The Discovery of Death

Excerpt

Welhampstead, Hertfordshire. Saturday 23 September

The skeleton lay screaming up at us.

We stood on the edge of the hole and stared back at it. Eventually Cassie, who is a Special Constable and was the only entirely sober one amongst us, said, ‘How come it isn’t buried? I thought Harry had unearthed a skull or a leg bone or something.’

Harry Green is a landscaper, working for me. I’m Tash, owner of Natasha Rowlands Property, and I renovate buildings for a living. We were standing in the gently sloping field that belonged to my latest project, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity on the outskirts of Welhampstead, and Harry, who had decided to do some preliminary grading on what would be the garden, had had a nasty surprise.

So had I. My cousin Willow and her new husband Mark had moored their narrowboat in the park where the Grand Union Canal runs through the town and we had been having a picnic party that started small and had snowballed as we were joined by passers-by and other boat owners.

Harry, who was only gradually recovering his colour, waved a hand at the slope. ‘We’re on the side of the hill, although the gradient isn’t much here. This field seems to have always been pasture and there was a hedge-line across it once. See those trees over there? I reckon that a long time ago, when the hedge was grubbed up, they left the really big trees – those and one that used to be here.’

We squinted along the slope and I could see what he meant. There was the faintest hint of a line connecting where we stood and two very fine old oaks. Welhampstead lies in a valley and the big Victorian house is on the very edge of the town, high up on the southern side.

‘The one here must have come down in a storm,’ Harry was saying. ‘That would have made a sizeable hole where the roots tore out and, because it is on the slope, it was more of a shallow cave than a pit. The timber from a mature tree would have been valuable, so that was all cleared away quite quickly, I’d guess.’

‘Then what are those?’ Matthew Sheldon pointed at some blackened, broken timbers sticking out of the earth that Harry’s machine had scraped back.

‘I reckon someone used the hollow as a shelter and made a rough roof over it with a couple of poles at the front for support. It made something for animals to get protection from the weather, perhaps. It had formed a sloping cover over the skeleton. When I pulled it away, there he was. It must have fallen down, or been pulled down, soon after he was put there. The earth above fell over it enough to discourage anyone from investigating, is my guess.’

‘How long ago?’ Cassie asked. The rest of us – me, Matthew and our friend and solicitor Frank – were conspicuously silent.

‘A long time.’ Harry knew what he was talking about when it came to soil. ‘The roots of the stuff growing above are deep and the soil was solidly bedded on top of the wood.’

‘Wouldn’t someone notice the collapsed shelter at the time?’ I asked. I still couldn’t look away from that screaming skull, even though I knew it was simply the fallen lower jaw that made it seem so horrific.

Harry squinted at the wreckage. ‘It isn’t as though it was a proper building of any value. Whoever owned the field probably just shrugged and forgot it.’

I was getting over the shock now and this was ringing alarm bells. There are quite a few things that a property developer does not want to find – galloping dry rot, asbestos, evidence of criminal activity and archaeology being pretty well at the top of the list.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of a nice Roman mosaic pavement or a standing stone or two, just so long as they are in a field half a mile away. I admit it, I’m a NIMBPy – Not In My Building Plot.

‘Is this murder or archaeology?’ I asked. It surely wasn’t an accident. No one lies down neatly against the back of a hovel and pulls the roof down on top of them, and this didn’t seem to be the remains of some poor huddled vagrant.

‘Looks like both to me,’ Cassie said. ‘If this is over seventy years old then you are in the clear as far as the police are concerned.’

‘Is that all?’ I was so surprised I managed to tear my eyes away from the skeleton and look at her. ‘I didn’t think there was any limitation on murder, and if this was done by someone fairly young seventy years ago, they could still be alive.’

‘Suppose so, but that’s the law. Anyway, look at him – those clothes are early nineteenth century or late eighteenth, surely.’ She dug out her phone. ‘I’ll call the station and report it, but I reckon what you need is a forensic anthropologist and an archaeologist.’

The rest of us shuffled back from the edge a few feet as she started to talk. Harry retreated to the cab of his digger and started puffing on a vape as a though it was an oxygen supply and he was halfway up Everest and I looked at Matthew who was still silent. ‘What is it?’

‘I think I know him,’ he said.

Matthew, you see, was born in 1783. No, that’s not a typo. During renovations on the Georgian house that is now my home I walked through a once-blocked door and found myself in the year 1810. I’m not too sure who was more shocked, me or Matthew, but we gradually came to terms with it and fell in love in the process.

It is not easy carrying on a relationship over two hundred years, particularly as we have managed to get ourselves involved in a number of mysteries and the occasional murder in the process. I don’t know whether all market towns are as bad, but Welhampstead – a pricy commuter favourite on the train line to London – seems to specialise in wormholes in time or whatever causes this. Cassie’s Significant Other and father of her twins, Luc, is actually Lucian Franklin, the third Earl of Radcliffe, born 1779, and Frank Ponsonby, my friend and solicitor, travels back and forth too. He stands in for his ancestor of the same name and uncanny likeness, who hates being a lawyer and skives off to be an artist in secret whenever he gets the chance.

‘You know who that is?’ I glanced back at the skeleton. ‘How?’

‘His rings.’ He looked at Frank. ‘Ludovic Washburn.’

‘Hell, yes.’ Frank went to the edge and peered down. The skeleton was laid out neatly on its back, hands crossed over what was once its stomach, and three heavy rings – one on the right hand and two on the left, glinted in the sunshine.

One of the weird things was that a considerable amount of clothing had survived. The skeleton wore smart Hessian boots, there were the rags of breeches, coat, waistcoat and shirt still clinging to the bones, and what must have been a tall hat stood neatly by the head.

‘He was a client,’ he said. ‘Not mine – one of ancestor-Frank’s partner’s clients, I mean. He was Polworth’s, I think.’

The firm of Polworth, Prendergast and Ponsonby where Frank is a junior partner still operates from the same town centre house it has since 1793.

‘I saw him last week,’ Matthew said slowly. ‘He’s probably still in town. I must warn him.’

‘You can’t,’ Frank said flatly. ‘He has been found, like this, now. If you prevent his death in 1810 then I have no idea what would happen in this time.’

‘I can’t just stand by and see Ludo Washburn murdered.’ Matthew was white about the mouth.