Excerpt of Time Enough to Die by Lillian Stewart Carl

Chapter One

The hand was delicately molded, the nails smooth, the
flesh stained brown. It lay palm upward, fingers gently
curved as though in supplication. Severed at the wrist,
the hand rested on the block of peat that was one of a
hundred ranged along a black, oozing gash in the earth.

Gareth March raised his eyes and looked across the moss
and bog myrtle of the marsh to the higher ground at
Durslow Edge. A misty rain moistened his face. But it was
too late to weep for this victim, whoever she had been.

"I reckon it’s one o’ them bog bodies, Sir," P.C. Watkins
said. "Every now and then the cutters will turn up a bit
o’ one. Like empty leather bags they are, after all those
years in the peat. Maybe two thousand years, Dr. Sweeney
says." The constable turned to the workmen who stood
nearby, the peat-digging machine looming behind
them. "Right, lads, bog body or no we’ll have to have the
boffins. Can you cut the peats somewhere else?"

With grumbles, good-natured and otherwise, the men moved
away to plot a new strategy.

"Thank you for having us in," Gareth called after them.
Watkins was right. The hand had to be investigated
scientifically.

Gareth looked back at it. It was so well preserved he half-
expected it to move.

"I reckon the rest o’ the body were chewed up by the
machine." Watkins squatted down and extended his own hand
over the one almost camouflaged by the peat. His hand was
large and pale, like an anemone. It completely covered the
smaller one. "A woman, right, Inspector March?"

"The forensics chaps can tell, I think."

"I reckon she were a pretty one. Dainty, like a princess."

"Princess Diana was six feet tall." Gareth saw no reason
to let a muddy relic of dead time seduce him into
sentimentality. "We’ll hand that block of peat in at the
lab. No need to call out a scene-of-crime team. There’s no
crime scene."

"Yes, Sir," Watkins said.

The mist thickened into rain. A breeze ruffled the dark
surface of the nearby lake. The air smelled of damp
vegetation and age, not of human death. What did the
locals call this place? Shadow Moss. To Gareth it sounded
like a name out of a fairy tale.

It’d been donkey’s years since he’d visited his
grandmother’s cottage in Aberffraw, since he’d listened to
her stories of heroes and demons, of gleaming swords and
magic cauldrons. His grandmother had claimed to have "the
power"—second sight. But Gareth was thirty now. He no
longer needed to believe in rubbish like ESP.

His transfer to Scotland Yard had just gone through.
London had bright lights and loud music. London was a long
way from the Welsh borders, Shadow Moss, and such petty
concerns as bog bodies.

Hunching his shoulders against the November chill, Gareth
turned and strode away. When the mud sucked at his boots,
he wrenched them free.

The taxi dived out of the parking lot onto the main road.
Another car didn’t crash headlong into it but passed
harmlessly by to the right. Ashley Walraven exhaled,
hoping the driver hadn’t noticed her gasp of fear. They
drove on the left here. She knew that.

She knew a lot. She’d studied hard, worked long evening
hours in a supermarket, and stood her ground stubbornly to
achieve this moment. "I’ve been accepted, Mom. Dr. Bates
even wrote me a letter of recommendation to Dr. Sweeney.
I’ll pay my own way. It’d be just too cool to study in
England. It’d help my career chances."

"Career?" her mother had replied. "Did you know that half
of all divorces happen when the wife makes more money than
the husband?"

"Mom. . . ."

Mrs. Walraven had turned away with a dull shake of her
head. Only now, as she blundered toward adulthood, was
Ashley beginning to understand her mother’s despair—damned
if you did, damned if you didn’t.

This trip was going to make a difference in her life,
Ashley assured herself. She looked out the window, hoping
to see half-timbered houses, castle battlements, Morris
dancers, anything. What she saw was modern Manchester with
its warehouses and concrete interchanges, cold, gray, and
featureless beneath a cold, gray, and featureless February
sky.

"Your first trip to the U.K.?" the driver asked.

Ashley considered his face in the rear view mirror. He was
about her own age, with longish brown hair and a
suggestion of a beard. His slight build was reassuring.
The intensity of his gaze in the mirror was not. She
shouldn’t expect British men to react to her any
differently than American men did. Yeah, she thought, you
work and work to look nice, and then you get attention you
don’t want.

She sat up straighter and fixed her eyes on the
window. "I’m spending a semester at the University of
Manchester studying British history, art, and
archaeology."

"Ooh, a scholar, now." His thin shoulders made a la-di-dah
shrug.

Ashley set her jaw. So much for a polite answer.

"Mind your step. They found a blond lass like you out at
Corcester yesterday, by Durslow Edge. Her throat was cut."
The driver’s long, bony forefinger made an evocative swipe
across his Adam’s apple.

Corcester. The old Roman fort where the dig was going to
be. Great—the last thing she needed was for any of her
mother’s dire predictions to come true. The taxi swooped
down from the freeway onto a street lined with shops that
didn’t look at all like those back home in St. Louis.

"She wasn’t a student, though," the driver went on. "Shop
assistant. Went missing last week. The police think she
was shagging her boyfriend in a layby. They’ve charged him
with murder. Says he didn’t do it, though. Says he hadn’t
seen her for several weeks, that she’d given him the push.
She’d been having it off with someone though. The boffins
must’ve had a giggle finding that out. You have a
boyfriend?"

Ashley didn’t answer. Neither did she ask him to define
his slang. She took a handful of change out of her purse
and started sorting pounds from pence.

She’d worked a long time to earn this trip. It was going
to make a difference. It was.

The sky had leaked rain every day this week. With a
grimace at the unrelenting overcast, Matilda Gray ducked
from the traffic of Gloucester Road into the tube station.
An assortment of Londoners trudged through the turnstiles
beside her, heads tucked, collars turned up. Footsteps
echoed from the high ceiling.

Oh to be in England now that April’s here, Matilda thought
sarcastically. Not that she’d expected sunny skies and
balmy temperatures—she’d been here often enough over the
years. But a lark or a daffodil or two could have had the
decency to appear this time, to mark her first summons
from Scotland Yard.

The stairs were crowded, as they usually were this time of
the morning. Matilda played human pinball to the edge of
the platform and stood there hemmed in by damp umbrellas
and soggy carrier bags. In the people around her she
sensed only an undercurrent of business and domestic
worries, tamped by dull resignation.

Except for one hard, hot bolt of purpose. . . . She
glanced to her right and intercepted the direct look of a
young man.

Even as their eyes met he melted into the throng behind
her. He’d hardly been flirting with her—Matilda was old
enough to be his mother. Not that he reminded her of her
own college-age son. Patrick had his moments of defensive
tautness, when he yet to accept his own burgeoning
persona. This youth seemed resentful and belligerent. It
was an occupational hazard, Matilda told herself, to
occasionally intersect some private trajectory of emotion.

A hot breath of exhaust stirred along the tracks, and the
hem of Matilda’s raincoat twitched. A rumbling roar and a
bright headlight heralded the approach of the train. The
crowd shifted expectantly. A sudden shove in Matilda’s
back thrust her forward.

For one long, breathless moment she hung in the air beyond
the edge of the platform, suspended more by disbelief than
by any law of physics. The wind of the onrushing train
whipped her hair back from her face. Its roar filled her
head to bursting.

A hand seized her arm and jerked her back onto the
platform. She caromed off several bodies and came to rest
gazing at a black-clad adolescent whose haircut made him
look like a punk poodle. "Eh, luv," he said, "you mustn’t
stand so close to the edge."

Her mind gasped, coughed, and squeezed out thought. She’d
sensed purpose, but not malice. Any number of people had
been standing behind her, on a crowded subway platform
during morning rush hour. Her near-fall—her near-death—had
been an accident.

The train stopped, thrumming, and its doors slid open.
Poodle-haircut guided Matilda across the gap and placed
her in the only empty seat. She craned past the bodies
cramming themselves into the car, but couldn’t see the
youth with the chip on his shoulder.

The doors closed, sealing her inside. The train jerked and
sped away. Odd, how cold she was. She could hardly feel
her own fingers clutching the strap of her shoulder bag.
The stale air lay heavy in her lungs.

"Thank you," Matilda said to Poodle-haircut, who swayed
above her grasping a ceiling knob.

"Yeh," he said diffidently, and turned away.

She looked at the Underground map above the windows. She
had to leave the tube at St. James Park. She had an
appointment at Scotland Yard.

That push in the back hadn’t been an accident. She must be
getting a great reputation—no one had ever tried to kill
her before. The pusher might have wanted revenge for some
old, successfully-completed, job, like the Mound Builder
scam in Arkansas or the affair of the Greek vase and the
California museum. Or he might have intended to keep her
from arriving at Scotland Yard and accepting a new job.
Hardly fair, to attack her before she even knew what that
job was.

Already she was a threat to someone, someone who knew her
plans before she did. This promised to be an intriguing
case. She’d have to raise her fee.

Matilda’s mouth and chin set themselves in a thin line
that her enemies would have called mulishness, but which
she preferred to call tenacity. She sank back into her
seat, closing her senses around her like a nautilus
retreating into its shell. Still she felt cold.