The Labyrinth Makers

by Anthony Price

  Faith held up Theodore's gift. 'Well, don't give up yet. The Fellowship of the Ring did just the same in The Lord of the Rings - they forced the Dark Lord to attack before he was ready, and he came unstuck. Maybe Panin will come unstuck too.'

  Audley smiled at her. Woman-like, she had committed herself with her affections. Panin was the enemy now, the Dark Lord, whoever he was. And the least he could do in return for such loyalty was to play the game out.

  He watched her in the mirror as he shaved, and Panin faded into immateriality. Not just Panin either–Stocker, Fred and all the rest as well. At some stage since Saturday night they had all changed places in importance with this girl. The longer he was with her, the closer he came to reality. And whatever happened, the real world was Faith struggling with her zip-fastener.

  She turned towards him at last.

  'Will I do, then?'

  The long white dress, slashed in front from the ankle to the knee, was classically severe, but the heavy golden earrings and elaborate necklace were barbaric–no, not so much barbaric as pre-Hellenic.

  'Take your glasses off.'

  'But David, I don't see so well without them. Don't you like me in glasses?'

  'I like you better in them. But not tonight.'

  She slipped them off and stared vaguely at him: Steerforth's daughter to the life now, almost as her father might have dressed her. Except that the costume jewellery was from Bond Street, not Troy.

  'Now you'll do very well. Very well indeed!'

  'I hope so! But I've got butterflies in the tummy, David. Don't ask me to play the femme fatale ever again–this is positively the last time.'

  Audley shared the same stomach-turning mixture of excitement and fear as he followed her down the passage. He had nothing with which to face Panin except pure bluff. Yet Panin didn't know it was bluff. And this was the home ground, for all its soft carpets and heated air: 3112 Squadron's home ground, where the Russian had been beaten once before. The ghosts were on Audley's side here.

  A subdued murmur lead them towards the bar. The swarthy waiter smiled unselfconscious admiration at Faith and honest envy at Audley before sweeping open the door for them.

  They had their entrance, anyway.

  For Nikolai Andrievich Panin.

  But he had his back to them, engrossed in watching Butler cut an imaginary cricket ball down past gully and third slip for four easy runs. Roskill stood politely at his elbow in the act of raising a tankard to his lips.

  Then the tankard stopped, the imaginary bat was lowered and Panin slowly turned towards them.

  Audley had known what to expect; that face was in a dozen pictures in the file. Yet it was a sickening anti-climax nevertheless: Faith's Dark Lord was a very ordinary little man, totally without any aura of power or menace. The sheep-face with its bent nose was greyish and deeply-lined like an eroded desert landscape. It was the file brought to life, giving away nothing–not even a raised eyebrow for Steerforth's Trojan daughter.

  Audley put out his hand.

  'Professor Panin.'

  'Dr Audley.'

  There was hardly a trace of an accent. Indeed, the foreign-ness of the voice lay in its complete neutrality.

  'This is Miss Steerforth.'

  Panin regarded Faith without curiosity.

  'Miss Steerforth,' he repeated unemotionally.

  Faith took the smooth, dry hand he offered her. 'Professor Panin, I'm afraid my father once caused you a great deal of trouble,' she said in a voice equally devoid of emotion. 'But I think it's rather late for an apology.'

  The Russian considered her for a moment.

  'Miss Steerforth, we are not responsible for our fathers. Mine was a sergeant in the Semenovsky Guards–the Tsar's guards, Miss Steerforth. And after that in the White army. But that was not my business, for I was a babe in arms. So you have nothing for which to apologise.'

  He turned back to Audley.

  'Major Butler has been instructing me in the finer points of cricket. I know the theory of the game, but the fascination of a game lies in the finer points, would you not agree?'

  'For the spectator, certainly. For the player it's winning that counts.'

  'But you played rugby, I believe–and that is a game of brute force played by gentlemen. At least, so I have heard it described.'

  'Whoever described it for you obviously never played in Wales, Professor Panin. I might just as well describe yours as a dirty hobby for scholars.'

  'A dirty hobby?' A note of puzzlement crept into the voice. He hadn't expected to be insulted.

  'Archaeology, Professor.' It was comical to see Butler relax. 'Archaeologists at work are indistinguishable from navvies.'

  'But an innocent hobby, Dr Audley. Archaeologists are safely sealed off from modern history. Historians are too often tempted to stray from their chosen field, are they not?'

  Parry.

  'Very true. And also there's always the danger that they'll make inconvenient discoveries.'

  Thrust.

  Panin nodded. 'And then they discover that the truth is not as indivisible as they thought. Not a clear glass, but a mirror sometimes.'

  It was time to stop playing, thought Audley. 'But we're not concerned with history or archaeology, are we! Only indirectly, anyway. I take it as confirmed that you want me to find the Schliemann Collection for you?'

  Panin inclined his head. 'I gathered from Brigadier Stocker that our small secret was out. Yes, Dr Audley, my government would be most grateful if you could do that. Then we will jointly restore it to the German Democratic Republic.'

  Just like that, as though it was a mislaid umbrella!

  'Well, I think we have a fair chance of finding it tomorrow, given a little luck.'

  Try that for size, Professor.

  Panin was unmoved. 'So soon? But I am gratified to hear it. I had feared that it might prove a needle in a hay stack.'

  'It certainly might have been easier if you had confided in us from the start–and I mean from the very start.'

  The lines deepened around Panin's mouth.

  'There was a certain … embarrassment about the loss of the collection in the first place, Dr Audley.'

  Sir Kenneth Allen had hinted as much. To abstract the collection from G Tower had been the prerogative of the conquerors; to have lost it then so quickly reduced the conquerors to bungling plunderers.

  'And then we formed the opinion that it was irretrievably lost,' Panin continued. 'We believed that there was nothing anyone could do. It was only when I heard of the recovery of the aircraft that I revised my opinion.'

  There was a great deal left unsaid there: the whole Russian obsession down the years with ditched Dakotas. A little honest curiosity would not be out of order.

  'Professor Panin, we all know of your reputation as an archaeologist,' said Audley slowly, 'but I must admit I find your interest in the collection–and your government's interest–a little curious. Couldn't you have left it to the East Germans? After all, it's not a political matter.'

  'There you have put your finger on the truth, Dr Audley. It is not a political matter. For me it is a very personal matter. It was I who lost the Schliemann Collection. I lost it in Berlin, and I lost it again here in England.'

  He stared lugubriously at the many-stranded necklace which rested on the false swell of Faith's chest.

  'There is a German scholar,' he went on, 'a Dr Berve, who argues that there was never a siege of Troy–that Homer's Troy was a village overthrown by an earthquake. But I have handled Schliemann's treasures, and I have never forgotten them. In fact, as I have grown older I have thought of them more often.'

  There was neither conviction nor passion in his voice. He was simply stating facts for Audley to accept or dismiss as he chose. Sir Kenneth might have used the same words. Faith had said it outright and Stocker had suggested it.

  And now even Audley found himself wanting to believe it too. Treasure–above all, treasure of gold–had always driven men to irrational a
cts. Cortes and Pizarro and all the victims of the search for the Seven Cities and the Gilded Man. Schliemann's treasure had been enough to tempt Steerforth to risk five lives and lose his own. It had killed Bloch quickly and Morrison after half a lifetime.

  But was it enough to haunt a man like Panin?

  He realised with a start that he was staring direetly at Roskill, and staring that young man out of countenance. And there was something else—

  It was the hotel manager, standing at his elbow, now beautifully dinner-jacketed and still sleekly out of place against the dark oak beams.

  'Excuse me, Dr Audley.'

  And marvellously out of place in Newton Chester too, thought Audley. The sleepy place could have seen nothing so Mediterranean since the Roman legion from Lincoln had come marching by to build its practice camp down the road.

  'Excuse me for interrupting you, Dr Audley, but Mistaire Warren, of Castle Farm–he was looking for you this afternoon here. He left a package for you which I have.'

  The man took each aspirate like a show-jumper on a tricky course of fences, landing triumphantly on the final full stop for a clear round.

  Butler already had an airfield map, but Audley suddenly wanted to get away from them all–to consider Panin for a moment by himself and to collect his thoughts again. This was a sufficient excuse.

  He followed the manager out into the hall, where the fellow darted into his office and reappeared flourishing a large envelope so exuberantly that Audley thought for a second that he was going to spin it across the hallway.

  But the flourish was converted into an elegant little bow, and Audley felt honour-bound to open it there and then as though it was a document of the highest importance.

  There was a note pinned to the folded map, biro-scrawled in a childishly copperplate hand.

  'Dear Dr Audley–I enclose my father's map, as promised. I'm sorry it isn't quite what I thought. The runways are marked in pencil though, but none of the buildings. My father was very interested in—'

  The next word stopped Audley dead in mid-sentence.

  Carefully he unfolded the creased section of the large-scale ordnance survey map. It wasn't luck really, he told himself. He would have come to it himself in the end, sooner or later. Indeed, he could see the signposts pointing to it along the way, which he had left behind only half-read.

  And there it was, of course: Steerforth's treasure neatly and precisely marked for him. Marked as exactly as if it had been Steerforth, and not Keith Warren's father, who had recorded it.

  As for luck, though–if any man had had good luck, and then equally undeserved and final bad luck, it had been John Steerforth.

  XVI

  For the second time Audley watched the water tower sink slowly into the tarmac skyline behind him. He did up another button on his raincoat. Roskill was driving with his window down, and the Land-Rover was draughty; it was another unseasonable morning, clear enough, but grey and unfriendly. One of those mornings when spring hadn't even tried to break through, even falsely. Morning had purged the old airfield altogether of the atmosphere it had possessed on Sunday evening: it was no longer melancholy and forlorn, but merely bleak.

  But it was a good morning for digging–that had been Butler's only comment as he dumped the spades in the back. And Butler, in navy-blue donkey-jacket and baggy gardening trousers, had undeniably come prepared to dig.

  Roskill's confidence was not so complete; or perhaps it was simply that his equally ancient tweeds still retained a lingering elegance. As he had explained unapologetically the night before, he had no garden of his own, and consequently no gardening clothes.

  Audley superimposed the ribbon of runway and the waving sea of grass on the map which was now etched on his memory. At about this point, on the left, there should be the break in the grass which marked the concrete base of the safe deposit hut.

  'Stop here for a moment.'

  He climbed out of the cabin and took in the whole circuit of the surrounding landscape. Ahead of him the taxiing strip stretched away, narrowing until it merged with the trees in the distance. Behind him the slow incline of the Hump obscured the old built-up area of the field. On each side the prairie lay wide and open. It was still a lonely and naked place, with only the distant racket of a tractor out of sight to the right: Farmer Warren was busy cutting his Italian rye grass for his wife's uncle's silage.

  Audley climbed back into the cabin, pointing out to Roskill the low, irregular line of hillocks ahead and off the tarmac strip to the left, insignificant in themselves, but perfectly discernible in their level surroundings.

  His confidence was almost absolute, and he recognised it as that same inner serenity which he had known sometimes before examinations, when he was sure that he could translate preparation into action. It was attended by the same uncontrollable physical symptoms, too–the dry mouth, the tight chest and the fast pulse.

  He signalled Roskill to stop as they approached the nearest mound, little more than 300 yards from the edge of the taxiing strip, and walked to the top of it while the others unloaded the equipment. From the runway it had seemed to be no more than one of a haphazard group, but now he could see clearly that it marked the exact corner of the old Roman Practice Camp, the meeting point of two lines of hillocks and low banks now related to one another as the time-eroded remains of the earth ramparts.

  He turned back to speak to the men behind him and saw with surprise that the water tower was once more in view. The changes in the land were extraordinarily deceptive, its rise and fall so gentle here that they tricked the eye. Yet it was perfectly logical: no Roman military engineer would ever have marked out a camp in a hollow, not even a practice camp, but would have used the rising ground to advantage.

  And it even added a touch of perfection to Steerforth's opportunism.

  He stepped down to where Roskill and Butler stood amid a small pile of equipment.

  'Where to now?' The resignation in Roskill's voice suggested that although DECCO was a far cry from the old mine detectors it was heavier than it looked.

  Right or wrong, Audley knew this was his moment and he couldn't resist underplaying it.

  'Where you're standing, near enough.'

  Butler looked around him disbelievingly.

  'Here? But, damn it–we're still well inside the perimeter! Why, you can see this patch from miles away. No one could dig a hole here without its being spotted, not when the airfield was in use!'

  'Let's try here all the same,' said Audley patiently. 'Let's see what the machine has to say.'

  Roskill began to fiddle with DECCO, and with a shrug Butler emptied half a dozen reels of white tape from a canvas haversack.

  'We'll lay down the start lines first, then. How long do you want for the base line, Dr Audley?'

  'Ten yards, say.'

  'Ten yards?' The scorn was stronger now than the disbelief in Butler's voice. 'I've got a hundred yards in each of these reels! You must be joking!'

  'Jesus Christ!' whispered Roskill. 'I've got a reading!'

  Butler swung round towards him.

  'I've got a reading,' said Roskill. 'It's right here under my feet!'

  Butler set the tape down and strode over to him, peering over his shoulder.

  'It's a strong one, too. Left a bit … a bit more … steady–that's it!'

  They both looked up at Audley.

  'Well, there's something down there right enough, and it's fairly substantial,' said Roskill. 'Richardson said this thing was so sensitive it would pick up the studs in an old boot. But we've got a lot more than an old boot here.'

  Butler looked accusingly at Audley.

  'And that wasn't luck, Dr Audley. You knew damn well it was there–you knew to the inch!'

  Roskill set DECCO down carefully to one side.

  'After what we went through yesterday,' he said gently, 'I do think you owe us some explanation for this sudden fit of–what's the word–serendipity … Just tell us, Dr Audley –is this the real thing?
'

  Audley breathed out heavily, conscious suddenly that he had been holding his breath.

  'I rather think it must be,' he managed to say. 'But I give you my word I didn't know until last night. I hadn't a clue up to then. Or rather, I couldn't make sense of the clues we had.'

  'Never mind the clues,' cut in Butler. 'Just tell us how the hell Steerforth dug a hole in full view of everyone for miles around without anyone noticing.'

  'The answer is that he didn't dig it, Major Butler. It was already dug for him. You see, there was an archaeological dig going on here all that summer, off and on. They filled the trench up just at this point on August 28, and that's the day after he landed his boxes in the hollow just down there.'

  Roskill whistled to himself softly.

  'They'd known about this Roman camp for ages, of course. But it wasn't a very promising site, and it was only because the farmer who owned the land was interested in archaeology that they decided to excavate it. That was in 1938, actually. But then the RAF got in first and they had to wait until 1945–and then they only obtained permission on condition that they dug one trench at a time and filled it in before they started on the next one.

  'It's all neatly marked on a map the farmer's son lent me, and when I saw the date on this trench I was pretty sure that it was here if it was anywhere. It fitted in with something the navigator told me.'

  'And Steerforth was bound to know about it,' Roskill murmured, looking back towards the airfield. 'He must have taxied past here often enough.'

  'That's just it, Hugh–only he knew better than most, because he used to walk down this way to collect things he'd had dumped in a hut just down there. Tierney said he had an excuse for coming. I think that just might have been an innocent interest in archaeology.'

  'By God, but he was damned lucky in his timing,' grunted Butler. The loot–and then the hole just at the right moment!'

  But which really came first? Audley wondered. Was the idea of hiding the treasure in the trench the sudden flash of inspiration he had originally imagined? Or was the existence of that trench the fatal knowledge which tempted Steerforth into doing what would otherwise have been impossible?