Dead Scared

by S J Bolton

  She looked up, half defiant, half guilty. Then, with a tiny purse of the lips, she turned back to Danielle. ‘What did you stand on?’

  ‘DC Flint …’ Joesbury raised his voice.

  ‘To die by hanging, you need to raise yourself off the ground, tighten the rope and then jump. What did you stand on?’

  ‘According to the CID report, Miss Brown balanced on the pedals of her bicycle for long enough to tie the rope,’ said Joesbury. ‘And if we don’t take her back now, she’ll be late for work.’

  ‘Bull – shit!’

  Joesbury glanced along the road and pulled out of the small car park. ‘Don’t mince words, Flint, say what you think.’

  ‘Double bullshit. What was she, a trick cyclist? She balanced on bicycle pedals for long enough to tie a noose round her neck and the other end round a tree. Bullshit in triplicate!’

  It was kind of nice, in a way, seeing her composure slip.

  ‘Yeah, I get the point,’ he said. ‘You hungry?’

  ‘She couldn’t have done that by herself. You heard her, she didn’t know her knots from her knitting. She had help.’

  ‘Possibly. Pub grub do you?’

  ‘What the hell do you mean, possibly?’

  ‘Danielle didn’t die because someone found her and cut her down,’ said Joesbury. ‘They phoned for help and then legged it. CID never found them. It’s possible it was some sort of black joke that went a bit too far.’

  ‘She couldn’t identify them?’

  Joesbury shook his head. ‘Unconscious when they found her. The important point to take away from today is that websites don’t seem to have unduly influenced her.’

  ‘She visited them.’

  Up ahead was a pub. The sign outside said it served food all day. It also said it offered overnight accommodation. Oh, if only. Steak pie and chips, a bottle of good claret and then upstairs for the rest of the afternoon.

  ‘Of course she did,’ he said. ‘Anyone semi-computer literate contemplating any major step Googles it first these days. What we don’t have is any indication that what she found online made a significant difference.’

  Make that the rest of the week.

  ‘Guess not,’ agreed Lacey.

  Joesbury indicated left and pulled into the pub car park. ‘So, you’ve had a day out of school and done some proper detective work,’ he said, as he switched off the engine. ‘Now, can you get on with the brief you were given or do I have to replace you with an officer who understands the meaning of the phrase do what you’re told?’

  For a second, maybe two, they stared at each other. She’d kissed him once, last October, at around four in the morning, had pulled him gently towards her bed. And he really could have done without remembering that right now.

  ‘Is it a disciplinary offence to call a senior officer a patronizing bastard?’ she asked him.

  She might never know what it had cost him to say no. What every second in her presence cost him when he couldn’t touch her.

  ‘Pay for lunch, Flint,’ he said, ‘and you can call me what you like.’

  THE SUPPER PARTY at which I’d been invited to be Evi’s guest was in the middle of nowhere. Or, if you want to be picky, a tiny hamlet called Endicott, between two villages called Burwell and Waterbeach, some eight miles north-east of Cambridge. I was well and truly in the Fens now. I had a feeling that, had it been a clear night, the view would have been un-interrupted until the North Sea. I’ve spent my life in cities and I was finding the vastness of the East Anglian landscape disturbing. There was just too much of it somehow, too much emptiness. No place to hide.

  Mind you, the sunset that evening as Joesbury and I had driven back had been awe-inspiring. There had been plenty of cloud cover all afternoon, and as the sun went down the wind picked up and the heavens began to swirl with endless shades of orange, crimson and gold. If someone had told me the sky was on fire, I might just have believed it.

  The awesome skyscape seemed to have affected Joesbury too. He was silent for most of the journey back and dropped me off with barely a goodbye. Now, colour had largely fled the world and just a few ribbons of gold broke up the unrelenting blackness. Like memories of a day I really hadn’t wanted to end.

  I spotted the gap in the hedgerow Evi had told me to watch out for and turned off the road. A few yards down the lane I switched off the Black Eyed Peas album I’d been listening to. There was something about the farm track, stretching for what seemed like miles ahead of me before disappearing into a black void, that made hip-hop seem entirely out of place.

  The surface wasn’t great and I had to go slowly, rocking and lurching from one rut to another. I seemed to have left civilization behind, my headlights the only break in the darkness for miles. Nor could I rely on anything astral. Someone had taken a vacuum and cleaned the sky of stars, and if the moon had come up at all this evening, it had changed its mind and gone in again.

  On a whim, I slowed right down and switched off the headlights, just to see. The night seemed to solidify. It leaped closer, surrounding the car. I swear I could hear the metal of the bodywork groaning under the pressure. Completely freaky! I switched my headlights back on quickly. I’d had no idea that night-time could be so intense.

  I carried on past farm buildings on the right-hand side of the track and what could even have been a house. No lights though. No parked cars. Nothing to indicate a gathering. I think I was almost considering giving up when I passed through two tall stone columns and saw the farmhouse ahead. Several vehicles were parked at the front and there were lights on in the downstairs windows. I parked and got out. The email Evi had sent me earlier had warned against wearing heels. Easy now to see why. This wasn’t even a rough gravel drive. This was rock-spattered earth.

  The house was two storey, square built, of stone construction. It looked like a haunted house in a children’s story book: carved window ledges, elaborate crest over the front door and those nasty imp-like statues that leer down at you, tongues dangling, from the roof edge. There was a large iron ring centrally placed on the door. I lifted it, was about to let it fall.

  ‘That door hasn’t been opened since the old Queen died,’ said a voice from the side of the house. I turned to see Nick Bell heading towards me, lit cigarette in one hand.

  ‘This is your house?’ I asked when he was closer, cursing my stupidity for not asking Evi whose party she was inviting me to.

  ‘I rather think it owns me,’ he replied. ‘Laura, isn’t it? Evi told me you were coming. Good to see you again.’

  He bent lower and kissed me on one cheek. The skin of his face was cold and his breath smelled of smoke and red wine. I couldn’t help a shudder as his lips made contact.

  ‘So did the old Queen die here?’ I asked, more to cover my confusion than because I have any interest in deceased royalty. The house looked old enough for any number of dead queens to be associated with it.

  ‘Quite possibly,’ he replied. He was wearing jeans and the same blue and brown flecked woollen sweater I’d seen him in at the hospital. ‘Her rotting corpse could still be in one of the attic bedrooms,’ he was saying. ‘We get some very odd smells from time to time.’

  I followed Nick round the side of the house, past smokers huddled around a fire-pit and in through a boot room that smelled of dogs. On a counter I saw what looked like a cardboard box of fluffy yellow chicks. I leaned closer. Chicks all right. Dead ones. I was about to ask Nick why he kept dead poultry in his boot room when he ushered me into the kitchen. A slim woman in her early fifties with shoulder-length dark hair claimed his attention and a couple of pointers grabbed mine.

  I have very little experience of dogs but it’s difficult to resist creatures that are so unashamedly pleased to see you. Both were predominantly white with speckled markings. The smaller and slimmer of the two had a chocolate-brown face with ears so active they almost seemed to be talking at me. The other, with red-brown face and markings, looked older, its big cocoa-coloured eyes both wise and
friendly. The name tag on the older one said Merry. The younger was Pippin.

  In my experience, people who are very keen on The Lord of the Rings can be a bit odd. On the other hand, I was quite a Tolkien fan myself.

  Nick was searching around in a kitchen drawer. I put down a bottle of wine and poured myself an orange juice.

  ‘Wonderful house,’ I said, when Nick had emptied the drawer of cutlery and I had his attention again.

  ‘Belonged to my parents,’ he replied. ‘I inherited a few years ago. I’m going to sell it to someone who can afford to renovate it just as soon as I can get it safe enough to show estate agents round. The place is falling apart.’

  Someone else came over to speak to Nick and I took myself through to an oak-panelled dining room awash with old Toby jugs and willow-patterned plates. The fireplace was massive. A second later I realized it needed to be. There was practically a breeze running through the room from ill-fitting windows on opposite walls. I counted two buckets and a bowl on the stone-flagged floor to catch the rain. And this was the ground floor.

  There were around a dozen people in the room and not much space for more. I carried on walking into another stone-flagged room with easy chairs, a shiny black grand piano, an even larger fireplace and, cliché though it was, the decapitated head of a large mammal on one wall. Evi was perched on a window seat at the far end. An older man was sitting next to her, leaning rather closer than would have felt comfortable had I been in her position. Evi was dressed in bright scarlet this evening: red sweater that came down to mid-thigh, black jeans tucked into red boots. Her hair had been gathered up and was held in place by a red clip. Tiny, sparkly red earrings. She had a long neck, I noticed, and she held her head high.

  She caught my eye and gave me a smile. I was about to cross the room and join her when someone spoke to me.

  ‘Dried off, have you?’ asked a boy I thought I recognized. He looked a little older than the average student, his skin a little more papery, deeper lines around the eyes. He was about five foot seven and thin. Pinched around the face. Runty was a word I might have used, had I been feeling mean.

  ‘Is it raining out?’ I replied, although I knew exactly what he meant. He saw the look in my eye and almost turned away. I was being Lacey.

  ‘I take it you were on the green on Tuesday night,’ I said, grabbing a nearby bowl and offering it to him. He glanced down and a confused look took hold of his face. Well, I was offering him pot pourri. Curled wood-shavings and dried leaves, to be specific. Lacey would have put one in her mouth just to prove a point. Laura put them back down on the piano and looked sheepish.

  ‘I’m Laura,’ I said.

  ‘Will,’ he told me. ‘What are you reading?’

  I bit back the temptation to say Dan Brown. ‘Psychology,’ I replied. ‘You?’

  ‘I’m doing part three of the mathematical tripos,’ he told me and I nodded, as though it meant something.

  ‘Who were those boys?’ I asked him. ‘The ones on the green the other night wearing masks?’ Scott Thornton I already knew about. Wouldn’t hurt to put names on the others.

  He smirked and his eyes fell to my chest. ‘Why, are you planning revenge?’ he said.

  ‘Just want to know which shins I have to kick when I see them in daylight,’ I said, before I could stop myself. There was something about this guy that was really bringing out the Lacey in me.

  ‘To be honest I’ve not seen that lot before,’ he said. ‘A lot of freshers get dunked in the first few weeks but not usually by Lone Ranger lookalikes. So did you enjoy the experience of being chained up?’

  God, this bloke was a twat. Fortunately, at that moment, people began appearing with loaded dinner plates.

  ‘I’m starving,’ I muttered. ‘Catch you later.’

  Evi had been abandoned by her admirer. ‘Can I get you something to eat?’ I offered. She started to shake her head, then seemed to change her mind.

  ‘That would be great,’ she said.

  Back in the kitchen I joined the small queue. The curry I could smell was a mildly spiced pheasant casserole served with roasted root vegetables. People were still tucking into the first course, though, which was some sort of pâté.

  I cut Evi a slice of pâté, found some bread and a knife and carried it back through, meaning to ask her how long she’d known Nick Bell and, if I could do it discreetly, what she thought of him. It probably wouldn’t hurt to find out how good his IT skills were.

  It wasn’t to be. Two men were talking to her now. She was beautiful and fragile, like a princess in a fairy tale. They just couldn’t help themselves. I reached around one of them to hand over the plate.

  ‘Thanks, Laura,’ she said. ‘Can we catch up later?’

  I left her to her admirers and went back to the food. The pâté was great, then the dark-haired woman started serving the casserole. I made polite conversation about nothing with people near by and was just wondering whether second helpings were acceptable when my host reappeared.

  ‘How you doing?’ he asked me.

  ‘Bursting out of my jeans but otherwise fine,’ I told him. ‘Fabulous food.’

  ‘Liz and I have an arrangement,’ he said, nodding towards the dark-haired woman. She caught her name being mentioned and gave him the sort of look a son gets from a mother who is just a little too fond of him. ‘I kill it, she cooks it,’ he went on. ‘What we don’t eat she sells at the Third Tuesday Farmers’ Market.’

  I was not in Kansas any more.

  ‘When you say kill it, you’re speaking figuratively, right?’ I said. ‘You mean you pop down to Waitrose, stalk the aisles in a predatory fashion and wrestle the last piece of frozen chicken from a single mum with toddler twins.’

  ‘You’re in the country now,’ said Liz, who’d crept closer. ‘Jim wouldn’t eat a piece of meat that’s seen the inside of a supermarket.’ She nodded towards a wiry, silver-haired man by the window and Lacey had an urge to ask if Jim were her husband or her brother, or both. Laura, though, gave her a tight-lipped smile. Without returning it, Liz picked up a stack of dirty plates and left the room.

  ‘So you’re a killer?’ I asked Nick, looking into his eyes, trying to see if there was anything not quite right in there. They looked steadily back, a rich golden brown. Beautiful eyes. With a light in them that I couldn’t interpret.

  ‘Got a problem with that?’ he asked.

  ‘Depends what you kill,’ I said. ‘And, I guess, on how you do it.’ Oh, I had to be careful. Lacey was standing on tiptoe, arms outstretched, desperate to be out of her box, and if this man had anything to hide I was probably putting him on maximum alert.

  He was a cool customer, I had to admit. He gave me a very wide grin and took my empty plate from me. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you my lethal weapons.’

  *

  Jessica Calloway opened her eyes to find she was no longer in her room at college, the scene of so many dreadful nightmares lately. She was in a forest. She got to her feet slowly. She could see stars shining down through impossibly tall trees. The ground was covered with a soft sprinkling of frost that gleamed silver in the starlight.

  ‘Jessica,’ called a voice from somewhere among the trees. A high-pitched, tinny voice that didn’t sound quite human. This was just another bad dream. She’d wake up soon, trembling and sweating and screaming, but awake and safe.

  She was standing on a rough path that had been formed by the constant passage of footsteps. Every few yards or so a small light was half hidden amidst the undergrowth, each giving off a soft glow. The lights seemed to invite her on, deeper into the woods.

  A movement above her head made her jump. She looked up to see a creature, a very large bat, swooping down from the trees towards her. Jessica started, then stared at it in astonishment. The bat was the palest shade of blue and it left behind a trail like a silver moonbeam. As Jessica watched, the bat disappeared and the trail shimmered away to nothing.

  In the boot room, Nick was holdin
g out an oilskin coat for me. I slipped my arms into it and we stepped outside to find that snow was falling. I felt a flurry of nerves and told myself to chill. We were surrounded by people. This was his home. Nothing was going to happen.

  ‘I didn’t bring a torch,’ he said. ‘Stay close.’

  We followed a flagstone path that led away from the main house towards a row of outbuildings. Some of them looked like stables. As we drew closer the long, pale face of a horse appeared.

  ‘This is Shadowfax,’ Nick said, stopping to stroke the horse’s nose.

  ‘You really are a Lord of the Rings fan,’ I muttered, as he pulled keys from his jeans pocket and slid one of them into the door of the next building.

  ‘They’ll be asleep,’ he said. ‘Keep your voice low.’

  Inside the shed was darkness, a strong smell of animal waste and an odd, expectant silence. Then a flapping just over my left shoulder. Light began to grow. I could see Nick’s hand in the corner of the room, adjusting a dimmer switch. I was being watched by ten pairs of soft, black eyes.

  I’d stepped back against the door. Too quickly. I’d startled them. They jumped, squawked, flapped and grumbled.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked Nick, frowning at me. ‘Sorry, should I have warned you?’

  ‘What are they?’ I asked, my eyes flicking from one creature to the next, taking in that they were all tethered to their perches. I still wasn’t moving from the door.

  ‘Peregrine falcons,’ Nick replied, approaching the nearest bird. The creature bent its head towards Nick’s outstretched hand, as though it would nuzzle against him. Or bite. Nick pulled out of reach before either could happen.

  The birds differed slightly in size but were identical in colouring. The feathers on their backs and upper wings were the colour of rain-drenched slate. Those on their breasts were cream and cinnamon, dappled with black. ‘Fastest creatures on the planet,’ said Nick. ‘Haldir, this is Laura.’

  The falcon looked at me. Its eyes were black, rimmed with yellow. I’d seen people with less intelligence in their eyes.