The three Spanish prisoners could not finish the job. Terror, superstition, or just the rank stink of the decaying body was making them shudder uncontrollably. Cochrane, impatient of such niceties and oblivious of the foul stench, leapt into the excavation and, with vigorovis sweeps of the shovel, cleared the coffin of its last layer of coagulated shingle.
Sharpe steeled himself to endure the nauseating odor and to stand at the edge of the grave to look at the simple wooden casket in which Bias Vivar was buried. The lid of the casket, made from some yellow timber, had cracked, and the wood itself had been badly stained by the cement, but some words which had been inscribed on the box in black paint were still visible; “BIAS VIVAR,” the simple epitaph read, “REQUIESCAT IN PACE.”
“Shall I open it?” Cochrane, who seemed more intent than Sharpe on finding Vivar’s body, volunteered.
“I’ll do it.” Sharpe took one of the discarded spades and rammed its blade under the thin yellow planks. The grave was so shallow that he had no trouble in levering up the lid by wrenching out the horseshoe nails that had held the crude coffin together. Cochrane helped by pulling the planks free, then tossing them onto the piles of broken concrete.
The smell grew worse, filling the church with its sickening bite. MacAuley, unable to suppress his interest, had temporarily abandoned a patient to come and gape at the open coffin.
Vivar was draped in a shroud of blue cloth that looked like matted velvet. Sharpe worked the edge of the spade under the cloth and, dreading the fresh wave of smells he would provoke, jerked it upward. For a second or two the material clung to the rotting flesh beneath, then it pulled free to billow a fresh gust of effluvial stench into the church. Sharpe swept the cloth aside and let it fall, with the spade, beside the grave.
“Oh, Christ Almighty.” MacAuley made the sign of the cross on his blood-soaked chest.
“Oh, good God,” Sharpe whispered.
Major Suarez could not speak, but just sank to his knees.
“Mary, Mother of God,” Harper crossed himself, then looked with horror at Sharpe.
Lord Cochrane reverted to poetry:
“Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow,
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.”
Then His Lordship began to laugh, and his laugh swelled to fill the whole church, for in the coffin, which had been partly weighted with stones, was the foully rotted corpse of a dog—a yellow dog, a wormy and half-liquefied dog that had been buried beside an altar so that on Judgment Day it would fly to its creator with the speed of a saint’s resurrection. “Oh, woof, woof,” Cochrane said, “woof, woof,” and Sharpe wondered just what in hell’s name he was supposed to do next.
“No wonder Bautista didn’t want us to get at the grave,” Harper said. “Jesus! Why did he bury a dog?”
“Because Madrid was pestering him to find Don Bias,” Sharpe guessed. “Because Louisa’s enquiries were more effective than she knew. Because he knew that if he didn’t find a body, the questions would get more persistent and the enquiries more urgent.”
“But a dog?” Harper asked. “Jesus, it isn’t as if he couldn’t find a dead man. They’re ten a penny in this damned country.”
“Bautista hated Vivar. So maybe using the dog was his idea of a joke? Besides, he didn’t think anyone would open the coffin, and why should they? Because by the time he needed to produce a body Don Bias had been dead three months, so all Bautista needed do was produce a coffin that stank and sent off his trusted Marquinez to concoct the wretched thing. And it worked, at least till we turned up.” Sharpe said the words bitterly, a despairing cry to the cold wind that whipped up from the mysterious Chilean southlands. He and Harper were walking around the citadel’s ramparts over which, just moments before, the decomposed remains of the yellow dog had been tossed away.
“So maybe the bastard faked that message in Boney’s picture just to have a reason to throw us out!” Harper said, “but Dona Louisa would have sent another request for the body! The thing wouldn’t have ended with us.”