3. ONE BIG PROBLEM

So Crin, the drummer, has been killed. But how?

It was a good thing that Jed’s camper-van was between me and whatever disaster had befallen Crin because I can’t stand the sight or the smell of death. I even shudder at the sight of blood. Yes, I know we’re all mortal and the grim reaper will claim each and every one of us before time is up, but I don’t want to be reminded of it just yet.

So, “He can’t be!” I spluttered, pausing and letting Scabbie and Joanie overtake me.

“He bloody is!” exploded Jed, “come and see if you don’t believe me!”

I did believe him when I saw how white his face had become and how his gnarled walking-stick shook in his grasp. That alone was a reminder that our fantasy folky group wasn’t as young as it had been way back. Walking sticks. But we’d probably sound as good as we ever had. At least, that was the hope.

Then, when we’d rounded his camper-van, he pointed at a deck chair.

It was an old fashioned deck chair, with a wooden frame and striped cloth forming the seat and back, one of a pair that were arranged neatly facing the crumbling castle and the sun.

And lying in it, as if he was asleep and about to snore, was Crin, bald now, and yellowing where he’d shaved his bushy beard off. And like an obscene gesture to the gods he had an arrow sticking out of his chest. Just like that. A patch of blood was staining his sixties vest and beginning to make a trail downwards, following the rules of gravity.

“No drummer, then,” I murmured as if what he did in The Sparklers was in any way important because he was a man who minutes ago had been alive and vibrant and was now an ex-man, deceased, his soul (if he had one �" he had never believed in such things but there’s more to reality than one man’s beliefs) drifting off into the great beyond where souls might go, if there is such a place.

“Don’t be so bloody insensitive!” hissed Joanie, “the poor man’s dead!”

“We’d best get the police,” said Jed, still shaking and still white.

“Who shot him, though?” I asked, knowing that none of us knew the answer but asking the question anyway.

“Not me,” muttered Jed, knowing it was either him or an unknown person.

And that unknown person appeared round a crumbled wall of the cruel castle, hobbling and fighting for breath.

He was a bit old for Robin Hood, in fact more than a bit, but he was dressed like him and suddenly I was suffused by a suggestion that somehow we’d found our way to a chink in the space-time continuum and somehow been presented with a bit of the distant past. Only the castle was still crumbled like it wouldn’t have been in the distant past and Robin Hood was followed by a woman in sexy modern dress.

A youngish woman.

Possibly the most delightful and enduringly beautiful youngish woman I had ever seen. And those eyes...

“What’s going on and why are you here?” she demanded harshly, almost shattering the illusion of female perfection, “I’ve booked the site until Sunday!”

Sunday. The original odd day. Number one.

“What site?” asked Jed, more for a sound bite to crackle in the air than because he was at all bothered with what site she meant. After all: there was only one site �" a castle so ruined that nobody was particularly interesting in either restoring or preserving it. There were loads of other castles around, and just about all of them were in better condition than this one. Much better condition.

“This site!” she protested.

“And you didn’t think of putting a sign up saying strangers who don’t want to be shot should keep away?” asked Scabbie, on top form because he had Joanie holding his hand and squeezing his fingers with unbelievable gentility.

Then Robin Hood noticed Crin. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at Crin.

“That’s Crin,” said Scabbie with more than a hint of vitriol in the two words.

“He’s a drummer,” I added.

“And a friend, which is more to the point,” hissed Joanie.

“My mate,” added Jed in order to establish his own relationship with the object in the deck chair.

“And he’s got an arrow sticking in him,” concluded Scabbie.

“We need the police,” said Joanie, firmly, “because a man is dead and I know for a fact that he didn’t want to be dead. In fact, dead’s the last thing he wanted to be. The very, very last.”

“It is for all of us,” said the beautiful woman with eyes that I could swim in if I was a spirit of something or other and able to swim in lovely eyes.

“We should have put a notice up,” said the woman to Robin Hood.

“That’s hardly my part in the fiasco!” protested the geriatric outlaw. “All I had to do was fire an arrow through what’s left of that window over there, retrieve it and then shoot is into the trunk of a tree, thus marking the place I want to be buried. You see, I’m dying.”

“I’m sorry, but Crin beat you to it,” put in Joanie, a little harshly, I thought.

“It’s a film we’re making,” said the woman, “excuse me, but I’m June. I’m the director.”

At last! I’d come face to face with a film director! Someone who, at this eleventh hour of my life, might decide to promote me to being a romantic hero surrounded by even more romantic heroines, all of which want a part of my own personal action.

But where was the rest of the cast? Where the engineers? Where the complex piles of scenery? Where the army of assistant directors? And best boys? Where were they, and what’s a best boy anyway?

June could see the questions forming and reforming in my brain and she decided to help me. “It’s for the Internet,” she said, “and we’re just using mobile phones. Two of them, to cover all angles.”

“And now you’ve got a dead body,” almost snarled Scabbie who could be, if the mood took him quite crabby. That’s probably how he got his nick-name.

“I wonder...” began June, “could we rewrite the scene? Put, what did you say his name was, in it?”

“Crin,” I put in, helpfully.

“No you bloody can’t!” almost exploded Scabby, and Joanie squeezed his fingers so affectionately he almost burst out of his trousers.

“We can’t have the police involved,” whispered Robin Hood. “I’ve only been out for a couple of months...”

“Out?” raged Scabbie, “Out of jail? And allowed to handle a vicious weapon like a bow and arrows?”

“No. Not jail. I’m gay, that kind of out,” he blubbered.

“What’s that got to do with the police?”

“It used to be illegal, when I was a nipper,” crumbled Robin Hood. Yes, he was that old.

“Oh, don’t be a pansy, granddad!” screeched June, “for goodness sake, the man’s dead!”

“There’s a real reason why we can’t involve the police,” said Jed flatly, and we all turned to him for enlightenment. Was he going to tell us something we didn’t know, something that would, in the very saying of it, put everything right?

“It’s Crin,” said Jed quietly, “he’s an illegal immigrant and he doesn’t really exist, and that’s one big problem...”

© Peter Rogerson 11.06.18