The Chaplin Conspiracy by Stewart Ferris

Author:Stewart Ferris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786151841
Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 2017-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

TUESDAY 14TH MAY 2013

The rains had ceased hours ago, but it was only in the morning sunlight that the extent of the devastation could be appreciated. Sides of buildings had been washed away. A mediaeval bridge had almost vanished, its jagged footings protruding like snapped bones. The river had fallen to something akin to its usual height, revealing twisted and broken cars and caravans and trees and bodies.

As in 1993, the churchyard had borne the brunt of the damage. The floodwaters had washed away a swathe of burial plots, both ancient and modern. A mangled Volkswagen camper van sat incongruously amid a patch of ground where most of the graves were still intact, but just two metres behind it the ground dropped bluntly down to the newly-expanded river. More than fifty sets of human remains had disappeared.

Scabies turned the key in the church door and peeked outside. Police and ambulance lights danced in the central square. A few stunned-looking people milled around.

‘Come on,’ he whispered, tightening the belt on his trousers. Like the others, he didn’t plan to spend the day dressed as a choirboy. With their own clothes almost dry, everyone was now dressed normally.

‘If you’re venturing out in search of our petit déjeuner,’ said Ratty, ‘please could you omit the tired cliché of croissants to which those sickly-looking French types seem so addicted and see if you can persuade any local chef fellow to knock up some scrambled eggs?’

‘Scrambled eggs?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Ratty. ‘Not overly concerned about a sausage, splendid though it would be, but the eggs are not negotiable. Scrambled, remember, not raw or in a stew or served with some unfortunate gastropod or any other act of culinary barbarism to which these local chaps are habituated.’

‘I’m not getting breakfast,’ said Scabies. ‘I’m going to see what happened to the graveyard. Anyone want to join me?’

Everyone rushed to the door apart from Ratty, who found that his damp leather jacket squeaked when he moved. He therefore walked at a pace that maintained the kind of low noise level more befitting to his status.

‘My van is still here!’ exclaimed Charlie.

‘It is, but half of the churchyard isn’t,’ said Scabies. ‘Come down to the river and see.’

‘That’s a bit macabre, isn’t it?’ asked Ruby. ‘There could be legs and arms and heads sticking out of the mud above the edge of the river. It’ll be gruesome.’

‘Remind me what your job is, Ruby?’ asked Scabies without waiting for an answer. ‘Oh, that’s right, you dig up old graves for a living.’

‘Only when they’re thousands of years old,’ she protested. ‘And I don’t do it for kicks or voyeuristic reasons. That’s all you’ll be doing down by the river.’

Charlie stopped to inspect his van on the way to the river bank. The vehicle itself was a total write-off, but the interior showed no indication of human entry since the night before. That meant his stolen artefacts were still inside, buried under the brown silt that now covered every surface. Insurance was something

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