The Vacant Casualty by Patty O'Furniture Page B

Sam.
    ‘I’m not
made
of money . . .’ said Sam, followed by, ‘. . . Yes, that’s good. Okay, nice . . . No, come on, I’ve got to draw the line
somewhere
and horse tranquilizers is it . . .’
    Some money changed hands and then they separated, both looking very pleased and placing things deep into their pockets, before they realized that the detective was watching them intently.
    ‘Thank God I found you,’ said Sam too loudly to the druid. ‘I don’t know what I would be able to do without my herbal tea remedies.’
    Bradley looked the other two up and down.
    ‘How can I help you?’ asked Saracene Galaxista.
    ‘I want to know who would have wanted Terry Fair-breath out of the way,’ he said, bad temperedly.
    ‘That fucker? Everyone,’ she replied. ‘Come into my tent.’
    S HE SERVED them both with a cup of tea in a tent that was, much to their surprise, far more like a tasteful ordinary British drawing room than Major
Eldred’s had been. Galaxista was hard to make out – she seemed half stupid, half bored and half stoned. And half
intelligent
, Bradley kept thinking to himself, but then he knew
that was possibly a stupid remark to make, even inside your own head, so he abandoned it.
    ‘They all hated him, as you say. The little old sisters, the stupid fat Mayor, the Reverend, Lord Selvington, even the librarian.’
    ‘The
librarian
?’
    ‘Yes. Miss Elvesdon, that decided weirdo. They became friends – study pals, bosom buddies – over something. I think they were digging up something from the past. Then when he
called it to a halt she was very hurt. You know, you should probably seek out the only heterosexual single male in the village, they would probably have a grudge against dear Terry. He was gay as a
cock-shaped kite on the Queen’s Jubilee, but women swarmed to him.’
    Bradley nodded and took this in, but was not ignorant of the extended roll-up that was being passed around. He didn’t know enough about that sort of thing to make trouble, and he was still
reliant on Sam to tell him how to develop his act. And Sam was having most of the roll-up, as far as he could tell.
    ‘So, who wanted Terry killed, Sister Galaxista?’ he asked.
    ‘Sorry, love,’ said the sister, sitting back on a cushion next to him. ‘It’s more a case of who
didn’t
want him killed. By which I mean me,
I
didn’t. He was a sweetheart for us and our cause.’
    ‘And what
is
your cause?’
    ‘We started off objecting to the nuclear waste dumps they were planning here thirty-five years ago,’ she explained. ‘Then there was going to be a massive bypass right across
the hill, near the henge, and we said, like,
no
. No way! We got enough people and we rejected it.’
    ‘So you succeeded?’ Bradley asked.
    ‘Yes, but they keep on trying,’ said Saracene. ‘Their latest plan is to dump thousands of unused books here. A bunch of publishers had tens of thousands of those crappy
parodies – you know, when talentless half-brained hacks try to make a quick buck off the back of genuinely successful authors by writing things with similar titles and book covers?’ she
spat on the floor. ‘It makes me sick. Anyway, they have hundreds of tonnes of these knock-off books they want to get rid of, and they want to dig a hole in the hill here and bury them. But we
said no. We cannot let it happen. You understand?’
    ‘Yes, we understand,’ said Sam. ‘You really don’t want it to happen.’
    ‘No. It
can’t
happen. This is a place of outstanding natural beauty, of ancient wonderment. We will call all the land’s children here to procreate and worship beneath
the henge!’
    ‘Procreate?’ said Sam, starting to find his proximity to Galaxista uncomfortable. He sniffed suspiciously at his tea. ‘What’s in this exactly?’ he asked.
    ‘Just tea,’ she smiled.
    ‘And milk?’
    ‘Tortoise milk, of course,’ she said. ‘It’s full of complex proteins.’ He threw it on the floor with a