Dead People Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘The patina and the pitting would make me think it has been in the ground for a lot longer.’
    I wafted off a silent thanks to the angel who looked after my hunch skills. ‘It’s a possibility that the skull and the missing hand were accidentally dislodged by the excavator,’ I offered.
    Sheila shook her head. ‘No,’ she said cheerfully, beckoning me down beside her, ‘not possible. See here . . .?’ She used her own spatula to indicate the points where the skull and the hand were missing. ‘There are definite indications of mechanical severance in both cases. And notice that the wounds have exactly the same surface encrustation and patination as the surrounding bone. If the separation had been recent I would expect to see a cleaner bone surface at the junction.’
    I should have noticed that. The rocks that had been touched by the digger had shown brighter scores where they had been scraped. The same thing would have happened to bone, the surface crud would have been removed.
    ‘So their removal was contemporary with the interment?’ I asked.
    ‘Or before.’
    Which meant that we were probably not going to find a hand on the end of the other arm that was currently under the skeleton.
    So why remove them? The obvious answer was to eliminate the means of identification. The skull, if the teeth were intact, could yield dental records, or even facial reconstruction. But skeletal hands? Whoever had buried the body had not wanted to take the risk that it wouldn’t be discovered before decomposition had taken the fingerprints.
    I stood up slowly. Black magic? There was also a possible ritual explanation that couldn’t be discounted.
    I looked around me, screwing my eyes against the wind. Trying to see it. A featureless spot on an empty hill. What gave this place its significance?
    Back down in the valley I chose Cogfryn Farm as my first port of call, on the scientific principle that it looked neat, cosy, and the dogs were shut away. It was also not in the Badger Face Welsh Mountain sheep-flock book.
    I left the professionals up on the hill painstakingly excavating the skeleton. I had no authorization to start an official investigation, but I reckoned no harm could come from putting out preliminary feelers. Get the taste of local reaction.
    Cogfryn was a low, two-storey stone farmhouse, with an attached stone barn, both recently whitewashed.
    ‘Mrs Jones?’
    The woman who answered the door didn’t seem surprised that I knew her name. She was small, with her hair tied back in a bun, wearing an apron, and was as neat as her house. I showed her my warrant card and introduced myself.
    ‘You’ll be here about that body they’ve found up Cwm Cesty Nant, I expect?’
    ‘You’ve heard?’
    She looked at me incredulously.
    I laughed. ‘I’m sorry, I forget how quickly news travels around here.’
    ‘My husband’s busy with the lambing, but you’re welcome to come in.’
    ‘I’d be grateful.’
    She opened the door and stepped back to let me through. ‘Watch you don’t trip over the suitcase,’ she warned as I followed her down the hall and skirted a red and well-travelled case, which looked cosmopolitan and incongruous in this rustic setting. ‘It’s my son’s,’ she explained, as if reading my thoughts.
    ‘This is Owen, my son, and his friend Greg Thomas.’ She introduced me to the two men who were sitting at the scrubbed pine table in the kitchen with mugs of tea and a depleted plate of chocolate digestive biscuits in front of them.
    Owen Jones had a stocky build, close-cropped hair and a bright smile, but what immediately struck me was his deep suntan, which looked so out of place in these parts, especially at this time of the year, when the rest of us had complexions that made us look like we had just crawled out from the under the boulder where we had spent our winter.
    I put Greg Thomas in his forties, the same sort of age as Owen. Lean and fit in a sweatshirt and sweatpants. His brown hair was