River of Destiny

by Barbara Erskine

  She peered at the empty eye sockets of the woman’s skeleton and shivered. ‘She was the second wife of the squire, and she was supposed to have been very beautiful.’ She glanced sideways at the chestnut hair. ‘Do you think they were lovers? Would someone from the Hall fall in love with a lowly blacksmith? Did she kill herself to be with him?’

  ‘Not unless she strangled herself,’ Doug Freeman the pathologist put in. ‘See here, the hyoid bone is fractured. Same with him. I would bet money they were both killed by the same person. Professional killer. Good at his job.’

  She peered at the bone he was indicating with his gloved hand. ‘But they could have hanged themselves.’

  ‘Possible, I suppose. But unlikely. If they did, why were they buried out there in the field?’

  ‘Because suicides couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground and an ancient burial site was the nearest they could think of?’ Sylvia was thinking aloud. ‘But murder does seem more likely. So was it the husband?’ She moved across to inspect the male skeleton. ‘I gather he was the main suspect, though he had an alibi; he was in London when she disappeared, but he was around when this guy vanished.’

  ‘I doubt if the husband was a professional killer,’ Doug said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve looked it up too. He was a country squire! He could have paid someone to do it, though.’ He shook his head morosely. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.’

  ‘What will happen to the bodies?’ Sylvia was looking at the jewellery now. The rings were tiny; the wedding ring would barely slip on her little finger. ‘Will they be buried together?’

  ‘There are no descendants to pay for a funeral, so I doubt it. They’ll probably end up in cardboard boxes in an archive somewhere.’

  She looked up, shocked. ‘You mean they won’t rebury them?

  ‘I doubt it. Are you going out to the mound again tomorrow?’ He looked at Colin Hall, who was standing beside him.

  Colin nodded. ‘We have to go very carefully there. If it is like Sutton Hoo there may be a sand body and nothing more.’

  ‘A sand body?’ Sylvia looked puzzled.

  ‘The actual body has gone and there is just an imprint of where it was.’

  ‘Where would the body have gone? You mean it’s been stolen?’

  ‘No. The sandy soil contains chemicals which would have dissolved it. It would have disappeared and just left a shape in the sand where it lay.’

  ‘Wow.’ Sylvia made a note. ‘That is spooky. Amazing. But his belongings are still there, is that right?’

  The men nodded. ‘They’ve found a few things already.’

  ‘But why weren’t these two sand bodies?’

  ‘They’ve only been there a hundred and fifty years or so. An Anglo-Saxon warrior – you can add a nought on the end of that.’

  As Sylvia left the building she pulled out her mobile. ‘Ken, thank you so much for the tip-off about the burial mound. It’s the most amazing story. I’ve spoken to my editor and he wants me to do a feature.’ She paused. ‘Can I mention your ghosts? Your Ouija lady seems to have been spot on. He was called Daniel Smith and she was Lady Emily Crosby, and we have stumbled on a Victorian murder mystery.’

  20

  Sharon opened her front door to the police at two o’clock that afternoon. A man and a woman, both astonishingly young, stood uncomfortably on her doorstep and asked to come in. She led them into her lounge and sat them on the huge settee in the bay window. ‘So, what is this about?’ She could feel her panic rising and she clenched her fists in the pockets of her jeans. ‘Rosemary’s snuffed it, has she?’

  The younger police officer, Anna Briggs, looked puzzled. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Isn’t that why you’ve come? To tell me Rosemary Formby has died?’

  Anna glanced at her colleague, Andy Nailer, in evident confusion. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about Rosemary Formby, Mrs Watts.’

  Sharon cast her eyes up towards the ceiling. ‘Gawd help us; so much for joined up policing. Then why have you come?’

  ‘We’ve received some information, Mrs Watts, regarding your daughter, Jade,’ Andy said solemnly. ‘A suggestion has been received that she has been seen in the company of a man suspected of being a paedophile.’

  Sharon stared from one to the other. ‘No!’ She narrowed her lips angrily. ‘That is not true. I thought we made it clear that my son made that accusation out of spite. There is no foundation to it whatsoever.’

  Anna glanced at her colleague. ‘You know the man concerned?’

  ‘Leo Logan? I know him, and I have already told the police in Woodbridge that I would trust him with my life – and with my daughter,’ she added. ‘Jackson had no business saying that and he is sorry.’

  ‘Jackson?’ Andy queried.

  ‘My eldest son. Isn’t this what this is all about? He thought he would drop Leo in it. Leo is a nice man.’

  ‘I appreciate that you like and trust Mr Logan, but it is often the nicest men who are guilty,’ Anna said grimly. ‘We are going to have to make further enquiries about this, Mrs Watts. As our colleagues in Suffolk have passed on the information and contacted social services we are bound to follow it up. And we would like to talk to your daughter, if we may. In your presence, obviously.’

  Sharon looked from one to the other. ‘I’m ringing my husband,’ she said at last. ‘You can’t do anything till he gets here.’

  Jade, unusually demure in a pink T-shirt and short frilly skirt, with on her feet mock-satin slippers with roses on the toe, sat on the edge of the sofa between her mother and father and smiled angelically at the two police officers. She was impressed that Jackson’s anonymous phone call to the police that morning had had a result so quickly. He hadn’t wanted to do it. She had had to threaten him with the information that she had heard him and Mike planning to shoot Rosemary. That knowledge would make the tractor accident look as though it was deliberate. Jackson, already in a state of nervous collapse, had caved in at once and made the call.

  ‘I liked Leo so much,’ Jade said with a sly glance at her mother. ‘My parents didn’t have much time for me, so I often went round to see him and he gave me biscuits and presents and took me on his boat.’

  ‘Alone?’ Anna said with a frown.

  ‘Just him and me, yes.’ Jade smiled.

  ‘And did he ever –’ Anna paused, ‘touch you inappropriately, Jade?’

  Jade smiled again. ‘He put his hand on my bottom,’ she said a little smugly. ‘I told him I didn’t like it.’

  ‘Jade?’ Sharon said warningly. ‘If we find out you’ve been lying –’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ Jade replied. ‘He did touch me. Often,’ she added defiantly. ‘Will he go to prison?’

  Andy nodded. ‘I think he probably will, Jade. Don’t you worry. It’s not going to happen to you again.’ He glanced up over her head at her mother. ‘We will need her to be examined, Mrs Watts.’

  Sharon looked at Jeff. She appeared to be stunned. ‘Of course,’ Jeff said quietly. ‘If this is true, I will kill him.’

  ‘No need, Mr Watts,’ Andy put in quickly. ‘We will deal with the matter.’

  ‘What do you mean, examined?’ Jade put in suddenly.

  ‘You will have to talk to a doctor, Jade,’ Sharon said. She was tight-lipped. ‘I will come with you. I can, can’t I?’ she asked Anna, who nodded.

  ‘Of course.’

  Jade looked wary. ‘Why a doctor?’

  ‘To see if Leo has hurt you.’

  ‘He didn’t hurt me,’ Jade said quickly. ‘I don’t need to see a doctor.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s the law, Jade,’ Anna put in firmly. ‘It won’t hurt.’

  ‘Hurt?’ Jade jumped to her feet. ‘What is he going to do?’

  ‘It will be a lady doctor, Jade. Nothing to be frightened of, I can assure you.’ Anna smiled at her. She glanced at Jeff. ‘Perhaps sooner rather than later?’

  Jeff nodded. ‘Now.’ His face was tight with anger. ‘To think we aske
d that ugly bastard into our house!’

  Sharon had stood up too, followed by the two officers. ‘If this is true, if Jeff doesn’t kill him, I will.’

  ‘What will happen to Zoë?’ Jade hadn’t budged. They all turned and looked down at her as she sat alone on the sofa. She looked up at her father.

  ‘Zoë?’ Jeff repeated, puzzled.

  Jade nodded. She narrowed her eyes. ‘She’s Leo’s lover. She hates me. She’s jealous.’

  ‘Who is Zoë?’ Andy had taken out his notebook again. He glanced at Jeff.

  ‘Another of our neighbours in Suffolk,’ Jeff replied with a sigh. ‘She and her husband moved in about four months ago.’

  ‘And she has been having an affair with Mr Logan?’

  Jeff looked at his wife. ‘I’m always the last to know about anything like that.’

  ‘She is,’ Jade put in smugly. ‘She is the one who should go to prison. She’s touched me too.’

  Sharon was studying her daughter’s face. ‘You are not making all this up, are you, Jade, to get back at Leo because he likes Zoë?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Jeff put in. ‘Why would she do that?’

  Sharon hadn’t taken her eyes off her daughter’s face. Jade dropped her gaze and studied her new shoes.

  ‘I thought the police were going to drop this matter when I told them my son had made it up,’ Sharon said suddenly. She looked at Andy. ‘Why have they changed their minds?’

  Andy consulted his notebook. ‘A call from a mobile phone was made to the Woodbridge station repeating the accusation this morning. It was a man,’ he added. ‘And he withheld his number.’ He looked at Jade and then at her mother. ‘Could that have been your son again, do you think, Mrs Watts?’ In his experience if parents started getting suspicious about what their kids were up to, it paid to listen to them. Perhaps they should follow up the mobile call. In spite of her despairing shrug, Sharon struck him as being a shrewd woman, someone who would never entrust her daughter to a bad apple. Still, even shrewd individuals sometimes made mistakes of judgement. He turned to follow Anna, who was already ushering Jade towards the door.

  Steve was standing looking down at his wife as she lay in the high dependency unit. She had been moved to a side ward, and lay white and unmoving as the life-support systems around the bed beeped and clicked around her.

  Their daughter, Sarah, had come at last to see her mother and had stood for a long time, staring down at Rosemary’s still, pale face. Watching her, Steve had tried to control his anguish; it was years since he had given up pleading with her to try to work out some kind of reconciliation with her mother. He wasn’t even sure what it was Rosemary had done to drive her away so completely. He had kept in touch by phone and postcard, and now and again, guiltily, by visits which he had kept secret, but the implacable dislike Sarah seemed to show towards her mother had left him numb and bewildered. Now as she looked down, her face showed no compassion at all. ‘I suppose she was engaged in another of her campaigns to ruin someone’s life,’ she said bitterly.

  Steve flinched. ‘She genuinely thinks she is in the right, Sarah.’

  ‘And she was in the right when she forced that footpath across an old man’s lawn, was she? When they put up the fence to separate his little bungalow from the garden he loved just on principle, when all the local people said they were happy to walk past a different way. But not my mother. Oh, no. He lived a hundred miles from her, it was none of her business, but in she went, bustling with self-righteousness, and forced it all through the council and went to the enquiry, used every trick and legal loophole to get her way. He died, Dad!’

  Steve moved uncomfortably in his chair. ‘I know,’ he said sadly. ‘But he might have died anyway. He was an old man.’

  ‘The local people said he died of a broken heart. No one ever walked that path, and Mother certainly didn’t. She had done her bit. She smugly ticked another box on her list. She never went near it again. And here she is, up to her old tricks, and on her own bloody doorstep this time!’

  Steve sighed. ‘She believes she’s doing the right thing, Sarah. So many people try and block footpaths. She believes passionately that someone has to fight to keep them open.’

  ‘But this isn’t a footpath, is it? There has never been one there.’ Sarah hadn’t moved. Her expression was still hard, her mother’s face still impassive and, Steve thought, unbearably vulnerable. ‘This time she’s trying to desecrate an ancient earthwork and go against an entire community, and because of her this poor young man will probably go to prison.’

  Steve gasped. ‘Sarah, that is enough. That poor young man, as you call him, is a drunken yob who tried to murder your mother.’

  ‘No he didn’t. He tried to scare her away. I’ve read the papers.’

  He looked up at her in despair. ‘Aren’t you the least bit sorry she’s been hurt, Sarah?’

  She opened her mouth to reply, then she shook her head, changing her mind about what she was going to say. ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘Then leave it alone, dear, please. She needs your love and your prayers, not a tirade of invective.’

  Before she left she had bent and brushed her mother’s forehead with her lips in a cold, angry kiss, then she gave her father a hug. ‘Sorry, Dad. I can’t help it. I hate what she does.’

  He patted her arm. ‘I know.’

  ‘You hate it too, don’t you?’ she added. She sighed. ‘No, don’t answer that. I know how loyal you are.’

  He stood still for a long time after Sarah had gone, watching Rosemary’s face, wondering how much of what they had said she had heard.

  ‘Come on, old thing. It’s time we were at home,’ he murmured at last. He reached over and touched the back of her hand gently. It twitched. His eyes automatically went to the nearest screen. The steady progression of pulses did not flicker.

  A nurse put her head round the door and glanced at him. ‘Everything all right in there?’ The two other beds in the small side ward were empty, white sheets pulled tight. There was nowhere for him to sit but he was reluctant to perch on their pristine whiteness.

  ‘How is she?’ His voice came out cracked and husky.

  She hesitated, and perhaps hearing his despair walked in to stand beside him, looking down at Rosemary’s face. ‘She’s far away, bless her.’

  Steve looked at her, surprised. He was used to the professional calm of the nursing staff. Compassion and gentleness, though he was sure they were there, were usually well hidden. ‘Where do you think she is?’ he murmured. He lifted the hand that was not tethered to drips and monitors and stroked it again.

  ‘Somewhere where there is no pain. The doctors are thinking of waking her tomorrow.’

  ‘Is that good?’ He could feel himself pleading inside, but he didn’t allow himself to let any hope register in his voice.

  ‘They won’t do it unless they think she is ready.’ She smiled and touched his shoulder gently, then she had gone.

  Hell was hot as she had always known it would be, and peopled with monsters. Steaming pools of volcanic lava bubbled at her feet as she tried to pull away, to hide, but the great black cliffs at her back held her trapped in the narrow confines of the valleys through which she roamed, trying, trying, trying to find a way out. Steve was there looking for her. For a moment she had thought she saw him, felt the touch of his hand, but he was gone and she was alone again in her torment. They knew she had moved the sword. She hadn’t known it was protected by elves and fiends; it was guarded by the servants of Wayland the Smith God. Every way she turned she saw them, hunting her, furious, dangerous, out for her blood. If she could find it and return it, all would be well, but it wasn’t there. She had left it on the ground under the hedge. Why? Why had she put it there? Why had she taken it? Why had she gone to the burial mound of the Lord Egbert? She didn’t know. She was screaming in her dream but no sound came.

  If Steve could hear her he would rescue her. He was there, so close by, but he was the other side of a glass so
thick she would never break free. She saw the nurse come in and talk to him, touch his arm. She saw him bow his head and wipe tears from his eyes. The nurse came back with a chair and put it by the bed. He tried to smile at her and she patted his arm again, then she was gone and Steve was alone with her body. Was she dying then? Had they told him she was dying and they were going to switch off the life-support machine? Perhaps she was already dead and this was the hell from which there was no return.

  Unless she could find the sword.

  It wasn’t there. Somehow she knew Zoë had found it and taken it to The old Forge. Zoë had showed it to Leo and he had picked it up and scrutinised it and looked at the blade and the hilt with a magnifying glass and copied down the runes which he saw there. He was excited by it; Zoë was frightened. It was Zoë who was the danger. Take it back, please take it back, she pleaded silently. Even if she had spoken out loud her cries would have been drowned by the bubbling of the lava pools at her feet and the roar of distant dragons.

  They were leaving the forge. Where was the sword now? Did they have it with them? Zoë wanted to throw it in the river. She was afraid of the curse. She knew it was cursed. She didn’t know the danger.

  Help me!

  Rosemary held out her hands, but they were trapped behind the glass wall. If they gave the sword to the gods of the river there would be no rescue, no respite, no mercy. She beat on the glass and now the only sound she could hear was the sound of her own screams.

  Zoë stopped in her tracks and put her hands to her head. ‘What is it?’ Leo stopped beside her.

  ‘Nothing.’ Zoë hesitated. ‘I thought I heard something. Someone calling.’ They were only a hundred yards or so from the river, standing on the dew wet lawns, on their way down to the Curlew. Below them a thick cold mist was curdling round the trees. She shook her head again. ‘It’s gone. It’s nothing. It was almost as though I could hear Rosemary.’ She gave an uncomfortable laugh. ‘I hope she’s OK.’ She turned and walked on. ‘Come on. I’m imagining things.’