by Jason Foss
She heard footsteps coming down the staircase and moved her attention to a rack of eco-friendly, politically correct postcards and plucked out one card at random. Its recycled paper featured an ethnic-art dolphin leaping from the sea. As the shopkeeper approached, Vikki turned to notice how tall Monica Clewes was. Those extra eight or nine inches made Vikki feel like a schoolgirl caught shoplifting.
‘This is an interesting place to work,’ she blustered on reflex, gesticulating towards the sacks of beans on the floor.
‘Are you interested in wholefood?’
‘Well, I’ve never given it a try really.’
‘You should, it enhances body and soul. You could try my cosmetics too.’
Vikki was conscious that she had dressed in a rush that morning and had probably applied too much blusher, whilst she knew the purple eye shadow had been a mistake.
‘They’re cruelty-free, not tested on animals and made from only natural ingredients,’ Monica continued, ‘they might save your skin.’
Vikki felt herself colour beneath the blusher as her lifestyle clashed with that of the shop owner. She pointed to the bookshelf. ‘What does all this black magic do for you?’
Monica discoloured. ‘Are you here to buy something?’
Vikki waggled the recycled card. ‘You know Jeffrey Flint, don’t you?’
A slow smile came to Monica’s face. ‘Yes, we’re good friends.’
‘I was looking for something for him.’
‘I have the very thing.’ Monica went away and Vikki followed back to the desk. She was presented with the Yule gift pack of special teas.
‘Wonderful, thank you.’ Vikki drew out her purse to pay.
The reporter was replacing the Christmas shopper as Vikki found another angle. ‘You’ve got all Temple-Brooke’s books back there; do they sell?’
‘Very well.’
‘You were at his reading, over at Waterstones?’
‘Yes,’ came the slightly irritated reply.
‘Look, you’re a friend of his…’
‘I am?’
Vikki took a wild stab in the dark. ‘You were in his car, when I tried to speak to him.’
‘Me?’ If Monica was lying she was exceptionally good at it. ‘That must have been his wife; they’re very close.’
‘Ah, sorry. I just want to interview him for my paper.’
‘Oh well, I’m sure you could try ringing him.’
‘He’s ex-directory.’
Monica glanced towards a pensioner who had just set the wind-chimes tinkling.
‘Why didn’t you go to Piers Plant’s funeral?’ Vikki asked directly.
‘Look, I’m busy. I hardly knew him and I hate funerals.’ Monica turned to the man. ‘Can I help you?’
Vikki slipped the gift pack into her Harrods shopping bag, then left the shop. The slit of sky above The Passage had a greenish hue, there was snow in the air and she shivered against the icy chill which had formed as she had spoken to Monica Clewes. Jeffrey Flint deserved better. She might just give him a ring.
Chapter 25
It was Wednesday, and it was snowing. Jeffrey Flint was sketching the plan of a typical ‘playing-card’ fort on the blackboard of seminar room 246 when he heard the sound of fingernails tapping on glass. He stopped talking and glanced towards the eye-level window in the door. Tyrone mouthed the words ‘it’s snowing’.
Flint signalled for him to come in. The first-years looked up at the postgraduate as their lecturer clapped him around the shoulders and turned Tyrone to face the class.
‘Tell us all.’
Tyrone paused, looking foolish. ‘It’s snowing.’
Flint banged on the table: ‘This! This is the power of observation that we demand of our students here at Central College.’
The class tittered and Tyrone frowned. Flint waved his hand at the class. ‘Class closed, disperse, go away.’ He turned to Tyrone.
‘That wasn’t fair,’ Tyrone said.
‘Life’s unfair. I know what you’ve been up to and I stand a good chance of losing my job because of it.’
Beating the students out of the room, they marched down towards Flint’s office.
‘Okay, tell me about it.’
‘I’ve spoken to Vikki every day.’
‘And?’
‘We’ve crossed most of the suspects off, and found a lot of dirt on James Templestone.’
‘Who?’ Flint asked, then remembered, ‘Ah, Rupert Brooke reincarnated as Aleister Crowley, or the other way around.’
‘He and his wife own all sorts of weird outlets for books, videos, games and they publish a whole load of magazines, not just Green ones. They’re into just about everything, right-wing politics, left-wing politics, church committees, Tory council, it’s completely mad.’
‘He could be a liberal, wanting to express all shades of opinion.’
‘But it’s all the same opinion, isn’t it, Doc?’
Flint halted outside Sally’s room. ‘You’ve noticed?’
‘Yeah; right wing — keep out the immigrants, left wing — keep out the capitalist multinationals; Church of England — let’s respect our betters, Pagan cults — let’s live in the past. Even the video games and Lucy’s dungeons and dragons form part of the same scene. His poems are all about rural landscapes, he hangs around with hippies like Monica Clewes...’
‘Wait.’ Flint held up the flat of his hand and stuck his head into Sally’s office.
‘Jeff?’ She looked up from the typewriter.
‘Sally, I’m going to be sick again,’ he said.
‘Oh no,’ she said in alarm, then her expression quickly changed. ‘Would this be one of your convenient illnesses?’
‘I feel it coming on already.’
‘Jeff, I wouldn’t...’
‘Be a hero and cancel my night school people.’
She frowned.
‘And everything else until next week.’
Sally’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘Ian will go mad.’
‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,’ Flint drawled in his best John Wayne voice.
‘Can’t you wait until the end of term?’ Sally’s utterly readable face was awash with anguished pleading.
‘Lucy Gray won’t wait that long.’
‘You’ve found her?’
‘Give or take a few hundred yards.’
*
It was a hunch, but one based on growing certainty. By dawn the following morning, Flint was packed into a high-winged Cessna with Ralph and Judy Slack. It had taken an afternoon and evening of frantic telephoning, plus pledges of favours, to persuade them to take to the air. The snow had been fitful during the afternoon and lay still on the freezing ground overnight. By mid-morning on the Thursday, it would begin to melt and no more was forecast.
The morning sky was clear, the sun weakly sparkling across frozen marshland as the Cessna swooped over Kingshaven. Ralph turned inland, passed the smokestacks of the industrial estates and flew on to the gently rolling farmland beyond, with the curving river as a guide. Judy navigated, with Flint hugging his map and spotting the landmarks one by one. A red smear in the distance had to be Durring, with curls of the Darkewater snaking towards it.
Some snow still lay on the fields, it lined hedge banks, clung to paths and hid in furrows. Changes in vegetation or surface height were sufficient to alter the pattern of white, so that even the faintest hollow showed up as a brighter concentration amongst the dusted brown or green fields. Ralph pointed out ancient features invisible from the ground: field systems, ring-ditches, enclosures, droveways – it was all text-book stuff.
Flint knew all the Darkewater megaliths intimately. He had read all the references, seen all the sketches and visited each in turn. One held his quest in its cradle and only tiny strands of evidence, plus gut feeling told him which one. Harriet’s Stone passed beneath them, the finger of the old witch pointing upwards at those come to steal her secrets. Ralph throttled back and lost altitude
, flattening out for his first run. Cold air blasted upwards through the open hatch in the Cessna floor, which permitted Judy to take the photographs under a barrage of instructions. Flint was reminded momentarily of The Blue Max and thought how Tyrone would love to be up there with them.
Ralph suggested that five of the sites were suited to air photography. Several passes were made at each until all three were satisfied and Ralph turned the plane back towards Cambridge. Flint should have been taking tutorials at that moment, instead he risked his career in the skies over southern England. The exhilaration was worth the expense, but it would be several hours before he knew whether the results justified the risk.
*
Tyrone had driven Flint overnight to Cambridge, then hung around with some old school mates until the expedition returned. Several more hours elapsed whilst Judy developed and printed the film, so it was evening before any progress was made.
Ralph set up a stereoscopic viewer to compare vertical photographs of each site, with those taken the previous year. Pictures with their ghostly echoes of peoples long past were scrutinised to millimetre accuracy. One was examined closer than any. Harriet’s Stone cast a black stripe across the photograph, like a giant sundial in the ploughed field. Less obvious was a white blur some twenty yards in circumference surrounding the stone itself. This was not in the previous shot, it was the result of the snow settling in the long grass and taking time to thaw. It was not the proof sought.
‘If you were a murderer, Ralph, where would you dump a body?’
‘In a ditch.’
‘But farmers recut ditches.’
‘In the cornfield,’ Tyrone said.
‘You foul up the shoots and create a nice empty patch.’
‘But in the autumn, the farmer ploughs it...’
‘And brings up the subsoil you’ve disturbed, plus bits of clothes, bones et cetera.’
Judy hung over their shoulders. ‘It’s complex, being a murderer.’
‘I’d choose a field of rough grass,’ Flint said, carefully checking the images, looking for a smudge no more than half a centimetre long.
‘If you had a new grave in grassland,’ Ralph thought aloud, ‘it might just retain some snow on the surface.’
The field around Harriet’s Stone was surrounded by a hedge and perimeter ditch. No marks showed in the Yule-log texture of snow sprinkled on evenly ploughed soil. The adjacent field was arable, with a faint path leading from its corner towards the nearest country lane. Snow clung more stubbornly along its course.
‘You keep away from the path, because that’s where the predictable man-with-dog walks.’ Flint continued to narrate his thinking on the psychology of murder.
Lower downslope was an area of swampy marsh, bordering a broad S-bend of the river.
‘Are you sure you know what you’re looking for’?’ Judy asked.
‘Piers Plant had an obsession with this place and this girl I met implied it was here that she last saw Lucy.’
It would be somewhere close to the stone but not too close, not too obvious. Towards the top edge of the field adjacent to that with the stone, a white oval stood out from the mottled shade of the rest of the field.
‘How long is that?’
Ralph laid a ruler along the mark and moved his whiskered lips to calculate. ‘Two or three metres. I’ll check it’s not a piece of dust on the negative.’
Flint laid the ruler from the stone to the white blob, then looked at the orientation marks Judy had applied.
‘South-east, roughly. That could be the direction of the midwinter sunrise, I can see Piers Plant loving that idea. I’ve walked across this field, it’s an old-fashioned meadow, with rough grass grown long for cattle feed. No one ploughs it, people only walk dogs down the far edge and the spring growth would bury any disturbance in the winter.’
Water came to his eyes. He knew what had been found.
*
Organisation takes time, people had to be mobilised, cajoled, and this was not easy by telephone. Central College operated on an archaeological timescale; things did not normally happen overnight, but overnight was the schedule that Tyrone and Flint worked to.
Arrangements were complete some time after midnight, when Flint bedded down on a camp-bed in Ralph and Judy’s barely heated study. As he tossed fitfully and tried to keep warm, he found himself somewhere else, barefoot and exposed on the cold, windless night. A gibbous moon low on the horizon threw long shadows across the hillside. One shadow was longer, sharper than all the others, which moved, swayed, circled and touched the hallowed ground. As the moment came, one moved forward, stripping aside the grey cloak to stand naked before the moon. She shivered against the cold, trembled as she took up the knife and the onlookers took up the chant. Ethereal harmonies of another age rose into the winter air. An animal struggled away the last moments of its life, the old and wise stood back in satisfaction and The Maiden declared her need to embrace the Earth.
A tall figure in a horned headpiece blew a blast on the hunter’s horn, then raised a cry to the night and the cry was answered. Something dark moved, clawed its way out of the blackness, summoned by the blackest of spells from the blackest of books.
Stupid, idiotic nightmare! That was not how it had happened! His logical brain fought back against the fear of darkness and loneliness as he forced himself awake.
It was edging towards four o’clock when his heartbeat returned to normal. He was cold down there in the study, surrounded by visions of demons and monsters, but in the morning, Jeffrey Flint would have to face the scene of that nightmare.
*
Before it was light, they drove back to London in Tyrone’s car and called at Flint’s flat to collect warm digging clothes. Next they drove on to college to change mode of transport. In the car park, Stuart Shapstone and Bunny Beresford both leaned on the Land Rover, looking ill-kempt and unhappy. They had already packed the rear with the tools of the archaeologist’s trade and were uncertain what the rest of the day held.
A wintry shower accompanied them on the drive towards the Valley, but the rain had moved on by the time the Land-Rover lurched down the country lane and pulled on to the verge behind the red Metro.
Muffled to the point of disappearing, Vikki met the team in a flurry of introductions, then gave Flint half a hug in the excitement.
‘So this is it!’
‘Don’t look so thrilled,’ he warned. ‘If I’m wrong, we could still look very foolish and if I’m right, it’s not going to be nice.’
‘I know.’ Vikki’s face fell to a sober equilibrium and she helped the men unload the equipment.
Grimly, they walked towards the objective, a ragged group of excavators laden with their tools like a gaggle of dwarves. Soon, Harriet’s Stone could be seen through the low hedgerow, glinting wet after the lunchtime rain. They passed the stubble field and into the meadow beyond, which had been cut in the autumn to leave rough and uneven grass. No further snow had fallen.
‘Explain how you know where to look,’ Vikki said, after the students set about their work. ‘I don’t really understand.’
The lecturer kicked at sticky earth. ‘Any disturbance of the soil alters its character. Perhaps it holds water better, perhaps less well than before. That will mean that snow or frost will exhibit differential settling, differential thawing. Especially down here, we’re near the bottom of the hill, so the drainage will be affected. Then, if you dig a pit, chuck in a body, you get a mound, so you have to disperse the spare earth. But, if you backfill it to produce a level surface, the contents will settle and compact over a period of months, creating a slight depression. This may be enough to retain a light snowfall for a few hours longer than the surrounding fields.’
‘And this is what the photograph shows?’
‘A little white shadow. In the summer it would have been a little black shadow, but I missed my chance then.’
Using a map drawn up from the photograph, Stuart identified a pair of trees and a
gatepost which had shown up clearly on the picture. It was a simple matter of twenty minutes to triangulate the position of the white smudge with a pair of surveying tapes. They then laid out a square, five metres to a side, around the point the air photograph suggested the disturbance might be. Bunny took up a four-foot-long piece of iron and began to drive it into the ground, following a pattern of points spaced at half-metre intervals within the square. He systematically drove the rod downwards as far as it would go, which in most places was only one foot. The point of the spike was pulled up each time, red with the clay of the subsoil. In the centre of the grid, Bunny’s rod sank two to three feet without undue effort.
‘Here, Doc, a fiver says it’s here.’
Flint quickly dished out orders: Bunny and Tyrone take the spades and cut the turf, he would wield the turf-cutter, whilst Stuart lugged the turves and piled them well clear of the area of excavation.
‘I don’t mind getting dirty,’ Vikki said.
‘You write the story, we’ll dig the hole and the union will be happy.’
She took out her camera and took a few working shots whilst they cleared away the turf.
‘This is too easy,’ said Bunny, ‘someone’s done this before.’
When he looked closely, Flint could see a slight change in the vegetation which suggested turf had been crudely torn up and even more crudely replaced. This gave them an area to work and it was cleared before Vikki gave a yelp of alarm.
A figure was coming across the field from the bottom, walking purposefully in their direction.
Bunny stopped.
‘Keep digging,’ Flint said.
A one-foot-deep excavation existed by the time the figure was close enough to shout. He wore a green wax jacket and flat cap and carried a broken shotgun under the crook of his arm. A border collie ran away from his heels, barking.