Watson & the Countess 02 The Lammas Curse by Anna Lord

Author:Anna Lord
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: murder, golf, scotland, macbeth, seance, witch, shakespeare, sherlock
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

Jackdaw Wood

Dr Watson hauled his trusty golf clubs into the landau, smiling as nervously as a boy going off to boarding school for the first time. The Countess wished him luck with his caddying as she waved him off then quickly donned her warm winter Redingote and set off for the Marmion Hydro Hotel on foot. She wanted to speak to young Robbie Fyfe and she wanted to explore Jackdaw Wood along the way, something she knew her companion in crime would discourage.

The drizzle from the day before had disappeared but a grey haze hung over the land. It was not as thick as London fog, more like a murky grey veil, just enough to confound the senses and bleary the air.

Jackdaw Wood was a queer place - a remnant from a time when Caledon fyrr forests covered most of Scotland. A time of wolf and lynx and wild boar; snow and ice; Picts and Celts. It was a lone survivor in a new landscape treed with slender white beauties called birch and alder, a forgotten place of towering brown trunks that resembled gargantuan legs, like mythic titans minus torsos. Every scarred and wind-whipped trunk was more than a century old, gangrenous with lichen and moss. But what was queer was that there were no jackdaws.

Once the Countess entered the wood it didn’t take long to realize that every moss-mottled trunk looked like another and the one after that and so on. It didn’t take long to lose her bearings. There were no straight paths and too many tracks that curved around clumps of heather and snaked through brittle fronds of bronzy bracken that provided perfect camouflage for foraging deer that sometimes lifted their heads and gave her a fright. The lofty branches dripped with damp and the spongy ground, thick with leaves and centuries of rotting vegetation, made a squelching sound underfoot. Every now and then the greyness was arrested by the startling flash of something vivid as a shaft of sunlight broke through the grey pall and spotlighted a bright red crossbill flitting through the topmost branches.

She heard a rustling sound and looked back. Something darted behind the tree. But which tree? Deliberately, she turned away then spun back round. Something flashed. She knew it wasn’t a deer –wrong shape - or a caipercaillzie – wrong size. Alert to every little sound, she walked on warily, her heartbeat echoing in her ears, but the track wound back on itself and she soon ended up back where she started. The grey veil blurred the light. The trees blocked the sun. She had no idea of the time. She walked on for a bit and once again saw something dart behind the trees – something human.

She turned her back then re-turned sharply and almost died from relief when it turned out to be the young lad, Robbie Fyfe.

He looked equally relieved. “I thought,” he stammered, still getting over the shock, “I thought you might be Mother MacBee. I couldna see your face under the hood and I hid behind a tree.

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