Humpty's bones

3. Monday Evening: 7.11

In the living room, Curtis poured three glasses of white wine. ‘Eden, I’m sorry to hear about your apartment. Were all the rooms affected?’

‘There’s smoke damage to the living room and the bedroom; they need repainting. Worst is the kitchen. The fire ruined the cupboards and even part of the floor burned through.’

‘Good heavens. But the insurance will take care of it?’ Even though Curtis had changed into a smock-top and jeans, which could best be described as rural hippy, he still sounded like the no-nonsense business man. Eden decided that many people Curtis met would be surprised by how his bohemian, easy-going appearance was at odds with the waspish manner.

‘I’m covered, so they’ll pay for the repairs in full. The trouble is the time it’ll take. It’s been nearly impossible to find a builder, they’re all so busy these days. I finally managed to get someone who can start at the end of the month.’

‘Long job?’

‘Two weeks to get it liveable again.’ There was something about Curtis’s expression that prompted her to add quickly, ‘Are you sure it’s alright for me to stay with you for so long?’

‘Fine… its fine.’

‘It really is good of you to put me up.’

‘No, the pleasure’s all ours.’ The smile was a tad professional, his eyes cold looking. ‘Heather could do with some company. We’re isolated out here… we love the peace of course. And that landscape, once you get use to the flatness, is really quite beautiful you know. Vast open spaces, enormous skies. You can almost reach out and touch the tranquillity of it all.’

Eden found she could only repeat her gratitude. ‘Thanks for inviting me to share it with you. I’ll do what I can to help out around the house.’

‘That’s very generous. With Heather standing in that damn hole in the garden all day sometimes the more mundane day-to-day stuff slips. And she has her accountancy work, too.’ He laughed. ‘We don’t want her clients banging on the door, do we? Howling about delayed tax returns. Now… seeing as Heather won’t come out of her lab and leave those bloody bones alone. Shall we take these to her?’

Eden picked up two wine glasses. Curtis followed with his.

‘Right to end of the passageway, Eden. Last door on your left. Duck your head; it’s the oldest part of the house. The doorways were built for goblins.’

The door was part open, so even with a glass in each hand, Eden managed by pushing it ajar with her elbow. Heather leaned over the long table in the centre of the room, with the kind of expression of concentration someone might wear when immersed in a jigsaw puzzle. On the table were laid fragments of bone; most still coated with mud. The low-ceilinged room accommodated ‘treasures’ from the dig: plastic trays full of those greenish copper coins, fragments of pottery, pieces of tile. On a desk in the corner, a microscope and a laptop sat side by side. Heather was oblivious to the new arrivals.

‘Have you put the chap back together again, yet?’ boomed Curtis.

Heather flinched. She shot him a glare that clearly said, Don’t you dare interrupt me like that! With Eden being there, Heather managed a polite. ‘Oh, you’ve come to see if I’ve made any progress? Eden, welcome to the lab, by the way.’

‘Lab?’ Curtis chuckled. ‘This is where they used to do the laundry way back when. So? Humpty Dumpty here… a Roman Legionnaire stabbed in the vitals, or a Vestal Virgin done horribly to death for being a tease?’

‘Ooh, wine. Lovely, thank you.’ Heather took the glass, her fingers still coated in good Yorkshire earth. ‘And at least it’s not too dry.’

‘White wine can never be too dry.’ As he sipped his he pulled a face that suggested he thought the wine mediocre. ‘Please note, Eden, your aunt isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. I tell her that stuff sticking to her fingers… if what she’s digging up is a stable… is two thousand year old poop.’

‘Hardly a stable. The dimensions are too small.’

‘A lavatory then. With contents thereof in situ.’

‘And these bones. There is definite charring.’

Heather offered a thighbone for her husband to examine more closely. He responded with a terse, ‘I’ll stay with the vin blanc, thank you.’ Then: ‘Eden was telling me about the fire damage to her apartment. Terrible state of affairs, isn’t it?’

Again Eden felt as if she had to reassure them that her visit wouldn’t be a long one. ‘And thanks again, Heather for inviting me to stay. I’ve told Curtis that I’m more than willing to help out around the house; I won’t get under your feet.’

Heather gulped her wine. ‘A boy, wasn’t it? Didn’t he do it deliberately?’

Eden tightened her grip on the glass. ‘I invited a friend home.’

‘But it turned out he didn’t give you his real name, did he?’ Heather’s gaze became uncomfortably penetrating as she regarded Eden.

‘That’s right. For whatever reason he didn’t want to… ’ Simply voicing the events that led to the destruction of half her home weren’t only painful, but they made her feel so foolish.

Curtis uhmed. ‘And you’d only met him the once, I understand?’

‘Yes. I feel such an idiot.’

Heather turned back to her bones. ‘You’re a very trusting person. Your mother’s like that. The trouble is that people aren’t always nice.’

Curtis took the empty glass from Heather as she picked up a jaw bone; it still had brown canines embedded in the sockets. Almost as if he couldn’t stop himself, he added, ‘The police think it was arson, don’t they?’

Heather murmured, ‘You can’t be too careful who you let into your home these days.’

‘Drug addict, was he? Or insane? Did he look right to you when you met him in the pub?’

Eden’s face burned. ‘He looked perfectly normal. There was nothing odd about him.’

‘Outwardly, maybe. But, with hindsight, you must remember some strange quirk about his behaviour?’

Eden’s hand shook enough for a drop of wine to spring over the rim to fall onto the bones laid on the table.

‘Careful!’ Heather used a tissue to dab wine from a rib bone.

Curtis laughed. ‘Did he spend the evening fiddling with a cigarette lighter?’

‘Look, I’d had a drink, I was lonely — ’

‘Eden, there goes more wine. Stand back from the table — please.’

Curtis still laughed. ‘But a dirty, great keg of diesel would have been a dead give away. I wonder what turns people into arsonists?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Eden’s eyes pricked. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. People could have died that night. My neighbours have children — ’

‘Uh, there it goes again.’ The phone in the passageway began to ring. ‘Excuse me.’ Curtis vanished back through the door. A second later Eden heard his brisk voice dealing with what appeared to be more problems. ‘You’ve tackled Klein, I hope? He gets no more studio time unless he pays at least half upfront… what’s that? If it’s not Klein, what is it then? The heating? What do you expect me to do about it this time of night? No, don’t call out the engineer. We can’t afford to run up more bills. The studio’s supposed to generate income for us. At this rate we’ll be pouring more cash in than we’re getting out. Damn it, Wayne. Look at the thermostat. Somebody’s probably just dicked around with the thing. Turn it down; don’t expect me to hold your hand while you do it.’

As Curtis fought his battles by phone Heather murmured, ‘Tibia, ribs, though not quite a full set. Vertebrae. Shins. Part of a pelvis. Do you know what we’ve got here?’

‘What?’ Eden had been so wound up by this couple’s insensitivity that she’d not been listening. If anything, she found herself thinking about her apartment. The stench of smoke that clung to everything. The heat in the kitchen had melted the windows so they hung down the wall like surreal icicles. The mess, the bloody awful, stinking mess.

‘Eden, do you know what we’ve got here?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I’m sorry that my mother asked you to put me up. It’s not working out. In the morning I’ll — ’

‘Oh, don’t let Curtis bother you. It’s just his way. Ever since he set up this studio he’s been like an old dog with a sore backside. Growl, growl, growl… I don’t even listen to what he says half the time. Water off a duck’s back. Now, see this ankle joint. Hardly any wear.’

Eden stared in disbelief. How can anyone take part in what had been a bullying interrogation, then switch subjects like nothing had happened?

Heather pressed on, clearly fascinated by the skeleton. Eden could smell the wet soil. It added to the oppressive air of the house. She longed to go out into the fields and walk and walk until sheer exhaustion released the emotional pressure she felt building inside of her. Heather purred her observations as she lovingly touched each bone in turn. ‘No sign of disease, or wear, certainly no arthritis in the big ball joints of the hips. We’re looking at the skeleton of a youth, I’m sure of it. Late teens at the most. From the lightness of the bones I’d say he was slightly built. Almost willowy you could say. Eden? We’ve been thugs, haven’t we? You come here as our guest and we’ve talked about that fire like it was nothing more than broken plate. You must have been devastated, poor thing.’

‘It’s not fair!’

‘Of course, it isn’t. The boy who started the fire must have been psychotic.’

‘No, I meant — ’

‘Wait here. Time for more medicine.’

‘No, I meant you’ve not been fair.’ But Heather had already vanished through the low doorway and so didn’t hear. Meanwhile, in the passage, Curtis loudly reminded the luckless Wayne that all studio bookings required a deposit.

‘Poor Wayne,’ Eden breathed. ‘Poor me.’

For some reason, Heather was delayed long enough for Eden’s temper to cool. By the time Heather returned with two more bottles of wine, Eden had begun to take an interest in the trays of coins. One about the size of her thumbnail revealed a human figure through the corrosion.

‘That’s one of the better preserved ones.’ Heather filled Eden’s glass. ‘Medicine. Drink up.’

‘I can make out a man; although it’s faint. Almost a ghost.’

‘If he’s wearing clothes it will be an emperor, if he’s nude it will probably be a god. Roman gods loved to disrobe.’

‘It’s impossible to tell. It’s so worn.’

‘It’ll have gone through a lot of Romano-British hands, no doubt buying flagons of ale. The money might have even belonged to Humpty here.’

‘Humpty?’ For the first time in a while Eden smiled.

‘We have to call this mess of bones something. Humpty Dumpty makes sense. At least until I’ve put him back together again.’ She perused the bones. ‘But I’m missing a skull. I have almost a complete human skeleton, but no skull.’

‘Only the coins can’t be his.’

‘Hmm?’ Thoughtful, Heather laid neck vertebrae in a line extending from the collar bone.

‘The coins. I mean they can’t all be his, can they?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Humpty’s bones were found beneath the coins. You said some are twentieth century.’

‘Of course, you’re right. Yes, absolutely — some date from the 1990s.’

‘So, why have generations of people dropped coins into that exact spot at the bottom of your garden?’

Heather scratched her nose with a dirt crusted finger. ‘There was a circular depression there; something like a bomb crater, but only about so big.’ She held out her hands to indicate a yard across. ‘It did look peculiar, though. It was quite deep. At the time I thought that it might be where a tree had been taken out and the root had pulled out a big chunk of soil. At the bottom of the crater was a hole. I assumed a rabbit had dug it.’

‘That’s where people had been dropping in coins through the centuries.’

Heather pursed her lips as she thought about it. ‘I guess you’re right. Perhaps it was the equivalent of a wishing well. You know, toss in a penny and make a wish. So, Humpty.’ She addressed the skeleton. ‘You’ve been lying there while folk chucked money at you. Hardly resting in peace, is it?’

‘Or they were paying him?’

‘Come again?’

Eden nodded at the bones that so much resembled dirty twigs. ‘Paying him. Making offerings of coins.’

‘Paying him to do what?’

‘Stay where he is. Not to harm them.’

Heather stared for a moment, then gave sharp-sounding laugh. ‘That’s beautifully imagined, Eden.’

‘Don’t laugh. It’s possible.’

‘You mean for the last eighteen hundred years men, women and children have been creeping furtively up to the hole and dropping their hard cash into it before scurrying away again before a bony hand darts out to grab them by the ankle?’

‘I’m serious, it adds up.’

‘Now you’re pulling my leg, Eden. Here let me top you up. Is that the time? I must switch the oven on.’

‘I’ve beaten you to it.’ Curtis stooped to enter through the low door. ‘The pizzas are already in.’

‘Is Wayne coping at the studio?’

‘The bloody fool. He didn’t realise that all he needed to do was to turn down the thermostat to lower the heating. He’s had the Dutch band cooking in the control room as they’ve worked on a sound mix. If Wayne screws up one more time… ’ He helped himself to wine. ‘Stick with your work, Eden. It’s got to be less stressful than running a recording studio. Ah, your bony wee chap has got a neck now.’

Eden said, ‘He’s also got a name — Humpty.’

‘Yes. Humpty Dumpty. What happened to his head?’

‘Ah, that’s the mystery,’ Heather sighed. ‘I’ve nearly a complete skeleton, as far as I can judge.’

‘Only no noodle bone?’

Eden made a point of joining in (to ensure talk didn’t drift back to the arson), ‘No human skull, although Heather’s found a dog’s jawbone.’

‘And parts of the cranium along with an eye ridge.’

‘It doesn’t surprise me. They’re crazy about dogs round here. They even called the village Dog Lands. We’re in Dog Star House, and there’s all kinds of Dog Lanes, Hounds Heaths. Plus there’s a weird carving of a dog in the lintel above the church door. The whole place must be barking mad.’

His wife tutted. ‘Wait until I’ve got more wine inside of me before you go cracking jokes like that.’ She took a hefty swallow. ‘Hmm. Before I forget: Eden has a theory about the coins.’

‘Why there are so many of them? And from different centuries. I must admit that’s a strange one.’

‘Eden thinks… ’ A little smile played on Heather’s lips. ‘People put money in the hole where the bones were to appease Humpty’s ghost.’

‘No, I didn’t say that.’ Eden flushed.

‘As near as. You thought they were offerings.’

Curtis chuckled. ‘Did you hear that, Humpty?’ He crouched down to look at the bones at eye-level. ‘If you stay there like a good skeleton I’ll bring you a slice of pizza later. What do you say, old chum?’

‘Eden — ’ Heather began.

But Eden had already left the room. They think I’m a fool, she thought angrily. They as good as tell me that I was stupid to bring home an arsonist for a one night stand. Now I’ve tried to show an interest in Heather’s bloody bones they’re making fun of me.

In the gloomy passageway she mistook one door for the way back to the living room. She miscalculated the height of the entrance; a second later Eden smacked her forehead hard against the low lintel.