“What exactly are we looking for?” asked the photographer confidentially, between sessions.
“Anything that shouldn’t be there,” said George laconically.
Their guess was as good as his, that was the truth of the matter; but the photographer shrugged and withdrew to his work again philosophically under the impression that the C.I. was being cagey. Yet he and everyone else in the group, if required to guess, would have come up with the same answer. What we’re looking for, George thought grimly, is a motive; but what we’re going to find is a man. What else gets itself buried secretly under a cellar floor? A man—or a woman, of course. The indications were so positive that there was no eluding them; yet they made no sense. They had one murder and one attempted murder on their hands, but nowhere in all this curious affair was there the least suggestion of a person lost, either man or woman. If this piece of the puzzle really existed, it was a piece that fitted in nowhere.
But if it existed, it was here, and they would find it.
It took them some time, but they had the whole night, and could afford to go about it methodically. When they had uncovered the entire centre of the floor, the cross-lights showed an area which seemed to vary slightly in colouring and texture from the surrounding hard-packed soil. They staked it out carefully and began to dig. Eight feet long, approximately, and five or six feet wide. Big enough. Big enough to receive the thing to be hidden, and for the contortions of whoever had hidden it. The earth grew more friable and workable after the first crust was off. As they removed it, it was piled carefully in the open space against the rear wall, where two sweating constables began to sift it under a strong light for any unforeseen trifles it might disgorge.
The boots of the diggers gradually vanished below soil level, a rectangle of darkness sank into the earth. Picks were discarded after the first foot or so, and the shovel went on steadily hefting out dark clots of earth to add to the growing heap at the back of the room. By midnight they were three feet down, and Constable Barnes had just taken over the shovel. He was one of Sergeant Moon’s young men, six feet three of solid countryman, with a light step and a light hand, a serviceable brain and an invaluable gift for looking simple-minded. His sense of touch was extremely sensitive. He drove in the spade, and halted in mid-thrust, refraining from pressing home the stroke.
“Something here—something soft but tough, that gives— Hold on!” He went to his knees, and began to excavate with hands nearly as large as the spade. Something allowed itself to be coaxed out of the soil, earth crumbing from it as he found an edge and eased it into the light. Fabric, beginning to rot, for his fingers went through the threads when he exerted too much force, but still tough enough to hold together. A button appeared, and as he scraped the soil away, another. When he turned the edge he held, there were fragments and frayed ends of a thinner fabric, a lining.
“Tweed,” said Barnes, thumbing the remnants. “There’s nobody inside this—look, just thrown in, folded double.” He scraped industriously until he got it free, and handed it up out of the trench, gently shaking into recognisable form a man’s coat. It was of no colour now but the colour of the earth, but the laboratory would have enough material here to keep them busy for a week.
“It looks as if we’re arriving,” said George, sitting on his heels at the edge of the grave. “Take it gently from now on, he shouldn’t be far below. If a coat had to be disposed of, there could be a hat, as well.” The coat had settled one thing. This wasn’t one of old Robert’s ladies, more importunate and inconvenient than the rest, which had been one of the possibilities in George’s mind.
“I went digging with one of the Birmingham University archaeologists, couple of seasons back,” said Barnes surprisingly. “He’d have had me brushing away delicately with a little soft paint-brush, just to open up a ruddy post-hole, and here we go digging for real men, not their artifacts, with picks and shovels, and one night to do it in. If you ask me, there’s something queer about that lot of values, history or no history.” But all the time he was on his knees at one end of the excavated trench, using his great hands, feeling for the strangers in the soil. “Who wants a post-hole, anyhow? When I volunteered, I thought I was going to dig out the foundations of a whole damn’ castle before lunch, and the bones of half the garrison after. All I found was a couple of bits of pottery, and a beef bone, and a bit of charred wood. I din’ think much of that. I never went again.”
“Is that why you joined the force?” George asked with genuine interest. The huge, artistic, subtle hands smoothing away the layers of soil had halted, gently probing, quivering like a water-diviner’s willow twig.
“Maybe. Live men matter more, I reckon.” He withdrew his hands for a moment, brushed off loam and flexed his fingers. “Something else here. Not a hat. Not cloth this time. Something hard—listen.” He had uncovered a small medallion of some flat, dingy surface, hardly distinguishable from the earth surrounding it except by its firm level. He rapped on it with his knuckles, and it gave forth a small, hollow sound, muted by the masses of earth gripping it on all sides. “All right, I reckon the shovel isn’t going to hurt this lot much.”
He stood up, and began to slide his spade along the level surface, exposing it gradually from end to end. Dull, clay-coloured leather or imitation leather—the sound suggested the latter, and after all, today’s plastics are practically indestructible. Barnes scooped away the earth from round it, and heaved it out of the ground by one end. A large, rigid-framed suitcase, substantial but lightweight, probably fibre-glass.
“Hmmm, all his belongings, too,” said George. “Shouldn’t be much of an identification problem, once we find the owner.”
They hoisted it out with great care and lifted it aside. If there is anything proof against dissolution, terrifyingly enough, it must be plastic matter. Some day we may bury ourselves under a mountain of our own ingenious refuse, imperishable and dead, a cosmic paradox in pastel colours, obscenely mute, naked, textureless and perpetual. And only our computers will survive to record our submersion. In a medieval cellar haunted by centuries of living and dying, the survival qualities of this synthetic creation seemed particularly out of place.
“That’s been bought new within the past six or seven years,” said Barnes, briefly considering the thing as he handed it out. “That sort of lock hasn’t been going much longer. Our Louie bought one something like it when she sailed for Canada to take up a job as a typist, that’d be five years back, or thereabouts. She got married a year after she went there—ask me, that’s what they want these girls for. There’s a lot of room for a lot of people in Canada.” He retired abruptly into his pit. By this time it had become his, he was in sole charge of it. “If I was getting rid of a bloke and his belongings,” he said hollowly out of the grave, “I’d put him down the lowest level, too.”