Skeleton Plot Read Free Page B

they?’ said Joe Jackson. He looked suddenly older, his scant hair thinner and more untidy as he ran a gnarled hand quickly through it.
    Bert Hook noted that Joe had assumed that the skull was male, just as policemen always assumed that a killer was male, until they knew otherwise. The facts supported them: four out of five killers were male. He didn’t know how many skulls found in the ground were male, though. He thought of these two suddenly frailer people holding on to each other in bed, trying to sleep through the night, which was now not far away. ‘There might be a perfectly innocent explanation for this, you know.’ Bert couldn’t think of one at the moment.
    Joe Jackson said defiantly, almost aggressively, ‘It wasn’t our ground. Not when that thing was put there, it wasn’t.’
    Pat Jackson seized on that thought. ‘No. And we’ve no idea how long it’s been there, have we? It could be quite old, couldn’t it? It must date from before these houses were built.’
    Bert hadn’t yet seen the skull. There’d been no hair on it, apparently. He nodded at the two anxious pensioners. ‘That’s almost certainly so.’
    Pat nodded. ‘Could that thing be really old? There were battles fought round here, weren’t there?’
    DS Hook smiled. ‘Yes. Most of them were fought near rivers like the Wye and the Severn. There was a big battle at Tewkesbury, near where I live.’
    ‘Do you think this could be left over from one of those battles?’
    ‘I think that’s very unlikely.’
    ‘They found a multiple grave a few years ago, didn’t they? From the Wars of the Roses, I think. They found skeletons of lots of soldiers who’d been killed in a battle. Do you think this could be something like that?’ She was torn between horror at the thought of there being others out there, multiple deaths near her quiet modern home, and her original idea that distancing this death would make it less sinister and less threatening than something more recent. Pat was seventy now. She didn’t want this to be anything which had occurred in her lifetime.
    Bert Hook said gently, ‘I doubt that this would be a multiple grave, Mrs Jackson. There’s no record of any major engagement in this area. But we shall know more very quickly, I’m sure. Once the experts get to look at whatever is unearthed out there.’
    He looked out through the window at the screen around the plot, wondering exactly what his chief and the scene of crime team were discovering behind it. ‘You won’t be planting vegetables for a little while, Mr Jackson.’
    Hook had been trying to lower the tension. But old Joe said dolefully, ‘I don’t know whether I’ll ever plant vegetables out there now, after that thing Damon turned up. I don’t think Pat would fancy anything I grew in that plot. She’d be thinking of what had been buried there.’
    ‘I expect you’ll feel differently in a few weeks. I’m a vegetable man myself. It looks to me as though you’ve got good ground there. Be a shame not to use it, now you’ve put the work in.’
    ‘Our Damon put the work in. He’s a good lad, our grandson.’ Joe Jackson was clinging to that thought, amidst a welter of much darker ones.
    Hook said, ‘We’ll give you back your ground as soon as we can. I expect in a year’s time this will seem no more than a bad dream to you.’
    He had no real belief that that would be so. This was a new experience to him as well as to them. He left the Jacksons to talk with each other in their living room and walked across their newly acquired paddock to the square in the corner which was now hidden from public view. John Lambert greeted him with a curt nod. Bert said, ‘I’ve never been involved in a death like this before. I don’t suppose you have.’
    Lambert said tersely, ‘Once, when I was a young copper – before I was even CID. They found remains on a Second World War bomb site in Bristol. They went down deep because they were building a tower block. Those