Ghosts of Mayfield Court by Norman Russell Read Free Book Online

Jackson was a marine chandler, had passed him a dud note, and had paid for his mistake with eight years’ hard labour. Another wretch, convinced that Inspector Jackson was a wholesale corn factor, had tried torecruit him into an eclectic gang of assassins, and had ended up on the gallows.
    Doctor Venner was a distinguished, grey-headed gentleman in his early sixties, for many years physician to some of the leading families in the county. Rubbing shoulders with the gentry may have given him his penchant for meticulously elegant attire: today, he was wearing a black frock coat with striped trousers, and a tall silk hat worn ever so slightly rakishly, its brim tilted over his left eye. He was sporting the lilac gloves that he favoured for day wear.
    To Bottomley’s way of thinking, Dandy Jim was one of the most elegantly foppish men that he had ever seen. He was also a brilliant police surgeon, with an immense knowledge of forensic medicine. The three men had worked together for many years.
    ‘So, Bottomley,’ said Dr Venner, ‘what have you got for me this time?’
    He deposited his Gladstone bag on a clear patch of grass near the wall and, unfastening the five ‘doctor’s buttons’ on the sleeves of his frock coat, turned back the cuffs. He placed his silk hat carefully on a section of the ruined wall, and deposited his gloves inside it.
    ‘I’m not quite sure yet, sir,’ Bottomley replied, ‘but I’m inclined to think it’s murder most foul – and the foulest of all, in my book: child-murder.’
    ‘Hmm…. Well, it’s a fine, dry day, so we can examine the remains out here in the garden, where we can be reasonably private. Can you find a bed sheet, or a horse blanket – something that I can use to place the bones upon? Then, Jackson, perhaps you’ll assist me in removing the skeleton from the cavity?’

    The bones of the skeleton lay gleaming white under the August sun. They had been removed piecemeal from the cavity in the wall, and Jackson had been obliged to grope around in a mulch of dried leaves and soil in order to retrieve the leg bones.
    Sergeant Bottomley had withdrawn a few feet from the spot, and Jackson joined him. Together, the two policemen watched their colleague go to work.
    Dr Venner spent a long time articulating the skeleton, carefully arranging the bones in their correct order. Then he removed a magnifying glass from his bag, and knelt down on the edge of the linen sheet that Bottomley had procured from the house. He examined every bone, and lifted the skull, so that he could scrutinize it before putting it back in its place. Then he selected three small bones from the mournful pile, and laid them out carefully on the grass.
    ‘There, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you can see the ilium, the ischium, and the pubis. After puberty, these three bones are fused into one, which we call the innominate bone, but in the child they are the three separate bones that you can see here. This is the skeleton of a child, and the contour of the pelvis shows it to have been a female child.’
    Venner rose to his feet, and dusted the knees of his trousers carefully with a handkerchief. ‘It was a little girl, you understand, aged ten or eleven. There is no way of ascertaining the cause of death. If she died by violence, then whatever force was used was not sufficient to break or damage any of her bones.’
    He looked away from the two officers, as though suddenly ashamed of what he was about to say. ‘All the bones have been gnawed by rats, and it is conceivable that the body was consumed by rodents over a period of some months after entombment. She has lain there about thirty years. Twenty-five to thirty years.’
    ‘The bones seem unusually clean,’ said Jackson. ‘I’d have thought that they would have become discoloured after so many years unburied.’
    ‘It’s a very dry location, and the skeleton had been gradually covered by leaves and other desiccated vegetable debris. I think that accounts