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Market Scarston
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Saturday morning arrived, crisp and bright with the pale blue sky and scudding clouds so common to autumn. Crowley stretched, looking from his window out across the school grounds, damp with early dew. It would be a fine weekend and while he had a lot of marking to do, and planning for the following week, his immediate concerns were focused well beyond the school walls.
He dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, put on a pair of running shoes, and packed a small backpack. Then he headed downstairs for a quick, light breakfast and a strong coffee. He was exhausted after being out so late, but a lie in until eight a.m. was all he allowed himself.
He avoided as much conversation as possible and slipped out with a minimum of fuss. At the school gates he had a cursory warm-up, then began jogging. After the fitness regime of the Army, it was hard to maintain the levels of physical ability he was used to. But frequent running and visits to the gym to lift weights helped, and it also helped his worries. He’d brought a lot back with him from the Middle East. A lot of it he got out of his system in the wild couple of years since he had returned to England and quit the SAS. But that had nearly landed him in jail and, on more than one occasion, nearly killed him. Ironic, considering what he’d survived to get to that point. But he’d been lifted out of that frying pan and helped into the relative calm of the Scarsdell Academy. He smiled. “Thanks, Auntie,” he muttered under his breath.
But even now, he carried a lot with him. He knew it was PTSD, along with a cocktail of other, less immediate issues. But he had coping mechanisms too. He wouldn’t be too proud to see a counselor again if he felt himself sliding back into old, bad habits. But rigorous physical activity was a great healer, of body and mind. He ran harder, drove his heart rate up. He also had somewhere to be.
It didn’t take long to reach the old church ruins, even running the long way around. Torn between pushing himself further and investigating more, he decided the situation of the night before was more urgent. He’d go to the gym at the Academy later in the day and make up for the short run. In truth, anything less than ten miles was a short run in his book, but that was SAS training for you.
He started at the spot where the teenagers had met the night before. Paying closer attention to where the chase had started, Crowley realized there were two further sets of prints, heading back towards the village. Perhaps those were the friends the students had said they’d come to meet. He lost that trail as soon as it reached the lane heading back toward the pub. There was nothing else of particular interest, and he couldn’t find any more dog tracks, in the cemetery or in the immediate woods near where the kids had hung out.
He retraced his steps from the night before, back out over the field, but couldn’t find any of the dog’s pawprints. He shifted grass around, frowning. Even the one he and Morgan had most definitely seen previously, gone like it was never there. It didn’t make sense.
A creeping sensation tickled the back of Crowley’s neck and he stood quickly, turned around. No one was there. But he had the distinct sensation of being watched. With the amount of time he’d spent in various theatres of war, Crowley had long since learned to trust his sense, trust his gut.
He crouched again, eyes narrowed against the bright spring sunshine, watching the trees. The day had begun to warm up, maybe summer was closer than he’d thought. After a minute or two, he gave up waiting. The sense of someone watching persisted, but there was nothing to see.
With a sigh, Crowley stood and stalked across the grass to the hole in the ground where Tommy had fallen the night before. This time, he’d come prepared. He pulled off his backpack and took out a short coil of rope tied tightly to a grappling hook. The hook was usually used for climbing rocky or frozen mountains, a hobby he’d found as another coping mechanism, but it would also do a fine job of securing the rope to the earth outside the hole, as long as Crowley dug two of its points in deep enough and at an oblique enough angle. He’d collected all kinds of gear since leaving the army, always on the lookout for more adventure. It was hard to replace the adrenaline rush of being shot at. While he would gladly never experience being shot at again, civilian life did get boring quite frequently. He paused, looking at his rope and hook set ready in the middle of a rural English field and couldn’t help a small laugh escaping. What was he even doing? Perhaps he should just go to the gym now and exhaust himself with weights. But he really wanted another look at the subterranean chamber and that strangely beautiful mosaic. He yanked on the rope again, double checking that the hook was firmly embedded, then slipped over the edge of the hole and lowered himself the short distance to the dirt strip between the flagstones.
With the bright sunlight streaming in through the hole above, it was much easier to see the details of the chamber. The stone walls and wooden support beams were well-constructed, and old. A cracked stone and fresh earth and grass showed where the roof had fallen in, probably as Tommy ran over it the night before. He assumed it had been weak for some time and only required weight at just the right spot to give way. Unlucky for Tommy Arundel.
The place was quite old, almost certainly from the era of Roman occupation. Crowley investigated the dirt strip and the embedded iron rings, but could make no more sense of them in the shafts of light than he could in the darkness the night before. Regardless, he took numerous photographs from as many different angles as possible.
Then he crawled back up the low passage, determined to get better shots of the mosaic at its end. But the mosaic was gone. And beyond where it had been the passage continued a short way until it ended in piles of rubble. Frowning, Crowley felt around the edges, shined his torch closely to see what had happened. Sharp, straight cuts in the tunnel wall indicated to him that the mosaic had been removed, and quickly, without much care taken. Had the passageway beyond it always been collapsed, or had whoever had taken the mosaic also blocked any further way forward?
Crowley pushed in past the edges of where the mosaic had been and tried to clear the rocks and earth out of the way, but quickly gave up. The collapse was total and there would be no way through without some heavy machinery. And there was certainly no room for that.
But disturbing the rubble had given rise to a faint whiff of a chemical odor. It triggered memories and nerves through Crowley’s body, set his hands shaking slightly. He recognized it instantly. Explosives like C-4 were uniquely encoded with materials or chemistries virtually impossible to duplicate. Called an odorizing taggant, they acted like a fingerprint, a unique signature of identity. Taggants were sometimes covert, likely only recognizable by a trained bomb squad dog or specialized technology, but some were overt like this one. Used for a wide variety of applications, they were often employed as a way of tracking bombs and munitions back to the manufacturer. Whoever had used explosives down here probably didn’t know anything about that, but Crowley was now certain that the collapse was both intentional and recent. Probably as recent as the early hours of this morning. What the hell was going on here?
Head swimming with confusion, trying to figure out who would do this and why, Crowley crawled back into the main chamber. As he stood in the wan light, he saw his rope shifting side to side. Was someone up there? He opened his mouth to call out when the rope dropped loosely through the hole.
“Hey!” Crowley yelled. “There’s someone down here, what are you doing?”
Something else fell through the hole and clattered onto the flagstones. Something small and rounded. Crowley’s eyes widened in horror as he recognized it for an old-fashioned grenade.