Classic Mistake

by Amy Myers

  So why had no one denounced him? There was the Crowshaw Collection to think of. Not everyone would have overlooked that element for the sake of Neil’s memory. Did Frank take the collection along with Joannie or had he been the convenient fall-guy? Again, it didn’t fit. Either Frank had left Joannie with or without the money raised from the collection, or Ambrose must have done so – and Carlos discovered that. Then I began to despair. Ambrose was in no position to tackle Carlos at the lock, so once again I was back to Frank Watson.

  I clutched my head, haunted by an image of Eva still in gaol. What could I do now? If Watson was guilty of killing him I’d get no further and it would be over to Brandon. He was no doubt working on it, but what could I do? Answer: pursue the Ambrose front.

  Josie was still living at Wychwood, and I arranged to visit her after the weekend. She had sounded so welcoming that I guessed the loneliness was getting to her, grateful though she was for the job and the roof over her head. The house seemed more like a tomb than ever and as I arrived I wondered who would buy such a place. Without Ambrose, Josie seemed lost and the house larger than ever. She took me through to the living room, and I could see through the windows that the grass was neatly cut and the flower beds immaculate, so it seemed that Matt Wright was a frequent visitor. I offered to make some coffee for us both, and Josie was pathetically grateful for this small gesture.

  ‘That Thursday, the first time I came to Wychwood,’ I began, ‘Ambrose said he had been to Eastry recently.’

  ‘He was always saying that. Meant nothing. How could he have got there?’

  ‘You didn’t take him?’

  She stared at me as though I were mad. ‘No way. It was his imagination. It was my day off, anyway. He only told me about it later when I mentioned my next day off – it was his way of getting at me when I went out on my own.’

  ‘He wasn’t expecting any visitors?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Was there anything odd about that day? Anything at all?’ I asked her.

  ‘Nothing. He’d spent the day in the garden – I suppose that was unusual.’

  ‘How do you know he did? Because he told you?’

  ‘His shoes were muddy.’

  A hopeful sign. ‘Suppose he actually had been to Eastry? There would be mud on his shoes then.’

  She sighed. ‘He wouldn’t know how to drive that Renault even if he’d remembered it was in the garage.’

  ‘Could someone have taken him there in his or her own car? His son perhaps.’

  ‘I suppose. No one came though, and if it was Dr Fairbourne he’d have warned me or left me a note.’

  ‘Someone else could have come with that Morris Minor and taken him.’

  ‘The one in the barn? Could have, I suppose.’

  ‘Did you check the barn when you got back?’

  ‘No. I never go there. Why should I?’

  Why indeed. Josie, I had to remind myself, was in the best position of all to take Ambrose anywhere or to influence him. Strangling an old man as weak as he was would not be beyond her strength. So far as I could gather through Dave, there had been no prints or DNA that the lab could identify on Ambrose’s body. Josie could also have lured Carlos to the towpath. But with what motive? Revenge was the answer to that. But how about evidence? I asked myself. None – to my relief. I’d come to like her, so I hoped that theory remained just that.

  ‘One last thing.’ I could see that Josie was already anxious to get rid of me. ‘When did Ambrose’s Alzheimer’s begin?’

  She thought about this for a moment. ‘I came in 2004 and he’d been losing it for a little while before that. He had a housekeeper before me, but she didn’t live in.’

  ‘And did he always talk about Eastry right from the beginning?’

  ‘Far as I can remember, yes.’

  The beginnings of an idea were springing up, so I rang Keith Fairbourne when I’d left Wychwood and arranged to meet him at a pub the next day, Tuesday.

  We settled on one at Chartham Hatch, which was handy for the Canterbury Road and therefore suited both of us as a halfway point. At the top of the Downs, it had such wonderful views that we chatted for some time before I had to get down to brass tacks.

  ‘Would it be true to say that your father still associated Morris Minors with Eastry?’ I asked him.

  He grinned. ‘I see you’re still mulling over that car in the barn. Yes, the answer is quite probably. As I told you, he shared the Morris Minor mania with my mother – first the one they owned together and then the later model until he switched.’

  ‘You told me that was in the late seventies. Which year? Can you remember?’

  ‘You’re a tough questioner. We’re going back a while. ’Seventy-eight or ’seventy-nine, I think. I know I pestered him to give me the Moggy, but I was still a couple of years off seventeen then, so he refused.’

  If he was right, then Ambrose probably had a Morris Minor at the time of the shoot-out and there was a chance it was involved in the disappearance of the Crowshaw Collection. If someone other than Josie had taken him to Eastry to revive old memories, what would those memories have been? His theories about King Egbert, perhaps, and where the king’s grave and grave goods might be, but they were nothing to do with Carlos and the shoot-out. Ambrose would hardly have taken the collection to Eastry unless he was bonkers at the time. Which he wasn’t. He would have returned it to the Martinford family.

  ‘Do you see any possible connection between the hunt for King Egbert’s grave and your father’s death?’ I asked Keith.

  ‘I don’t see how. He was deeply involved in the earlier digs, but, as I told you, in 2006 when Time Team arrived in Eastry he was too far gone even to take it in. He did get very excited over watching it on TV, presumably because he was thinking of his own failed dig.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything more about that?’

  ‘As much as I can, but I wasn’t closely involved. At the time of his first dig on Woodlea Hill I was only four or five years old. I do have vague memories of sitting in the sun and my mother allowing me to dig a trowelful of earth out, but nothing more. If they’d expected to dig up the golden statue of Woden, then no such luck. Dad told me later they’d had great hopes of it and there could have been a burial there, but there had been nothing to indicate it was a king’s grave. So he and my mother went home to lick their wounds and eventually came up with another possible site on the hillside. This one really convinced them, but then my mother died.’

  ‘But he didn’t give up the hunt, did he?’

  ‘Far from it. For my mother’s sake, Dad saw it as his mission to see the quest through. Like the previous site, this new one was on the hillside but a little distance from where he calculated the track used to run. This time Dad laid on a proper dig. All the drums and whistles. This was going to beat the Suffolk hoard, he hoped, but again it produced nothing. I was about ten by then, so I went along on one of the three days’ digging. Once again a lot of hopes raised, but nothing firm found, even though Dad was sure he’d nailed it this time. Dad never talked about Eastry after that, not until his mind began to go. He concentrated on other sites, both in Suffolk and Kent, and by the time the nineties arrived he had money worries so he turned to writing and TV work and left Eastry behind him.’

  ‘Did he ever write about Eastry?’ I wondered what had made Egbert’s grave prey on his subconscious mind to such an extent that his illness brought it to life so many years later.

  ‘Never. Odd, really, because he wrote about every other site, but not that one. I think he couldn’t bear to think he might have failed my mother. Sorry, Jack, but I think this Eastry line is a storm in a teacup.’

  I clung to the last vestiges of hope that it might lead somewhere, though for the life of me I couldn’t see how. ‘Even so, could you take me to the place where he believed the grave was?’

  No hesitation from Keith. ‘Sure, if you think it’s worth it. Can’t guarantee any results though. Want to go now? Ther
e’s a footpath nearby, so we don’t need permission to look at it – not unless you want to take a trowel in the hope of finding Woden’s statue.’

  He was a man after my own heart. I did want to go now. If this was another false avenue I wanted to know sooner rather than later, even if it meant all I could do would be stare at the ground that was so important to Ambrose Fairbourne – once upon a time.

  The fates were with us. Even the sun emerged to wish us well. We had made a brief stop for Keith to show me Highborough Hill where Time Team had dug in 2006 and then parked in the centre of Eastry village itself. The village lay slumbering peacefully, and it seemed almost sacrilege to park so casually on ground underneath which could be Anglo-Saxon, even Roman, burial grounds, royal palaces, and homesteads. Keith took me on a brief tour to show me the sites of some of the other digs – the one in the grounds of Eastry House, and the others off the main street in a secluded corner where the church and Eastry Court lay. A cat ambled up towards us took one look and passed on; a villager or two looked at us curiously and did the same.

  The pub was still open when we rejoined the main street, so we went in for a quick drink while we studied the map. Our route lay further along the street we were on, which was the old Roman road to Dover. We would be walking south along it out towards the original boundary of the village. Woodlea Hill, our destination, would be on our left before we reached it. The hill was part of Woodlea Farm, the owner of which, we were told, was Ken Parker, who lived at Northbourne, a mile or two away. However, our informant told us helpfully that ‘old Silas’, Ken’s father and the former owner, was sitting ‘right there’ at the bar.

  Silas, once fortified with another beer, and having summed us up, told us all in one breath that he’d no objection to our going for a walk over his son’s land and what’s more he’d come with us, and if there were any caches of gold coins they were his, not Ken’s, and all dropped by chance so no need of this treasure trove rubbish.

  ‘Agreed,’ Keith told him cordially.

  A footpath led from the road up to the high ridge along which Ambrose’s track line ran. It took us across gently rising fields, and on a day such as this it was easy to think that the Iron Age wasn’t that long ago, and that the Anglo-Saxon era was yesterday. I didn’t expect to see golden cups lined up to greet us when we reached the higher ground, but the reality was certainly starkly different. Grass, trees and fields with scant signs of habitation made my quest look doomed from the start, even if I’d been sure exactly what it was! Keith must have understood, because he advised, ‘Look down, Jack, not out at the big wide world.’ Maybe he thought that was my problem – don’t keep trying for an overall answer; study the case detail by detail – and perhaps he was right.

  When we were close to the highest point, though not quite at it, Keith stopped to look around, then branched off to the right, with Silas and myself in his wake. We were in rough meadow-land with trees and bushes close by. Keith stopped again to study the map. Silas, however, was more interested in studying the ground.

  ‘Someone’s been digging round here,’ he said severely.

  ‘My father,’ Keith explained. ‘Years ago, in the seventies.’

  Silas chuckled ‘That chap? I remembers him. Thought he’d go off his rocker when he found nothing. This is recent digging though.’

  I joined them, but could see nothing strange. Keith could though. ‘This is near enough the spot, Jack, so far as I can work out. And Silas is right. The turf’s loosened.’

  ‘Sheep?’ I said, but this earned the scorn it deserved. The experts were both working their way with their hands round the clumps of grass.

  ‘About four or five feet by three,’ Keith said eventually.

  ‘No one asked me or Ken,’ Silas grunted. ‘They’ve blooming well dug and filled it in again. Metal detectors, most like. Come here, and dig away for England. Think they own the place, some of them.’

  ‘Not all,’ Keith said mildly.

  Now was not the time to mention the metal detector I’d glimpsed in his car boot when he extracted his walking shoes. ‘Any hope of our digging here – with your permission, of course, Silas?’ I asked hopefully. Hopeful of what, I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Not today,’ Keith said firmly. ‘Forgot to bring my bucket and spade. How would you feel about it, Silas? I’ll bribe a few of my students and we could do the thing by the book, if you and your son have no objection.’

  ‘What you aiming to find?’ Silas asked cautiously. ‘One of them gold cups, like Ringlemere?’

  ‘Can’t say,’ Keith told him. ‘That’s the fun of being an archaeologist.’

  ‘The fun of being a farmer is you get to clear up afterwards,’ he grunted.

  ‘No mess, we’re fully house-trained,’ Keith told him cheerfully. ‘And if it’s gold we dig up, your son gets rich very quickly.’

  ‘What do I get out of it?’ Silas asked practically.

  ‘Fame and a day out. You can play with my metal detector.’

  Silas shot a look at him. ‘Suits me. I’ll talk to Ken. He likes these newfangled things.’

  It suited me too, only not from the fame angle. ‘It’s good of you to set all this up,’ I told Keith on the way back to the car park. ‘I don’t know what I’m after though, so is there anything in it for you? If that’s the site where your father dug, then you already know he didn’t find anything in it.’

  Keith considered this. ‘Call it bloody-mindedness. Dad had a mission to see this Egbert’s grave quest through to the end because he owed it to my mother; I feel the same about owing it to him now that there seems to be a question mark over it.’

  I was silent. There was indeed a question mark. Did I go fully into what it consisted of? Keith must suspect from our previous conversations that it might concern his father’s involvement in something murky.

  He picked up my reaction immediately. ‘Look,’ he added, ‘you think Dad was mixed up with the Crowshaw Collection robbery, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know – that’s the problem. And even if he was, why would it be connected with King Egbert?’

  ‘Let’s find out, Jack,’ Keith told me. ‘I’m willing – because I know that my father was a responsible archaeologist and a highly moral man. The honesty of his academic mind wouldn’t let him run off with something like the Crowshaw gold unless he was going to return it to its original owners which—’

  He broke off as the same thought must have struck us both, and we stood in Eastry High Street staring at each other.

  I spoke first. ‘But who are the original owners? The Martinfords at the manor?’

  ‘Or King Egbert of Eastry.’

  ‘His grave goods. You said –’ my words were tumbling out now, although I hoped not so incoherently as my thoughts – ‘your father believed that grave goods belonged in the ground, not in museums.’

  I could see Keith gulp. ‘Dad took them back to Egbert’s grave? Is it possible?’

  ‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘How and when did the Martinfords get the Crowshaw Collection in the first place?’

  Keith was very pale. ‘I don’t know. Not even the British Museum knows much about it, except that the manor has owned it for hundreds of years.’

  ‘How many hundreds? Wasn’t there –’ I scrabbled in my mind for the results of the reading I’d done about Eastry – ‘a collector who lived here, in Brook Street, who discovered one of the graveyards to great acclaim in the late eighteenth century?’

  Keith gazed at me, and I saw him swallow, his academic training clearly fighting archaeological excitement. ‘That was the fashion then. Everyone who had time and money started digging into the past, physically and mentally, and whether in Italy or here. Sir John Martinford – I think that was the manor’s owner then – could well have come here and paid the farmer a pittance to let him dig, or not even bothered. Just dug.’

  ‘And Ambrose realized what had happened.’

  ‘I’ll do some research.’ Keith paused. ‘But wh
o’s been digging recently, Jack?’

  I parted from Keith on a high, convinced that we now had the missing link: Morris Minors, Eastry – and the Crowshaw Collection. Keith would set up the dig within days, and somehow, soon, surely Eva would be freed of all charges. Then I could relax just a little.

  All seemed set fair when Keith rang me to say his father had been called in to give an expert opinion on the manor collection before it was sold. And then Dave rang me and the barometer sank rapidly. I was back in the real world.

  ‘Thought you should know,’ Dave said blithely, ‘that Brandon is dropping the Frank Watson line. We can’t pin the Morris Minor theft on him, and Brandon won’t move on the Carlos front. Alibi like a brick wall without any loose mortar. The most Brandon can do is refer Watson as a 1978 cold case. Meanwhile, he’s a free agent.’

  ‘Oh great.’

  ‘There’s no evidence against him at all. Yet,’ Dave added encouragingly.

  FIFTEEN

  Woodlea Hill seemed an entirely different place than the site I had visited with Keith eight days earlier. This time I was an outsider and I walked along that footpath and up the hillside alone. Keith and his ‘gang’ were already gathered there, judging by the cars parked by the roadside, and as I looked up to the crest of the hill I could see their outlined figures moving along like a shot from a John Ford film.

  ‘Glad we chose a Wednesday,’ was Keith’s welcoming remark as he came to meet me. ‘It’s Wodensday, the Vikings’ divine boss.’

  ‘Found his golden statue yet?’

  ‘Only an ancient beer can so far.’ He paused. ‘I take it we’re looking for buried treasure of a more substantial nature?’

  ‘Egbert’s grave, and whatever your father or his companion was looking for recently when that ground was disturbed.’ What if there were nothing though? That was highly possible, as it had been recently dug. I fought back panic and doubt. I had to go on.

  ‘I’ve marked out a grid with stints covering a wider area than the one we looked at the other day,’ Keith told me. ‘It’s good practice for measuring resistivity.’