A Late Phoenix by Catherine Aird Read Free Book Online

force too long to confuse civil law with criminal law and was wise enough never to give an opinion of the former. Besides, the law of contract was quite tortuous enough without the police coming into it. He stepped over the rubble and called back over his shoulder, “There’s bound to be a clause about enemy action in it. There almost always is.”
    This was clearly a new thought to both men.
    Detective Constable Crosby followed close on Sloan’s heels, grinning. “You can see them both working that one out, sir, only they can’t quite remember in whose favor enemy action would be.”
    â€œNobody’s, Crosby,” Sloan reminded him soberly. “Ever.”

Clear as you go
    C HAPTER F OUR
    P.C. Cresswell led them across the site. It was already taking on a smoothed look.
    Except at one point.
    The point which had been first a cellar and then a tomb.
    â€œWe’ve had the press here, sir,” said Cresswell. “I didn’t know quite how you would feel about them but seeing as how I understand it’s a question of identification I didn’t know but that you might think a bit of publicity might come in handy.”
    â€œFound,” murmured Sloan absently. “One woman.”
    â€œYes, sir.” P.C. Cresswell moved ahead. “The ladder’s over here, sir.”
    The ladder was leaning against the only remaining wall of the cellar. Sloan took his bearings all over again in daylight and decided that it had been an outside wall with solid earth on the other side—the solid earth of the garden, in fact. The side of the cellar facing the street had been shored up a little from the inside—presumably to keep the pavement intact. The two walls which were common to the houses on either side had disintegrated completely. You could now step into the cellar of what had been the house next door without let or hindrance.
    But could you have done so thirty years ago?
    Sloan stopped and examined the rubble. He thought he could make out the remains of an old party wall. He had a good look at the trench which had contained the skeleton. It was lying parallel to the remaining wall and about two feet from it. Whatever had buried the skeleton, it had not been the wall immediately beside it.
    â€œLying there for shelter, sir?” suggested Crosby. “Along the ground under the wall …”
    â€œPerhaps,” said Sloan.
    If so, the wall hadn’t given enough protection when the whole house—when all four houses—came tumbling down on the top of the cellar.
    He turned and regarded the other excavation—the one made by the archeologists of last weekend. Saxon remains, wasn’t it, that Dr. Latimer had said that they had been looking for?
    The little trenches of the archeologists followed an entirely different pattern from those of the remains of the Conway Street and Lamb Lane houses. Sloan wondered idly what cataclysmic event had brought the Saxon settlement in Berebury—if there ever had been one—to an end. Before you had high explosives to hand, so to speak. He sighed. He supposed they, too, had had their enemies.
    Everyone had enemies.
    Even Saxons.
    Perhaps especially Saxons.
    Crosby inadvertently dislodged a piece of broken brick with his shoe. It went clattering down into the shallow trench that had been the unknown woman’s grave.
    Perhaps, thought Sloan, still considering, the Saxon settlement here had ended not with the wail of warning and the crash-bang of weaponry but with a whimper.
    He didn’t know.
    He wasn’t an historian.
    Fire and flood and human aggression were enemies common to all history. Perhaps it didn’t matter very much in the long run which you succumbed to. And they were all of them better than some diseases he’d seen.
    â€œSir …” Constable Crosby interrupted his reverie.
    â€œWell?” Perhaps this woman was history, too. Lying waiting for some archaeologist not yet born