IN THE CAREFULLY constructed grave, made of paving slabs and once lined with blankets, was the body of a child—a boy of eight or ten years. It had been in the ground long enough to be entirely skeletonized, making it difficult to judge the sex on initial inspection, but there were things in the little tomb—David Sperrin would have called them grave goods—that made it more than an educated guess. Boys’ toys: a wooden train, a pair of cheap plastic binoculars, a yellow digger, a battered Frisbee. And though at first glance the clothes could have belonged equally to a boy or a girl, when Hazel leaned closer, she saw that both the jeans and the denim jacket fastened left over right.
One might not have been significant, an item passed down from an older sibling; two were suggestive. DNA would prove the matter conclusively, but Hazel had no doubt that she was looking at the remains of a little boy, laid to rest by someone who loved him with as much care and dignity as could be managed without benefit of clergy or churchyard. It was a crime scene because it’s illegal to bury members of your family in the woods without telling anyone. The discovery launched a murder investigation because no one could think why anyone should bury in such a way a child who had died of natural or accidental causes.
The senior investigating officer from the local division was a tired-looking middle-aged man whose Wellingtons had started to leak halfway across the water meadow. “Detective Inspector Edwin Norris,” he said, one slightly rheumy eye settling on Hazel. “You’re Constable Best?”
She nodded. “My father works on the estate.”
He went around the others, establishing who was who, why each of them was there. “Who opened the grave?”
“I did,” said Sperrin.
“Why?”
The archaeologist shrugged. “It’s my job.”
“Digging up children’s graves?”
“Finding unexplained lumps in the landscape and explaining them.”
“I’ll be interested,” rumbled Norris, “to hear your explanation of this.”
“Not exactly my period,” said Sperrin airily. He seemed entirely untroubled by the discovery. Of course, thought Hazel, he’s used to digging up human remains.
“Which is?” asked Norris.
“Well before plastic toys,” said Sperrin.
“Did any of you touch anything inside the grave?”
Hazel shook her head. “We looked in. When we saw what it was, everyone backed off and I called you.”
“Good.” The inspector turned ponderously to Pete Byrfield. “This land is yours, sir?”
Byrfield nodded, then turned and pointed. “My house is over there.”
“Where’s the nearest public access?”
“The gate lodge.” Byrfield turned a quadrant, pointed again. “About half a mile.”
As he went through the routine questionnaire, DI Norris recognized that it didn’t apply terribly well to the current circumstances. “How long have you lived here?”
“All my life.”
“It belonged to your parents?”
“It belonged to my ancestors.”
“Since when?”
Byrfield looked slightly embarrassed. “After Bosworth.”
“Who was he, and when did he leave?”
David Sperrin made little attempt to disguise a smirk.
“The Battle of Bosworth Field,” explained Byrfield. “August twenty-second, 1485. When the first Tudor defeated the last Plantagenet, there was a major reallocation of national resources. The first Lord Byrfield had done something useful for Henry Tudor and this was his reward. The land, that is. The current house is the third one on the site.”
Norris looked across at the grave, now covered by a forensics tent, and back at Pete. “So we can safely say that, whenever that child was buried, your family were living here.”
“Yes.”
“Who would have had access to it?”
Byrfield gave a helpless shrug. “I can tell you who was living in the house if you can give me a date. But all sorts of people use the land, with and without permission. It’s not like it’s our garden—it’s rough grazing and woodland, we’ve never objected to local people coming here. You try to discourage poaching, but you can’t stop that, either, the best you can do is keep it manageable.
“There are four farms on the estate, so the families there and anyone working for them might pass through here. The local children play around the lake. Stockmen drive cattle across from one holding to another. Anyone mislaying a beast might come here looking for it. I’m sorry, Inspector, I can’t give you a list of people with a good reason to be here. People don’t need a good reason to be here.”
Norris breathed heavily at him. “Then can you tell me when you first noticed this mound?”
Byrfield did no better with that. “I never noticed it at all,” he admitted. “The whole area’s covered in lumps and bumps. David singled it out when he was field walking—surveying the land for possible archaeology. But that was less than a month ago, and you can tell from the turfs that it’s not been disturbed for years.”
Norris turned back to Sperrin. “What made you open this mound rather than any of the others?”
The archaeologist shrugged. “Instinct? Experience? It looked a bit more regular than some of them, it’s slightly separated from a lot of them, and when I stuck a ranging rod into the earth, I met stone. I didn’t know it was anything. I thought it was worth a look.” He grinned wolfishly. “You can’t say I was wrong.”
Norris squinted at him. “Sir—you are aware that we’re talking about the death of a child? I’m not sure your tone is altogether appropriate.”
Sperrin remained unconcerned. “Whatever happened here, it happened decades ago. Possibly before I was alive. Possibly before you were alive. It hasn’t been a tragedy for a very long time. Now it’s just a puzzle.”
The inspector continued to look at him just long enough to register his disapproval. Then he turned his gaze to Hazel. “Thank you for your help, Constable. We’ll get formal statements off everyone, but as Mr. Sperrin”—he pronounced the name carefully, the way you might handle something sticky—“points out, this isn’t a recent event, there’s no reason to connect it to any of you people. Even Lord Byrfield”—his lips formed a letter M before he remembered and corrected himself—“was probably a babe in arms when this happened. Not much point asking what you remember.”
Byrfield was looking thoughtful. “You could talk to my mother.”
Norris was taken aback, as if he thought earls arrived in the world in a different manner from normal folk. “She still lives here?”
Byrfield gave a slightly strained smile. “Oh yes. She has an apartment in the house. I’ll take you, if you like.”
The inspector considered. “Maybe later. No point troubling her until I know what questions to ask. Right now I don’t have even an approximate date of death. When I’ve had a preliminary report from Forensics, then I’m sure it would be helpful to talk to her. Er—I’m assuming she’s still—er…”
“In full possession of her faculties? Believe it,” said Pete Byrfield fervently.
After a moment Hazel touched his arm gently. “Come on, let’s leave them to it. There’s nothing we can do here except get in the way.”
He blinked, then gave her a grateful grin. As they walked back up the water meadow he said wistfully, “Isn’t it funny how the world changes? An hour ago, all I had to worry about was whether or not I’d got a Neolithic tomb on my land. Now it turns out that for most of my life there’s been a small child buried within sight of my house and nobody knew. I played down here when I was a boy. I don’t doubt I scrambled over that mound along with all the others. It makes you feel a bit … well, funny.”
“I think it’s rather nice,” said Hazel. “That even after he was dead, he still had other kids coming around to play.”
Byrfield smiled. He’d forgotten—or rather, not forgotten, just not thought about it recently—that she’d always had the ability to make him smile. They hadn’t been close friends when they were growing up—four years is a big age difference in your teens—but she’d always been somewhere on his radar, in the same way he’d always been somewhere on hers. He’d gone away to agricultural college, then she’d gone away to university, and it’s doubtful if either had given the other more than a passing thought in all the years since. But a link remained, and the link was Byrfield itself. Only in the most literal sense did Byrfield belong to Pete. In every other way Pete belonged to Byrfield, and so did the daughter of his handyman. Land has a grip like iron.
“I’m glad you were here,” said Byrfield. A thought occurred to him. “Does this mean you’ll be staying?”
Hazel hadn’t thought about it. She thought about it now. “We probably should, if only for a few days. Until Detective Inspector Norris says he’s finished with us. It’s not as if either Gabriel or I has anything to rush back to.”
“Good,” said Byrfield quietly.