Strange Tombs

by Syd Moore

  Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god there was an escaped snake on the loose, I screamed silently, as I followed Sam.

  So WHY THEN WAS I GOING BACK UPSTAIRS?

  Putting myself in the line of BITING?

  Had I completely lost it?

  No, I hadn’t, I told myself, regulating my breathing and oxygenating my blood.

  I was doing it because, despite all my flaws, and I know I’ve got some, notwithstanding excellent taste in hair and cowboy boots, I was actually an honourable person and wanted to show off a bit, but mainly safeguard the writers downstairs.

  Except for Nicholas. I’d be quite happy if he got done in by the opportunist adder or whatever species it was. Python maybe – no flies on me.

  Though, actually thinking about it, snakes were probably repelled by blue blood.

  Anyway, point is, despite my own nutball mentalism, I was trying to be gallant. I was trying to be nice.

  ‘Oh god,’ I said (again), as we mounted the first set of stairs and a fresh thought occurred to me. ‘I hope Cullen didn’t see it coming. He’s terrified of snakes. He said so in the Greatest Fears workshop yesterday. Down the pub.’

  ‘Sh!’ whispered Sam. ‘Don’t think about it now. Grab that walking stick,’ he ordered, pointing at one leaning against the door outside of what I guessed must be Margot’s room.

  ‘Why?’ I said, frowning hard.

  ‘In case we need to hit it.’

  Oh crikey – I’d never been much good at hockey and that had been with a hard, round thing that someone hit your way and warned you about. An elastic invertebrate with an open mouth, sharp fangs, and an ability to climb and hide was going to be a more dastardly foe than the Leytonstone Under 15s. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for it yet, but I picked up the stick anyway and followed Sam up the stairs, our speed slowing, the sounds our footsteps made muffled by the seagrass, our breathing less heavy, conspicuously more controlled.

  When we reached the top of the stairs we both sighed with relief. For the door was firmly closed. I must have shut it on the way out.

  Thank god we didn’t have to go in there, I thought. But then Sam put his hand on the door knob.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I whispered in alarm.

  ‘Clues,’ he said and began to turn.

  ‘No,’ I said and whipped his hand off it. ‘We don’t need clues. The Adder had him.’

  ‘Python,’ he said, but dropped his hand, thankfully. ‘Can they cover that much distance?’

  That, more or less, had also been the question that Scrub posed when she arrived.

  Once her team had got there we were immediately ordered out whilst the area was secured.

  By ‘area’ I mean Hall. So we were indefinitely contained in The Griffin whilst another police team and forensics combed the Hall for escaped reptiles or other beasts.

  Carole, who was not happy about any of this if you can imagine that, had been forced to let Scrub commandeer the small office downstairs in the pub, which is where we were gathered now.

  ‘I mean, it’s a snake,’ Scrub said again and shook her head. ‘They haven’t got legs, have they?’

  ‘They are crepuscular – awake at dawn and dusk – but spend most of the day sleeping in their hides,’ said Sam, holding up his phone. He had already checked it out on Wikipedia. ‘So, if that’s the case, it would have had to be extremely agile. Colchester Zoo is about eighteen miles away, as the crow flies and flying covers a lot more ground more quickly than any amount of slithering can. The news came over the airwaves yesterday morning. Which means if the snake is only active at dusk, it would have had to move at about nine miles per hour to get all the way here, avoiding main roads, where it could be sighted, traffic, horses, farm machinery, Ophidiophobes, etc.’ Before Scrub and I could ask, he replied, ‘People with a fear of snakes. Sometimes it’s referred to as herpetophobia. But that’s incorrect and means a fear of reptiles or amphibians.’

  Scrub tutted and rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, well that would just be sloppy of me to mix those two phobias up, wouldn’t it? I do however, get your drift, Samuel.’ She cupped her rounded chin. ‘That python would have had to have bloody good map-reading skills too.’

  ‘They don’t, do they?’ I said, still a little hung-over from last night’s session at The Stars.

  Sam and Scrub ignored me.

  My colleague gestured to the panelled wall, beyond which, a good mile away, lay Ratchette Hall. ‘So the python must have been brought here?’

  ‘To kill Cullen?’

  Scrub sniffed, ‘If indeed his death was caused by a snake at all?’

  ‘You think it might be something else?’ I shuddered. ‘A spider?’

  ‘Or something in human form,’ Scrub grunted.

  ‘Oh bloody hell,’ I spluttered, my worst fears realising. ‘A vampire! I thought that too, but worried to say it in case I looked crazy.’

  Scrub cocked her head and said, ‘You all right, chuck?’ then turned to Sam. ‘In shock mibbe?’

  He shrugged. ‘She seemed okay this morning.’

  ‘Delayed reaction?’

  ‘Hang on,’ I interrupted. ‘You just said that Cullen’s death might have been caused by something “in human form” …?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘As in a human.’

  Sam nodded and sat down. ‘Another writer? Murder?’

  ‘We’ll have to see what Kitty, the medical examiner says. Graham Peacock was a cardiac arrest. Confirmed. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that, if it was somehow induced, the “assailant” won’t face charges. Homicide by heart attack is rare, but not unknown.’

  She straightened her slacks and swung left a little bit on the office chair. ‘I’ll be very interested in what Kitty makes of Mr Sutcliffe. But while I’m waiting for her to have a look I want to know exactly what you know. And fast. Go out there and start typing me a timescale. You can talk to the others but don’t tell them what you’re doing. I want to know what happened from the moment you got here. And why exactly you were called in.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘I’m getting one of my people to phone the zoo.’

  ‘And then there were eight,’ said Nicholas. Two tables had been pushed together to accommodate all the residents from Ratchette Hall. Sophia was up one end on her phone. Carole was behind the bar restocking and swearing about the fact her pub was being used as makeshift waiting room.

  Sam looked at the table and counted them loudly. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘There’s eight of you.’

  ‘And that is relevant how?’ I said, perhaps a little unsympathetically considering the circumstances.

  ‘Be nice,’ I told myself and remembered that they knew Cullen better than we had. They’d spent days and nights with him. Got to know him. In fact Laura, up the far end of the table looked very red-eyed. Tabby was on one side of her stroking her palm, Devlin on the other was restless and wired. Margot, Starla and Imogen all had a kind of stony gloss to their eyes. I wondered if it was shock.

  Jocelyn hadn’t looked up. Her eyes were resting on the coffee cup in front of her. They all had one and there was a cafetière in the middle of the table with milk and sugar and a spare cup. I went and grabbed it and poured some coffee in. Black and unsugared, like a slap round the face. It was just what I needed.

  ‘There were ten of us staying at Ratchette Hall on Sunday,’ Nicholas spoke steadily, which surprised me. ‘Monday evening we ate and drank lots of whisky and wine. Graham died in the night and then there were nine. Nine little Ratchette writers staying up late, one got bitten and then there were eight.’ His voice trembled but he kept going. ‘It’s an Agatha Christie story with a very unpleasant title. I’m sure you’ve heard it. Recently it was dramatised on the BBC as Then There Were None.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Cullen had the same thoughts. He mentioned that story on Tuesday.’

  Nicholas’s eyes widened. ‘Did he? Well, let’s hope we don’t run foul of the rhyme:
One little writer left all alone; he went and hanged himself and then there were none.’

  Jocelyn slapped him hard on the arm, then apologised. ‘Don’t Nicky, please. We’re upset enough as it is.’

  ‘Well,’ he said and pulled his arm away. ‘It’s true. Someone’s going through us.’

  Tabby turned her head from Laura and pursed her lips, ‘Nicholas! Please, this isn’t helping. We’re all in states of distress. Poor Cullen. It’s tragic. Don’t make this about you.’

  I thought that was well said and assumed the subject was going to be dropped but Devlin stood up. ‘Then I came along and made it up to nine again. And Sophia came down too. So actually dear Nick, the numbers are going up. Rosie and Sam add to us too.’

  Nicholas rolled his eyes.

  ‘You were really horrible to him too, weren’t you?’ Jocelyn said ruefully. ‘Here, yesterday.’

  ‘And now he’s dead,’ said Imogen like a judge passing sentence.

  A heavy silence dropped on the table like a stone, flattening all conversation.

  Eventually Robin fluttered his eyelids and said, ‘We should let the police do their work and not jump to conclusions.’

  Murmurs of agreement rippled round the table.

  ‘Okay then,’ said Devlin. ‘I don’t want to appear crass …’

  As if he could ever appear crass, I thought.

  ‘… but we’re here and we’re on a course. Let’s do a writing exercise. It’ll take our minds off it.’

  The reaction was sluggish. No one had any enthusiasm, but they all started reaching for their bags and notebooks.

  ‘You can join us,’ he said to Sam and me.

  But Sam’s phone had started ringing. He walked away towards the front door to answer it in privacy.

  ‘We’ve got some work to do,’ I told Devlin thinking I would rather stick needles in my eyes. Then I remembered I was trying to be nice. ‘But you go ahead.’ I sent him one of my own toothy smiles. ‘We’d love to hear what you’ve written later, though.’ Which wasn’t true but I thought they’d probably forget.

  Amazingly this seemed to animate them.

  I followed Sam to the door. He was calling over his shoulder, ‘It’s Monty. Ask Scrub if we have permission to leave for a bit?’

  Luckily Scrub didn’t care where we went as long as we presented ourselves back at the office ‘soon’, however long that was, to share our timescale and what we’d gleaned so far. So we went and established ourselves in a tea room down the road and sketched out the timeline. Monty phoned back after Sam texted him. The agent had the intelligence reports back on the Ratchette residents.

  ‘Right,’ he said. We had him on loud speaker. ‘You’re in a secure environment yes?’

  I looked around the café. There were a couple of waitresses hovering round a gaggle of young mums with newborns and toddlers. They were all very preoccupied. On the next table an old man hunched over tea in a bone china cup and crumpets with what looked like honey on them. ‘Yes,’ I confirmed, then bent lower to the speaker and whispered, ‘There’s just a mum and toddler group …’

  ‘Mums and toddlers?’ Monty blasted so that phone crackled.

  ‘Correct,’ said Sam, as a plastic bowl in the act of emptying its baked beans, sailed through the air and hit the wall next to the old guy. ‘They’ve got their hands full. I don’t think they’ll be paying any attention to us.’

  But Monty’s grunt sounded unconvinced so I added, ‘And just one old man here but he’s got a hearing aid in.’

  ‘A hearing aid?’ asked Monty in a tone that meant it wasn’t a question. ‘You mean something to make him hear better? Where are you both?’

  ‘Kitty’s Tea Rooms,’ said Sam quietly into the speaker. ‘I don’t think anyone will be able to hear the detail. Not all of it.’

  Monty muttered something under his breath which may or may not have been a swear word. ‘For goodness sake, you two. I am really going to have to give you some training.’ He took a deep breath in. ‘Phone me when you are in an environment where no one can overhear you. That’s fundamental to a secure position. And take something to make notes with. I am not repeating myself.’

  We phoned back from a shady, and thus private, fairly secluded, plausibly ill-used track with no mums and toddlers or old men with hearing aids, which led into a wooded section of Damebury Common.

  Chastened by Monty’s reproachful tone we even went so far as to heap a couple of fallen branches and dead leaves over the roof. Sam assured me he would get the car cleaned and valeted, though he always said that and never did. I went with the camouflage effort anyway.

  The whole thing reminded me of another time we had done something like this, outside a certain Hades Hall. Now that had been a crazy old night. Spectacularly so. Please god we weren’t going to get involved with anything similar when we kept vigil at the writers retreat. If we were still going to do that, now that there was the whole kind of further unexpected death thing to consider.

  Death again. I sighed. It seemed to be all around me lately. From the first moment, when I had discovered the museum had been left to me after my grandfather’s death, right up to this moment with Cullen’s. With some odd ‘worse than death’ scenarios peppered in for good measure which reminded me of the unholy ritual that we had disrupted in that chapel in Hades Hall. If I closed my eyes I could recall the temperature of the night air, the scent of cypress pines on the wind. My mind roved over the inverted cross erected behind those chapel’s doors, the gleaming bowl at its foot, waiting to collect some unknown bodily fluid, cruelly rendered, from some fresh victim.

  I shuddered.

  Although I had a sense that there was darkness afoot, metaphorical darkness, I had no notion of organised nastiness, of the kind we had encountered in the proprietor of Hades Hall, Countess Elizabeth Barbary, and her circle of cronies and desperado alchemists. Though there was certainly, and now very evidently, danger in the air here, it was a subtle undertone that I detected around the Hall, possibly scented in the sweat of the disquieted residents, the raw discharge of chemicals from frightened armpits, dried adrenaline perhaps. Whatever way you explained it, I knew that I was picking up on fear. Yet it was a niggling feeling. Not the breathtaking, blade-like danger and hateful antagonism I picked up during the Barbary incident.

  ‘I think that will do,’ Sam said touching my arm as I piled another heap of dead leaves on the boot. I had forgotten what I was doing and covered it with a good three inches of mouldy brown leaf detritus.

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered.

  Sam managed a quick smile. ‘It’s your car. Let’s be organised – do you want to take notes or shall I?’

  I thought about that and said, ‘I will,’ and got into the passenger seat. Sam passed me his laptop. I settled it onto my knees and switched it on.

  As Sam was dialling Monty’s number I said, ‘Do you think in a few years’ time we might actually have a clue about what we’re doing?’

  He put the phone to his ear, looked straight ahead out the windscreen at the trees around us and said, ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  Which was, at least, honest.

  When Monty connected, Sam put the call on speaker. He reassured the agent that we were indeed in the middle of nowhere in what was now a specially camouflaged car.

  I dutifully fired up Word.

  Down the other end of the line Monty went into tutorial mode. ‘I suggest you draw up some kind of document and take notes as I relay the information.’

  ‘Already on it,’ I said, inserting a table into the document. I was going to be efficient and thorough. Monty would make an agent of me yet. It was becoming a more attractive career possibility than benefit fraud. The hours were much more flexible and I didn’t have to sit opposite Charlie and his stupid ties.

  ‘Destroy after use, of course. Okay,’ said Monty in a voice that demanded attention. ‘I’m not wasting any time with an executive summary. We know where we are and what’s happened. So here we go.
Regarding Graham Peacock, he is astonishingly unremarkable. And I use that adjective because you wait to hear about the rest. Now, if we look for the usual motivating factors pertaining to Peacock’s demise, I’m afraid there are scant pickings. Mr Peacock had been the administrator and caretaker of Ratchette Hall for eleven years. Before that he was a teacher in Birmingham. Glowing reference when he left. Doesn’t seem to have had a problem with anyone that we are aware of. Never married. One long-term affair with a fellow teacher who was Canadian and returned home to live with her ailing parents when the relationship ended. It was amicable. They remain in touch. After that Mr Peacock seems to have been quite content with his books and his job. No extended family, although he had one nephew whom he was fond of. Only appears to have had a few thousand in savings. Nothing to kill for I’d say. His nephew is well established as a businessman in Manchester with a family. So, as you can see, in terms of motive, like I said, there is not much to go on. Though of course there are limits to what one can ever find out about anyone.’

  Sam nodded ferociously. My fingers tap tap tapped away at the keyboard recording the information.

  ‘The residents then, I will go through in alphabetical order,’ he continued barely drawing breath. ‘Surname first. Got that Rosie?’

  I nodded then said, ‘Yes,’ when I remembered he couldn’t see me.

  ‘Okay then, numero uno: Blackman Nicholas.’

  The mere mention of his name had me sighing. The evident weariness was loud enough to be audible to Monty down the line.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he responded. ‘I can imagine he might be a handful. I gather Nicholas is going through a rebellious stage. He’s had a bit of a journey lately. Father is the heir to the Blackman Mustard empire. The business will be passed down to Nicholas as the first-born son, when Mr Blackman senior retires. The family is quite traditional that way. Nicholas, however, is not making noises about going into business. Ergo – he’s enrolled on the course and has aspirations to write. Graduated last year from Durham University. Classics. Got a third. Family not happy. Were expecting a first, but they are aware that he’s not exactly on the rails at the moment. Like I said Rafe Blackman is rather hoping he’ll grow out of it.’