“Her?”
With gloved hands, Faulkner took out some kind of long silver tool and gently lifted one of the bones, to see the underside.
“This looks like the pelvis. I’m no medical doctor, but from experience alone? The size and shape definitely looks female.” He paused again, taking an initial view of the area, the cavity, the absence of recent decay. “The hair looks long, which probably also denotes female. More likely that a female would wear a bracelet of this kind, too.” He pointed to the dulled silver bangle, which hung from one of the bones.
“I thought hair carried on growing after you die,” Phillips remarked.
“Common misconception,” Faulkner stood up and turned to them again. “You’re going to want to have the experts give you the final say-so, but I’m thinking these bones look anywhere up to fifteen years old.”
“That’s recent, as far as we’re concerned,” Phillips commented.
“Yeah, it is.”
Faulkner pointed towards the remains with a gloved hand.
“I’ll tell you something else,” he added. “I’ll bet whoever killed her never thought she would be found, after all this time.”
“Bad luck,” Ryan returned, with a tigerish smile, before turning to retrace his steps.
Once they returned to the elevated ridge upon which the fortress of Housesteads had been built, Phillips was dispatched to deal with the necessary paperwork. There were forms to be signed and protocols to be followed, before human remains could be exhumed from a site of historic importance. Although it was small of him, petty maybe, Ryan was relieved that the responsibility of looking after the body fell into their hands. His hands. Being a criminal investigation, justice took precedence over antiquity.
Clearly, that didn’t present any undue obstacle to the officious Professor Freeman, who was still making herself known to the police and forensic staff on site.
Mildly irritated, Ryan turned his sights on Colin Hart, who was seated in the back of one of the police hatchbacks parked nearby. He dipped his head inside.
“Mr Hart?”
He saw a man in his forties, with light brown hair ruffled by the wind and perhaps from restless fingers. Watery blue eyes greeted him from an unremarkable, only slightly lined face, smoothly shaven. Average looking sort of personality, Ryan deduced.
“Chief Inspector Ryan. Fancy a bit of fresh air?” He held the door open to the other man and watched him shuffle out of the car.
“Thanks,” Colin said. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me.”
“Sorry about that. There were a few matters to see to, first,” Ryan replied easily.
They started to walk slowly, in no particular direction.
“Can I get you some water?”
“Well, I had some earlier, in my backpack.” Colin turned around, as if to look for it.
“It’s still there, don’t worry.” Ryan stopped at the edge of the car park, where the asphalt met the grass leading down towards Housesteads Fort.
“So, Colin. Do you mind if I call you Colin?”
“Go ahead.”
“Tell me about what happened this morning. How did you come to find the body?”
Ryan judged him to be shaken, but not so much that they needed to pussy-foot around the subject.
Colin blew out a long breath.
“I was just walking. I wanted to get down to Sycamore Gap, to try to catch the sunrise.” He went over his movements in a quiet, no-nonsense way.
Ryan considered.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t strike me as a curious sort of man. What made you start messing around with the stones?”
Colin looked guilty as sin, Ryan thought with an inward smile.
“I’m terribly, terribly sorry that I tampered with the wall. I really can’t explain what came over me,” Colin shook his head, presumably at himself. “I would never dream of doing such a thing, normally.”
Ryan made a brief, dismissive gesture.
“Let’s try to keep this in perspective. It may be frowned upon, but I bet hundreds of people walk all over those stones every year, when they think nobody’s looking. You might have gotten a bit carried away, but at least you’ve uncovered something of interest.”
“It was awful,” Colin said slowly. “I saw the silver and, I don’t know, maybe I thought it was some sort of buried treasure. Anyway, I just had to know. When the stones came loose and I looked inside –”
He swallowed back the memory of those wide, hollow eyes.
“Did the stones come away easily?”
“Well, I’d better be honest with you and admit that they were quite tightly packed. It took some elbow grease to dislodge them.”