A Late Phoenix Read online

  “Why, Doctor?”

  “Well, it must be a good couple of months since Dr. Tarde went.”

  “June,” said Sloan.

  “Poor old Henry,” said Dabbe. “Now, there was a good fellow. Pint sized, but a darn good doctor. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard about him. Last person on earth I should have said to have done a thing like that.”

  “This skeleton,” said Sloan, keeping to the point. “It’s not recent surely, Doctor, is it? Not when you’ve only got the bones …”

  “Praise-God Barebones,” murmured Dabbe irrelevantly.

  “I beg your pardon, Doctor …”

  “One of Cromwell’s mob, Inspector.”

  “So,” said Sloan heavily, “you think we should be taking an interest?”

  “I do, Sloan.”

  Sloan got out his notebook. “No chance of it being archeological at all?”

  The pathologist shook his head. “I can’t date it exactly for you down here in a bad light but I’d say it’s definitely within your hundred year limit.”

  Inspector Sloan sighed. “The bombing, then, I suppose …”

  “Perhaps.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan waved an arm. “The whole of this corner looks as if it caught a proper packet. The house came down on top of him, I expect.”

  “Perhaps,” said the pathologist again. “Looking at the skull generally I’d say it hadn’t been lying here more than—say—thirty years. So that part would fit.…”

  “Something else doesn’t then?” responded Sloan promptly.

  “Don’t rush me, Sloan.”

  “But …”

  “I haven’t seen the rest of the skeleton yet,” temporized Dabbe.

  “But …” said Sloan again.

  “But when I have I’ll be able to tell you a lot more.” He straightened up. “You can bring on the resurrection men now, Inspector.”

  Sloan beckoned in the direction of the ladder and two young policemen materialized out of the gloom beyond the arc lights. They were carrying spades.

  “Trowels would have been better,” growled Dabbe. “It’s not that deep in the ground.” He waved towards his own assistant, a perennially silent man called Burns, who had been lurking in the shadows. “We’ll have some soil samples, please, and some measurements.”

  Sloan stood by, watching, while the pathologist superintended the digging policemen. What was it that Dr. Dabbe had called them? Resurrection men? He meant Burke and Hare. Sloan took another look at the skull. The anatomists wouldn’t have had any use for that. Not now, they wouldn’t.

  “Gently does it, Constable. The scapula should be about there—ah, yes, that’s it. Those are ribs. Now take your spade away while I have another look.” Dabbe grunted and then stood back. “Right, carry on.”

  Sloan murmured “The deceased’s age, Doctor …”

  “Age?” said Dabbe. “Not young. Not old. I’ll tell you when I’ve had a better look. I really need to see the wrists and hips.”

  Sloan nodded. “The age will be a help.” It made a report more tidy, did a stated age.

  “Good teeth,” observed the pathologist, just as Dr. William Latimer had done. “Mostly present. That’ll perhaps be how you’ll get onto the identity.”

  “After all these years?”

  Dabbe nodded. “It’ll be difficult enough. I can see that.”

  “Still,” Sloan looked round the site, “people often sheltered in their cellars in the bombing. They must have done.”

  “Careful with that spade, man,” adjured the pathologist suddenly. “You’re not digging a trench for sweet peas, you know.”

  Both constables were sweating now. Behind and beyond them the embers of a fire still glowed visibly. That would have been where the men had burnt the smaller branches of the uprooted elm tree earlier in the day. Sloan had been told about that. And about the workmen who had been reluctant to leave the site. From the sound of things they had adjourned to the Rose and Crown. Every now and then he could hear a burst of confused singing from that direction.

  The pathologist was back on his knees beside the skeleton now, his hands getting in the way of the two spades.

  “Ah,” he said suddenly, “the humerus. Now you can expect the rest of that arm about here.”

  One of the constables obediently applied his implement to the spot. Gradually, ever so gradually, the exposed bones were taking the shape of a complete skeleton.

  “If it’s lying flat,” said the pathologist to the second constable, “you should be getting near the pelvic girdle your side.”

  “It’s funny, Doctor, isn’t it,” murmured Sloan mildly, “when you come to think of it, that it should be lying absolutely flat.”

  “If you ask me, Sloan,” the pathologist grunted, “I should say it’s funnier still that it should be lying flat on its back so …”

  “So neatly?” supplied Sloan.

  Dabbe frowned. “I wouldn’t have said it was usual with a crush injury. Blast, perhaps.”

  The whole of the top of the skeleton was visible now. The pathologist paused and took a good look at it.

  “If,” said Dr. Dabbe, after a long moment, “it was buried by falling masonry then it was without breaking a single rib. There’s the rib cage there absolutely complete.”

  “Gas?” suggested Sloan suddenly. “I’ve heard that that happened. The bomb burst the domestic gas supply and bob’s your uncle. The other injuries don’t matter then.”

  The pathologist grimaced. “I can’t tell you that. Not now. Not just from this.”

  “No.” Sloan stepped back a pace. “There’s the earth, of course.”

  “That’ll tell us a thing or two. Burns can start working on that.”

  “All good Calleshire clay, I expect,” said Sloan, “if my garden is anything to go by. Just the job for roses.” Though roses seemed a far cry from the scarified rubble of the site.

  Suddenly there was a distant gust of singing. It reached them quite clearly over the still evening air.

  “Merriment?” enquired Dabbe sardonically. “In St. Luke’s on a Monday evening?”

  Sloan said he thought it was the Irish laborers from the site conducting a wake for their lost overtime in the Rose and Crown.

  “Much more likely,” said Dabbe. Suddenly he bent down. The constable on his left had just cleared the earth away from the farther hip bone. “Iliac crest coming up now.”

  “Ah,” said Sloan.

  “And it’s not quite united,” said the pathologist. “Very nearly, but not quite.”

  “And that means …”

  “It usually becomes united between about twenty-two and twenty-five.” Dabbe pointed. “Look here, Sloan, do you see?”

  The police inspector crouched beside him and nodded.

  “Union is still incomplete, Sloan, so the deceased, whoever they were, wasn’t much more than twenty when they died.”

  “Thank you,” said Sloan drily. “That will give us something to work on …”

  “It’s a European-type skull …”

  “So will that …”

  “And unless I’m very much mistaken, Inspector, it was female.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan permitted himself a smile. “Free, white, and not more than twenty-five, in fact, Doctor …”

  “My wife says women are never free.” Dabbe indicated a still-covered patch of earth to one of the digging constables. “You’ll find a femur under that, my lad, if you go carefully. Unless she was one-legged, of course.”

  “Yes, sir.” Dutifully.

  “She’ll not have been over tall. Her feet’ll be about here.”

  The constables went on digging and Detective Inspector Sloan peered down at the remains. In the last half hour they had progressed from being “a skeleton” to “the deceased” and now to “her.”

  That was pathology for you.

  But Sloan hadn’t time for semantics. “It isn’t going to be easy,” he said, “putting a name
to her after all these years …”

  “No fractures in the lower limbs either,” reported the pathologist, still following his own line of thinking.

  “Odd that,” said Sloan. He began to shiver a bit. It really was beginning to get quite cold out here now. And he would have to stay here until the police photographers, Dyson and Williams, arrived. What was keeping them? he wondered. Beyond the restricting glow of the arc lights an autumn mist was hovering. He wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t close in on them soon.

  “Sloan!” called out Dabbe. “Come and take a look at this, will you?”

  Obediently the police inspector dropped to his knees beside the pathologist and craned his neck over the narrow, gravelike trench.

  “See this?” Dr. Dabbe pointed with a long probe to a small indeterminate mass muddled up with the earth in the pelvic girdle. “Do you know what I think this is? I can’t tell you for sure until I’ve seen it in the lab but …”

  “I think I can guess,” said Sloan slowly.

  “A fetus,” said Dabbe. “See that Flash Harry takes a good picture, won’t you?”

  Sloan stirred. “So she was pregnant when she died then, was she, Doctor?” Flash Harry was Dyson’s nickname. Police Photographer was his proper title.

  “For what it’s worth. It’ll maybe help with the identification, that’s all.”

  “Poor woman,” he said suddenly. “Let’s hope she never knew what hit her.”

  “Aye,” said the pathologist, not without compassion.

  They both stared down at the pathetic collection of bones lying there in the soil and rubble and rudely exposed to their clinical and legal gaze. To Sloan it didn’t seem possible that they could properly be described as “woman with child.”

  But they could.

  For the first—but by no means the last—time someone besides Mick the Irishman wished that his pickaxe had not struck just where it had.

  If in doubt, the advice of a coal merchant should be sought

  CHAPTER THREE

  A man sat in an office in Berebury and thumbed a piece of paper. It carried all the relevant information so far known about the skeleton in Lamb Lane, Berebury.

  The man was Superintendent Leeyes and he was sitting at his desk in Berebury Police Station. It was nine o’clock on the Tuesday morning. Detective Inspector Sloan had been summoned to his presence as soon as he had set foot inside the police station.

  “What’s all this, Sloan?”

  “What you might call a Records job, I suppose, sir.” Sloan didn’t see a lot of hope that it could be shunted onto someone else but it was always worth a try. “The pathologist says the body’s been dead between twenty-five and thirty years …”

  “Thirty years?” said Leeyes lugubriously. “That makes a change from the day before yesterday’s fatal road traffic accident and today’s suicide.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan could have done without any of them actually.

  The superintendent waved the paper in front of him. “It’s a pity it wasn’t just that bit older and then we might have got him to stretch it a bit.”

  “Stretch it, sir?” Cautiously.

  “Call it a hundred years old, Sloan, and we don’t need to bother, do we?”

  “N … no, sir, I suppose not.” For a wild moment Sloan toyed with the idea of trying to explain to the superintendent that forensic medicine—the pathology of injury—was a neutral science: and then thought better of it.

  “Twenty-five to thirty years,” said Leeyes.

  “Thirty years,” said Sloan, frowning, “would make it somewhere in the war …”

  “Well done,” said his superior officer kindly. “And seeing as how it’s been found on an old bomb site, I shouldn’t be at all surprised myself if it wasn’t a leftover bomb casualty.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Though, Sloan, there was a civilization which buried their dead under their houses. In Cyprus, it was.” The superintendent was given to attending adult education classes and was the possessor of sundry items of totally unrelated knowledge.

  “Really, sir?”

  “Bit niffy, I should have thought myself but there’s no accounting for habit.” He pushed his chair back and walked across to the window. And groaned.

  Once upon a time the superintendent had been able to look out of his window with equanimity. His office was on the first floor of the Berebury Police Station which was in the Market Square. It enjoyed a view across to the other side of the square. Until last June this had mattered not at all. The view had included the Willow Pattern Tea Rooms, an inoffensive establishment run by two inoffensive maiden ladies, the Misses Simpkin.

  Since June however there had been changes. One of the Misses Simpkin had gone to heaven and the other to Bournemouth and a new owner had taken over. The Willow Pattern Tea Rooms had been renamed Dick’s Dive and the younger generation had moved in.

  It was the younger generation which so disturbed the superintendent.

  “Look at them, Sloan.” He groaned again. “Just look at them. Dirty. Lazy. Long-haired …”

  “Yes, sir. This body, sir. In Lamb Lane.”

  He turned. “It’s just a leftover.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You won’t remember, Sloan,” said Leeyes loftily, “but that sort of thing did happen.”

  “I know they will come across unexploded bombs on Luston Moor, sir. I had to give a hand with the traffic once when they found one.”

  “Same idea,” said Leeyes generally. “Leftovers. Like on the golf course. I wrote to the Committee about it only the other day.”

  “Really, sir?”

  “Asked them if they could remove the Danaert wire from behind the ninth green now that the danger of German invasion appears to have receded. That should shake ’em.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sure it will. Now about this woman …”

  “Was she married?”

  Sloan started. “I don’t know, sir. There’s only the skeleton, you know.”

  “Wedding ring,” snapped Leeyes. “Third finger, left hand. Old English custom.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I will make enquiries. And then see what sort of records we’ve got downstairs.”

  “The wrong sort,” rejoined Leeyes gloomily. “Bound to be. A note of everyone who’s ridden a bicycle without a rear light for the last fifty years or who parked their horse and cart badly and nothing more useful.” In a flash the superintendent was astride another hobby horse. “That’s the trouble with records. You never know which to keep. File one lot and you’ve got them cluttering up the place for years. Chuck ’em out and someone wants them the next morning.”

  “Yes, sir.” No one could say that the prospect of a records job carried much appeal to a working detective inspector. “So what you want me to do now is to find out who she is.”

  “Was.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’d better do it with the speed of light, Sloan, because of the building works.” Leeyes left the window and came back to his desk. “I’ve had someone onto me already about that. Name of Garton.”

  “That’ll be the builder.”

  “He says this has put them behind schedule right at the beginning of the job. They’ve got plant and machinery itching to get at the place and men held up.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” promised Sloan. “Dr. Dabbe’s doing the official post-mortem this morning.” He stood up to go. “I’ll need someone with me.”

  “Crosby.”

  “Gelven,” suggested Sloan quickly. “What about Sergeant Gelven?”

  “Crosby,” countered the superintendent magnanimously. “You can have Detective Constable Crosby.”

  Inspector Sloan sighed. “Sergeant Gelven’s a good man.”

  “I know. That’s why I’d better have him keeping an eye on Dick’s Dive while you’re busy. Lord knows what’s going on in there. Besides, Crosby can be spared. Easily.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  �
�And I don’t see that he can do any harm on a case like this.”

  “I’m sure I hope not,” muttered Sloan.

  “Open and shut,” said Leeyes. “That’s what it’ll be.”

  Just as Detective Inspector Sloan’s day was by now well under way, so was Dr. Latimer’s. He had finished his morning surgery and was studying the visiting list for the day—the Tuesday—put on his desk in front of him by Miss Tyrell.

  “I’ll go to Farnely Terrace first,” he said, “to see how little Billy Nicholls is now. Unless anything more urgent has come in …”

  “No, Doctor. Not so far.” Miss Tyrell ran her finger down the list. “Jane Appleby sounds to be in a bit of a state but not urgently, if you know what I mean. Mr. Smith will just be having you on, whatever he says the matter is.”

  “Will he indeed?’ said William grimly.

  “And watch Mrs. Reddley.”

  “Oh?”

  “Neurotic as they come,” said Miss Tyrell succinctly. “She’ll waste your whole morning, if you’re not careful. And don’t forget Mrs. Caldwell. Just a routine call at the moment.”

  William wasn’t likely to forget Mrs. Caldwell. She looked like being his first maternity case in Berebury.

  “What shall I tell Mr. Hodge if he rings, Doctor?”

  “That his X-ray shows a large ulcer and he’d better come to see me this evening.” William stowed the list away in his pocket. “I might call in on him myself if I have the time.”

  “That just leaves Anthea Garton then,” said Miss Tyrell. “Can you fit her in after luncheon? We don’t want her in the surgery with a rash.”

  “I expect I can. Tell her to come at two.”

  “Though if it’s only a rash that young woman’s got,” said Miss Tyrell, “she can be thankful the way she’s spending her time.”

  “Really?” William wasn’t paying much attention.

  “If her skirts get any shorter this winter,” said Miss Tyrell, a steely glint coming into her eye, “her chilblains ought to make medical history.”

  William grinned. “There’s one good thing, though. You aren’t going to have your noise from over there on the bomb site just yet after all …”

  “Oh?”

  William told her about the skeleton.