A Late Phoenix (6 page)

Perhaps, thought Sloan, still considering, the Saxon settlement here had ended not with the wail of warning and the crash-bang of weaponry but with a whimper.

He didn't know.

He wasn't an historian.

Fire and flood and human aggression were enemies common to all history. Perhaps it didn't matter very much in the long run which you succumbed to. And they were all of them better than some diseases he'd seen.

“Sir …” Constable Crosby interrupted his reverie.

“Well?” Perhaps this woman was history, too. Lying waiting for some archaeologist not yet born to come along and disinter her bones and her history.

“I reckon she took shelter under the stairs.” Crosby pointed to the remains of the wall. “Look, sir, you can see where the staircase would have been.”

“Yes.” Sloan stirred unwillingly. She had been found a hundred years too soon. That was her trouble. Better by far if she had been undisturbed until she was more definitely history.

“So she comes down and gets under the stairs,” said Crosby, serenely untroubled by thoughts of the past, ending lamely, “only it didn't do her a lot of good, did it, sir?”

“No.” The site looked bleak enough in all conscience now. What it must have looked like just after the bombing was beyond Sloan's imagining. “No, it didn't do her a lot of good. The first question, Crosby, is whether it did anyone else any harm at the same time.”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

Sloan spelled it out for him. “Was she alone, man, or was anyone else buried at the same time?”

Crosby scratched his head. “I hadn't thought of that, sir.”

“We shall have to make sure.” Sloan dropped to his knees, noting, just as Dr. Latimer had done, the other set of peg marks the archeologists had left behind. “I wonder what made them change their minds?”

If there really were archeological remains about he would have to check with the curator of the Berebury Museum, Mr. Esmond Fowkes, before any more digging was done. Sloan knew him by repute: a man to whom the past was more important than the present.

He paced out the small cellar and was glad neither Crosby nor Cresswell had asked him why it was important to find anyone else. If any other bodies were here they were buried in earth and if they were found they would later be reburied in earth …

Earth to earth, dust to …

“Blast,” said Sloan enigmatically.

“Sir?”

“I expect that's what killed her without breaking any bones.”

“Yes, sir.”

They spent the next half hour in going over the remains of the cellar, gleaning only the knowledge that the floor was compounded of an indeterminate mixture of broken brick and mortar churned with Calleshire clay. Where the rubble ended and the earth began, it was impossible to say.

Garton, the harassed-looking builder, and the more contained developer, Reddley, were still in the road talking.

“There is something you two could tell me, gentlemen,” said Sloan, “that might save a bit of time.…”

“What's that, Inspector?” Reddley turned quickly. “Anything that will save time.…”

“This site—who does it belong to?”

“Gilbert Hodge,” said Garton immediately. “Gilbert Hodge of Glebe Street.”

Sloan wrote that down. “And what sort of building is to be put here?”

“The development”—Reddley waved the plans which he still carried in his hand—“is for shops on the ground floor and office space above.”

“Offices out here?” Sloan looked around. “This far out?”

The developer smiled. “It can't stay that way, you know, forever. It won't be far out soon.”

Garton tugged at his ear. “I know what you mean, Inspector, and I must say I think it's a pity all the same. There are some nice old houses in this part of the town.”

“If you had to pay rent for some of those offices and shops in the High Street,” declared Reddley, “you'd want something less expensive pretty quickly. Farsighted chap, old Gilbert Hodge.”

“Is he?” enquired Sloan.

“He bought up a lot of this sort of derelict bomb site immediately after the war. Reckoned he was going to make on it in the long run.” Reddley tapped his plans again. “I should say he hasn't lost on this one.”

“'Tisn't built yet,” pointed out Garton obstinately.

“You mean”—Sloan attempted to sort out the police wheat from the commercial chaff—“that this Gilbert Hodge didn't own these houses when they were bombed in the war?”

“Mr. Hodge,” said Garton respectfully, “is a purely postwar enterprise. What he has done began with his gratuity.”

“Who owned them before?”

“I couldn't say, Inspector.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Try the doctor's receptionist. She'll know. She knows everything in these parts. Face like the back of a bus but a memory like an elephant.”

“Much more important,” agreed Sloan gravely. Faces were deceptive things. Until you considered them all impartially as masks you couldn't really be said to be a policeman. Then you knew you had first always to get behind the mask.

Mr. Esmond Fowkes, the curator of the Berebury Museum, was a short man with a neat white spade beard. He was down at the Lamb Lane site within minutes of getting Sloan's message. He certainly wanted to be present if there was going to be any further digging.

“The Saxon excavation …” began Sloan, waving an arm towards the cellar.

“Ah! Most disappointing.”

“You thought …”

“Thought? I was sure, Inspector. Ready to stake my reputation on there being a Saxon settlement there.”

“But …”

“It was all most unfortunate.” The little man was determined to have his say. “You see, I had to be in London last weekend. No time. They were going to start building work first thing on Monday morning, you know …”

Sloan said he knew.

“So I had to drum up help quickly. I got Colin Rigden to arrange the actual dig. He's a good lad. But they found nothing at all, I'm afraid.”

“Nothing Saxon,” pointed out Sloan, who was a policeman and not an archaeologist.

“Not a thing,” declared Fowkes, the museum curator. “And I could have sworn they would. There's a fair bit of Saxon stuff in Berebury, you know, and I took my bearings from a known settlement. A late one.”

“Late?” enquired Sloan carefully. “How late?”

Fowkes waved a hand. “Ninth century.”

Crosby smothered a snort.

Only just.

“Quite so,” said Sloan swiftly.

“And when they ran the new gas main down Lamb Lane—you can see their trench over there—one of the workmen came up with a disc brooch. Same date. Lovely piece. Silver niellosed.”

“Really, sir?”

“Saxon art is a study of its own …”

“I'm sure it is, sir,” said Sloan hastily.

“Can't understand it at all.” Fowkes frowned. “I still think there should have been something here.”

“Something Saxon,” interposed Sloan.

There had, after all, been something there all right.

“I worked it out most carefully. Sat up most of the night, if you must know, Inspector.”

“Did you, sir?”

“I only got wind of the work starting so soon on the Thursday. You know what it is. We have all this elaborate business of someone in the Council Office giving us museum people fair warning, and when it comes to the point some little office girl forgets and the whole machinery breaks down.”

“Yes, sir.” Their instructions at the police station had been equally firm. Ever since a police constable had put a piece of perfect Roman glass in the dustbin. Esmond Fowkes, though small, had torn a stripe off no less a person than the Chief Constable. “How did you happen to hear in the end?”

“I got a whisper in the Goat and Compasses, if you must know.”

Sloan nodded. He knew that pub, all right. Just off the Market Square.

“Then I got straight on to Garton. Blew him up good and proper, I did …”

Sloan could well imagine it. A mere builder would be nothing to a man who had presumed to reprimand the Chief Constable.

“… but he said Reddley had said he'd notified the council. Anyway, Garton told me I could do what I liked on the site as long as I'd got it done by eight o'clock on Monday morning.”

“But you had to go to London,” prompted Sloan. He was anxious to get on. To talk to this receptionist, to find out who used to live here and to clear up the case. Then he could get back to more pressing problems. Like the goings-on in Dick's Dive.

“That's right.” Fowkes tugged at his beard. “So I did the paper work Thursday night, and Friday I got the caretaker at the museum to give me a hand with the pegging out. Rigden came along first thing Saturday morning with his team and started digging.”

“I see, sir. Now if …”

Fowkes shook his head sadly. “This is all a big disappointment to me, Inspector, because of the church.”

“The church?”

“I'm doing a monograph for the Calleshire Archaeological Society on St. Luke's Church.”

“Really, sir?”

The curator waved an arm to take in the whole area. “The one good thing that came out of the bombing.”

“And what would that have been, sir?”

“They got St. Luke's Church,” he said simply. “Victorian, it was. It all went except for the tower.”

Sloan observed that towers always seemed to last well.

“They stood up to blast,” said the archaeologist academically. “The thick walls and great weight were just the thing for that, though their builders could never have known.” He sighed. “But it made them chimney shafts at the same time.”

“Chimney shafts, sir?” Sloan changed his weight from one foot to the other. He should have left the site before Mr. Fowkes arrived. He would know another time.

“That's right. Drawing up the flames from the body of the church.”

“I see.”

“Then the wooden bell frames went and the bells came crashing down.”

“That wouldn't help.”

“And then you lost your cupola.”

“Did you?”

“But afterwards …”

“Yes?” Sloan supposed he should be taking an interest in anything that happened in St. Luke's after the bombing.

“Afterwards,” said Fowkes, “we found a Saxon doorway in the tower of St. Luke's.”

“Did you, sir?”

“Together,” said Fowkes, “with portions of a Saxon cross of rather rude sculpture. The modern architect often used the lower part of the existing wall if it was sound, you know.”

Sloan nodded. “So you wanted to connect the Lamb Lane site with this in your paper, sir?”

“Naturally,” He sighed. “And I thought I was on safe ground.”

In the event, thought Sloan, the Lamb Lane site hadn't turned out to be safe ground for someone else either.

Whoever she was.

“Perhaps,” suggested Sloan, “your original peg marks would have been better after all.”

The spade beard came up with a jerk. “My original peg marks, Inspector?”

“Yes, sir. You know. The first set by the wall. Before you moved them.”

Fowkes stared at him. “I didn't move them, Inspector. I put them in by the wall.”

Scrape and wash the bones and saw in half across

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Miss Tyrell answered the policemen's ring at the surgery door of Field House. She was still in her white coat.

“The houses opposite, miss,” said Sloan, when he had explained their errand, “can you tell us …”

“Draycott, Masters, Waite, and Crowther were the people who used to live there, Inspector.”

“Thank you. That's a great help.” Sloan scribbled rapidly. “Now, about the actual night of the bombing … it was night, I take it, miss?”

She nodded, a faint smile on her lips. “A Wednesday night.”

“You remember it well,” offered Sloan.

“It's not the sort of thing you forget easily.”

Sloan tried again. “What do you remember about it most clearly?”

“The nightingales,” she said without hesitation.

“What about them?”

“They wouldn't stop singing.” She adjusted her glasses more firmly on the bridge of her nose. “It was quite heartbreaking. They were so lovely—and so unconcerned about all the death and destruction. I've never heard them sing like it …”

“A Wednesday, you said it was?” That would give them something to go on. Something that the coroner could write down. For the record.

“That's right. There was a good moon so we guessed—Dr. Tarde and I—that there would be a bad raid. He was on duty at the First Aid Post. I stayed here.”

Sloan twisted his pencil. “The moon helped the planes to see where they were going, I suppose, miss …”

Miss Tyrell's thin lips twitched. “What we had that night was worse than that, Inspector. What we had was moon after rain. That's what suited them best.”

“Moon after rain?”

“Especially if the moon wasn't too high in the sky. That way,” said Miss Tyrell, “the shadows cast by the buildings together with the moonlight reflected from the wet streets gave them all they needed.”

“What you might call a Hunter's Moon, miss …”

“A Bomber's Moon, Inspector. That's what it was.” She looked at him wryly. “Dangerous Moonlight.”

Dangerous Moonlight. The phrase rang a bell in Sloan's mind, but he couldn't immediately place it. “I see. Now, miss, can you remember if anyone was killed or missing opposite?”

“No,” she said positively. “Not there. Corton's had a lot of casualties that night and so did the railway station but there was no one missing at the time from over there.”

“The people,” he said. “Where were they?”