Chapter Twelve
We had run out of chips and the grocery order wasn’t due for two days. It was coming up to rush hour and I’d spend ages stuck in traffic if I went to the supermarket in town, so I decided to take one of my rare trips into the village to buy some at the SPAR.
Bunting was strung everywhere, there were a couple of stalls on the driveway, one selling homemade ice lollies, the other an opportunity to give to another good cause, beaver repopulation this time.
By the main door was a cardboard sign with an arrow, pointing to the interior, and the words “More Inside!” I remembered what Mrs. B had said about a raffle and a disco.
As I sat there, Mrs. Chambers from the small shop rode up on her bike, half a rib cage sticking out of the basket on the front. She gave me a cheerful wave when she saw me and rang her bell.
Being an outcast, I tended to stay away from social gatherings in the village, but this was too intriguing and Mrs. Chambers’s greeting was encouraging.
As long as I spent plenty of money in there, I should be tolerated, so I parked up and nipped over to the ATM.
Before I entered the building, I stopped to give twenty pounds each to the bell fund and the beavers—a beaver dam in the right place might have stopped the mausoleum collapsing.
Inside the village hall, the table where the bones were collected was center stage and was manned by one of the archaeologists.
It should have been a simple trestle table with a large, plain cardboard box on it, but under the leadership of Mrs. Faulkner from the newsagent’s, the table had been adorned with bunting in pastel shades, and the box was covered with floral design paper.
Alongside was an exhibition celebrating the skeletal invasion, including a display showing where some of the bones had been found.
Most were in the flower beds and water features of the gardens nearest the river, those that had been flooded, although there was a skull and crossbones found on the roundabout in the playground, just a few hundred yards from where we stood.
That may not have been how they had washed up.
Music played from a system on the stage, and around the rest of the room were the farm shop and tea stalls, the raffle, a separate raffle, a Guess the Weight of the Melon competition, various craft stalls from various villagers: crocheted doilies, macramé plant hangers, jewelry made from kits bought online, dried flowers glued onto bookmarks.
Mrs. Dowden, whom I had once worked with at the SPAR, presided over a display of wooden plaques with names etched onto them.
There was one for most residents of the village, forename and surname, making it hard to say no to making a purchase.
My name had been overlooked, but feeling the weight of their expectant stares, I bought a few with general platitudes on them: “There’s no place like home” and “Love conquers all,” along with a few more cautionary notes, “What goes around comes around,” “Familiarity breeds contempt,” and “As you sow, so shall you reap.” They could go in the drawer full of knickknacks I kept for Mrs. B; eventually, I might even take one out to see if she would steal it.
Although the jamboree had been going on for some time now, it seemed Upper Ifflians never tired of a fete and the room was busy with people browsing and trying their luck.
I had a wobble when I saw Jo Newman, deep in tea and sympathy with the vicar.
Meg was lying on the floor beside her, head on her front paws, eyes cast down.
She looked like a dog without hope. I wanted to leave, to get far from the evidence of the devastation we had caused.
Then Mrs. Thorpe from the tea stall shouted: “Daisy!”
I turned, wondering what vitriol was heading my way.
But no, I was quite the celebrity. I was greeted as the bringer of the bones and, subsequently, all the gaiety I saw before me.
I was stood by the bone table to have my photo taken, by myself, with the archaeologist, with the stallholders, empty-handed, and holding a couple of bones.
“There was a minibus came from Great Beadington to have a look-see,” Mrs. Thorpe told me. “They’ve heard about the bones and they’re jealous.”
Mrs. Thrussell nodded. “They’ve never had anything like it. And they won’t do; they don’t have a stately home.”
Mrs. Faulkner joined in. “I had to chase one of them Great Beadingtonites out, she was trying to take a vertebra.” There were gasps, although no one could verify Mrs. Faulkner’s story and Mrs. Thorpe said she’d made it up.
“It was one of the Morten boys,” she said. The Mortens were not a well-respected family. “And he tried to take a skull, not a vertebra. Who would want a vertebra that wasn’t their own?”
“Don’t you worry, Daisy,” Mrs. Dowden said, patting me on the shoulder. “We’ll make sure all those bones get back to you.”
I was sat down for refreshments, and a village teenager, who was hoping to become a journalist, was summoned to interview me.
“How did you feel when you realized all the bones had been washed away?” he asked me, and I had to consider my answer carefully because once the initial horror had worn off, my first thoughts were of Lennie and what had become of his body.
“I was mortified,” I said. “I know now that it’s just the usual ravages of time that caused it, but when I first saw them, I felt somehow responsible.”
He nodded somberly. “Do you know how many bodies were affected?”
Including or excluding Lennie’s? “No,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“How long will it take to get them collected and put together again?”
I referred that one to the archaeologist, who answered with, “How long’s a piece of string?” James wouldn’t be pleased to hear that.
Then he asked me a few questions about life in Langley Hall, which I answered with, “It’s loads of fun,” “It’s a lot of work,” and “The time just flies.”
“Next time you come, you’ll be able to read what he writes,” Mrs. Dowden said as we finished the interview. “Now, do you need any more of these?” She was brandishing her etchings again. “You must have a lot of rooms needing plaques up in that big house.”
I bought “The best things in life are free” from her, thinking I could give it to James for his birthday. He’d hate it. Then I went around the craft stalls and bought samples from every one. Maybe James wouldn’t think my homemade clothes were so bad when he saw these.
I was about to leave when there was a kerfuffle at the door and in came another journalist, one whose words would be published in The Western Bugle Online, not just the Upper Iffley Pages. It was Emma Beddoe, the reporter I had met on the day I went to Great Beadington.
Emma looked around the room, smiling, looking hopeful. Her bright-pink hair was tied back, she was wearing combats and an orange T-shirt that still didn’t go with her gaudy tresses, with a rucksack slung over her shoulder and camera on a strap around her neck.
“Hi,” she said to Mrs. Faulkner, who was the first person to make eye contact with her. “I’m from The Western Bugle Online. I heard you had a do going on down here. I thought I’d check it out.”
The Western Bugle! It caused quite a stir and Emma was given much the same welcome as I had been treated to only an hour earlier. I could hear Mrs. Faulkner telling her about the coach trip from Great Beadington and the woman who had—allegedly—tried to steal a vertebra.
“Goodness!” Emma said.
I moved toward the door, but as I neared it:
“Hi! Wait!”
I should have ignored it and pretended I thought she was talking to someone else, but the volume of her voice made me look round. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” she said.
For a moment I wondered how she’d known, my hair had been hidden under my cap when we’d met and the cap had obscured my face.
Then I realized she was looking at my T-shirt; it was the same one I was wearing on the day we met.
My heart sank. It wasn’t even one of my most distinctive ones, although apparently it was distinctive enough.
“I like your skirt,” she said. It was a patchwork arrangement, made from countless leftover scraps that would otherwise have been thrown out.
“This is Daisy,” Mrs. Faulkner told her. “From Langley Hall.”
“Langley Hall,” Emma said, and suddenly all her attention was on me. “Do you live there?”
“Yes, that’s her ladyship,” Mrs. Faulkner said. “Married to the village billionaire.”
Emma’s eyes widened. “You must have had a shock when that tomb-thing came down.”
“The mausoleum,” I said. “Yes.”
“How many bodies washed out?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What did you think when you first saw it?”
At that the women around her started to protest because these were the same questions I’d been asked by the local teenager and it didn’t seem fair that she’d get her words printed in The Western Bugle Online and read all over the district, and beyond, when his would not go past the bounds of Upper Iffley—Great Beadington, if he was lucky.
So, I was allowed to leave and Emma was dragged toward the stalls, but now she knew who I was and where I lived, and I suspected that might be the reason she went so docilely toward Guess the Weight of the Melon.
“Do you think there is any connection to the finding of Lennie Green?” she called out as I hurried away, but I pretended not to hear, even when she shouted, “Or Doug Newman?”
***
It turned out Emma Beddoe wasn’t the only person to have connected the ancient bones to the body of Lennie Green. The next morning Mrs. Billings took a break from vacuuming our bedroom to tell me, “Old Bill’s poking around in the graveyard.”
“What’s that?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m very busy.” I looked around for something I might be busy with; I chose to clear out a cupboard.
Mrs. Billings came hobbling through. “I said Old Bill’s on the premises. What do they want now?”
“I don’t know.” I was already struggling to keep my voice level.