‘That they are all dead? If that is so, it seems a large undertaking. (I am so sorry! I did not intend to make a somewhat tasteless pun!) We must hope for another explanation.’

  ‘Darling, as I’ve got myself mixed up in all this, do tell me what Lady Bitton-Bittadon’s fantastic theories are.’

  ‘Her idea, for what it’s worth – and there may be something in it, I suppose, now that you’ve seen those skeletons – is that some person or persons must have been determined to get that sarcophagus opened. Tell me again exactly what you saw when you looked at it.’

  ‘Well, before I went into the church I saw three workmen with a small crane mounted near the tomb, and by the time I came out again into the churchyard the top of the grave had been removed, the men had gone and the crane was still there. Nobody was about, so I indulged my curiosity and went to the edge of the cavity and took a peep. It was a very big hole and there were steps going down into it. Some of it had been excavated beyond the limits of the stone slab which formed the lid, so there was a kind of short, quite broad passage to which the steps led down, and the bodies were laid out on shelves like those in the catacombs.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that gives me a picture. Well, I think, you know, that we shall have to obtain permission to lift that slab again. It is possible – in fact I think it is highly probable – that while the sarcophagus was left open on Mayering Eve the skeletons you saw in the crypt this last time were removed from it and are those of Sir Bathy’s ancestors.’

  ‘You mean somebody robbed the family vault and put the skeletons into the crypt so as to prepare for future Mayerings?’

  ‘It seems to me a logical supposition.’

  ‘Well, of course, it had been opened up ready for Sir Bathy’s May-Day funeral, and I’m bound to admit that on Mayering Eve, so far as I could make out, anybody could have done anything anywhere in the village and got away with it. There’s just one thing, though.’

  ‘Ah, you’ve realised that, have you? It doesn’t necessarily follow, you know. But I interrupted you.’

  ‘I was only going to say that, from all I saw and heard, the people interested in getting hold of some more skeletons were those frightful signs of the zodiac.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, they couldn’t have been responsible for robbing the tomb that night. They were far too fully occupied with that burial up at the hill-fort.’

  ‘Yes, I understand that. They may not have been the only interested parties, of course. From what you have told me, it seems that a ritual interment within the circumference of the hill-fort was an annual event in which the whole village was interested.’

  ‘Do you really mean to tell me that anybody – simply anybody at all – could have been Sir Bathy’s murderer, and that he was killed just to get the tomb opened and five skeletons stolen?’

  ‘I did not think so when Lady Bitton-Bittadon suggested it, but, at the present stage of our knowledge, I am forced to that conclusion.’

  ‘Who (apart from the zodiac people – I’d believe anything of that frightful boy and one or two of the others) would have dared to do such a thing for such a reason?’

  ‘Superstition lingers on, and it seems to be beyond the power of orthodox religious belief to remove or eradicate it.’

  ‘And I suppose you mean to have the tomb re-opened. The vicar won’t like that much, will he?’

  ‘Time will show. Tomorrow I shall share my thoughts with the C.I.D. inspector who has now taken over the case, and we shall see what we shall see. If the vicar can be persuaded that the tomb has been robbed, I think we may assume that he will be as anxious as anyone else to discover who the sacrilegious parishioners are. I wonder, in fact, what the poor man thinks of the whole of the village Mayering, for one assumes that he is cognisant of what goes on.’

  ‘Well, Dame Beatrice,’ said the gentlemanly detective-inspector from London, ‘if you’ll tackle the vicar, the superintendent and I will take a look at the More to Come. Know anything about it, sir?’

  Superintendent Soames liked his younger colleague’s attitude and after a preliminary period of reserve and doubt had accepted co-operation with more goodwill than he had ever supposed he would show towards one who, at first, he had regarded as his supplanter.

  ‘We’ve never had any actual trouble,’ he replied. ‘Always kept to the licensing hours, and the law about nobody under eighteen, and no betting-slips, and all that kind of thing. It’s true the landlord who gave up a week or two back came to the village with the reputation that he kept two wives, but some of these villagers will believe anything, particularly if there’s something spicy or disgraceful attached to it.’ (The superintendent’s station was at Cridley, thirty miles away). ‘You can’t believe all you hear, and Seven Wells is a funny kind of place. Dead from the neck up and festering from the neck down, if you really want my opinion.’

  This powerful imagery intrigued Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Can you produce chapter and verse?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, take this Mayering Eve business,’ said the superintendent. ‘We know all about it, of course. There used to be a whole heap of bodies down in the cellar of the More to Come. Seems it started when plague struck the village more than six hundred years ago. There was nobody to do the buryings at the rate the people died off, so they chucked the bodies down what was the church crypt before the new church was built, and then, I suppose, when the plague was over, they decided on Christian burial.

  ‘Well, it seems the village priest of the time wasn’t too sure they’d all died in the odour of sanctity, as I believe they call it, because the records – I believe they’re still scratched on the wall of the space underneath the bell-chamber in the church – show that his predecessor must have been one of the first to go. He took the disease from a sick man to whom he’d given the last rites, which seems ruddy bad luck for him on the face of it. Well, such was the state of the country at the time, with people of all ranks and conditions dying like flies, that no successor was appointed until this new man came along in a year or two, and his argument was that no priest meant no shriving, and so he refused to have those poor unlucky corpses interred in consecrated ground.

  ‘Well, the next best place, the villagers seemed to reckon, was up on the hill. They hadn’t a clue, I don’t suppose, that it was a fort and not a temple. Well, of course, that accounted for the victims of the plague, but they couldn’t bury all of ’em at once, I don’t suppose, being that there must have been several dozen of ’em, according to the records, so the thing turned into an annual ceremony, the people seemingly liking it that way.’

  ‘But the supply must have given out at some time or other,’ argued the detective-inspector.

  ‘Not if you follow the course of history, Mr Callon,’ said the superintendent, ‘which has always been a bit of a hobby of mine when I’ve got the time. The ceremony no doubt lapsed for a bit, but villagers have long memories and when a man was hanged (we’ll say) and the church wasn’t too particular what happened to the body (because they didn’t draw and quarter them in those days; they wasn’t near so barbarous as what they became in later times) the village claimed it and chucked it down in the charnel house which, after the dedication of the new church, was no longer, I take it, regarded as holy ground, and there it waited its turn for a hill-top burial.’

  ‘There couldn’t have been that many people hanged, even in those days,’ objected Callon.

  ‘Maybe not. But then come other plagues – lesser ones, but the plague was always about – and then come the Wars of the Roses and, later on again, the fight between Queen Mary’s lot and them that rooted for Lady Jane Grey. Then come the Armada corpses. They weren’t all washed up in the West Country, not by a very long chalk, and there’s a record of them, too, and the village reclaiming ’em from the beaches along by Tymshore, not so very far, as the crow flies, from Seven Wells. Then there was the Civil War, when, again, the village must have put in a plea for to bury the dead.

  ‘After that, I daresay things quietened down for a bit, because this part of the country wasn’t touched by Monmouth’s rebellion, out of which they might have looked for a pretty fair haul, what with them who died at Sedgemoor and them that Judge Jeffries made away with, but the tradition had been established, you see, and the story is that, for sixty miles around, a malefactor never hung in chains from a gibbet for more than a couple of days. The last lot which finished up as offerings at the Mayering were air-raid victims, I dare say, dug out of the rubble and carted away to the crypt before anybody could do much enquiring about them. When the locals are the demolition and heavy-duty squad, and some of the R.D.C. are also Brethren of the Zodiac, you can see what sort of a fiddle could go on with the corpses, and they, poor sods, couldn’t care less where they were put, I don’t suppose, do you, Mr Callon? After all, I reckon a pagan grave is better than none at all, and the villagers have always believed that a burial up on the hill-top brought luck to the crops.’

  ‘Well!’ exclaimed Callon. ‘I’ve never heard such a story! And to crown it, Dame Beatrice believes that these skeletons, the ones Mrs Pardieu claims to have seen, were filched from Sir Bathy’s tomb before they buried him!’

  ‘One thinks of witches and other night fears,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Well, if you are bound for the inn, I will get along to the vicarage. I think I had better begin by representing myself to the vicar as a collector of religious graffiti. That should engage his interest, as his church seems rich in them.’

  ‘More historical than religious, ma’am,’ said the superintendent, ‘but one of them don’t seem to be either. “What makes the devils smile?” Maybe the ruins as Cromwell knocked about a bit, the ugly warthog!’

  ‘And you a man of the eastern counties!’ said Dame Beatrice, cackling. ‘What shocking disloyalty!’

  ‘Devon born, ma’am. All king’s men down there!’ said the superintendent.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Unconsecrated Ground

  ‘It is a rough truth, ma’am, that the world is composed of fools, and that the exceptions are knaves.’

  George Meredith – The Egoist

  * * *

  ‘But I have no jurisdiction over the Bitton-Bittadon sarcophagus,’ said the vicar. ‘It rests with the family to decide whether it shall be re-opened or not.’

  ‘It appears to be in the churchyard.’

  ‘It is not in consecrated ground. Have you been to look at it, Dame Beatrice?’

  ‘No, I hoped that, if you could spare the time, we might inspect it together.’

  ‘We can do so, by all means, but, by an ancient deed, it is on demesne land and outside the provenance of the church. No funeral service is ever performed at the grave-side. If the family ever wished me to hold prayers in the church I should always be happy to do so. However, Sir Bathy was not a communicant and his interment took place without the rites of the church.’

  ‘You do not ask, I notice, vicar, my reason for wishing the tomb to be re-opened.’

  ‘No doubt you wish to ascertain whether the body of Sir Bathy is still in situ. Oh, I know what goes on on Mayering Eve, and on Mayering Night, too, for the matter of that. There is no particular harm in any of it, so far as I can see. I know they sacrifice a cock, but the killing is immediate and, one supposes, painless, so no question of cruelty is involved. As to the skeletons, one can only assume that they have come, at some previous time, to receive the recognised observances and, in any case, so long as the law does not interfere, there is nothing I can do. To my mind, these people are as innocent as the savages who offer human sacrifices to ensure a plenteous harvest. The superstition is the same and the ritual less repugnant.’

  ‘Your broadminded approach astonishes and delights me.’

  ‘Oh, the villagers are not to blame. Traditions, you know, die hard. As to your desire to re-open the communal grave of the Bitton-Bittadons, well, I am convinced that you will find the body of Sir Bathy sheathed in panoply of iron and lying in its appointed place upon its appointed shelf.’

  ‘I agree with you, but I should be interested to know on what you base your opinion.’

  ‘On the same premises as you do yours, Dame Beatrice. Sir Bathy is still in the flesh. He is not yet reduced to the decent cleanliness of bare bones.’

  ‘No, but doubtless some of his forbears are.’

  ‘Yes. I now see why you want the grave opened up. You suspect that tomb-robbers have been at work, and as the resurrection men (so-called) belong to the past, you think the skeletons have been removed to the cellars of the More to Come ready for next year’s ceremonies. Have you anything more than surmise to go on, I wonder?’

  ‘Let us call it an inspired hunch,’ said Dame Beatrice, who found some of the vicar’s views so unorthodox that she decided not to mention that Fenella had actually seen the five newly-installed skeletons in the crypt at the inn.

  ‘I know something about your career and your inspired hunches,’ said the vicar, smiling for the first time during the interview. ‘They are hardly intuitive, but always appear to be founded on hard fact. You mentioned that you are interested in our graffiti. I will get an electric torch so that we may examine them in detail.’

  ‘What did you make of the vicar, ma’am?’ asked the superintendent when he called at the manor house on the following morning.

  ‘He seems refreshingly broadminded,’ Dame Beatrice replied.

  ‘He’s like they say the curate said about his egg, good in parts,’ said the superintendent. ‘Of course, he was a doctor in some outlandish part of Bengal when he was a young man and before he went in for the church. I daresay he saw a few native customs there which make the doings here on Mayering Eve look like a Sunday School play for the tots. Everything is just a question of comparison. There’s no such thing as the Absolute.’

  ‘What you tell me about him certainly helps to explain his somewhat unorthodox views. He does not seem in the least concerned that the Bitton-Bittadon family are buried in what is called unhallowed ground,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Ah, that’s a bit of a funny tale, that is, ma’am. The grave is inside the churchyard wall, but it seems that in the eighteenth century it was decided the churchyard needed enlarging and the only enlargement available was land belonging to the squire. Well, as gentlemen did in those days, he’d founded a sort of local hell-fire club and professed himself in every way a heathen and worse. His gang used to hold meetings up at the old hill-fort and pray to the old gods (whoever they might have been in the squire’s opinion, for, by all I can read up about him, he was anything but an educated man) and he agreed, being a good-natured sort of cuss in his way, (and very liberal-handed to the villagers at harvest times) to give the parson the ground he wanted except for the piece he meant to keep for his own grave. The parson of that time seems to have agreed and to have signed the papers, and nobody’s ever taken any more notice, so far as I’m aware. There’s no law against burying folks wherever they’ve a mind to be buried, so long as the death is reported and the death certificate signed, I believe.’

  ‘Most interesting. And none of the family, even in Victorian times, has ever attempted to make the piece of land over to the Church?’

  ‘They say that, in his will, the old chap swore he’d come and haunt the one that did. We’re great believers in ghosts around these parts, ma’am. There’s all sorts of tales of headless horses drawing a phantom coach with a headless driver, and a ghost that runs at you backwards, and the usual black dog, and all the rest of it.’

  ‘Ghosts hardly seem to be a race of original thinkers, or villagers either, do they? How did your enquiries go at the More to Come?’

  ‘I can’t think we gained much, ma’am. The story, on the face of it, seems likely enough. On the Sunday after the Mayering on the Thursday, the Shurrocks were due for their annual fortnight’s holiday, and the present manager was put in as a locum by the brewers.’

  ‘The Shurrocks did not own the inn, then?’

  ‘Lessees, not exactly owners, ma’am, but, of course, the pub had to be kept open and it seems the Shurrocks themselves didn’t know of anybody to take over, so, as was their custom during the other years they’d been here, they asked the brewers to help them out, and the brewers sent along these people whose name is Kingley.’

  ‘Had they ever acted in the same capacity before?’

  ‘At other houses run by these particular brewers, yes, ma’am, but not at the More to Come. They always seem to have given satisfaction and had been promised the next nomination as soon as there was a vacancy, but, up to then, they’d been unlucky. However, it seems that Shurrock wrote to Kingley (who, of course, he’d met on the Friday just to introduce him to the business and one or two of the regulars) by the first post Monday morning, telling him that none of them were coming back and that if he wanted the lease, and the brewers would let him have it, to go ahead. Seems the brewers were all set on opening up the place and making it residential, but Shurrock told Kingley he wanted no part of it and that there had been a bit of a toss-up with the brewers about the proposed alterations. We’ve been on to the brewers, but they say there was no argument.’

  ‘The Kingleys, from what my great-niece tells me, have wasted no time in carrying out the brewers’ instructions,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Oh, a lot of the work had already been done in odd spots and from time to time, you know. Then, it seems, Shurrock took the chance the holiday gave him to quit, leaving no forwarding address. Seems to me a bit queer, but that’s the story, and the brewers received his resignation all right.’

  ‘But they do not know where he has gone?’

  ‘Don’t much care, either, according to Kingley. Shurrock didn’t leave owing any rent, or any other bad debts, and they’re just as glad to see the back of him, seeing how discontented he said in his letter he’d been, with the village so dead and alive.’

 

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