The Quick and the Dead (A Sister Agnes Mystery) Read Free Page A

crouched by a smouldering fire, prodding at the embers, trying to balance a blackened kettle on the stones. She looked up, grinned at Agnes, then carried on. A boy was sitting further off, playing the guitar. He had long blond dreadlocks. He looked up. ‘Hi,’ he said.
    ‘Hello,’ Agnes said. ‘I’m — um — looking for someone called Sam. She might have come here. She’s a friend of a girl called Becky.’
    ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, they’re here. They went off to buy stuff in town.’ A few notes trickled from his guitar.
    ‘Sort of shoulder-length hair, mousy-brown —’ Agnes asked.
    ‘Yeah, that’s the one. They shouldn’t be long. Have a cup of tea if Jenn ever gets the kettle to boil.’
    ‘Oh yeah, and you have a PhD in thermodynamics,’ the girl by the fire said.
    ‘Might do.’
    Agnes sat down, screwing up her eyes against the smoke. There was a jangle from the nearest tree and a boy abseiled gracefully down. He threw some rope to the young man. ‘Jeff — we’ve done the walkway between these two,’ he said. ‘Rona’s up there now.’
    Agnes looked up and saw a young woman suspended in mid-air. On each side of her the huge oaks reached out their ancient branches into the shimmering sky. Her long red curls danced as she began to move, and Agnes saw that her hands were on one rope, her feet on another. Against the blue sky she walked from one tree to the next. Agnes began to see why Sam would want to stay.
    Jenn rinsed some mugs out and made tea, squeezing every last thick brown drop out of each teabag. Agnes watched a figure sauntering lazily up the hill from the village. As the girl came close she saw Agnes and stopped in her tracks.
    Agnes looked at her. ‘No, I haven’t come to take you back.’
    Sam broke into a broad smile. ‘Great. ’Cos you can’t, I’m staying here, it’s great, look these are my friends, this is Jeff and this is Jenn and there’s Rona up there and there’s Col, only he’s away somewhere, and Paz, and Becky, she’s still in town, and there’s Zak and his dog called Dog and — and we’re saving these trees from the diggers,’ she finished. Jenn grinned and handed her a mug of tea. Agnes looked at Sam’s tanned skin, her clear grey eyes, the laughter that bubbled from her. She remembered the nervous, huddled person that she’d last seen at the hostel.
    ‘No,’ Agnes said. ‘Of course I haven’t come to take you back.’
    The day wore on. Paz arrived with bags of vegetables and started to cut them up for stew. People worked up in the trees, building platforms. The fire was stoked up, the sky turned pink. Sam took Agnes into the woods to show her where the road would go. Agnes saw a column of smoke rising some way away. ‘What’s that?’ she asked Sam.
    ‘Oh, that’s Bill. He’s lived here for years, I think. He eats rabbit and dandelions and things. Got a gun and everything.’
    ‘He’s not one of you, then?’
    ‘Nah. He’s quite friendly if you meet him, but he keeps himself to himself. Bit of a weirdo. Come on, let’s get back, Becky might be there by now.’
    They wandered back to the camp, and Agnes told Sam about Mike Reynolds.
    ‘My dad, he says? Never ’eard of ’im.’
    ‘He left when you were a baby, apparently.’
    Sam shrugged. ‘Nah. Bet me mum just made it up to get me back. Lyin’ cow.’
    They sat around the fire and ate stew, as the moon rose in the darkening sky. Someone wondered where Becky had got to. Someone else picked up a guitar and started a song, and other voices joined in. Sam was singing by the fire, her face radiant. Up in the trees, lights went on in a tree-house and there was laughter and shouting.
    Then, a scream. A strangled cry from the woods. The music stopped. Another scream, a man’s voice crying for help.
    ‘Paz,’ someone said. They scrambled to their feet, people slid down from the trees, grabbing torches, heading towards the sound, the voice which cried again, ‘Help, help, come