II

A Noise in the Night

WHEN REVERS GOT back to his office, there was a message from Swindon to say that Dr Arbolent had identified the body as that of Paul Clayton. The back of the head was horribly mutilated, but the face, although crushed, was still more or less recognisable. The archaeologist had also recognised the clothes as those normally worn by Paul Clayton, and the shirt was found to be marked with his name. It was not a completely satisfactory identification in a legal sense, for Dr Arbolent had known Clayton only for a few weeks. He could say nothing of the young man’s background, and did not even know his exact age, but for the moment it would have to do. Perhaps the Cambridge college would send along someone who had known Clayton for longer; that would please the Coroner, but Revers thought there could be little doubt but that the body was in fact that of the young archaeological student.

He remembered that he had not yet fully examined Paul Clayton’s wallet, which he still had in his pocket. He had sent back the driving licence with the request for information from the Cambridge police, but he had not yet studied the wallet’s other contents. There was just time to do so before setting off again for Avebury. There were three £1 notes, a snapshot of an unnamed girl, a bank cheque card, and a short letter, headed ‘Cambridge’ and signed ‘David’ which said, ‘Glad to hear that things are going well. I’m not sure when I can get away, but I’ll try to come down some time in July. Will let you know in good time.’ There was also an envelope containing a cigarette stub. The envelope was a small brown one, and the stub, as far as Revers could make out, a very ordinary cigarette end. ‘What on earth did he want that for?’ he wondered. ‘The girl’s perhaps?’ Reflecting on the inconsequential bits and pieces left on the sudden winding up of life, he put the wallet and its contents in a big Manila envelope, wrote on the outside ‘The property of the late Paul Andrew Clayton’, and put the envelope in his safe.

Superintendent Macleod decided to go to Avebury in his own car, which was as well, because Revers had to pick up the firemen, and while he could just fit them into his car there would not have been room for the superintendent too. The cars reached Avebury almost together, and while the firemen went to their lorry Revers took the superintendent to the fallen stone. Before leaving for Marlborough the fire crew had looped a steel cable round the lip of the stone and run back the cable to their winch. They were helped by the lozenge-shape of the stone, which, they thought, would hold the loop when the cable tightened.

‘They’re ready to lift now,’ Revers said. ‘Shall we get on with it? We haven’t been able to see the ground where the body was, yet.’

Macleod walked round the stone, looked into the pit at the back and said, ‘OK John. But for God’s sake tell them to be careful.’

The fire crew, used to working in dangerous structures, needed no telling. The chief officer made everybody stand well clear of the cable in case it broke, and gently applied power to the winch. The cable grew bar-taut as it took the weight of the stone, and very slowly the top of the stone began to lift. When it had risen about four feet the fire officer stopped the winch and held it there. ‘Get a couple of jacks under her,’ he said to his men, ‘and then it will be safe to look at the ground.’

In spite of the hydraulic jacks and the powerful cable holding the stone, Revers had to grit his teeth to go underneath it. There wasn’t enough height to stand upright, but by bending down he and Macleod could study the ground where the stone had lain. There wasn’t much to see. There were some dark patches of blood on the grass, and Macleod picked up a small white object, which turned out to be a tooth. ‘Poor kid,’ he said. ‘Well, John, there’s not much more here. Better have the stone down again – then it can’t fall on anyone else. I want another look at yon pit.’

When the firemen had let down the stone Revers said that he didn’t think there was any need for them to stay any longer, ‘You’ve done a marvellous job,’ he said. ‘At some time, I suppose, the stone will have to be re-erected, but that’s for the Department of the Environment to see to. You’ve done your bit. If there’d been any chance of getting the chap out alive, I’m sure you’d have managed it.’

*

The constable on guard duty was out of earshot at the far end of the roped-off enclosure. When the firemen had gone, Macleod said, ‘You’re not happy, John.’

‘No,’ replied Revers, ‘I’m not. I’ve been thinking all morning, and I can see no reasonable way for a man to be trapped by a falling stone as this man was, lying face downwards and with his head towards the stone – unless, of course, he was asleep, or drunk, or drugged – or dead. It’s a queer place to go to sleep. There was no smell of drink when we got him out, and no sign of vomit on the ground. I looked for that particularly. The autopsy will presumably show if he was drugged. If not . . .’ he gave a worried little shrug.

‘There’s some queer religions about nowadays,’ Macleod observed. ‘He might have been praying to the stone.’

‘He might. But if he was kneeling he’d have been crushed kneeling, and if he was prostrate – well, it’s possible. But remember what you say to recruits, Super – “Ninety-nine per cent of detection is taking note of the obvious”. To lie prostrate before a great stone just before it falls isn’t at all an obvious thing to do. And there’s another thing. Come and have a look in the pit.’

They walked round the fallen stone and Macleod stood for some time on the edge of the hole without saying anything. Then he nodded. ‘A good point, John,’ he said.

‘That timber simply couldn’t have fractured like that when the stone fell,’ said Revers. ‘If it had fallen the other way, into the hole, yes. But falling outwards, away from the hole, there’d have been no pressure on the wood at all; the piece would simply have been thrown aside, as the other one was.’

Macleod got down into the hole, and looked closely at the splintered baulk of wood. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘But it certainly has fractured, round the knot-hole as far as I can make out. Yet there doesn’t seem any reason for it to have gone at all. What are those figures on the wood?’ He pointed to the numerals ‘29’ stencilled at one end of the broken baulk. There was a similar ‘29’ on the unbroken piece of timber.

‘Dr Arbolent referred to the stone as “Stone No 29”,’ Revers said. ‘They’re doing some pretty substantial excavating on the Wansdyke Great Barrow, and they must have tools and stores. I suppose the numbers are to identify the site, but I don’t know because I haven’t asked about them yet.’

‘We’ll get those broken timbers away for forensic examination,’ said Macleod. ‘And I’d like to get them away now. It doesn’t look like rain, but you never know, and I’d like them to be gone over thoroughly before they’re rained on. Do you think they’d go in your estate car? The broken bits are not all that long. It’s heavy wood, but I reckon we can manage it between us. And the constable can give a hand if we need it, though it would be better not to have too many finger-marks: it’s got yours and mine already.’

They got the broken baulk out of the hole and were able to carry the separate bits quite easily. When they’d been stowed in the back of the estate car they returned to the hole.

‘You think there’s a cavity going down even more than the original socket of the stone?’ Macleod asked.

‘There’s a cavity of some sort. How far it extends I don’t know: that’s where we’ve got to dig tomorrow. How did you get on with the Home Office about digging round a scheduled monument?’

‘All right. They want us to be careful, naturally, and to cooperate as far as we can with the archaeologist in charge – that’s your Dr Arbolent. It’s a Department of the Environment responsibility, and some top brass at the Home Office is going to have a word with equally top brass at Environment. If we need to act on our own we’re to go ahead, but if it’s at all possible Environment would like to know beforehand so that they can get one of their own experts down to keep an eye on things. Dr Arbolent seems respectable enough, and they’re quite satisfied with him. But he’s party to the affair, in a way, and I explained that in certain circumstances it might be desirable to act without him.’

‘As things are at the moment,’ Revers said, ‘I don’t think it matters much. He’s a pompous little man and as touchy as hell, but he knows the site, and he certainly helped over the identification, which couldn’t have been a pleasant job. I expect he’s more used to bodies that have been safely buried for a couple of thousand years.’

‘Where’s that carving that he got so excited about?’ Macleod asked.

The two men climbed down into the hole again and Revers pointed to the faintly scratched markings of a circle with nine radii. ‘Can’t say that I can make anything of it,’ said Macleod, ‘but any marking on one of these stones is likely to be important. Remember the excitement in the fifties when they found a drawing of an axe at Stonehenge? I daresay there’ll be half a dozen books about this circle before long. But it’s a queer place to put it, at the base of the stone where nobody could see it; it must have been at least three feet underground. What’s that hole a few inches below it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Revers. ‘It was full of earth, but it was fairly loose, and I ran a length of wire through it – the firemen had some stiff wire with their tools. The hole goes through. It may be natural, these sarsens do have odd holes in them sometimes, like the Blowing Stone near Uffington. Or it may have been made by the people who put up the stone, though Lord knows how they did it.’

‘They did some pretty marvellous things with stones, those ancestors of ours – at least, of yours, though probably not of mine,’ Macleod said. ‘Well, I think we’ve done about all we can do here for the moment. Let’s go back and have a think.’

*

Macleod’s typist brought them a pot of tea. ‘I suppose it’s my own Highland blood, but I’ve always felt that Avebury Circle is a bit of a spooky place,’ said Macleod. ‘How much of our puzzlement is due to the queer setting rather than to anything real?’

‘Not much,’ said Revers. ‘If there are ghosts at work, of course it’s another matter – police training doesn’t go into the next world, or the last, if that’s more appropriate to prehistoric stone circles. But that poor boy was flesh and blood, and the stone, and the bits of wood, and the earth seem pretty solid. I don’t like leaving things I can’t understand. I’ve no reason to suppose that there’s any crime to investigate, but I think there’s a good deal that still needs to be investigated.’

‘I’m with you all right, John,’ said Macleod. ‘I was just being a wise old policeman and making sure that fancy doesn’t run away with us. We have got evidence that needs explaining – the position of the body and the splintered wood. I’ll get those timbers away to the forensic laboratory, though whether they’ll be able to tell us anything, I don’t know. You should have a report of the autopsy in the morning – that may clear up most of our doubts. It won’t explain the timbers. But I was in the Engineers during the war, and I’ve seen some astonishing things happen when a great dead weight runs amok. What else do you want to do, John?’

‘Just straightforward police routine, Super, though I’ll need a couple of men. That American family found the body within a minute or so of 05.00 this morning. I don’t think the stone could have fallen before dark last night – somebody in the village would have noticed it, and Avebury gets a good many visitors at this time of year. I’d like to make a house-to-house inquiry in the village to see if anybody heard anything during the night.’

‘Aye, you must do that, John. And I’d make a start on that now – it’s much better to ask about “last night” than “the night before last”. But don’t go yourself – we’ll put Sergeant Grey on to it. I’d like you to go across to that camp where the archaeologists are staying and find out what you can about young Clayton. Somebody may know why he’d have wanted to walk out to the stone at night, and even when he went. By your account the doctor’s in London the noo, and it may be easier to get people to talk if he’s awa’.’

*

Revers got to the camp soon after five o’clock. It was a biggish establishment, made up of four of those long transportable buildings that can be moved on lorries and erected to stand on jacks. One end of one of the buildings was labelled ‘Office’. Revers went there, to find it empty. He was wondering what to do next, when a young woman came out of one of the other buildings. ‘Where can I find whoever is in charge of the camp?’ he asked her.

‘Well, Dr Arbolent is in charge of things,’ she said, ‘but he doesn’t live here, and anyway, I think he’s away today. Mr Clayton is a sort of second-in-command, but he’s not here either, and we’re getting very worried about him because there seems to have been an accident at Avebury. I’m on cookhouse duty today. The others will be knocking off from the site soon. You can wait in the Mess for them. Would you like a cup of tea?’

Revers didn’t particularly want any more tea, but he accepted the offer because it would give him a chance to talk to the girl. She was about twenty, wearing faded, much-patched dungarees. She took him into the building she had just come out of. ‘It’s the Mess one end and the cookhouse at the other,’ she explained. ‘We have a rota for the cookhouse job.’

The Mess consisted of two trestle tables, with wooden benches along each side. He sat down at the end of one of the tables, and the girl drew a mug of tea from an urn. ‘Milk and sugar on the table,’ she said. ‘Oh, but you’ll want a spoon to stir it.’

Explaining that he did not take sugar in tea, Revers declined the spoon. ‘How many do you have to cater for?’ he asked.

‘Well, there are ten of us working on the dig,’ she said ‘and sometimes Dr Arbolent comes in for meals as well. And there’s his secretary usually for lunch, but she doesn’t live in the camp. She’s staying somewhere in Marlborough, I think, and as Dr Arbolent isn’t here today she isn’t here either.’

‘Where do you all come from?’

‘Oh, all over the place. Paul Clayton’s an archaeologist from Cambridge – he’s already a graduate, and he’s doing research on Megalithic Cultures. One of the other men – there are six men and four girls – is also a graduate: he’s got a job at a museum in Manchester. The rest of us are students. We don’t get paid anything, but we get our keep and it’s quite an exciting sort of holiday.’

‘Are you all archaeological students?’

‘Oh, no. Three are I think, but the rest of us are doing all sorts of things. I’m doing Social Economics, we’ve got a couple of historians, a chemist, even a mathematician, and various other things. We’re all interested in archaeology, of course, and most of us have been on other digs, so we know a bit about it.’

The door opened, and a big, pink-cheeked man, with a bright flaxen beard came in. ‘Hullo, Sara,’ he said, ‘what’s for tea?’ Then, ‘Who’s the visitor?’

Revers got up. ‘Detective Inspector John Revers, of the North Wessex Police,’ he said.

The big man and the girl both looked rather startled. Revers went on gently, ‘I’m afraid I may have rather bad news for you. A stone at Avebury that Mr Paul Clayton was, I believe, working on collapsed during the night and a man thought to be Mr Clayton was crushed by it.’

‘Is he – is Paul badly hurt?’ asked the girl.

‘I am sorry to tell you he is dead.’

The girl sat down on one of the benches and began to sob. The big man put his arm round her shoulders, but said nothing. Revers said, ‘Please forgive me. It must be a terrible shock. But there will have to be an inquest, and you will understand that we must learn what we can of Mr Clayton.’

‘The person you should talk to is Dr Arbolent,’ said the big man.

‘I have already seen Dr Arbolent. He has had to go to London, and I saw him before he went. Unhappily he does not know much about Mr Clayton in a personal sense – he knew him only as a Cambridge archaeologist who had been working with him. The only address we have for him is a Cambridge college. It is necessary for us to discover the whereabouts of his relatives, and to collect any belongings he may have here. You can do nothing now for Mr Clayton himself, but you may help to save other people distress if you can help me with the information I need.’

‘Of course we’ll help you,’ said the man. ‘I am George Armitage, Assistant Keeper of the Dennison Museum in Manchester. This is Sara Rogers. We . . .’ He broke off as a group of three or four more young people entered the hut. Then he raised his voice and went on, ‘Listen, everybody. There’s been a dreadful accident, and Paul Clayton is dead. This gentleman is a police inspector who has to make inquiries. Sara, I think you’d better get on with tea. Inspector, if you’ll come with me to the office I’ll tell you everything I can, and then if you need to you can talk to any of the others.’ He patted the girl’s shoulder, and said, ‘Life’s got to go on, Sara.’

The girl got up and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Paul was so nice,’ she said.

*

In the office hut, Armitage said, ‘We’d heard that there’d been some sort of accident. One of our chaps went to the post office at Avebury at lunchtime and learned that one of the stones had fallen, and that the police were there. He tried to find Paul, who’d just started a dig on the Circle, but he couldn’t. Nobody seemed to know much about what happened, and he had to get back to our own work on the Great Barrow. Dr Arbolent’s very strict about time-keeping.’

‘Can you tell me how your work is organised?’ Revers asked.

‘Well, it’s the usual sort of vacation dig, but because of the importance of the site it has to be controlled pretty carefully. Our main work is on the Great Barrow, about a quarter of a mile from our camp here, and until a few days ago everyone was working there. Then Dr Arbolent wanted a trial dig round one of the stones at Avebury, and he put Paul and another man, Bill Summers, on to that. They had bad luck, because they’d only just started when Bill went down with some sort of tummy trouble, and the day before yesterday he had to go to Devizes hospital for observation. It doesn’t seem to be serious. I’ve been on to the hospital this morning, and they say they’ll probably let him out tomorrow. But it meant that yesterday and the day before Paul was on his own. Several of the others volunteered to take Bill’s place, but Dr Arbolent wouldn’t let them. He said that work on the Great Barrow couldn’t be held up for a subsidiary dig.’

‘What was Mr Clayton’s position?’

‘Well, he and I are both qualified archaeologists. Paul’s special field is Megalithic Cultures, so he acted as Dr Arbolent’s second-in-command. I’m chiefly concerned with the Early Roman period. Very little is known of what happened to these sites then, whether there were any continuous settlements, and so on. That’s why I was particularly keen to come. But Paul knew a lot more about the main Megalithic period – second millennium and early first millennium BC – than I do.’

‘Did it seem strange that he should be detached from the main work to dig at Avebury?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Dr Arbolent wanted to be at the Great Barrow most of the time. He was excited by some markings he’d come across on the stones in one of the burial chambers there. There are at least six other burial chambers, all very early, and filled with rubble and fallen earth. Only the front part of the barrow has ever been properly excavated, and the older part seems to have been blocked off in antiquity. Dr Arbolent wanted the blocked off chambers cleared and examined as thoroughly as possible. It’s slow work, because everything has to be sifted, and exact levels measured and recorded. And a digging team is only available for a limited time. Dr Arbolent thought he’d found evidence linking these early burial chambers with the Avebury Circle – I’m not sure exactly what, because he’s a bit secretive: no, I don’t want to give a wrong impression, “academically cautious” would be better, perhaps. And there’s another reason for his being secretive. A dig like this is very expensive: I know we don’t get paid, but we’ve got to be fed, and equipping and maintaining the camp costs a lot of money. This particular work has been financed largely by the Sunday Examiner, in return, of course, for news of any spectacular finds. Naturally they want their news to be exclusive – Dr Arbolent gave us all a lecture on the first night stressing that we mustn’t say anything to anybody about the job. Since he got the money out of the newspaper, it’s understandable that he should want to be discreet. Anyway, he formed some theory about Avebury, wanted his ideas followed up, but couldn’t go himself. It was reasonable enough that he should send Paul.’

‘Did you know Mr Clayton well?’

‘No, I’d never met him before coming here, though I’d heard of him as one of the best of the young generation of Cambridge men. I was at Nottingham, and I’m several years older than he is – or was, I suppose, I should say. But we were both professionally qualified, both a bit older than the students, so naturally we rather gravitated together.’

‘Do you know anything of his family?’

‘No – except that I don’t think he had much in the way of family. We went into Marlborough for a meal one evening, and talked a bit about ourselves. I think he said that he was brought up in an orphanage – I thought he’d done remarkably well to get to Cambridge.’

‘What sort of a person was he?’

‘Quiet, gentle, exceptionally able, and passionately keen on his own period of prehistory. Everybody liked him –you heard what Sara said, that he was “so nice”. That about sums it up.’

‘It seems that he must have gone to Avebury at some time during last night. Would he have any reason for going there? And why wasn’t he missed this morning?’

Armitage considered this. ‘We work to a pretty strict timetable, but we’re not exactly a military encampment,’ he said. ‘We’re all volunteers – we’re more or less on holiday. People have their private affairs, and after tea there’s no reason why anybody shouldn’t go off as he pleases. I don’t know about last night, because I went to have dinner with some friends of my parents who live near Swindon. Paul was certainly here when I left. Breakfast is always a bit of a rush. Obviously Paul wasn’t here then, but I can’t say I noticed that he wasn’t. After breakfast we wouldn’t expect to see him, because he had his job at Avebury and we had to get off to the Barrow.

‘The men – six of us – sleep in one of the huts, the girls in another. We turn in at different times, and since we’ve been doing manual work for most of the day, we’re mostly pretty tired. Someone may have noticed that Paul didn’t come in, but I don’t know. You can ask. I didn’t notice his not being there myself, because I came back pretty late, and I went to bed by torchlight, not wanting to disturb any of the others.

‘Why did he go off to Avebury at all last night? I haven’t any idea, but there could be a hundred reasons. It’s unusual for someone to go back to a dig in the evening, I’ll admit that. But Paul was exceptionally keen: he may just have thought of something, and it would be like him to go off and test some theory straightaway. But this is all speculation. My only real answer to your question is that I don’t know.’

*

Revers asked if he could see the sleeping quarters, and Armitage took him across to the men’s dormitory hut. It was much like a barrack room, with a row of iron beds. ‘We bring our own sleeping bags,’ said Armitage, ‘but the mattresses and blankets are provided. We don’t bother with sheets.’

Beside each bed was a wooden locker. Clayton and Armitage, as the two senior members of the party, had beds at each end of the hut, which gave them slightly more room. Revers opened Clayton’s locker – it had hasps to take a padlock, but it was not locked. Inside were two shelves. On the top shelf were a sponge bag, containing a razor, shaving brush and toothbrush, a small canvas wallet holding needles, cotton, darning wool, half a dozen assorted buttons and a pair of scissors, and another small bag with shoe cleaning materials. On the shelf below were three paperback detective stories and a writing case. The case held notepaper, envelopes, and a few stamps: there were no letters. On the floor by the locker was a kitbag holding a spare pullover, a clean shirt, a couple of pairs of socks and a few other oddments of clothing. A grey suit of quite good quality, neatly arranged on a coat hanger, was suspended from a hook on the wall, and underneath the bed was a pair of well-polished shoes. That seemed the extent of Paul Clayton’s earthly possessions at the site. ‘He seems to have travelled light,’ said Revers, ‘but he was well-equipped.’

‘Yes, he was exceptionally neat and tidy – a great help in a party like this, when not everybody bothers where he puts things,’ Armitage replied.

‘Well, I shall have to collect his belongings for his next of kin, when we find out who it is. Can you give me a hand to get them to the car? I’ll give you a receipt for them. Then I’d like a word with the rest of the party, if that isn’t awkward for you.’

‘They’ll be just about finishing tea. We’ll go across to the Mess.’

It took only a few minutes to put Clayton’s few possessions in the car, and Revers wrote out a receipt. In the Mess, Armitage knocked on one of the tables, and announced, ‘The Inspector would like to ask one or two questions about Paul Clayton. I’ve told him that we’ll all help in any way we can.’

‘I’ve only got two questions at the moment,’ Revers said. ‘First, do any of you know anything about Mr Clayton’s relations, and secondly, can anyone say what time it was that he went out last night?’

There was a buzz of worried, low conversation, and then one of the men said, ‘We’re sorry, sir, but I don’t think any of us knows much about Paul personally. He was always friendly, but we talked mostly about the dig. Bill Summers was working with him, but he’s not here – he’s had to go to hospital. He may know of some relations, but I’m afraid we don’t.’

‘From what we’ve been able to find out so far,’ said Revers, ‘he doesn’t seem to have had many relations, but we have to go on making inquiries. Now, what about the time? Let’s try working backwards. Who has the bed next to his?’

‘I do,’ said another of the men. ‘I went to bed soon after ten o’clock, and dropped off pretty quickly. He wasn’t in the sleeping hut then – in fact, I think he was still in the Mess.’

‘Yes, he was,’ said the girl called Sara. ‘We were listening to a programme on the radio, and I’m sure he was with us.’

‘Which of you was the last to see him?’

Nobody could say. The radio programme ended at 10.30, and those who had not already gone to bed went off soon afterwards. There was a general impression that they’d left Paul sitting in the Mess, but no one could say more than that. Did anyone remember seeing the Mess in darkness? Yes. There was a box for posting letters by the office hut – the postman collected letters when his van brought incoming mail in the morning. One man remembered that he’d forgotten to post a letter, and he’d gone out to do so just before turning in – that might have been about a quarter to eleven. He’d walked past the Mess hut, and he thought the lights were out: he couldn’t swear to it, but he thought he’d have noticed if they’d still been on.

Revers had not expected much, and on the whole he was pleased with the information they’d managed to piece together.

‘You’ve done very well,’ he said. ‘There was no reason why you should take any particular notice of last night.’ He thought what a wholesome bunch of youngsters they were – alert, obviously ready to work hard, very different from the too-prevalent conception of students fostered by the posturings of their lunatic fringe.

Revers had still some routine work to get through at his office, and it was nearly nine o’clock before he got home. It had been a long day. He wondered, not for the first time, at his wife Diana’s cheerful readiness to put up with it.

*

A few minutes after he got to the office in the morning his telephone rang. It was the police surgeon, Dr Mortimer. ‘We’ve done the autopsy on that young man from Avebury,’ he said. ‘You’ll be getting the report, of course, but I thought it might be helpful if I came over and gave you a summary of things beforehand. Are you free now?’

Revers thought, ‘As free as I’m ever likely to be.’ He said, ‘Yes, it will be a great help. I’ll stay here till you come.’

*

Revers had seen violent death in various forms, but privately he still found it sometimes shocking, sometimes grotesque, always pitiful. He rather envied the medical ability to be detached and matter-of-fact. ‘It was an interesting job,’ the doctor said, ‘because there were so many injuries that it was hard to say precisely what caused death. I got over Professor Santikell, from Oxford, and what I’m telling you represents his findings as well as mine. One obvious cause of death was a broken neck, but there were appalling head injuries as well, and we can only say that he died from multiple injuries. What we’re not absolutely satisfied about is precisely how they were caused.’

‘A twenty-ton block of stone falling on you would seem to account for most things,’ Revers observed.

‘Yes, but you yourself pointed out that he was lying flat on his face. The main crushing force of the stone was on the back of his head, which was dreadfully damaged, as one would expect. But there was also extensive injury to the right side of the skull, extending to the right temple, with severe bruising round the temple. It is not easy to account for this.’

‘But surely the weight of the stone crushing his head to the ground would account for almost anything.’

‘Yes and no. The human skull is remarkably well-engineered and tough. It was crushed from the back, and the nose and upper jaw were broken, in the same way as they might be broken by a powerful frontal blow from a heavyweight boxer. That implies that they received a frontal blow from the ground as the stone crushed the face against the ground. It is difficult to see what could have caused such extensive injury to one side of the skull, particularly as the other side was not similarly crushed in. Indeed, you could say that the shape of the skull and the strong frontal bones of the forehead in a way protected the sides of the head.’

‘Well, obviously they didn’t. Is there any evidence to suggest a separate injury to the side of the head – a bullet wound, for instance?’

‘No. The injuries are all consistent with a severe blow from a heavy stone: the puzzle is the apparent angle of incidence of the blow to the side of the head.’

‘God knows,’ said Revers. He’d been unhappy about this case from the start, and he had been hoping that the autopsy would remove at any rate most of his doubts. It had simply made things worse. The doctors couldn’t say anything definite – they’d just produced another problem for him.

‘Can you estimate the time of death?’ he asked.

‘Not very exactly. Between six and eight hours after his last meal.’

‘That was probably about six o’clock in the evening – which would make it between midnight and two in the morning.’

‘That would seem reasonable enough. It would fit in with the body temperature when we got him to the mortuary – at least, within acceptable limits. But these things are notoriously difficult. You policemen ask for time of death as if life were a clock that just stopped. You must know that there is considerable argument nowadays about what precisely is the point of death.’

‘Come off it,’ said Revers. The doctor smiled. ‘I know I’m adding to your troubles, but really I can’t help it,’ he said.

‘Well, perhaps you can actually produce facts on a few things. What was the general condition of the body?’

‘Apart from the injuries, that of a well-nourished, healthy young man in his early twenties – under twenty-five at any rate.’

‘Any evidence of drugs or alcohol?’

‘None whatever. We can say categorically that he was neither an alcoholic nor a drug-taker.’

‘The Coroner wants to open the inquest tomorrow morning. What are you going to say to him? Do you want Professor Santikell to give evidence as well as yourself?’

‘That’s for the Coroner to decide. Personally, I think he should be called, though we can only confirm each other.’

‘Are you going to say that you’re puzzled by some of the injuries?’

The doctor considered. ‘If either of us is asked,’ he said, ‘we shall have to say so. But I don’t see why we should be asked. The law, at any rate at this stage, doesn’t want our uncertainties: it wants factual medical evidence on injuries and cause of death. That we can give quite readily. I take it the inquest will have to be adjourned: you must still have masses of inquiries to make.’

‘Yes, it will have to be adjourned. We don’t know yet why the stone fell, nor – though in a legal sense this is less important – what Paul Clayton was doing there at that time of night. Maybe we shall never know. But we’ve got to try to find out. I’ll have a word with the Coroner – I don’t suppose he’ll want more than formal evidence.’

‘Well, I hope you get to the bottom of it. Santikell’s and my uncertainties are pretty marginal, really. It’s like a bad car crash when bodies are frightfully smashed up – there are often particular injuries that you can’t logically account for. The tremendous forces involved may do all sorts of things.’

*

Revers’s next job was to see Sergeant Grey about last night’s house-to-house inquiries in the village. ‘We didn’t get much,’ the sergeant reported. ‘One woman said that she heard an owl hooting over towards Silbury at midnight, and that when a Silbury owl hoots at midnight it means the death of a king. I asked if this applied to a queen as well, and she got quite cross. “You mark my words young man, just mark my words,” she said. Well, I’ve reported them to you, sir, but if you ask my opinion I think she was half-mad. Everybody else except for one man said they were asleep and didn’t hear a thing – they seem to sleep well there. The one man who wasn’t asleep has a sick wife, and he had to get up at two o’clock to give her some medicine. He did hear something, but whether it’s any use to you I don’t know. Anyway, I took a statement from him.’

The sergeant opened his notebook and read out, ‘My name is Samuel Wilkins and I live at 6, Ring Cottages, Avebury. I am a tractor driver at Hill Farm. At two a.m. – actually I think it was a few minutes before two o’clock –Agnes woke me to say her pain had come on again and she’d better have one of her pills. I got a glass of water and gave her a pill. While I was doing this I heard what sounded like a noise of a power-takeoff from a tractor. I can’t say where it came from, but it might have been somewhere over by the Stones. I thought, “Funny time for a tractor,” but I didn’t think much of it, and went back to bed. The noise didn’t last long. Just before I went back to sleep I think I heard something like a tractor or Land Rover revving up and driving off. I can’t say for sure – I wasn’t that interested.’

‘I was able to see the wife. She’s had an operation and isn’t at all well, but actually she’s a better witness than her husband. She said she didn’t like waking him up because he starts work at six and has a long day, and lay awake for some time herself before doing so, She doesn’t recall hearing any sort of car drive up, but she did hear the tractor noise described by her husband. She doesn’t recall hearing a vehicle drive off, but explained that she wouldn’t have heard it anyway, because her pill acted pretty quickly and sent her off to sleep. I didn’t bother her with a formal statement, but she said she’d make one if we wanted it. I’m afraid that’s about the lot.’

Revers thought for a bit. Then he said ‘There are so many cars about nowadays that one car more or less during the night doesn’t mean much. A tractor noise at two o’clock in the morning is a bit different. I suppose any heavy vehicle on the Swindon road could make a noise like a tractor, but the man’s a tractor driver and he may be able to distinguish one sort of noise from another. It’s useful to have the statement, and you did very well to get it. Look, Sergeant, I’ve got a hell of a lot to do this morning and I’ve got to go to Avebury again this afternoon to do some more digging in the presence of that archaeologist. It hasn’t rained since the night before last. Can you go back to Avebury now and see if you can find any tractor or Land Rover marks on the ground near the fallen stone? The most obvious place is where the fire brigade lorry drew up off the road. I’m afraid that may have churned up the ground a bit; the ambulance was there, too. But it’s just possible there may be something, and I’d be glad if you’d have a look as soon as possible. Take a photographer, and photograph everything that’s there. Then have a look at the tyres of the fire lorry and the ambulance, so that we can rule them out – you’d better get photographs of them, too. Remember, the tracks of any vehicle that could possibly concern us must be underneath, or crossed by, the tracks of the lorry and the ambulance. Anything superimposed on those tracks doesn’t matter.’

Sergeant Grey went off, and Revers telephoned the Coroner, making an appointment to see him later that morning. With an hour or so in hand, he got a sheet of paper and drew up an estimated timetable of Paul Clayton’s last hours on earth. He began with tea at the South Down Camp, which he reckoned would have finished around 18.00. He wrote down:

18.00–22.30	In Mess, chatting and listening to radio
22.45    (?)	Set off for Avebury
02.00	Killed by falling stone?
05.00	Found by Boyce family

It was a thin record of fact – and much of it wasn’t fact, but only guesswork. Still, even an estimated framework of times was a starting point for trying to reconstruct what had happened between those times. The dead man couldn’t have left the camp before 22.30 because he was seen in the Mess until then. He might have left later than 22.45, but probably not much later: he didn’t appear to have gone into the sleeping hut, and it was unlikely that he would have stayed on in the Mess with the lights out. What time would he have got to Avebury? Assuming he had walked there direct, he had about a mile to go – in darkness. Twenty minutes? It couldn’t have taken much longer. Allowing for uncertainties about the actual time of his leaving the camp, Revers estimated his time of arrival at Avebury at about 23.15.

He had died, or so the medical evidence seemed to indicate, around 02.00: that left nearly three hours from his time of arrival at Avebury. What on earth was he doing? And why had he gone there, anyway?

Revers had no evidence to suggest the time at which the stone had fallen: he had estimated its fall at 02.00 because that was about the presumed time of Clayton’s death. The stone couldn’t have fallen before dark, or somebody would have noticed it. It had certainly fallen by 05.00, when the Boyces came upon it. Why had nobody in the village heard its fall – surely it must have made a great crash? Revers thought about this more closely, and decided that there need not have been a particularly loud noise. The stone had rolled over rather than fallen, it had landed on relatively soft turf, and there would have been, perhaps, more of a rumble than a crash. Could the noise heard by Mr and Mrs Wilkins during the night, and taken by them to have been a tractor engine of some sort, have been in fact the noise made by the falling stone? It seemed unlikely – an engine noise is not easily mistaken for anything else; least of all by a man who was himself a tractor driver. But it was about the right time. Could the tractor noise have masked any noise made by the falling stone? That was possible, certainly. But if there had been a tractor to make a noise there must have been somebody with the tractor: would he not have heard the stone fall, or, although it was night time, have seen the sudden change in silhouette of the Great Stones standing on Avebury Mound? If so, why had he done nothing about it? Revers was glad that he’d sent Sergeant Grey to look for traces of the tractor: if there was a vehicle there at about that time, they must certainly try to find it.

Revers had a sudden, sickening sense of futility: why was he bothering with this at all, using police time and manpower to accomplish – what? There was no evidence of any crime. There were puzzling features, certainly, about Clayton’s death and about the fall of the stone, but had not the doctor really diagnosed them away when he talked about the unexpected happenings in car crashes? The collapse of a twenty-ton sarsen boulder was enough to explain anything . . .

But it couldn’t explain what Paul Clayton had been doing there at that time of night. Revers sighed, and set off to make his call on the Coroner. On the way he thought of something else: wouldn’t a man on any expedition in the middle of the night have carried a torch? There had been no torch found by the body, and there had been nothing but the wallet, a handkerchief, a pen-knife and a few loose coins in the pockets of his clothes.