“We don’t know it’s fake, but that’s not an unreasonable surmise.” Robin ruffled Adam’s hair. “We’ll make a detective of you yet.”
“No, thank you. I have quite enough to do.”
“Shame. I’d like to have you on my team. Actually”—he leaned closer—“I’d like to have you, full stop, but I suppose there’s no chance of that until Stuart’s gone?”
Footsteps overhead formed a theme track to the answer. “No bloody chance at all.”
Agnew didn’t sound surprised to be contacted by Robin so hard on the heels of the detectorists’ meeting. He arranged to meet the police over coffee later that morning, at one of the university cafés. The police could arrive armed with the Culdover archaeologists’ viewpoint on things, as a debrief with Pru and Sarah was first on Robin’s list, before the Friday morning meeting with the rest of the team.
“How did it go with the CAS?” Robin asked once the three were in his office. “Are they as painful as Adam reckons the detectorists are?”
“Not a bit. We had a hoot of a time.” Pru, grinning, gave an encouraging glance to Sarah, who took up the story.
“Yes, sir. Part of it was a brief formal meeting, following up some actions from last time, but mainly the evening was about networking and sharing ideas. And there didn’t appear to be any constraint because we were police. It’s been a long time since I was offered so many top-ups of my glass.”
“Drinking on the job. Whatever next?” Robin shook his head theatrically.
“Leave off, sir. We kept strictly to the lemonade. Diet at that. And we got lots of information.” She held up her official notebook, pinching a wodge of numbered pages between her fingers.
“Blimey.”
“They like to talk,” Pru chipped in.
“But do they like to say anything useful?”
“I’ll have to work with Ben and compare all this to the other information we have. Painstaking, but seeing as we’re so short on leads, who knows what could help.” Sarah opened the notebook, then flicked through it.
“Actually, we might have got a lead, but I’ll leave that until the team briefing.” Robin, amused at the disappointed looks his statement produced, waited for them to continue.
“Spoilsport,” Pru said, no doubt reflecting what Sarah was thinking too, although she’d have been too polite—or wary—to say it. “Couple of things came out. This’ll amuse you. They call Tuckton’s lot the ‘defectorists.’”
Robin chuckled, not wanting to give away that he’d already been informed. “I like that.”
“You’ll like this too. They feel as cross about Lydia Oliver as the detectorists did. The two groups used to get on like a house on fire, and they think she caused the great rift. They’ve been spitting nails since it emerged that she’s really somebody else; nobody likes being conned. And at least one of them says they’ve heard rumours about her and Howarth, although how accurate the rumours are or where they started, who knows.” Sarah came to something in her notes that raised a smile. “They describe Charlie Howarth as a slimy creep.”
“They’ve got good judgement. Howarth and Bairstow seem to have put plenty of backs up.” Maybe it was just as well Ms. Bairstow’s name had leaked, even if Robin wished he could have controlled the flow of information. If people started to talk, so much the better; the police could sift rumour from fact.
“Yeah. They were furious when they discovered the detectorists thought the CAS were behind the ‘spying’ thing, that one of them had put Becky up to it. But now they think it’s a huge joke, and they’re delighted to have severed all connections.” Sarah consulted her notes. “‘Good riddance to a bunch of pretentious twits.’ The actual words they used weren’t as complimentary.”
“No, I bet they weren’t.”
“And they’re much more concerned about the dead girl and who she might be than most of the people we’ve talked to seem to be. They say that if there’s anything they can do to help us work out who she is, we’ve just got to ask.”
“Go back and ask them about fakes.”
“Fakes?” Pru’s head shot up from where she’d been bent over her notes.
“Yes, they’re my new lead. So look surprised when I tell the rest of the team, eh?”
“Will do, sir.” Sarah gave Pru a wink.
“Becky Bairstow isn’t the only person who’s been doing some spying.” Robin consulted his own notes. “Adam met a bloke called Agnew—remember Ben coming across that name?—at the detectorists’ meeting. He’s on the trail of faked artefacts, and he’s convinced that trail takes in Culford. We’re seeing him later, Pru, to get the details.” He halted, puzzled at his officers’ mischievous expressions. “Okay, spill the beans. What do you know that I don’t?”
“Well, we might have heard about the fakes before you did,” Pru explained. “One of the blokes we met last night works at Kinechester Uni, and he’d seen the picture that student took of the mosaic. Apparently, the place is awash with the story.”
Damn. He’d forgotten about that photo.
“So he suspected it was dodgy, just by looking at the picture,” Pru continued. “Maybe Agnew might give us an expert view.”
“It’s on my list of questions for him. Anything else you’re one step ahead on?”
“All the theories the CAS have about what happened. Some of which are weirder than others.” Sarah rolled her eyes.
“Go on; hit me with them.” Robin eyed the thick pile of notes. “For elimination purposes.”
“Okay. There’s a view that the villa might be built on an older site of occupation, one that was used for ritual purposes. What’s so funny, sir?” Sarah asked.
“Ritual. It’s what they always used to say on Time Team when they didn’t know what something was for.”
“This has got evidence to back it up, though. Apparently, when the villa was first excavated in Victorian times, they found the body of a small child in a ditch. Bronze Age, maybe.” Sarah hesitated a moment. “Its head had been stoved in and a flint scraper placed in the grave with it.”
“Like our dead woman?” Robin took a deep, calming breath. “They reckon this murder is somehow linked to that one?”
“That’s about the size of it, although I don’t see it myself,” Pru confided. “This doesn’t feel like the work of an obsessive. If we’d known who the victim was from the start, we’d have plumped for something like an argument that went wrong, and a hurried, unplanned attempt to hide a body. You always look at the domestic angle first, don’t you, sir?”
“Yes. You’re more at risk from your nearest and dearest than any stranger. Although those sorts of murders don’t usually involve dodgy bits of mosaic.” Robin scratched his head. “Hold on, though. What about those letters to the local paper, saying that future digging at Culford should be banned because it was a sacred site?”
“Yes, sir. We asked the CAS if they’d seen them, and whether they mentioned this small child. They said they had read them—for a laugh—but the child wasn’t referred to.” Sarah rubbed the side of her nose, like one of Adam’s pupils might have when puzzling over a tricky sum. “They had no idea who’d written them, although they suspected it was just a loony.”
And they were probably right. “Any other theories get aired?”
“Remember the Community Payback people they had working at the site?” Pru glanced through the office window at the rest of the team.
Robin took the hint. “We effectively eliminated them. Are you suggesting somebody cocked that up?”
“Not sure. Tom, who we met last night, knew one of them. Jamie Warnock, the bloke who’s supposed to have moved back to Scotland. Tom reckons that he comes back here visiting, pretty regularly.”
“And your contact thinks Warnock might be involved?” Heads might have to roll if they’d let a vital thread unravel. The impression he’d got from his team was that Warnock had moved permanently north of the border. “What was he done for in the first place?”
&
nbsp; “Driving offences, I believe.” Pru checked her notes. “Yep. And Tom said he’s seen him three times out and about here; each time Warnock’s been acting out of character. Blanks him. And it can’t be that he’s mistaken somebody else for Warnock, because the bloke’s apparently got a distinctive scar under his right eye.”
“Blanking somebody’s not a lot to build suspicion on, let alone a case.” Albeit this whole investigation was built on thin foundations. “This Warnock might feel embarrassed that he’s got a criminal record.”
“This Warnock used to go out with a girl called Philippa Palmer.”
“Really? Our Philippa Palmer?”
“I didn’t know she was ours, sir.” Sarah cheeked the boss a bit. “I don’t know how common a name it is, but they said she was an archaeologist. That’s one of the reasons why Tom mentioned her, because Warnock used to go on and on about how clever she was and how she’d have loved the Culford site.”
“That sounds like she’d never been there.” Or at least Warnock believed she’d never been there. “You said ‘used to go out with.’ Did Tom say anything about why the couple had split?”
“No. He didn’t appear to know. Just that she’d been on the radar and now she wasn’t.”
“We made a point of asking them if they knew of any women who’d mysteriously disappeared,” Pru clarified, “even if we didn’t put it quite as dramatically. No leading the witnesses.”
“I should hope not.” Robin pushed back his chair. “Time to update everyone.”
The morning briefing and brainstorm had a better, positive atmosphere; Robin’s outburst had evidently had an effect. Alison even volunteered to follow up on the Warnock angle, although Robin gave that job to Sarah, as she’d been the one to first light on it. He gave Alison the ritual aspect to follow up—they couldn’t ignore the possibility of this being the work of some lunatic—encouraging her to look for any evidence of other peculiar happenings at Culford on any other occasions since the Bronze Age.
“If it is a lunatic, one obsessed with ritual, surely that’ll make matters worse, sir.” Ben addressed Robin, but his eyes scanned the team. “People who pick up victims at random and do despicable things to them are usually the ones who get away with it longest, aren’t they?”
“Then we’ll have to hope, Alison’s best efforts notwithstanding, this isn’t that type of case.”
Robin should have been grateful to hear the murmur of agreement run round his team—the first time he’d heard them be united on anything—but he couldn’t shake off the depressing thought that they might never identify the victim, nor her killer.
When Robin and Pru arrived at the café, Agnew proved easy to spot from Adam’s acerbic description of, “Brooding demeanour. The kind that people might describe as smouldering if it belonged to a Spaniard, and would probably call miserable if it belonged to a Scotsman.”
From the firm handshake and the brisk welcome, Robin immediately classified him as a person who wouldn’t tolerate any arsing about; no wonder he’d been so harsh online about the shenanigans between the two rival Culdover groups. He’d certainly struck Adam as being the sort of man who, once he’d decided you knew what you were talking about, would take you into his confidence.
Robin couldn’t help warming to Agnew, in the same way as he’d taken against Howarth, even though he’d taught himself not to be affected in any interviews by how he reacted to the witness or suspect—didn’t they call it the horns and halo effect? An easy trap for young coppers to fall into, interviewing a witness they took to and assuming they were telling the truth, especially if they reminded said copper of their Uncle Fred, who was a bastion of probity. Too easy to go the other way, as well, and give that witness a hard time while you made a deliberate effort not to let your bias affect you.
While Robin reckoned he was savvy enough to identify his biases and remain objective, he’d probably been a touch too heavy on Adam during the Lindenshaw murder when they’d first run into each other. It had been entirely necessary, not letting sexual attraction to a potential suspect cloud his judgement.
“Sir?” Pru’s voice knocked him out of a fond memory of those days.
“Sorry. Copper’s brain—always darting off somewhere.” He took a swig of coffee.
“Occupational hazard, I’d have thought.” Agnew gave Pru a dazzling smile. “I’m glad I met your partner last night, Chief Inspector. He seems very switched on. I guessed he’d have you hot on the trail.”
“He knows how important it is to pass on information in a timely manner.” Bloody hell, how toffee-nosed did he sound? He should simply let his pride in Adam shine through. “So you think somebody is making pretend Roman artefacts and selling them on as the real thing, dodgy provenance and all?”
“I don’t reckon, Chief Inspector. I’m ninety percent certain. Mind you, I don’t have an audit trail of who and where, or else I’d have got in touch with you before now.” He laid a large brown envelope on the table. “This is what I have so far.”
“Thanks.” Robin opened the flap, then whistled at the volume of paper. “I’ve got a nice, keen pair of constables who’ll enjoy ploughing through this.”
“Good. I wish you every success in pinning the swine down.”
“When did this start?” Pru asked.
“Hundreds if not thousands of years ago, although not—obviously—this particular racket.” Agnew gave a shiver of evident distaste. “As long as there have been gullible people with a bit of money to spend, there have been people willing to take it off them. It’s an ancient and not very noble business.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Faked relics for pilgrims, animal bones masquerading as saints’ bones in shrines—I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a burgeoning market in faked carved mammoth tusks being sold out of the backs of caves to unsuspecting Neanderthals.”
Pru chuckled. “You’re probably right. Villainy’s as old as the hills. So, when does this outbreak date to?”
“I’d say a couple of years. Not that it was picked up at the start.” Agnew consulted his notebook. “I got called in about eighteen months ago, when somebody was changing the insurers for their collection of artefacts. I had to give some expert opinions on valuation.” He grinned self-deprecatingly at the word “expert.” “The stuff in this collection would have graced any museum—most of it came from antiquarian Victorian relatives who’d dug it up hither and yon. But there were a few other pieces that had been acquired recently. The last two were definitely ‘off,’ and some of them appeared to be a bit dodgy.”
“How could you tell so rapidly?” Robin had seen the experts on Time Team study a bit of old pot and date it to within fifty years; it always seemed like a magic trick. “I mean, what did you see that he didn’t?”
“She.” Agnew grinned. “For a start, one of the objects in question was an almost exact copy of an artefact I’d inspected only a few months previously. And not a mass-produced Samian Ware bowl. A distinctive statuette. I won’t go into the details, but it rang all sorts of bells, and not tuneful ones. When we looked further, it turned out her version had been manufactured by the wrong kind of iron-production process.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “Had all the dodgy items come from the same source?”
“That’s a good question. And one to which I couldn’t get a decent answer. She was distinctly cagey about where they’d come from. I suspect she thought they’d been smuggled off a site somewhere rather than turning up legitimately in somebody’s back garden.”
“Does that happen? Artefacts turning up in back gardens, I mean?” Pru clearly wasn’t a fan of Time Team, or she’d not have had to ask that.
“Surprisingly often. Sites get used, forgotten about, reused . . .” Agnew waved his hand. “Dig up your own garden and see what you find.”
“I’m afraid I live in a flat. There won’t be any stray Roman roads in my window box.” Pru gave Robin a sidelong glance.
Time
to produce the Culford mosaic? Robin got out the evidence bag which held it; maybe the piece not having been dispatched for identification would turn out to be a blessing in disguise. He encouraged Agnew to slip on disposable gloves, even though the item had already been found to be without fingerprints. Better to be safe, rather than risk Grace’s wrath. “What do you make of this?”
“Hm.” Agnew turned it in his hands, then brought out a small eyepiece to inspect it in more detail. “It appears to be set in opus signinum.”
Pru snorted. “Opus what?”
“Opus signinum.” Robin grinned. “Roman cement.”
“Very good.” Agnew nodded. “Did you study ancient history before you turned to enforcing the law?”
“No. I just watched an awful lot of Time Team. One of my mother’s favourite programmes.”
“Then you’ll know that you don’t usually get tesserae set in this stuff. It happens, but as a rule it’s one or the other. Cement floor or mosaic.” Agnew studied the piece again. “Is this what was found in with the dead girl? Before you ask me how I know, it’s the talk of the Kinechester archaeology department.”
“So we understand.”
Agnew raised an eyebrow. “That must be galling when you’re trying to control flow of information. For what it’s worth, the sensible opinion is that the picture she shared told us little, although it rings alarm bells.”
“Wrong era for the site?” Robin recollected what they’d been told that first day.
“Yes. On the face of it. So either this piece has been imported from somewhere else or Culford has a different history than we presently believe. And there’s a third option.” Agnew studied the piece again. “I’d say this was not only brought in from elsewhere, but probably knocked up within the last year or so. I said appears to be set in opus signinum. I’m not convinced this is the real thing, but I’d need to take it away and check.”
“Thanks for the offer, but we have to follow protocol on that. We were going to send it to Kinechester, although using an expert out of the area might be better.”
Two Feet Under (Lindenshaw Mysteries Book 3) Page 14
