Gerald Seymour - The Dealer and the Dead

Did she believe a word he told her? She wrote his name on the back of each package and their Shropshire address code. The postman would be the proof of his game’s credibility. If no tie or scarf came back, Benjie Arbuthnot had read it well.

He said, ‘I’ve learned… things are seldom what they seem to be.’

She said, ‘Never are, and never will be.’

A bitter, chilled morning. Snow had fallen on the fields in the night and lay almost virgin around the wooden cross. There was peace and calm, and buzzards soared on the winds, clouds scudded and a pair of young foxes were wary as they padded past the cross, leaving trails of their paw prints. The wind, soon, would have covered the tracks with blown snow from the drifts, and already the signs of the path that ran close to the cross were gone. Smoke, from the burning of damp logs, climbed from the distant chimneys of the nearest village but no mourners came to this place, tramping through the impediment of the snow, to grieve and remember. The cross, its lengths of rough wood held together by nails, and the items hanging from it, placed there with love, protruded above the carpet blanketing the ground. Only the cross gave an indication that it was at this point Harvey Gillot had cheated death and Robbie Cairns had not, and that here a schoolteacher and three young men had waited too long for a rendezvous and been trapped in another winter’s first dawn light. A lonely place, cursed, where the dead and their ghosts kept uneasy company.