Read the first Chapter of the latest Shaman Mystery here!

The 4th Shaman Mystery by Nina Milton

THROUGH THE FLOODGATE 

Chapter One

Boiling Blood in his Brain

John Spicer was already waiting, when Larry drove down into Harper’s Coombe.

It was like a lover’s tryst – a lung-drying desire.

Larry pulled the old pickup to a halt behind John’s Audi and jumped out the cab. The ground was so soft he felt his wellingtons sink by inches.  Across the coombe there were patches of shining water, the start of little lakes.

Bloody rain. It was never-ending. Even down here in the coombe, the wind behind it was throwing water into his face.

He pulled the fur of his trapper hat down around his ears and went to the back of the pickup. Water pooled on the tarp, trickling down to the metal base as he shifted it, wetting the random items he carried. His fingers were slippy as he spun the combination lock. It was an old-fashioned document case, but it did the job. Empty, of course, because the previous money he’d carried home was now in a Second World War tin box, which had belonged to his father’s father and had previously held old documents and his sister’s first baby shoes. 

Soon, he would buy a soft leather case with a laptop inside, slender as a slate tile.

He left the briefcase ready and waiting to be filled, and splashed over the wet grass towards the Audi, obscenely large, less than a year old and glowing gold-brown with its metallic finish.

He’d told people he’d been getting migraines since the disaster, but it wasn’t actual pain. It felt more like boiling blood. Eighteen months of acid thoughts rolling in his brain, steam pushing at the lid.

At first, he had blamed God for his ruin. Then, with the promise of compensation, he had blamed the government. But one afternoon, standing in his own yard, a chance remark lit the gas beneath his stew pan of resentment, and the truth rose in the steam.

John Spicer was to blame.

Spicer had taken
everything away from Larry, taken more than his livelihood, taken the man he was. He could afford to pay for his mistake and Larry saw it as his duty to suck at the man until he was hollow inside.

The window of the Audi rolled down, but Spicer didn’t look at him. 'This is the last time I come here. You’re getting no more, Larry.' 

Spicer’s voice had a softness about it, as if he’d just eaten ice cream. Through that gentleness came the final trace of Somerset accent that going to posh schools couldn’t get rid of. Listening to John’s soft voice made his own speech sound unnaturally rough, hoarse, and littered with swear words, like his tongue was a lash.

'If you think this is the last time, you’re a stupider fuckhead than I thought you were.' 

'I only came here to say it to your face.'

Yet he was not saying it to his face; he was still staring though the windscreen as if there was a football match being played on the far side of the coombe, rather than the damp drip of willows, green with moss and pale with age, stubby things that rose almost vertically out of the steep sides.

From the start of this, Spicer had rarely done him the courtesy of glancing his way, and it made his brain boil harder, the knowledge that he couldn’t stand the sight of Larry.

It had been late July, the first time they’d met in Harpers Coombe. Midday, the sun warm on the balding crown of his head. The dell had been full of colour – meadowsweet and marsh marigolds and huge clumps of loosestrife, as if someone had thrown a quilt, ready for a picnic. He’d asked for a grand. He hadn’t expected Spicer to agree, but as the pack emerged from the half-open window, a flexible wodge wrapped in plastic, still warm from Spicer’s touch, he’d realised he should have asked for more.

Once the money was in Larry’s hand, the Audi shot forward by a couple of feet then reversed skilfully around the Land Rover pickup, whining as it sped up the track.

He’d had a flash of panic, ripping open the plastic there in Harper’s Coombe. Bank notes spilt into the briefcase, crisp from a bank clerk’s count. For the first time since the flood, his head felt cool, rested…atoned. He had scared John Spicer, a man not easily frightened.

In August, he’d put a zero on the end –  ten grand, you fucker, or I go to the police. 

It was chilly and damp when they met in September, with sedge growing at the soggy edges of the coombe. 

By October it felt like he was amassing a small fortune. 

End of November, John had not turned up.

He’d gone to his house, under cover of darkness. The windows glowed against the storm outside. The Christmas decorations were already up. They were playing music and their voices rose, fell, cheerful and relaxed. He heard John chuckle and Alison was chattering to her granddaughter in that baby voice people did.

He’d turned his collar up against the storm and slunk away.

He’d taken too long to think what to do, finally scribbling something down, sealing the envelope and stuffing it into the postbox at the end of the Spicer’s half-mile driveway.

The run-up to Christmas was in full swing when the brief reply, unsigned, had fallen through his letterbox. Capital letters exploded across the page;

WE SHOULD TALK.

TOMORROW.

Well, yeah, John. We should. You’re a month behind. That’s what we should talk about.

Rain dripped into his collar from the back of the trapper hat and he sensed that his right sock was getting damp; there was a small hole at the heel of his boot that only let in water when he was actually standing in it. He shifted, trying to find a dryer spot and saw how the Audi’s wheels were sinking into the boggy turf. John would probably be bleating for a tow, when they left.

'I’ve had enough,' Spicer was saying. 'It’s taken me this long to realise that I should never have started it.'

'You’d like to forget what you did,' Larry hollered back. 'Sabotage! You put people in clear danger!'

'I never meant to! But blackmail? That’s what you are doing, Larry Waish, damn you!'

He’d never heard the man let out an oath. 'Okay. You’ve had your little rant. Now it’s time to pay. You missed last month. I need the money. It’s fucking Christmas.'

John shifted in the seat, until, finally they were staring at each other. 'It’s over, mate. No more money. I’m going straight to Bridgwater to make a police statement. Tell them what I did; tell them what you are doing.'

The look on the man’s face. Pity. Larry stepped away from what was in those eyes, forgetting the boggy ground, and suddenly, his butt was in the mud.

John did not laugh. As if Larry Waish, and his pathetic life – never married, living with his weirdo sister, scraping a living from a barn full of poultry – was not a matter for mirth or taunts, but for compassion. The knowing chaffed the bottom of his stomach. All this time, John Spicer had felt sorry for him.

He sucked his boots free of the marshy ground and scraped himself up. He was mired. Shat upon. 'Fuckhead,' he hissed. 'Fuckhead, fuckhead.'

Spicer looked away, like he hadn’t seen the fool he’d become, and dropped the stick into drive. The fat, black tyres flew round with a high whining sound, splattering further mud over Larry’s jeans. The engine screamed. His foot must have been on the floor. He punched at the wheel and the horn burped out.

‘All right,' said Larry. His heart was pounding, he could hear the rhythm of it in his voice. 'All right. Make this the last time. Give me your payment and we’ll call it  a day.'

Perhaps John Spicer’s lips twitched, in and out of a smile. 'You’re too late. Because, Larry, blackmail is the bigger crime.'

'I call it fair payment. I lost two-thirds of my living.'

'You got compensation. I heard in the village.' Spicer tried to reverse, taking it steady, but the wheels dug deeper into the furrow he’d already made. The engine hollered for mercy. He stuck his head out of the window. 'Could you pull back up the lane?' As if they’d only stopped here to exchange pleasantries. 'Give me a bit of room, please?'

'You’ll need a tow,' Larry grunted. 'You’re in too deep.'

He mashed his way to the pickup, his jeans stuck to his backside. Somewhere in the back was a bit of good rope they could use to get the Audi out of its predicament. He shifted the briefcase to one side. It was still wide open, like a dog waiting for a treat.

The bastard owes. 

A double payment.

Fucking feels sorry. 

For me.

Fuckhead.

He’s in too deep.

Bloody fluid fizzed inside his brain until it felt like it was oozing out of his eye sockets. He wiped them and looked at his hands. Nothing but mud and rain and hot, invisible tears.

Blackmail is the bigger crime.

The back of the pickup was littered with his stuff. Bits from the farm, bits for the car, a spare sack of layer’s pellets. He spotted the fat coil of blue rope towards the bottom and reached down for it. His hand knocked against his shotgun. 

How did this happen? How did that sod turn his one bit of luck around like this?

He picked up his gun so he could pull the rope out. His shotgun. It felt good in his hand, like a friendship.

  As he walked along the side of the Audi, he drew his right hand behind him, the shotgun nestling against his back. The rope dangled from his left arm, almost tripping him.

'Look, Larry…I’m sorry, mate,' said John.

And he really was; sorry he couldn’t pay him any more money, as if the Waishes were a charity case.

Had he only agreed to pay him because he was a fucking charity case?

'You will be sorry.' 

He dropped the rope in the mud and poked the barrel of the shotgun through the window. It crashed against John’s teeth. The man veered away as best he could within the confines of the seat belt he’d never undone, his hands clutching at the barrel, struggling with the gun. The fucker had not been expecting this.

He couldn’t think. Couldn’t control his head anymore.

He fired. His eyes slapped shut with the recoil. When he cracked them open, he couldn’t make out where John’s face had gone. 

For a few further seconds, everything was motionless. 'Mate?' 

He went to wipe away the blood. His hand touched bone, and the slippery stickiness of innards. Like the entrails of a drawn chicken. He tried to help John up. The body moved. There was no sound as it gained momentum, just a single soft, squelch as Spicer collapsed towards the steering wheel.

He couldn’t take it in. He had no idea his shotgun could do this damage. It could kill a fox, from across a field, but he’d never used it on anything close up before.

He couldn’t recall what had gone through his mind before he pulled the trigger, or even if he had pulled it. All he remembered was the look of pity in John’s eyes, the mud on his jeans. The stew boiling bloody in his head. The friendly gun in his hands.

And then, a soul-saving moment of clarity as he realised no one knew they were here. No one knew they had ever met here.

He walked back to the car and threw in the tow rope. He pulled on a pair of chainsaw gloves and polished his gun with an old rag, burnishing it as if for a game show.

It was quiet in the glade. Even the crows had been scared away. Was Spicer dead? 

He had left Spicer’s brain splattered over the Audi. Of course the man was dead.

He stood in front of the car for a long time, thinking about positions. How a man might kill himself with a shotgun in a car. He rested the stock of the gun on the open window, so the trigger was just inside. Yes, that seemed to work. He let go of it and it fell into the driver’s well, where blood was pooling.

It wasn’t Spicer’s gun, but luckily, it wasn’t his, either. He’d picked it up somewhere, probably in some pub for a good price.

Sinking into the wet ground was the discharged cartridge. He nudged it towards the car with his foot. 

As he did so, the clarity left. As if the last of his luck had turned and walked away.

He was on his knees before he knew he’d fallen. A thin trail of bile ran from his mouth into the grass and was dissipated by the rain. He’d only had whisky for breakfast. His eyes stung. He ran his fingers over them and this time, yes, blood came away, smearing the bright colours of the chainsaw gloves. 

But it wasn’t his blood.

It was John Spicer’s.

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