by Jason Foss
Sally Partin had been secretary to the department for twenty years. Well spoken, correct, elegant and demure, it was her boast that she steered Classical Archaeology between Scylla and Charybdis. She claimed to remember each student who had passed between her doors over two decades, and it was only she who truly knew the state of departmental politics.
‘Have you been sick again, Jeff?’ she asked as he extended an arm towards the message board.
‘Yes. You got my message?’
Her tight lips were a confirmation. Sally pulled out a parcel and a trio of letters for his attention whilst Flint took down one telephone message from the board.
‘It was your chemist, Timmy Wright: he rang to apologise.’
‘Cretinous erk. I should send him the bill for my wasted time.
‘And Ian would like to see you. The moment you came in, he said.’ Her face carried a strong hint of warning.
‘Bad?’ he asked.
She winced as a coded signal. ‘Be polite and don’t try any jokes. The tabloid press have been grubbing their little snouts around the department. Ian is not best pleased.’
‘Ten minutes?’ Flint pleaded, retreating with his pile of post. He reached his office, mentally preparing his defence against a dressing-down. Flopping into his chair, he ripped open the first envelope in the pile of mail. Inside was a dull enquiry from some West Country school teacher. It was tossed aside; the parcel at the base of the heap looked far more interesting. Book-sized – perhaps something for review. A freebie, something to shred through the intellectual mincer, something to distract the mind from Lucy, Vikki, Sally, Barbara and Chrissie Collings’ slender white neck. Off came the brown paper, off came the lid, out came the newspaper, out fell the severed chicken’s head.
His heart kicked, he shot backwards on his toppling chair. Regaining balance, he checked again. Staring through a half-closed eye was the bloody head of a chicken, still partly wrapped in newspaper. The stench of offal flooded out and assaulted his nostrils.
Flint spun the chair around and jerked open the window, leaned out and breathed deeply. In, out, in, out; no more shocks this week please! His pulse began to return to normal and he chanced a sideways look at the blood-soaked mess. He’d followed the red herrings, he’d had the narrow escape; this was his first public warning.
Mouth drying, he began to think logically once more. Stained dark red and stinking of death, the newspaper had a familiar look. He slipped the chicken onto the teacher’s letter and uncreased a page of The Durring and Kingshaven Advertiser. It was one of Vikki Corbett’s masterpieces of subtlety, the one where he had volunteered to stand in crumpled jacket before an ugly Victorian building. He examined the wrapping and the first-class stamps. The parcel had been posted in south London.
Deliberately, he relaxed back into the chair, contemplating the head, weighing up the situation. This was proof he was drawing closer, and confirmation that something sinister lurked behind Lucy’s disappearance. Postcards from far corners of the country, now a threat from south London? An inner feeling told him that Piers Plant had not been the one licking the stamps.
The internal phone jolted him back to reality. It was Sally, gently suggesting that the moment was ripe for him to see the Head of Department. Flint opened the window to maximum, then left the chicken where it was.
Professor Ian Grant had an office somewhat larger than that of his junior lecturer, with a view out on to the central quadrangle of college. When Flint was called inside, he was standing by his window, completely sober, gazing outwards.
‘Ah, Jeffrey, I trust you are fully recovered.’
‘Fine,’ Flint lied, his mind switching between a burning museum and a decapitated hen.
‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your research, but you have been,’ he paused, ‘so seldom in the department. How is your paper progressing?’
The Professor moved back to his seat and Flint sat opposite him, in the awkward chair reserved for students. Joys of the third century were briefly resurrected. The new evidence met with appreciative nods, the Marxist reinterpretation caused further furrows in an already richly landscaped brow.
‘And what of your excavation; it’s going to be Burkes Warren again?’
‘Everything’s arranged, my team is picked and ready to go. All we have to do is wait for the farmer to cut his field.’
‘And when do you expect to begin?’
‘Second week in August.’
The Professor repeated the date quietly, it was clear that academic matters were not his reason for summoning the junior lecturer to his office. ‘Next year, perhaps, we might organise something abroad. There may be a villa excavation in Tuscany.’
‘Terrific,’ Flint enthused.
‘Which I shall probably be directing myself, but I daresay I will need assistance.’ The Professor was clearly manoeuvring around to a point of conflict. Handling confrontations and decision-making were not his happier talents.
‘Since we spoke a few days ago, I hear you have been playing the detective.’
‘Not exactly playing.’
Professor Grant pulled a copy of the Sun from his desk, and turned to the page four headline. The story of the fire had been lifted directly from Vikki’s humbler paper, with added spice and reduced fibre.
‘Have you read your contract lately? There is, I believe, a clause where staff agree to make no statements to the press.’
‘But she was there, she saw it all.’
A finger flicked hard at the photograph of the blazing museum.
‘How do you think this looks to the Dean of Arts, to the archaeological profession as a whole? Do you consider that burgling museums is a suitable mode of conduct for a member of the academic staff? Would you consider it a valid use of meagre university funds?’
‘Yes.’
The Professor gave an ingratiating smile. ‘We pay exorbitant rates here in London. Much of that goes to pay the police force.’
‘The police are getting nowhere.’
‘Nevertheless, we have to ask, are missing persons our business?’
‘Missing student; one of our students. We can’t simply lose young people, it looks careless. Makes bad reading for the Alternative Prospectus.’
‘Don’t be sarcastic with me, Flint. You’re not with your students now. This girl, ah...’
‘Lucy’
‘The police think she’s run off somewhere.’
‘She was into witchcraft, Satanism, something of that nature. I think she’s been killed and I have a good idea who did it.’
‘Killed?’ He looked unhappy at dismissing the weight of argument. ‘By this curator fellow?’
Flint inclined his head. The Professor could clearly read a newspaper.
‘Still, I must ask...’ Grant began to bluster, betraying that his prepared lines of rebuke had been exhausted. ‘I must say that, you must feel that chasing lunatics and burning down museums...’ That was it, the coherent sentence construction was gone. ‘…we have our reputation to maintain.’
‘Reputation?’
‘…We cannot afford to have our research efforts... ah... frittered.’
‘Frittered?’ Flint would have said more, but regard for his tenure kept a bottle of crude ripostes firmly corked. Being a rebel is one thing, but even Che Guevara kept his eye on the odds against him.
‘You are paid to lecture, to conduct research and to take legitimate interests in the welfare of the students. All this is too much.’ Grant looked back at the paper, searching for inspiration. ‘You have gone too far. You have even come to the attention of the Dean of Arts. I would have preferred it to have been for the production of your long-awaited paper, rather than for this...’ He waved the rag again.
They looked at each other in silence. How old was he? Flint wondered. Fifty-five? Sixty? Time to retire the old drunk? The pause offered a chance to escape.
‘I had better get back to my research,’ Flint said, with only a hint of irony.
‘Quite.’ Professor Grant was unused to berating his staff. Thirty seconds after Flint left the room, he would lunge for the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk.
*
Enraged rather than chastened, Flint stomped back to his office to find Tyrone loitering outside the door, about to write a note. He was invited inside, and shown the head.
‘Did they read the entrails first?’ Tyrone asked, kneeling on the floor and staring the chicken in the eye. ‘The jungle telegraph said that Prof was giving you a ticking-off.’
‘Said I was frittering our research effort.’ A pencil cracked down on to the table as Flint exploded. ‘Frittered! Most research effort is frittered! Frittered on bonking undergraduates, going off on foreign jollies and pissed away down the ceramic pipe in the Senior Common Room toilets!’
‘You told him that?’
‘No.’
‘Good job,’ Tyrone said. ‘So you’re still my supervisor, then?’
Unconstructive anger had been vented on the empty room. ‘The shit came from above – the Dean of Arts.’ Flint’s hands simulated pigeons dumping on his head. ‘I wonder when they dug him up. If I was paranoid, I’d sense a conspiracy.’
‘Why not? It would explain other facts.’ Tyrone was so relaxed, almost unflustered by the museum drama.
‘Such as?’
He blinked heavily. ‘Why the police are being so pathetic.’
‘You’re fantasising.’ Flint dismissed the comment verbally, but his mind continued to play on the word. ‘It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just more complex than we first thought. It’s like digging a test pit through a site of unknown depth and function. It just keeps going down, deeper and deeper, making less and less sense.’
Tyrone rephrased one of his supervisor’s favourite quotes. ‘Mark Twain: “We have already thrown much darkness on the subject, and if we continue we shall soon know nothing at all.”’
‘Not quite, but almost.’
‘It will make sense sooner or later, when the pieces fall together. Just you see.’
Flint gave a heavy sigh. Despite the chaos at the museum, despite the warnings, he wanted to keep digging. The hole yawned wide, and tantalisingly deep. He pointed at the chicken’s head.
‘You happy to continue with this game, Tyrone? Back out if you want to. It could get very nasty if Plant isn’t found.’
‘I’ll give it a couple of weeks. I’ve nothing planned until August.’
‘You could come to Burkes Warren, if you’re feeling bored by then.’
‘No, I’ll give that a miss. Me and the lads are hitting Italy. Red wine, white marble and brown-skinned girls for one whole month.’
‘You’d give up four wet weeks in Hertfordshire for that?’
‘Easily.’
‘Right, Tyrone, you’ve a month to crack this one.’
Tyrone stood up and indicated the severed head. ‘Is this evidence? Do the police want to see it?’
‘They’d probably toss it in a casserole.’
‘If you throw it away, remember to keep the stamps and wrappers. Do we know anyone who lives in south London?’
‘What does your computer say?’
‘Do you want to come and see?’
Flint supposed it was research of a sort, so allowed Tyrone to lead him to the computer suite to see his data base. Prepared to accept data for his thesis, he was testing it on the Lucy case. Every fact, supposition, statement and piece of research had been reduced to computer-friendly form.
‘Excellent.’ Flint thumbed the mouse and watched the data flood by. ‘Do you have a working hypothesis too?’
Tyrone switched to another file, then began to summarise his theory. ‘Lucy left hall on 30th January, it was a Monday. She went to the station, bought a student return ticket for £9.60 and travelled to Durring; Kingshaven is fifty pence more. At Durring she met someone...’
‘Piers Plant?’
‘There’s no other candidate. She arranges to stay somewhere overnight, perhaps. Late on the night of the 30th, they drive to one of your megaliths, meet the other weirdoes and do whatever weirdoes do on February 1st. That’s Imbolc, the feast of the lactating of ewes: it says in my book.’
The air-conditioned hygiene of the new computer suite was an incongruous place to be discussing Pagan ritual. Flint cast his eyes around the rows of empty terminals, themselves reminding him of an avenue of standing stones.
‘Then what?’
‘Before your Piers Plant tried to sauté us in the museum, I thought we were dealing with a group of harmless cranks. People don’t go crazy, hide in attics, torch museums and burn people alive just to cover up an elopement. I think something pretty nasty happened to Lucy. I bet they sacrificed her.’
‘Uh?’ Flint sat back in shock; the idea appalled, yet seemed curiously possible. ‘That’s horrible, and it’s hardly likely.’
‘The tabloids are full of that sort of stuff.’
‘Yes, but is it true? Don’t tell Vikki, whatever you do, she would love that. Can’t you see the headline? SEXY SEDUCTRESS IN SATANIC SACRIFICE SHOCK SENSATION. Anyway, Plant was obsessed by Lucy, every fact we gather points to that.’
‘Lots of murders are crimes of passion. He’s a loony and his friends are probably all loonies too.’
‘Friends.’ Flint hung on the word. ‘Everyone says he has no friends, but he must have had help, and I don’t just mean his mother. There’s too much going on for one crank to organise. Fake postcards, phone calls, two disappearances, fingerlickin’ chicken in a bag...’
‘And the museum fire,’ Tyrone said.
Flint nodded. ‘Four a.m. this morning, I had some very uneasy thoughts about the whole museum caper.’
‘Timing,’ Tyrone said bluntly.
‘We go upstairs. Plant hears us hack down his door and escapes through his rabbit hole. While we’re making idiots of ourselves in the store room and quietly reading his library, he gets no more than five minutes to set light to the whole museum. Then, he manages to skip out of the building without bumping into George and disappears before the police turn up three minutes later.’
‘Magic.’
‘Let’s say we don’t believe in magic. There is something missing.’
Tyrone looked back at his theory on the computer screen. ‘You’re saying there are more people involved?’
‘That’s my hypothesis. So before we try any more heroics, we do more research, get a full grasp of the subject, find the other people. We really ought to do the rounds of those blessed megaliths too. Can you drag up the relevant data, get me some map references too?’
‘Okay, but this is taking stacks of my time.’
Flint stood, slapping him on the shoulder. ‘This is for the good of your fellow students.’
‘It’s applied research, so can I submit it as my thesis?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
The third century could whistle. Once the chicken’s head was in the dustbin, Flint set about reading all Lucy’s books on the occult. After only an hour he found the reference to the rattlesnake garter, the one Lucy was supposed to wear; it was the mark of the witch. He suppressed irritation at the idiocy of the parascience books, but read on. The J. B. Stoat library had another fourteen which touched on the subject, Senate House library a few more. It took three days to plough through them all, finding notes to feed to Tyrone. It was a poor research base, but Lucy would have read all the books on the subject she could easily get hold of. He already felt he knew her so well. To follow her shadow, Jeffrey Flint needed to enter her mind.
Chapter 12
The books and papers which had once filled Piers Plant’s attic room had been turned into black ash and mixed with the rubble of what had been the north wing of the Darkewater Valley Museum. Half an hour’s access to that information would have been sufficient to solve the case, Vikki had observed. Plant knew this too, and seemed willing to sacrifice his lifetime’s work to save himself. Vikki sat at her desk, ignoring a trio of
less pressing stories, looking at the four letters she had managed to grab in the panic to escape the museum. In the post that morning she had received something different, something odious and crude. What was worse, it had been delivered to her home.
Her hands still trembled at the thought, whilst her fingers hovered over the telephone buttons. Jeffrey Flint – no, sorry Doctor Flint – thought she was stupid, didn’t he? It had been her idea to raid the museum and by inference, her fault the place now lacked a north wing. It had been a grotty dump, after all. She tapped in the telephone number, wondering if all that junk had been insured?
After three minutes, someone found Doctor Flint in the library.
‘Jeff,’ she said sweetly, ‘did you like my story?’ she asked.
‘Demon curator in arson drama?’ he recited with unrestrained irony. ‘I have it pinned to my wall.’
‘I bet you’d prefer something a little more pretentious?’
‘No, it was fine. Write to the market.’
‘Do you know what some bastard did to me today?’ she asked.
‘Present in the post?’
‘Dog shit. A parcel of dog shit, wrapped in one of my articles, posted to my house. Somebody out there is really sick.’
‘Oh, but I got the top prize: poulet cru au papier.’
Was she supposed to understand him? ‘Stop mucking me about.’
‘Honest, a chicken’s head neatly gift-wrapped in one of your pieces. It was like The Godfather on a low budget. Gave me a real turn.’
A smile came to her lips. Where did he get it all from? ‘I guess someone didn’t like the way I write.’ Vikki was more offended by this than anything else.
‘Maybe they didn’t like my photo.’
‘No, it’s because I upset someone, by revealing that witchcraft is involved. Well, if they think this is going to frighten me, they’re wrong. What about you?’
He sounded very relaxed. ‘I’m not going to chicken out now things are getting interesting.’
‘Very funny,’ she groaned. ‘Now Jeff, I’ve been looking at those four letters. Three of them are just routine junk, but the other is an odd one. It’s a card from a book dealer in Holborn. I don’t understand it, but you will. Do you have a fax?’