Kissing Toads (41 page)

‘Was Elizabeth murdered?' several people asked, temporarily distracted from more recent shenanigans at Dunblair.

‘As yet we don't know,' Nigel said. ‘The remains are amazingly well preserved thanks to the dry atmosphere in the underground chamber. It is completely lined with stone, watertight and virtually airtight; there were holes bored in the trapdoor to admit oxygen, but they were very small and blocked with impacted earth. However, we do not believe Elizabeth suffocated. Her position, laid on her back with her arms at her sides, doesn't show any indication of trauma. She may well have been dead when she was placed there. We have to wait for the results of the autopsy; it's possible that may give us some clues as to how she died.'

‘If she died by violence, surely it must be obvious,' someone said.

‘Not necessarily,' Nigel pursued. ‘Remember, after so long the flesh and internal organs have rotted away. What we have left is a skeleton with some mummified skin and the remnants of female clothing. Stabbing or shooting might mark the bones and a head wound would damage the skull, but something like, say, strangulation would leave little or no evidence behind. Of course, the dress may be helpful; it really is in extraordinarily good condition. It is worth noting that this body is almost exactly contemporary with the ones in the catacombs at Palermo, which can be seen today as skeletal corpses fully dressed in their original clothes.'

This piece of erudition silenced everyone for a moment or two, since nobody knew anything about skeletons at Palermo.

(‘Where the hell's that?' I heard one man asking in an aside.

‘Italy – I think,' said his colleague.)

Afterwards, back in the relative security of Dunblair, we found Fenny had treed a photographer who'd sneaked in over the wall and was growling menacingly every time he attempted to come down from his perch. Jules and Sandy finally condescended to rescue him and escort him off the premises – ‘He'll say it was a Dobermann,' Harry guessed – and the rest of us went in to dinner, eager to discuss our discovery and all its implications. Ash joined us, though his icy mood didn't seem to have thawed out, and even Dorian was there, allowing himself to give way to schoolboy enthusiasm at the gruesome nature of what we had unearthed. This, it was clear, would definitely boost his status at Gordonstoun. Anybody could be the son of a rock star, but digging up a corpse was
really cool
.

‘Can I see it?' he demanded. ‘Does it look, like, all greenish and manky?'

‘It's a she,' Delphi snapped.

‘Brown, not green,' HG said. ‘And not manky. More dry and shrivelled. It's in the laboratory at the moment. The forensics people have to do a lot of tests.'

‘When they've finished with her,' Delphi said, ‘we should see she gets a proper burial. With a vicar and everything. She was bound to be a Christian; people were in those days. If we could do that, and solve the mystery, maybe her spirit could move on. Don't you think so?'

The question was addressed to Ash, who came down from whatever plateau he was on to look faintly intrigued.

‘Possibly,' he said. ‘Religion was very important to the Victorians. It's something she would have wanted, I suppose.'

‘Can't you – er – commune with her spirit?' Morty suggested with a sarcasm that was presumably meant to be subtle. ‘You're the psychic, aren't you?'

‘I'm a researcher, not a medium,' Ash said, failing to rise to the taunt.

Delphi, who thought any communing with Elizabeth should be done by her, said: ‘Will they give us back the body?'

‘Good question,' said HG. ‘Who does it belong to – apart from its original owner? As it's on my land, it might be me, or so I imagine. Unless any of her sister's descendants want to claim it. Formal burial is an idea, but I'm not sure where.'

‘The local churchyard?' Russell said.

‘Iona Craig, later McGoogle, is interred there in the family vault,' Nigel pointed out. ‘If she
was
involved in Elizabeth's death, I doubt her victim would want to spend eternity lying beside her.'

‘Bloody right,' Delphi said warmly. She and Nigel were showing dangerous signs of bonding over this. ‘Maybe we could boot Iona out.'

‘We have to prove she dunnit first,' I said.

After dinner I hung around, hoping for a chance to talk to Ash, but other people monopolised him and when I
did
get the opportunity I couldn't think of a conversation starter. He left without so much as a goodnight, and I found myself thrown together with HG, who wrinkled his eyes at me.

‘Sorry about the row the other night,' he said. ‘I didn't mean anyone else to get caught in the crossfire. At least you've been left out of the publicity. I had someone drop a hint to the press – off the record – about Delphinium and me. Under the circumstances it probably wasn't necessary, but it doesn't hurt to give them a nudge.'

‘Did you ask her?' I said.

‘No.' He lifted an eyebrow. ‘She's a bright girl on the make. It can only be good for her image.'

‘Maybe,' I said, ‘but you should have asked.' I still liked him – I couldn't help it – but he had the classic arrogance of the megastar and the slight contempt the ultra-famous feel, not so much for the fan in the street, as for those rather less famous than themselves.

‘In that case, I must apologise,' he said, with a trace element of irony.

‘Not to me,' I responded. ‘To Delphi.'

I turned my shoulder and moved away, and it was only on the way up to bed that it occurred to me I'd just snubbed Hot God, one of the biggest rock icons of all time. Would he mind? Would he cancel the show? Would he be amused/offended/disgusted/enraged? I lay awake worrying about it for what seemed like an age.

It was only the next day that I realised from his attitude, which hadn't changed, that snubs were plainly so rare in his life he hadn't even noticed it.

  

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman, whatever her income, is sad, sad, sad. I think it was Jane Austen who said something of the kind, ages ago (people are always quoting it), but although this is the twenty-first century and we've emancipated ourselves out of the kitchen and into the office, the studio and the boardroom, it's still true. To get away with being single you've got to be frightfully eccentric, or Germaine Greer, or both. Otherwise, to be thirtysomething and single, no matter how glamorous you are, is just to look as if you can't get a man. The coolest women are the ones who are married to one husband and then pinch someone else's before they've finished with the first one. It's the kind of thing that soft-hearted, principled girls, like Roo, would never do, but society doesn't admire soft hearts and principles. Society admires success – man-grabbing, man-holding success. And the worst of it is, it isn't the men who are doing the admiring – men like soft-hearted singles: it gives them a better chance of a shag – it's
the other women
. It's women who eye their single girlfriends askance, and talk of them in pitying murmurs, and don't invite them to dinner parties (unless there's someone really boring to pair them off with). That's where all our emancipation has got us. We aren't in contention with the male sex any more – we're too busy being our own worst enemies.

Take Tasha Blaggard (known in the trade as Trasha), queen of the crap-show hostesses. I met her once at an awards ceremony. When she wants to put down the competition, the clincher she utters about her rivals is always that they
aren't married
. And she's supposed to be a classic example of successful modern womanhood. Or Princess Di, the ultimate end-of-twentieth-century heroine. She made a career of being single and having unhappy affairs and making everyone sorry for her, but
she was married to a prince
. If she'd been single and unmarried, no one would have paid any attention.

And now here I was. Single. Totally, devastatingly single. With not even the glimmer of a suitable man on the horizon. Roo was breaking up superstar marriages and being pursued by half the men in the place, and I was going to bed alone, unloved, unlusted-after. I wasn't jealous of Roo because I love her so much and I
want
men to pursue and appreciate her, but I couldn't help minding a bit. I mean, I'd always been the beautiful one with a string of guys in pursuit, and now we'd swapped roles. I minded, and I didn't like myself for minding. I knew it was nasty and mean-spirited, so the end of it was I felt worse than ever.

And in bed there was no Alex to cuddle up to, which was . . . well, bearable. After all, I had Fenny. And the great thing about Fenny was that I didn't have to deal with his little moods, or put up with his tiresome friends (
vide
Darius Fitzlightly), or feel anxious because I wasn't having sex with him. Of course, he didn't have a gorgeous mews house, and a high-society profile, and . . . But there was no point in dwelling on all that. The catch was, I'd been madly in love with Alex, we were supposed to be getting married, and now my heart was broken and what I really needed was someone to pick up the pieces and stick them back together again. But this was Dunblair, and though the castle was full of men, there was nobody who fitted my requirements.

Besides, far too many of them were Scottish.

So there we were. The paparazzi were besieging the castle. The press were having a field day. And then, on top of everything else, we found the skeleton.

I knew at once it was Elizabeth Courtney.

Roo was right: even if she'd lived to be old she'd still have died nearly a century ago; but I cared about that, too, really cared, with a sort of sharp angry pain at the thought of her. The pathologists took lots of photographs and then had to bring the skeleton out in pieces because the trapdoor was too small to lift it through intact. They reassembled it on a board like a kind of stretcher before taking it to the laboratory for an autopsy. I was impressed you had to have an autopsy, even after so long. That made it sound as if her murder
mattered
, even though a hundred and thirty years had gone by: she was still a victim and someone would be held to account for what had been done to her.

I thought the bones would be white, but they were brown, with shrunken brown stuff clinging to them which the woman from forensics said was skin. The dress, too, was brown and papery round the edges, but in places you could see the original pattern, embroidered flowers on a background that might have been cream or white. She was a bride, I thought; it was her bridal gown. It reminded me, spookily, of my own unworn wedding dress.

Because Elizabeth was lying on her back, her mouth had fallen open – death, apparently, would have slackened her jaw muscles – but it looked horribly like she was screaming. A brownish skull with empty eye sockets and lipless jaws, screaming and screaming in its underground prison . . .

I shivered. Nigel, who was beside me, said, ‘I can see this has really gripped your imagination. That's great: I'm going to need your input.'

He was being patronising again, but I ignored it. Maybe it was just his unfortunate manner.

‘We
have
to find out who did this,' I said.

‘Forensic analysis should give us some idea of the cause of death,' Nigel offered.

‘They didn't . . .' I stammered in sudden horror . . . ‘they didn't put her in there –
alive
?'

‘I don't think so. Her position looked fairly relaxed. If she'd been trapped in there she would have attempted to get out, there would have been indications . . .'

I breathed again. It was bad enough to see that hideous skull, thinking of the woman in the portrait, vital and glowing with the sunset golden on her face. Worse still if she had died in abject terror, struggling to escape her subterranean prison . . .

The police cordoned off that part of the garden and that was really all we could do for the day.

‘Does this sort of thing happen often in garden makeover shows?' Roo asked me. ‘I mean – what else have you dug up?'

‘We found some coins once,' I said. ‘Roman, I think. And dead pets. But this is my first human skeleton.'

‘I was beginning to worry,' said Roo. ‘I've worked in the Balkans in the aftermath of war, I've been in an earthquake zone, covered inefficiency and corruption in famine relief and checked out an environmental disaster, but I've never seen anything as catastrophic as everyday life at Dunblair. To think I was afraid this job would be dull.'

Up yours, Kyle Muldoon, I thought with a tiny flicker of satisfaction. Roo, like me, might still be single, but at least she was having fun.

At dinner, I had my brainwave about giving Elizabeth Christian burial when the forensic archaeologist had finished with her. I thought it was something she would want, something that might help her spirit to find peace after all those years of being shut in a kind of stone coffin in the no-man's-land of the vanished maze. People used to think Christian burial was important; I know, I've seen lots of old movies. Personally, I don't care about the Christian stuff so much, but I want a huge funeral with lots of celebrities and people crying (and absolutely amazing flowers) but not, of course, for an
awfully
long time.

Anyway, Roo called Crusty with a progress report and we decided to take the weekend off until we'd got more info on the skeleton. Morty made plans to go away for a couple of days (good), as did Russell, who'd hardly seen his family since we started the series. I felt depressed all over again because I couldn't fly off to see Alex. I hadn't even been invited to a glamorous party. Mind you, with my mobile switched off most of the time that wasn't surprising. It cut out the nagging journos and the drip, drip of sympathy from friends who wanted to hear every detail of my plight, but if there was someone eager to ask me to a wonderful party where I would meet a wonderful guy it cut that out too.