An Unkindness of Ravens by Ruth Rendell Page B

more than right-angled corner of the field. It was near enough to the forest for the air to smell resinous. The soil was light and sandy with an admixture of pine needles.
    ‘Easy enough to dig,’ said Wexford to Burden. ‘Almost anyone not decrepit could dig a grave like that in half an hour. Digging it deep enough would have taken a little longer.’
    They were viewing the terrain, the distance of the grave from the road and the footpath, while Sir Hilary Tremlett, the pathologist, stood by with the scene-of-crimes officer to supervise the careful unearthing. Sir Hilary had happened to be at Stowerton when Fitzgerald’s call came in. By a piece of luck he had just arrived at the infirmary to perform a postmortem. It was not yet ten o’clock, a morning of pearly sunshine, the blue sky dotted with innumerable puffs of tiny white cloud. But every man there, the short portly august pathologist included, had a raincoat on. It had rained daily for so many weeks that no one was going to take the risk of going without; no one anyway could yet believe his own eyes.
    ‘The rain made the weeds grow like that,’ said Wexford. ‘You can see what happened. It’s rather interesting. All the ground here had grass growing on it, then a patch was dug to receive that. It was covered up again with overturned earth, the weed seeds came and rain, seemingly endless rain, and what grew up on that fertile patch and that patch only were broad-leaved plants. If it had been a dry spring there would have been more grass and it would all have been much less green.’
    ‘And the ground harder. If the ground hadn’t been soft and moist the dog might not have persisted with its digging.’
    ‘The mistake was in not digging the grave deep enough. It makes you wonder why he or she or they didn’t. Laziness? Lack of time? Lack of light? The six-foot rule is a good one because things of this kind do tend to work to the surface.’
    ‘If that’s so,’ said Dr Crocker, coming up to them, ‘why is it they always have to dig so far down to find ancient cities and temples and so forth?’
    ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Wexford. ‘Ask the dog. He’s the archaeologist. Mind you, we don’t have any lava in Sussex.’
    They approached a little nearer to where Detectives Archbold and Bennett were carrying out their delicate spadework. It was apparent now that the corpse of the man that lay in the earth had been neither wrapped nor covered before it was buried. The earth didn’t besmear it as a heavier clayey soil might have done. It was emerging relatively clean, soaking wet, darkly stained, giving off the awful reek that was familiar to every man there, the sweetish, fishy, breath-catching, gaseous stench of decomposing flesh. That was what the dog had smelt and liked and wanted more of.
    ‘I often think,’ said Wexford to the doctor, ‘that we haven’t much in common with dogs.’
    ‘No, it’s at times like this you know what you’ve always suspected, that they’re not almost human at all.’
    The face was pale, stained, bloated, the pale parts the colour of a dead fish’s belly. Wexford, not squeamish at all, hardened by the years, decided not to look at the face again until he had to. The big domed forehead, bigger and more domed because the hair had fallen from it, looked like a great mottled stone or lump of fungus. It was that forehead which made him pretty sure this must be Rodney Williams. Of course, he wasn’t going to commit himself at this stage but he’d have been surprised if it wasn’t Williams.
    Sir Hilary, squatting down now, bent closer. Murdoch, the scene-of-crimes officer, was beginning to take measurements, make calculations. He called the photographer over but Sir Hilary held up a delaying hand.
    Wexford wondered how he could stand that stink right up against his face. He seemed rather to enjoy it, the whole thing, the corpse, the atmosphere, the horror, the squalor. Pathologists did, and just as well really. It