Deadlock

Colin Forbes
Prologue

Breckland. Shrouded by dense fir forest on three sides, The Bluebell pub seemed like a haven from the April storm to the seven villagers drinking inside. Night was a cloak, further isolating the ancient two-storey building. The gale rattled the windows, rain lashed the mullion panes, a single tile was torn from the roof. There was a deathly hush along the drinkers as they heard the clatter of the falling tile. Although death was the furthest thought from their minds.

Outside the pub the distant cottages of Cockley Ford were blurred silhouettes. No lights showed in the tiny Norfolk village. It was eight o'clock.

Ted Jarvis, ploughman, clad in an old check shirt, corduroy trousers tied at the ankles with pieces of string, a shabby windcheater, broke the silence.

'Well, let's get on with it. Are we all agreed? We're having nothing to do with this crazy foreigner and his mad plan. Money isn't everything…'

'Now, Edward, there's more to it.' Mrs Rout, postmistress, clutched her glass of port, her voice raucous and domineering as she settled her plump body inside her favourite wooden chair – next to the bar. The other villagers – greedy lot that they are – have to be told. And no nonsense. No argufying. Without us they can't do a thing. That's the long and short of it.'

Everyone, including Joel, the barman, nodded. Mrs Rout had spoken and that was an end to it. She drank more of her port. The other four men – Ben, the tractor driver; Eric, the lad who was simple in the head; George, the grocer; and William, the ditch digger nodded again. Mrs Rout drove her point home.

Then there's that new doctor just come. Portch. Don't like him. Not one of us. Anyone needs doctoring goes to Ransome at Cockley Cley …'

The heavy wooden door slammed open. A weird figure stood inside the doorway. Mrs Rout stiffened. She opened her mouth to speak but only a croak of fear emerged. She had thought it was the gale which had forced open the door.

The figure wore a Balaclava helmet. Over that he wore a yellow oilskin with the hood half-pulled down across the helmet. Rivulets of water ran off the oilskin, dripping on to the scoured wooden floor. In gloved hands he held an Uzi machine pistol.

He stood motionless, the cold eyes behind the helmet slit surveying the room with its smoke-blackened beams supporting the ceiling. The eyes noted the position of each of the seven villagers who looked like frozen waxworks. Then he began operating the gun. In short bursts. A fusillade of bullets swept the room as he arced the weapon.

Rain beat against his back as he stood, steady as a rock, continuing the sweep of the muzzle. Mrs Rout slumped in her chair, her hand knocking over her glass of port. Its contents stained the floor as she lay with her head twisted to one side, her false teeth hanging half out of her mouth. Joel, the barman, tried to duck behind the counter. A hail of bullets hurled him against the shelves attached to the rear wall. He sagged out of sight, bringing down a load of bottles on top of his corpse. A momentary pause in the lethal chatter of the Uzi. The gun moved past Simple Eric, leaving him standing and staring with glaucous blue eyes, staring at the blood oozing from Mrs Rout's lolling hand, blood which mingled on the floor with the spilt port. Ted Jarvis stood up from his chair and the gun chattered again. He crashed back into the chair, broke its back, sprawled behind it. Ben, the tractor driver, a tough stocky man, grabbed an almost-full bottle of beer, hoisted his arm to aim for the killer's head. He doubled up like a jackknife closing, dropping the bottle. It rolled across the floor in another brief pause. The only sound was beer gushing on to wood. Two more brief bursts. George and William crumpled into lifeless caricatures of human beings.

It was all over in twenty seconds. Five hideous corpses in various postures of death furnished the room, the sixth out of view behind the bar. The man in the Balaclava helmet walked into the room as a hawk-nosed man wearing a black wide-brimmed hat and a black coat sodden with rain came in behind him. He had a pince-nez perched on the bridge of his nose.

Balaclava pressed a lever, changing the mechanism to single-shot, then paused by each body. He placed the muzzle tip close to each skull, fired once, then moved on. He was walking behind the bar when the hawk-nosed man spoke as he shook water from his hat.

'Is that necessary?'

'I do a job.'

Balaclava was laconic, spoke English with an American accent. He stooped behind the bar. A last shot rang out. The man with the pince-nez carried a black bag which he placed on the nearest table before bending over Mrs Rout. He pursed thin lips.

'I'll have to dig the bullets out of the skulls,' he complained.

'Your part of the operation, Dr Portch,' Balaclava commented. He stared towards the doorway where another man had appeared, a wide-shouldered countryman with an overlong jaw which gave him a primeval look. 'Grimes, are you coming in to clean up this mess?'

They're queueing up outside,' Portch answered. 'Best give them a few minutes to prepare them for this. I've been in enough morgues but the place looks like an abattoir. Where is Simple Eric?' he queried.

'Ran right past me,' Grimes replied. 'Hell for leather towards village. Christ! What's that?'

Balaclava stiffened, his first reaction since he had entered the pub. In the near distance, muffled by the torrential rain, a bell began chiming. A slow, dirge-like chime. Portch reacted first, addressing Grimes whose ruddy face had lost colour.

'Ned, it's the idiot. Eric. Stop him at once. We have to clean up quickly…'

Grimes ran outside. Villagers stood huddled in pairs, protected against the weather in oilskins and raincoats. Each couple held a makeshift stretcher, carried a plastic bucket and a mop. Inside Portch beckoned to them, calling over his shoulder to Balaclava.

'They'll be all right. I gave each of them a Valium to soothe their nerves…'

Grimes pounded along the curving road, head down against the driving rain, heart thudding in his chest, glad of an excuse to get away from the bloodbath. He ran on past the few cottages lining the three sides of the triangle-shaped village green.

His objective was a tiny church perched beyond a wall on a small hill. The church was constructed of flintstone. Attached to the western end of the ancient edifice was a circular bell-tower. The chimes continued, louder now. With trembling hands he pushed open the grille gate in the wall, stumbled up the mossy path to the entrance porch and turned the iron ring handle of the studded door. He paused, then went inside.

At the foot of the bell-tower to his left Eric stood hauling a long rope up and down with both hands. The single rope was tied at intervals into a series of loops like nooses. The solemn, doomful note of the invisible bell – a metal ladder led up to a closed trap-door in the wooden ceiling – rang out again.

'What the hell are you doing?' Grimes demanded.

Tolling for the dead. Tolling for the dead…'

Eric grinned foolishly and then the grin vanished as Grimes hit him a savage blow on the jaw with his clenched fist. The simpleton sprawled on the stone-paved floor, his back against the curving wall as he gazed up.

'No one died,' Grimes told him as though speaking to a child. 'Understand? No one died tonight. They was ill, they was sick. They did die. A few weeks ago. Dr Portch was away. It was too late to save them when he got back. So they was buried. Do you understand, for God's sake?' He grasped Eric by the shirt collar and shook him like a dog. There was saliva on his mouth as he bent close to the simpleton's face. 'I said, do you understand? '

' Aaarraagh! '

Eric was choking, gasping for breath. Grimes realized he had twisted the lad's shirt collar in a vice-like grip, that without meaning to do so he was strangling him. The horror he would have to return to inside The Bluebell had filled his mind. He relaxed his grip, began slapping Eric's face with desperate urgency.

Eric mustn't die. Grimes was panicstricken at the thought. They had discussed it the previous day. Dr Portch had said the idiot lad would help to frighten people away from the village. That it didn't even matter if Eric was there when the killing of the objectors took place. No one would believe a word he said. And he never left Cockley Ford. He was an asset to the atmosphere of a tightly-closed off community Portch had created. Only Grimes left the village to collect supplies from Thetford. To Grimes' profound relief, the lad began to recover, sitting up.

'They was sick,' Grimes repeated, hammering the message into the fool's skull. They died a few weeks ago. They was buried then. No one died tonight.'

'No one died tonight,' Eric agreed, parrot fashion…

Outside in the churchyard in the drenching rain behind the building six sheets of heavy canvas covered freshly-dug graves. In the lee of the church wall, sheltered from the rain, crouched an old man like a guardian of the graves. He leant on a rusty shovel smeared with wet mud, huddled in a sailor's pea-jacket with a hood concealing his head. He would have to wait. He knew that – but that was one thing a gravedigger learnt. Patience.

The outside world might never have heard of the April massacre at Cockley Ford but for a chance happening. A man called Tweed decided to take a rare holiday.

Over a year later.