Sweeney wafted away, but the room didn’t grow any cooler.
Gareth glanced over at Ashley. “I’ll sort her out,” he muttered beneath his breath.
“Gareth, don’t . . .” Matilda began, and then stopped. He would only convince Ashley she couldn’t confide in them. But telling him that Ashley might be going with Nick because she couldn’t go with the detective himself wouldn’t help.
“. . . not as much progress as I’d hoped on the dig,” Reynolds was saying. “Dr. Sweeney has his methods, I suppose.”
Matilda said something appropriate to Reynolds and beamed calming thoughts toward Gareth’s scowl.
“As do you,” Reynolds went on. “Fascinating, how you turned up that gold coin the first day you were here. Would you say there was a bit of—well, the old country people call it second sight, but I suppose educated people like you and I should say. . . .”
Ashley, Bryan, and Jennifer stood up and headed for the lobby. Gareth launched himself from his chair and followed. Matilda turned to watch him stride, coiled with self-righteousness, toward the door.
“. . . does the gold cause an itch in your palms?” Reynolds asked.
I didn’t come here, Matilda told herself, to babysit either a twenty-year-old student or a thirty-year-old detective. . . . “What did you say?” She spun back toward Reynolds so quickly she gave herself whiplash. He was looking at her, his black eyes glittering, like a cobra swaying gently before its prey.
He knew about the gold torc. And he was daring her to do something about it.
Chapter Fourteen
Jennifer yawned. Bryan waved Ashley through the doorway ahead of him. “End of another day. Who had the bright idea of our paying them to work our butts off?”
“Look at the bottom line, Bryan. The lines that are on your resume.” He was a nice guy, Ashley added to herself. A shame he didn’t have an exotic bone in his body.
Just beyond the door Ashley stopped, letting the others go ahead. She wondered if she dared go back in the bar and sit down with Matilda and Gareth. But Reynolds gave her the creeps. He was like a pterodactyl, eyes cold and shoulders sloped, watching for prey in the jungle below.
Sweeney, now, Sweeney was okay, even though he sure liked to play the lovable English eccentric. Well, not entirely lovable. Maybe geniuses—genii?—didn’t have to follow rules or be politically correct or whatever.
Matilda was a genius, and that didn’t keep her from being considerate of other people’s space. She wouldn’t make me feel guilty about Nick, Ashley thought. As though there was anything about Nick to feel guilty about. He was pretty darn bright, he just didn’t have it together yet. Being with him was like being on a roller coaster, both scary and exciting.
Gareth wasn’t scary. He was a strong, silent type who needed a woman to warm him up. Not that Ashley was likely to be that woman. It wasn’t that she wanted to get anything going with him—he was way out of her league. She just wanted him to notice her. She turned back to the door of the bar, encouraging herself with expressions about birds in the bush and pushing the envelope.
Gareth was walking directly toward her. All right! She inhaled to say something, anything—letter-writing, the dig, his newspaper article.
“Here,” he said. “I need a word with you.”
She exhaled. “Sure.”
“One of Watkins’s men saw you with Nick Veliotes Sunday night. He’s a bad lot, Ashley. You’d better leave him be.”
What? Her heart went into free-fall, diving through shock, embarrassment, and hurt into a loud splash of anger. How could he? This wasn’t what she wanted from him!
“There’s no saying what sort of jiggery-pokery Nick’s involved in, but it’s nothing good, I promise you that. If I were you I’d give him a miss.”
“You’re not me, are you?” she retorted.
Gareth leaned forward patronizingly. “Now, now, I’m only trying to protect you.”
“I don’t want you to protect me. I want you to get off my back!” Ashley turned on her heel, sprinted up the stairs to her room, and slammed the door. A picture fell off the wall. Shit, she thought. Shitshitshit.
Courtney had gone home. Jennifer’s make-up case and robe were missing. She must be in the bathroom. Ashley hung the picture back up and braced herself on the window sill, scowling at her reflection in the glass. For a few moments she tried desperately to shape Gareth’s condescension into jealousy—he wanted her for himself, that’s why he was down on Nick. . . . Yeah, right. All the time he’d been smiling at her he’d thought she was just another stupid kid.
Through her own pale image in the glass she saw Reynolds spurt from the door of the hotel and walk briskly toward the car park. Of course he had to drive his precious red MG the few hundred yards between his house and the hotel. She watched the car’s headlights cut an arc from the gloomy night as they swung toward Fortuna Stud.
As quickly as a flashbulb, the lights picked out the shape of a man standing by the bowling green wall. So she hadn’t imagined him standing there Monday night while Gareth and Matilda walked down from the fort. She’d stood in the door of the hotel, willing him to come to her, but she hadn’t had enough courage to plunge into the darkness after him. Now she did. Gareth might see her as a child. To Nick she was a desirable woman.
Putting on her sweater, Ashley crept back to the head of the stairs. Below her, Clapper turned off the lights in the bar and lumbered into his office. In the distance a door shut.
She tiptoed down the stairs and out the door, waited while a car whizzed by, and hurried across the street. From one of the cottages came pompous soundtrack music. The other cottage was silent, only one window lit. Cornovium rose in front of her, a black ridge against the muted glow of an overcast sky.
Even though she knew he was there, when he spoke she jumped. “Eh, Ashley. You shouldn’t be out on your own.”
“So why are you here?” she demanded.
His grin was a flash of white in the shadows. “Oh, just fossicking about. How’s my lass?”
“Mad. P.C. Watkins saw me with you on Sunday night and told Gareth, and he just had to tell me off.” She almost added I don’t know what I ever saw in him. But she did know, that was the problem.
“It’s none of their business, is it?”
“No. It’s not.”
Nick draped his arm around her shoulders, rather distractedly, she thought, without the conviction he’d displayed on Sunday. He must be mad, too, at the busybodies who tried to run his life.
A couple of cars sped down the road. Maybe it was the rush of their headlights that made it look like something was moving in the deep shadows of the excavation. Ashley shrank closer to Nick, wrapping her arms around his waist. She could hardly feel his body beneath her double armful of jacket. His sweet smoky scent teased her nostrils, along with an elusive breath of mildew.
“Did you know,” she said, “that someone hit one of the students over the head and pushed Dr. Sweeney down the trench Sunday night?”
“I was told,” Nick replied. “Extensively, by our local bloody-minded plod. Who’s after blaming me for it.”
“Watkins ought to be going after Adrian Reynolds. Anybody that obnoxious must be up to something underhanded.”
Nick laughed humorlessly. “That’s the way of the world, lass, everyone getting and grabbing and trampling the other chap underfoot. Look at my dad. Has a little caff in Manchester. Not posh enough for the neighborhood, so the landlord’s trying to turf him out. It’s all he has. He’s lived in the flat over the shop since he came to this country. I was born there. My mum died there. And the bloody landlord says either tart it up or get out.”
“He can’t afford to fix it up?”
“Business is worse every year. I thought if I left he’d have a few extra quid. No, the old fool ticked me off, said I was deserting my family.” Nick’s lips tightened. Ashley tried to hug him a little closer. His body was stiff, unresponsive. “Toffs like Reynolds can commit any sort of
crime and the police look out for some poor sod like me to blame. You have to look out for yourself. No one else will do.”
Ashley wasn’t quite sure she agreed with that. “I always thought the world would be a better place if people just followed the golden rule.”
“The toffs go to church on Sunday and rabbit on about the golden rule, don’t they, and on Monday they screw you over. It was better in the old days, when gold belonged to the gods, not to man. . . .”
He straightened abruptly, his chin going up. His earring and the three necklaces on his chest winked in the light. Yes, there was someone or something moving on the embankment of the fort.
“Matilda says there’re ghosts up there,” Ashley whispered.
“Rubbish. They only told you that to keep you from treasure-hunting. I heard them talking the other night, didn’t I?”
“It’s not literal treasure, it’s . . .”
“Hush.” He drew her back behind the wall.
She peered into the gloom until her eyes burned, but could see only shadow upon shadow—no, there, a human form was etched briefly against the sky and then disappeared down the far slope.
A light shone out from the street, sharp and bright as Luke Skywalker’s light saber. A flashlight, she realized, carried by a man with a steady step. Nick seized her hand and pulled her along the wall and around the far corner of the bowling green. They huddled in impenetrable blackness beneath the eaves of the recreation center roof. “Watkins?” she asked breathlessly.
“Or one of his goons,” Nick replied.
The dim shape of the constable and his helmet was illuminated only by the backspatter of light from his flashlight. He crossed the road, stood at the gate, and shone the beam of light across the mound of the fort. But the lurking figure was gone, and the moving patch of light illuminated only grass, dirt, and ancient stone. The constable turned off the light. A moment later Ashley saw a tiny point of fire and smelled cigarette smoke.
“At least Watkins is keeping Reynolds from his usual nighttime scavenging,” said Nick.
“If you know he’s actually stealing things, why haven’t you turned him in?”
“The police don’t believe anything I say, do they?”
“It doesn’t sound like it, no,” she conceded.
“Well then,” Nick said. “I’ll collect you at half past three tomorrow afternoon. The ceremonies don’t begin til sunset, but the fires need laying, and the Druid’s altar draped with mistletoe.”
“How many people will be there?”
“I don’t know. Some come for the party. Others are searching for the gods. It’s not just my lot, mind you. The celebrants come from all over the country.”
“Is the, ah, ceremony at Durslow Edge?”
“Of course. The place of power. Brighid’s well. Where else?”
Like they were going to do it in a school gym festooned with paper streamers, Ashley told herself. Still her skin crawled—Durslow was eerie enough in the daylight. She shrugged the qualm away. “What should I wear?”
“Anything you like. It’s not like the toffs parading up to the church on Sunday, is it?”
She’d take his word for that.
“You’d better be getting back before Gareth-bleeding-March misses you.” Nick steered her down the side of the wall away from the fort and behind the two cottages. He stopped across the street from the lighted doorway of the hotel.
“See you tomorrow.” She turned her face up. His kiss was just as distracted as his embrace and his mouth was sour—it was just as well he wasn’t any more enthusiastic. She trudged across the street wondering whether the problem was his or hers.
Nick could be a great source for Gareth’s book about the murder case. Except the murder case was a little too close to home for poor Nick. No wonder he was down on the police, when they hadn’t solved Linda’s murder yet. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about it. Ashley could just see getting Gareth and Nick together. It’d be like throwing a match onto a puddle of gasoline. Nick would think Gareth was trying to exploit his lover’s death, but even now Ashley didn’t think Gareth was that crass.
Wondering vaguely how many other lovers Nick had had, she tried to open the door of the hotel. It was locked. Damn! She’d either have to ring the bell to summon Clapper or stay outside all night. Alone—Nick was already gone, vanished like Dracula into the darkness. She rang the bell.
Matilda bustled out of the sitting room and unlocked the door. “There you are! I went to your room but Jennifer said she’d seen you going down the stairs with your sweater. I was worried about you.”
“I was just across the street. There was a policeman standing at the gate to the fort. No problem.”
“You weren’t with the policeman, were you?”
Sometimes Ashley thought Matilda could read minds. “Well, no.”
The door from the back hall opened. Like a jack-in-the-box Clapper peered out, said, “Oh, thank you, Mrs. Gray,” and popped back in.
Matilda shooed Ashley into the sitting room, shut the door, and pointed toward an overstuffed chair. “Sit down, please. I want you to talk to me.”
That was a different tack from her mother’s, “I want to talk to you.” Ashley sat down and clasped her arms across her chest. She was tired. She wished people would just leave her alone.
“I gather Gareth planted his foot square in his tonsils,” Matilda began, sitting down opposite.
“He’s not ready for the diplomatic corps, that’s for sure.”
“It’s odd how men and women operate so differently. I once stitched a sampler for my son—I have one just about your age, that’s his picture in my room. . . .”
“He’s cute,” Ashley told her.
“I think he is, too, but I’m biased. Anyway, I stitched him a sampler saying ‘Come in, state your business, and leave. That way no one gets hurt.’”
In spite of herself, Ashley smiled.
“While for me,” Matilda went on, “I’d have to stitch a sampler along the lines of, ‘Come in, tell me about your family, express your ambitions, discuss the cut of your new dress, and exchange recipes. Oh, you have business?’”
“I know, I know. Gareth thought he was helping me.”
“He doesn’t know you have a crush on him. If he did he’d be embarrassed.”
“How’d you . . .” Ashley looked down into her lap. She hadn’t realized she was being that obvious. “Okay, yes. But he thinks I’m a kid.”
“He’s still struggling with his own maturity. Cut him some slack.”
“Sure, when he cuts me some.” She looked back up.
Matilda’s smile was thin and wry. “What did he say, exactly?”
“That Watkins saw me with Nick—you know that, too, don’t you?”
Matilda nodded. Instead of leaning forward she leaned back in the chintz-covered chair.
Ashley had expected another lecture, not silent listening. She went on, “He said Nick was a bad lot, that he was up to no good, that I shouldn’t see him any more.”
“Is Nick a bad lot?”
“No! He’s really intelligent and well-read, he knows as much about history and mythology as you and Dr. Sweeney, but he can’t afford college. His father’s about to lose his restaurant, he can’t help being poor. Sure he’s got issues, who doesn’t? Plus he’s depressed and mad about his girlfriend. She’s the girl who was murdered. Linda.”
Matilda’s eyes flashed. She didn’t actually leap from the chair, but still Ashley got an impression of cartwheels and handstands. “Linda was Nick’s girlfriend? Oh, Ashley, Gareth was just saying he’d give a month’s pay to know that.”
“For his book, yeah.”
“Book?”
Ashley’s own tonsils tickled. “Oh—well—sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing you and Gareth talking about the murder case. I figured that since he’s a reporter, he was writing a book about it. And you’re helping him with the archaeology angle.”
“How clever of you to come
up with that explanation!” Matilda rested her head against the lace doily on the back of the chair and laughed. Finally she managed to say, “You’re wrong though. Dead wrong, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Oh.” Ashley looked around the room, at the blank face of the television screen, at the rows of dog-eared books, at the squashed but comfortable couch. Bryan’s New York Yankees hat lay on the coffee table on top of copies of Country Life, In Britain, and the Sunburn.
“Ashley,” Matilda said, “you told us you could keep a secret.”
“I never told anyone about the gold torc, did I?”
“Reynolds knows about it, more’s the pity, but I’m certainly not going to blame you.”
“Maybe he has ESP.”
“No, I’m the one with ESP. I’m a professional parapsychologist. That’s one thing I’d like for you to keep quiet.”
“You’re a what?”
“Let’s skip the explanations for now, okay? Suffice it to say that I’m here not only as an archaeologist—that much is perfectly genuine—but also to investigate the theft of some Romano-British statuary from Cornovium. In January Linda Burkett wrote a letter to the Manchester police saying she knew who stole it. The first of February, someone—the thief, I expect—killed her.”
“Whoa.” Ashley broke out in gooseflesh, as though a cold hand stroked her spine. “Why would she know who stole it?”
“She worked for an antiquities dealer in Manchester. She went around the countryside looking for antiquities to sell. She was here, talking to Adrian Reynolds, not long before she died.”
“Do you think he killed her?”
“He’s on our short list. There’s not enough evidence to charge him, though. And he probably had at least one confederate, perhaps among the travelers.”
“Not Nick,” protested Ashley. “He hates Reynolds’ guts, for one thing. And Nick’s no criminal. His caravan has lots of history books and magazines and there are a bunch of cardboard boxes stamped with—what was the name—‘The Antiquary’s Corner’. Sounds like an antique store.”
Time Enough to Die Page 20
