Alex Scarrow - October skies

The top-heavy wagon lost its grip, toppling over the edge, throwing the woman out on to the ground. She landed heavily at the top of the slope only to watch the wagon roll over as it tumbled down the slope, crushing the hickory canvas bows and, undoubtedly, the poor girl inside. The oxen, dragged over the edge with it, followed in its wake, a squirming tangled mass of muscle and hide and flailing legs.

The wagon’s tumbling descent, as one whole, came to a shuddering halt as it slammed into a tree trunk. The wooden vehicle shattered with an explosive force, leaving an avalanche of debris — torn and jagged planks of wood, barrels and boxes and tattered cloth and shattered pottery — to continue its rolling descent to the bottom of the gulch. The oxen followed the same path down, most of their limbs and necks already broken and flopping like lengths of ribbon.

Skittering down the slope a moment later came a length of rope and, attached to it, the axle ripped from the conestoga being used as a winch at the top of the hill.

Ben looked up the trail to see that the wagon had been pulled partway down and turned on its side, leaving a trail of damaged and battered possessions strewn behind it.

Mr Hussein whispered a curse in Arabic.

It was Preston who reacted before anyone else, throwing his broad-brimmed hat to the ground and beginning to scramble down the perilously steep slope, with little apparent care for his own safety.

From the top of the hill, where the men had been working together to winch up the wagon, Ben heard Mr Zimmerman bellowing with grief.

Sunday

Flight UA176

Julian stared out of the window at the fluttering port wing of UA176 and the two very heavy-looking engines that wobbled precariously beneath it.

He hated turbulence — really hated it. The ‘seat belts on’ sign pinged.

‘Great,’ he muttered, gripping the armrest tightly.

The little girl sitting beside him looked up from the game on her phone. ‘Are you scared?’ she asked.

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and knotted his eyebrows sternly as he turned to her, hoping he was conveying both a relaxed lack of interest in the mild buffeting and the notion that right now, he really didn’t need to be consoled by a maternally minded child.

‘Just fine, thanks.’

She nodded, satisfied he wasn’t going to need babysitting and returned to her game. He returned to focusing his mind off the fact he was riding a 350-ton kerosene bomb, 30,000 feet above the ground, kept aloft merely because they were travelling through air fast enough.. for now. He turned away from the window and pulled down the blind. If he couldn’t see those wafer-thin wings wobbling through the turbulence, it might help.

There was news playing on the small dropdown LCD screens; more on the still-distant US election, and the Republican party’s continuing efforts to find a strong partnership to run against the Democrats. It was followed by a quick throwaway item on several independent candidates who had already thrown their hats into the ring. There was the usual array of attention-seeking nuts amongst them, Julian noticed. He decided to turn his attention to work, opening up a folder of printed sheets — the Lambert journal — but his mind swiftly drifted off-piste.

Rose.

What happened there?

In the last few years they’d spent literally thousands of hours in each other’s company, and a few dozen of those, the worse for wear from booze. But nothing like that had ever happened before. On the one hand, there was a tingle of desire, on the other, it felt wrong — like looking at a sister or an auntie in a funny way.

Julian shook his head. Why, all of a sudden, after three years of working together, had this awkward situation cropped up?

Why now, for crying out loud?

Work, Jules… work.

He looked back down at the open folder and the scanned pages of the Lambert journal. The first entries had been few and far between, sometimes days, even weeks between them. The handwriting was measured, tidy, comfortably spaced and relatively easy to read. But, as he flicked quickly through the pages, they became longer, the handwriting more erratic, cramped, dense and much harder to decipher — like a child running out of space in a school exercise book, the letters were shrinking towards the end, and the ink grew fainter. He found himself squinting with the folder held up almost to his nose as he tried to make out a few random sentences on the last few scanned pages. There the writing was all but indecipherable — careless hurried scrawls.

A word here, a word there stood out of the dense pages. He wasn’t sure if his tired eyes were deciphering the spidery handwriting correctly. But one word he thought he had picked out whilst digitising the pages a couple of days ago, he now saw again.

… murder…

He felt some instinct inside him twitch. He suspected there might be something more to this story than a wayward wagon train that had got lost in the mountains. As soon as he got back home, he planned to set up some meetings, but he was going to have to read through as much of this journal as he could in the meantime, then get the story transcribed and typed up for others to read more easily. More importantly, reading through this diary would help him make sense of the mystery he’d discovered at the very back of the journal — the ragged edges of three or four pages that had been ripped out.

Murder and mystery.

‘This just gets better and better,’ he muttered to himself. The girl beside him looked up from her phone for a moment before turning back to playing her game.

Then there was research. He was impatient to get back to his flat, fire up his computer and start the process of researching this Benjamin Lambert’s background. He suspected it wasn’t going to be too difficult. Even back in mid-1800s England, it was difficult to live a life without leaving behind a forensic trail of yellowing paper records.

First things first, though.

He flipped back several pages in his notebook and resumed transcribing the contents of Lambert’s journal, stopping every now and then to interpret the faded ink scrawls, the gentle buffeting of the plane soon forgotten about.

23 September, 1856

Preston emerged onto the track where Mr Zimmerman stared anxiously down at the tangled wreckage below, holding his sobbing wife in his arms and rocking her gently.

Mr Zimmerman looked up at him. ‘William… is she…?’

Preston, breathless from the exertion of pulling himself up the steep slope, ignored the father and looked around at the gathered faces. He spotted Ben.

‘Mr Lambert?’

Ben nodded.

‘Your trail captain, Keats, says you have some medical knowledge.’

‘What? Just a little. I was training as a doctor before I…’

‘Come with me, now.’

‘Let me get my bag.’

‘Quickly, please.’

Preston led the way back down, a treacherous descent made more difficult by an inch of snow rendering every foothold slippery and unreliable. Near the bottom, as the rush of the stream grew louder, they passed the oxen, wrapped around the base of a stout Ponderosa pine like some many-legged, many-headed beast. To Ben’s surprise, amidst the mass of tan hide, one or two of them were still alive, struggling and bellowing pathetically.

They climbed down further, until Ben could see the tangled remains of the wagon, and the curious sight of modest undergarments and Sunday-best clothing dangling from the higher branches of several trees nearby, as if hung out to dry.

Lower down he could see Keats squatting over something near the stream. Preston stopped and turned round to face him. Ben could see tears in the man’s normally stern eyes.