Free Dust to Dust by Ken McClure Page A

with the unfamiliar gears.
    Smith was unconscious and Blackstone barely knew what was going on around him because of the excruciating pain in his face, but Fielding was all too aware of the little yellow digger beginning to trundle towards them and the pair of murderous eyes looking directly at him. ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ he cried out in panic. He knew he had to get out of the trench but it was taking him an eternity to free himself from the weight of Smith on top of him. He felt as if he were caught in a living nightmare.
    The digger had almost reached him by the time he had managed to free his legs and swing one up over the lip of the trench. Motram saw his intention and responded by steering the digger to that side and lowering the bucket sharply.
    Fielding fell back into the trench, crying out in pain and clutching his injured knee. He could only watch as Motram managed to reverse after several abortive tussles with the digger’s control levers. It was clear that he intended to drive the digger down the slope and over the bodies of the three men lying there, perhaps to continue straight on through the wall of the burial chamber.
    To Fielding’s relief, Motram misjudged the alignment of the digger’s tracks as it lurched forward after an uncertain change of gear. He missed the narrow entrance to the trench so that the left track stayed above ground while the other started down the slope. The angle of tilt was too great for the digger and it toppled over to the night, coming to rest against the lip of the trench and throwing Motram out onto the grass, where he lay holding his throat and seemingly fighting for breath before rolling over and lying still.
    The digger’s engine died, restoring peace to the abbey and its surroundings, making everything that had gone before seem quite surreal to Fielding, who stared at Motram’s motionless body, willing it not to recover, before looking briefly up at the sky. ‘Mad bastard,’ he mumbled, searching through his pockets for his mobile phone.
     
     
    ‘He did what?’ exclaimed Cassie Motram when the police told her what had happened.
    ‘He appeared to take leave of his senses, doctor. Ran amok, according to the others; almost killed one of them and severely injured the other two.’
    ‘But this is my husband you’re talking about,’ protested Cassie. ‘He’s an academic, for God’s sake. He’s the kindest, most gentle man on earth. He goes to enormous lengths to avoid killing spiders. There just has to be some awful mistake.’
    The senior of the two policemen sent to break the news gave an apologetic shrug. ‘I’m afraid the medics have had to restrain him and place him in an isolation facility at the hospital,’ he said. ‘They say they haven’t ruled out some kind of … reaction to what was in the tomb.’
    ‘Reaction? What d’you mean? What kind of reaction?’
    The policeman looked helpless. ‘The doctors say they can’t rule out some kind of poisoning or infection …’
    Cassie sank into a chair, holding her head in her hands, unwilling at first to even consider what she was being told. ‘Let me get this straight,’ she said slowly, trying to adopt a rational approach when she really just wanted to scream. ‘You are telling me that John entered the chamber sane but came out mad?’
    ‘That’s pretty much what we’ve been told, doctor.’
    Cassie shook her head as if trying to clear it. ‘I have to go to him,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Borders General Hospital, you say?’
    ‘Yes, doctor. Sorry to be the bearer of such bad news.’
     
     
    Bad news became tabloid news the following morning. The redtops had a field day. The Black Death, the opening up of a centuries-old tomb and the resulting insanity of the principal investigator was the stuff of editors’ dreams. It didn’t take them long to invent an accompanying curse that had come down through the years, which enabled them to draw parallels with the families