He dragged himself back out of the dell, trying not to put any more weight on his stump, taking the torch from a descending Robin and holding it steady for the other two as they worked, the end of his stump throbbing and, he suspected, rubbed raw.
Barclay had created a short channel a couple of feet deep before he took his first break, clambering out of the hole to fetch a bottle of water from his kit bag. While he drank and Robin took a rest, leaning on the handle of her spade, the sound of barking reached them again. Barclay squinted towards the unseen Chiswell House.
“What kind of dogs has she got in there?” he asked.
“Old Lab and a yappy bastard of a terrier,” said Strike.
“Don’t like our chances if she lets them oot,” said Barclay, wiping his mouth on his arm. “Terrier’ll get straight through those bushes. They’ve got fuckin’ good hearin’, terriers.”
“Better hope she doesn’t let them out, then,” said Strike, but he added, “Give it five, Robin,” and turned off the torch.
Robin, too, climbed out of the basin and accepted a fresh bottle of water from Barclay. Now that she was no longer digging, the chill made her exposed flesh creep. The fluttering and scurrying of small creatures in the grass and trees seemed extraordinarily loud in the darkness. Still the dog barked, and, distantly, Robin thought she heard a woman shout.
“Did you hear that?”
“Aye. Sounded like she was telling it to shut up,” said Barclay.
They waited. At last, the terrier stopped barking.
“Give it a few more minutes,” said Strike. “Let it fall asleep.”
They waited, the whispering of every leaf magnified in the darkness, until Robin and Barclay lowered themselves back into the dell and began to dig again.
Robin’s muscles were now begging for mercy, her palms beginning to blister beneath the gloves. The deeper they dug, the harder the job became, the soil compacted and full of rocks. Barclay’s end of the trench was considerably deeper than Robin’s.
“Let me do a bit,” Strike suggested.
“No,” she snapped, too tired to be anything but blunt. “You’ll bugger your leg completely.”
“She’s nae wrong, pal,” panted Barclay. “Gie’s another drink of water, I’m gaspin’.”
An hour later, Barclay was standing waist deep in soil and Robin’s palms were bleeding beneath the overlarge gloves, which were rubbing away layers of skin as she used the blunt end of the mattock to try and prize a heavy rock out of the ground.
“Come—on—you—bloody—thing—”
“Want a hand?” offered Strike, readying himself to descend.
“Stay there,” she told him angrily. “I’m not going to be able to help carry you back to the car, not after this—”
A final, involuntary yelp escaped her as she succeeded in overturning the small boulder. A couple of tiny, wriggling insects attached to the underside slid away from the torchlight. Strike directed the beam back on Barclay.
“Cormoran,” said Robin sharply.
“What?”
“I need light.”
Something in her voice made Barclay stop digging. Rather than direct the beam back at her, and disregarding her warning of a moment ago, Strike slid back down into the pit, landing on the loose earth. The torchlight swung around, blinding Robin for a second.
“What’ve you seen?”
“Shine it here,” she said. “On the rock.”
Barclay clambered towards them, his jeans covered from hem to pockets in soil.
Strike did as Robin asked. The three of them peered down at the encrusted surface of the rock. There, stuck to the mud, was a strand of what was plainly not vegetable matter, but wool fibers, faintly but distinctly pink.
They turned in unison to examine the indentation left in the ground where the rock had sat, Strike directing the torchlight into the hole.
“Oh, shit,” gasped Robin, and without thinking she clapped two muddy garden gloves to her face. A couple of inches of filthy material had been revealed, and in the strong beam of the torch, it, too, was pink.
“Give me that,” said Strike, tugging the mattock out of her hand.
“No—!”
But he almost pushed her aside. By the deflected torchlight she could see his expression, forbidding, furious, as though the pink blanket had grievously wronged him, as though he had suffered a personal affront.
“Barclay, you take this.”
He thrust the mattock at his subcontractor.
“Break this up, as much as you can. Try not to puncture the blanket. Robin, go to the other end. Use the fork. And mind my hands,” Strike told Barclay. Sticking the torch in his mouth so that he could see by its light, he fell to his knees in the dirt and began to move earth aside with his fingers.
“Listen,” whispered Robin, freezing.
The sound of the terrier’s frenzied barking reached them once again through the night air.
“I yelled, didn’t I, when I overturned the rock?” whispered Robin. “I think I woke it up again.”
“Never mind that now,” said Strike, his fingers prizing dirt away from the blanket. “Dig.”
“But what if—?”
“We’ll deal with that if it happens. Dig.”
Robin plied the fork. After a couple of minutes, Barclay swapped the mattock for a shovel. Slowly, the length of the pink blanket, its contents still buried too deep to remove, was revealed.
“That’s no adult,” said Barclay, surveying the stretch of filthy blanket.
And still, the terrier continued to yap, distantly, from the direction of Chiswell House.
“We should call the polis, Strike,” said Barclay, pausing to wipe sweat and mud out of his eyes. “Are we no disturbing a crime scene, here?”
Strike didn’t answer. Feeling slightly sick, Robin watched his fingers feeling the shape of the thing that was hidden beneath the filthy blanket.
“Go up to my kit bag,” he told her. “There’s a knife in there. Stanley knife. Quickly.”
The terrier was still yapping distractedly. Robin thought it sounded louder. She clambered up the steep side of the dell, groped around in the dark depths of the bag, found the knife and slid back down to Strike.
“Cormoran, I think Sam’s right,” she whispered. “We should leave this to the—”
“Give me the knife,” he said, holding out his hand. “Come on, quick, I can feel it. This is the skull. Quickly!”
Against her better instincts, she handed over the blade. There was a sound of puncturing fabric and then a ripping.
“What are you doing?” she gasped, watching Strike tugging at something in the ground.
“Jesus fuck, Strike,” said Barclay angrily, “are ye tryin’ to rip off its—?”
With a dreadful crunching noise, the earth gave up something large and white. Robin gave a small yelp, stepped backwards and fell, half-sitting, into the wall of the dell.
“Fuck,” repeated Barclay.
Strike shifted the torch to his free hand so as to shine it onto the thing he had just dragged out of the earth. Stunned, Robin and Barclay saw the discolored and partially shattered skull of a horse.
66
Do not sit here musing and brooding over insoluble conundrums.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Protected through the years by the blanket, the skull shone pale in the torchlight, weirdly reptilian in the length of its nose and the sharpness of its mandibles. A few blunt teeth remained. There were cavities in the skull in addition to the eyeholes, one in the jaw, one to the side of the head, and around each, the bone was cracked and splintered.
“Shot,” said Strike, turning the skull slowly in his hands. A third indentation showed the course of another bullet, which had fractured but not penetrated the horse’s head.
Robin knew she would have been feeling far worse had the skull been human, but she was nonetheless shaken by the noise it had made when released from the earth, and by the unexpected sight of this fragile shell of what had once lived and breathed, stripped bare by bacteria and insects.
“Vets euthanize horses with a single shot to the forehead,” she said. “They don’t spray them with bullets.”
“Rifle,” said Barclay authoritatively, clambering nearer to examine the skull. “Someone’s took pot shots at it.”
“Not that big, is it? Was it a foal?” Strike asked Robin.