The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [62]
‘Bloody woman,’ said Mr Keiller, as soon as she was gone. ‘She knows my chest is delicate.’
‘You have to look after yourself,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘God knows, Alec, you work hard enough for ten Sorel-Taylours, and you’re irreplaceable.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I needed her to type some letters. Cromley, be a good chap…’ Mr Cromley jumped to his feet, delving in his jacket pocket and pulling out a small squarish package, wrapped in a brown envelope and bound with a rubber band. But Mr Keiller rocked back on his heels, shaking his head. ‘No, dammit, don’t go after her–she’d only spread her microbes over the Discavox.’
He would notice you if he needed you.
‘Miss Robinson.’ There was a wheedling note in his voice. ‘How is your typing?’
‘Excellent, sir,’ I said, trying to answer like Mrs Sorel-Taylour would.
The package came whizzing through the air towards me. Luckily I caught it.
‘Two blue carbons,’ he said. ‘Drop them with the fair copies into the Map Room for me to sign before you leave tonight. Now, Piggott, let’s get this bloody dog out of its box.’
Canis familiaris felstedensis. I had to spell it out longhand among the Pitman’s. Then cross it out again.
‘Alec, you can’t label it that,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘You got into trouble before.’
‘Nothing wrong with naming the creature after a Derby winner. Looks like a greyhound, anyway’
‘Cross it out, Miss Robinson,’ said Piggy Eyes. No sense of humour. Well, he did have one, but it was silly and cruel. ‘It’s called canis familiaris palustris!
Whatever the blazes that meant.
I wanted to see the human skeletons that had been dug up at Windmill Hill ten years before, but those hadn’t come down from London with the dog bones. There was supposed to be a child’s skeleton, which they called Charlie, and a tiny baby.
‘Yooman sacrifice,’ said Mr Piggott, trying to mimic a village accent. ‘Arrr, Martha, ‘tes awful strange what our great-grandmamas was up to.’
He and Mr Keiller were behaving like over-excited schoolboys, without Mrs Sorel-Taylour’s presence to restrain them, and that display of temper might never have happened. I had the feeling they were both vying for my attention, Mr Keiller because he could never stop until he had caught you up in his web, Mr Piggott because whatever Mr Keiller did, he had to copy.
‘Stop playing the fool, Stu Pig,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘Don’t pay any attention, Miss Robinson. He knows perfectly well there is no evidence how those infants died. The puzzle is why their bones are complete when the rest of the human bone we found on Windmill Hill is fragmented. Still, we may find human remains to shed some light when we dig the henge.’
‘You hope,’ said Stu Pig. That was a good name for him, I thought. ‘You hope, you hope, you hope.’
‘Nothing so abstract as hope,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I plan. Stop giggling. Young will disapprove. I’ve set him to draw a survey of where he thinks the buried stones could lie, and if the rain’s cleared I could do with fresh air. Let’s leave the delightful Miss Robinson to get on with my letters.’
Mr Cromley had been keeping quiet. When I got to my feet to fetch the dictation machine, I caught his eyes on me, cool, grey and thoughtful.
The dictation machine was an extraordinary fandangle that Mr Keiller had brought back from somewhere overseas, America, I suppose, or maybe Switzerland. It was his favourite toy, housed in a polished walnut box with a hinged lid. Mrs Sorel-Taylour had shown me how to work it. It was like magic. Mr Keiller recorded his voice on it, but instead of engraving it onto a phonograph, the machine used plastic tape. She told me you had to be careful not to hold it near a magnet or somehow it would all be gone.
By day it was kept in the Map Room, where he liked to work, but at night it was taken up to his dressing room so he could talk into it whenever the mood came over him to write a letter, which it often did. When he was full of enthusiasm he’d sometimes write to the same person several times in a day. He’d go on late into the night, his voice coming and going as he paced up and down