They moved back to the entrance or gateway to Todd’s Mound. Tom looked downhill in the direction of the fallen tree. A tattered black shape seemed to unfold itself from the tangle of branches and Tom felt a thrill of horror until he realized that it was nothing more than a crow, a great crow which rose into the air and clattered out of sight round the slope of the hill. Tom wrinkled his nose. He glanced at Helen standing beside him but, though she too had observed the bird, she was now gazing out at the city and the countryside beyond.
‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘Wait for me.’
‘Stay there, Helen. It’s probably nothing.’
He was already several yards below and to one side of the embankment gateway. The slope was steeper than it seemed from above. To keep his balance, Tom used his walking stick. The hem of his coat brushed against the chalky soil. He edged towards the fallen tree. That was where the crow had been. That was where the smell seemed to be coming from.
He halted to get his bearings. But if he’d expected to see anything he was disappointed. The flank of the hillside rose sharply on his left. The bulk of the falllen tree — a beech, he thought — lay a little below where he was standing. The crown of the tree was further down, although a number of severed branches were strewn casually across the slope. Where the roots had been was a gaping black hole with only tooth-like shards remaining. Nothing more. But not quite, because Tom noticed that just above the root-hole was another gap, a yet darker space, partly obscured by a branch to which withered leaves still clung.
Afterwards he didn’t know what had drawn his attention to that darker spot on the slant of Todd’s Mound. Whether it was the suspicion of something man-made in the arrangement of stones around a hole in the ground. Or the way the severed tree branch almost seemed to have been positioned so as to obscure the hole. Or the sense that, if the smell — a sharp, unpleasant smell — on the hill-side had a source, then it was from here.
Tom covered the few dozen feet to the place. He was right. It was an entrance, of sorts, into the hillside. There were three slabs of stone forming a primitive door, although one of the uprights had fallen. He tugged at the branch laid across the entrance.
‘What are you doing down there, Tom? Are you all right?’
By now, Tom was on his hands and knees, oblivious to the mud on his coat. Oblivious too to Helen’s call. A strong smell emanated from the mouth of the cave or chamber or whatever it was. Something dead lay in there. Of course something dead lay in there! It must be a burial chamber. But this was a recent death, not one from thousands of years ago.
Two things prevented Tom Ansell from rising to his feet and scrambling back to where Helen stood, and then calling for attention and help. The first was the fear of looking a fool. Whatever was inside the chamber might be animal, not human. He did not want to summon a rescue party to pull out a dead sheep. The other reason was that Tom felt he ought to see this through himself. It was up to him to have a first sight of whatever lay inside this hole in the hillside.
Clutching his stick with one hand, he got out a hand-kerchief and held it tight against his nose and mouth as he edged his way inside the aperture. The smell was almost overpowering. He paused. There were small sounds, scuffling sounds, which he could just detect over the banging of his heart. He coughed, and the scuffling stopped. Using the walking stick as a probe he pushed forward and it tapped against a hard object. He picked it up. A bone, a human bone he thought. But not recent, because it was white and dry and stripped of everything.
The day was overcast but there was enough light seeping into the entrance of the hole for Tom to get an impression of what was lying deeper inside. More scattered bones, it seemed, and something else in among the bones, not white and sterile like them, but an object which was wrapped up and foul-smelling and too large to be a sheep. An object with shod feet. He prodded at the soles of the feet with his stick. Then he crawled as fast as he could out of the hole, going in reverse. He sat on the chalky slope, gulping in draughts of fresh air, even if that air was still tainted by the scent from the burial chamber. A movement startled him. It was Helen. Worried by Tom’s absence, she had half walked, half scrambled down the slope. Her hair was tumbling out from under her sensible cap and her face was flushed. Seeing Tom, she shrieked because of his appearance. He’d turned a touch green. But Tom hardly noticed her arrival or her shriek. Instead, he was trying to keep his gorge from rising and he was thinking: two bodies in three days. It’s a bit steep.
Somewhere below Tom and Helen, near the eastern base of Todd’s Mound, was a third figure. The discovery of the body — it must have been discovered, judging by the woman’s shriek, sharp as a bird-call — was no surprise to this person, who had been responsible for putting the body in the burial chamber. Well, it would have been found sooner or later. No great harm done.
Canon Selby’s House, Again
Tom Ansell’s thoughts were echoed by Inspector Foster that evening as he sat with Tom and Helen in the drawing room of Canon Selby’s house. They were all sipping brandy, courtesy of the owner.
‘You mustn’t make a habit of this body-finding, Mr Ansell. First Canon Slater and now, well, now whoever the unfortunate individual was out at Todd’s Mound. .’
‘We think it was Mr North,’ said Helen.
‘Possibly, possibly,’ said the policeman with all his professional caution. ‘But there’s no way of telling, is there? Not until we get some of those clothes cleaned up and give Mrs Banks a sight of them.’
This was true enough. The process of recovering the corpse from the flank of the hill had taken up most of the day. Tom and Helen returned to the town on foot and entered the police house, muddy and bedraggled and breathless. Inspector Foster had to be found and their story told several times over. A trio of constables was gathered and, together with the Inspector and Tom and Helen, they were driven back to Todd’s Mound in a carriage and a cart. A carriage for Foster and the two young people, the cart for the three constables. There was a purpose to the cart, as they realized later. Tom urged Helen to stay behind — he could lead the group to the place by himself — but she insisted on being ‘in at the kill’ (as she said, before clapping her hand over her mouth in horrified amusement).
Tom and she had been content to do no more than guide Foster and his men towards the point above the fallen beech on the eastern side of the hill. They did not see Gabriel the shepherd again. Perhaps he was alarmed by the crowd of police. Tom and Helen watched from the embankment gateway while the constables did what was literally the dirty work down below under Foster’s direction. The first constable to go in, Chesney, came out almost straightaway. He said, ‘There’s two of ’em in there, guv.’ Foster explained that they weren’t interested in bare bones, which might have lain there for centuries, but in fresh (or freshish) corpses. Chesney should go back inside and concentrate on that.
The burial chamber was too small to hold more than a single person at a time so first Constable Chesney and then the other policemen entered one by one, holding their breath and tugging at the corpse until it was brought out, inch by inch, from the interior of the burrow and laid out on the hillside. One of the constables turned away to be sick. Even from a distance the sight was unpleasant. Tom instinctively put up his hand to shield Helen but she had already averted her gaze.
The body was still clothed but the garments were stained and discoloured, and rents in the material showed grey-green flesh underneath. The head, which was the same colour, had little hair left and the face was shapeless and pitted with myriad tiny holes. It was apparent too that small animals must have been feeding on the whole body.