October Skies (10 page)

‘Great,’ he muttered, gripping the armrest tightly.

The little girl sitting beside him looked up from the game on her phone. ‘Are you scared?’ she asked.

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and knotted his eyebrows sternly as he turned to her, hoping he was conveying both a relaxed lack of interest in the mild buffeting and the notion that right now, he really didn’t need to be consoled by a maternally minded child.

‘Just fine, thanks.’

She nodded, satisfied he wasn’t going to need babysitting and returned to her game. He returned to focusing his mind off the fact he was riding a 350-ton kerosene bomb, 30,000 feet above the ground, kept aloft merely because they were travelling through air fast enough . . . for now. He turned away from the window and pulled down the blind. If he couldn’t see those wafer-thin wings wobbling through the turbulence, it might help.

There was news playing on the small dropdown LCD screens; more on the still-distant US election, and the Republican party’s continuing efforts to find a strong partnership to run against the Democrats. It was followed by a quick throwaway item on several independent candidates who had already thrown their hats into the ring. There was the usual array of attention-seeking nuts amongst them, Julian noticed. He decided to turn his attention to work, opening up a folder of printed sheets - the Lambert journal - but his mind swiftly drifted off-piste.

Rose.

What happened there?

In the last few years they’d spent literally thousands of hours in each other’s company, and a few dozen of those, the worse for wear from booze. But nothing like that had ever happened before. On the one hand, there was a tingle of desire, on the other, it felt wrong - like looking at a sister or an auntie in a funny way.

Julian shook his head. Why, all of a sudden, after three years of working together, had this awkward situation cropped up?

Why now, for crying out loud?

Work, Jules . . . work.

He looked back down at the open folder and the scanned pages of the Lambert journal. The first entries had been few and far between, sometimes days, even weeks between them. The handwriting was measured, tidy, comfortably spaced and relatively easy to read. But, as he flicked quickly through the pages, they became longer, the handwriting more erratic, cramped, dense and much harder to decipher - like a child running out of space in a school exercise book, the letters were shrinking towards the end, and the ink grew fainter. He found himself squinting with the folder held up almost to his nose as he tried to make out a few random sentences on the last few scanned pages. There the writing was all but indecipherable - careless hurried scrawls.

A word here, a word there stood out of the dense pages. He wasn’t sure if his tired eyes were deciphering the spidery handwriting correctly. But one word he thought he had picked out whilst digitising the pages a couple of days ago, he now saw again.

. . . murder . . .

He felt some instinct inside him twitch. He suspected there might be something more to this story than a wayward wagon train that had got lost in the mountains. As soon as he got back home, he planned to set up some meetings, but he was going to have to read through as much of this journal as he could in the meantime, then get the story transcribed and typed up for others to read more easily. More importantly, reading through this diary would help him make sense of the mystery he’d discovered at the very back of the journal - the ragged edges of three or four pages that had been ripped out.

Murder and mystery.

‘This just gets better and better,’ he muttered to himself. The girl beside him looked up from her phone for a moment before turning back to playing her game.

Then there was research. He was impatient to get back to his flat, fire up his computer and start the process of researching this Benjamin Lambert’s background. He suspected it wasn’t going to be too difficult. Even back in mid-1800s England, it was difficult to live a life without leaving behind a forensic trail of yellowing paper records.

First things first, though.

He flipped back several pages in his notebook and resumed transcribing the contents of Lambert’s journal, stopping every now and then to interpret the faded ink scrawls, the gentle buffeting of the plane soon forgotten about.

 

Preston emerged onto the track where Mr Zimmerman stared anxiously down at the tangled wreckage below, holding his sobbing wife in his arms and rocking her gently.

Mr Zimmerman looked up at him. ‘William . . . is she . . . ?’

Preston, breathless from the exertion of pulling himself up the steep slope, ignored the father and looked around at the gathered faces. He spotted Ben.

‘Mr Lambert?’

Ben nodded.

‘Your trail captain, Keats, says you have some medical knowledge.’

‘What? Just a little. I was training as a doctor before I . . .’

‘Come with me, now.’

‘Let me get my bag.’

‘Quickly, please.’

Preston led the way back down, a treacherous descent made more difficult by an inch of snow rendering every foothold slippery and unreliable. Near the bottom, as the rush of the stream grew louder, they passed the oxen, wrapped around the base of a stout Ponderosa pine like some many-legged, many-headed beast. To Ben’s surprise, amidst the mass of tan hide, one or two of them were still alive, struggling and bellowing pathetically.

They climbed down further, until Ben could see the tangled remains of the wagon, and the curious sight of modest undergarments and Sunday-best clothing dangling from the higher branches of several trees nearby, as if hung out to dry.

Lower down he could see Keats squatting over something near the stream. Preston stopped and turned round to face him. Ben could see tears in the man’s normally stern eyes.

‘I think young Johanna will not live . . .’ He struggled to clear the emotion from his voice. ‘She’s down there.’

Preston led him to the floor of the gulch, strewn with boulders, shards of shattered and twisted timber and scattered personal belongings. The small, ice-cold brook energetically splashed and gurgled around them, carrying away with it the lighter things; letters, poems, dried flowers, keepsakes and mementoes sailed away downstream.

‘This way,’ said Preston again, leading him over to where Keats squatted, powder snow gathering on the floppy brim of his tan hat. To his credit, the grizzled old guide had managed to manoeuvre his scarred and pockmarked old face into something that resembled a tender smile for the poor child.

Ben looked down to see him stroking the ghostly white face of a young girl, stretched out across a wet boulder and bathed in the freezing cold water of the stream. Across her narrow waist lay a large section of the wagon’s trap. The heavy wooden frame had crushed her, cutting her almost completely in half.

‘My God,’ Ben whispered and Preston shot him an angry glance.

‘If you cannot help her, at least let her think you can,’ he hissed at him.

He nodded and then knelt down beside her. ‘Johanna, is it?’

She looked up at him, her blue lips quivering from the cold. ‘I . . . I know you. Y-you’re an outsider.’

Ben nodded and smiled. ‘That’s right, my name’s Benjamin. I’m a . . . a doctor. I’m going to have a little look at you. See what we can do.’

She smiled up at Preston. ‘G-God a-always p-provides.’

Preston stooped down and held her hand. ‘Yes, he does, Johanna, my love. God saw to it that Dr Lambert was to travel with us.’

‘Where is m-my m-momma and p-papa?’ she whispered, through flickering, trembling lips that were turning blue.

‘Your mother is fine. She leapt free and is safe at the top.’

She sighed with relief and turned to look at Preston. ‘M-momma t-tried to get me . . . d-didn’t she?’

‘Yes, she did. Because you’re special to us, Johanna.’

Ben looked across at Preston; it was a tender thing to say.

She smiled faintly, shivering as she did so. ‘I’m h-happy my m-momma is s-safe.’

Preston nodded. ‘She’s fine, just fine.’

Ben fumbled for her pulse; it was weak and fading. ‘Johanna,’ he said, ‘we’re going to get you out of here, then I’ll tend to you shortly, up at the top of the hill.’ It was a shameless lie to comfort her last few moments. He looked down at her separated body. The shattered timber had cut through her like a serrated blade, not a clean bisection but an untidy tangle of shredded organs, muscle tissue, skin and fragmented bone . . . messy.

‘Yes, we’ll have you out of here very soon. But first, let me give you something. You’ll feel better.’

Ben reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of laudanum.

‘What is that?’ asked Preston.

‘An opiate. It will help her . . .’ Ben’s words faded to nothing. He uncorked the bottle. ‘It’ll make it easier.’ He lifted the girl’s head and poured a modest amount through her quivering lips. Almost immediately the trembling began to ease.

‘There, there,’ cooed Ben softly, stroking her face, ‘there’s a good girl. You’re going to be fine.’

The young girl nodded dreamily, reassured by the soothing tone of his voice and the soft touch of his hand. She was slipping away now, mercifully, very quickly with the hint of a smile on her purple lips.

Ben glanced across at Keats, seeing, to his surprise, tears tumbling from narrowed eyes, and down his craggy cheeks into his beard. The guide chewed on his lip silently as Preston uttered a quiet prayer.

Looking back down at Johanna, Ben could see she had slipped away.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, ‘there was nothing I could do.’

Keats nodded. ‘Nothin’ no one could do.’

Preston turned to them both. ‘I’d like a moment alone with her, if you please.’

Ben put the glass bottle carefully back in his bag and stood up. Together he and Keats made their way across the stream and a few yards up the steep hill.

‘She must have been only eight or nine years old,’ whispered Ben. ‘Poor girl.’

‘Yup,’ Keats replied, his gravel-voice still thick with emotion. ‘And these stupid sons-of-bitches will consider it God’s will . . . just you see.’

Ben nodded.

They stood in silence awhile and watched as Preston knelt down and kissed the child.

‘What you saw there, Lambert,’ said Keats, ‘was the elephant.’

He knew what the guide meant, and that was exactly how it felt; as if some huge malevolent entity had grown tired of watching from afar and decided to announce its presence.

‘All of us seen the elephant today, Lambert . . . all of us. And that ain’t no good.’

 

Julian was glad to be home in his modest flat. Junk mail was piled up against the inside of his front door, and the smell wafting through from the kitchen suggested some food in his waste bin had gone off. In the fridge there was nothing to grab - he noticed some paté had grown some blue hair, and a litre jug of milk had separated into curious layers of yellow liquid and pale gunk.

Otherwise, though, his flat was the tidy little sanctum sanctorum he had left behind a fortnight ago.

Though keen to hit the sack and catch up on the sleep he’d missed in the woods and on his uncomfortably hard motel bed, he called Soup Kitchen’s part-time receptionist, Miranda, to grab a handful of phone numbers that he’d be calling later.

Then he turned his attention to finding some details on B.E. Lambert.

 

Three hours later he pushed himself away from the desk, wandered over to the phone and ordered himself a pizza. With twenty minutes to wait, he sat back down at the desk and reviewed the notes he’d printed out.

It appeared that Benjamin Lambert had come from a very wealthy family. His father, Maurice, had made a fortune on property in the Square Mile, but accrued most of his wealth as a result of investments he’d made in America. Most of this information Julian had found on the website of Banner House Hospice (formerly Asylum). Maurice Lambert had donated substantially to the institution, funding the building of a wing - the Lambert Wing, naturally.