The Marriage Hearse Read Free

sister-in-law, Pam, finding
     the presence of another adult in the house a strain after a hard day’s teaching.
    When Wesley had received the phone call early on a Saturday afternoon summoning him to deal with someone who’d beenthoughtless enough to die in suspicious circumstances, she had experienced a pang of resentment. And when Maritia had returned
     from the vicarage to get changed, Pam had left her to entertain the children. She felt restless, discontented with her lot
     but she wasn’t sure why. She had told Maritia that she had to go out, not saying where to, and left her holding the babies.
    Pam had been brought up in a household quite unlike that of the churchgoing Petersons from Trinidad. She had been raised by
     a feckless mother who taught sociology at a local college – a woman with an eclectic taste in men, alcohol and the occasional
     illegal substance – and she wasn’t altogether comfortable with the Petersons’ brand of Christian virtue. Usually she tried
     hard, for Wesley’s sake, but today she felt the strain. She had to get out of the house. And the first person she thought
     of was Neil Watson.
    As she drove towards Neston, she gripped the steering wheel, concentrating on the slow-moving traffic stuck behind a parade
     of caravans and coaches. It was Saturday at the start of the holiday season. Wesley should be home on a sunny Saturday. Home
     with her and the children. But he was at work again. Sometimes she imagined that he arranged with a network of tame criminals
     for their offences to take place outside normal office hours just to spite her.
    Neil was working at Tradington Hall and she knew that the fact it was the weekend meant nothing to him. In his own way, she
     supposed, Neil was as work-obsessed as Wesley. But archaeologists, unlike police officers, are rarely called out after midnight
     to view some stinking corpse. If Wesley had stuck to his original choice of career, she might not have had to put up with
     the ruined meals and the worry. And the constant, tiny voice in the very back of her mind telling her that somehow the job
     was more important to him than she was.
    She turned the car into the drive of Tradington Hall and took her foot off the accelerator. She had been there many times
     before. When she had studied English at university she had attended a creative writing course there. And she had seen many
     plays, good, bad and indifferent, in its intimate theatre. The hall itself was a substantial stone house, arranged around
     three sides of a largerectangular courtyard. If dated from the late fourteenth century and the guidebooks boasted that it was one of the most important
     examples of medieval domestic architecture in the south-west, if not the entire country. To Pam it had always looked pretty
     impressive.
    In the 1950s Tradington Hall had become a centre for the arts, internationally renowned. And over the years the demands on
     its delicate medieval fabric were such that more space was needed. New art studios were to be built near the old stables and,
     as was normal at such an historically sensitive site, Neil’s team had been asked to conduct an excavation before the construction
     began.
    She left the car in the public car park and walked up the drive until she reached the stables which now served as recording
     studios. At the side of the stables she could see a tall wire fence, erected to prevent members of the public from stumbling
     into deep trenches, breaking limbs and suing the trust that owned the hall for obscene sums of money. Pam stood behind the
     fence watching as three figures – two women, one young, one middle aged, and a long-haired man – knelt in the deepest trench,
     absorbed in their task of scraping at the red earth.
    She called out, ‘Neil,’ and the man looked up.
    He grinned. ‘What brings you here?’ He straightened himself up, put his trowel down carefully beside a bucket full of soil
     and climbed out of the trench. When he