Gallows Hill Read Online Free

Town.’
    ‘Prof Stone,’ called one of the students, a lanky girl wearing a man’s shirt.
    Clare and Riedwaan followed Stone to where the girl had been working, near some bits of broken concrete. The corner of a wooden object stuck out of the sand.
    ‘What’ve yougot there?’ asked Stone.
    The student pushed her sweaty hair out of her face. ‘Looks like something made of wood. It’s obviously been here a while, but –’
    She knelt down in the trench.
    ‘The soil above the wood seems to have been disturbed,’ she said, running her fingers lightly over layers of debris. ‘But there’s no ways it’d be in this condition after 200 years.’
    Stone turned toRaheema Patel. ‘Give me your brush,’ he said.
    He cleaned around the object.
    ‘Hey, Faizal. It looks like a box of sorts,’ said Stone. ‘Take that spade and dig. Like this, slowly. We need to get this thing out. If it’s a coffin, all that should have remained after two centuries is some stains in the sand. And metal hinges, maybe.’
    Riedwaan and Stone worked the sand loose around the cornerof the box, revealing first a lid and then two sides. Stone picked up the spade again and scraped more sand away from the box. Another half an hour, and they had all four sides exposed. The remnants of metal braces holding the box together had corroded, but the wood was intact.
    ‘Looks like a smallish packing crate,’ said Stone.
    Clare felt a chill, despite the heat. She photographed thecrate where it was, and took a panoramic shot of the area, including ragged remnants of a concrete floor, and two remaining warehouse walls.
    ‘I want it open.’ Riedwaan said. ‘Here, so we don’t disturb whatever’s inside it.’
    ‘You’re the cop, Faizal,’ said Stone. ‘You open it.’
    Riedwaan slipped a steel blade under the lid. It popped off with surprising ease. Inside the box was a bundlewrapped in black plastic.
    The sound of the crowd beyond the hoardings filled the silence.
    ‘There was no plastic builder’s sheeting when the Gallows Hill gibbets were busy.’ Stone passed Riedwaan a knife. ‘This one’s going to be yours, Captain, not mine.’
    Riedwaan slit open the sheeting, exposing delicate bones in a foetal curl, swaddled in the dirty plastic.
    ‘Young and female,’said Raheema Patel, bending over the skeleton, ‘with bones like that.’
    The woman lay curled up inside the small box. She had been jammed into it. Her head must have pressed up against the top, her feet against the bottom. Her belly would have pressed painfully against her lungs, her thighs. If she had been alive to feel it.
    ‘How long’s she been dead, Solly?’ asked Riedwaan, turning awayand lighting a cigarette.
    ‘I need to autopsy her to tell you that, Faizal.’
    ‘We’ll get her to the mortuary. Clare will attend,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But give me an estimate at least.’
    ‘Balls on a block?’
    ‘Not that precise.’
    Friedman knelt beside the makeshift coffin and studied the bones.
    ‘Twenty-five years,’ he said, pushing himself upright again. ‘Max.’
    ‘And the others?’asked Clare.
    ‘Two hundred years, maybe three,’ said Stone. ‘Archaeological specimens.’
    ‘Which she is not,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘Can we get her covered up?’
    The student who had found the coffin held out a green tarpaulin, which she and Clare pulled over it.
    Riedwaan called the mortuary, and got them to send out another van.
    ‘Fuck it,’ he said, pocketing his phone. ‘As if I don’thave enough trouble.’
    ‘Basie Steyn in Records should have something,’ said Clare. ‘A woman going missing would have left a trace. A missing person’s report, at the very least.
    ‘Records don’t keep that long,’ said Riedwaan, pocketing his phone. ‘In theory, yes. But in practice, everything older than a few years got moved out and dumped in a shed on the Cape Flats. There are no systems outthere. And rats have eaten half the boxes. It’s a mess.’
    ‘I’ll find out