by Matt Hilton
I wished that I’d left the SIG back at Broom’s house, but following my Billy the Kid moment down on the beach, the gun’s presence had felt so right that I’d automatically holstered it and pushed it down the rear of my waistband, where it now remained. Burning me like a hot coal as soon as I’d became aware of its presence once more. Glancing around in what must have been a furtive manner wasn’t a good idea. At least one of the police officers standing nearby, a tall, gaunt man with silver hair, gave me the once over. I quickly turned away and continued along the road past the copse of trees.
Out of sight of the police I considered removing the gun and concealing it in the foliage with the intention of returning for it later. Not a very good idea at the best of times. Knowing my luck I’d be seen hiding the gun, subsequently arrested and locked up whilst I tried to come up with a feasible excuse for carrying the weapon. Or, worse still, the police search of the area would discover the gun and it would be presumed that it had some connection to the murdered child. Considering my fingerprints or DNA could be all over the gun, or the bullets I’d loaded, that too would mean a one-way trip to prison. Best I keep the gun on me for now and hope that my wandering wouldn’t bring me to the attention of the police.
Coming to the crime scene was a mistake. When Broom suggested visiting the remote location to get a handle on the crime, I should have argued against it. Broom’s suggestion that something important could come to light from viewing the scene first hand had seemed reasonable at the time, but what on earth could looking at a white poly tunnel achieve? Anyway, what the hell did I hope to find that the experts wouldn’t?
“Trust in The Force, Young Skywalker.”
“You’re back, are you?”
“Hale an’ hearty an’ ready to rumble,” Cash laughed.
“Okay. But while you’re here, why don’t you make yourself helpful for a change.”
Cash sniggered.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re asking for my help, yet you ignore my pointed quotes of wisdom?”
“These being? Oh, yeah, I remember. ‘You can’t see the dead wood for the trees’. What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” I continued down the road that ran parallel to the trees, my eyes scanning, expecting what? to leap out. To my left the tide rumbled on a rocky shore.
“Means exactly what it implies, Carter. You’re missing the obvious because you are blinded to it.”
“So why don’t you just point me in the correct direction?” I demanded. “Instead of giving me the old ‘Confucius say’s’ palaver?”
“Nah, wouldn’t be very fair of me,” Cash said. “See, if I make it too easy for you, you won’t experience any self-worth in the solving of the riddle. You will feel most inferior, and won’t be up to the coming test.”
I came to a halt. Fisted my hands in my pockets. “There you go with the test thing again. What is this test you keep talking about?”
“You will know it when it presents itself.”
“But not before?”
“Not until you realise the truth.”
“So, tell me.”
“Nope. You have to discover it yourself, brother.”
I marched on, head down. “This isn’t exactly what I’d call ‘helping’,” I said.
“All depends on your perspective. See, to me, I’m acting like the veritable Good Samaritan.”
“God help us all for small mercies,” I said.
“Not my fault that you’re too thick to understand where I’m trying to point you.”
Kicking at loose gravel, I said, “C’mon Cash. Just tell me what you’re talking about instead of messing me around.”
“Wouldn’t be fair.”
“Yeah, you’ve already made that clear.”
“Like I said…The Good Samaritan.”
“Go back to sleep, Cash.”
“I wish.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. “Me too.”
The point was Cash didn’t sleep. Not ever. Made me wonder how he could remain so alert all the time. Had to be something to do with having no corporeal body. Sleep was a basic human necessity, but it was something unattainable in the spirit form. I guessed that, by now, Cash was possibly ready to trade his chance at retribution upon me for a good eight hours’ shut eye. Would have been a good bargaining chip I could use against him, if indeed I had the power to allow him some respite. That, unfortunately, wasn’t something I was able to do.
Whilst I was so engrossed, something large and deadly swept up behind me.
“Heads up, boyo!” Cash said. In response, I stepped on to the roadside verge, and Broom finally brought the Subaru to a halt two feet beyond where I’d been standing. “It’d be kind of ironic if you ended up road kill. That’d put a spanner in the works.”
Broom leaned across the passenger seat to fling open the door. Almost took the skin off my shins. “Get in, Carter.”
The way in which he said it didn’t allow for argument. The fact is, I wasn’t in a mind to argue. I’d done everything I could there, which amounted to absolutely zilch. Which meant it was pointless hanging around where the final probability would be to attract unwanted questions from an inquisitive police officer. But more than that, my mind was fixed on what Cash had just said. Was he intimating that if I were killed in an accident then he wouldn’t get the opportunity at revenge? The only way for him to have a chance at dominating my soul would be through the natural process of death through natural causes?
If that was the case then it was comforting in one respect; it was in Cash’s best interest to keep me alive as he’d said. On the other hand, it was quite disturbing to think that my only opportunity at peace was to die a violent or painful death. It wasn’t a forecast to engender happy thoughts.
The Subaru gave a lunge like a racehorse from the gates, and we were off. Broom was chewing at his lips.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Overheard it on a police radio,” he said at barely more than a whisper.
Frowning at him, I asked, “Heard what?”
“There’s been another death.”
I swallowed down bile. “Another death? Not the little girl?”
“No,” Broom said. “Bethany is still missing. It’s an adult, this time.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know. They didn’t say on the radio.” He pushed the hair from his brow, snatched his hand back to the steering wheel. “Or if they did, I didn’t hang around long enough to hear who it was.”
Ahead of us I saw the roofs of a small settlement. The village of Ura Taing, no doubt. I assumed that the village was the site of this latest death, but Broom ignored the turn-in towards the village and continued on the circuitous coast road.
“Where are we going, Broom?”
“Trowhaem.”
I glanced at him. Trow again?
Clarifying, he went on, “At the archeological dig. They’ve turned up bones.”
I sniffed. “Isn’t that what archeologists do?”
“Yeah,” Broom said. A grim smile fluttered at the corners of his mouth. “Thing is, Carter, the bones normally dug up by archeologists don’t have flesh and blood sticking to them.”
TWENTYTWO
Trowhaem
Harry Bishop was hardly acting like a leader under these circumstances. In fact, there was very little he was doing other than sitting in the front of his hippy van muttering nonsense into his beard. As an archeologist and in particular an anthropologist majoring in osteology, you’d think he’d have been armoured against the sight of human skeletal remains. But, as Paul Broom had so succinctly put it minutes earlier, the bones normally dug up by archeologists don’t have flesh and blood sticking to them.
The remains had been discovered by pure chance. Because the flooded site was proving obstinate to further investigation, Bishop had requested a geophysics sweep of a short strip of land adjacent to where previous graves had been discovered. Conducting a geo-scan of the area, his students had report
ed an area of disturbed ground and what was termed a metal spike/blip. Bishop knew these anomalies could be caused by burnt stones that have become magnetised by being repeatedly heated and cooled a number of times. For instance it wasn’t untoward to find magnetised stones in an old fire pit used for burning rubbish. But he was convinced instead that the shadowy readout was indicative in shape and size as previously discovered boat-shaped graves. The anomaly appeared to be approximately five-and-a-half metres long, shaped like an elongated teardrop, and it took only a few moments scraping at the dirt to discover the usual stones piled over the top. Not a good sign to the keen eye of Bishop; the stones bore the hallmark of recent disturbance and he guessed that unscrupulous treasure hunters could have previously robbed the grave.
Ordinarily the clearing of the find would have been conducted at a snail’s pace whilst the dimensions and positions of stones on the grave were perfunctorily catalogued. However, due to nothing more than impatience on his part, Bishop had commanded the grave opened post haste. He was, after all, on a short timetable and had up until now shown very little in the way of discoveries to offset the spiralling costs and growing dissatisfaction of the university faculty. It was very likely that the grave had already been pillaged - he could tell that by the misaligned stones - yet he still retained hope that the robbers had missed whatever was causing the metal spike the geophysics team had located.
In lieu of a diagrammatic record, he used his smart phone to film the exhumation, intending to use the recording as evidence of any subsequent find should the need arise.
He was standing over the dig, doing his best Spielberg impression when tow-headed Davy Richardson shrieked like an adolescent and scrambled out of the shallow pit. Mesmerised, Bishop had employed the zoom facility of the camera to bring into sharp definition whatever had freaked out the young student.
As he’d studied the screen it had taken Bishop long seconds before he could fully credit what it was that he was looking at. An eyeball, milky in death, stared out the bloody socket of a human skull. With this realisation, he too gave out a startled yelp and dropped the smart phone. Bellowing like a hippopotamus in rut, he’d staggered down into the grave, tugging at stones with his bare hands, until he’d fully exposed the cranium, throat and upper torso of an adult male. The remains were practically skeletal, but not due to the natural course of decomposition. Bishop could tell that this body had been in the ground little more than a few days, and yet most of the outer dermis and a large portion of the underlying musculature had been removed from the bones. And not with the finesse of a surgeon’s scalpel, either. The flesh had been literally ripped off.
The corpse had all the indications of a large animal attack. Bishop knew that it wasn’t untoward for certain animals to conceal a kill to protect it from other scavengers. There was, of course, only one animal capable of exhuming the original Viking grave, placing the corpse within it, then piling back the stones and earth in this manner. That animal could only be Man. This meant he could only be looking at one thing: murder.
Bang goes his funding. Bang goes his reputation. Bang goes his status as leader of this dig. Bang, bang, bang, like a rapid-fire volley of mortar fire, bursting his entire well laid plans and aspirations. And with that realisation came despondency.
Standing next to the gruesome find, Janet looked over at Bishop. He was unresponsive to her glance. He was a man in his mid-forties, but for the few seconds she studied him he seemed more like a lost little boy, dressed in the beard and clothing of an old man. He appeared diminished. Both in stature and in command. Not the ideal scenario, really. That meant that it was down to her to take charge of the proceedings.
It was Janet who’d marshalled the students into some form of order when all around her panic was the order of the day. She had used a mobile phone to inform the police of the discovery. She had set a couple of the girls to comfort Davy Richardson. Chased Kiera McCann from Harry Bishop; he could do without the love struck administrations of the horny girl when answering the subsequent police enquiry. No doubt photographs of the professor would be splashed over newspapers, and the last thing he could do with was Kiera hanging on his arm. Janet wasn’t concerned about Harry in that respect, and only intended sparing his long-suffering wife any further heartache. She hated that some people would see her actions as protection of Harry’s infidelity, considering what Jonathon Connery had done to her, but she didn’t intend to be the one to hurt Harry’s wife by allowing his dirty behaviour to become front-page news.
Further, she’d ensured that a tarpaulin was erected over the gravesite, and that the inquisitive students kept well clear of the area so they didn’t disturb the scene. Already, important forensic evidence could have been disrupted or even corrupted by Bishop’s hurried excavation. She’d damn well ensure that nothing further could be held against them for their actions. Inevitably Harry’s unprofessional activity would be a sore point with the law, and this dissatisfaction would undoubtedly be reported back to their sponsors.
Now she stood a lonely vigil. Shock - more to do with the knock-on ramifications of the situation than the horrible find itself - had made Harry useless to her. And being honest, worry was impinging on her own thoughts. The murdered man was trouble in capital letters. Yet another setback to this continuously troublesome dig. Made her wonder if the curse of Trowhaem held validity, after all.
She’d always discounted the haugbonde curse as childish fantasy, but appreciated that certain islanders remained staunch in their beliefs. More than any talk of inappropriateness, she knew that the underlying point behind the resistance to the excavation was the fear that ancient terrors would be loosed upon the land. Casting her mind back, she recalled a group of vociferous islanders meeting them at the ferry terminal, demanding that the archeologists return to their university at fear of further trouble should they continue. The police had broken up the unruly protest, and the team had been allowed on their way. But that wasn’t the last of the trouble. Some of the students had been targeted with abuse and threats of violence, to the point that none of them socialised in Skelvoe now. Also, whenever they travelled, they did so as a group, and were always met at the ferry terminal and ushered away before those who - eighteen months later - still resisted the team’s presence on the island could descend upon them. Not without reason she believed that the murdered man had been deposited in the grave to further compound the ongoing setbacks they’d already endured. Whoever killed the man, and subsequently placed him there, was against any further excavation of the land.
Janet realised that she was holding her breath. She exhaled, hoping that this ill feeling would be expunged along with the bad air. It was a shocking thought that someone would be so depraved - or for that matter so adamant - that they would halt the excavation by resorting to murder and these awful scare tactics.
‘Who could do such a thing?’ she thought. ‘Never mind that, who in heaven’s name is the dead man?’
Frighteningly, she found herself conducting a head count of the students under her care. She double checked, meticulously listing names and current whereabouts and was relieved to find all her charges accounted for.
What about contractors, security men, caterers? They’d employed various off-island employees while the heavy work of clearing away much of the landslide that had buried the town was underway. Still, that had been last year, and since then only university staff had been on site. Her hurried examination of the corpse prior to her having it concealed beneath the tarpaulin had assured her that the man had only been dead for a few days, so it was unlikely to be the corpse of any of those workers. She also knew that a couple of watchmen looked over the site at night whilst the university team retired to their nearby shantytown of tents and caravanettes. The watchmen, Terrence and Kirk, had become well-known faces around the dig, and she could certainly remember both of them being on site when she’d arrived this morning.
Unaware of the terrible events unfolding at the Stewart home, Janet couldn
’t begin to guess who this man was, or who was responsible for his death. With that thought she experienced the first pangs of panic - almost to the point that she could sympathise with Harry Bishop - and it was a conscious effort to subdue the trembling in her limbs.
“Where the hell are the police?” It felt as though hours had passed since her call for help. Fair enough, travel from Skelvoe wasn’t a minute or two’s work, but surely the police should have descended on the scene by now? The surf made a low rumble against the nearby cliffs, and the wind groaned through the stunted trees, but above these she should have been able to detect the shriek and wail of approaching sirens. Unfortunately the only discordant tones she could detect were the screeching of gulls riding the waves in the bay.
Gulls were the dominant species of bird on and around the island, finding rich pickings in the shallow seas around Conn. Saying that, something she hadn’t been aware of until now was the number of crows that had made Trowhaem their home. It was almost Hitchcockian the way in which the black plumed birds were lined up on the outcrop of land above her. She studied the birds and they studied her in return, her face reflected in their beady eyes as they cawed and nodded like wise old men ruminating over the woes of the world. Janet didn’t like the birds. Not simply because they were carrion eaters and were probably grouped there as they’d detected the aroma of lunch beneath the tarpaulin, it was more for the malicious intent in their eyes and their spearing bills that made her think of the cruelty of battlefield slaughter.