by Mike Ripley
Exerting his own area of expertise, Lugg asked, ‘Did you get a good look at him?’
‘Hardly any look at all. I think he was more scared than I was.’
‘He is now,’ said Lugg, quickly silenced by a severe glance from Mr Campion, who changed tack.
‘He was stealing bottles, you said; bottles of what?’
‘Not what you might think,’ said his son, anxious to help. ‘You and I would certainly have gone for the brandy or the gin, whereas Lugg would have made a beeline for the rum.’
‘Nothing wrong with a drop o’rum,’ growled Lugg, ‘unless that’s a sideswipe at me being some sort of pirate.’
‘Oh, don’t be so sensitive! We all know that with a better education and a pair of sea legs you’d have been a pirate! Now, Rupert, was your clumsy burglar messing about in the pub’s display of old beer bottles by any chance?’
‘Yes, he was; how did you guess?’
Campion looked towards the backs of Daniela Petraglia and Gianfranco, who were both leaning over the camera a few yards away, and lowered his voice. ‘Oh, just something somebody said earlier,’ he said vaguely. ‘Mr Yallop seemed proud of his collection. Were any broken?’
‘Just the one, and of course I had to put my foot on it.’
Campion glanced towards the camera again and lowered his voice to little more than a whisper. ‘Let me hazard a wild guess. It was the bottle of Prince’s Ale.’
Rupert, speechless, nodded enthusiastically. ‘You don’t think that was the famous Abdication Treasure, do you?’ Then his face fell in dismay. ‘And I’ve gone and broken it.’
‘Mebbe Bill Crow thought that was the treasure too.’ Lugg jutted a conspiratorial jaw into the huddle of Campions. ‘But he’s way off beam there. I was telling our cowgirl friend, Precious the Yank, abaht it. Nice drop o’beer an’ all and a collector’s item these days but hardly worth getting yer collar felt for. We can’t be talking much more than twenty quid.’
‘I agree that even Bill Crow might think that beneath him when it came to treasure hunting,’ said Campion, ‘though I suspect his standards are breathtakingly low.’
‘Who is this Bill Crow?’ Perdita asked him.
‘A local rogue who trades as a rag-and-bone man in Heronhoe; almost certainly the hot favourite in the frame for the break-in at the hall and Rupert’s little scuffle last night. Not that he’s confessed completely but he has shown a considerable interest in the Abdication Treasure.’
‘He’s not the only treasure hunter round here,’ hissed Lugg. ‘Coming through them trees just now I almost turned my ankle on a bit of metal lying in the scrub. Turns out to be one of them mine detectors!’
‘Yes, Precious told me the sound man did a bit of metal-detecting in his spare time,’ said Campion.
‘His name’s Maurizio,’ confided Perdita, ‘and he’s done his detecting thing all over the site. I don’t think he’s found anything but he doesn’t say much. I don’t think his English is very good.’
‘No, he hasn’t found anything yet,’ said Mr Campion enigmatically. ‘Of that I’m quite sure. Look out! Here we go.’
Daniela Petraglia was turning on the impressive heels of her leather boots with one arm raised vertically. ‘Ready for one more take,’ she shouted, ‘with background sound only. So actors, please keep quiet!’
‘She means us,’ whispered Perdita in Rupert’s ear.
Mr Campion’s retort was also barely audible. ‘Don’t be too sure. You two are not the only actors in this field today.’
It should have been a simple exercise for the film-makers: a slowly rising panning shot taking in the upper section of the trench and the diggers – from the waist up, at least – happily doing what diggers do, having been carefully instructed not to look up into the camera lens and thus hopefully preserve the fiction that they were a fine example of robust Suffolk agricultural workers from the Thirties rather than a quartet of students and school-leavers, two of them female, feeling slightly ridiculous in second-hand clothes their parents would have thought unfashionable. Precious Aird, situated nearest to the camera, was designated ‘Number One’ followed by the two boys trying desperately to look like their grandfathers doing the garden, as ‘Two’ and ‘Three’ and then, at the far end of the trench, the diminutive Cat was a hopefully unidentifiable ‘Four’. In fact, Cat had received specific instructions from Daniela Petraglia not to dig too effectively as if she lowered the level of the trench where she stood much further she would sink completely out of sight behind Number Three.
Il Regista, taking her directing duties seriously, patted her cameraman on the back and issued her final orders to the extras.
‘OK, diggers, start digging. Camera rolling. Action!’
‘Is that it, then?’ Lugg grumpily asked no one in particular. ‘Not much to it, this filming lark.’
‘That’s one shot,’ Rupert explained, ‘and quite a long one as it happens. Now they’ll move the equipment and do a closer shot or one from a slightly different angle, once they’ve checked the gate and made sure the sound has taken.’
Lugg looked deliberately confused until he remembered he had already been told about checking the camera lens for obstructions and the sight of the sound man, Maurizio, just out of shot, wearing headphones and carrying a bulky tape recorder on a long strap around his neck and shoulder giving a thumbs-up gesture elucidated things further.
‘It looks like that was a take,’ Rupert explained. ‘It does take an awful long time to create the magic of what you see on the screen.’
‘Just listen to David Lean here,’ Perdita said sarcastically, ‘you wouldn’t believe it was his first time in front of the camera.’
‘But it’s true, darling. Even on such limited experience, it’s clear to me that film-making involves hours of hanging about …’
‘Hours and hours.’
‘And then a few minutes of frantic activity to provide a few seconds of screen time.’
‘Plus,’ Lugg observed philosophically, ‘you ’ave to dress up in all that old clobber, though I admits you both look quite smart, apart from the hair. What have they done to your ginger locks?’
‘It’s called make-up, to add realism,’ said Perdita, ‘and you should try wearing the amount of slap I have to. All Rupert has to worry about is if it rains and the dye leaches out.’
‘Now that I’d pay to see,’ said an immediately cheered Lugg. ‘That’d look like something out of an ’orror film. Masque of the Red Hair, we could call it.’
‘Very droll,’ said Mr Campion, whose eyes had not left the activity in and around the trench. ‘You have raised the art of curmudgeonliness – if that is a word, and I’m pretty sure it should be – to a profession.’ He pointed a finger, drawing their attention towards the trench. ‘While you three have been engaging in caustic persiflage – another splendid word by the way – nobody seems to have noticed that digger Number Four has disappeared.’
‘Where is Number Four?’ demanded an irate film director, peering into the trench.
Diggers One to Three turned their heads to the southern end of the trench and automatically took a step back towards the side. In doing so, they opened a line of sight for Daniela Petraglia who was now standing on the northern lip, hands on hips, bending forward and peering down the length of the trench.
‘I’m still here.’
It was a plaintive, childlike voice, muffled by the fact that its owner was on her knees, bowler-hatted head bent, scratching at the dirt on the trench floor.
‘Are you OK back there, Cat?’ Precious dropped her spade and gently pushed Number Two and Number Three further into the wall of the trench. ‘You haven’t hurt yourself, have you?’
‘No, I’ve found something,’ said Cat, still flicking soil away with her hand. ‘I felt something in that last spit of earth I dug. It didn’t feel right and … Oh, goodness! I think I’m standing on some old bones!’
Then Cat gave a small, kitten-like scream, but it was enough
to make diggers Two and Three jump and attempt to push past Precious to get to the far end of the trench.
By then, Mr Campion was moving quickly towards the trench and Daniela Petraglia was issuing orders loudly in fast Italian.
FIFTEEN
The Hound of the Press
‘Are you sure you felt something?’
‘I’m very sure.’
‘Something solid?’
‘Very solid and it looked like … bone.’
‘Out of the trench! Everybody out of the trench. Maurizio, Andiamo a lavore!’
Any filming done in public, whether for a television news bulletin or a big-budget drama, invariably attracts a crowd of fascinated onlookers drawn to the process as if by magnetism. As long as the crowd remains out of shot, do not shuffle their feet too loudly, cough, sneeze, or make political comments or exclamations of love to the presenters or the actors soon to be ‘on screen’ (usually known, often erroneously as ‘the talent’), then film-makers tend to tolerate them, though invariably wishing that the unwashed, rubber-necking populous had something better to do and somewhere else to be.
At the Sweethearting Barrow that day, the usual crowd of gapers, gawkers and snoopers surrounding a film unit and the assembled ‘talent’ was made up of the unit itself. Only Mr Campion and Lugg could, technically, be classed as civilians or innocent bystanders, and they too were keen to get in on the rubber-necking.
While Daniela Petraglia was clearly in command at ground level, a few feet below her spikey boot heels in the trench itself it was Precious Aird who was organizing things. She pulled Dave and Si out of the way so she could get to where Cat was kneeling and ushered them unceremoniously towards the other end of the trench. She pulled off her hat and flung it on to the spoil heap, the briar pipe following its trajectory, and sank down beside Cat, whose face was white and shocked beneath the rim of the ridiculous bowler hat.
‘I felt something solid under the spade,’ said the girl. ‘I thought it might be a stone, but look, that’s not stone, is it? It’s bone and I don’t want to touch it.’
‘Whatever it is, the best thing to do is leave it alone.’ Precious put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and gently squeezed. ‘Let me take over. You go to my backpack and get me a trowel, OK?’
Cat nodded, the rim of the bowler hat almost catching Precious across the bridge of her nose, then climbed out of the trench like a swimmer leaving the pool.
Precious realized that she was alone in the trench and had an audience in a semicircle above her. This must be the view gladiators on the arena sand had of the baying crowd in the amphitheatre, she thought; and there, looming over her as if with the power of life and death of an emperor, was the Italian woman.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know yet. Let me clean the area with a trowel and see if I can find some edges.’
Cat appeared at the trot and had to squeeze through the onlookers, which now included diggers, film crew, actors and interested civilians in the form of Mr Campion and Lugg, to hand Precious a shining new four-inch builder’s pointing trowel as if passing over Excalibur.
‘Wait!’ It seemed that Caesar was not pleased with the idea, and had a better one of her own. ‘We must let Maurizio in there first.’
Daniela Petraglia’s next utterances were in Italian and Maurizio jumped clumsily into the trench, almost knocking Precious over. Unnoticed by everyone except Mr Campion, he had exchanged his tape recorder and long black microphone for the metal detector and, once in the trench, busied himself connecting the battery and clamping the headphones to his ears.
‘Charming!’ Perdita said loudly, offering a hand to Precious to help pull her out of the trench and up to ground level.
Campion sidled quietly round the lip of the trench to stand next to her. ‘Are you all right, Precious?’
‘Hey, sure.’ She flashed a brilliant smile full of American teeth as she slid the trowel, blade first, into the back pocket of her jeans. ‘Thought for a minute I was going to be called on to do some real archaeology. Phew! That was a narrow escape.’
Campion leaned in to her and spoke softly. ‘What do you think is down there?’
‘I didn’t get much of a chance to look properly but Cat was standing on something, that’s for sure. I got a glimpse of what could be bone; then again, it might be a stone or a piece of rubbish left by the last lot of diggers.’
‘Could it be from the boat burial?’
‘No. Hey, I’m making most of this up as I go along, but I have read up on the basics and we are still digging out the backfill that was put back in after the original dig.’
‘So whatever Cat found went into the ditch when it was being filled in.’
‘Yeah, it’s in the backfill, like I said. That give you a clue?’
‘It gives me a date,’ said Campion.
Below them in the trench, Maurizio became the focal point for the ten pairs of eyes following his every move with rapt attention and bated breath. Once the machine was working to his satisfaction, he began to waft the circular head in slow, sweeping motions across the floor of the trench where Cat had been working. The action of the silvery detector head hovering a few inches above the black earth was hypnotic and Campion was reminded of a Greek word, dredged from ancient memory – boustrophedon, which meant a right-to-left and then left-to-right sweeping movement usually used to describe the alphabetic writing, or reading, of an ancient script or inscription. He had never enjoyed his schoolboy struggle with Ancient Greek and was grateful when Lugg, shuffling up beside him, broke his reverie.
‘If that fella does find a mine, shouldn’t we be standing further back out of range?’
‘Don’t fret, old son. I’ll lay you a tenner against a bottle of brown ale that our friend down there doesn’t detect anything made of metal.’
Almost immediately, Maurizio’s metal detector began to emit a series of high-pitched rapid beeping noises.
‘That’ll be ten of your English pounds,’ said Lugg smartly. ‘I’ll take cash.’
Things happened rapidly. Before the significance of those electronic beeps had registered with most of the onlookers, Daniela Petraglia was issuing instructions in Italian at breakneck speed and handing down a spade to Maurizio in exchange for the metal detector. Without hesitation he set to with a will, digging large spits of soil and flipping them casually behind him so they scattered along the length of the trench.
Precious Aird sucked in air between her teeth and clenched her fists. ‘This isn’t the way to do it.’
Perdita reached for her arm to comfort her, but before she could make contact there was a collective intake of breath from the crowd as Maurizio put his spade aside and bent down to pluck something from the earth. What he held up for the approval of his audience, just as a victorious gladiator would offer up a particularly grisly trophy to the baying crowd, appeared to be a piece of dirty brown fabric. There was a further collective gasp from the onlookers as something solid and grey fell out of the fabric and landed on to Maurizio’s right boot, causing the startled Italian to jump a pace backwards.
Mr Campion decided it was time to intervene. ‘Signora Petraglia, I think we must take things at a more considered pace. This is not what you think it is.’
There was no doubt Campion had grabbed the attention of the Italian woman, and also that of everyone else gathered around the southern end of the trench.
‘The machine says there is metal down there.’ Daniela Petraglia reacted angrily as if defending herself from a vile accusation.
‘It is not what you think it is,’ Campion said with a severity which impressed all who heard him and surprised those who knew him well. ‘We should allow Precious here to do some delicate trowelling and then we can see what we have. Are we agreed?’
Daniela Petraglia held Campion’s gaze for an uncomfortable length of time and then simply nodded once and ordered Maurizio out of the trench. Campion bowed briefly to her then turned and jerked his head at Precious.<
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‘Can you sort this out?’ he asked and, without giving him an answer, Precious drew her trowel like a sword from the scabbard of her jeans pocket and jumped into the trench.
Sinking to her knees, Precious began to wield her trowel, scraping crumbs of earth from the flap of dirty brown material containing the small grey object which Maurizio had lifted and then dropped.
‘It’s bone all right, I’m sure of it, and there’s more of it.’ Head down and concentrating, Precious began to give a running commentary. ‘The fabric could be leather, though I’m no expert and, if it is, it’s pretty cool it’s survived this long.’
‘Thirty-five years,’ said Campion as if thinking aloud. ‘That’s not unheard of in these conditions.’
‘What are you talking about, Pa?’ Rupert, transfixed by the activity in the trench, found his voice.
‘Whatever is down there is within the backfill of the trench. That means it was put in there after the trench was opened and then closed in 1935. Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with an Anglo-Saxon boat burial nor, for that matter, with any so-called treasure.’
Without taking her eyes off Precious working directly below her feet, Daniela Petraglia took issue with Mr Campion. ‘How can you know? The detector says there is metal down there.’
‘There may well be,’ said Campion coolly, ‘and it could well be valuable.’
There was a hush around the site. Lugg, his bushy eyebrows raised quizzically, pushed his face in front of that of his friend and mentor, the gesture asking the question for him.
‘If I was a betting man,’ said a smiling Campion, ‘which clearly I am not, I would hazard some small change on the fact that there’s a gold watch and chain down there.’
‘You claiming to have X-ray vision now?’
‘No, it’s just a hunch, but I’m willing to bet that ten pounds you think I owe you.’
‘Tut, tut,’ Lugg admonished him, ‘and you not a betting man; shame to take the money really. You’re on.’
Mr Campion may not have been a gambler but he was sure he could have placed a winning bet on the fact that Precious, busy trowelling away at the bottom of the trench with her head bowed, would be doing so with a spur of pink tongue protruding from her lips in the universal habit of the young and innocent when they are deep in concentration.
