strong farm labourers.
Feeling useless, I stood by, leaned on a tree and watched them work. Though it was a chilly February morning, they soon broke sweat as the pile of sod and earth grew beside the kiln. I had no idea how far down they would have to dig, and it was almost an hour later when Jill bent over and said, ‘Good Lord, Chris. You’d better come over here and have a look at this.’
I walked over, and my gaze followed her pointing finger. There, in the bed of soil, was what looked like the skeleton of a human hand. I had no idea of anatomy, of course, and I will admit it could easily have been from a cow or a sheep, but as Jill carefully brushed away the rest of the clinging soil, the form slowly took shape, and by the time she had done the best she could, there was not one of us standing there who was not convinced that we were looking at a human skeleton.
I had just put the lasagne in the oven when Heather arrived for dinner two days later. Across from Kilnsgate, the lime kiln was still mysteriously screened off by canvas, though it was deserted at the moment. After our grim discovery, I had called the police, of course, and they had removed the remains for forensic examination. Their preliminary findings, communicated to me that afternoon by the detective assigned to the case, had borne out my suspicions, but had not determined the cause of death. Perhaps that was too much to ask after all this time.
I had planned a simple meal, entirely home made, accompanied by a Caesar salad – a genuine one, not the kind they serve with cucumber and tomatoes at the local Italian restaurant – topped off by a dish of fruit and a plate of local cheeses from Ken Warne’s.
Heather looked as lovely as ever, dressed simply in black tights and a roll-neck rust-coloured dress that came to just above her knees, her hair tied back with a green ribbon at the nape of her neck.
‘My God,’ she said as I led her through to the living room. ‘You’ve got a suntan and you were only away three days.’
‘I tan quickly,’ I said. Nobody ever noticed in LA. I had, however, developed a distinct Yorkshire pallor since I had been over here, and the tan wouldn’t last long. I gave Heather the dress I had bought her, and she made excited sounds about the colours and the pattern, wrapping it around herself, trying to figure out how she could wear it decently. ‘Maybe we can try a few variations later,’ I suggested.
By the fire, which I had lit before preparing dinner, I poured us each a glass of wine, and we sat down. ‘From what you told me on the phone there’s been more than a little excitement around here,’ Heather said.
‘You could say that.’
‘It all sounds rather gruesome. Bodies in the lime kiln.’
‘One body,’ I said. ‘And it was a skeleton.’
‘Even so.’ She gave a little shiver. ‘To think it’s been out there all that time.’
‘Since 1941 or 1942, to be exact,’ I said. ‘Nat Bunting.’
‘But how do they know?’
‘He had a club foot. It shows on the skeleton.’
‘And what happened to him?’
‘That we don’t know.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I have plenty of theories, but I can’t be certain. At first I thought it was because he might have seen something, found out too much. Tony Brotherton’s grandfather saw Nat inside the wired-off compound at Kilnsgate during the war.’
‘You only thought that at first?’
‘Nat was… challenged,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t have known it if he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to see.’
‘But they probably didn’t know that.’
‘Ernest Fox did.’
‘So, what, then?’
‘I know it sounds far fetched, but I think he may have died as a result of the experiments they were doing there at Kilnsgate, most likely infected by accident. I did a bit of research, and not much of it is public, but what we do know is that in the Second World War the Porton Down people were doing a lot of experiments with biological weapons. Not so long ago, some War Cabinet committee files were released to the National Archive, and it turns out that they were particularly interested in bacteriological diseases such as typhoid, dysentery and cholera in humans, and anthrax, swine fever and foot-and-mouth in animals.’
‘Animals?’
‘Yes. They produced cattle cakes doctored with anthrax. They were going to drop them over Germany to poison the food supply.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Us, I mean.’
‘Good Lord. That’s crazy. And terrible.’
‘As it turned out, we discovered that cattle are suspicious of new types of food and unlikely to take the bait, so we scrapped that plan. Anyway, there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth at the Brotherton farm. It was dealt with very quickly by the military and hushed up. It never spread beyond the one farm, which is almost unheard of in foot-and-mouth.’
‘How could they get to it that quickly?’
‘They couldn’t unless they knew it had happened.’
‘So you think they caused it?’
‘It seems a logical explanation. And I’m not even sure it was foot-and-mouth. It could have been anthrax. That could also have been what killed Nat Bunting. But that’s just speculation on my part.’
‘What else could have happened to him?’
I shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe they actually injected him with anthrax or dysentery and he died, like Ronald Maddison did in 1953 in the sarin experiments. They may even have been playing around with antidotes, vaccinations against these diseases they thought the Nazis were going to unleash. Or maybe, as I said, he came into contact with something by accident, got too close, and they simply buried the body under the lime kiln.’
‘And put quicklime on it?’
‘There wouldn’t be much point. Most people have the wrong idea about using quicklime to get rid of bodies. Quicklime burns the skin it comes into contact with, yes, if you add water, but afterwards it tends to dry out the tissues and cause mummification. Hardly getting rid of the evidence! Anyway, they used it on Brotherton’s cows, mostly because it would kill anthrax spores or foot-and-mouth, but I should imagine the lime kiln was just a handy place to hide a body. As for the full story, what Nat was doing up there, what really happened to him, I doubt we’ll ever know it. I do know that Nat was apparently obsessed with joining up, but no one would have him because of his physical and mental handicaps. Maybe he saw the unit at Kilnsgate and went to ask if he could join up with them. Maybe they had a place for him. I don’t like to think they simply plucked people out of the landscape and shot them full of dysentery or typhus, but if they did, then Nat Bunting was probably a safe bet. There wouldn’t be much of a hue and cry over him. It didn’t even make the papers.’
‘But that’s terrible.’
‘Terrible things happen in war. Look at what Grace witnessed at the chateau in Normandy and, later, in the camps. Look at some of the stories that have come out about Japanese and German medical experiments on POWs and concentration camp victims. Do you think we were that much better?’
‘I do like to think so. Yes. To be honest, it’s sickening to think we were brought down to that level, too. I mean, trying to give cows anthrax or foot-and-mouth is one thing, but…’
‘I’m not saying that was the case. Just that it’s possible. I certainly think they were responsible for the foot- and-mouth outbreak, or whatever it was, at Brotherton’s farm – it doesn’t make any sense otherwise – and however he met his end, Nat Bunting certainly didn’t bury himself. I suppose it’s possible that he got sick and crawled off to die there and his body just got covered up by the elements over time.’
‘Surely there must have been others involved in these experiments?’
‘Probably. Volunteers, or prisoners from the nearby POW camp. But Nat was the one who died, and for whatever reasons nobody else spoke out.’
‘Couldn’t it just have been some wandering maniac?’
‘How many of those are there? Realistically? Besides, Kilnsgate, including the lime kiln, was cordoned off by
