Lovers and Newcomers

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Small children? All over again? At my age?’

  ‘Are you so very ancient?’

  They told each other their ages. Katherine was the older by nine years. She was nearly relieved it was that much. They might divert themselves by paying compliments, but she thought that on the whole men didn’t take a serious interest in women who were their senior by almost a decade.

  But at the same time she felt a sharp and quite precise pang of disappointment. Dr Christopher Carr was an attractive man. Or – she made the effort to be honest with herself – she found him attractive, decidedly so. And how long was it since she had thought anything of the kind, about any man?

  Decades, probably.

  She drank the last of her orange juice, now warm and sticky, and wished it were gin. Luckily, the lights were dim and so probably Chris couldn’t see her pink face.

  A silence developed between them. Katherine played with the idea of breaking it by suggesting they go to a hotel together, just to see how he would extricate himself.

  ‘Well. Look at the time,’ he said. He was grinning now. His confidence had returned.

  ‘Yes, I’d better get back. Amos will be wondering where I’ve got to.’

  A cold wind drove spitting rain down the cobbled street outside the pub and Katherine pulled her coat tighter. Chris insisted on walking back with her to her car, parked further from his office than it need have been because she was unfamiliar with the town’s one-way system. They strode at quite a pace past the estate agents’ windows, apologizing when they accidentally bumped shoulders at a crossing.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said when they reached her Audi. He took her bag and placed it on the back seat for her, and held open the door. She hesitated. Nine years was nothing, she thought. She had never taken the sexual initiative, not once in her life; was that why she found herself gabbling about never having lived? Soon, very soon, it would be too late.

  ‘Can we see each other again?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course we can.’

  She almost reeled with shock.

  He leaned down and kissed her, on the corner of her mouth, firmly enough to leave her in no doubt that there was more to come. He stepped back afterwards, which was probably just as well, she thought, or she’d have been standing there snogging him in the street like a teenager.

  He was wearing a North Face anorak, the sort of garment that Amos would sneer at. He patted a pocket and brought out his mobile.

  ‘May I use the number you called me on?’

  My God, Katherine thought. So this is how it happens.

  ‘Yes.’

  What the hell.

  She got into the car. The window slid down like a barrier dissolving between them.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he promised. ‘Goodnight, Katherine.’

  As she drove away, she saw in the rear-view mirror that he watched until she turned the corner at the end of the road. It took a prolonged negotiation with the one-way system to find her way out to the ring road, but Katherine didn’t care. She felt sufficiently in control of her own destiny to have driven all the way to the North Pole.

  Out in the countryside there were no lights and almost no traffic. The black tarmac unravelled between high hedges, and once in a while the eyes of a cat out hunting, or maybe a fox, glimmered at her from the depths. She felt that she had entered a foreign country, a territory that was as yet unmapped, and full of secrets.

  She was sorry when she finally reached the mossy stone gateposts at Mead. She had enjoyed being out in the night, alone with her thoughts.

  The trees that knitted their branches over the Mead driveway were bare of leaves except for a few tatters. The car’s headlights passed over the opening to the track that forked down to the site, where the guard would be ensconced in his caravan, and she rounded the last bend to the house. All the windows were dark, and in a haphazard row in the courtyard the cars were drawn up, the Jaguar, Polly and Selwyn’s dented Nissan, Miranda’s and Colin’s tidy German vehicles.

  All are safely gathered in, she thought, except for me.

  Katherine trod softly around the side of the house. The wind was loud in the trees. There was a wan light showing in the barn, and in the cottage a chink glowed between the bedroom curtains. She let herself in and padded up the stairs.

  Amos was asleep in their bed, propped on pillows, his book fallen to his chest and his glasses slipped down his nose. When she leaned over him to take the book and spectacles, his eyes opened.

  ‘I’m sorry to wake you,’ she murmured.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  Into her head came the memory of all the nights in their marriage when he had come home from heaven knows where, and she had tried not to ask that very question.

  ‘I went to see the treasure, I told you that. And I had a drink afterwards with Chris Carr.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The archaeologist.’

  She went into the bathroom and put on her nightdress. When she came back she expected to find him asleep again, but he turned over on his side and watched her.

  ‘I had a microwaved curry and a couple of scotches with Selwyn.’

  ‘Did you?’

  Katherine got into bed. Amos’s weight depressed the mattress, but if she held herself rigid she didn’t roll towards him. This was holiday cottage furniture.

  Most of their own stuff was in storage and so far she had missed none of it, but it would be a relief to get her own bed back. She wondered when that might be, and realized that it would all depend on Chris and the princess’s treasures, and the schedule of his excavation.

  She had stopped herself from asking questions about Amos’s whereabouts because she feared the answers.

  Amos didn’t ask for more details about her evening because he wasn’t interested, or because the idea that she might have been doing anything out of order with a bearded man who wore a North Face anorak was simply too ludicrous to contemplate.

  Oh, Amos.

  In the Portakabin overlooking the site, the guard yawned over his paperback. He liked Dan Brown and this one was the best he’d read, but at two o’clock in the morning it was hard to stay awake. He got up and clicked the switch of the kettle. He’d do a round of the trench and the diggings and walk up as far as the trees, log his hourly report to the control centre, then make a brew and eat his sandwiches. He took his torch and went outside.

  The white forensic tent had been removed. Now there were rough canvas awnings over the various holes in the ground. These strained and sucked in the wind, grey shape-shifters against the black meadow, but they were all secure. The guard shone his torch into the biggest hole. Under a skein of tapes it was empty, the sides made of layered earth and stones. This was the first time, he thought, that he had been sent out to guard thin air. A big building site with plenty of designer taps and electrical goods and copper piping lying loose, or a bonded warehouse, he could understand villains wanting a piece of those, but there was nothing here except grass and stones. Not even the tools that were locked up overnight were worth nicking, just a few old shovels and buckets and some miniature trowels. He flashed the torch into the smaller pits.

  Wet grass swished over his toecaps as he tramped across to the copse, turned and listened. He swung his torch in an arc. A second ago he thought he was hearing the slow approach of a vehicle, but now there was only the creak and rustle of the rural night. He didn’t care for these country places. How could people live out here, in the middle of nowhere?

  He walked back to the cabin, listened again, and went inside. He used his phone to call control and made an all-clear report. It was Polish Jerzy on the desk tonight. That was a boring job, if ever there was one. At least he was out here, not just sitting in a stuffy room waiting for a series of guys to ring in and tell him nothing was happening.

  The guard picked up his tea-stained mug, dropped a teabag into it, brought the kettle to the boil again. He was standing with his back to the door. When it crashed open he ha
lf-turned, but the two hooded men were on to him. They pulled a bag over his head, tied his knees and ankles and wrists, and tipped him on to the floor. He shouted as loudly as he could through the folds of the bag, but they pushed the mouldy fabric into his mouth and twisted a gag between his teeth. He stopped the noise then, because he was afraid that he would choke.

  He heard them blunder out of the door and turn the key in the lock.

  SIX

  Miranda woke up to hear a police siren.

  The noise stopped as soon as she came to full consciousness but she knew it was real, not the soundtrack of a dream. She ran to the window but could see nothing. When she stepped out on to the landing a darker shadow shifted against darkness and a shock of fear froze her before Colin clicked on the light.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘You scared me. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something’s happening. I’m going to look.’

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  Outside in the yard, treading their feet into wellingtons seized from beside the back door, they hesitated in silence and blackness before the blare of another siren sounded from the drive.

  ‘It’s the site,’ Colin muttered. He fumbled with a torch and began to run.

  Miranda stumbled after him. ‘Should we call Selwyn?’

  ‘Because we’ll need a big strong man with us? Why not Amos in that case?’

  Colin could run surprisingly fast, she realized. She concentrated on keeping pace with him.

  They raced through the copse, ploughing into thick drifts of fallen leaves that mounded the path. The torch beam swayed over tree trunks and knotted roots. Miranda knew every inch of the way but darkness changed all the familiar dimensions.

  Colin was ten yards ahead of her as she panted out into the meadow. Two police cars with headlights on full beam bracketed the contractor’s cabin, and a policeman flashing a heavy torch was already heading towards them.

  Inside the hut the security guard was propped in a chair. He held a dressing pressed to his head and there was blood on his cheek and collar. Miranda made to go to him but their escort signalled her back.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she called.

  He put his other hand up to his forehead. ‘I didn’t see them, no more than a glimpse. There were more than two, I know that much. I heard them outside.’

  His face was as white as the bandage, but he was doing his best to answer the police questions. He had been tied up for almost two hours. After he failed to make his next scheduled call to control, the supervisor tried several times to reach him. He heard his phone as he lay trussed up on the hut floor, and from outside the urgent ping of metal detectors and the thud of shovels. Eventually the security company had reported his prolonged silence to the police.

  By the time the first patrol car arrived the intruders had gone, but the guard reckoned they had had at least ninety undisturbed minutes in which to ransack the site.

  Colin and Miranda were escorted to the workmen’s caravan. Passing the trench, they looked down. The canvas awnings had been torn away, and the archaeologists’ markers and tapes. The walls and floor of the half excavated grave were a ruined mass of dug earth and stones.

  ‘This way,’ the policeman told them.

  ‘Is the guard badly hurt?’ Miranda asked.

  ‘He hit his head when he was knocked down.’

  The caravan smelled strongly of sweaty work clothes. It wasn’t easy to prove their identities wearing only coats over their dressing gowns and unmatched boots. When Colin pointed out that their outfits and behaviour made them unlikely suspects, the irritable copper only snapped that he would be the judge of what was or was not likely. Miranda shivered in the cold. At length the policeman agreed to accompany them back to the house. As they emerged an ambulance came swaying down the rutted track.

  The guard was led into the ambulance and the door closed on him.

  In the Mead kitchen, the officer took Colin’s and Miranda’s statements. They were in agreement. They had heard nothing, seen nothing, until the siren woke them up.

  The policeman eventually left, promising that he would be back first thing in the morning to interview the others. Miranda showed him that the cottage and the barn were still in darkness, which meant everyone was asleep and almost certainly had been throughout the night.

  ‘We’ll do our job, ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked Colin, as soon as they were alone.

  ‘Whatever else was buried there with the princess is now in the back of a van.’

  The first spasm of outrage passed through Miranda. The princess, her treasure, whatever else had lain in the earth at her side, this was part of Mead as much as the house and the trees. The robbery was an assault on Mead itself.

  ‘Who did this?’

  ‘It was someone who knew what might be there, and the probable value of it. Someone who was probably told by someone else.’

  They pondered the possibilities. Colin counted them off on his fingers. It could only be one of themselves, one of the archaeologists, an employee of the security company, or Jessie.

  ‘None of us. Surely not even Amos would think of pulling something like this?’ Miranda said.

  Nothing was quite certain, though.

  They exchanged a glance, then looked through the window at the black night. To Miranda the darkness seemed solid, exerting an inwards physical pressure that made the old window frames creak.

  Colin said, ‘I can’t quite see how robbing his own site could work to Amos’s advantage and the only way Selwyn might be involved would be as a gross practical joke which seriously misfired. A man was injured, after all. I’d be prepared to bet that it’s not one of us, unless it was by mentioning it inadvertently to some outsider.’

  Miranda looked angry and baffled now as well as shocked. Colin crossed to where she was huddled against the incubator warmth of the range. She uncurled her fists and let him rub her fingers.

  She shook her head. ‘Of course it’s not one of us. That still leaves quite a lot of people who have been here, doesn’t it? If not one of them directly, it would only take one of their wives, staff, drivers, whoever, to mention the discovery in the wrong place. How much must that brutal gold neckpiece alone be worth?’

  ‘For the metal, maybe a few thousand? For what it is, what it represents, probably an incalculable amount. The theft is going to cause quite a stir once the news gets out. And it will get out.’

  Miranda hadn’t even considered this aspect. The appearance of the Warrior Princess at Mead was turning out to be less magical than it had seemed. The insinuations of prehistory and the demands of the present day were working together like the bony fingers of two hands, prising their way between the cracks of her shuttered privacy in this house, where she had planned to make herself secure with her old friends and her memories of Jake.

  She gripped Colin’s hands so hard that her nails dug into his palms.

  ‘Why is it so dark? Is it never going to get light again?’

  It was four in the morning.

  He said, ‘Come on. It’s time to go back to bed.’

  There was nothing more they could do tonight, Miranda had to agree.

  Outside her bedroom door, he saw that she hesitated and forced herself to look into the shadows in the stairwell. She was still shivering.

  ‘Thieves take more than loot, don’t they? How can they have made off with my ease in my own house?’ She tried to laugh.

  ‘They must be miles away by now, Mirry. Would you like me to come and sleep with you?’

  ‘A belated offer, I must say. But I appreciate it even more for that.’

  She did manage a laugh now, a quick delighted wheeze of mirth that made Colin laugh too. They tottered in each other’s arms on the creaking landing.

  ‘I couldn’t deliver in the technical sense, remember.’

  ‘I’d prefer your company tonight to the hottest stud in the county, Col.’<
br />
  Miranda crawled under the covers and Colin lay on top of them, wrapped in a quilt. They spooned together, listening to the wind, as warmth spread between them. It was the first time that Miranda had shared a bed since Jake’s death. She had almost, but not quite, forgotten the comfort it provided.

  Colin stroked her hair. ‘Go to sleep,’ he murmured.

  She did as she was told.

  They slept until early morning, when the telephone started ringing.

  A journalist from the local paper was first, quickly followed by two local radio stations and a reporter from the area television news. Dissatisfied with the stonewalling answers they received from Miranda on the phone, the reporters soon started to arrive in person. Amos opened the door of the cottage to a young woman who, he claimed later, doorstepped him with a radio mike. His comments, with the more intemperate sections edited out, made the lunchtime bulletin on the county station. Complaining about vandalism and citing property rights he sounded, as he put it himself later, like a puce-faced rural grandee whose croquet lawn had been trampled in the course of an audacious raid on his wine cellar.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop me making an arse of myself?’ he raged to Katherine.

  ‘When?’ she asked gently, but he wasn’t waiting for her answer.

  Miranda telephoned the hospital. She was told that the security guard was severely shocked, but stable, and would be kept under observation for another night.

  A pair of policemen interviewed Selwyn and Polly and Amos and Katherine, but all four of them had slept from bedtime to breakfast and had heard nothing.

  ‘Missed all the drama,’ Selwyn complained. ‘Why didn’t you wake us, Barb?’

  The archaeologists returned to their ravaged dig, but it was cordoned off and guarded while the uniformed branch waited for the arrival of the forensic investigator and the CID. The neat sections of the grave’s walls and floor were a trodden pit of raw earth and heaped spoil, turning to mud as the day’s steady rain trickled through the hastily re-erected canvas shelters.

  As Colin had predicted, outside interest in the story quickly gathered momentum.