The Medieval Murderers - King Arthur's Bones

‘But we still don’t know what happened to Arthur’s bones apart from this one,’ moaned Bromhead, swinging the thigh-bone they had retrieved from Merrick’s coat pocket. ‘If Merrick didn’t have them, then where have they gone?’

It was Mrs Stanhope who solved the mystery, by entering the room at that very moment with a familiar canvas sack over her shoulder.

‘Mr M, if you don’t want these old bones I hid away for you before the Runners came round, I will throw them on the local tip.’

Malinferno strode across the room and gave his startled landlady a long and lingering kiss.

The final act of the three conspirators was to agree to hide King Arthur’s bones away securely so that a future generation may call on them in a time of real need. It was Bromhead who had voiced all their fears about the bones.

‘They have been nothing but a curse since I uncovered them. We should put them somewhere secure where they will not be found for a very long time.’

They had called on the services of Thomas Dale, who provided them with a newfangled wrought-iron coffin, inside of which was placed the bones, along with the battered and scarred remains of the ancient wooden chest that had once housed them. From Bromhead’s house at dead of night, they had solemnly processed to the rundown building across the yard that was ironically called Pope’s Mansion. The cellars beneath it were the original undercroft area of medieval Bermondsey Abbey, and it seemed a fitting place for Arthur to rest a while longer. With the aid of four of Dale’s men, sworn to secrecy with a plentiful supply of ale, they secreted the heavy coffin behind an old, crumbling wall, which they patched up after them. Malinferno silently prayed it would be a considerable time before the bones saw the light of day again.

London, August 2004

The rescue dig at Bermondsey Abbey was coming to an end, as the contractors for the huge development project, which would bury the ancient foundations for ever, were itching to send in their piledrivers. Only two archaeologists remained, sitting in their Portacabin over mugs of instant coffee, while their solitary student volunteer was somewhere outside, grubbing through the basements with his metal detector.

‘Never gives up, does he!’ muttered Edward Asprey. ‘The last day and he still hopes to find a pot of gold with that thing.’

Gwen Arnold jumped to the defence of Philip Grainger, as she knew that Asprey, the rather depressive team leader, disliked the student, probably because he was unfailingly cheerful. ‘Come on, he’s harmless enough. And he has found a few coins and bits and pieces with that gadget of his.’

Gwen was a physical anthropologist on secondment from Cardiff University, an earnest woman of thirty drafted in to advise on the human remains found when they excavated the abbey cemetery, though some unexpected finds had been unearthed elsewhere in the dig.

Edward Asprey grunted and looked despondently around the cabin at the piles of papers, books and assorted debris that would have to be packed up and removed this weekend. He was a small man, with a wispy beard and a mop of black hair. ‘It’ll seem odd to be back in my office after months in this place,’ he observed. ‘Are you going straight back to Wales?’

‘No, I need to write up this project first. Then I must get back before term starts, as I’ve got to get my lectures sorted.’

She had plain but pleasant features, with rather lank brown hair pulled straight back and secured with an elastic band.

Abruptly the door was thrown open and Philip’s amiable face appeared around it. He had a pair of headphones pushed down around his neck and seemed excited, but he was always one to be enthusiastic about everything.

‘You’d best come and have a look at this, folks!’ he chanted, waving a gadget that looked like a walking stick with a black dinner plate stuck on the end.

‘Oh, God, not that bloody thing again?’ whined Asprey, but Gwen was more sympathetic. ‘What have you found this time, Phil?’ she asked.

‘Not actually found anything yet,’ he answered, rather crestfallen. ‘But I’ve had the strongest signal I’ve ever had with this.’ He waved the detector again. ‘Almost burst my eardrums. There must be a huge piece of ferrous metal there.’

‘And where’s that?’ asked Asprey wearily.

‘In the cellarer’s undercroft, against the north wall.’

The senior scientist groaned. ‘Not that bloody place again. It’s cursed!’

They had had several misfortunes there during the dig. It was the site of the storage vaults beneath the cellarer’s building of the original eleventh-century priory. First, a volunteer had fallen into the excavation and broken a leg, then a new JCB had crashed over the edge – and finally lightning had struck a bizarre discovery behind a false wall. [10]

The more sympathetic Gwen went out with Philip and followed him as he almost danced across to the ladder that went down into the long excavation. It was criss-crossed with the remains of walls from haphazard building over almost a millennium.

At the bottom he led her over to a ruinous patch of masonry about six feet high, which showed stones, bricks and crumbling mortar from many different periods. Philip brandished his detector again and fiddled with some of the control knobs.

‘I’ll put it on the speaker, rather than the headphones, so you can hear,’ he offered excitedly. Raising the dinner-plate end towards the wall, he moved it slowly along, just above ground level. The steady whine suddenly erupted into a rising shriek, which persisted for about six feet as he closely traversed the stonework. ‘Something big in there, Gwen!’ he said gleefully.

Next afternoon the three of them stood in a cluttered preparation room next to a laboratory in the Archaeology Department, just off Gower Street. A badly rusted metal coffin sat on the floor, its lid propped against a nearby wall, the corroded holding bolts cut off with an angle-grinder.

A spreading pool of rusty fluid seeped across the floor, even though a large volume of water had been drained out at the excavation site.

‘No doubt about it being early nineteenth century,’ said Edward Asprey. ‘It was from the time when there was this real fear of grave robbers – the “resurrection men” and all that.’

‘Stealing bodies to sell to anatomists, you mean?’ asked Philip. He was still on a high from being the finder of this strange contraption. When a section of the decayed wall had been pulled down, the iron coffin had been found under pile of waterlogged rubble and had to be hauled back to the laboratory before it could be opened by their technicians.

‘But what was left of that box inside certainly wasn’t nineteenth century,’ objected Gwen. ‘Nor are those bones, though God knows how old they are.’

They moved to a metal table against the wall, where at one end a pile of mouldering wood had been separated from a collection of fragmented bones at the other.

‘So what are you saying about these?’ asked Edward, pointing at the remains of a fragile, brownish skeleton. Gwen carefully picked up a length of thigh-bone, with the round knob of the hip joint at the top. ‘It’s a partial skeleton, very badly decayed – the bone is sodden and porous. Probably the last two centuries in that leaking metal box did it more damage that it suffered in all its previous history.’

‘Which is how long?’ demanded Edward Asprey.

The anthropologist shrugged. ‘Impossible to tell! Environment affects the appearance of bone far more than time itself. Without carbon dating, it would be sheer guesswork.’

‘What about the remains of the box?’ asked Philip. ‘Those bits of wood lying all around the heap of bones must be what’s left of some sort of container.’