The Gallows Tree by RJ SCott

Author:RJ SCott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay contemporary mystery romance
Publisher: Silver Publishing
Published: 2011-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Before Cody had time to digest this, a second cop emerged from inside and looked across to Cody and Justin.

"Justin tells me this is your cottage." Cody recognized the cop as a guy from the inn who'd spent most of the night before playing cards in the corner and nursing a single beer, he was clearly a local.

"Whose body is it?" Cody asked quickly. He wasn't entirely sure who he was asking, but when Justin shook his head and the policeman didn't answer, he assumed no one actually knew. No one was arresting him. No one was arresting anyone. What was going on?

"It's been there a while," Justin said simply. The hand he placed on Cody's arm was to reassure him, but it didn't really help. "Just the upper part of the body wedged into old brick, wood, and mud under the second layer of concrete."

"Someone concreted half a body under my house?" Disgust pressed at the edges of his words.

"No, bloody hell, no. I'm not an expert, but it looks to me like some of the remedial work to the supports in the early nineteen hundreds was done on surface cracks only. Hence the shifting. We scaffolded and dug back farther. Way farther than they had." Twentieth century? So that meant the body, or what was left of it, was older. Still in stunned disbelief, Cody joined the other two workers on the grass, and only a few minutes later, Justin sat next to them.

"What are they doing?" one of the other workers asked.

"Calling in experts; forensics, I guess. Someone who can look at the bones and tell… things." Justin held out a hand for the whisky, and when he had it, he swallowed a full shot down in one swallow, spluttering as it burned. "Bloody hell. That has never happened to me." Cody guessed it wasn't an everyday occurrence in a renovator's life to find the dead. Who the hell had been left under his cottage and when? Could it be the remains of someone that had never been found? Katherine Brier, for instance, his young ancestor who could have thrown herself under the mill race pregnant?

"Fuck," Cody said simply. It summed up the whole mess in his head very nicely.

"Fuck indeed," Justin emphasized, and passed the whisky back to the other two. "You can go," he said, dismissing them, and gratefully, they left. Weaving under the influence of neat whisky on fright, they made their way back down the village. The inn probably. "They'll be in the pub when we're finished here."

Cody had questions running through his head so fast he couldn't clearly sort them in order. Most of all, he wanted to know what happened now. He didn't vocalize any of them.

A third car arrived and parked at right angles to the first cop car, and two men climbed out. Everything went from shocking and bad to completely surreal.

"You'll need to stop working here," one man said authoritatively. "Do we have your contact details, sir?" Cody stared up at Mr Tall and Official.

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