A Late Phoenix Page 2

  He waved a stick at the bomb site. “They ain’t rushed themselves, Doc, have they?”

  “Well …” said William consideringly, looking at the workmen, “it’s heavy work, you know.”

  “I don’t mean today, Doc,” wheezed the man. “I mean since it happened.”

  “Oh, haven’t they?”

  “The morning after this little lot copped it they was round from the Council promising to rebuild. And such houses as you’ve never seen. With everything you could think of inside …”

  “That wasn’t yesterday,” agreed William.

  “Yesterday? It was in 1941, Doc. Wanted us to move out and all.” He pointed to the shored-up wall of his house. “Only temp’rarily, mind you. Till they got going on the building again.”

  “Did they?”

  “Just as well we didn’t go. We’d have been waiting a tidy while afore they got round to touching this little lot.”

  “That’s true,” observed William.

  “Said my house wasn’t habitable, they did …”

  “Really?” William cast an eye towards Bert Jackson’s house in Lamb Lane. It looked to him as if it was being held together in some grotesque wooden corset.

  “Not habitable,” snorted Bert Jackson. “As I said to them, if the landlord collects his rent it’s fit to live in, in spite of the Borough Engineer and all his mob.” Jackson wheezed away. “And sure enough, come the Friday he was round. And he’s been round every Friday ever since.”

  William murmured that landlords were like that.

  Jackson waved his stick again. “Bert, boy, they said to me, just you wait until this bloomin’ war’s over and we’ll build a proper row of houses fit for a lord, they’ll be. Well, Doc,” he wheezed, “I waited, but I reckon unless they look sharp I’ll be dead afore they’re finished.”

  “Nonsense,” said William warmly. “You’ll live to be a hundred.”

  The big tree had almost gone now.

  The logs that had made it up were being tossed on to the contractors’ lorry. The leaves and the twigs and the other surface detritus from the site were being heaped onto a bonfire. Someone had driven a surveyor’s stick into the ground, and another man was knocking in little wooden crosses for sight lines.

  Considering that they had only started work that morning, the men had made a fair impression on the site.

  William could see quite clearly when the bomb must have fallen. The remains of the other houses told him that. On the end of the house in Conway Street which had once joined the bombed buildings was a new brick wall, less weathered than the rest of the house. The other house which abutted the damage—old Bert Jackson’s house—was round the corner in Lamb Lane. It hadn’t been so lucky in its repairs or, perhaps, the party wall hadn’t been so badly damaged in the first place. The timbers were shoring up a torn wall. He could still see where the bedroom fireplace had been and the jagged holes climbing the wall which had meant the staircase.

  Field House must have been damaged, too, decided William, swinging round on his heel and taking a good look. Once he started looking for damage he could see the patches in the roof tiles. And odd chips on the facing.

  “Look at the pretty flowers,” said the woman with the pram to the baby.

  “Dada,” said her daughter automatically.

  The men had started tearing up the remaining greenery on the site. William peered down.

  “Epilobium augustifolium,” he thought. He had resented botany and he still resented it. Its connection with medicine smacked to him of herbalism and ancient unscientific, uncertain remedies, but it had been on the curriculum and he had had to learn it. The men were scooping up great armfuls of the plants now, scattering the seeds to the four winds.

  The young woman with the pram nodded to him. “Funny how that stuff always grows on places like this, isn’t it?”

  “Rose bay willow herb,” agreed William, mentally abandoning its Latin name. “Hardy.”

  “No,” said the young woman. “That’s fireweed, that is.”

  He got back from his afternoon round just before five o’clock, looking forward to a quiet cup of tea before evening surgery at six. He had barely sat down when Mrs. Milligan came in, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “I’m ever so sorry to trouble you, Doctor, but it’s the foreman from the building site. They want you to go across there straightaway.”

  He got to his feet. “An accident?”

  It wouldn’t be surprising with all that machinery about—or had Bert Jackson fallen into a hole?

  Mrs. Milligan frowned. “I don’t think so, Doctor. He just said he’d be obliged if you’d step over there as soon as you could.”

  It looked like an accident to William as he left his own house and started across Conway Street. It had all the earmarks of one. All the men who had been working there were standing round the bottom of the site in a little crowd. They were staring but doing nothing—just like they did when someone had been knocked down.

  “This way, Doc,” one of them shouted, spotting him.

  Another held a ladder while he climbed down to their level. He supposed they were in what had been the cellars of the bombed houses. He picked his way across to the waiting group.

  They were looking down at a body.

  Work each foreleg free in turn …

  CHAPTER TWO

  It wasn’t so much a body as part of the remains of one.

  A skull.

  “It was Mick here what found him, Doctor.”

  One of the laborers was pushed unwillingly to the forefront of the small crowd.

  “Sure and I didn’t know he was there at all.” Mick was small and wiry and Irish. “Just swung my pick, I did, widout tinking.” He peered anxiously at William. “I didn’t do the poor fellow no harm, Doctor, did I?”

  William shook his head. This body was well beyond all harm.

  “I swung my pick and there he was,” insisted Mick, “lying there.”

  That was quite true anyway. Though only the skull and the cervical spine had been exposed by the blow from Mick’s pick-axe the skeleton gave every appearance of lying flat in the ground face upwards.

  “Some poor bloke what caught it in the bombing, I expect.” One of the younger laborers, not born then, looked round the torn site wonderingly.

  The foreman, a compactly built man with more self-assurance than the others, said, “Let’s hope so, Patrick, me lad, else you’ll be short of a bit of overtime come the end of this week.”

  “Me, Mr. Burrows?”

  “All of you,” said the foreman grimly. He turned to William. “Unless we can get this shifted tonight, Doctor?”

  William shook his head. “It’s not for me to say, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “If it’s a question of help with the digging, Doctor, I’m sure we can …”

  “It’s not,” said William briefly, going down on his knees and taking a closer look at the skull. “I’m not an expert, Mr. Burrows—I’m only a general practitioner, you know, but I’d say that he or she …”

  “Strewth,” said one of the men standing by. “Not a bird.…”

  There was indeed something utterly unfeminine about the skeleton.

  “You mean that could be a she, Doctor?”

  This was obviously something they had none of them considered.

  “Could be,” said William noncommittally. He didn’t know a great deal about skeletons. Moreover, what he did know was based on a highly polished, fully articulated model called Fred that had accompanied him through his medical student days and which, truth to tell, bore very little resemblance to this dirtbound decaying shape.

  “Well, I never …”

  Immediately they all crowded round again and took another look.

  William noted with wry amusement that they appeared less uncomfortable in the presence of a skeleton than they would have been with a dead body.

  By now someone would inevitably have covered a dead body. That was an instinct
too deep for words: a feeling he had heard someone say that came with the dawn of civilization, marking its very beginnings—consciousness in man.

  And the next stage, they said, had been when man did not marry his sister. Now, who had that been? One of the medical school professors, he supposed. That was the trouble with lectures. You didn’t know which bits were the ones that were going to be important until it was too late.

  “It’s been here a goodish while,” said William, still professionally cautious. “I wouldn’t like to say it wasn’t the bombing …”

  “That’s something to be thankful for anyway, Doctor.” Burrows, the site foreman, looked quite relieved.

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid it might be historical,” said the foreman, “and then we’d be properly in the cart.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?” William was now squinting down at the skeleton’s teeth. It still had practically a full set.

  “A real mess we’d be in then, and no mistake,” said Burrows savagely. “I’ve had that happen to me on a site before now, Doctor, and believe you me, I’ve had cause to regret it.” He pointed down at the skull. “And it wasn’t even a body before. Do you know what it was?”

  “No …” murmured William absently. Those teeth had a meaning, he thought, if he had a minute in which to work it out. “No, I don’t.”

  “A vase.”

  “A vase?”

  “That’s right. A perishing vase.” The man Burrows grimaced. “And we couldn’t do a ruddy thing about it except grin and bear it.”

  Kneeling down beside the skull William thought he could detect a grin there, too. There was something macabre about those teeth …

  Burrows was still fulminating about the vase.

  “Nicest piece since the Portland the old dodderers kept on saying.” He shrugged. “But it didn’t look anything special to me.”

  “No?”

  “They tell me it’s in the Greatorex Museum now,” said Burrows, “not that that was any consolation at the time, I can tell you.”

  “Quite,” said William.

  “Before you could say ‘knife,’” went on the foreman, in whom the injustice of the vase had obviously bitten deep, “the place was swarming with people and we lost the best part of a fortnight’s work—good work, too. That wasn’t all, either, Doctor.”

  “No?” William had grasped the significance of the teeth now. Surely a full set like this must mean someone relatively young.…

  “No,” said the foreman seriously. “There was a penalty-clause in the contract and the firm caught a cold.”

  “Oh, dear.” William wasn’t really paying attention to the man.

  Burrows waved an arm. “And I don’t mean your sort of cold either, Doctor. The site owner said he didn’t know this old vase was there and the developer said he didn’t see why he should stand the racket and as for my firm.…”

  “Yes?”

  “My firm said it wasn’t their fault the thing had turned up …”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Though I suppose you could say,” said Burrows heavily, “you could say in a manner of speaking it was.” Here Burrows glared at the luckless Mick. “Anyway, they lost.”

  “Did they?”

  “They’d contracted to finish by a deadline and they hadn’t.” He sucked his lips expressively. “Not a penny bonus for anyone on that job.”

  His audience clearly didn’t like the sound of this. A big burly fellow standing next to the man called Patrick stirred.

  “It’s all right, Jack,” said Burrows promptly. “The union didn’t want to find any vases but there wasn’t anything they could do about it either. Not once it had been found.”

  Jack subsided, nodding.

  William Latimer looked from one face to another. In the main they were young men—though the big chap called Jack was older; and they wore cheerful, dirty clothes under their virulent red-colored monkey jackets. Not a single man had string tied round his trouser legs in the old laboring tradition. Any more than Mr. Burrows had a bowler hat to distinguish him as foreman.

  He didn’t.

  His authority was based on something different but it was there all right and they all listened to what he had to say.

  “It was the lawyers,” insisted Burrows. “They argued that these archaeological remains hadn’t been provided for in the contract. And it wasn’t what the contract meant that counted. It was what it said. You know what lawyers are.”

  William nodded. They were about as well understood by the lay public as doctors.

  “They’d got everything else you could think of in.” The foreman wrinkled his brow. “Strikes, lockouts, civil commotion, Acts of God, force majoor—the lot.”

  “But not vases,” said William sympathetically.

  “Not vases.” Burrows indicated the skeleton. He grinned. “They have now. Archeological finds are the responsibility of the site owner.”

  “That means we’ll be all right then after all, Mr. Burrows, does it?” asked a lanky man anxiously. “I got mouths to feed at home.”

  William Latimer coughed. “I’m afraid I can’t swear that this is—er—archeological, you know.”

  All eyes turned back to William.

  “It’s too well preserved for one thing to be all that old and the little bones are still here.” That was one of the things he did remember from his anatomy lessons. The smaller bones disintegrated and disappeared first. If they were still present it meant something. “I’m sorry, chaps, but I can’t certify that these are Saxon remains or anything like that. They could be—er—quite young, relatively speaking. I’m afraid that means the police and the coroner.”

  Mr. Burrows groaned aloud.

  Mick, the Irishman, was beginning all over again. This time his voice had a distinct keening tone to it. “Just swung my pick, I did, widout tinking. Making a dacent hole for the marker, I was. The digger’s got to come this way first ting in the morning and …”

  “Not now, he hasn’t, Mick.”

  There was a small silence while this fact sunk in.

  “It’d go right through where he’s lying, mate.”

  Mick looked at the skull and let his glance travel along the ground.

  “If the rest of him’s under there,” said Burrows ominously, “where we think it is …”

  The skull, noted William, was still obstinately male.

  “… then the digger would have had him.”

  Mick’s mate, Patrick, did an expressive scoop with his big hands. “And then we might never have known he was here. Man, that digger really digs. A couple of goes and the driver not really looking and that would have been the end of him.”

  “On the other hand,” remarked the observant Dr. Latimer, “they very nearly found him yesterday from the looks of it.”

  “Yesterday?” said Burrows at once.

  “The archeologists. Look where they were digging …”

  “Pretty near,” agreed the foreman. He looked down at the archeologists’ neat little trench in very much the same way as the captain of an ocean liner might have regarded a cabin cruiser. “Thank goodness they didn’t find him or we’d never have got on to the site at all.”

  William moved over the rough ground a little. “It looks to me as if it was a nearer thing than you might think, Mr. Burrows. Look over here. You can see where they drove their first markers in and then changed their minds.”

  “Wonder what made them do that?” said Burrows politely, but he obviously wasn’t really interested in the vagaries of the archeologists. What he was interested in was the present and the immediate future. He stepped back to the crowd. “Would one of you lads go and find a copper, smartish, while I try to ring the firm? Mr. Garton’ll want to know about the holdup as soon as possible …”

  William finally straightened up. “There’s just one other thing, Mr. Burrows. If you’ve found this body and it did happen to have been the bombing …”

  “Yes, Doctor?” Burrows alr
eady had his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

  “… then there may be others here too.”

  “Oh, no there won’t,” said the foreman flatly. “I’ve told them not to find any more.”

  The consultant pathologist to the Berebury and District Hospital Group Management Committee was Dr. Dabbe.

  It was slightly more than dusk by the time he and Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan got to the site. Sloan was the head of Berebury’s tiny Criminal Investigation Department. It was so tiny a department that if there were any odd jobs going it got them too. This was one of the odd jobs.

  In spite of the dusk they were not short of light. The contractors had rigged up arc lamps so that their own men could go on working after dark.

  But not tonight.

  Dr. Dabbe and the police were the only people working on the site tonight.

  “It’s human, Sloan,” said the pathologist immediately he saw the skull. “At least they haven’t got us out here for an old sheep.”

  “No, Doctor.” Sloan wouldn’t have minded particularly if they had. In the police world a false alarm was probably the best sort of alarm of all.

  “And it isn’t an ancient Greek.”

  “No, Doctor,” said Sloan stolidly. “I didn’t think it was.”

  “The Greeks always put an obol between the teeth of the dead to pay Charon, the ferryman, his fare.”

  “Did they, Doctor?” There was only one thing worse than a pathologist in a bad mood: a pathologist in a playful mood.

  “Nowadays,” said Dr. Dabbe with mock gravity, “we are all ferried across the River of Death on the National Health.”

  “So it’s not an ancient Greek,” began Sloan encouragingly. He was in a hurry even if the doctor wasn’t.

  “I’m afraid not,” said Dabbe. “I’m afraid it’s not ancient anything.”

  “That’s what young Dr. Latimer thought,” offered Sloan, who had spoken to the general practitioner.

  “Latimer? Don’t know him.”

  “Just been appointed to Dr. Tarde’s old practice. Shouldn’t think he’s been here above ten minutes.”

  “Taken their time, haven’t they?” said the pathologist.