The Brotherhood of the Dragon

Chapter Six

Chapter Six‘Do you think we should dig him out?’ I asked Vulk, kneeling by the hole and peering in.

‘And by “we” do you happen to mean you want me to dig him out?’ None too subtly, Vulk tried to hide the spade he had been carrying behind his back.

‘Guess that means he’s staying in there. Would have been nice to know how he died,’ I said, trying for a little emotional blackmail.

‘That’s easy enough. He’s been exsanguinated.’

I looked from the corpse to Vulk, and then back at the corpse. ‘How can you tell?’

The old dog gave his nose a little tap. ‘No blood, and I do not mean on the body. There is no blood anywhere near that body, or in it. You are looking at something that is little more than a dry husk.’

Reaching down, I completed a quick search of the man’s pockets that I could reach from my position. This revealed nothing so, exasperated, I grabbed one sleeve and yanked hard, pulling the arm free of the earth. Sitting on one finger was a ring I recognised from a description I had been given days earlier.

Finding the ring and retrieving the ring, however, turned out to be two different problems. After a number of tugs, it was clear the ring was there to stay.

‘Out of the way,’ Vulk called out as he raised his shovel and brought it down with a loud chud. ‘There you go,’ he said, pulling the ring from the now dismembered digit and tossing it to me. There are no words for how open my mouth was during the dismemberment.

The ring fit a description I had been given by Mr Thomas De Gois, father of a missing boy, Jerome De Gois. The lad had also been the fiancé of Miss Robyn Stamford. The De Gois family knew how much the boy loved the girl and had become suspicious when he disappeared and the Stamfords claimed he had run away with someone else. Normally I would never have bothered with such an investigation, but the Stamford family had caught my interest after I did a little research on their history. The boy’s father had also offered me a lot of money, and I mean a truly obscene amount of money, to find their son, so that helped.

Before arriving at the house, I had investigated the boy’s disappearance, and almost immediately great holes appeared in the Stamford story. There had most certainly been train and ship tickets as the family had claimed, purchased in the name of Jerome De Gois and Miss Julie David, the girl he had supposedly run away with. Yet enquiries at the hotel where the pair had allegedly stayed before their departure revealed no description of the lovers. No one at the station, nor the port where the ship had sailed from, could remember anyone resembling them, and a letter sent to the shipping line’s office at their port of destination in New York revealed no one had actually occupied their cabin during the crossing. Certainly none of this was proof of any wrong doing; the couple may well have laid down a false trail to ensure anyone following them—such as a vengeful Stamford posse—would waste time chasing phantom passengers and allow them to merrily sneak away in the opposite direction. I mean De Gois was apparently running from a bride whose father at one stage had an entire army ready to die for him. Surely out of the ranks he could find a few lads willing to do him a nasty favour to find and eliminate the man who’d just broken his daughter’s heart?

I was no longer pursuing that line of reasoning because this had been too obvious, and history has taught me nothing was ever that easy. The body lying at my feet was proof my suspicions had been correct.

‘Are there any more?’ I asked Vulk, who was busy keeping an eye on the rest of the garden to make sure we were not disturbed.

‘Any more? Bodies, you mean?’

‘The girl to be exact. I expect Miss David will be lying about here somewhere as well.’

The light seemed to dawn behind Vulk’s honey-brown eyes. ‘His girlfriend. I should have thought of that myself. I haven’t found anything, but to be fair I stopped looking once I found him.’

‘Right, well, I have to get back to the main house. Keep up the good work,’ I said, nodding my head at the body, ‘and when you get the chance, have a look for the girl.’

‘I’ll do better than that, I’ll do a thorough search of the grounds, plus any place a body could be stuffed into. I usually find whenever there’s one body, there’s going to be more. Like weeds, corpses are.’

‘A gardener to the end,’ I said, slapping Vulk on the shoulder and wandering back up the path to the distant house.