Bloodstream, page 1
BLOODSTREAM
Sally Spedding
The right of Sally Spedding to be identified as the author of BLOODSTREAM has been asserted by her under Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 1998.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © Sally Spedding 2022.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted by any other form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author. Also, this book may not be hired out whether for a fee or otherwise in any cover other than supplied by the author.
Front photograph: by fmatte
Cover design: Dave Lewis
Published by DEATH WATCH BOOKS
Praise for Sally Spedding:
DOWNFALL
‘I could almost taste the fear as Delphine and Captain Valon investigated. Twists and turns galore.’ - Graham Watkins. Successful Author of ‘The Enemy Within’ and historical non-fiction
THE DEVIL’S GARDEN.
‘A really spine-chilling, absorbing story. Delphine is a really sparky character with guts and determination, bent on bringing the criminals to justice.’ Tricia Chappell. ‘Mystery People’ reviewer.
BLOOD AT BELTANE
‘Wow, Sally Spedding hits the spot once again. A clever tightly wound plot with many surprises. Delphine once more reveals hidden depths of endurance and great detective skills.’ - Tricia Chappell. ‘Mystery People’ reviewer.
THE NIGHTHAWK
‘True noir from Sally Spedding…like a cold breath on the back of the neck.’ - Adrian Magson. Bestselling Crime & Thriller author.
BLOODLINES
‘A complex mystery which both chills and entertains.’ - Thomas Waugh. Crime/thriller author
DEATH KNELL
‘A visceral, chilling novel with twists and turns, which keep the reader gripped from start to finish.’ - Christoph Fischer. Best-selling author & Llandeilo LitFest organiser.
CUT TO THE BONE
‘Sally Spedding has unquestionably got what it takes.’ - Crime Time
BEHOLD A PALE HORSE
‘Explores the fragility of love and humanity as mediaeval Europe’s apocalyptic mind-set gallops into the 20th century with brutal consequences. A thought-provoking journey into the macabre.’ - Dot Marshall-Gent. Former police officer, educator and ‘Mystery People’ reviewer
THE YELLOWHAMMER’S CRADLE
‘No-one does evil like Sally Spedding. Chilling. Seriously chilling. Fully 3D landscapes, full of menace in themselves, peopled by desperate characters… A very compelling read, hard to put down.’ - Thorne Moore. Author of best-selling chillers
MALEDICTION
‘An intense, intelligent, visceral thriller from the get-go. If you thought Dan Brown was the last word in clerical depravity, think again.’ - Peter Guttridge. Reviewer and crime/thriller writer
COLD REMAINS
‘This is a horror story and a mystery. If you like well-written, creepy thrillers, this is one to remember.’ - Geoff Jones. Eurocrime
COME AND BE KILLED
‘Sally Spedding is a font of creepy stories, the kind of tales which wheedle their way into your mind days and weeks later.’ - Western Mail
PREY SILENCE
‘Sally Spedding has written an excellent, creepy chiller of what can happen to ex-pats who fall foul of their new neighbours. The perfect gift for those who boast about their French idyll they’re about to live.’ - Carla McKay. Daily Mail
A NIGHT WITH NO STARS
An alarming story of surprises and shocks.’ - Gerald Kaufman. The Scotsman
CLOVEN
‘Sally Spedding has been credited with being a latter-day Du Maurier.’
- Crime Squad
WRINGLAND
‘A tale of chilling menace and powerful atmosphere in haunted fen country. A ghost story handled with real assurance.’ - Barry Foreshaw
Welsh-born, award-winning Sally Spedding’s dark crime/thrillers, short stories and poetry are inspired by Wales, also France where she spent part of each year in the Eastern Pyrenees.
www.sallyspedding.com
Un petit roseau m’a suffi
Pour faire frémir a l’herbe haute
Et tout le pré
Et les doux saules
Et le ruisseau qui chante aussi;
Un petit roseau m’a suffi
À faire chanter la forêt.
Mais avec tant d’oublie comment faire une rose
Avec tant de départs comment faire un retour?
Mille oiseaux qui s’enfuient n’en font un qui se pose
Et tant d’obscurité simule mal le jour.
Écoutez, rapprochez-moi cette pauvre joue
Sans crainte libérez l’aile de votre Coeur
Et que dans l’ombre enfin notre memoire joue
Nous redonnant le monde aux actives couleurs.
La chêne redevient arbre et les ombres plaine
Et voici donc ce lac sous nos yeux agrandis?
Que jusqu’à l’horizon la terre se souvienne
En renaisse pour ceux qui s’en croyant bannis!
Memoire soeur obscure et que je vois de face
Autant que le permet une image qui passé…
From ‘Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins’ by Henri de Régnier (1864-1936)
CARRION CROW (Corvus corone)
Resident.
A solitary creature unlike the rook, and smaller than the raven, it flies alone, all black from head to claw. The bill at the base is overlapped by feathers. The call of the crow - a “caw” - carries a sharp, complaining quality, and when calling, the head is thrown up and brought down whilst the tail is depressed and spread into a fan.
The carrion crow is one of those few species to have derived positive benefits from changes wrought by man, for without woodland and the predators, which roamed therein, these birds have continued to thrive. Their indiscriminate gorging, however, poses a serious threat. Eastern inhabitants migrate west and south-east, whilst those already in the west are sedentary.
1.
Friday 17th May 1985.
The road, wide enough for only one car, left the smooth, silent river Choiseuf at the point of its tightest convolution under the bridge, and followed the hill’s winding contours up towards Millevaches.
Hidden from grazing land and forestry by the high, overgrown hedges, sixteen year-old au pair Pauline Ambrose Archibald from suburban Manchester, removed her hand-knitted cardigan as she walked, then tied both sleeves into a cumbersome knot over that already burgeoning form ripening in harmony with other fruits of branch and briar bank.
Umbelliferous clusters of raw, green elderberries merging with catmint, night-shade and cow parsley, made a fetid barrier of early summer growth. A rare presence in that closely cultivated corner of Lorraine where borderless fields stretched eastwards to the Vosges foothills.
This hedge marked off Joseph Clissot’s territory, lining the road and brushing against her white, English legs, while far below, she heard the Mediterranean express train drawing its chain of crowded sun-seeking carriages through flat patchwork farmland, from grey skies and the threat of rain to guaranteed cerulean blue.
My God…
She’d suddenly noticed a large, black sow rooting and snuffling in a waywardly indecisive manner, coming her way, together with a troupe of well-grown weaners and yet more scavenging adults. Knowing herself to be delicately vulnerable between rib and groin, the girl pressed her back against those sticky, bristling shoots of nature’s wild abandon, not daring to breathe, watching their advance.
Meanwhile, a young lad who, despite his serious expression and ill-fitting dungarees, couldn’t be older than seven or eight, pursued his charges while waving a forked stick. She’d never seen him before, this small guardian who in an instant could lose a limb if those porcine jaws so chose. Nevertheless, he circled confidently around the leader forcing it to retreat, snorting and defecating. The others jostled in its spattered wake, through to a high, sloping field opposite the turning for St. Gannat.
With a few deft movements he’d secured the gate and, while her heartbeat still thudded in her ears, Pauline wondered how many children in her Manchester suburb could have done the same. But weren’t they all of a practical and resourceful nature in these parts? A region once chosen for a renewed German offensive in 1940? Bomb-blighted and hurriedly rebuilt by Armand Rétiers, his farm is all that remains of the tiny, inbred community.
*
In the silence that followed, Pauline crept from her stifling sanctuary and looked around at this foreign landscape so different to the grey, bleak moors near her home where her mother regularly marched her along for several miles at a furious pace in the battle to lose her daughter’s adolescent weight. For a moment, that grim alternative seemed preferable, and she considered sneaking away to the sad ‘Les Sapins’ to pack her few belongings, then thumb a lift to the railway station. But something held her back. A monochrome photograph on the dining room sideboard of a little boy in his Christmas-themed beanie, still missing from home after two years. His big, dark eyes hypnotising her even here. Still pleading to be found.
2.
Meanwhile, that other, older lad wearing dungarees, seemed to have disappeared, engulfed by the bank of gre
She passed those pigs noisily searching in one weedy spot, then that crossed-out sign for the end of Millevaches. Meanwhile, the ground on her right continued up to the edge of La Fôret de Horivelle, the largest field of bachelor Clissot, studded with fudge-brown dairy cows all grazing the same way, as repetitively and mechanically as her passing footsteps. Anticipating rain.
The verge was newly cut and awash with ungathered clippings which lodged between her chilblained toes, so this orange-haired stranger moved out into the narrow road, only to bear round sharply again at the entrance to ‘Les Sapins,’ her place of employment. Both words barely legible. Burnt long ago with a poker into a section of pine, then chiselled and serrated in the shape of a conifer. Beyond this, a weather-worn ‘CHIEN MÉCHANT’ placard swung from a dead beech stump at the end of the driveway pitted by craters of exposed hardcore and bordered by nettles.
This neglected, uninviting approach was added to by the cracked, discoloured rendering and faded shutters of that house lying directly ahead. Its once red tiles which various school books had always shown to be the warmest feature of any French dwelling, were barely light brown and badly in need of repair. Dislodged, askew, or lost altogether, its roof made a sorry summit to ‘Les Sapins.’ A sad memento, perhaps. Maybe even an omen?
*
Whatever, Pauline then walked on the grave of that once sleek Weimaraner dog who now lay beneath one of the lower windows. His bone and lithe muscle enriching the soil for early season strawberries that she’d never be offered. So, she surreptitiously stuffed some of the unripened fruit into her mouth and was thus unable to answer the call from that side of the house.
“Venez ici, immédiatement!”
Damn.
It was Frau Herrendorf, that old German housekeeper. Pauline glanced at her watch, realising she was over an hour late.
“À table, Mademoiselle Archaunbault!” The sharp clap together of those hausfrau hands made her jump as intended, and push past that housekeeper’s large frame into the dark, cheerless room where thick pork vapours filled the air.
“My surname’s Archibald,” protested Pauline as she, the étrangère washed her hands in the sink full of scrapings, then used her bluebell-patterned dress as a towel. “If that’s alright with you.”
“Soyez vite!” Barked that old woman from Mittelwïhr while ladling the bubbling encrustation from the soup’s surface. “Those potatoes are waiting.” She looked angrily at the interloper. Impatience making her movements more pronounced, while pork-brown liquid from her ladle spilled over on to the workbench alongside.
“Merde.”
Frau Herrendorf, widowed as a young bride in 1945 had always, since the English girl’s arrival in October, referred to her in the more impersonal ‘vous,’ and for that sixteen-year-old from Chorlton-cum-Hardy whose stay at ‘Les Sapins’ had been agreed until the following September, this lack of intimacy would remain unchanged.
*
“Voilà!” The old war widow, built like a tank, placed both bowls on a tray and pointed for Pauline to deliver them. But that wasn’t part of her job. A skivvy for the only other help kept. And hadn’t her mother’s advertisement, placed for three consecutive days in France L’est at considerable cost, clearly stated her daughter’s desire to accompany children and help improve their English? There’d been no mention of table-laying or potato-scrubbing, and gradually since those first cautious handshakes in the station forecourt at Longéville, her status had deteriorated, so that when she’d first been introduced to her employer’s twin brother and his wife after Christmas, Pauline Ambrose Archibald, was referred to merely as “La domestique.”
A misleading impression, as later on in the chill, damp beech wood of La Fôret de Horivelle, the handsome Jean-Marie Vincente, a Catholic lawyer with no thought for contraception, had come to know her better. Familiarising himself with her previously unremarked-upon qualities.
*
That slender teenager of medium height with shoulder-length hair the rich colour of orange hawkweed - commonplace enough on that region’s waste grounds - moved the single red rose from amongst the condiments and placed the tray near Renée Vincente’s elbow. White and lustrous like a chicken bone below her employer’s frilled cuff, it matched the pale, sunless tone of her small, pointed face.
Occasionally the older woman’s reddened eyes alighted on that same haunting, framed photograph set on the nearby walnut sideboard. An enlargement, judging by its slight lack of definition. The one used by the media after her youngest infant disappeared. Gérard Louis Vincente, aged only four years and half a month, wearing his Christmas present clothes from tante Hélène in Outreménil.
She remained expressionless while Pauline duly served the soup, only for Olivier to wave her away then recall her to pass him the pepper mill. She was glad to leave at that point, despite the alternative being Frau Herrendorf in the kitchen, for it was always the same. That married couple sitting without speaking, even when their two other children were there. Madame Vincente with her grief-drained eyes and his hooded, identical to those of Jean-Marie, his twin, focussed on his plate.
*
Then came the materialisation of Pauline’s labour. Saucisson chaud à la Lyonnaise lay with German precision on a long, oval dish in the kitchen. Thick rounds of those boiled, waxy tubers carefully overlapped one another under the fulsome sausage, and the woman whose gun-metal grey dress resembled more a war-time nurse’s uniform, excluded l’Anglaise by applying the vinaigrette sauce herself.
This was pushed towards her for delivery with a force that dislodged the glistening bolster of meat, and again, that teenager with a year to spend between school and secretarial college, entered the dining room. She clumsily removed the half-empty bowls, imagining all eyes to be upon her, but the Frenchwoman’s thoughts were much further away.
“The children return tomorrow,” their mother suddenly announced, clearly unimpressed by that platter’s presentation. However, the man whose head was balding in advance of Jean-Marie his twin brother, helped himself with the confidence of one who takes what is rightly his.
“You must be at the station at half past eleven with Frau Herrendorf.” His wife’s English was good, and Pauline nodded, disconcerted by that woman’s sudden focus on her midriff. Olivier Vincente reiterated the train’s arrival time through a mouth stretched to capacity with spiced, fat pork. But Pauline ignored this and pretended to look down at those thin strands of hair swept over to disguise his middle-aged scalp, imagining that here instead of him, sat her lover.
Renée Vincent then made an impatient gesture with her scratched fingers, and Pauline removed her meal, untouched.
“If I see saucisson again this week, I shall force it down that old woman’s throat.” Her eyes narrowed, and those unpainted lips pursed with surprising intent before she’d spat out the rest. “We shall all resemble swine by the end of the month!”
*
Pauline’s stomach complained too loudly as she cleared the table-set trappings no longer needed. She’d not eaten since the previous evening, when boudin had been presented, and only picked at the brown-edged apple flakes clear of those lattice-work strands of coagulated blood. Again, her insides rumbled during the awesome task of refilling wine glasses.
