Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 (24 page)

The darkness of the barn was almost blinding after the bright sunshine. The two men appeared like black shadows, side by side, facing away from him in the dimness. Belle came towards Magnus, pale and ghostly. He asked, ‘What’s going on?’ but she ignored him and went outside, whispering softly to the dogs cradled in her arms as if they were in need of comforting. Magnus drew closer and saw that Will and Jacob were standing over the body of a man. He had been dead for some time, Magnus guessed, but it was not the sweats that had killed him. Blood from deep cuts on the man’s wrists coated his legs and belly. A gash yawned on his neck and a black bib crusted across his chest. Before the sweats Magnus had only seen two dead bodies, but now this was nothing to stare at.

Will said, ‘It’s Henry, he was with us for a while.’

Jacob passed the other man the keys to the van without looking at him. ‘You and Belle should go back to base.’ He was staring at the body as if something about it fascinated him. ‘Magnus and I will take care of Henry. We owe him that much.’

It was in Magnus’s mind to say that he was not one of Jacob’s soldiers to be ordered around. He had never known Henry and owed him no more than the cattle they had burned, but then the priest’s eyes met his and he caught an expression in them that might have been fear or a warning.

‘She liked Henry. She’ll be upset.’ Whatever Will had been on the verge of doing was forgotten. He took the keys and left the barn.

Jacob waited until the sound of Will’s footsteps had faded and the truck’s engine gunned into life, then he hunched down beside the body.

‘What do you make of this?’ He touched dead Henry’s wrists with the tip of his gun barrel.

Magnus squatted next to him. ‘Things got too much for him and he cut his wrists.’

‘Look properly and tell me what you see.’ The priest lifted one wrist, then the other with his gun.

‘Two deep cuts on each wrist, one crossed over the other like an X. He meant to do it.’

‘And this?’ Jacob let Henry’s slaughtered arm drop and traced the gun along a dark bruise, striped above the wound like a bracelet. ‘There’s a matching one on the other wrist.’

‘I don’t know.’ Magnus leaned forward to get a closer look. Each death had its own particular scent. Henry’s smelled of freshly spread fields and iron. ‘Perhaps it’s something that happens when you cut your wrists like that.’

‘It’s something that happens when someone sticks a pair of handcuffs on you.’ The priest’s voice was as dead as the corpse on the floor between them. ‘I’ll tell you something else. No one cuts their wrists in one clean slice. It takes a few goes before the natural instinct for self-preservation is completely overcome. Henry didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ Magnus whispered.

‘You and Jeb were the only ones who weren’t here when it happened. That means you’re the only ones I can vaguely trust.’ Jacob got to his feet.

Magnus followed him. ‘Raisha and Belle . . .’

‘Are as suspect as anyone.’ There was a sheet of plastic draped over some machinery in the corner of the barn. Jeb pulled it free and dragged it towards the body. ‘It’s comforting to think of women as a higher species, less inclined to violence than men, but they do occasionally kill.’ He put the plastic over Henry’s corpse, slipping its edges beneath the body, as if he were tucking him into bed. ‘We’ve been through an unprecedented trauma. Life is cheaper than it was before. Who knows what effect it will have on those of us who remain?’

‘What are you going to do?’

Jacob pushed the final edge of the plastic beneath Henry’s head.

‘What can I do? Maybe it was one of our group, maybe it was a stranger. I’ll keep my eyes open and try and make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.’

‘It could have been Jeb or me, we’re strangers.’

Jacob gave a weird grin. ‘Was it?’

‘No,’ Magnus said. ‘It wasn’t.’

Jacob nodded. He looked Magnus in the eye. ‘It wasn’t me either.’

Twenty-Eight

The combine harvester they had found was bigger than the one his father had rented each year for the croft and Magnus guided it slowly through the ripe field of corn. Jacob sat in the cab beside him to ‘learn how it was done’, but Magnus was aware of the gun on the priest’s hip and his own lack of weapon. They were each wearing ear mufflers they had found on the driver’s seat, ready for a harvest that had come too soon for some now-dead farmer and his mate. It was too noisy to talk and neither of them had mentioned Henry’s body. Magnus was glad of the noise. Murder or not, there was nothing he could do about it. He liked the faint, familiar rumble of the combine’s engine, the smell of newly felled corn and the uneven jolt of the field beneath the
machine. Sweat was beading his forehead and trickling down his back, but the task felt clean. There was something purifying in the labour and even with Jacob riding shotgun it gave him space to think. He would leave Tanqueray as soon as he had cut the three fields of corn they had agreed on.

Magnus had visited Jeb and told him about Henry. One of the puppies had been curled on the floor of the room, chewing at the bedside rug’s fringes. Jeb had stretched out a hand, caught hold of the dog by the scruff of its neck and pulled it to its feet. He rubbed the dog’s ears. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t Jacob who did it?’

It was a typical police response, Magnus decided, blame the nearest person, but he kept the thought to himself. ‘Why would you think that?’

The dog made a lunge for Jeb’s shirt sleeve and he batted it away. ‘You saw the way he shot the guy who attacked us. He blew his head off with no warning. Jacob’s a soldier. He knows how to handle a gun. Okay, the man had a machete, but Jacob could have taken him out with a hit to the leg, a hit to the body if he wasn’t sure of his aim.’ The puppy jumped at Jeb’s sleeve again. He cuffed it gently on the back of its head and it trotted out of the room. ‘Jacob went for the execution shot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, but if you’re looking for a killer I’d say Father-armed-and-dangerous is an obvious candidate.’

Magnus had wondered at the way Jacob had shot the Audi driver, but he had seen the grim set of the priest’s mouth as he looked at Henry’s wounds.

‘He took us to the body. Why would he do that if he had killed him?’

Jeb leaned forward, still stern, but more confident than Magnus had seen him since the accident.

‘What’s the point in putting on a display if there’s no one there to admire it? We were trained to look out for the neighbour who’s a little too nosy about the crime scene; the person who’s over-eager to offer an opinion to the news cameras; the man or woman who knows a little too much.’ Jeb opened the desk drawer and took out a pencil and a piece of paper. ‘Describe what you saw in as much detail as you can remember.’

Magnus looked out at the trees beyond the window. Jeb’s story about Cherry and Happy was harder to imagine by daylight. It seemed to belong to the night. He wondered about the truth of it; the woman jumping to her death with the child in her arms, the last terrified look at the world the girl had given before she was plunged into the sky beyond the balcony. Magnus’s trust in Jeb was wavering again, but he found that he wanted to tell him about Henry’s butchered body, the way the priest had touched the wounds gently with the nub of his gun. How he had tucked the dead man tight in plastic, as if preserving him for another day.

Jeb listened silently, jotting down the occasional note. He nodded when Magnus mentioned the lack of defence cuts and the red weals Jacob had said were caused by handcuffs. When Magnus finished Jeb said, ‘I’d like to talk to the priest about this. Do you think you can get him to visit me?’

Magnus had promised to see what he could do.

The corn toppled beneath the combine’s blades in rows that were less straight than his father would have approved of, but which gave Magnus a forgotten sense of pride. He would find a van somewhere, pick up his abandoned motorbike, replace its damaged tyre and press on for Scrabster. The van would speed his progress and the bike would ensure he was not stalled by some obstacle: a tangle of abandoned cars, a collapsed bridge or a barricade that a larger vehicle could not negotiate. When he got to Orkney, Magnus would be able to tell his mother and Rhona (please God let them be alive) that he had done something good.

Jacob was saying something to him. Magnus lifted his muffler, but the words were lost in the din of the engine. The priest pointed at the ignition. Magnus killed the engine and drew the combine to a halt.

Jacob said, ‘Ready for a break?’

‘I can keep going for another hour.’ Every moment he worked was a moment closer to leaving.

‘I’m ready for a break and I think you should have one too. These are dangerous machines. It doesn’t do to drive them for too long.’ Jacob slung the bag with their water and sandwiches in it around his body, opened the cab door and climbed down into the field.

Magnus said, ‘I’ve been driving these beasts since I was sixteen. I don’t need to be told when to have a break.’

His father had been working his neighbour Bobby Bird’s field since sun-up on the evening he died. Bobby supplemented the yield from his croft by working in a bank in Stromness. He paid for the combine’s rental and Magnus’s father cut Bobby’s crop, then used the machine to harvest his own fields.

‘I told him not to batter it,’ Bobby had said tearfully to Magnus at the funeral, ‘but you ken your faither, God bless his soul, he wouldn’t touch his ain fields till he had done mine and he was feart the rain was coming in.’

His father had been right. It had rained for three days after his death; torrential, biblical, sheets of rain. Bobby and the rest of their neighbours had worked in it, Magnus, Rhona and his cousin Hugh with them, to bring in his father’s crop. But it had not brought the man back.

Magnus got out of the cab, slammed the door and jumped down into the stubbled corn. The sky was blue and almost cloudless. There were no jet streams intersecting in the sky, white on blue like ragged saltires. Jacob tipped a water bottle to his mouth. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand and then reached into his bag and passed another bottle to Magnus who unscrewed its lid and took a drink. Jacob was wearing dark Ray-Bans that contrasted oddly with his dog collar. It was hard to see his eyes, but Magnus could feel the priest watching him.

Jacob said, ‘Did you tell anyone about Henry?’ Magnus considered lying, but he hesitated a moment too long and the priest asked, ‘Who? Jeb?’

‘He used to be a policeman. I thought he might be able to tell whether it was murder or not.’

Jacob nodded. ‘The same thought crossed my mind.’

Magnus said, ‘He told you he used to be in the police? You’re privileged.’

‘He didn’t have to tell me.’ The priest smiled, his eyes still hidden. ‘Jeb Soames is distinctive. He’s changed, grown a decade older in two or three years, but I got a feeling of déjà vu when I was setting his leg. The pain brought out those big bones in his forehead. It took me a while to place him, but then I remembered a newspaper photograph of him wearing the same expression as he was taken into court on the first day of his trial.’ The priest paused as if something had just occurred to him. ‘Do you know his history?’

The sun was warm on the back of his neck. Magnus took a hanky from his pocket and mopped his face with it.

‘He told me some of it. He wanted to convince me he was innocent.’

‘Did he succeed?’

Magnus thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know.’

‘The judge and jury thought he was guilty.’ The priest’s voice was neutral, as if guilt and innocence were all the same to him. ‘The newspapers did too. Jeb was bulkier in the photo, like a human battering ram. I remember wondering how a man his size could bring himself to lay violent hands on a child.’ Jacob stared up the field at the rolled bales of harvested corn. ‘The girl who died was the same age as my younger daughter. Maybe that’s why the story stuck in my mind.’

Magnus said, ‘And you don’t mind having him here?’

‘If I’d realised who he was when we first met, I might have walked away . . .’ The priest shrugged. ‘He’s here now. Maybe God intended it that way.’ He tilted his water bottle to his mouth and drank. ‘Is he getting close to Belle?’

‘I think he feels sorry for her.’

The priest took off his Ray-Bans, wiped his eyes and put them back on. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes.

‘Love is the thing that will make the post-sweats world bearable, love and children; new life. But it’s probably best if Jeb doesn’t get too close to Belle. From what I remember of the press coverage she’s rather too like the woman he killed for any good to come of it.’ Magnus was about to say that Jeb might still be innocent, but the priest asked, ‘What did he say about poor Henry?’

Magnus shrugged. ‘Nothing much, just that he’d like to talk to you about it.’

‘Did he tell you that he thought it was probably me who killed him?’

‘No,’ Magnus lied. There were whole fields surrounding them and no one to care if Jacob should decide to aim his gun and shoot.
He went north
, the priest would say,
home to his family
. ‘Why would he think that?’

‘I would in his position. You’ve already seen me kill and I was the one who found the body. I reckon that makes me a prime candidate.’ Jacob grinned. ‘Don’t look so worried. I’ve no intention of burying you among the corn. At least not until we get our three fields done.’ He reached into his bag and took out the bread and cheese he had been wrapping in wax paper when Magnus had joined him in the kitchen early that morning. ‘Next year at harvest we’ll be eating bread made with our own flour.’