Watkins was standing at the curb looking over at the dig. Which, Gareth saw, was rapidly developing beneath the spades of twenty students. Already they had peeled back the turf and were cutting trenches into the dark soil. Sweeney, in a leather jacket and scarf, looked like a World War I air ace separated from his Sopwith Camel.
Matilda was walking back and forth, hale and hearty—not that her London assailant was likely to have another go at her whilst she was with the students. She’d survived the five days between Forrest’s office and Corcester without Gareth hovering protectively over her. Her mishap in the tube station had probably been an accident. Still Gareth had walked her to the door of her room last night and made sure no one was inside. She’d thanked him politely. If she was frightened she was hiding it well.
“Morning, S . . .” said Watkins, the truncated “sir” making a sibilant.
“Good morning, Constable.” And under his breath, “Clapper was telling me that Linda Burkett was seen with Reynolds.”
“Several days before she died, that was,” Watkins replied. “Reynolds was at home with his wife at the time of the murder, near as we could estimate.”
“What about a local girl named Emma Price?”
Watkins frowned slightly. “What about her?
“She was having it off with a fellow named Nick, at the traveler’s camp. She said he’d bewitched her or some sort of rot.”
“That weren’t witchery, that were biology, if you take my meaning, Ins . . . Mr. March. Some of the lads were nattering about devil-worship, true, but I reckon Nick and his mates were having them on. Finding Linda’s body up on Durslow Edge in February gave everyone a turn, like. That’s all.”
Gareth was perfectly willing to believe that was all. . . . His shoulders prickled and he glanced round. Clapper was standing in his window, his massive frame wavering like a manta ray in the old glass. He smiled and nodded. Gareth smiled and nodded back again, then pulled out his notebook and scrawled a few random words in it. “Thank you, Constable. It must be very interesting to walk a beat in a town with a Roman heritage.”
“Oh—er—that it is,” said Watkins, and with a roll of his eyes toward the window ambled away up the sidewalk.
Mind your step, Gareth admonished himself. One person seeing him with Watkins was all right, but he didn’t want anyone else to.
He crossed the street and skirted the cottages and the bowling green. As he crossed the second street a few raindrops plopped softly on his head. Some of the students glanced up in annoyance. Sweeney produced a furled umbrella and flourished it at the sky. Gareth felt no more raindrops.
The three trenches, dark gashes in the damp green grass, were already revealing muddy shapes. Except for the occasional “Ewww” when someone encountered a not-very-ancient relic of cow, the students were working quietly and efficiently.
Manfred stood over his group with transit and plumb bob, making sure the trench was exactly six feet wide and its sides were a proper ninety degrees. Jason was in the trench with his group, taking the shovels from their hands and doing the tricky bits himself. Caterina hunkered down, troweling a large flat stone. At least, Gareth told himself, she and her lover had the decency not to bring their extra-curricular activities to work with them. Lads that age tended to be frivolous and girls foolish, silly little Emma Price being a case in point.
Gareth could hardly blame these lads for moments of inattention, though, when the charms of the girls were displayed a treat by snug blue jeans. Ashley, the girl with the typical American unisex name, was using a small pick to clear a stone wall a few paces away from the others. Yesterday she’d reminded Gareth of a kitten. He’d felt like offering her a saucer of milk.
Bryan eyed Ashley’s progress and said something encouraging, then walked on, checking that each member of his group was doing his or her assigned task. Jennifer put a camera back in its case, set it down with the other equipment, and picked up a sketch pad. Sweeney tucked his umbrella beneath his arm like a swagger stick and moved from group to group. “Objects are all to the good, children, but we need surfaces—surfaces, now, a light touch. . . .”
Speaking of jiggery-pokery, there was Matilda. No, that wasn’t fair. Gareth had no proof that Matilda was a charlatan. Or that she wasn’t. He ranged up beside her and saw that she was comparing what looked like old photographs of the area with its current appearance.
“Miller’s expedition in the thirties,” she explained. “The remains of some medieval buildings were still here then. I imagine they’ve gone to build the walls of chip shops and garages. Along here.” Her forefinger sketched lines and angles over the turf.
Gareth didn’t know whether she was extrapolating from the photos or whether she was “seeing” the after-image of a building. He didn’t ask, any more than he’d asked her last night about her vision, or hallucination, or whatever it had been. He hadn’t seen or heard anything. The air had been still and cold, the night so quiet it had rung in his ears. Matilda had stood looking intently at nothing.
“That trench over there, the deep one’s overgrown,” he said. “That’s from the Miller expedition?”
“Yes, although those scars along its edge are much more recent, like the potholes I was pointing out yesterday. In fact. . . .” Matilda climbed down into the weedy ravine that cut through the northern embankment of the fort, Gareth at her heels. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if those statues came from that hole there. It’s fairly recent—smaller weeds, and the bank has collapsed into it. A pretty good tunnel was driven in here, into the foundations of what used to be a substantial building, judging by the stone and pottery debris.” She poked the dirt with the toe of her rubber wellie boot, turning up a few scraps of stone.
“Someone digging here would have been hidden from the farm and from the town,” Gareth said. “Do you suppose they knew what they were after?”
“Whoever stole the statuary dug several pits in the area of the temple, the legion headquarters, and the commander’s home, places where he could reasonably expect to find valuable items. Corcester town council offers a very nice map of the fort, the Miller excavation reports are available at the library, and metal detectors work just as well for the dishonest.”
“So we’re not necessarily looking for someone with specialized knowledge?”
“No, just someone with a bit of luck and no conscience. The statuary must have been buried just outside the temple, perhaps by a third or fourth century thief who never returned for his loot. According to the catalog listing it was found bundled into a cooking pot.”
“This is the temple, then?” Gareth nodded toward the stone scraps. They might just as well have been Tahitian seashells to him.
“Yes. This is where Miller found the tessellated floor of what was probably the Celtic temenos. The Romans might have built their own temple—to Mars, or Augustus, or some other deity—on top of its ruins, backed up to the perimeter wall. That would be one way of keeping the local people from returning to Epona’s shrine.”
Gareth thought of the Catholic pilgrims continuing to come to St. Winifred’s shrine at Holywell despite the Reformation. He eyed the scraped and scrambled burrow in the slope of the embankment. Matilda had decided on the point of origin of the statuary by scientific deduction. He could have done that himself if he’d had the proper background. “And if the statuary came from the temple then it was deliberately abandoned and not treasure trove, if I take Reynolds’s point correctly.”
“Reynolds is straining at a gnat, trying to avoid having to sell his finds to the Crown. The statuary might just as well have come from the legion commander’s home, but a much later home than the one I saw last night. That was from the earliest period, about 80 Anno Domini—not that they were measuring time Anno Domini, of course. . . .” She cut herself off. “Well now, I can’t prove anything more than Reynolds can.”
Gareth didn’t reply. Matilda smiled, privately, and turned just as Sweeney scrambled down the slope. “Howard, I was t
elling Gareth that this is probably where the statuary came from.”
“Wouldn’t be the least surprised,” Sweeney responded. “The beggar—Reynolds—has no documentation, though. No case.”
“Perhaps every valuable artifact has already been removed from the site,” suggested Gareth, and added, “valuable to collectors, that is.”
“Not necessarily,” Sweeney answered. “Remember Snettisham?”
Gareth didn’t. Matilda moved in before he could say so. “A cache of gold torcs, Celtic necklaces, was turned up by a plow in 1948. Everyone said, how nice, but since it’s a plowed field there won’t be anything else there. More torcs kept turning up, though, and in 1990 the British Museum did a formal area excavation. They found an incredible hoard of gold still hidden. The ancient gold traders must have used the field as a safety deposit box.”
“Ah.” Gareth pulled out his notebook.
“Of course, with Matilda here,” said Sweeney, “I suppose we could try and sniff out the valuables.” He laughed—only joking.
If Matilda really could sniff out gold, Gareth thought, a thief would be more likely to use her than to kill her.
“Snettisham is in Norfolk,” Sweeney went on. “So is Icklingham, whose owners lost some statuary much the same way as Reynolds. And Thetford. The Romano-British hoard at Hoxne is in Suffolk. Iceni country, all of it. The Iceni sat astride the ancient gold route, and as a result were one of the richest of the Celtic tribes. When their king, Prasutagus, died in 60 A.D., he willed half his wealth to the Romans, hoping they’d leave his family alone. Greedy beggars the Romans were, though, wanted it all. So they took it. Their mistake was to insult Prasutagus’s queen, Boudicca.”
Ashley had said something about Boudicca last night. Gareth scribbled gamely in his notebook. “What does a tribe in Norfolk have to do with Cornovium? We’re in far western England here.”
“The gold route ran clear across the country,” answered Matilda. “Celtic gold came from Ireland. The only known Roman gold mines in Britain are in Wales. Are you familiar with them, Gareth?”
“The mines at Pumpsaint? No, I’m not.” He shouldn’t have mentioned the corpse-candles last night. That’s when she’d caught him out. He’d worked hard to erase the Welsh lilt from his voice, the upward inflection at the ends of sentences and the softness in the vowels. His mates in Manchester might have called him “Taffy,” but he’d earned his transfer, and his mates in London called him “Inspector.”
“The ships landed in Anglesey,” Matilda said, “and pack trains brought the gold through Wales and across what is now England to the country of the Iceni, from where it was shipped to the continent. Along the way it was worked into objects, beautiful objects, not only torcs but other works of art.”
“Worth a packet, I suppose,” said Gareth.
“To us, yes,” Sweeney said. “However, the Celts saw gold as divine and the artifacts made from it as religious votives. To them, the Romans’ lust for gold as wealth was sacrilegious. There’s an outdated concept—sacrilege.”
“What we had here,” said Matilda, “was a serious failure to communicate.”
Gareth shut his notebook. “Just what did the Romans do to Boudicca and her daughters?”
“Flogged the mother, raped the girls,” Sweeney replied. “Mortal insult to the royal house, as you can imagine.”
“Mortal insult to the women.” Matilda looked toward the spot where she’d been standing last night. “I am of the Iceni. . . .”
She murmured so softly Gareth almost didn’t hear her. With a shrug, he left Matilda and Sweeney discussing horizons, praetorians, and someone named Cartimandua, and walked about taking notes. After he’d filled several pages with comments less on the dig than on the various students—as though one of them would turn out to be the murderer—he took pictures of the emerging stones. By noon he’d slap run out of things to do. He’d always hated stake-outs, and this one promised to be even more boring than most.
The students and their mentors trooped to the hotel, ate sandwiches, fish and chips, and curry, and trooped back again. Gareth brought up the rear, feeling like the whipper-in of hounds at a fox hunt, whilst Sweeney led the charge, scarf flying in the wind.
Just in front of Gareth walked Ashley and Matilda. “I’ve seen the class records,” Matilda was saying to the girl. “You should’ve been one of the team leaders, not Jason.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a jock,” Ashley replied, as though that explained anything.
“You’d be embarrassed if I talked to Howard for you, wouldn’t you?”
“Harassed is more like it.”
“Maybe Howard could designate a fourth team. . . .”
Ashley looked sharply over at Matilda. “No, please. I appreciate it, but—well, okay, maybe I could use some assertiveness training, but I’d rather do without than attract the wrong sort of attention. Jason’s so immature, he’s on my case already because I’m kind of shy and I write home every week. So far I’ve just shrugged it off. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Never let them smell blood,” agreed Gareth.
Ashley glanced over her shoulder, her ponytail bobbing. Gareth deflected her look with a cramped smile. Smiling a lopsided smile of her own, she opened the gate.
Matilda, too, looked round at Gareth, then back at Ashley. “You’ve assessed the situation very well, I think. Don’t worry, I won’t interfere.”
“Thanks.”
Through the gate they went, and scattered across the fort, Ashley back to her wall, Matilda to make a circuit of the field. She paused at the far embankment, silhouetted against the cloudy sky. Her own jeans fit a treat, Gareth thought, loose enough to camouflage that she wasn’t a willowy young girl, snug enough to show that she was a woman.
He was about to set down his camera and volunteer to shovel when he heard a nasal voice calling, “March! Hallo, hallo!” Adrian Reynolds sauntered down the near embankment. He wore riding pants and tall boots, and his tweed jacket flapped open round his puffed-out chest.
“Good afternoon,” Gareth replied. “Have you been out riding, then?”
“Oh yes, nothing like a gray day for a good canter. How are you getting on?”
Sweeney was bending over the flat stone Caterina had been cleaning. “Very nice memorial stone,” he said. “Probably set up outside the headquarters building. Let’s see—praefectus cohortus— equitatae—yes, we knew there was cavalry here. . . .”
“. . . Domitianus,” said Caterina. “The emperor Domitian. The stone is very early, yes? ‘In memory of Marcus Cornelius Felix’, yes?”
Sweeney stared at her.
“Uxor,” she went on. “That is sposa. Wife? The stone was set by his wife Claudia Sabina, yes?”
“You read Latin?” Sweeney demanded.
Caterina drew herself up, dark eyes flashing. “Signor Doctor, I am not only a student in Roman studies, I am myself a citizen of Rome!”
“Yes,” said Sweeney, “of course you are. Well done, my dear. Good show.”
Reynolds eyed the Italian girl up and down and whistled between his teeth. “Pretty little spitfire, eh? Those Mediterranean girls, they know a thing or two.” He nudged Gareth in the ribs.
Gareth was tempted to sort the man out. He restrained himself. “Is your offer of a horse still good, Reynolds?”
“Oh yes, by all means. Would you like a ride?”
“Yes I would, rather. And Dr. Gray as well.” No reason for him to ride out to Durslow Edge alone. He might as well take Matilda and get the tour over with.
“Go down to the farm and tell Jimmy I sent you,” said Reynolds. “Ask him for Bodie for the lady, and Gremlin for yourself. They’re two of my best.”
“Thank you. Very kind.”
Matilda walked back through the dig. She stopped at the gouge in the root of the embankment, considered it, then turned to Ashley. “May I borrow your pick, please?”
“Sure.” The girl handed over the tool and watched curiously.
Matilda knelt, scraped at the weeds matted into the mud, and held up a coin. “A Roman denarius,” she said. “That’s interesting. It wasn’t here before lunch.”
“Are there any more?” Reynolds asked.
“No. Just the one,” answered Matilda, without digging any further.
“Very good!” Sweeney took the coin from Matilda’s hand, pulled out a handkerchief, and cleaned off the mud. “Reign of Tiberius. Fell from some legionary’s pay packet, I daresay. Into someone’s collection. This has hardly been buried for two thousand years.”
“I just said that,” Matilda told him. She gave the pick back to Ashley. Ashley’s large brown eyes gazed at her in something between bewilderment and admiration.
Matilda knew someone had been at the hole, Gareth told himself, because the weeds had been tamped down. No ESP in that.
Reynolds scuffed at the muddy spot but turned nothing up. Sweeney glared at him and popped the denarius into his pocket. Matilda watched them both, her hands fixed on her hips, her expression inscrutable.
“I allow the local lads to go coin-hunting here,” Reynolds said. “What’s a denarius between friends, eh? Looks as though one of them was up here during your lunch break. I’ll tell them to bugger off, if you like.”
“It’s your property,” said Sweeney, and turned back to the memorial stone.
Gareth didn’t like working undercover. Too many subtleties. “I’m having a recce,” he said to Matilda. “Background material. Reynolds is kind enough to lend us horses, if you’d care to join me.”
“Certainly. Howard, Mr. March and I are going to look around the area—he needs background pictures for his story.”
“I’ll need to fetch some more film from the hotel,” Gareth added.
“Carry on,” called Sweeney, with a glistening smile. “We want you to do a ripping good story, don’t we?”
With a wave at Gareth and Matilda, Ashley settled back down at her wall. No, Gareth thought, Matilda shouldn’t speak for the girl. The girl should speak up for herself. But he well and truly understood the importance of fitting in with one’s mates. So they took the mickey out of her. It happened to everyone. She was dealing with it in her own way.
Time Enough to Die Page 6
