The Body in the Woods Read online

  Ray watched Goodchild back away, then turn and head up the field to his car.

  “No cup of tea for us then,” said Tom.

  “No bloody treasure either,” said Ray. “He’d better be paying cash or this is a right waste of time.”

  “That’s what Cresswell said on the phone,” said Tom, loosening the chains on the digger. “Day’s end, you get your dosh.”

  “Only I don’t want no messing about with National Insurance numbers or anything.”

  He watched Tom shrug. “I told you. It’s sorted.”

  Ray looked at him suspiciously. This wouldn’t be the first time Tom had got him a job and the money had mysteriously gone south.

  “When you’re done working out your beer and weed money,” said Tom, “you can give me a hand getting the digger down.”

  Ray nodded. Tom was his real boss here.

  “Don’t forget — you owe me three quid for breakfast, you said that—”

  “Broken bloody record you are, Ray Stroud.”

  Ray watched him head round to the trailer and drop the ramps.

  I’ve got four weeks of this, he thought. Still — all these students here — the grub’s sure to be good. Might even be able to sell ’em a bit of weed too …

  Shame about that cup of tea, though.

  3. A Summer Storm

  Two hours later and Ray had worked up a right sweat.

  First he’d fired up the chainsaw and felled the last of the trees, right up to the fence line. Dragged the timber down to the water’s edge, ready for stacking.

  Then Goodchild had made him chop out the remaining bushes at the edge of the meadow so he could peg out some string for the digger.

  Turning out not to be such an easy boss, that one.

  And all that time while he was busting his ass, Tom had stayed up at the top of the field in the shade, drinking tea and chatting to the students.

  Cheeky bugger, thought Ray, watching the digger driver light another fag. I’m burning up down here.

  The sun sat high in a clear blue sky. And now that all the trees were down, there was not an inch of shade.

  Ray stared at the deep, dark woodland just the other side of the fence. Tall trees in full leaf, dense bushes, just dapples of sunlight.

  Nice and cool in there, I bet, he thought.

  But Ray knew the gaffer would spot him if he slipped away for a secret sit-down and a roll-up.

  He took off the heavy strimmer harness and laid the machine on the ground. Then he lifted his hard hat and goggles and wiped his sweaty brow.

  At least down here by the river’s edge he caught a bit of a breeze. He watched a pretty little pleasure boat chug past, full of tourists.

  Some of them waved and took pictures of him. He stared back.

  Silence again. He took in the scene.

  Not much different from the view from his own not-so-pretty boat, a few miles downriver in Cherringham.

  The cool, dark water gliding past. The odd swan chugging up and down. Cattle dopily chewing cud in the meadows on the other side of the water, lowing in the heat.

  Then he heard a loud snap from inside the wood. Like someone standing on an old branch, breaking it.

  Ray turned and peered into the darkness of the trees.

  He saw a flash of movement.

  Some kind of animal? Wild boar maybe?

  No. Surely that was … someone watching …

  Just a glimpse — deep in the silent wood — but yes, a face.

  He blinked, wiped away the sweat again, screwed up his eyes against the sun, peered into the darkness …

  Yes, there it was again — a movement!

  And, for a second, he saw a shape move between the trees.

  A man. Definitely.

  Trying to stay out of sight.

  But why?

  Who?

  Loopy birdwatcher maybe? Not a day for birdwatching, with all these people around.

  And then a chilling thought.

  Someone watching … him?

  He ran through a quick mental inventory of people he wouldn’t want to see in a dark wood.

  People he owed money to.

  People he owed more than money. People maybe with long memories …

  Nah, most of them would still be in bed at this hour.

  Chill, he said to himself. Maybe it’s just the tax man trying to catch me out.

  He looked back up the slope of the meadow towards the vehicles and the digger. All the students were there still, setting up tables and tents, laying out tools. Goodchild poring over papers on a table.

  He looked back at the wood.

  The mystery man had gone.

  Leaving Ray feeling … more than unnerved.

  Feeling something …

  Wasn’t right …

  ***

  “Told you it was going to rain,” said Tom from inside the cab.

  Ray shovelled another load of thick, wet, black soil into the wheelbarrow and looked up at the digger driver in his high cab.

  Tom was grinning. Dry as a bone in there.

  “You and your bloody phone,” said Ray.

  Tom revved the engine, prodded the bucket into the mud, lifted the digger onto the back of its tracks, and did a clever turn that looked near impossible.

  Guy knew how to work the machine, that was for sure.

  Bloody show-off, thought Ray.

  But he knew it was Tom’s skill — not cutting up the surface — that was the reason he had got this job in the first place.

  Ray drove his shovel into the soft ground, picked up the wheelbarrow and pushed it up the hill towards the big pile of soil.

  Already today, he’d done thirty loads and he was knackered. Digging through gnarled tree roots. Rotten ground.

  And soaked through.

  Seemed everyone else had waterproofs. He could see the students and the volunteers huddled together under a big awning, drinking their bloody tea and waiting for the rain to stop.

  No rest for the wicked, he thought, running the wheelbarrow fast up the plank, nearly slipping off before quickly tipping it onto the top of the pile.

  Then, with a quick flip, he turned it round and headed back down the hill.

  He and Tom had dug three shallow trenches in different parts of the field, each time watched carefully by Goodchild and the others, all holding trowels and buckets.

  Stop-start work it was. Scrape a bit, wait for them to have a good butchers at the ground looking for God knows what. Then, scrape a bit more, wait, and so on and so on.

  All for a bloody bridge too!

  Then Goodchild had taken steps closer to the digger, and held up a hand to broadcast his words like they were in the middle of a hurricane and not just heavy rain.

  “Time for one more trench — eh, chaps — before close of play?”

  Ray had hoped that they’d already hit the end of bloody play!

  But then Goodchild had marked out another grid by the woods for them to dig, and disappeared up the field.

  All right for him, sitting in his car listening to his damn radio, thought Ray. While I’m out here in a bloody downpour, sodden through, boots full of water, covered in mud, not a cup of tea all day …

  He skirted the moving digger carefully, so that Tom could see where he was, then parked the wheelbarrow and watched the big bucket scrape another six inches of topsoil out of the marked-up area.

  Then …

  Some instinct made him look into the trees.

  A flash of white again.

  Was that another movement?

  Dammit — who the hell was hiding in there watching?

  He decided to have a proper look and took a couple of steps towards the copse, but then—

  “Ray!”

  He turned, to see Tom, sticking his head out the side window of the digger, waving to him. He walked back towards the digger.

  “Ray. Take a look will you, mate?” said Tom, nodding at the trench.

  Ray stepped carefully
along the side of the pegged area. The trench was about twenty feet long and four feet wide, and — he had to admit — beautifully level at around a foot deep. Its edges clean and carved by the bucket — green grass on one side, black soil where the turf had been peeled back.

  Nice work, in spite of all them roots. But in the centre — Ray could see a big patch of differently coloured soil — brown and grey, with bits of gravel in it.

  He turned back to Tom. “Someone’s already dug this up,” he said.

  Tom nodded — head jutting out still, getting splattered by the rain. “That’s what I thought,” he said, turning off the digger and stepping down from the cab.

  Ray looked around the field.

  “Odd place to dig a hole,” he said. “Think it might be treasure?”

  In which case, he would do all he could to keep it hidden from Goodchild and his bridge-hunters!

  “Never know,” said Tom, inspecting the dirt. “Only one way to find out.”

  “No need to tell the gaffer, eh?” said Ray.

  He watched Tom peer through the rain, past the digger, at the archaeologists at the top of the field.

  A grin. “Shame to get him out of the dry when it might be nothing,” said Tom.

  Ray knew exactly what Tom was thinking. The digger was in the way — Goodchild couldn’t see them.

  “Gonna get the shovel,” Ray said. Tom watched while he went over to the barrow and brought back the shovel.

  With the digger in the way, he and Tom were hidden from view.

  Ray took the shovel and slammed it into the discoloured area of dirt. Here, the blade went in easily — way easier than the root-blocked soil elsewhere — and he took a great bite out of the earth.

  He looked at Tom. The digger driver looked back at him, eyebrows raised.

  What we got here then?

  Ray took another shovelful, then another, dumping each load into the barrow.

  The earth loose. Looser than it should be.

  “Funny,” he said, “if this was dug when the Romans was here, you’d expect it to be more compact, like the rest of the site.”

  “Doesn’t have to be Roman, does it?” said Tom. “Treasure’s treasure — long as it’s old.”

  Ray stopped for a breather and looked down. He’d dug quite a pit. At least three feet deep. And still the soil was loose.

  “Bloody deep hole they made, whoever they were,” he said. “Whatever they put down here they didn’t want anybody finding it.”

  “Exactly,” said Tom, grinning.

  Ray grabbed the spade again and slammed it into the soft, sticky earth.

  Crack.

  Something hard.

  “Aha!” said Ray, dropping the spade to one side and looking up at Tom.

  Tom grinned back at him.

  “Pass me one of them trowels,” said Ray, nodding to the bucket of tools which one of the students had left on the digger.

  Ray waited for Tom to hand him the trowel, then went down onto his hands and knees, and started scraping at the bottom of the hole.

  Now this — was exciting.

  “What is it?” said Tom.

  “Hold your horses,” said Ray.

  He peered into the dark hole, the air moist and sweet, the soil so dark and rich, but veined through with gravel and brown dirt.

  He felt the trowel scrape something hard.

  Wood? Metal?

  A treasure chest?

  He scraped faster along the line, feeling a contour emerging. Something pale.

  He put the trowel to one side and used his fingers — clawing away at the muddy soil, sliding his hand along this shape, which now felt somehow … familiar.

  His fingers slid into a slot along the length of the thing — smooth, then knobbly.

  Then, the realisation …

  He jerked back.

  “Bone,” said Ray.

  “What?” said Tom. “Bugger.”

  Ray stopped digging.

  “Probably some old sheep. Or a cow.”

  He stood up, brushed the mud from his jeans.

  “Waste of bloody time, that was,” said Ray. “Just our bleeding luck.”

  “Looks like you’ll have to shove all that muck back in there, mate,” said Tom.

  Suddenly, this mess was all Ray’s to repair, now that their hopes of a treasure were dashed. “Before the gaffer sees what you’ve done.”

  Ray wiped the rain and sweat from his face and stared at Tom.

  Bastard, he thought.

  Then something shiny caught his eye in the hole.

  He peered down into the dark pit. Yes — there …

  “Hold on,” he said, getting down onto his knees again. “I think we just got lucky.”

  He reached into the soil, fingers scraping at the dirt. Bits of old cloth coming away, lifting clods of earth with them.

  Then …

  There was something shiny.

  Something metal — he could feel it so hard in his fingers.

  Quickly he scraped more soil away.

  Yes! It was some kind of jewellery — must be!

  Diamonds! Gold!

  He reached down and grabbed the thing and pulled it upwards, and as it popped out of the thick earth, it seemed to lift a long chunk of old bone with it, the cow bone, or pig bone, or sheep bone, or whatever the hell it was.

  The white bone, now lifting from the dark suffocating ground, coming up fast with the suction of the muck suddenly stopping …

  And then Ray stopped dead, not understanding, not believing what his eyes were telling him …

  His eyes staring at this … thing … in his grasp, this thing that his own fingers had just held, slipped through, shaped, felt …

  No damn doubt about it.

  A human arm, broken, bare, white — skeleton fingers splayed wide at its end.

  And caught up in the bits of bone — a shiny, glinting metal and glass watch.

  And now, so clearly visible in the soil …

  A skull, bone-white, shrouded in tattered cloth, its eye sockets mud-full, its teeth bare and brown as if the head was about to call out to Ray, to thank him for freeing it after all this time.

  “Oh bugger,” said Ray, stepping up and away from the corpse, standing in the relentless rain and staring at his own muddy, shaking hands.

  “Now look what we’ve bloody done.”

  4. The Carnival Committee

  Jack Brennan sat back in the wooden chair that felt like it was designed for a much smaller human.

  When he shifted in the tight seat, the chair gave out a sequence of loud creaks in protest.

  Everything’s so old in this country, he thought.

  Back in the states, something one hundred years old was an heirloom. A treasure!

  Here — just furniture.

  He took in the crowded meeting room of the village hall. With its big oil portraits of past mayors, and tall windows set in stone, it looked like a cross between a medieval castle hall and a church.

  When he was a kid back in Brooklyn, he’d seen places like this on TV: only thing missing was Robin Hood swinging in on a chandelier, sword aloft, coming to rescue Maid Marian.

  But this evening, not everything looked like it belonged in a history lesson.

  Up on the high wall ahead of him, a big projection screen had been set up. Below it, behind a long table, Jack saw the dozen or so members of the esteemed Cherringham Carnival Committee, all business-like with laptops and folders, smartphones and laser pointers.

  He recognised most of the faces from the village. In fact, two or three, he knew pretty well: his old friend local solicitor Tony Standish, the vicar Simon Hewitt, and local plumber Pete Bull.

  A few he hadn’t seen before: one in particular, a harassed looking man in a tired suit, who sat at the end of the table, hunched over his phone.

  He took in the rest of the audience, the ranks of loyal volunteers, all here, he knew, to run through the final plans for the yearly carnival.

&nb
sp; Just a week away. Highlight of the summer. And — Jack had to admit — one of his favourite times of the year. A real taste of English village life, in all its eccentric, bizarre and sometimes beer-filled ways.

  He’d lived in Cherringham for a few years now but this was the first time he’d been invited to glimpse “behind the curtain”, to see how the event was organised.

  Just have to wait to find out why I’m so privileged, he thought.

  He checked out the back of the hall. He’d hoped that his good friend — and partner in their occasional detective work — Sarah would be here tonight.

  As well as running a web design business in the village, she also edited the online village Newswire and Jack knew tonight was her last chance to check the carnival schedule before she published.

  But Sarah had texted him to say she was just running out of time — I thought kids were supposed to get easier when they grew up — and could he be an angel and take some notes?

  Shame she’s not here, thought Jack. He missed her at events like this.

  “Want to swap seats, Jack?” came a voice from his side.

  He turned to see Josh Robinson, the aged owner of Cherringham Electricals, peering at him behind big spectacles.

  “Sorry, Josh,” said Jack, “can’t seem to stop the damn thing squeaking.”

  “Not built for a big fella like you,” said Josh. And then a tad louder: “Sooner this meeting starts, the better.”

  And, as if the committee had heard Josh’s advice, Jack heard the tinkle of a hand bell from the top table and the room went quiet.

  He saw the woman in the centre of the table tap her microphone.

  Mid-forties, with the sharp focus of a person used to being in charge, hair curled in a perfect swirl, she leaned forward to speak.

  Then she seemed to notice the man in the suit on the end, still deeply involved with his phone.

  “Mr Simpson?” she said archly. “If you don’t mind?”

  Jack saw the man look up, nod sheepishly and put his phone away.

  Something of the Hillary Clinton going on there, thought Jack. Wouldn’t like to cross her.

  He watched her turn back to the audience with a patient smile: “Thank you all so much for coming — I promise we shan’t keep you any longer than we have to. No sermons tonight — isn’t that right, Vicar?”

  Jack saw her turn to the Reverend Hewitt at the end of the table, who gave a nervous nod while a polite laugh rippled through the room.