Winter's Last Victim Read online

  “You… you knew how to open it?” She stuttered and Rob nodded.

  “Yeah… I told you that once you get into the gist of it, their language is pretty easy to decode. Well, all that mumbo jumbo I said about the writing on this tube was exactly that… complete mumbo jumbo. What it actually says is something along the lines of: ‘Change password from default setting of password’.” He finished and Holly stared at him.

  “You’re telling me that the password for the canister was ‘password’? You just said that the Midastophians were careful! What if they’d been as careless with the vial?” She said, eyeing the dark liquid at the bottom of the vial with distrust. Rob shrugged.

  “You know me, I like to take a chance,” he said with a grin and Holly would have punched him if it hadn’t been for the well-sealed but breakable looking glass vial in his hand.

  “The question now is what do we do with it?” She said aloud and Rob sighed. She could tell he was thinking about the evidence of the Midastophians and how it would change everyone’s view on the world’s history. But then, if knowledge of the disease spread, there would be panic and inevitably more people who might choose to use it for ill. It wasn’t safe in anyone’s hands.

  “I figured a few things out while I was waiting in my cell for you to come through and save my butt,” Rob said with a slanted grin. “We can’t let this thing get into anyone’s hands. It needs to be hidden again and never found.” The smile slipped from his face. “The Midastophians, they’ll stay a myth, or a suspected hoax forever. We’ll share the vial but never the whole truth. The vial will almost certainly be called a hoax, even with the canister. But everything else must stay secret… this is just a smokescreen… something that will worry our hunters until we can get away,” he finished with a sigh. Holly reached out and instinctively took his hand, knowing how hard it must be for him to say that after dedicating his whole life to finding the real proof of the ancient population. “Where we’re gonna hide the real deal though… I don’t know.”

  Holly chewed her lip for a second before feeling a lightbulb flash in her head. She got out her phone and typed out a text, not expecting a quick response. When her phone buzzed a moment later with a new message on the screen she was pleasantly surprised.

  Madison Church, Little Green, Oakend

  “What’s that?” Rob asked, looking at the address. Holly typed the info into her sat nav.

  “We’re going to pay our last respects,” she said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Last Respects

  “Grave digging? Is this what my lengthy career of crime fighting has come to?” Rob complained as he turned over a spadeful of earth. Holly didn’t know why he was complaining so much. The grave had already been dug. They were just excavating it.

  “If no one sees us, then this is a good idea,” she said. Rob pulled a face but he’d already grudgingly agreed that she had a point. Who’d think to look beneath a freshly dug grave for an ancient vial of deadly disease?

  Holly paused to wipe the sweat from her forehead as their spades finally clunked against the wood of the coffin. This was the part she wasn’t relishing.

  “Ladies first…” Rob said and she glared at him before wedging a spade into the seam of the lid and levering upwards. She looked down at the pallid face of the deceased archaeologist, Douglas Patterson. A thick line of stitches showed where his head had been reattached for burial. She shook her head.

  He shouldn’t be dead.

  “I know it’s not much comfort, but you’ll be keeping something incredibly important safe for us,” she said to the lifeless corpse. For once, Rob didn’t make any jokes and pulled the vial from his pocket, bending down and slipping it into the corpse’s hand.

  “May you rest in peace for a long, long time to come,” he said.

  Holly and Rob returned the lid and reburied the coffin. As the sky started to lighten in the east, the grave looked just as it had when they’d started - fresh but professional. Holly was silently grateful for Rob’s long digging career.

  They walked back to the entrance of the graveyard slowly, with Watson playfully snapping at their heels.

  “Things aren’t going to be the same again, are they? We aren’t just going to be let go,” Holly said, knowing that sooner or later, one of the groups they’d crossed would come looking for the missing vial.

  “Leave it to me… I’m a man with a plan,” Rob said mysteriously. They made a stop at a 24 hour pharmacy and he returned to the car, his intentions still a secret. Holly watched as he coughed for a bit and than hacked up some phlegm.

  “Eww, really?!” She complained as Rob gobbed into the glass tube he’d just bought.

  “What? I’ve got a cold!” He said and then smirked. “It’s the classic, isn’t it? A vial of mysterious disease that wiped out an ancient, hyper-advanced civilisation is analysed only to find that… dun dun dun… they were killed by the common cold. Case closed.”

  Holly rolled her eyes.

  “I think you’ve been listening to War Of The Worlds. Also, no way is that going to fool anyone for long, right?” She said as Rob typed some coordinates into the sat nav. He shrugged.

  “Well, it might not be far from the truth. Their civilisation died out but some humans must have survived or we wouldn’t be here. It’s possible that whatever is in that vial, we’re resistant to it.” He tilted his head. “Or all the humans who survived were the dumb ones who lived far enough away from the smart population that they didn’t catch the disease. It’s probably that, but let’s not dwell on it. Next stop… the local news!”

  Holly drove off, wondering what they were going to do when they got there but couldn’t ask Rob as he was on the phone.

  “We’re going to London, aren't we?” Holly said, glancing the estimated time of arrival and the postcode on the sat nav. Rob shot her a grin in-between dialling numbers.

  “Yeah… the local news. It’s time to go public with all of this,” he said, picking up his disgustingly fresh vial of germs and popping it back into the metal tube. The case was still at the casino but they had the bits that mattered.

  ***

  Holly nearly had to pinch herself to believe it. Just hours ago she and Rob had been caught in the middle of a gunfight and now he was going live on the news to talk about the discovery of the Midastophian vial and to go public about both the government’s and the underworld’s intervention. The Twitter feed was already going nuts and Rob hadn’t even dropped the bombshell about the potentially fatal disease he was carrying in the secret vial. She hoped he’d make that announcement sharpish as she wouldn’t put it past either of the big players they were up against to try and cut the news off… if that was even possible.

  She breathed a sigh of relief when the interview concluded and the evidence was turned over - very publicly - to be analysed by top scientists who had already volunteered their services. It was just too bad that Rob had needed to lie about exactly when the society was and the extent of their technology. He’d likened them to Greeks or Romans, although it wouldn’t be long before the analyses threw up too many questions and the whole thing was written off as a fraud. But for now, it bought them time.

  “Won’t they still come after us, despite all of this?” Holly said, ducking down as lights flashed in her face when she and Rob walked out of the studio. All too late she remembered her self-promise that she would look super glamorous the next time she appeared in the news. Unfortunately, being caught up in a gun fight and pulling an all-nighter digging a grave did not equal a fresh face and a fashionable look. She had a strong feeling that she looked even worse than she had after Horn Hill House.

  “Yeah, they’ll come all right. Especially when they figure we did something with the real vial, which they will when they try and date the find and discover that the vial and the canister don’t match,” Rob said once they were beyond the rabid paparazzi.

  “What will we do?” Holly pressed, thoughts of her cottage in Little Wemley and the
surprisingly successful detective agency she’d set up flashing through her mind. They got in the car and Watson jumped over the seats, washing their faces eagerly. Holly realised he wanted breakfast and made a note to stop at the first shop they drove past. The poor puppy hadn’t had the best 24 hours. Neither have I, Holly thought.

  Her gaze drifted to Rob and she was disgusted to see that despite the mud, which stained the clothes that he’d worn for the past couple of days, he still looked great. His dark hair seemed to tousle itself naturally and the dirt just added to that rugged look. He might have walked straight off a calendar photo shoot.

  It was so unfair.

  Rob turned in his seat, noticing her stare and smiled, his eyes flickering towards her mouth. His lips curved into his usual devilish smile.

  “I’ve got a few ideas about what we can do together… but for starters, how about a company holiday?” He raised an eyebrow and Holly thought furiously, trying to ignore the seductive images of Rob lounging around on a sun bed, which seemed to persistently distract her.

  “I can’t leave Watson!” She said, thinking of the puppy above all else, and he nodded thoughtfully.

  “Yeah, I wasn’t talking anywhere exotic. That would be way too predictable for two people on the run. We should go somewhere scenic, safe, and completely unexpected. How do you feel about…” He paused dramatically. “Birmingham?”

  END

  Other Books in the series:

  Snowed In With Death

  A Fatal Frost

  Murder Beneath The Mistletoe

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