Chapter 2

"Mmmm…Phryne Fisher speaking." The voice on the line was low and sultry.

"Miss Phryne? This is Jane. I need your help."

"Ooo… of course, darling Jane. Mmm, that's good." Jane heard a deeper growling moan over the line, interwoven with the voice of her guardian and was suddenly mortified. Oh God. But soldier on, she must.

"Miss Phryne, I think there's been a murder."

"A murder! Jack, stop. Stop. What do you mean, 'you think' Jane?"

Thank goodness, the other sounds stopped abruptly. "I was digging and I found a watch. I think it's still attached to an arm, but the police are here now and they're not letting us near the dig plot. I didn't want to disturb you, but I think they're going to need your help."

"Of course, Jane. We'll be there within the hour," her guardian promised, "Oh. Oh. OH!" and then a long pause and a breathless, "Or perhaps two hours."

"Thank you, Miss." Jane replaced the receiver and pressed her lips into a thin line wishing she weren't quite so worldly. She was not naive. She knew that grown people in love behaved a certain way. She just didn't care to hear it. At least Miss Phryne and her partner were professionals, or likely would be, once they got here.

She wandered back over to Mary. Her roommate was slouched against the sturdy wooden picnic table in a sort of half lean, half sitting position. Mary didn't acknowledge Jane's return but she started speaking anyway.

"I suppose I should be more careful about what I wish for." Mary was staring straight ahead, not really looking at anything.

"You couldn't have known," soothed Jane, "this isn't your fault."

"Yes, well, you didn't wish to find a body, did you?" Mary was still searching the ether for something unseen. Her tone was bitter, but Jane felt as if the bitterness was probably focused internally rather than at her.

"Wishing for something doesn't make it so." Mary finally turned to her. She opened her mouth to respond, thought better of it, and then simply nodded.

It was getting close to the normal time for dinner, but no one was very hungry. The police had been there for a few hours. Things were at an impasse. Professor Wheeler had been trying to convince the police authorities that more of the apparent crime scene (and not coincidently, his dig site) would be better preserved if he and his team were allowed to extract the body (if there was indeed a body) in a methodical, anthropological way.

To the detective chief inspector's credit, he did see merit in what the professor was saying. But with the body (or whatever it was) being found on land the professor was excavating, and what with the professor not being a member of the Hertfordshire constabulary, he didn't think it wise to let him control the scene.

Professor Wheeler agreed that he was not a member of the Hertfordshire constabulary, but until such time as the detective chief inspector obtained a warrant, he could kindly piss off.

And so the afternoon passed.

"Jane! Are you alright?" young master Wheeler came rushing up to the pensive young women.

"I'm fine Michael. We didn't really see anything except a bit of…"

"Stop, Jane. He doesn't want to hear about it," Mary interrupted her before she described the orange marbleized leather with over pronounced pores and thin, fine hair protruding.

Michael looked a little green. "Yes, well. I'm glad you're alright," he directed to Jane, and then remembering that she wasn't the only other person in the world, turned briefly to Mary, "Um… I'm glad you both are, of course."

The three teens sat in silence for a long while. Michael finally broke it, "Do you think it's her?"

"It was a woman's watch. Deco, so fairly new." Jane considered aloud, "Do you still have this morning's newspaper?" She asked, turning towards Michael.

He nodded solemnly and extracted himself from the picnic table they were now all seated around. "I'll go get it. I have the other articles as well."

Jane and Mary looked at him quizzically. "What? It's an interesting case." He offered in his defense.

"You're an odd duck, Michael," Mary called after him. "He's obsessed with this missing person and crime, but he doesn't want to see any part of the actual remains."

"I don't know if that's odd," Jane chuckled, "It's rather normal, really. Death is fascinating in the abstract, but the reality of remains isn't for everyone."

Mary scoffed, "People are strange."

They looked out across the field at the inaction near the body. Or arm. Or, possibly just a watch and hyperbole. Nobody had told them anything since they'd been shooed away from the scene.

They watched as the lead detective — DCI Canterbury, he'd introduced himself to them earlier during one of the more frustrating draws — spoke to Professor and Mrs. Wheeler. Several constables stood around looking worried, but not doing anything. Kath stood in front of the unearthed test pit as if she were guarding it. She was a statue, not moving for hours on end.

Jane watched DCI Canterbury from across the field. He was perhaps 50 years old, give or take 5 years. Jane suspected that the give or take would largely depend on how much strife he'd seen. St. Albans seemed like a quiet town, so she was willing to consider that he might be on the upper end of the scale — but she was also aware how the life of a copper could wear on a caring man, so possibly late 40s. When he'd come to speak with them earlier, she noted he had kind eyes. Taking that into consideration, she decided he probably hadn't rounded the half-century mark.

Michael returned fewer than five minutes later with a stack of clipped newspaper articles. "As I said," he blushed slightly at his evident obsession with this story, "interesting case."

The articles were about a woman who had gone missing from St. Albans some four months before. Ellen Burchill had last been seen walking her dog Barkley on a chilly April afternoon. Her fiancé, a Mr. Euan Clarke, had reported that she'd boarded a train for Somerset later that afternoon to visit family, but she never arrived. The family in Somerset verified his story that she had, in fact, written to them to let them know she was coming and when to expect her, but when the train arrived, she wasn't on it. Her suitcase was found on the train but she and her dog were missing, so police all along the line had been searching for months.

No one from the train who had been interviewed remembered seeing her or her dog, but the police conceded that it was possible that they had not yet found the right witness. After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In a seemingly endless reservoir of hope, Mr. Clarke had been travelling the route as well, putting up signs with sketches of his beloved containing pleas for information. She had, according to all the evidence gathered thus far, vanished without a trace. In the past couple of weeks, since the Verulamium dig began, the teens had met Mr. Clarke and promised to keep their eyes open for anything suspicious. He was very charming, and seemed utterly sincere in his concern.

"I hope it isn't her," Jane sighed as she read through the articles "Such a tragic life already."

"If it isn't her, it's someone else," Mary countered, "No one deserves an end like this."

The trio poured through the articles in a much more diligent fashion than they had when they first read them. And with a much more precise objective. If this Bulova-wearing apparent arm did belong to Ellen, they wanted to see if there might be some clues in the story of her disappearance.

According the story, Mrs. Ellen Burchill was a widow who had lost her husband some five years previously in a tragic drowning accident in Barbados. John Burchill had been a treasure hunter and had been extracting items of unknown origin, value, and quantity from an unexpected find just off the north coast of the island. The rumor was that it was cursed pirate treasure, but the teens all agreed that thought was just the ridiculous thinking of too many trips to the cinema. Curses were anathema to men and women of science.

When Mrs. Burchill met the charming Mr. Clarke last year, it seemed as if her luck changed. He was handsome and from a good family. The wedding was to have been in early June, but the bride didn't make it to the wedding. The groom and her family, as well as the press and others who had been following the story, showed up at the chapel out of some boundless sense of optimism, or possibly sick sensationalism. It was all garbage journalism, but there was no one in this part of the kingdom who didn't know about poor Ellen Burchill.

Mr. Clarke was questioned extensively in relation to the case. Standard procedure is to look close to home first. It usually was the husband or boyfriend in a case like this, but in this case the motive was unclear. Euan Clarke stood to become a wealthy man only after he married Ellen Burchill. Her disappearance before the wedding left him without legal claim to her fortunes. No wedding, no money.

Jane gasped as she looked at the picture of Ellen and Euan the local paper had included in the first story of her disappearance. "Mary, Michael… look!"

She pointed at the picture of the missing woman. The picture was the engagement photo the same publisher had run just a few months before. Mr. Clarke and Mrs. Burchill were sitting side by side. Her left arm was crossed over his right to show off the engagement ring. On her left wrist sat an Art Deco watch the same shape as the Bulova in the dirt.