‘I think you should be present, sir, if you don’t mind,’ said Callan quietly. He had asked to be present at the interview.
‘I don’t see any point in my being there,’ argued Sir Jeremy. ‘I wasn’t present when the funeral took place. I shouldn’t have any idea whether anything was different from what it had been when my father was buried.’
‘Just as you wish, of course, sir.’ The detective-inspector took out his notebook, wrote in it and handed it over to the young squire. ‘In that case, would you mind signing to say that you were invited to be present, but declined? It might save trouble later.’
‘Oh, well, all right. But, look here – Dame Beatrice threw out a hint a little while ago – what do you expect to find when you open the grave?’
‘That some of your ancestors have been removed from it, sir.’
‘Some of my ancestors? Then you do know something! You’re on to something! Why wasn’t I told?’
‘So far, there is nothing to tell you, sir. We are working on surmise. Do you still prefer not to be present at the opening of the vault?’
‘If you put it like that, all right, I’ll come. When will it be?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon at half-past two, sir. We have arranged for the necessary apparatus to be forthcoming to raise the lid,’ said Callon.
The police, Dame Beatrice realised, had chosen a good time for the opening of the tomb. At that hour of the afternoon the men had gone back to work, the children were in school and the women, as Fenella had discovered on her first visit to the village, preferred to remain indoors behind closed front doors and drawn curtains. If one or two of the last were pulled aside as the crane, a small affair mounted on a lorry, came trundling down the main street, that was the only obvious sign of curiosity, and when they arrived at the lych-gate (the lorry having used the double gates opposite the south porch) Dame Beatrice and the police had the churchyard to themselves except for the vicar and the men in charge of the crane.
The tackle was fitted and with very little trouble the great stone lid was removed and placed on the grass. The detective-inspector, armed with a powerful torch, descended into the depths and began an inspection of the stone slabs which acted as shelves for the iron-sheeted dead. He remained down there for about a quarter of an hour while the crane-driver and his mates, outside the churchyard wall, took the opportunity of having a quiet smoke, the vicar talked about the church tower to Dame Beatrice, and the superintendent stood at the edge of the cavity in case his colleague needed assistance or wanted to give him information.
When Callon returned to the surface he said to Soames,
‘Want to go down, sir? Five suits of armour are empty and have been tampered with, I should say, as the various parts have only been put together very carelessly, as though the tomb-robbers were in somewhat of a hurry, as I’ve no doubt they were.’
‘Fingerprints any good?’
‘Not at this stage, sir. I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have any on the files to match up with them. Anyway, they’ll keep. I didn’t need to touch anything. My torch was sufficient.’
‘Anyway, the suits of armour were empty shells?’
‘Five of them, sir. There was no sign of Shurrock and his wife and servants down there. No substitutions had been attempted, although that’s what I’d rather suspected.’
‘That’s something, anyway. Those skeletons were placed in the cellar of the pub before the Shurrocks left the place, that’s very certain. The thing to find out is whether Sir Bathy’s murder had any connection with the determination of some of the villagers to provide themselves with some more skeletons – or whether advantage was taken of the fact that the grave had been opened to receive his body.’
Callon put the question to Dame Beatrice when she and the vicar joined them.
‘The last point must not be lost sight of, as Sir Jeremy Bitton-Bittadon has already appreciated,’ she said. ‘But people with a fixed idea in their minds do not always see clearly. Still, unless the zodiac people wanted the skeletons, it is difficult to assess a motive for the murder of Sir Bathy. If we could show any reason for his death other than a determination to get the grave opened so that the skeletons could be abstracted to be used in further ritual buryings, I would be better able to refute Sir Jeremy’s argument. I think the only thing to do is to pursue our enquiries in the hope that another motive for the murder will emerge.’
‘Anything more, sir?’ asked one of the workmen, coming up to the group. ‘If not, we has Lady Bitton-Bittadon’s order to close all down again.’
‘Right. Carry on,’ said the superintendent. The vicar, having made a vague offer of tea at the vicarage which, to his obvious relief, was refused, took himself off. The others watched while the lid of the sarcophagus was replaced and then Callon said,
‘Well, all it boils down to (unless or until we find this other motive Dame Beatrice mentions) is that the zodiac people may have had deputies who pinched the skeletons while they themselves were otherwise engaged on Mayering Eve. They would hardly have dared to rob the grave during the daytime, and we can account for them during the whole of the evening and up to midnight. Of course there was plenty of time for operations to take place between midnight and dawn, though.’
‘I could bear to know what really happened to the Shurrocks and the others,’ said the superintendent. ‘The London end hasn’t come up with anything concerning them, but my bet is that they’re somehow concerned in all this.’
‘Well, at any rate, they were not murdered on Mayering Eve, so that does not account for their disappearance from the scene,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘for my great-niece is a
