WADING INTO MURDER: Book Two of the Laura Morland Mystery Series

by Joan Lambert

  “I think so but I’m not sure.” Laura wriggled her stiff fingers. “If only I could see!

  “Flashlight!” she blurted suddenly. “There’s a torch in my pack. Maybe Abdul dumped it in here with me. I’ll crawl around and see if I can find it.”

  Raising herself with a grunt to her knees, she waited until her head cleared and the dizziness passed, then she began to creep across the earthen floor, searching the uneven surface in a circular motion with her hands. Her groping fingers found a lump, one that was far too large for her pack. She poked at it, trying to make out what it was. Unexpectedly, the lump swore.

  “Bloody hell!” The voice was barely audible.

  Laura froze. “Who are you?” she asked cautiously.

  “Never mind me. Who are you?” a man’s voice challenged.

  Laura had a sudden thought. “Are you the new bus driver?” she asked.

  “Not talking,” the man rejoined. He sounded barely conscious.

  “It’s all right,” Laura told him sympathetically. “Richard, a friend of mine, and I got knocked on the head and dumped here, too. I’m Laura Morland, one of the tour members. And a friend of Violet’s,” she added for good measure.

  She heard an exhaled breath. “Right,” the voice wheezed. “Another person next to me. Dead I think. Pen flashlight, right jacket pocket. Get it and see.”

  Laura stomach clenched painfully. Surely it couldn’t be another of the tour members? With shaking fingers, she felt along the man’s clothes until she came to the right pocket. Pulling out what felt like a pen, she pushed experimentally at one end. A slender beam illuminated the man, who was indeed the new bus driver. Beside him lay a shapeless bundle dressed in a long, bedraggled skirt and a gaudy shawl. Her weather-beaten face looked peaceful, as if she were merely asleep, but even before she felt for a pulse, Laura knew she was dead.

  Richard slithered up beside her. “Peg,” he said grimly. “It’s poor old Peg – she’s the Glastonbury bag lady,” he added for the bus driver’s benefit.

  “Bastards,” the bus driver muttered. “They’d no right to go after an old lady.”

  “A sick old lady, too,” Richard agreed soberly. “Peg got out of hospital yesterday, though she was due back for more tests in a week. Some of the local people treated her to a few drinks, and she hasn’t been seen since. My guess is that someone saw whoever impersonated Peg that night and didn’t know she was an imposter – which means the killer wasn’t a local. They would have known Peg was in hospital.”

  Laura tried to quell her uneasiness as she gazed at the lifeless body. “I guess the killer thought the bag lady saw something incriminating in the alley, the clothes or the wig,” she said, and shuddered as the implications registered.

  “Which doesn’t bode well for our future,” Richard observed, echoing her fears.

  Suddenly and shockingly, a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling went on. Laura had time only to note that they were in a cellar devoid of any object that could be used in self-defense, when a door opened at the top of some rickety stairs. She saw a hand come through the doorway, a man’s hand covered with dark hair.

  She waited, frozen in suspense.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Someone called out angrily and the hand retreated to the accompaniment of arguing voices. Laura took advantage of the delay to finish untying Richard. She had made surprising progress even in the dark, and now that she could see the task took only a moment. Richard rubbed his wrists, wincing, and she saw that he had a long gash on one side of his head. He was very pale.

  The voices drifted away. Laura went to the bus driver and freed him too. He looked worse than Richard. One eye was purple and almost closed, there were abrasions on his cheeks, and his left wrist was swollen and discolored. He must have put up quite a fight. Laura hoped he had inflicted his share of injuries. The thought of Abdul with a similarly swollen face and a black eye was immensely satisfying.

  A hissing sound from Richard made her turn. “Window,” he whispered, pointing. “Get out that way. You’ll fit. We won’t.”

  Laura regarded the small aperture dubiously. It was about six feet up on the wall in a deeply recessed space that looked no more than two feet high and three feet long. It seemed too small for anybody to get through. Still, if she could get up there, she could try. The problem was that there was nothing to stand on so she could reach it.

  The voices came closer again and they all froze. Three people, Laura thought, one of them a woman. One of the men sounded like Abdul. Had that been his hand? They were speaking a language she couldn’t understand. The woman seemed to be in charge, at least it sounded as if she were giving orders to her companions and criticizing someone harshly. Abdul?

  Another door closed with a slam and heavy footsteps passed the cellar entrance. Someone else must have arrived. They heard a murmured consultation and then a different voice, loud and deep, carried down to them.

  “Bloody hell, you can’t keep them down there! What kind of fool are you? We’ve got to get rid of them.” The man sounded pugnacious, and ruthless.

  He paced back and forth over Laura’s head, muttering to himself. “Damnation! I never thought the stupid cow would crack like that. And why the devil couldn’t you do the job right in the first place? What a bloody mess!”

  The newcomer stopped pacing and thumped toward the cellar door. Laura braced herself. Why hadn’t she taken one of those courses on Karate or self-defense at least? And who was the stupid cow who had cracked?

  The woman began to argue with him, also in English, and the footsteps stopped. Her tones were icy and commanding, as if she were accustomed to being obeyed. Laura was too far away to hear clearly, but she caught the words timing, and delay and next one. The voice seemed vaguely familiar, but the perfectly modulated, precise accent was not. Could she be Claudine? She had said she could talk any way she wanted. Everything else she’d said in that confessional outburst could be pure fabrication.

  Laura made a mental note to find out where Claudine had been at this hour, and glanced at her watch. Only ten o’clock, she discovered with surprise. It felt like the middle of the night. She realized suddenly that she hadn’t had lunch or dinner and that she was ravenous. How horrible of her! How could she think about eating with a dead woman in the room?

  Richard hissed at her and Laura forced her mind back to the business at hand. The bus driver had positioned himself on all fours under the window, favoring his left wrist. Richard climbed carefully onto his back and assumed the same position.

  They were making a platform for her, Laura saw with astonishment. How clever of them! Apologizing mentally for inflicting further pain and for any extra pounds she might have added in this country of buttery scones, she climbed gingerly aboard. The two men wobbled precariously but the platform held. With great care and more balancing skill than she’d known she possessed, Laura slowly extended her body up, leaning against the cold wall for support.

  When her shoulders came level with the window, she saw that it had a wide inner sill and that it opened into a roughly built window-well about two feet below the ground. If she could just maneuver herself onto the sill, she could work at opening the window. The trouble was that one pane of the window slid over the other, which would cut the open space in half. She would have to be a contortionist to go through that! Still, she had no choice but to try.

  Slowly, Laura pulled herself higher; then she propelled her body onto the sill with a lurch, using her elbows for leverage. She swayed and almost fell back, but Richard’s hands pushed hard against her backside, shoving her forcefully into the narrow aperture that enclosed the window.

  Laura gasped. There wasn’t room for her up here. Her back was squashed hard against the cement top of the window opening, her neck was bent under it at an awkward angle that made it almost impossible to breathe and her knees were shoved against her chest. The pressure on her spine was agonizing.

  With frantic strength, she forced a hand out fro
m beneath her cramped body and grabbed at the handle of the window so she could get her head out at least.

  The window was stuck fast. Wriggling desperately, she managed to haul out her other hand so she could attack it from a different angle. With a suddenness that propelled her backward onto Richard, it opened. Laura grabbed at the jagged rocks enclosing the window well. They bit into her palm, scraping it raw, but she managed to steady herself and take her weight off Richard. And at least her head was out.

  Gritting her teeth and ignoring the ripping sounds from her jacket, Laura twisted and shoved until one shoulder was outside. Then she wriggled the other shoulder into the narrow opening. It stuck there. Now she couldn’t move at all.

  Claustrophobia struck hard. In desperation, Laura forced her body to twist the other way. She succeeded only in sending a stab of almost intolerable pain through her spine that left her terrified to try again.

  The voices returned, followed by footsteps. The sounds galvanized Laura. She couldn’t abandon the two men to the mercy of that icily commanding woman and the pugnacious man. And she could not, would not, let them find her stuck in a window with her backside protruding into the room, inviting torment.

  Don’t think about that. Think about squeezing through easily, Laura instructed herself. All you have to do is push out all your breath and make yourself smaller. Wasn’t that was magicians did to escape?

  Laura pushed all the air out of her lungs. Her chest really did get smaller, she thought. Encouraged, she emptied her lungs again and at the same time shoved her upper body forward as hard as she could until the second shoulder squeezed through. Her hips were next. The window frame dug so far into them as she twisted them out that she was sure its outline would be engraved in bruises for weeks. They had stared to throb already. Ignoring the pain, she dragged the rest of her body into the window well outside.

  Shakily, Laura hauled herself to her feet, controlled an urge to throw up and an equally strong one to faint, and heaved a deep sigh of relief instead. Below her she heard a muted cheer, a shuffle and exhalations of even greater relief as Richard and the bus driver relinquished their uncomfortable positions. She also heard footsteps again, more than one person. The whole group must be heading for the cellar.

  Up, she told herself, up and out of here, fast. Propping her elbows on the ground above her, she scrabbled up the wall, threw herself onto the hard earth and crawled away from the window.

  As soon as she left the glow cast by the light bulb, the darkness was absolute. Were there no streetlights in this place? Crouching behind what felt like an upright stone, Laura stayed still long enough to let her eyes adjust and her dizziness and nausea to subside. She saw a faint light coming from her right and crept toward it. Immediately, she fell over another stone. The thump sounded loud after the silence in the cellar.

  She waited, muscles tense, but nothing happened. She crawled on, taking shelter behind upright stones. There were a lot of them. She tried to think what that meant.

  A cemetery! That was it. Hadn’t the escaped convict in that novel by Dickens been hiding in a graveyard? He had grabbed the boy from behind a tombstone…

  A shadowy form materialized out of the darkness near her, and Laura’s heart seemed to stop. The form paused, and she made out a dog raising its leg on one of the stones. A man called to it. Gradually, her heart rate slowed, but dog and man disappeared into the darkness before she could gather her wits and ask him for help. Better to find Violet anyway, Laura consoled herself, or at least a policeman. No one else was likely to believe her.

  She crept on toward the light and came out into a narrow lane with a single street lamp at the other end. Leaning against it was a bicycle. The owner was nowhere in sight. Laura eyed it nervously. It wasn’t locked to the lamp post, but would she be able to ride the thing? Even when she was young, she hadn’t been much good at it. In her present state, keeping her balance seemed downright impossible.

  A commotion further down the lane caught her attention. Two men had burst out of the doorway of an old church. Abdul was one of them. Talking volubly in a strange language, they pointed at her and began to run. In moments they would be upon her. The bicycle was her only hope.

  Yanking it from its perch, she swung her leg up, but it was too short to get over the high bar. A man’s bicycle, she realized in dismay.

  The men were closing in. Laura leaned the bicycle down, swung her leg as high as she could and leaped for the narrow seat. It thudded into her most tender areas with an intolerable thump, and for a moment she was afraid she would vomit or pass out. The sensations eased and she was off, weaving wildly down the little street.

  If you can just stay on this thing you can get away. Laura repeated the words like a mantra as she sped away from the footsteps pounding behind her.

  Reaching an unexpected corner, she veered right into an unevenly surfaced road that turned out to be cobblestones. The bicycle wobbled precariously in the lumpy surface, and she swayed dizzily from one side to another. Managing to regain her balance, she pedaled furiously to the next corner and careened into a larger, better-lit street. There might be other people there, people who would help her.

  There were. A pub was just closing and the street swarmed with men, who watched her unsteady progress in astonishment. Laura felt another wave of dizziness coming on, and the bicycle swerved even more wildly. The men stared. She was about to call out to them for help when she heard a shout from further down the lane.

  “My bicycle! That dame’s stolen my bicycle. Grab her!”

  The men looked back at the speaker, appeared to recognize him and sprinted into action. Laura glanced quickly behind her. At least fifteen men were charging toward her from the pub. She pedaled faster, swung desperately around a corner in an effort to lose them and side-swiped a stone wall. Bouncing off it, she changed direction, careened over a curbstone and onto a sidewalk. Laura steered down it with wild abandon and hoped no more dog walkers were out tonight. They were. An elderly lady with two poodles on leashes was heading straight at her, all unsuspecting. The dogs knew she was coming though, and began to bark shrilly.

  Laura crashed down over the curbstone again and put a frantic hand to her head in a vain attempt to control its painful thumping. The bicycle swayed dangerously.

  A young policeman came out of nowhere and grabbed her handlebars. “Here now, Miss, we can’t have that sort of riding, not while other people are about. Nor any other time for that matter. You know the rules. No bicycles on the sidewalk.”

  “Thank heaven!” Laura said fervently. “Please. I need help. You’ve got to help me. I’ve been kidnapped and locked up in a cellar…”

  “Don’t you believe that crap,” another voice yelled. “That’s my bicycle she’s riding. She took it right off the lamp post. A thief, that’s what she is. A bloody thief.”

  “Evening, Bobby,” the policeman rejoined. “Had a drink or two, I see.” He chuckled and examined the bicycle with a judicious eye. “Still, this looks like your bicycle, doesn’t it? Well, that’s a pretty kettle of fish, ladies stealing bicycles. You’d better come with me, M’am. Serious matter, trying to steal a bicycle.”

  “I didn’t steal it,” Laura protested. “I only borrowed it so I could get away, find help. Really, I’ve been held captive for hours in the cellar of that old building over there, I think it’s a church, and the people who captured me are right behind us, and there are two men still in the cellar, and a dead woman, too…”

  Her voice dwindled into silence as the policeman, the bicycle owner and a variety of fascinated onlookers stared at her in stark disbelief.

  “She’s plumb crazy,” one of the men ventured. “You’d better take her in quick, John, before she gets violent.”

  Laura tried again. “I’m an American with a tour group,” she said firmly. “I want to talk to the man who runs the tour. There was a murder yesterday…”

  The bicycle owner rolled his eyes and shook his head in mock dismay for the benef
it of his onlookers. “Well, boys, you know how it is. There’s all types on the far side of the pond.” His fellow drinkers guffawed and competed to produce still more witticisms about Americans and American women in particular.

  The policeman took charge again. “All right, boys, head on home now. Fun’s over for tonight. Come along now, Madam,” he said to Laura, taking her elbow firmly. “Best to cool off for a time, and then we’ll see.”

  “But it’s true,” Laura insisted. “My name is…” A wave of dizziness so strong she almost fell came over her, and she felt her knees buckle. Suddenly she couldn’t think who she was, couldn’t think of anything except Violet. That was it. If she could get Violet everything would be all right…

  “Violet!” she said explosively. “Get me Violet. She’s in charge of the case.”

  The dizziness came again and she felt herself disappearing. She put out a hand to steady herself. It landed on the handlebar of the bicycle.

  “Wants to grab it again once your back is turned, that’s what she’s up to,” the bicycle’s owner growled. “Proper actress, that one. Belongs in a cell, she does. I’m leaving, but I’m gonna raise a fuss if you don’t book her.”

  Laura squinted, trying to see his face, but her eyes wouldn’t focus any more. All she could see was a vague blur of bodies all around her. They were all talking at once, and the lady with the two poodles had come to see what was happening, and the dogs were yapping and yapping…

  The noises faded, but now she was cold all over and her legs no longer seemed able to hold her. Nausea rose in her throat. Laura took a deep breath, trying to quell it, but she knew it was no use. She had better warn them.

  “Please excuse me, gentlemen,” she said politely as the ground rose up to meet her, “but I really did get hit over the head and now I am afraid I am going to faint. And when I faint I always…”

  She couldn’t get the last words out. Suddenly and dramatically, her throat gave a violent heave and she crumpled to the ground, leaving an even more startled group of onlookers staring down at the morning’s breakfast spreading across the policeman’s large and well-polished boots.