The Trowie Mound Murders by Marsali Taylor

Author:Marsali Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783755486
Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

I wasn’t dead, but they were shoving me, ready to fling me overboard. The deck planks were wet with blood; it was smeared on my cheek and smelt sickly in my nostrils. I couldn’t see their faces, although I was striving to open my eyes, and the no, no that I was trying to say was silent. They rolled me over, and I was falling, falling, then I was lying on Marielle ’s deck, the cold fibreglass under my back, except that it was covered with grit, I hadn’t had time to sweep the decks, and it wasn’t Alain but Anders who was lying beside me, one arm across my breasts, and he was kissing me, his neat beard rough on my cheek. In the dream I wanted him to go on, but not now, my head hurt too much, and I was trying to tell him that, turning my head away from him even as my body was arching against his. The scrape and thud of the great stone being eased into place echoed dully round me …

I awoke then. My cheek lay on grit that smelt of things left to rot, long forgotten. It was my own arm that lay awkwardly doubled across me, fingers brushing the earth. I reached a little further and felt the hard grains below my fingers. My body was aching and cold. Worst of all, the darkness pressed around me. I hadn’t realised that I was afraid of the dark. Even on the blackest night with the ship’s lanterns glimmering through shafts of rain, it was never truly dark at sea. Now I felt it as a presence, drawing closer to suck the breath from me. It lay over me like a shroud, and however much I strained my eyes, hoping for one friendly pinprick of daylight, there was no variation in its thickness. Pain-heavy eyelids open or shut, it made no difference. Above the darkness was the weight of stone and peat and heather. I could feel it pinning me down until the last breath was crushed out of me and my bones decayed with the others. How would my ghost communicate with the Neolithic ghosts of so many centuries ago? If I died here, would my spirit be shut up under the earth, unable to ask Alain’s forgiveness?

My head throbbed, and I wanted to be sick. My body hurt all over, arms, legs, wrists, ankles, as if I’d been stretched on a rack. Whoever had flung me in here hadn’t bothered to handle me like a living person. They’d just rolled and dragged me inside the doorway and left me.

They didn’t expect me to be a living person. It didn’t matter what you did to someone who was going to die of thirst in the next couple of days. Maybe they’d meant me to die sooner than that. It had been an efficient clout over the back of the head. I wanted to raise a hand to feel the bruise, but it was too much effort.

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