by Jason Foss
Rowan started to run as she sensed the danger, but slowed to a halt as she splashed into the water. She looked over her shoulder, immobilised by fear and exhaustion, knowing that one wrong step took her off the causeway and into the mud, depth unspecified. She stood motionless, seemingly standing on water. Then she screamed, turned and raised the shotgun. Her target threw himself on to the rough cinder track, crawling for a water-filled pothole and her shot fell hopelessly wide, pellets peppering the water some way short of where Flint grovelled.
Now she was unarmed! He had her! On impulse, Flint stood and tried to run forward. For fleeting moments, he planned to Rugby tackle the exhausted woman, then drag her back to where Tyrone must be waiting with the car. His own feet splashed into water, but fear gripped him. It was suicidal. He stopped twenty yards away from where simple Monica Clewes stood mesmerised by her own plight.
Monica looked at him with fear in her eyes, no longer the confident, all-powerful Priestess. She turned to run once more, but lost the track almost at once and stumbled. Waist-deep in swirling brown water, she struggled to her feet and floundered on, but the soft mud of the estuary grabbed at her ankles and her forward motion ceased. Soft and liquid it held her and pulled her down as she struggled to wrench herself free.
Sharp and freezing water lapped around Jeffrey Flint’s ankles and he glanced round to see a shimmering bight already lay between him and the island, advancing almost as fast as he could run. He could sprint for safety, risk tripping in a pothole, twisting an ankle or losing the path. Or, he could save Monica. He hated her, wanted her to burn in a hell of her own devising, but he could not watch her drown.
He took half a dozen more steps towards her, but felt the causeway edge with his toes and realised that it was madness. She was up to her armpits, flailing and shouting for her gods. Even if he reached her, what could be done? Would she be rescued or would she fight to drag them both down?
The silhouette of the Spitfire could be seen atop the sea wall. Flint waved frantically and yelled, but no response came. A jetty ran down from the boathouse, and he imagined two figures moving upon it, so waved and yelled again. Surely, the shotgun blast had been heard for miles? Indecision paralysed him into inaction.
‘Don’t leave me!’ a voice screamed from behind.
He took a few heavy, cautious steps back towards the island, before the fear of stumbling brought a halt. The sea reached his knees, icy cold and he felt the first real tug of current.
Monica was still screaming and pleading, blanking out his own thoughts. He began to think of swimming, the water was almost deep enough, but he was still panting. Could he fight the freezing water and be certain not to be swept away? Horror and cold steadily numbed his system, making the world unreal and decisions impossible.
From behind came another scream, summoning him to watch. ‘Jeff! Jeff!’
Perhaps five minutes of motionless terror passed. He witnessed the splashing and heard the cries, the cries of a little girl who never anticipated punishment. He felt tears for the victim, for all the victims, for his own helplessness to save any of them.
The cries were no longer coherent, the churning of the waters simply frantic. The Maiden had been buried in the earth, the Priest had been consumed by fire and at last the Priestess was embraced by the waters. Plain Monica Clewes writhed then choked. Her head and waving arms burst from the waters for the last time, then, exhausted she allowed herself to fall.
Jeffrey Flint stood hip-deep, no feeling below the knees, straining now to keep balance. Mesmerised, he continued to watch until the trail of silver-blonde hair faded from sight. A tiny dot just beyond the jetty seemed so very far away and ceased to seem relevant. The same current that bore it closer tugged at his knees. Soon he would lose his footing and that would be it.
The boat was a minute or two away, forcing forward as fast as Tyrone and Bunny could row. To Flint, their idle, sluggish pace assumed a dreamlike quality from where he wavered, numbed by fear and shock. He staggered once, twice in the current, felt himself lift in the ripples, then stumbled over the edge of the trackway and was floundering. In moments, forgotten muscles kicked him to the surface and turned him on his back, trying to control breathing, stay upright, fighting cramp in the left shin. He began to drift away from salvation, heavy jeans weighing him down and the cold biting at his body. An effort had to be made to fight the current, but as soon as he moved, that cramp bit deep. He went down, up again, spat muddy, salt-and-oil-rich water, then lost sight of the boat and panicked.
Tyrone passed his oar to Bunny, who turned the boat and approached Flint from stern-on. Hanging over the stern, Tyrone grabbed at the collar of the floundering figure and was met by shocked and staring eyes.
‘In you come, Doc.’
Chapter 29
Jeffrey Flint spent two nights in the general ward of Kingshaven District Hospital as ‘real doctors’ checked him for shock and exposure. The students had found difficulty holding the boat against the current and an eon had passed whilst the lecturer sat shivering on the thwarts. An open-top car is not the best way to get an exposure victim to hospital, but Tyrone, being Tyrone, succeeded. In a private room within the same wing, R. Temple-Brooke lay shrouded in bandages and tubes, his conscious hours spent contemplating criminal conspiracy charges, a smashed right arm, a divorce writ and public humiliation.
After Flint had been discharged, he had to make one final journey into the Valley. The week before Christmas was not the best time to go to a funeral, when normal life dissolved into parties, feasting and jovial irrelevance. By some ironic quirk, Lucy Gray was buried on the day of the winter solstice below a bowl of perfect blue. Mrs Gray had asked Flint to choose a hymn, putting the sometime atheist on the spot. He was tired of religion, but even more tired of alternative religion, so he offered to choose a Bible reading. In the warm sandstone church of St Michael, Jeffrey Flint stepped up to the pulpit in his jacket and tie and read aloud from Revelations, 21. The new heaven, the new earth and the new Jerusalem might just have appealed to Lucy. The end of death, and pain, and tears appealed to the congregation.
Only one house in Nether Durring did not have festoons, Christmas cards or a pagan tree, but Mrs Gray had lavished love into baking very fine vol-au-vents. In a quiet corner of the family home, Jeffrey Flint ate in near-silence, wishing the English had a more cheerful way of sending the dead on their way. Munching in polite reverence, he longed for a New Orleans jazz procession or a boozy Irish wake. Instead, he was embarrassed with the rest, making small talk, thinking of Lucy not with joy for her life, but sorrow for her death.
Flint had been driven down by Tyrone, who was working his way through the salmon sandwiches as a way of hiding his own emotion. Vikki Corbett had been asked to stay away, but she came anyway, in neat grey check skirt and black jacket, with notepad slipped into and out of a half-moon handbag. Flint knew she had resigned from the Advertiser and wondered who she was working for.
Barbara came over, her white face contrasting with the new black dress. Flint was conscious of his outdated grey suit and blue striped college tie, but nothing else he owned was even remotely suitable.
‘I’m so glad you came.’ A smile cracked the pain. Some relief at last was visible.
He said something polite and meaningless.
‘I don’t know how we can thank you.’ Barbara tried to kick-start the conversation again.
He shook his head. If Lucy had been found alive, he could have accepted praise.
‘The newspaper made what you did sound very dangerous.’
‘Vikki exaggerates. As always.’
‘You could have been shot, or drowned.’
‘It wasn’t planned that way.’
‘No.’ She looked pleased with him, proud almost. ‘I still can’t understand it all, Jeff, all this awful business with those people!’
‘Nor me. One day I must sit down with a pencil and work it all out.’
‘Well, you got those responsible.’ There
was an assured air of satisfaction in her voice.
‘They got themselves, poetic justice.’
‘Well, thank you anyway. For Lucy. I think she can rest now.’
It was as if this was the last release for Barbara, the tension seemed to be slipping from her features by the moment. ‘Mother loved the passage you chose, and you read it so well.’ She gave a nervous grin. ‘I’m not much of a churchgoer myself, not even high days and holidays.’
‘Me neither, I’m a bit of an atheist really.’
‘Like Lucy.’ She smiled sadly.
‘Lucy was no atheist, she had firm beliefs. Although most people will think badly of her, she did have faith of her own. Faith in the Earth, in the sky, in that.’ He gestured out of the window towards apple trees and to the rolling hills beyond. ‘Nature and beauty.’
‘Strange gods and demons,’ Barbara added.
‘That too.’
Barbara sighed, it was the sigh of someone who could not yet understand the loss. ‘Will she hate us for burying her in the churchyard?’
He gave a slight shrug of his shoulders.
‘What else could we have done?’
Leave her at Harriet’s Stone, was his first thought. Then he considered the girl, lost, confused, misled. Left to a lonely grave on a hillside, without even a hurried, made-up Pagan ritual. She may have forgiven her family for drawing her back into the conventional world.
‘I think you did right.’
This reply seemed to please Barbara, who turned to practical matters.
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘I’m not sure, Tyrone has it all written down somewhere.’
‘The insurance money comes to eleven thousand pounds. I want you to have it, repair your houseboat and pay your student for all the work he’s done for you. If there is any left, buy something for the college, some books for the library, or an essay prize. Something they can remember Lucy by.’
‘The Lucy Gray Bequest?’
‘Something like that.’ She offered her hand. It was a kind of farewell. The circle was squared, the Gray family was wishing for peace.
Tyrone was amongst the first to leave, he waved farewell to Vikki and Flint, then roared away towards his family Christmas. For the lecturer, there would be one more interview and one more ride in the red Metro.
‘There are still things I don’t understand,’ Vikki said as she drove towards Kingshaven. ‘Perhaps I’m thick, and you’re the one to put me right.’ She smiled at him and the car wobbled around a bend.
‘Don’t ask me, I’m brain-dead for the rest of the year. There are loose ends lying all over the shop and we’ll never be able to tie them all up, even if the police manage to trace all the circle.’
‘Like, for instance, who set fire to the museum?’ Vikki asked.
‘Piers Plant? Monica? Both of them together? I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters anymore.’
She suggested they have an evening out at a restaurant, but he pointed out that celebration was a little irreverent, so they had called at a corner shop for a pile of boxes to push into Vikki’s microwave. Taking home a clinking carrier bag of Mexican beers would add a little seasonal cheer.
Changed and freshened, Vikki cooked a mean three-minute vegetarian chilli.
‘I do eat meat,’ Flint said, striving for once not to be too offbeat.
The pair made an odd contrast. Still clean-shaven, but wearing his favoured red glasses and tie cast aside, Jeffrey Flint strained towards normality. Opposite him, Vikki had minimised her makeup, changing down into tight jeans and baggy purple jogging top, meeting him halfway and almost passing in the attempt.
‘I feel I haven’t eaten for a week, and there were all those canapés at Mrs Gray’s,’ she said, clearing her plate by the scoopful. ‘I’ve had my busiest week ever. I just need to write up that funeral.’
‘Is that necessary?’
She winced at his sincerity. ‘It’s my job.’
‘Don’t you ever feel bad about it?’
‘All the time. Don’t you feel bad when you dig up someone’s great-granddad and whip his gold ring?’
Those eyes of hers were so lovely and round, almost black in the dimmed light.
He gave in. ‘All right, I suppose we all have to trim our morality. Has your editor taken you back?’
‘Stuff him, it’s next stop Fleet Street; everyone loved my last piece.’
‘KILLER PRIESTESS DEATH HORROR?’ He grimaced at the memory.
‘Okay, so it’s corny, but it’s what people want.’
‘So you’ll be moving to London?’ Flint was tired of visiting the provincial town, and Vikki’s move opened possibilities.
‘Not actually Fleet Street, of course, but I’m on a daily from the New Year. Between now and then, do you know what my next deal is?’
He mumbled through the last tacos. ‘Shock me.’
‘My Life as a Witch. Serialised in three parts.’
‘Sorry, I don’t follow you.’
‘Michelle, you remember Michelle? The police tracked her down and I got talking to her. She’s moving back to Ireland, but first she’s giving me all the dirt on the coven, moonlight orgies, goat sacrifices – it’s terrific copy. I found an agent who thinks it could even make a quick-selling paperback.’
So Michelle had succumbed to disillusion too.
‘I hope she’s getting a good deal.’
‘My agent is auctioning the rights today. Michelle might walk out of this with a few thousand in her Christmas box.’
He had to smile. ‘I suppose I have to be happy for her. She’s not a bad girl, just sad and lonely and very mixed up.’
‘But crazy about you – at least she was crazy about Grant Selby.’
He turned red.
Vikki had a broad grin on her face. ‘She’s been telling me her life story, and she told me all about you.’
‘Including the mucky bits?’
Those pupils were as wide as they would go. ‘Especially the mucky bits. I know all about you now.’
Another glass of beer was what Flint needed.
‘Does that mean you’re going to do a feature on me too? My Life as an Archaeologist?. You can have exclusive rights: ten grand, cheap at the price. Do you need any more detail, or do you have it all?’
‘Well, I already know all about you and Michelle, and I know something about you and Monica, but there is one thing I want you to tell me.’
He would play her game, hoping she would play his. ‘Ask away.’
‘Do you treat all your women so badly?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
About the Author
Jason Foss was the original pen name of Dr Jason Monaghan under which he began the Jeffrey Flint and Maddy Crowe series of archaeological thrillers. As an archaeologist Jason has published a number of textbooks on shipwrecks and Roman pottery, and his travels have inspired his fiction. His first five novels were Shadow in the Corn (now Darkness Rises), Byron’s Shadow, Shadesmoor, Lady in the Lake and Blood & Sandals. Unlikely twists in his career saw him working as a merchant banker, anti-money laundering specialist and Museum Director. He is an active member of the Crime Writers Association and lives on the island of Guernsey.
