Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

I turned to confront a tall, stooping, birdlike figure peering over our shoulders. He reminded me of one of the bony herons I’d seen on arrival, hunched at the edge of the lake. This was Nicholas Wemyss, the curator, and introductions followed.

‘How do you know?’ he asked again.

‘If the exit holes are big enough to let you poke a match head into them, it’s deathwatch beetle. If they’re only big enough for a pin, it’s woodworm – furniture beetle, that is,’ I said, as I’d been taught.

‘Ah!’ said Nicholas, looking impressed. ‘Now I really appreciate a complicated technical explanation! But, Ellie, is this serious? Does it mean the stairs are unsafe?’

‘Well, it shouldn’t be left. Some of this bore dust,’ I held out a sample, ‘is quite fresh and, no, it probably isn’t quite safe.’ I looked at Johnny, who was nodding in agreement. ‘Let’s see if we can take up a board on the quarter landing. That’ll tell us more.’

Once more the hacksaw blade disappeared under the stair nosing, and one by one the ancient nails were snipped through. The first mighty board came loose. Loose for the first time since some ancient carpenter had tapped it into place over three hundred years before. Johnny waggled it to and fro, inserted the end of a nail bar, and prised it upwards. ‘Can’t move it!’ he said in surprise. ‘That’s stuck! There’s something under there!’

He poked around with the end of a two-foot rule. ‘Yes, bugger me – there’s something under there!’

We watched in puzzlement as he took up a second board. With that obstruction gone, the first board came out more easily. But it was unnaturally heavy. It was as much as the two of us could lift and, as it came from its ancient seating, ‘Corst blast!’ said Johnny. ‘There’s a little old box fastened up to the bottom of that!’

‘Little old box, nothing!’ said Nicholas. ‘No…that’s a little old coffin!’

There was no mistaking it. The profile of a coffin lid is in some way branded on the memory. The eternal symbol of death and dissolution, an object of reasonless fear buried in the country memories of us all. It was tiny; not above two foot long. A whiff of profound grief and misery briefly embraced us all as the darkness deepened, the thunderous rain began to fall again, and the damp chill of the day sharpened to an icy coldness.

The carpenter ran a knowledgeable hand over the small structure. Must have made hundreds of coffins in his time, I thought.

‘Oak boards. Nicely made,’ he said, absently caressing the joints with a craggy thumb. ‘That were tacked up from below.’ He slipped the point of a chisel under the rim of the coffin and pressed upwards against the covering board. ‘Lift it off, shall I?’

‘No! Wait!’ I heard my own voice call out. I didn’t want him to take off the lid. I didn’t want to see what the box held. ‘Perhaps we should call the police? Isn’t that what you do when you find a…er…come across a burial?’

‘If that’s what it is, it’s a very ancient burial,’ said Nicholas gently. ‘I don’t think the police will be interested in something so old. Because it is very old, wouldn’t you say?’

‘It went in the same day as the staircase was put up,’ said Johnny Bell firmly. ‘The only way you could get it in with this construction.’

‘So we have a date, then,’ said Nicholas. ‘Diana will know. My wife, Diana. She’s somewhere about…’

‘Sixteen sixty-two. That’s the year it was put in.’ A low clear voice called down to us from the upper floor. Diana came to join us, taking in the strange scene at a glance. ‘Oh dear! How extraordinary! But how fascinating! Look, with the stairs in their present parlous state I think we should take whatever that is downstairs and put it on the big table in the yellow drawing room and decide what to do about it when we’re in no danger of disappearing through a hole. Eleanor, is it? Eleanor Hardwick? I’m Diana Wemyss. I was just making you a cup of tea. Perhaps that can wait for a few minutes?’

I smiled as Diana’s comforting presence chased away the chill foreboding. She couldn’t have been more different from her gaunt husband. Short and rounded, with merry brown eyes, she had the cheerful and confident charm of a robin. We all made our way back down the stairs and into the drawing room and gathered around the little box waiting for Diana to tell us what to do next.

‘We really have to open it,’ she said. ‘Too embarrassing if we hauled a busy constable all the way out from Norwich to witness us opening an empty container.’

Everyone nodded, and Johnny got to work again with his chisel. Hardly breathing, we all peered into the coffin as the lid rose.

‘Ah,’ said Diana in an unsteady voice. ‘Nicholas, perhaps you’d better inform the constabulary? Just to be on the safe side.’

Two hours later, an inspector had called and viewed the pathetic contents of the box, and had taken brief statements. He agreed that the burial had been clandestine and there’d probably been dirty work at the crossroads back in the seventeenth century but, really, this was one for Time Team, not the Norfolk constabulary He was quite happy to leave it, as he put it, ‘in the hands of the experts’. That was us. We were on our own.

On a scatter of almost-fresh sawdust in the bottom of the box lay the yellowed bones of a very small infant. It lay on its side in a foetal position and, as far as our appalled and fleeting glances could determine, there was no obvious cause of death. There was no tattered winding sheet, no identifying bracelet. The only other thing the box contained was a slip of parchment. It had been glued inside the lid and so remained unaffected by the decay within the box. On it a neat hand had written, ‘Deus tute eum spectas.’

‘Good heavens!’ said Diana. ‘What have we here? The lost heir of the Easton family?’

I remember even then, in the turmoil of mixed emotions I was feeling, that something was off-key. I felt sick and guilty that we had, however innocently, displaced and disturbed the little body after all those years. With uncomfortable sideways glances at each other, we had replaced the lid on the coffin, Johnny Bell solemnly making the sign of the cross before packing up his tools and leaving.

Gratefully I accepted Diana’s invitation, in view of the late hour and the filthy weather, to stay the night in one of the guest rooms. While she put together a supper in their small flat on the second floor, Nicholas invited me to come round the house with him as he ‘put it to bed’. I watched him set alarms and lock doors, the whole process taking about half an hour. As we wandered down through the dark house, our progress was much delayed by Nicholas’s discursions as we passed one beautiful thing after another.

Pausing finally in the gallery which encircled the staircase at first-floor level, he drew my attention to a run of portraits. ‘I’d like to haul this lot in for interrogation, Ellie,’ he said. ‘I bet one of them could tell us more about the contents of that box. The Easton family. They were all here the year the staircase was put in. They came up from their London home for the jollifications in sixteen sixty-two. The celebrations covered the restoration of the monarchy two years earlier, but also the marriage of the younger brother of the earl.’

He lifted the shade of a table lamp and held it upwards. ‘Here he is, with his wife alongside. This is the chap whose anniversary we’re celebrating this Christmas. Father of the dynasty. His descendants still live hereabouts – they gave the house to the Trust thirty years ago. Robert Easton. Took over when his elder brother died childless in sixteen seventy-two.’