Hamilton nodded.
They left straightaway.
Where the salt pools were, the ground was boggy but not sour. They trudged through the marsh, toward a group of men working at the far end. Rutledge saw Wister there, but didn’t recognize the others.
This pool was at the very edge of the marsh. Hamilton was saying, “It’s not very productive—the tides don’t always come up this far, and the land there is starting to dry as well. There was a high tide last week, and someone thought to take a look last night. The verdict was, it was finally ready.”
Rutledge could see the salt rind on the stalks of plants growing next to some of the pools, which were more or less a catchment for seawater left behind as the tide went out.
The men digging in the pool looked up as Rutledge and Hamilton approached. Wister turned and nodded. At his feet were several more bones. They were not clean.
“What have you got?” Rutledge asked.
“Not much so far. That looks like a tibia. And those are part of a hand. Over here, there are several toes. Whoever it is was dismembered and buried here. This isn’t an animal’s leavings. No signs of gnawing. My guess is a male, judging by the length of the leg. He’s been here some time. But the salt has preserved some of him. Rather nasty.”
Although they worked for several more hours, they didn’t find much more.
Rutledge asked one of the men, “How long has this section been used as a salt pool?”
“Before the war,” he replied. “It was expanded then, but dried too quickly to be much use.”
“And so it has been sitting here untouched for some years. Eight? Ten?”
“Closer to ten,” the man answered.
“We’re going to need that area adjacent to the pool dug up as well,” Rutledge said. “And we need more men.”
Hamilton went off to find them, and Rutledge watched the work here until Wister said, “It’s useless. Let’s start to expand it to your right.”
The work went on, laborious and careful. More bones began to come to light.
As more men appeared and helped, the work went faster. And then a woman cried out.
Rutledge turned to see Mrs. Dunn coming toward them.
He hurried forward, with Wister in his wake. Catching her by the shoulders, he stopped her, although she struggled against his hold, crying out for him to let her go.
“You mustn’t,” he said gently. “We’ve only begun, we don’t know what we’ve found.”
“I have a right to see. It’s my Gerry, isn’t it? Tell me—I’ve waited all these years—I have a right—!”
Dr. Wister said, “Mrs. Dunn—Mary—you need to go home and wait. Mr. Rutledge is right, it could be anything, a Viking burial—”
“No. It’s my boy, and I want to be there.” She was crying now. “I said, it didn’t matter, alive or dead, as long as I knew. But all along I wanted him back, alive. I’d have hidden him from the Army—I’d have done anything—”
Another woman came running. “I couldn’t stop her,” she called. “Let me take her home.”
Mary Dunn, her shoulders slumped, let her neighbor take her by the arm and lead her away, certain now and brokenhearted. “None of you know what it was like, waiting. Else you’d understand,” she said over her shoulder. “He’s still my boy . . .”
Wister watched her go. “Poor woman.”
Rutledge said, “This is the worst part of murder.”
Wister turned. “Here—I never said it was murder—”
“You told us the body had been dismembered. What the hell did you think it was?”
Wister answered quietly, “I know. I just didn’t want—” He stopped. “I wish to God it is a Viking grave!” He left Rutledge standing there and walked heavily back to where the men were digging.
By teatime, the rest of the body had emerged, scattered about ten square feet of marsh and the adjacent higher ground.
“How did anyone not see him?” Hamilton was demanding.
“It was at the start of the war,” one of the younger workmen answered. “They had rolls of wire here, and it was off-limits because of the inlet yonder. There were even stories that it was mined. No one ever tried to test that. It was ’14, and invasion fever. Mum slept with an axe under her bed, for fear the Germans would break through the coast road and come in the night.”
“His killer must have thought that when the ravens and gulls had finished with the body, it would wash out to sea. Then he came back and discovered it hadn’t.”
“But who is it?” someone asked as Wister began to place the bones on a length of canvas someone had brought out.
“I thought Gerald was a deserter,” another man put in. “That’s what the Army called him.”
“I heard he went away in the night,” someone else commented. “And the Army had no choice but to call it desertion.”
“It’s not desertion if he’s been murdered,” the first man retorted. “Army jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
“Best not to let her see him brought out,” Hamilton told them. “It will have to be a closed casket.”
“Reminds me,” an older man said, “of the war. Caskets went into the ground empty, until someone said how foolish that was, until the body came home. But most never did. My son’s one of them, still lying in France.” They stood in a half circle, caps off, as Wister and three other men lifted the corner of the canvas and began to walk back to the harbor and then up the long hill to the surgery. Women were standing in their doorways, watching the somber party pass by. One or two were weeping.
When they arrived at the surgery and the bones were deposited in a back room, everyone walked out except for Rutledge, Hamilton, and Wister.
It took the doctor the better part of an hour to assemble the bones on the long table covered with a sheet. When it was done, he straightened and turned to the two policemen who had silently watched him work.
“All right. I’d guess he was twenty? Not more than twenty-one. And he hadn’t been in the ground very long. A few years. Five? Give or take. They’re still finding bones in France and Belgium, did you know? The grave teams. Terrible work. But necessary.” He went to a sink against the far wall, washed his hands with water from a pitcher and then dried them carefully, as if washing off the smell of death.
He turned and walked back to the table. “I can’t tell you with any certainty that this is Gerald Dunn. Nor can I tell you it isn’t. The age fits, from what I was told. The time of death, mid-1917, seems likely. The ribs were smashed, as you can see. But if you look here”—he pointed—“I would guess that’s a knife wound. You can see where the blade scraped that bone. Very different to the heavy hammer blows that broke up the bones later on. There’s nothing to suggest blunt force or a shooting. A few pieces are still missing—some of the smaller bones of the hands and feet. The head. But we were remarkably lucky to find as much as we did. Poor Mrs. Dunn. She’ll have to be told something.”
In the event, they found her waiting stoically, her younger son beside her, on the street in front of the doctor’s surgery.
She took one look at the faces of the three men who came out to speak to her, and didn’t wait to hear what they had to say.