The Silver Witch(43)

‘I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade,’ Dylan says, liberally sprinkling salt on his chips, ‘but there could be a much simpler explanation.’

‘Such as?’ The irritation is plain in Lucas’s voice.

‘The person in the coffin took all the stuff with him or her. The second person, the one on top, wasn’t buried at the same time, but a little while later. That person had nothing left, couldn’t afford a coffin or a decent burial, but wanted to be in the same place as their loved one. Still happens today, after all, people being buried in extra-deep graves so that their spouse can be laid to rest in the same spot when they eventually die.’

Lucas gives him a weary look and adopts the voice of a tired parent addressing a bothersome child. ‘In the first place, we know roughly when the grave was dug—somewhere between 850 and 950 AD—and at that time couples were always buried side by side, no matter how many years after the first one died the second one joined them. Stacking bodies was a tactic employed because of a lack of space. By the Victorian era, for example, there simply wasn’t room to put people next to each other, particularly in urban areas. Hundreds of years before that, out in the countryside, when the population was a fraction of what it is now, space wasn’t an issue. In fact’—he pauses to enjoy a mouthful of shepherd’s pie before going on—‘it would have been much easier to dig two shallow graves side by side than one deeper one. Anyway, there is a more compelling reason to suppose this was a punishment killing.’

Tilda hurriedly snatches at some chips while she waits for Lucas to go on. He has paused again, in part to eat some of his food, but more, she suspects, for dramatic effect. And possibly to annoy Dylan.

‘The body near the surface is prone, not supine.’ He waits, clearly hoping one of them will ask what that means. Eventually he saves them the trouble. ‘It was buried facedown, not faceup. Hardly a respectful and dignified way to treat a corpse. And as if that weren’t enough, a very large, very heavy flat stone was placed on the back of the deceased.’

‘To hold him or her in place?’ Dylan gives a light laugh. ‘Hardly seems necessary if they were dead.’

‘But very necessary if they were still alive,’ Lucas points out.

‘What?’ Tilda is aghast. ‘You mean that the person who was executed was punished not just by being killed, but by being buried alive?’ All at once she can feel her appetite fading.

Lucas shrugs and tucks into his meal with enthusiasm. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, just what crime they must have committed to have deserved such a fate?’

A thoughtful silence descends on the table, during which Tilda attempts to rekindle her appetite. The steak and kidney pudding is delicious, and soon the nourishing food, the heat from the fire, and the small amount of alcohol in her shandy soothes her into a more pleasant state of mind and body than she has experienced for quite a while. Even so, the notion of such a gruesome execution taking place so close to home disturbs her. Could the ghost be the spirit of the body the archeologists are so intent on unearthing?

It would explain why my visitor is so angry.

‘Will you be able to find out who exactly it is you’ve dug up?’ she asks Lucas as he polishes off the last of his pie.

He shakes his head. ‘Highly unlikely. Very few written records exist for tenth-century Wales, and a lot of what there is would have been written sometime after the events, so it’s pretty unreliable. At least if you want specifics. So, no, basically, we are not going to be able to give you name, rank and serial number. What we hope to do—what lovely, lovely science now enables us to have a stab at—is to say male or female, age, cause of death, health and diet during life, and, possibly, position in their community. Given that this looks like an execution, we may get more clues when we reach the coffin below.’

‘Would the two deaths necessarily be connected?’

‘There is a precedent. There was a grave in the southeast of England found with a similarly dispatched guilty party on top, and studies strongly indicate that the body below was the victim of the crime. So, it’s possible our upper-level remains are those of a murderer, and the body in the coffin was murdered by them. But we are getting ahead of ourselves,’ he warns her, washing down his food with some mineral water. ‘Lots to search for yet. Lots to prove, or disprove.’ He might have been about to say more, but Molly looks up from her laptop on the next table and calls him over to see something.

Thistle, relaxed at last, begins to show an interest in the food. She gets up and stretches lazily, before reaching up to sniff the edge of the table, her nose twitching. Tilda smiles at her.