by Ellis Peters
‘But if someone knew all about it before, this treasure, why hadn’t he removed it earlier?’
‘It was safe enough where it was, until the river took a bite out of the hypocaust. It’s possible the hoard was actually found somewhere else on the site—say the cellar of one of the houses—and put in the flue for safe-keeping, to be drained away gradually. A whole thicket of broom bushes came down in that slip, as you saw. I think there was a way into the flue all along, under cover of those bushes. Possibly the slip, while it exposed it, also partially filled it in. I think, too, that the find was not merely of coins, but also of small pieces of jewellery and other articles. The indications are that this site may have been exploited for at least a year. You can’t dispose of such pieces wholesale. You take one or two, having studied the collectors of the world, and the highly professional fences of the antique market, and place them where they’ll bring you in the best and safest return. You lie low for a while, and you disperse a handful of coins, singly, perhaps not to the best advantage, but still it’s all clear profit. And when you hit a passionate collector who takes care to ask no questions, then you venture the big deal. But it means dedicated study, exact judgement, and above all, time.’
He could sense, even in the darkness, the enormous wonder of her eyes, fixed unwaveringly upon his face though they saw him only as a bulk solid and still between her and the sky. ‘But how do you know all this?’ she said. ‘About a whole year’s robberies from here?’
‘I don’t yet—not to say know. But for about a year certain pieces of late Roman coinage and art have been cropping up in unexpected places in the international market. Obviously genuine pieces, but of very dubious provenance. Only a few, of course. Collectors are queer fish, you know, liable to banditry without any qualms. But four instances have come to light within the year, through dealers or buyers who did have qualms. And four coming to light argues forty or more in the dark, most likely for good.’
‘And there’s something to connect these cases with Aurae Phiala?’
‘Not until now, not specifically. But period and style are right. You’ve seen the ones in the museum here, the curvilinear trumpets and dragons, those un-Roman Roman antiquities? Let’s say, there was plenty to connect our cases with four or five border sites, of which Aurae Phiala is one. And one such gold coin here, and a cold-blooded killing, are fairly eloquent argument.’
She was shivering slightly but perceptibly, not from cold and not from fear, but with the vibration of some personal and secret tension about which he had, as yet, no right to ask. She might, if he waited, confide in him, but not now; there was no time, if she was to retain her immaculate position in this household. He put a hand upon her shoulder, which was firm and slender, and turned her towards the gate.
‘Keep your lips closed and your eyes open, and think about it. And if you want me, I won’t be far away.’
‘But you won’t be here,’ she said, not complaining, merely making the position clear to herself, and well aware that her utterance had its ambiguities. ‘Not all the time.’
‘You won’t be entirely unprotected here,’ he assured her, ‘even when I’m not around. Better get back now, before they come out to look for you.’ She sensed that he was smiling again. It wasn’t an amused smile, but it was one that sent her away at a brisk and confident walk towards the house, and with a gratifying sense of being respected and appreciated.
The Roman city of Aurae Phiala remained closed to the public next day, and for several days following, an apologetic notice on the gate making known the fact to a largely indifferent general public. The enclosure was never exactly crowded, even in the height of the summer. On the riverside, where the pathway could not be closed, a uniformed policeman paced imperturbably, and occasionally moved people along if they tended to congregate and linger too long. The natives, markedly, did not. They passed, apparently oblivious, intent only on their own business; but hardly a soul in the village failed to pass at some time during that day, and not one missed a detail of what was there to be seen.
Operations had begun early. Breakfast was not yet over at the curator’s house when Orrie came to announce that the police were in occupation, and beginning to stake out the ground. Paviour left his coffee without a word, and went rushing away to protect his beloved site, and the two girls followed in slightly apprehensive curiosity. Three uniformed men were there with spades and sieves, and three or four more in plain clothes, with George Felse at the head of operations. More surprising, and to Paviour more confounding and conciliating at the same time, was the presence of Gus Hambro, busy with a large clip-board, charting on squared paper the patch of ground to be taken up, and sketching a hurried but accurately proportioned elevation of the exposed vault of the flue. He had a coloured pencil behind either ear, and a couple more in his breast pocket.
‘I knew you wouldn’t mind,’ said Bill Lawrence, hurrying to account for the phenomenon, a sheaf of plastic sacks and fine brushes under his arm. ‘He came along to copy some lettering in the museum, not expecting the place to be closed, of course. When he heard why, naturally he was interested. It was my idea, asking him if he’d like to lend a hand on doing what recording can be done on a job like this. He knows his stuff, you know. He jumped at the chance. We shan’t be able to do a thorough coverage, I know, but it’s a relatively small area, and we may as well keep it under what control we can manage between us. There might be some useful finds.’
‘Naturally,’ said Gus diplomatically, ‘I regard myself as under your orders, sir. If there’s any possibility of anything to be gained from this operation—and in the absence of the kind of labour you’d prefer to have on a job like this—I thought an extra pair of hands might be welcome.’
A faint look of baffled pleasure crossed Paviour’s harried face and vanished again instantly. However carefully and reverently the job was going to be handled, obviously he expected nothing but disaster. He hovered about the site restlessly, like one barefoot on thorns, all the while they were removing the debris of sagging, uprooted broom bushes, which Orrie phlegmatically loaded into a handcart and wheeled away along the riverside path to be unloaded and burned as far as possible from the sacred precincts. The care with which they examined and photographed those bushes before allowing them to be removed brought Paviour quivering to the spot. With straining eyes he watched small fragments, meaningless to the lay eye, delicately extricated from the tangle of earth about the roots and the soft turf beneath them, cased in plastic, and labelled.
‘Not your relics, I’m afraid,’ said George, meeting the baffled and frantic gaze. ‘Ours.’
He dared not ask, and was not told more. But he could not tear himself away. The operation proceeded methodically once the bushes had been cleared, though the spots where the mysterious fragments had been found were carefully tagged and covered with plastic. The broken fringes of grass were lifted off and stacked well out of the way, the spades began to clear the ground downwards from the arc of russet brickwork, warily because of sinister little trickles of loose earth that drifted down the slope at every movement. Layer by layer the narrow strata of brick and rubble were laid bare. Bill Lawrence, his eyes gleaming with the hunting passion, pounced on the fragments of encrusted ceramic and bone that were left behind in the police sieves, and Gus industriously entered their location in his graph, and sketched in each layer of masonry as it emerged.
Detective-Constable Barnes, large, rustic, intelligent and benign, put down his spade and went to work lovingly with a soft brush on the exposed uprights of the flue, whisking away loose, moist soil that abandoned its hold with revealing readiness. ‘Look at that, now! That stuff’s only been dropped here a few days. Watch that brickwork dry off in the sun, it’ll be as pale as the arch, here, in ten minutes. I reckon there was eighteen inches or so of this passage open till the bank gave way.’
They had just passed that level now, and the darkness that yawned within the flue was black and inviting. Barnes reached
a long arm over the ridge of fallen soil that remained in the mouth of the hole, and groped experimentally around within.
‘Drops a foot, inside there. The bushes covered it. Nobody walks on a slope like this for choice, only sheep, and they don’t let sheep graze this lot. Reasonable folks walk on the level—either up top, or down below.’
‘What’s it feel like, as far as you can reach?’ George asked. ‘Still silted over, or any traces of flooring? Tiles? Stone-work?’
‘No, rubble. But still dropping. I’d say you’d get clear flooring a yard or two inside there.’
Lesley, watching in fascination from the sidelines, said with conviction: ‘You’ve done this before! I know the signs.’
‘Only once, miss.’ Detective-Constable Barnes turned his benevolent gaze upon her with pleasure. He liked a pretty girl. ‘I went on a dig with a bunch from Birmingham University. They had me brushing out post-holes on some rubbish dump they said was a castle. Not my idea of a castle. We never turned up nothing like this. My dad was a mason —I reckon he’d have been right interested in these bricks. There’s a colour for you! Spot-on what you mean when you say “brick”.’
‘What’s it like above? Never mind further in, how about the first couple of feet?’
‘Feels sound as rock. Arched—shallow, like.’ His stretched knuckles tapped as far as they could reach. ‘Barrel-vaulted, but low. Could be brick, could be stone. But I’d say brick. I can feel the courses.’ He withdrew a hand like a shovel, and spread fingers black with the fine dust of centuries and a mere veiling of cobweb. ‘Not much for seventeen hundred years, is it?’
The opening loomed before them, sliced into the bank, brushed relatively clean, a narrow, erect oblong of darkness with a rounded roof and pale, red and amber jambs rooted in deep green turf. And within was empty darkness, fenced off by no more than a ridge of soil. George looked round his team, and they were all massive countrymen, well in advance of the minimum police requirements. The slightest person present, leaving out the girls, was Gus Hambro, busy pricking in on his diagram the latest minor find.
‘Care to take a look inside for us? You’re the ratling.’
‘Loan me a torch, and I’ll have a go,’ said Gus. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘Whatever you see. Structure, condition—and anything that looks out of place.’
‘Right! Hang on to this,’ he said to Bill Lawrence, and thrust the clip-board and its records at him. He shed his array of colour pencils, dropping them haphazard into the grass, hesitated whether to shed his tweed jacket, too, and then, considering its worn condition, buttoned it closely for protection instead. The dank darkness had a chill and jagged look.
‘Don’t go beyond where we can reach you,’ George warned him. ‘Six feet inside is enough. Just look it over, and memorise whatever there is to be memorised.’
‘I’ll do my endeavour. Right, give us that floodlight of yours.’
He dropped to his knees in the turf, now trampled into glistening, half dried mud, and plunged head and shoulders under the ochre tinted lintel. Torso, slim flanks and thighs, thrusting legs, vanished by silent heaves into the hollow under the slope. He was now nothing more than the neatly tapered ends of corduroy slacks, and a pair of well-worn Canadian hide moccasins. And these hung still, though alertly braced, for more than a minute, while the torch he carried ranged round the interior of the passage, and leaked little sparks of muted light into the outer day. He heaved himself six inches forward, and George laid an arresting hand on the remaining available ankle, and held fast.
‘All right, you inside there! Leave it at that!’
Indistinct sounds emerged from within the earth, deprived of sense by the complicated acoustics of the soil. There was an interlude of silence, absorbed and intent. Then, without previous movement or sound, only with a sudden gush of closed and graveyard air, the rotten surface above buckled and dimpled, lolling in sagging bubbles of turf, and sending its under-levels of soil cascading down on top of the ancient arc of bricks that upheld it. Those without heard the ceiling yield, with a muffled, sickening grinding of brick against brick and stone upon stone, and the dull, filtering trickle of soil busily winding its way between.
A hollow yell was forced out with the jettisoned air. And George Felse dived forward at the jerking ankles under the archway, felt his way forward towards the knees, and hauled strongly backwards as the roof sagged slowly and ponderously inwards on top of Gus Hambro.
CHAPTER EIGHT
« ^ »
They dug him out with their bare hands, scrabbling like frantic terriers to clear the soil away from his head and shoulders; and within minutes they had him laid out like a stranded fish on one of their plastic sheets in the grass. All the internal filth of generations, cobwebs and dust and soot, had been discharged on top of him as the joints of the roof parted, but an outstretched arm had sheltered his head and face, and he was not only breathing, but spluttering out the dirt that had silted into mouth and nostrils. They had to brush away the layers before they could examine him for worse damage, George on one side of him, Barnes on the other, feeling urgently at a skull that seemed to have escaped all but the loose, light weight of the fall. They drew off his damp, soiled jacket, and felt at shoulders and arms, and could find no breakages. Everyone hovered unhappily. Little rivulets of loose soil trickled capriciously down the slope of raw earth. Somewhere on the sidelines Paviour could be heard protesting that they could not possibly proceed with this excavation in these conditions, that the risks were too great, that someone would be killed.
‘No damage,’ said Barnes, breathing gusty relief. ‘Just knocked silly. He’ll be round and as right as rain in five minutes. All that got him was the loose muck, not the bricks.’
‘I’ll fetch some brandy,’ Lesley offered eagerly. ‘And take this jacket to sponge and dry, he can’t possibly put it on again like this.’
They were two deep round him in any case, nearly a dozen people hanging on the least movement of a finger or an eyelid. She’s right, Charlotte thought, watching dubiously but compulsively like all the rest, one grain of sense is worth quite a lot of random sympathy.
‘I’ll bring one of Stephen’s coats,’ said Lesley, and set off at a light, long stepping run for the house.
Charlotte offered tissues to wipe away the trailing threads of glutinous, dirty cobweb from the victim’s eyes, for his eyelids were beginning to contract and twitch preparatory to opening. He lay for some minutes before he made the final effort, and then unfurled his improbably luxuriant lashes upon a bright, golden-brown stare of general accusation.
‘What in hell do you all think you’re doing?’ he said, none too distinctly and very ungratefully, and spat out fragments of soil with a startled grimace of distaste. ‘What happened?’
It was a fair enough question, considering how abruptly he had been obliterated from the proceedings. His exit had been brief, but absolute, while they, it seemed, were still in possession of their faculties and the facts. He sat up in the circle of George’s arm, seemed to become suddenly aware of his shirt sleeves and the late April chill, and demanded, looking violently round him: ‘Where’s my jacket?’
‘Mrs Paviour’s taken it away to clean and dry it out for you. You were taking a look inside there, and half the roof came down on you,’ said George patiently. All the victim’s limbs seemed to be in full working order, even his memory was only one jump behind.
‘Oh, blimey!’ he said weakly. ‘Was that it?’ And he leaned forward to peer at the spot where two policemen were stolidly clearing away newly-fallen rubble from the mouth of the flue, and a third, well above them on the level ground, was cautiously surveying the crater. ‘You’ll have to dig for that torch of yours,’ he said more strongly, not without a mildly vindictive satisfaction. ‘I let go of it when things started dropping on me. That chap up there had better watch his step, there was a gleam of daylight a good two yards forward from where I got to. He didn’t put one of those beetle-cr
ushers through there while I was inside, did he?’
‘He did not,’ said George tolerantly. ‘The thing just gave. Mea culpa. I shouldn’t have let you do it.’
‘The thing just gave. Did it?’ He was coming round with remarkable aplomb now, it was with the old, knowledgeable eye that he stared at the ruin of the neat archway which had been their entrance to the flue only ten minutes ago. But all he said was: ‘You know what? Either I’m accident-prone, all of a sudden, or else somebody, somewhere, is sticking pins in a wax image of me.’
Some minutes later, when all anxiety on his behalf had ebbed away into renewed interest in the job on hand, when he was sitting hunched with Price’s sportscoat draped round his shoulders, and one of George’s cigarettes between his lips, and not a soul but George within earshot, he said, softly and with intent: ‘Watch it from now on! I’m getting clearer every minute. Somebody’d been hacking at the brickwork inside there. That wasn’t any accident.’
‘You sure?’ asked George in the same tone.
‘I’m sure. I lost your torch—and switched on, at that, you won’t get much mileage back in that battery!—but I know what I’d already seen. Fresh-broken surfaces, high in the wall. The upstream side was what I noticed. A gash in the brickwork, pale and clean. Even if you have to dig out from on top, now, with care you’ll find it. Somebody aimed to bring that flue down.’
‘Nobody,’ said George, gazing ahead of him at the spot where Price was re-deploying his forces on the level of the caldarium floor, ‘can have got into that place ahead of you. Earlier, yes, that I believe. Not since the slip.’
‘They wouldn’t have to. I told you, at least one gleam of daylight ahead there. More than one hole on top. A crowbar down one of those would be all he needed.’ The momentary silence irritated him. He said with asperity, and considering his recent escape with some justification: ‘It worked, didn’t it?’
