jimmy Edwards anybody else who talked about ghosts after lights. That wouldn’t matter so much, but he said he’ll send Julius Caesar to the town museum if it happens again and he’s rather apt to keep his word when it’s things like that. Anyway, he’s now gone and locked poor old Caesar up.”

  “I don’t see,” said Laura, when she was back at the Stone House and in the presence of her yellow-skinned, black-haired, elderly employer, “how on earth those kids could have missed the skeleton if their story of the afternoon they spent digging up Dickon’s place is true. I had a most detailed and picturesque account of their activities from Sysko and Saintso, otherwise Simon Prynne and Andrew Coustie, as I walked along the road with them just now.”

  “Interesting,” said Dame Beatrice. “I should like to see this exhibit. It might be a good idea to write to the headmaster and request permission to call at the school and inspect it. The skeleton of a Roman who has received cursory burial should be a matter of public interest.”

  “Right. I’ll see to it at once. Do I accompany you?”

  “By all means.”

  “I wonder what the fascination is about human bones?” said Laura thoughtfully. “You’d think people would recoil from them in horror, whereas most people, given the opportunity, will goggle at them for hours on end. I remember being taken to the Egyptian galleries at the B.M. when I was of tender years, and the only thing I really cared about was that repulsive leathery-looking thing lying in a sort of a bath . . .”

  “Your impression of it seems a trifle vague,” said Dame Beatrice.

  Dame Beatrice visited the school library alone, as it turned out, because Laura’s husband, Detective Chief-Inspector Robert Gavin of the C.I.D., having no outstanding case on hand to engage his interest, had obtained some leave which was owing to him and had taken his wife and small son to his home in Scotland for a fortnight.

  Mr. Eustace Brooker, M.C., M.A., B.Sc., the headmaster, well aware that his visitor, except for her lack of military distinction, was considerably more eminent than himself, met her upon arrival and conducted her personally on a tour of the school. The library he reserved until she had seen the playing fields, the indoor swimming bath, the gymnasium (complete with showers), the dormitories, the woodwork centre, the gardening shed, the assembly hall (complete with stage), and the new sanatorium (complete with one patient who had blown off some of his hair, disobediently, in the chemistry lab).

  The library proved to be a sizeable room with alcoves for bookshelves and tables, the statue and the tooth, a six-inch Ordnance map of the district, a newspaper and magazine rack, and a large photograph of the Acropolis at Athens. The skeleton was in a cupboard which the headmaster had to unlock. As he explained, one never knew, with boys, what might happen on the fifth of November and that, with any luck, after the initial excitement had died down, out of sight would be out of mind.

  Dame Beatrice examined the specimen of deprived humanity in silence. Then, when it had been locked up again, she said:

  “It’s female, of course.”

  “Really?” If it had been alive and pulchritudinous the headmaster could scarcely have looked more nonplussed. “I had never thought of that!”

  “Moreover,” continued Dame Beatrice, “I am not at all satisfied that it is Roman. One could not be definite until the necessary tests had been made
, but I should say that it is of considerably later date than even the sixteenth, let alone the sixth, century.”

  “You astound me. Even so . . .”

  “Quite. You see, it could be modern.”

  “Buried in a smallholding? And what about the split in the skull? You don’t mean . . .?”

  “It is not my business, of course.”

  “But you are suggesting . . .?”

  “Yes, I fear that I am.”

  “What on earth can I say to the boys if what you infer turns out to be the truth?”

  “Let us hope that I am wrong.”

  “You’re a doctor,” said the headmaster slowly. “I shan’t rest until I am satisfied about this. How truly horrible!”

  “Yes, murder is truly horrible. You will be wishing that I had never come here.”

  “No . . . oh, not at all. As a citizen . . .” His voice tailed off, then functioned again, but on a different note. “Yes, boy? What is it?”

  “Mr. Tallboy asked me to tell you that the new taperecorder has come, sir, and it needs a signature before the man can leave it.”

  “Oh, very well, I’ll come. Excuse me one moment, Dame Beatrice . . . There’s always something!”

  He hurried away towards the door which the boy held open. It closed behind the pair of them. Dame Beatrice, who had noticed that the headmaster had left the key (one of a formidable bunch too heavy to be trousered) on top of a nearby table, reopened the resting-place of the suspect cadaver and subjected the bones to keen scrutiny. By the time Mr. Brooker returned, the cupboard was locked up again, the keys were where he had left them and Dame Beatrice was inspecting the books on the library shelves.

  “Of course,” he said, this time in a brisk and business-like tone, “there is no certainty whatever that the skeleton is that of a Roman. It is extremely interesting that one should jump to these conclusions owing merely to an association of ideas. Dickon finds evidence of Roman occupation on his land; very close to where he makes this discovery a skeleton is unearthed, and so everybody connects the bones with the previous finds. It is almost frightening to think how easily one may be hoodwinked and misled. And, you know, Dame Beatrice, another thought comes into my mind.”