Classic Mistake (27 page)

‘Someone’s been digging round here,’ he said severely.

‘My father,’ Keith explained. ‘Years ago, in the seventies.’

Silas chuckled ‘That chap? I remembers him. Thought he’d go off his rocker when he found nothing. This is recent digging though.’

I joined them, but could see nothing strange. Keith could though. ‘This is near enough the spot, Jack, so far as I can work out. And Silas is right. The turf’s loosened.’

‘Sheep?’ I said, but this earned the scorn it deserved. The experts were both working their way with their hands round the clumps of grass.

‘About four or five feet by three,’ Keith said eventually.

‘No one asked me or Ken,’ Silas grunted. ‘They’ve blooming well dug and filled it in again. Metal detectors, most like. Come here, and dig away for England. Think they own the place, some of them.’

‘Not all,’ Keith said mildly.

Now was not the time to mention the metal detector I’d glimpsed in his car boot when he extracted his walking shoes. ‘Any hope of our digging here – with your permission, of course, Silas?’ I asked hopefully. Hopeful of what, I wasn’t sure.

‘Not today,’ Keith said firmly. ‘Forgot to bring my bucket and spade. How would you feel about it, Silas? I’ll bribe a few of my students and we could do the thing by the book, if you and your son have no objection.’

‘What you aiming to find?’ Silas asked cautiously. ‘One of them gold cups, like Ringlemere?’

‘Can’t say,’ Keith told him. ‘That’s the fun of being an archaeologist.’

‘The fun of being a farmer is you get to clear up afterwards,’ he grunted.

‘No mess, we’re fully house-trained,’ Keith told him cheerfully. ‘And if it’s gold we dig up, your son gets rich very quickly.’

‘What do I get out of it?’ Silas asked practically.

‘Fame and a day out. You can play with my metal detector.’

Silas shot a look at him. ‘Suits me. I’ll talk to Ken. He likes these newfangled things.’

It suited me too, only not from the fame angle. ‘It’s good of you to set all this up,’ I told Keith on the way back to the car park. ‘I don’t know what I’m after though, so is there anything in it for you? If that’s the site where your father dug, then you already know he didn’t find anything in it.’

Keith considered this. ‘Call it bloody-mindedness. Dad had a mission to see this Egbert’s grave quest through to the end because he owed it to my mother; I feel the same about owing it to him now that there seems to be a question mark over it.’

I was silent. There was indeed a question mark. Did I go fully into what it consisted of? Keith must suspect from our previous conversations that it might concern his father’s involvement in something murky.

He picked up my reaction immediately. ‘Look,’ he added, ‘you think Dad was mixed up with the Crowshaw Collection robbery, don’t you?’

‘I don’t
know
– that’s the problem. And even if he was, why would it be connected with King Egbert?’

‘Let’s find out, Jack,’ Keith told me. ‘I’m willing – because I know that my father was a responsible archaeologist and a highly moral man. The honesty of his academic mind wouldn’t let him run off with something like the Crowshaw gold unless he was going to return it to its original owners which—’

He broke off as the same thought must have struck us both, and we stood in Eastry High Street staring at each other.

I spoke first. ‘But who are the original owners? The Martinfords at the manor?’

‘Or King Egbert of Eastry.’

‘His grave goods. You said –’ my words were tumbling out now, although I hoped not so incoherently as my thoughts – ‘your father believed that grave goods belonged in the ground, not in museums.’

I could see Keith gulp. ‘Dad took them back to Egbert’s grave? Is it possible?’

‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘How and when did the Martinfords get the Crowshaw Collection in the first place?’

Keith was very pale. ‘I don’t know. Not even the British Museum knows much about it, except that the manor has owned it for hundreds of years.’

‘How many hundreds? Wasn’t there –’ I scrabbled in my mind for the results of the reading I’d done about Eastry – ‘a collector who lived here, in Brook Street, who discovered one of the graveyards to great acclaim in the late eighteenth century?’

Keith gazed at me, and I saw him swallow, his academic training clearly fighting archaeological excitement. ‘That was the fashion then. Everyone who had time and money started digging into the past, physically and mentally, and whether in Italy or here. Sir John Martinford – I think that was the manor’s owner then – could well have come here and paid the farmer a pittance to let him dig, or not even bothered. Just dug.’

‘And Ambrose realized what had happened.’

‘I’ll do some research.’ Keith paused. ‘But who’s been digging recently, Jack?’

I parted from Keith on a high, convinced that we now had the missing link: Morris Minors, Eastry – and the Crowshaw Collection. Keith would set up the dig within days, and somehow, soon, surely Eva would be freed of all charges. Then I could relax just a little.

All seemed set fair when Keith rang me to say his father had been called in to give an expert opinion on the manor collection before it was sold. And then Dave rang me and the barometer sank rapidly. I was back in the real world.

‘Thought you should know,’ Dave said blithely, ‘that Brandon is dropping the Frank Watson line. We can’t pin the Morris Minor theft on him, and Brandon won’t move on the Carlos front. Alibi like a brick wall without any loose mortar. The most Brandon can do is refer Watson as a 1978 cold case. Meanwhile, he’s a free agent.’

‘Oh great.’

‘There’s no evidence against him at all. Yet,’ Dave added encouragingly.

W
oodlea Hill seemed an entirely different place than the site I had visited with Keith eight days earlier. This time I was an outsider and I walked along that footpath and up the hillside alone. Keith and his ‘gang’ were already gathered there, judging by the cars parked by the roadside, and as I looked up to the crest of the hill I could see their outlined figures moving along like a shot from a John Ford film.

‘Glad we chose a Wednesday,’ was Keith’s welcoming remark as he came to meet me. ‘It’s Wodensday, the Vikings’ divine boss.’

‘Found his golden statue yet?’

‘Only an ancient beer can so far.’ He paused. ‘I take it we’re looking for buried treasure of a more substantial nature?’

‘Egbert’s grave, and whatever your father or his companion was looking for recently when that ground was disturbed.’ What if there were nothing though? That was highly possible, as it had been recently dug. I fought back panic and doubt. I had to go on.

‘I’ve marked out a grid with stints covering a wider area than the one we looked at the other day,’ Keith told me. ‘It’s good practice for measuring resistivity.’

Keith’s contribution to the day consisted of about a dozen young students, plus Silas and someone who was probably his son Ken, an army of tools that would make an iron-age worker jump for joy, some businesslike machines and a dump of flasks and picnic stuff to keep the troupers going.

‘That’s Kelly.’ Keith pointed out a blonde girl about Daisy’s age who looked too slight to hold a trowel let alone the unwieldy machine she was moving around with the help of a young toughie exerting himself by holding the cable. ‘She’s in charge of the machine that checks the resistance in the ground, such as walls or other blockages, or indicates the contrary in the form of ditches and cavities.’

‘That sounds good for a burial mound search.’

‘Not if the land’s been ploughed or dug a lot over the years. Can’t always tell. Silas says that, apart from the bit we first looked at, it’s hardly been disturbed in his time, though, because the ground’s too sloped, too uneven and too near what was probably always woodland.’

I could see another two of his party going round with metal detectors, with Silas enthusiastically in charge of a third. All reservations as to their use had clearly been forgotten. ‘Any luck with them?’ I asked Keith.

‘Not much so far, only one soft buzz. No gold brooches, no coins, no Ringlemere cups yet. But don’t despair. There can always be reasons why things don’t register.’ He glanced at me. ‘Come and have a look at the rez machine.’

I duly peered over Kelly’s shoulder as she reached the area we’d first looked at, on which I was still pinning my hopes despite someone having been there before us. I admitted there didn’t seem much logic to that because anything of value would undoubtedly have been removed, and if there hadn’t been anything in it, it wasn’t worth the effort of re-digging. Nevertheless, Keith was still adamant that this was the spot his father had picked on, and the fact that it had been disturbed reinforced that conviction. That was why he wanted to check it again. Why did I? Call it sheer obstinacy.

Keith peered at the rez machine over Kelly’s other shoulder. ‘These aren’t too good on metal, but it likes this patch at least. Good reading for cavities. That could be the result of the loosened soil, of course. Let’s have another go with the metal detector.’

He picked up his own detector as I watched, hardly daring to hope. That was wise because even I could tell that the one faint buzz it emitted was hardly likely to indicate that the Crowshaw Collection was beneath our feet. Nevertheless, Keith didn’t seem perturbed and continued to supervise the rez readings round the rest of the area marked out by the stints. It was a painfully slow operation, one of which I felt Len would have approved, but eventually the digging itself began.

Keith had extended the original area to cut an oblong trench of about ten feet by four. I didn’t query why; he knew what he was doing and wouldn’t want an impatient amateur breathing down his neck. Even so when the chalky topsoil was eventually out and they were down to a depth of two feet, the digging was clearly getting harder, and I found it difficult not to keep peering down in the hope of spotting the odd buckle or golden cup. There’s a child inside all of us, and mine was wreaking havoc with my patience. Every so often something would be extracted from the shovelfuls and then trowelfuls of earth, examined and put on one side. I hadn’t a clue what for, but none of the finds looked like the Crowshaw Collection.

Keith worked on keeping the trench level throughout and they were down to about three feet when he yelled an urgent: ‘
Stop
,’ and climbed out of the trench together with the helpers.

‘Found something?’ I croaked. A cliché, I know, but we all speak in clichés when we’re too choked with emotions to sort out something better.

‘This is as far as the initial area was dug, and the detector’s still giving that gentle buzz at one spot. We’ll go easy now.’

The words Crowshaw and King Egbert were on the tip of my tongue but I held them back. Hope sprang inside me, though, like the firing of an engine on the fifth crank. Keith’s call had brought all the students gathering round. Up here the birds were chirping and the whole world seemed to be still and waiting. With our little army of students I could almost imagine that any moment Saxon or Viking hordes might come storming up to take the ridge. What was I hoping for? I couldn’t even focus on that. King Egbert’s grave? His grave goods?

‘Here’s what I found,’ Keith told me, showing me what was in his hand.

It was only a piece of heavy cloth, but Keith was not happy about it. Then, only then, did he get back into the trench, where he set to work with his trowel while the rest of us watched. I could hear my heart beating as I watched him reveal more pieces of cloth. Could this be a blanket put by Ambrose round the Crowshaw Collection to protect it? No, the metal detector would surely have picked up such a hoard. I was sick with tension as my imagination ran riot.

And then imagination stopped. It wasn’t needed now. Something was poking through the cloth. A bone.

‘A sheep, Chris?’ one of the students asked uncertainly in the dead silence as Keith worked further, gradually pulling the pieces of cloth away.

‘It could be a sheep,’ he agreed.

I knew he thought it wasn’t. Not with that cloth around it. Cloth that could not have dated back to the seventh century and King Egbert’s death. I wasn’t going to let him bear this alone, so against orders I climbed down to the far end of the area some three or four feet away from him and, on my knees, reached out to pull away a few pieces of the cloth myself. He didn’t object, until suddenly he shouted: ‘
Out
!’

I obeyed instantly and grabbed his hand to pull him out after me. The rest of the cloth had come away in one piece and now we saw what it had covered.

It was a skeleton, more or less intact, and it was human.

My turn to take control, though I’d never felt less like doing so. ‘I’ll ring the police,’ I said. My mouth was very dry. The skeleton could well be within the seventy-years limit when the coroner has to be called in. No prehistoric burial this, given the circumstances.

Keith did not comment as I did so, but we must both have been thinking the same thing – Ambrose’s question: ‘Are you going to take me to Eastry?’

We all had to wait now. I wondered what the metal detector had picked up and peered in, trying not to think of that skeleton as a human being. I didn’t have far to look. There was a wedding ring still hanging from that skeletal finger. Silas had noticed that the site had been disturbed not long ago, but no way could these sad remains be as recently interred as that.

At last Keith began to speak. ‘This may not have anything to do with my father.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘But you think it has?’ he said furiously. ‘Is that why you started this charade?’

‘I had no idea that this would be the result.’ So much for buried treasure. So much for the Crowshaw Collection.

‘It’s not my mother,’ Keith said aggressively. ‘She died in hospital.’

‘I hadn’t thought it was.’

‘Who then?’

I had to force myself to put it into words. ‘I think it could be the late Mrs Joan Wilson.’ Poor Joannie. Where was her flirting, her love of life now?

Ambrose. Everything centred on him. Right from the beginning when Carlos had made that first call and spoken to Josie, not Ambrose as he had intended. Whatever answers were to be found started with him. The rest of that long day at Eastry was a nightmare, with neither Keith nor I able to talk freely: Keith because of his undoubted realization that his father must have been involved; I because of unjustified (I hoped) guilt that the dig had turned out so disastrously. We had parted silently, both perhaps wanting to talk but unable to find common ground.