The Ghost Fields by Elly Griffiths Read Free Book Online

an effect if accessorised by a body?
    Nelson looks back across the marshes. Blackstock Hall is clearly visible against the skyline, grey and forbidding. It’s not exactly the front garden but the new development will certainly be in the eyeline of the Hall’s occupants. What had Chaz said? That the sale of Devil’s Hollow would be ‘breaking up the estate’. An estate that would, presumably, belong to Chaz one day.
    â€˜What do you think?’ he asks Clough as the car bumps along the unmade road.
    â€˜Bloke should wash more often.’
    â€˜About Chaz Blackstock. Why was he talking about engine parts? Do you think he knew the plane was here all along? After all, he was brought up here.’
    Clough considers. ‘It’s possible. Grubbing about in the dirt, digging up buried planes, it’s the sort of thing boys do.’
    Nelson’s elder daughter, Laura, had briefly been interested in engines. Her biggest treat had been when a local farmer allowed her to drive his tractor round the field. Nelson rather regretted it when this interest gave way to rather more stereotypically female concerns.
    â€˜Girls too,’ he says. ‘Cassandra may have known too.’
    â€˜But if they knew about the plane,’ says Clough, wincing as Nelson narrowly avoids a gate, ‘did they also know about Uncle Fred’s body?’
    Nelson is about to answer when his phone rings. It’s on hands-free so he barks, ‘Yes?’
    â€˜Nelson. It’s Ruth.’
    â€˜Hi, Ruth. What is it? Has something happened to Katie?’
    He hears Ruth sigh. Clough hears it too and grins.
    â€˜Kate is fine. Enjoying her second day at school. Remember, you rang three times to find out about the first day?’
    â€˜Has she done music again?’
    â€˜She wasn’t “doing music”.’ He can hear the irritated quotation marks. ‘She was banging a tambourine. I wouldn’t book tickets for Carnegie Hall yet.’
    Where? thinks Nelson. Aloud he says, ‘So why are you ringing?’
    â€˜I’ve had the soil analysis results back on the body. The one found in the plane.’
    â€˜And what do they tell us?’
    â€˜The body was originally buried in anaerobic alkaline silt.’
    â€˜Tell me that in English.’
    Another sigh. ‘The plane was buried in chalky soil. Chalk’s alkaline but it drains well so you don’t get the skin preservation that you see in waterlogged anaerobic conditions.’
    â€˜The plane looked pretty well preserved to me.’
    â€˜Yes, metal’s no problem. Bone too. You get very well-preserved skeletons found in chalk. It’s just the way the skin was still attached.’
    Nelson doesn’t think he’s ever going to forget the way theskin was still attached. He remembers Barry’s description of a ‘bleeding dead body looking at me’.
    â€˜The way the skin was preserved was typical of marshy, boggy soil,’ Ruth is saying. ‘According to the soil analysis the body may have been buried fairly nearby—there are traces of marine life, for one thing—but in more marshy soil. Not the peat bogs, because they would have conserved it completely, but somewhere halfway between chalk soil and marshland. And it was wrapped in something. Remember I said that there were traces of something waxy on the bones?’
    Nelson dimly remembers something of the sort. The trouble is, Ruth always gives him so much information that the important bits sometimes get filtered out.
    â€˜Well, the body may have been wrapped in oilcloth, tarpaulin, something like that.’
    â€˜Deliberately buried then? He didn’t just lie where he fell?’
    â€˜It doesn’t look like it. No.’
    There is a silence. Nelson thinks of the house rising up out of the flat landscape. ‘This marshy ground, could it be somewhere like the grounds of Blackstock Hall, for example?’
    â€˜It’s