Classic Mistake (26 page)

So, consider Carlos, I thought. He had disappeared from the May Tree by the time the police reached it – but he was only twenty or so, rather young to take on a lady like Joannie, even if she had been flirting with him. Ambrose had been chatting her up at the bar, and both he and Carlos could have arranged to meet Joannie after she had left with the Crowshaw Collection – or at least
thought
they were going to meet her, according to plan. Joannie might have had different ideas.

Nevertheless, I toyed with the idea that it was not Frank but Ambrose whom Carlos had expected to meet at Allington Lock. Would that work? I had been told that he had rung
Josie
,
but suppose he had in fact rung Wychwood to speak to Ambrose – not knowing that he was in the state he was or that Josie was in residence? Could Ambrose have been the person from whom Carlos was hopeful of getting money, regardless of the fact that Ambrose hardly looked flush with it – certainly not enough to keep Carlos in the style to which he thought he should be accustomed? Take it a step further: why should he have expected Ambrose to help him unless he had something to hide? I was back to blackmail. But who was Carlos blackmailing or had done so in the past – Frank or Ambrose?

I tried not to go too quickly so that I could take it step by step but it was hard not to rev up with such a straight road ahead: could Carlos have seen or discovered that it was Ambrose not Frank who had taken the Crowshaw Collection and run off with Joannie?

That balloon burst. All very neat but the engine didn’t start. Why on earth would Ambrose steal the collection – or Joannie? He had a good reputation and he was an archaeologist given to digging hoards out of the ground not helping himself to the spoils of a robbery. And as for Joannie – Ambrose had adored his wife, and Joannie sounded an unlikely replacement for Muriel.

Moreover, Joannie had clearly not settled down with Ambrose. He had continued living at Wychwood and patronizing the May Tree. It was theoretically possible he had helped Joannie dispose of the gold in consideration for cash, but that just did not tie in with his reputation as an archaeologist.

Back to the problem’s engine again. Why wouldn’t it fire? Should I look again at Carlos himself? Was he capable of running off with Joannie
and
pinching the loot? Yes, yes, yes. Capable at any rate, I still wasn’t so sure about his being Joannie’s chosen soulmate number two though. Ambrose or Frank were much better candidates for that. Should I run this by Betty Wilson again?

It was then I realized what was worrying me. I’d been staring at the engine too long and failed to see the missing nut. Correction: I
had
seen it but not this angle. Back to the anniversary lunches and Betty Wilson. Betty had been seen with Frank Watson during the 1978 shoot-out. Both she and Belinda had denied meeting him during the Charros era, but suppose one or both had lied? If Frank Watson had been present at all those lunches as Neil’s father, something would have clicked. Someone – which in effect meant everyone – would have known exactly who Stephen Frank was.

So why had no one denounced him?
There was the Crowshaw Collection to think of. Not
everyone
would have overlooked that element for the sake of Neil’s memory.
Did
Frank take the collection along with Joannie or had he been the convenient fall-guy? Again, it didn’t fit. Either Frank had left Joannie with or without the money raised from the collection, or Ambrose must have done so – and Carlos discovered that. Then I began to despair. Ambrose was in no position to tackle Carlos at the lock, so once again I was back to Frank Watson.

I clutched my head, haunted by an image of Eva still in gaol. What could I do now? If Watson was guilty of killing him I’d get no further and it would be over to Brandon. He was no doubt working on it, but what could I do? Answer: pursue the Ambrose front.

Josie was still living at Wychwood, and I arranged to visit her after the weekend. She had sounded so welcoming that I guessed the loneliness was getting to her, grateful though she was for the job and the roof over her head. The house seemed more like a tomb than ever and as I arrived I wondered who would buy such a place. Without Ambrose, Josie seemed lost and the house larger than ever. She took me through to the living room, and I could see through the windows that the grass was neatly cut and the flower beds immaculate, so it seemed that Matt Wright was a frequent visitor. I offered to make some coffee for us both, and Josie was pathetically grateful for this small gesture.

‘That Thursday, the first time I came to Wychwood,’ I began, ‘Ambrose said he had been to Eastry recently.’

‘He was always saying that. Meant nothing. How could he have got there?’

‘You didn’t take him?’

She stared at me as though I were mad. ‘No way. It was his imagination. It was my day off, anyway. He only told me about it later when I mentioned my next day off – it was his way of getting at me when I went out on my own.’

‘He wasn’t expecting any visitors?’

She shook her head.

‘Was there anything odd about that day? Anything at all?’ I asked her.

‘Nothing. He’d spent the day in the garden – I suppose that was unusual.’

‘How do you know he did? Because he told you?’

‘His shoes were muddy.’

A hopeful sign. ‘Suppose he actually had been to Eastry? There would be mud on his shoes then.’

She sighed. ‘He wouldn’t know how to drive that Renault even if he’d remembered it was in the garage.’

‘Could someone have taken him there in his or her own car? His son perhaps.’

‘I suppose. No one came though, and if it was Dr Fairbourne he’d have warned me or left me a note.’

‘Someone else could have come with that Morris Minor and taken him.’

‘The one in the barn? Could have, I suppose.’

‘Did you check the barn when you got back?’

‘No. I never go there. Why should I?’

Why indeed. Josie, I had to remind myself, was in the best position of all to take Ambrose anywhere or to influence him. Strangling an old man as weak as he was would not be beyond her strength. So far as I could gather through Dave, there had been no prints or DNA that the lab could identify on Ambrose’s body. Josie could also have lured Carlos to the towpath. But with what motive? Revenge was the answer to that. But how about evidence? I asked myself. None – to my relief. I’d come to like her, so I hoped that theory remained just that.

‘One last thing.’ I could see that Josie was already anxious to get rid of me. ‘When did Ambrose’s Alzheimer’s begin?’

She thought about this for a moment. ‘I came in 2004 and he’d been losing it for a little while before that. He had a housekeeper before me, but she didn’t live in.’

‘And did he always talk about Eastry right from the beginning?’

‘Far as I can remember, yes.’

The beginnings of an idea were springing up, so I rang Keith Fairbourne when I’d left Wychwood and arranged to meet him at a pub the next day, Tuesday.

We settled on one at Chartham Hatch, which was handy for the Canterbury Road and therefore suited both of us as a halfway point. At the top of the Downs, it had such wonderful views that we chatted for some time before I had to get down to brass tacks.

‘Would it be true to say that your father still associated Morris Minors with Eastry?’ I asked him.

He grinned. ‘I see you’re still mulling over that car in the barn. Yes, the answer is quite probably. As I told you, he shared the Morris Minor mania with my mother – first the one they owned together and then the later model until he switched.’

‘You told me that was in the late seventies. Which year? Can you remember?’

‘You’re a tough questioner. We’re going back a while. ’Seventy-eight or ’seventy-nine, I think. I know I pestered him to give me the Moggy, but I was still a couple of years off seventeen then, so he refused.’

If he was right, then Ambrose probably had a Morris Minor at the time of the shoot-out and there was a chance it was involved in the disappearance of the Crowshaw Collection. If someone other than Josie had taken him to Eastry to revive old memories, what would those memories have been? His theories about King Egbert, perhaps, and where the king’s grave and grave goods might be, but they were nothing to do with Carlos and the shoot-out. Ambrose would hardly have taken the collection to Eastry unless he was bonkers at the time. Which he wasn’t. He would have returned it to the Martinford family.

‘Do you see any possible connection between the hunt for King Egbert’s grave and your father’s death?’ I asked Keith.

‘I don’t see how. He was deeply involved in the earlier digs, but, as I told you, in 2006 when
Time Team
arrived in Eastry he was too far gone even to take it in. He did get very excited over watching it on TV, presumably because he was thinking of his own failed dig.’

‘Can you tell me anything more about that?’

‘As much as I can, but I wasn’t closely involved. At the time of his first dig on Woodlea Hill I was only four or five years old. I do have vague memories of sitting in the sun and my mother allowing me to dig a trowelful of earth out, but nothing more. If they’d expected to dig up the golden statue of Woden, then no such luck. Dad told me later they’d had great hopes of it and there could have been a burial there, but there had been nothing to indicate it was a king’s grave. So he and my mother went home to lick their wounds and eventually came up with another possible site on the hillside. This one really convinced them, but then my mother died.’

‘But he didn’t give up the hunt, did he?’

‘Far from it. For my mother’s sake, Dad saw it as his mission to see the quest through. Like the previous site, this new one was on the hillside but a little distance from where he calculated the track used to run. This time Dad laid on a proper dig. All the drums and whistles. This was going to beat the Suffolk hoard, he hoped, but again it produced nothing. I was about ten by then, so I went along on one of the three days’ digging. Once again a lot of hopes raised, but nothing firm found, even though Dad was sure he’d nailed it this time. Dad never talked about Eastry after that, not until his mind began to go. He concentrated on other sites, both in Suffolk and Kent, and by the time the nineties arrived he had money worries so he turned to writing and TV work and left Eastry behind him.’

‘Did he ever write about Eastry?’ I wondered what had made Egbert’s grave prey on his subconscious mind to such an extent that his illness brought it to life so many years later.

‘Never. Odd, really, because he wrote about every other site, but not that one. I think he couldn’t bear to think he might have failed my mother. Sorry, Jack, but I think this Eastry line is a storm in a teacup.’

I clung to the last vestiges of hope that it might lead somewhere, though for the life of me I couldn’t see how. ‘Even so, could you take me to the place where he believed the grave was?’

No hesitation from Keith. ‘Sure, if you think it’s worth it. Can’t guarantee any results though. Want to go now? There’s a footpath nearby, so we don’t need permission to look at it – not unless you want to take a trowel in the hope of finding Woden’s statue.’

He was a man after my own heart. I did want to go now. If this was another false avenue I wanted to know sooner rather than later, even if it meant all I could do would be stare at the ground that was so important to Ambrose Fairbourne – once upon a time.

The fates were with us. Even the sun emerged to wish us well. We had made a brief stop for Keith to show me Highborough Hill where
Time Team
had dug in 2006 and then parked in the centre of Eastry village itself. The village lay slumbering peacefully, and it seemed almost sacrilege to park so casually on ground underneath which could be Anglo-Saxon, even Roman, burial grounds, royal palaces, and homesteads. Keith took me on a brief tour to show me the sites of some of the other digs – the one in the grounds of Eastry House, and the others off the main street in a secluded corner where the church and Eastry Court lay. A cat ambled up towards us took one look and passed on; a villager or two looked at us curiously and did the same.

The pub was still open when we rejoined the main street, so we went in for a quick drink while we studied the map. Our route lay further along the street we were on, which was the old Roman road to Dover. We would be walking south along it out towards the original boundary of the village. Woodlea Hill, our destination, would be on our left before we reached it. The hill was part of Woodlea Farm, the owner of which, we were told, was Ken Parker, who lived at Northbourne, a mile or two away. However, our informant told us helpfully that ‘old Silas’, Ken’s father and the former owner, was sitting ‘right there’ at the bar.

Silas, once fortified with another beer, and having summed us up, told us all in one breath that he’d no objection to our going for a walk over his son’s land and what’s more he’d come with us, and if there were any caches of gold coins they were his, not Ken’s, and all dropped by chance so no need of this treasure trove rubbish.

‘Agreed,’ Keith told him cordially.

A footpath led from the road up to the high ridge along which Ambrose’s track line ran. It took us across gently rising fields, and on a day such as this it was easy to think that the Iron Age wasn’t that long ago, and that the Anglo-Saxon era was yesterday. I didn’t expect to see golden cups lined up to greet us when we reached the higher ground, but the reality was certainly starkly different. Grass, trees and fields with scant signs of habitation made my quest look doomed from the start, even if I’d been sure exactly what it was! Keith must have understood, because he advised, ‘Look down, Jack, not out at the big wide world.’ Maybe he thought that was my problem – don’t keep trying for an overall answer; study the case detail by detail – and perhaps he was right.

When we were close to the highest point, though not quite at it, Keith stopped to look around, then branched off to the right, with Silas and myself in his wake. We were in rough meadow-land with trees and bushes close by. Keith stopped again to study the map. Silas, however, was more interested in studying the ground.