The Legacy of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson

Author:Tade Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Fourteen

Sod’s Law, it’s raining, the annoying kind that starts and stops. When she finishes this assignment, Myke is going on holiday to somewhere warm, where the only umbrellas are the ones on drinks.

She has a thermal dry suit on underneath her other gear, which is a concession to old age. She’ll ache in her right sacroiliac joint a week from now, she knows for certain, but for today, she will push herself to find the molly.

The Okement’s water level is higher, of course, but nothing that makes Myke think of flooding. She has swum in faster, deeper rivers, but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t give it her respect. She keeps it in sight and goes deeper and deeper into Dartmoor. She orients herself with a map reference. The molly won’t be on a footpath. Myke isn’t moving like a camper or hiker. She is moving between areas that provide cover, like a bush or rock. From there, she stares and listens and stares some more. She slowly surveys her entire visual field, then moves her neck to widen it, until she can say for certain there is nothing suspicious ahead of her. That done, she darts to a new position and repeats. She looks up the trees for a particular kind of spoor. Nothing yet.

She slips and falls. She slides on muddy grass for about half a yard. When she stops, she looks around her and sees why. The area has been denuded. There are flecks of wood on the ground. She picks them up and brings them closer to her eyes—her vision is going too. They are curved, with sharp edges. Shaved off a branch or log. Weapon making. Stakes for camp and for a trap. She looks carefully, but there is nothing else to spot.

She finds the police tracks. They have trampled over everything in their clumsy quest to find the killer by beating the bushes. Idiots. The molly would have heard them coming and hidden, watching them from a distance. They thought they were dealing with some lunatic. Their notes say so. They have no idea.

As she plods on she remembers a film she saw some years back. A space creature hunted US marines in a South American jungle, killed them off one by one. One of them, in frustration, stopped running, dropped all his gear, and decided to face the monster bare chested and with just a hunting knife, mano a mano. At that point Myke checked out of the film. Why do men think this is how fighting is done? Or is it just Hollywood? Never give away your advantage.

She finds something, a depression in the grass. She scrapes away at it and reveals a hastily filled hole. Myke digs in it and encounters fresh shit. Might be other campers, but Myke doubts it. The story of the murder would have spread like a brush fire. The soft-arse campers are all gone. Only the molly and Myke remain.

Myke moves back about a yard, then starts weaving foliage into a covering she brought along, then she sits under it.

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