Kindle Edition
Amazon
Amazon
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Phillip Strang
ISBN-10: 1973282917
Type: Fiction
Pages: 229
Copyright: Nov 11, 2017
ISBN-13: 9781973282914
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
It was meant to be high drama, not murder, but someone’s switched the daggers. The man’s death, in plain view of two serving police officers.
The man was not meant to die; the daggers were only theatrical props, plastic and harmless. A summer’s night, a production of Julius Caesar among the ruins of an Anglo-Saxon fort. Detective Inspector Tremayne is there with his sergeant, Clare Yarwood. The assassination scene, the man collapses to the ground, Brutus defending his actions, Mark Antony’s rebuke.
They’re a disparate group, the amateur actors. One’s an estate agent, another, an accountant. And then there is the teenage man, the gay, the funeral director, the commodities trader. And what about the women? They could be involved.
They’ve all got a secret, but which of those on the stage wanted Gordon Mason, the actor who had portrayed Caesar, dead?
Excerpt
Detective Inspector Keith Tremayne knew one thing: his idea of fun was not sitting on the grass on a balmy summer’s night watching a rendition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar acted out by the local dramatic society. He had to admit, though, that choosing the Anglo-Saxon fort of Old Sarum was as good a location as anywhere; not that much of it remained, just a few old stones here and there.
It had been six months since the events at nearby Avon Hill, and the village was supposedly half empty after ten of the men arrested were sent to prison for murder. The media had invaded the place for a few weeks after the revelations of pagan rituals and human sacrifices, but they had soon tired of it. Tremayne knew full well that what they really wanted was orgiastic rituals with a naked woman writhing in the centre of the old church while lecherous men ogled and took advantage. However, for worshippers of ancient gods, they had been a dreary group of people. There they were, a captive group of believers, and their idea of enjoyment was sacrificing some hapless individual whose only crime was believing in such nonsense.
Sitting there at Old Sarum, being bitten by mosquitoes and listening to amateur dramatics, was not the time to dwell on that case, especially as it was his sergeant’s first week back at Bemerton Road Police Station, and he had agreed to accompany her to the play.
Personally, he would have preferred a quiet pint or two of beer, but Clare Yarwood, his sergeant, was definitely teetotal after the love of her life and her fiancé, Harry Holchester, the publican of the Deer’s Head, his favourite pub, had turned out to be one of the elders of the pagan sect.
Tremayne could see that Yarwood was still not happy, even after several months of compassionate leave. He had never imagined that she would return, but there she had been several days earlier, standing in front of his desk on a Monday morning. ‘Reporting for duty,’ she had said.
It surprised him so much so that he had rushed round to her side of the desk and given her a big hug. The department had not been the same since she had leave, and the only murder in between her leaving and returning had been by the wife of a butcher who had caught her husband in bed with her best friend. By the time she had finished with the two of them, they could have been served up in the man’s shop, skilled as she was in preparing a cow or pig carcass for sale.
Tremayne looked up at the stage, looked at Yarwood. She looked fine, he thought, but he was still concerned. After all, she had seen the man she loved plucked from the ground and pinned in a tree, branches stabbing his body, even heard his last gasping breath. On the way to Old Sarum, she had asked him not to drive down Minster Street, so as not to see Harry’s pub, closed since he had died.
For someone uncommonly disaffectionate, he had grown fond of her; she was almost like the daughter he had never had. And now, she was back in Salisbury, and there was no way that she could avoid painful memories being reactivated as they moved around the city.
On the stage, or in this case a rise in the ground, a man dressed in a Roman tunic made his speech:
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.
Tremayne wondered why the man didn’t speak plain English, but then he was a blunt man, not used to beating around the bush, which was what the man was doing up on the stage. It was the last place that he’d ever visit of a night time, but he owed it to his sergeant to at least show interest in what she liked. It had been the two of them who had been intimately involved with the pagans, although others had come and gone in the Homicide department during the investigation, especially Vic Oldfield, the young and keen constable who fancied Clare but who had never had a chance while Harry was alive. And Oldfield had then died, along with a self-confessed murderer, in a crash on the Wilton Road.
Tremayne touched the crucifix around his neck at the thought of it. It was nonsense, this talk of ancient gods, and being able to summon them from the depths of wherever, but he had seen things he couldn’t explain, the same as Yarwood. He would never admit it to her, nor even to himself, but it was weird at the time. The memory still remained of that night up in Cuthbert’s Wood where the two of them, along with a couple of uniforms, had nearly been sacrificed in a pagan ritual.
If it hadn’t been for Harry Holchester freeing Clare first, and then the others, all four would have died. Tremayne noticed that Yarwood still touched her ring finger. He knew that idling her time in the office would do her no good, but then idling her time back at her parent’s hotel in Norfolk had got to her in the end; she’d admitted that to him.
What she needed, what they both needed, was a good juicy murder to take their minds off the past, not a group of actors prancing around in Roman attire. The only problem was that there weren’t any murders on the boil at the present time, although after the medals had been dished out for bravery above and beyond the call of duty that night in Avon Hill, any talk by Superintendent Moulton of his forced retirement was definitely off the agenda.
He’d accepted the award on Yarwood’s behalf, said a few words for her, but she had not wanted to come. It would have inevitably led to further discussion about her dead fiancé and Avon Hill, and she wasn’t up to that, not even now.
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