Skeleton Plot Read Free Page A

from the rest of the animal kingdom, but it was too anonymous as yet to prompt even the grim humour of the practised CID officer.
    John Lambert sent DS Hook in to deal with the elderly owners of the bungalow whilst he went down to the area which had already been screened off as a scene of crime. Bert was good with people, adept at calming the shocked and the bewildered. Far better than Lambert was himself; eleven years of working with Hook had taught him that.
    The Jacksons were certainly bewildered. After ten minutes with Bert Hook’s village-bobby persona, they relaxed a little. Hook was far more intelligent than the public face he presented. The criminal fraternity with whom he dealt for much of his time often underestimated him, which brought him and his chief many advantages. Bert decided in his first sixty seconds with the Jacksons that they were entirely innocent of whatever had happened at the edge of their property. And the Jacksons decided that this burly figure with the weather-beaten features was entirely trustworthy and reliable.
    ‘My grandson was double digging a new vegetable plot for me. Going down to almost eighteen inches. He’d almost finished it. He was on the very last trench when he found that – that thing. He’s a good lad, Damon,’ Joe Jackson concluded irrelevantly.
    The grey-haired woman beside him put her hand on his without looking at him. ‘I suppose there’s no doubt that what Damon found out there was human?’ she asked Hook.
    ‘None at all, I’m afraid. That’s one of the very few things we can be sure of at the moment. Had you any reason at all to suspect that there might be anything like that out there?’
    ‘No!’ They chorused the negative in horrified unison.
    ‘I know that seems a silly question, but it’s one we have to ask. You haven’t heard any rumours of mysterious deaths or disappearances in the area?’
    ‘No. We’ve only been here for three years. Our bungalow is the only one in the close. It was the last home to be built; I think the planning permission for the houses said that they had to include one detached bungalow. A gesture to pensioners, I suppose.’ Joe managed the first smile he had produced since he had seen that grim thing at the boundary of his newly extended garden.
    ‘And the ground where you were digging your vegetable plot was not originally part of your property.’
    ‘No. I bought it from the farmer. The purchase wasn’t completed until last week. I wanted to get on with digging the vegetable plot, so that we could have some crops this year. I was going to plant maincrop spuds in most of it. That breaks up the ground, you see; makes it more suitable for brassicas later.’ The facts, relevant and irrelevant, tumbled out of him, as if he needed to divest himself of all of them to prove that he had no involvement in this awful thing.
    Pat Jackson broke in as if it was important to stop her husband talking, to cut the strings on his involvement with what was going on in their garden. ‘Have you found other things? Have you found other bones to go with what our grandson turned up in that trench?’
    ‘The scene of crime team are working on it now, Mrs Jackson. They have to go carefully, you see. It seems slow to us, but they know what they’re about. They will search the earth very carefully. They want to find everything they can, but they can’t rush things because they don’t want to risk destroying evidence.’
    ‘Destroying evidence’. It was that word ‘evidence’, with its legal connotations, which made her appreciate for the first time what was involved here. ‘What they’re turning up out there is evidence, isn’t it? There’s a crime involved, isn’t there, and the people out there are looking for the evidence to find out who put that thing into our land?’
    ‘There might be a crime, yes. We don’t know yet. If there is a crime, it may well be a very serious one.’
    ‘Someone might have killed him, mightn’t