FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller)
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Authors: D. M. Mitchell
FLINDER’S FIELD
____________________
A novel by D. M. Mitchell
FLINDER’S FIELD
Copyright © D. M. Mitchell 2013
The right of Daniel M. Mitchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, organisations, businesses, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Agamemnon Independent Publishing
By D. M. Mitchell
Max
Silent
Mouse
Blackdown
The Soul Fixer
Flinder’s Field
The Domino Boys
The King of Terrors
The House of the Wicked
The Woman from the Blue Lias
Pressure Cooker
The First D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
The Second D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double Bill
Please check the D.M. Mitchell Author Page at Amazon for details of all his latest releases
CHAPTERS
10
: The Ballad of Sylvia Tredwin
20
: Pacific-Wide, Pacific-Deep
27
: A Mumbled Jumble of Voices
1974
Flinder’s Field
He was going mad with worry. Going mad without her.
He simply couldn’t take the anguish anymore.
Bruce Tredwin grabbed his scruffy old waxed jacket from the hook by the door. It was still dripping wet from his morning excursion
in the fields. He never even noticed the damp feeling on his arms as he threaded them automatically through the muddied sleeves.
‘Bruce, please…’ said his mother, her face anxious and pale.
‘I’ve got to find her,’ he said determinedly, his own face drawn, almost skeletal, like the life had been sucked out of it. His once attractive features had now assumed the grey bloom of unremitting stress, and his skin seemed to hang loose on his high cheekbones, as if it had lost the will to cling on.
‘You’ve been out already for three hours this morning,’ she pleaded. ‘Leave it to the police.’
‘The police!’ he snorted, zipping up the coat with a vigour born of frustration. ‘Sure, like what good have they been this past fortnight? She’s missing, mum. My wife is missing and what are they doing about it? Well she ain’t run off with a travelling salesman, that’s for sure, but that’s what they’d like to believe. She’s in trouble, I can feel it.’ He stomped to the door and she followed him.
‘You don’t know that, Bruce,’ she said. ‘We’ve searched every inch for miles around and she’s not been found. Almost the entire village has been out.’
‘And even they’ve given in,’ he retorted. ‘Well I can’t, I have to find Sylvia. My life might as well be over without her.’
‘Don’t say that, Bruce!’ Her eyes sorrowful
, hands clasped at her waist.
‘Well it’s the damn truth.
She’s all I ever wanted, and now she’s gone and I want her back.’
‘Maybe she did leave
you…’
He stuck out a warning
index finger that hovered a few inches from his mother’s ashen face. ‘You watch what you say, mother!’
‘You know what she’s like…’
‘She’s been different since we got married. Sylvia loves me. She’d never leave me for anyone else, she said so and I believe her. You’re no better than the rest of the fools in Petheram if you believe everything you’ve heard.’
‘But you’re wearing yourself to a frazzle with all this worry. I’m concerned about your health. Going out in the rain like this will only make you ill.
Leave it until morning at least.’
He lowered his head, let out a painful breath. ‘What else am I to do? She’s gone missing. She didn’t take anything, not a single piece of clothing, no
suitcase, nothing. Went for a walk and never came back. I know she’s out there somewhere, and I know she needs me. I won’t rest till I’ve found out what’s become of her.’ His eyes screwed up in misery. ‘Christ, if anything has happened to her…’ And with that he slammed the door shut on his mother and stepped outside into the driving wind and rain.
He pulled the lapels of his coat tight to his neck, b
ut his dark hair was soaked in seconds. Their cottage was surrounded by high trees of hazel and ash, and the wind whipped their naked boughs into a frenzy, the sound not unlike the pounding of the sea raging upon some jagged, forbidding shoreline. They appeared to mirror his inner turmoil, the savage sounds giving voice to his tormented soul. His Wellington boots splashed in the mud of the lane that ran from their house to the main road, the main thoroughfare that cut like a scar through the small Somerset village of Petheram. But while others on this wintry day sought the cosiness of their inner sanctums he could not ever think of comfort, not without Sylvia, not while she might be lying wounded in a ditch somewhere, in pain, desperate for his help. Nor could he think about eating, or sleeping. He was as a man barely alive. A wandering spirit, a shadow of his former self.
Bruce Tredwin searched the high hedgerows meticulously, though he had done so on several occasions, but he
was worried he might have missed something. A tiny detail that pointed in her direction. The police made a pretence of searching for her, but leant towards believing the tales of Sylvia’s supposed latent promiscuity, her proclivity for chasing young men. Sure, she had a few boyfriends, and his friends had warned him off her, but he wasn’t going to listen to lurid tales born of jealousy, because in the end beautiful Sylvia had chosen him above all others to be her husband, to have and to hold forever. Even on his stag night he got into a fight with one of his so-called mates when the drink-fuelled banter got around to Sylvia being the village bicycle. Bruce punched the guy’s lights out and they never spoke again after that.
Sylvia and he had been happy for two years. Blissfully
so. They bought old Hoskins’ place that had stood empty for ages, and were in the throes of doing the cottage up. They’d even managed to get the living room sorted and had chosen a brand new settee two days before she went missing. Why would she leave him after buying a new settee? She loved it when she saw it in the shop in Exeter and tried it out; couldn’t wait to pay for it and get it home. On the way back she even talked about having a baby, painting up one of the rooms as a nursery. Was that the talk of someone about to leave him for another guy? Was that the Sylvia of old, the young, headstrong, passionate, footloose, flighty Sylvia?
No, there was something
dreadfully wrong here and the more he dwelt on it the more his gut screwed itself up into a taut, painful ball.
He measured time only by the dimming of the light as dusk began to creep over the storm-racked land. He must have been
out about two hours, he estimated dismally. Damn the light fading like this. He should have brought a torch.
He was up on
the expanse of ground known as Flinder’s Field, a large open field system on the high, wooded hills overlooking Petheram. The field was dominated on all sides by palisades of dense woodland, towering firs that appeared to scratch the sky with their spiky boughs. The place was sinking into shadow as the bruised clouds overhead continued to mass into a single, dark, boiling ceiling that appeared to press down on him, to crush his hopes out of existence.
‘They’ve always suffered emotionally,’ said Bruce’s moth
er of Sylvia’s family, when the young couple were first going out with each other. ‘Look at Sylvia’s mother – locked away in an asylum or something. That has to mean something.’ Bruce told her straight that Sylvia’s mother wasn’t in an asylum. Unwell, yes, but not a nutter. He took the comment as being born of the archetypal reaction of a clinging mother afraid of losing her son to an attractive younger woman. But he had heard the tales. He’d have had to be deaf otherwise. Small communities like Petheram’s always had their fair share of spiteful tall tales and malicious myths that circulate like bad smells in the small village confines, finding no way out and getting worse.
‘Did you know Sylvia’s father once had to go into hospital
, too?’ she continued. ‘Problems up here,’ she said, tapping her temple. ‘They say it runs deep in the family. Think on what that would mean if you were ever to have children…’
‘Her father had a nervous breakdown down due to stress at work, and the fact he was a Japanese prisoner of war doesn’t help. A few months off work to recover. Nothing sinister. Give the man a break!’ he fired bluntly. ‘It can happen to anyone!’
Except
he had to admit that Sylvia could be a highly-strung wreck sometimes, a little irrational. Even a bit vacant and otherworldly at times. But she was young, they both were. She was twenty when they started going out. He was twenty-two. The young can be forgiven for being vacant, irrational and highly strung. Look at him now; strong, dependable, no-nonsense Bruce Tredwin as everyone thought – how highly strung can you get? And irrational… He was searching a spot he’d searched only the day before. How irrational is that?
But something kept drawing him back to Flinder’s Field…
He looked at the blackening sky and spat out a glob of rainwater that had seeped from his wringing hair into his mouth. Perhaps, in his mind, even spitting at God for visiting this unwarranted distress on him.
‘Sylvia!’ he screamed, the word stretched out long
and aching so that it sounded more like the pitiful howl of a tormented dog.
Then he saw her.
A ghostly figure, like a smudged splash of muted grey paint against the canvas of growing stygian gloom. Silent and ethereal. Staggering over the muddy field, the thrashing trees as her shivering backdrop.
‘Sylvia?’ he said, hardly daring to believe what he was seeing. He moved swiftly over the boggy ground towards her. ‘Sylvia!’ he yelled as the thought struck home that it wasn’t some kind of stress-induced mirage.
It was only then that he saw she was totally naked.
She looked up in his direction but appeared not to see him. Her eyes vacant. Traumatised. Her pale, almost bloodless cold body was covered in splashes of mud, her lower legs and feet torn and bleeding
with bramble cuts. Her long black hair was plastered down with the wet onto her forehead, and sat on her bare shoulders like glossy coiled serpents.
Bruce Tredwin grabbed his wife in a tight hug. ‘Sylvia! Sylvia!’ he sobbed, kissing her forehead and wiping away the hair from her bloodshot eyes. ‘My God, what has happened to you?’ he said, slipping off his sodden coat and wrapping it around her shivering shoulders.
‘Where have you been?’
At last her eyes registered recognition
, but it was as if she regarded him through a gauzy curtain. ‘Bruce?’ she gasped. ‘Is it you, Bruce?’
‘It’s me, it’s me!’ he said, crushing his cheek against her
cold, wet forehead, afraid she might disappear again. ‘Where have you been? Where are your clothes?’ He saw bruises on her slender wrists. ‘Who did this to you?’
‘They came and took me,’ she said drowsily.
‘Who took you?’
‘They came down and took me.’
‘Down?’ he said, frowning. ‘Down from where?’
She looked up
meaningfully to the storm-tossed clouds, rain dripping off her upturned chin and dribbling in rivulets down the wet channel formed by her naked breasts. He followed her rapt gaze heavenwards.
‘They came down from the sky and took me.’
Then she screamed hysterically, fighting off the coat as if it were a clammy beast clinging to her shoulders. He tried to control her, but she broke free and ran across the field, yelling at the top of her voice, but it was swallowed by the melancholy sound of the thrashing trees. He gave chase, desperately calling after her.
And high above, the ominous dark clouds churned.