At Death's Door: The Shires Mysteries 2

Book 2: The Shires Mysteries

by Anna Legat

Genres: Family Life

Synopsis

BOOK TWO IN THE SHIRES MYSTERIES - A GRIPPING NEW COSY CRIME MYSTERY.

When Maggie Kaye and Sam Dee join the Bishops Well archaeological dig, they are as surprised as everyone else to unearth a body that was buried there less than fifty years ago. It can't possibly be the remains of an ancient Celt.

Maggie, with her usual flair - and psychic intuition - is convinced that there is more to this discovery than meets the eye. And some Bishops residents seem to know a lot more about the case than they are willing to let on.

But nobody is as shocked as Maggie when a face from the past - a face she thought she'd never see again - appears in the village, and long-hidden secrets begin to surface.

With danger at her door, and Sam by her side, can Maggie uncover the truth before it's too late?

A TWISTY NEW WHODUNNIT, FOR FANS OF BETTY ROWLANDS, FAITH MARTIN AND JOY ELLIS.

What readers are saying about Anna Legat:

'Brilliant. I didn't want to put it down!'

'It's a rare author who can keep me guessing until the end - and the ending was a shocker'

'Plenty of twists and turns'

'A brilliantly complex spaghetti of unrelated sub-plots to challenge any armchair sleuth'

'I thoroughly enjoyed this book, reading it cover to cover in a weekend'

'I shall look out for more from Ms Legat'

Release date: January 6, 2022

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 256

Sample

It was raining – an incessant drizzle, thin and misted like a giant spider’s web spun over the swamps by industrious Arachne. Anaemic sunrays seeped through the clouds, giving them a metallic polish. Although the excavation site had been drained prior to the dig commencing, even this feeble precipitation was already causing trouble: the ground had turned into a soggy sponge smeared with the dirty grey icing of mud. Puddles were expanding in depth and diameter, determined to join forces and turn the dig into an underwater wonderland, Bishops Well’s very own Atlantis. Now and again the wind would throw a tantrum and pull down someone’s hood, give someone else a vicious slap or a lashing of water under their collar. The temperature teetered in the upper single digits. It was early November and the weather couldn’t quite make up its mind whether it wanted to continue being autumnal or to boldly venture into the realm of winter.

Sam Dee was soaked to the bone. There was a leak in his left boot of which he had not been aware until now. His toes felt like slimy tadpoles wriggling in a puddle. He was cursing the day when he had agreed to join the damned Bishops Well Archaeological Association. He had done this under duress: his lovely but unrelenting neighbour, Maggie Kaye, had twisted his arm so hard that it was either joining the group or having his arm broken. If he hadn’t conceded defeat there and then, she would probably have proceeded to kneecap him until he said yes.

Maggie was bristling with enthusiasm for the project. She was the driving force behind the draining of the swamp to excavate what was believed to be an ancient Celtic village. There were some scant records of the existence of a Bronze Age settlement, which the chair of the society, Cherie Hornby, had uncovered in the vaults of Bishops’ church, St John the Baptist.

Maggie though relied on additional evidence, which happened to be the existence of a woman’s ghost, haunting the swamps (according to Maggie, and Maggie alone). In Sam’s professional opinion, and he used to be a barrister after all, Maggie’s evidence would be considered circumstantial, not to mention utterly fantastical, and would be dismissed out of hand by any respectable adjudicator; though Sam wouldn’t dream of telling her that. He was probably the only person with whom she had shared her imaginings. He didn’t want to be unkind by trying to bring her down to earth and anchor her in the world of the living, with all its rules of common sense and rational thought.

That was his professional take on things. From a personal point of view, deep, deep down and against his better judgement, he believed her. After all, she had successfully defied reason on previous occasions, and had been proved correct. Secondly, he simply couldn’t hurt her feelings. He was fond of Maggie despite her eccentricities. He had joined the Association to please her, hoping that his tokenistic act would be the end of it. But it was only the beginning, for soon he had been enlisted to get down on his knees and start digging. In bad weather. With toads jumping in and out of his pockets.

‘You’re doing a grand job, Samuel!’

Maggie was standing over him, beaming her wide, dimpled smile. Her yellow wellies and high-vis windbreaker seemed to bring some much-needed warmth to the hole in which he was squatting. With Maggie nearby, he no longer resented this muddy pit. On the contrary, it seemed rather cosy.

She slid into the pit and produced a hot flask. ‘I thought you could do with a nice cup of coffee.’

Sam didn’t have to be asked twice. He accepted the steaming cup and drank from it in big gulps while, at the same time, warming his hands on it. He returned the empty cup to Maggie who screwed it on to the flask.

‘Any finds?’ he asked, not because he believed for one minute that there was anything to be found here, but because he didn’t want Maggie to go away.

‘Edgar and Michael found some cracked bits that look like remnants of clay pottery, and there appears to be a fragment of a wooden structure, possibly a partition of some kind, where James is digging,’ Maggie enthused while Sam instantly thought of fly-tipping. ‘Cherie is taking photos. We’ll have them verified with Professor Fitzgerald. Vera is taking samples for carbon dating. It’s happening, Samuel – this is really happening!’ Another bright beam. It nearly blinded him.

‘That’s great, Maggie. And she – the ghost, I mean – is she still about? Even in this weather?’

Maggie peered at him with a hint of suspicion. He shouldn’t be mocking her, but he couldn’t quite help himself. She said, quite gravely, ‘She’s always here.’

‘Here! Here!’ James bellowed excitedly. Sam could only see his head bobbing and his arms flailing from his pit. ‘Come here! Take a look at this!’

There was so much urgency in James’s voice that everybody flocked to see what the hullabaloo was about.

Maggie charged out of Sam’s pit but slid back right into his arms. ‘Give me a leg up, Samuel!’ She exhaled a hot breath smelling of chocolate into his face.

Awkwardly, Sam placed his hands on her muddied bottom and pushed, thinking that there was more to Maggie Kaye than hot air. She was one substantial lady. Her fingers skidded and she plummeted at Sam again. He tensed his shoulders to protect himself against being crushed to death. Summoning all his manly strength, he heaved her up and at last she scrambled out of the pit. She wiped her face with a muddy hand and looked down at him. ‘What are you still doing in there? Come on, let’s go!’ Caked in dirt, the whites of her eyes flashing, she looked like one of those female mud wrestlers.

‘My God!’ Cherie waved her arms towards them. ‘We’ve found human remains! It’s a burial site!’

With it being an archaeological dig on a suspected burial ground, uncovering human remains seemed perfectly in order. Sam had expected a skull and a few bones, maybe a couple of artefacts, jewellery or weapons which would have been buried with their owner to accompany him or her into the afterlife. But what he saw couldn’t be further from his idea of an archaeological find.

The body was exceptionally well preserved, as if it had been mummified. The skin was darkened and desiccated, patches of it missing in places. The lips were gone, exposing a macabre grin of dirt-yellowed teeth. There were no weapons, but the corpse was dressed in rotting rags impregnated with soil and mould. Perhaps they weren’t rags, but a dress: a short, sleeveless tunic. There was a hint of geometrical print on it, a combination of concentric circles, squares, and triangles. There was no distinct colour to it other than hues of muddy grey.

‘When I dug through to the solid wood, I thought, hell, it may be a roof beam, or some other part of a dwelling . . . I lifted it to peer underneath, and there she was! In her full glory . . .’ James was the only one standing inside the pit – the grave – while everyone else gathered above, gaping. He looked up at them, his eyes darting from one face to the next in bewilderment. ‘How did I know?’

‘Know what?’ Edgar Flynn asked. A clinical psychiatrist, he was good at asking open-ended questions.

‘That she’d be here! I mean, look at this, I dug out the exact length and width of her tomb . . . as if I knew where to find her.’

At first, Sam attributed James’s strange words to the shock of discovering the body. But then, upon a closer examination, he realised: James’s pit was aligned precisely with the grave. The body had been uncovered in full by removing the wooden lid. Like a well-informed gravedigger rather than an amateur archaeologist, James Weston-Jones had hit the bull’s eye when he had delineated the perimeter of his dig.

‘It’s the name of the game, James. You struck it lucky, that’s all,’ Edgar Flynn explained.

‘We knew where to look,’ Cherie went on the offensive. ‘All the records pointed us to this area. We made an educated guess and we were rewarded, simple as that. Now, let’s be careful with the remains. They are ancient, they could easily crumble in our hands . . . Luckily for us, it looks like they’ve been well preserved in the swamp. This is a typical bog body. Right . . . James, get out of there. I’ll photograph everything every step of the way. We’ll—’

‘This isn’t a bog body. This is a crime scene.’

It was Michael Almond. A forensic pathologist who worked for the CID in nearby Sexton’s Canning, he knew what he was saying. ‘We must call the police.’

‘A crime scene?’

‘That corpse hasn’t been buried here since the Bronze Age, no way. This grave dates back to the mid-twentieth century at the most. It can’t have been here much longer than fifty years. The fabric is far too well preserved, and it looks like cotton.’

Without further ado, Michael whipped out his mobile and dialled 999. He told the operator who he was and what was needed to secure the scene of crime. He had usurped full authority from Cherie, who gawked at him with dismay and the greatest of disappointment. Her prized Celtic village was no more than a crime scene!

Deep down, Sam was relieved: there’d be no more digging. At least, not for him. He would go home, have a hot shower, a double brandy, a fresh change of clothes, and spend the rest of the evening watching a good film. In future, he would think twice before agreeing to participate in his neighbour’s outlandish projects, no matter how nicely she asked or how hard she twisted his arm.

She was doing it again – twisting his arm. Literally! Her fingers were clutching him tighter and tighter. Sam turned to free his arm and caught a glimpse of Maggie’s face. The mud had dried on her, forming a white mask. Her eyes were rounded and her mouth gaping open, in a state of frozen shock.

‘Are you all right, Maggie?’

‘It’s her,’ she whispered, ‘the ghost I’ve been seeing here, in the swamp. I told you about her. It is her!’

‘We don’t yet know for sure that it is a woman. All we have is a cadaver and scraps of mouldy rags.’

‘Oh, it is! It’s a woman. It’s the woman! She’s wearing the same dress with an imprint on it: circles, triangles. I can see it: the primary colours – vivid reds and blues and yellows, like a Cubist painting. She has black hair. Very long – all the way to her waist.’

And she is the queen of Sheba. Sam had just enough sense not to say it out loud.

I should have known that she wasn’t Boudicca or some other Celtic woman stranded on earth three millennia after dying. They – the dead – don’t hang out amongst us – the living – for that long. If they did, the air would be thick with souls, a bit like the M5 southbound on the first day of the school holidays. No, they only pause briefly before passing on to the other side: sometimes to say goodbye, sometimes to cause mischief, and sometimes to finish unfinished business. Most of them don’t linger at all – life after death seems to carry so much excitement and promise that they bounce off into it hastily. They generally move on and never look back.

I had been seeing the Swamp Lady ever since I had started seeing the dead. Whenever I wandered into Sexton’s Wood I would be drawn to the swamp where, without fail, I would come across her. She would sit on a moss-covered felled tree or amble aimlessly, her feet hardly touching the ground but sometimes dipping into the murky green water, stirring it faintly like one of those long-legged water striders.

I had assumed she was a Celt. Local lore had it that a prehistoric Celtic settlement, as old as Stonehenge, existed here before slowly sinking into oblivion in the rising marshes. So, I thought the Swamp Lady was one of its inhabitants – it was an easy mistake to make.

Michael Almond had dispelled my misconceptions. He had every reason to be right – he was, after all, a forensic pathologist, bound to know a thing or two about dead bodies. Without a doubt the Swamp Lady was a modern-day woman, secretly buried in isolated marshy woodland where nobody would ever find her.

Against all the odds, I had found her.

Well, OK, James Weston-Jones had. But without sounding boastful, if it hadn’t been for me, no one would have thought of looking for her there. I was the only one who could see her ghost prowling the swamps and it was my duty to put the poor thing to rest.

Seeing dead souls seems like such a gift – in honesty, it is nothing but a curse. I don’t want to see them. I have never asked to see any of them, anyone other than my missing sister, Andrea. She went AWOL twenty-five years ago, and is presumed dead but her spirit has never showed up. Meanwhile all the others keep turning up uninvited.

I can’t speak the truth about seeing the dead – people already have their doubts about me. They call me Mystic Maggie behind my back. Only my mum knows. And Samuel, my neighbour. But that’s it. It will go no further. I don’t want to become the proverbial village idiot – the butt of all jokes. In most people’s minds, the line between the supernatural and plain lunacy is very thin. Before it all started, I would have considered someone like me a fraud and a charlatan, or at the very least, barking mad. Today, I don’t know what to make of it all, but I am certain that it isn’t a figment of my imagination. Those poor souls stranded on earth do exist and I can see them, but to what end, I haven’t the faintest.

The police, led by DI Gillian Marsh – Michael’s partner – arrived on the scene within half an hour of Michael making the call. They cordoned off the entire excavation site and erected a marquee over the Swamp Lady’s grave. Michael slipped on his forensic-man overalls and dived in, in a manner of speaking. The rest of us were ushered to the outer perimeter where, for some reason, casts of our boot imprints were to be taken.

Waiting my turn, I sat on a log next to James Weston-Jones. He was still badly shaken by the experience. The fact that the body had been discovered within the boundaries of his father’s estate may have had something to do with it, though personally I wouldn’t have attached any weight to the location of the grave – the estate is vast. Sexton’s Wood encircles it in a wide and thick belt, freely accessible to the general public, with dozens of thoroughfares zigzagging across it. It’s frequented by ramblers and favoured by the homeless, and by passing gypsies as their seasonal retreat. Anyone could have buried a body there.

I told James as much.

He shook his head, rather obstinately. ‘It’s not that, Maggie. I still can’t get over it – how did I know where to dig? It’s as if I knew the grave was right there, as if I had buried her there myself.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, James. You would’ve known if you’d buried someone – unless you had been off your head. Which is unthinkable – of course! I know you. And didn’t Michael date that body to around fifty years ago? You would’ve been just a kid – you couldn’t have buried a plastic spade in a sandpit, never mind a body! It was a pure coincidence.’

He peered at me, his black eyes grim and filled with guilt, his mahogany skin grey. ‘It does sound ridiculous, doesn’t it, but I went for that particular spot as if I’d known it was there . . . I was meant to find that grave. And when I looked at her, I didn’t shudder, didn’t get a fright . . . I wasn’t surprised. Can you imagine that? Not being rattled by finding a corpse?’

I rather thought he was seriously rattled, so rattled that he couldn’t see it.

‘You’d expected to find something, bodies and bones included, so that wasn’t a surprise,’ I pointed out sagaciously but without conviction. I wished I could tell him about the Swamp Lady. Maybe he was right – maybe she had been guiding his hand. But I chose to keep quiet. The man I was talking to wasn’t the James I knew. The James I knew was a rational and sophisticated man. Yes, I fancied him a little – innocently and without any sinister intentions, I hasten to add – so it mattered to me that he didn’t regard me as a complete raving lunatic. Because after he came to his senses, he would look back and laugh at himself. And then, what would he make of me and my ravings about the Swamp Lady?

I didn’t say a word about her. Instead, I insisted that he was in shock and not in a state to drive himself home. I offered to give him a lift. He resisted, but only briefly as I can be rather persuasive when I put my mind to it. As soon as Forensics had finished with us and our boots, I steered him towards my trusty old Hyundai and we rattled along a dirt road to the Weston-Joneses’ stately home, known to us commoners as the Weston Estate.

The Weston-Joneses are one of the oldest families in the county. Their blood is bluer than blue and their pedigree dates back to the Norman Conquest. Historical chronicles have it that their family progenitor was a Breton knight who arrived on the shores of Britain with William of Normandy and fought so bravely by his side that he was later bestowed vast lands in the West Country, confiscated from some unfortunate Saxon rebel who in his turn had probably snatched them from under the feet of Celtic druids who had built the Stone Circle on Harry Wotton’s farm (long before it became Henry Wotton’s farm, of course).

The family’s fortunes and estate have somewhat dwindled over the centuries. In recent years they have had their share of tragedy. Lord Philip’s beloved younger son Joshua was murdered by a marauding terrorist – it was all over the news. Lady Weston-Jones suffered a breakdown and has been convalescing in Switzerland ever since. Lord Philip withdrew from public life. Joshua’s death was a terrible blow to them, a blow from which they never recovered. Joshua was Lady Weston-Jones’s only child so understandably life had lost meaning for her when he died. Lord Philip still had his older son, James, but that seemed to be of little consolation to him.

I don’t have children so I couldn’t even begin to imagine what they must have gone through having to bury their son. My own parents refuse to accept that Andrea may be dead despite the fact that she disappeared from our lives twenty-five years ago and hasn’t been heard from since. They still tell me not to worry, that she is fine and in good health, somewhere out there in the big wide world. They believe that. I think that the acceptance of the only alternative – the only viable, realistic alternative, that she is dead – would kill them. And it wouldn’t matter, not in the least, that they still had me and Will.

But who am I to judge their obstinacy? I am the same – I too am clinging on to the irrational belief that Andrea is alive, because I can’t see her amongst the dead.

I had to help James out of my car – he was shattered: emotionally and physically. We trundled to the door, me supporting him, his arm draped over my shoulder. We were covered in mud and soaked to the bone. We resembled two Tommies returning home from the frontline. Gerard, the prehistoric family butler (he was already ancient when I was born), opened the door and gawped at us, silently demanding an explanation before he would let us – let me – in.

‘Gerard, give us a hand,’ I panted. ‘James here is a bit shell-shocked. We found a corpse. It’s a long story. Best we come in and I can explain everything.’

Gerard took a while to draw breath. ‘I’ll let Lord Philip know.’ He ushered us into the sitting room.

‘Tell Letitia,’ James mumbled. ‘Tell her to come down, please.’

‘Presently, Master James.’ Gerard nodded curtly and vanished. There were times when I thought he was dead too and what I was seeing was just another ghost shuffling about, bloated with hot air and haughtiness.

Letitia, James’s wife, appeared first. A good-looking woman, she and James made a beautiful couple: she fair, blue-eyed, and statuesque, he athletic and bronzed. I’d heard that James’s mother, the first Lady Weston-Jones, was from South Africa. He must have inherited her genes, considering that Lord Philip was stooped, with narrow hunched shoulders, and pale eyes bulging under bushy ginger brows. He reminded me of a pike.

Letitia dashed to James’s side. ‘What happened? Are you all right, darling?’

‘Shall I pour a glass of brandy for Master James?’ Gerard re-materialised out of nowhere, ready to wait on them hand and foot.

‘I’ll have one too.’ Lord Philip entered the room.

‘We could all do with something strong to drink,’ I said, since none of them had bothered to offer anything to me – and I was knackered and cold, and deserved a drink more than all of them.

Gerard busied himself with the brandies, juggling the glasses on a silver tray while all the time eavesdropping as I appraised them of what had occurred at the dig and the powerful effect the discovery of the body had had on James.. . .