‘Yes, I understand that. They may not have been the only interested parties, of course. From what you have told me, it seems that a ritual interment within the circumference of the hill-fort was an annual event in which the whole village was interested.’
‘Do you really mean to tell me that anybody – simply anybody at all – could have been Sir Bathy’s murderer, and that he was killed just to get the tomb opened and five skeletons stolen?’
‘I did not think so when Lady Bitton-Bittadon suggested it, but, at the present stage of our knowledge, I am forced to that conclusion.’
‘Who (apart from the zodiac people – I’d believe anything of that frightful boy and one or two of the others) would have dared to do such a thing for such a reason?’
‘Superstition lingers on, and it seems to be beyond the power of orthodox religious belief to remove or eradicate it.’
‘And I suppose you mean to have the tomb re-opened. The vicar won’t like that much, will he?’
‘Time will show. Tomorrow I shall share my thoughts with the C.I.D. inspector who has now taken over the case, and we shall see what we shall see. If the vicar can be persuaded that the tomb has been robbed, I think we may assume that he will be as anxious as anyone else to discover who the sacrilegious parishioners are. I wonder, in fact, what the poor man thinks of the whole of the village Mayering, for one assumes that he is cognisant of what goes on.’
‘Well, Dame Beatrice,’ said the gentlemanly detective-inspector from London, ‘if you’ll tackle the vicar, the superintendent and I will take a look at the More to Come. Know anything about it, sir?’
Superintendent Soames liked his younger colleague’s attitude and after a preliminary period of reserve and doubt had accepted co-operation with more goodwill than he had ever supposed he would show towards one who, at first, he had regarded as his supplanter.
‘We’ve never had any actual trouble,’ he replied. ‘Always kept to the licensing hours, and the law about nobody under eighteen, and no betting-slips, and all that kind of thing. It’s true the landlord who gave up a week or two back came to the village with the reputation that he kept two wives, but some of these villagers will believe anything, particularly if there’s something spicy or disgraceful attached to it.’ (The superintendent’s station was at Cridley, thirty miles away). ‘You can’t believe all you hear, and Seven Wells is a funny kind of place. Dead from the neck up and festering from the neck down, if you really want my opinion.’
This powerful imagery intrigued Dame Beatrice.
‘Can you produce chapter and verse?’ she asked.
‘Well, take this Mayering Eve business,’ said the superintendent. ‘We know all about it, of course. There used to be a whole heap of bodies down in the cellar of the More to Come. Seems it started when plague struck the village more than six hundred years ago. There was nobody to do the buryings at the rate the people died off, so they chucked the bodies down what was the church crypt before the new church was built, and then, I suppose, when the plague was over, they decided on Christian burial.
‘Well, it seems the village priest of the time wasn’t too sure they’d all died in the odour of sanctity, as I believe they call it, because the records – I believe they’re still scratched on the wall of the space underneath the bell-chamber in the church – show that his predecessor must have been one of the first to go. He took the disease from a sick man to whom he’d given the last rites, which seems ruddy bad luck for him on the face of it. Well, such was the state of the country at the time, with people of all ranks and conditions dying like flies, that no successor was appointed until this new man came along in a year or two, and his argument was that no priest meant no shriving, and so he refused to have those poor unlucky corpses interred in consecrated ground.
‘Well, the next best place, the villagers seemed to reckon, was up on the hill. They hadn’t a clue, I don’t suppose, that it was a fort and not a temple. Well, of course, that accounted for the victims of the plague, but they couldn’t bury all of ’em at once, I don’t suppose, being that there must have been several dozen of ’em, according to the records, so the thing turned into an annual ceremony, the people seemingly liking it that way.’
‘But the supply must have given out at some time or other,’ argued the detective-inspector.
‘Not if you follow the course of history, Mr Callon,’ said the superintendent, ‘which has always been a bit of a hobby of mine when I’ve got the time. The ceremony no doubt lapsed for a bit, but villagers have long memories and when a man was hanged (we’ll say) and the church wasn’t too particular what happened to the body (because they didn’t draw and quarter them in those days; they wasn’t near so barbarous as what they became in later times) the village claimed it and chucked it down in the charnel house which, after the dedication of the new church, was no longer, I take it, regarded as holy ground, and there it waited its turn for a hill-top burial.’
‘There couldn’t have been that many people hanged, even in those days,’ objected Callon.
‘Maybe not. But then come other plagues – lesser ones, but the plague was always about – and then come the Wars of the Roses and, later on again, the fight between Queen Mary’s lot and them that rooted for Lady Jane Grey. Then come the Armada corpses. They weren’t all washed up in the West Country, not by a very long chalk, and there’s a record of
