Episode 6 - The hideyhole

Tuesday cont.

Was the phone-call telepathic. Did Cleo realize how disgruntled Dorothy was?

“Hi, Dorothy. Surprise! I’ve been meaning to phone you,” Cleo improvised-

“I don’t suppose you’ve had time,” Dorothy snapped.

“Well I have been rather busy.”

“Too busy to bother telling me what is going on,” said Dorothy.

“Don’t make me feel guilty,” said Cleo. Her conscience had already been gnawing at her.

“If you asked for my help, you’d get it,” said Dorothy, peeved by Cleo’s apparent indifference to her feelings. “And you do feel guilty!”

“Well, just a little, but it’s all been so weird.”

“How weird?”

Cleo did not want to upset Dorothy with gruesome details.

“At least it didn’t get leaked to the papers. You’d know if it had,” she said,

“Would I know about the headless corpse, Cleo?”

“Who told you that?”

“The anonymous note in the Monday Gazette reported headless bones somewhere near Middlethumpton.”

“So how come Bertie Browne did not contact Gary about it?” said Cleo. “And why do you think I had something to do with it, for heaven’s sake?”

“You know something, Cleo, and you know I would want to know. That’s why you haven’t phoned, isn’t it?”

“Do you know who wrote to the gazette?”

“It certainly wasn’t me. Someone must have witnessed the scene and sent a mail. The dig was on Sunday, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and someone always sees, Dorothy. You know that. But that kind of vague information is no good to Bertie. Even he can’t make a story out of totally vague information.”

“I beg to differ!”

“He’s more careful these days, Dorothy.”

“I bet Gary doesn’t think he is.”

“OK. He’s more careful too, these days. You cannot tell Bertie anything. He reads between the lines.”

“It was under the rubric ‘last minute’ that is meant for cars and bikes. Someone must have smuggled it in,” said Dorothy.

“Another mystery, but one we can’t solve.”

“And I suppose you wanted to protect this poor old piano teacher from the beastly news.”

Cleo was put on the defensive.

“I didn’t look at the Gazette yesterday and Gary relies on Joe to keep him up to date about the contents, but he can’t have seen it either. You could have called as soon as you saw it, but you didn’t, Dorothy.”

“I was waiting for you to call,”

“People only read the column if they want to buy or sell a vehicle,” said Cleo.

“And that includes me,” said Dorothy, “though I eventually read every word in the Gazette.”

“Do you? You surprise me.”

“I always read the last minute column twice. Occasionally someone wants to sell a lawn-mower and I would like a new one, but one that goes by itself.”

“Wow!”

“Lawn-mowers that go by themselves are all the rage, Cleo. You should have one for that acre of grass behind your cottage.”

“It’s the only fitness training Gary has time for, so I won’t stop him running after the lawn-mower, Dorothy.”

“He’s seen mine and wants one.”

“You don’t have one!”

“I mean that I’ve mentioned it and showed him a photo ages ago. I haven’t got one yet.”

“OK. I was just curious.”

***

“So now we are back in contact, can you please reveal the facts of the gruesome case I’m not supposed to know about?” said Dorothy, wishing she had gone to Cleo’s cottage and confronted her personally. She hated phone-calls because she liked to see the face of the person she was talking to challenging or ordering from.

“I can tell you that whoever sent that information to the Gazette did not know that the skull was buried nearby and was reunited with the skeleton.”

“Are you sure they match?” said Dorothy.

“That’s a good question. Chris’s theory is that all the body parts would be buried close together because that’s what people did, but we’ll have to wait for the DNA results.”

“What people?”

“Anthropophagous ones,” said Cleo.

“I don’t know that word.”

“Cannibalism, Dorothy.”

Dorothy gasped.

“So the informant must have left the scene before the head was found,” she said with great presence of mind.

“The bones had been in the ground for about 2 years” said Cleo, realizing the Dorothy would not be fobbed ff.

“So the skeleton probably can’t be identified and whoever put it there got away with it.”

It dawned on Cleo and she could normalize things with Dorothy by sending her on a mission. That also occurred to Dorothy.

“Who did the dig? Do I know him?”

“I doubt it. It’s a Mr Sloane, and Albert Medic known as Al is a teenage volunteer helping him.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?” Dorothy said.

“Why that’s a brilliant idea,” Cleo improvised.

Dorothy was good at being a step ahead.

“From what I hear, Al is something of an unknown quantity,” Cleo continued. “He is the only witness to the discovery of the bones. In fact, he found them and dug one up.”

“Where will I find him? At the priory? You’d better tell me everything.”

Cleo told Dorothy all she knew, pointing out that things could have moved on since then.

“So you see what a dilemma I had keeping you out of it against my better judgment,” she said.

Dorothy did not think that was a reason to keep her in the dark, always assuming Cleo ha d not made it up  the excuse on the spur of the moment.

“Well, I’m in it now, so I’ll see what I can do,” said Dorothy. “The last thing we can use is an informant.”

“Exactly! Keep me posted when you’ve been there,” said Cleo.

“Don’t I always?” retorted Dorothy with heavy emphasis on the ‘I’. “Aren’t you going to provide me with detailed instructions?”

“I think you’ll have to play it by ear, Dorothy, but if you go there now, you might find someone to talk to.”

“I was just about to suggest that.”

***

Dorothy was sure that her mission was too urgent to delay. She was extremely curious about the goings-on at the priory. A brisk walk there followed almost immediately. She did not even eat lunch.

Mr Sloane and Al were sitting on tombstones observing from a distance the rubble that had closed off whatever was behind it. Chris and Ned were busy on their side of the dig site looking for clues to the person who had buried the human remains.

Dorothy approached the teenager she assumed was Al sitting warily on his tombstone, rather defiantly making large bubbles and popping pink gum and seriously annoying the person she thought must be Mr Sloane. Dorothy had a hunch based on her knowledge of body language gained when dealing with little ballet prodigies and their ambitious parents. That made her decide to question Al as if she did not know what was going on, in the hope that he really had been the anonymous informer.

To her amazement, Al immediately said that he had played a game called Defend Your Castle on his Nintendo more than once and decided to warn people about the wicked things going on at the priory.

“It was ‘orrible finding them bones, Miss!” he said, obviously glad to talk about the horror.

“So it was your letter in the Gazette, was it?”

Al pulled faces in an attempt to stop Dorothy saying any more in front of Sloane, who was sitting on his neighbouring tombstone watching the forensic activity on the dig site and wondering what to do about the heap of rubble he and Al had conveyed to the surface.

“What was that about the Gazette?” Sloane said.

“I want a new moped,” Al improvised. “I’m saving up for one that goes faster.”

Sloane was satisfied with that explanation.

“When the dig’s over,” said Dorothy, “you might like to do some gardening for me.”

“For bees and honey, Miss?”

“Sausage and mash!”

“You’re a china plate, Miss!”

“Thanks, Albert!”

Mission accomplished, Dorothy decided not to stay any longer. It was too cold to hang around in a graveyard, so she left.

***

Bill and Ben Gates possessed a gadget that could intercept anything the police wavelength had to offer. Going straight was not easy if you had led a life of petty but lucrative crime and they took umbrage if youths like Al told on them. They recognized him from an incident  for which he had earned a warning beating. What’s he doing here?

After surveying the lie of the land, the Gates Brothers – advertised in the Gazette with ‘we transport everything’- decided that there was something creepy about this job. They ran a business that purported to be gardening. They felled trees and tidied things up, and took away shavings they had made out of bits of tree in a portable shaving-machine they could set up when needed. But today they had understood it was only a transport job and were dismayed at the idea that they would have fill their van with rubble. They thought they should leave, but the woman who ordered the transport had been desperate, and they were gentlemen at heart.

Al really should have raised the alarm. The Gates brothers were criminally imaginative and had not got away with the job Al had told the police about. Bill and Ben Gates hoped that Al would not recognize them if they kept their heads down. They had recognized the little skunk, but even if he had cottoned on to the appearance of the Gate brothers in their white van (not unlike the forensic one), Al would know better than to snitch on them and get another good hiding for his treachery.

Arguably, this job was legal having been ordered by the police themselves, in the guise of Gisele Thring, who was in charge of the transport and police car division and thought it would be alright to use the HQ security van to transport items on a Sunday, since it was not needed in an official capacity when the banks and prisons were not open for business.

The Gates had thought seriously about going straight, hence the serious advert in the gazette, and when the Thring woman had phoned them from HQ and asked desperately for their help since the security van was already out on a mission, they were fortified in their good intention. Gisela Thring had found their advert and was relieved when they told her they had time.

Th gardeners, who had worked to free the blockage in the hole left without removing most of it because they explained that they did not have the right tools.

In truth, Chris and Ned were now sure that there was nothing behind the rubble except for more rubble. The ecclesiastical treasures were a fata morgana concocted by Mr Sloane who had persuaded the Hartley Agency to let him dig and had roped in a garden designer to make inroads into the hole and a now a transport firm had arrived to take away those mythical ornaments. It beggared belief. The only useful result of this ludicrous archaeological dig was the discovery of the bones.

***

Bill Gates shouted to Chris, Ned, Mr Sloane and Al that he would back his van up nearer to the hole so that they could pack the rubble  into it and take it to the tip.

“No need,” shouted Sloane.

“No problem,” shouted Ben Gates.

“Al can help,” Sloane shouted, worried that removing building materials might mean they had nothing to fill the hole in with later.

“No need,” both Gates brothers shouted. “We can manage.”

“They started y stacking stones careful in the van. Only Al was interested, and only because he was now sure he had been recognized. He thought he should make himself scarce, but he watched closely from his tombstone and was intrigued when the Gates brothers took sacks into the hole.

Chris and Ned took their leave after instructing the Gates brothers to please drive everything to the forensic lab at HQ, since the stones would have to be examined before being returned to the priory in case they were needed. If they found anything interesting, even  buried treasure, they could bring that along, too. The forensic scientists were still laughing as they got into their van. The idea of there being anything worth finding behind that pile of rubble  was absurd, they agreed.

But mentioning treasure had an dramatic effect on the Gates brothers, who started to move the stones gustily.

Sloane praised the Gates brothers for helping. He had a date and would have to leave, he explained, and left.

That left the Gates brothers first carrying stones to the van, then carrying jute bags, normally required to transport wood shavings or compost, out of the van and into the hole. They even emptied some of the compost bags to make room for stones and, as it soon became apparent – at least to Al - metal ornaments.

The battery on the floodlight ran out of juice and the hole was now lit only by a hazy November moon.

Al crept forward while the Gates brothers were in the hole and took possession of one of the ornaments before dashing round the corner of the priory church to retrieve his moped and push it until he was out of earshot.

Anxious to complete the task of loading treasures, the Gates brothers, unaware that Al had seen what they were doing and got away, worked flat out until they had removed all the ornaments after ejecting most of the stones from the van. They then made of off with their precious cargo.

And no one – except Al – was aware of what had gone on.