Dying Fall, A (26 page)

Clayton laughs. ‘These days you can’t get away from them. They’ve got my email address, my mobile phone number. They’re on at me all the time.’

‘So Professor Henry,’ says Sandy, ‘are you a member of the White Hand?’

‘No!’Clayton stands up and attempts to look masterful. Unfortunately, he’s only the same height as Sandy is sitting down.

‘We’ve got Norman Smith’s computer,’ says Tim. ‘There’s a lot of interesting stuff on it.’

There is a silence. Clayton fiddles with a silver paperknife. One of Sandy’s first rules—never trust a man with executive toys or archaic stationery on his desk. Clayton has an inkwell too.

Clayton sits down again. ‘All right. I may have dressed up in white robes a few times but I’m no white supremacist. I’m just interested in druids and the old religion. That’s not a crime, is it?’

Sandy looks as if it may well be. Tim says, ‘We’ll need to look at your computer hard drive.’

‘I’ve got lots of confidential papers on there.’

‘I can come back with a warrant.’

Sandy is looking at his mobile phone. Then he raises his head and smiles at Clayton. The professor seems to find this an unpleasant experience. He recoils.

‘Sorry not to have a chance to visit your house again,’ says Sandy. ‘It was quite some place.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Great idea, converting a windmill like that.’

Clayton says nothing. He looks from one policeman to the other, as if trying to work out what is going on.

‘Must have taken a fair bit of brass,’ says Sandy.

Clayton stiffens. ‘My wife has some money of her own.’

‘That’s handy.’

‘What are you getting at?’

Sandy glances at Tim, who is also looking mystified. ‘So, if my sergeant examines your computer records, he’ll find all your financial affairs in order?’

‘Why? What do you . . . yes, of course.’

‘So you haven’t been dipping into departmental funds?’

‘Of course not. How dare you!’

Sandy smiles again. ‘Must have been a shock for you when those bones vanished. I expect you thought you were on to a nice little earner.’

‘It was an important archaeological discovery,’ says Clayton stiffly.

‘Think it was King Arthur?’

‘We can’t be sure but, historically, it’s possible.’

‘Professor Henry,’ says Tim. ‘Before he died, did Dan Golding discuss the results of the DNA analysis with you?’

‘The DNA analysis? What do you mean?’

‘It’s a simple question,’ growls Sandy. ‘Did he mention any results to you?’

‘No,’ says Clayton. ‘I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks when he . . . when he died. Not to speak to anyway. It was a busy time, end of term and all that.’

‘Where were you on the night of Dan Golding’s death?’ asks Sandy. They already have this information from Pippa, thinks Tim. Sandy must want to give Clayton Henry a shock.

And, it seems, he has succeeded. Clayton Henry stands up. He is shaking all over.

‘I had nothing to do with Dan’s death. Nothing. I was at home with my wife all evening. And I’ve got nothing to say about financial irregularities either. I’ve worked myself into the ground for that department. If I have to abdicate, the whole place will collapse.’

Sandy leans back in his chair, looking delighted, but Tim says, quietly, ‘That’s an odd choice of word.’

‘What?’

‘Abdicate. Kings abdicate, not university lecturers. Is that how you see yourself?’

Clayton says nothing. Sandy is still grinning.

‘Do I need a lawyer?’ Clayton asks at last.

Thing is delighted to see them again. He runs up and down the stairs whimpering ecstatically.

‘He obviously thought we’d abandoned him too,’ says Cathbad, sitting down to make a fuss of the dog.

‘Well, he hasn’t chewed the place up,’ says Ruth. ‘Good boy, Thing.’

Thing thumps his tail and looks smug.

Ruth puts together a hasty lunch of French bread and cheese. Thing makes it clear that he likes both these foods. Kate sits in her high chair dropping mini Babybel wrappers on his head.

‘What do you want to do this afternoon?’ asks Ruth. ‘Go for a walk? Go to the beach?’

‘I know what I’d like to do,’ says Cathbad, spreading butter thickly on his bread. ‘I’d like to go to Ribchester. See where this whole thing started. Be a nice run for Thing as well.’

Before they leave the university, Sandy asks if they can look in Dan Golding’s office.

‘Of course,’ says Clayton, who is clearly dying to get rid of them. ‘He shared it with another lecturer, Sam Elliot, and it’s his now but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind . . .’

‘Why do you want to look in here?’ asks Tim. ‘I searched the place after the fire. Didn’t find anything of interest.’

Sandy thinks that Tim sounds put out. He resents the idea that he could have missed anything. Sandy makes a noncommittal noise. He’s not sure himself why he wanted to come in here except that it might put the wind up Clayton Henry. But there’s no harm in Tim thinking that his boss might know something he doesn’t. He’s a good cop, Tim, but he doesn’t know everything yet.

The office is small with two desks very close together, almost touching. You’d have to get on very well with someone, thinks Sandy, to work in such close proximity. He couldn’t stand it himself. He likes to have room to spread out. One desk is clear. Sandy presumes this was Golding’s and that someone (who?) has cleared his belongings. The other desk has a closed laptop, a book about tanks and a pile of essays.

Sandy opens the laptop and tries to turn it on. After a few seconds, Tim helps him find the switch. A message flashes across the screen: ‘Enter password’.

‘Want to try and guess it?’ says Sandy.

‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ says Tim. ‘And, strictly speaking, we’d need a warrant.’

Sandy grunts and closes the laptop.

One wall is full of bookshelves. Tim goes closer to examine the titles. Sandy starts to open drawers in Dan Golding’s desk.

‘What are you looking for?’ asks Tim over his shoulder. He still sounds disapproving.

‘Don’t know,’ says Sandy. ‘But Dan Golding was shagging Henry’s wife. That might be motive enough to kill him.’

It was Tim who had alerted his boss to the references to Pippa Henry in Dan’s diaries but now he seems disposed to argue.

‘Do you really see Clayton Henry as a killer?’

‘Not really,’ admits Sandy. ‘It’s one thing to be ripping off the university. He’s a shyster, that’s obvious, swanking around in that big house like Lord Muck. But torch someone’s house, put petrol-soaked rags through their letterbox, burn them alive? I can’t see it.’

‘How did you know about the money?’ asks Tim.

Sandy laughs. ‘Got a text from Harry Nelson. And he got it from Ruth Galloway. The archaeologist woman.’

‘She seems to get everywhere.’

‘She does indeed.’

The drawers yield nothing except dust and a few paper clips. Someone has cleared away very effectively.

Tim is looking out of the window. ‘We’re very high up,’ he says. Sandy doesn’t join him. Though he would never admit it to Tim, he’s afraid of heights.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing here.’

‘No sign of Pippa Henry then?’

‘Oh I wouldn’t say that,’ says Sandy. ‘What can you smell, lad?’

Tim sniffs the air. ‘Perfume?’

‘Exactly.
Ma Griffe,
I think.’

Now Tim really does look at his boss in awe. ‘How do you know?’

‘It’s Bev’s favourite. Question is, who else wears it?’

Ribchester is much busier today. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon and that has brought the tourists. They fill the narrow streets and wander into the churchyard where they peer myopically at the Roman remains before heading for a cream tea. Families sit outside cafes eating ice creams, and in the playground near the car park children play on a miniature Roman fort.

‘I didn’t realise gladiators had ray guns,’ says Cathbad, watching them.

‘Those Romans were ahead of their time,’ says Ruth. They take the path behind the church and walk along the river bank. Thing pants excitedly at the sight of the water meadows, but with so many children about they daren’t let him off the lead. Kate, too, is excited by the landscape.

‘Wet,’ she says. ‘Grass, sky, ducks.’

‘A perfect summary,’ says Cathbad. ‘This is like the Saltmarsh, isn’t it?’

Ruth, who has been thinking the same thing, says, ‘Too many people about.’

‘I bet it was even busy in Roman times,’ says Cathbad. ‘This was a fort, right?’

‘The Roman name was Bremetennacum Veteranorum,’ says Ruth. ‘Max says that the “veteranorum” might mean that it was a place where veterans retired. They may even have helped with rearing and training horses for the cavalry.'

‘Want horse,’ says Kate.

‘A retirement home for old legionnaires,’ says Cathbad. ‘I like that. But what about in King Arthur’s day . . . you reckon that was after the Romans left?'

‘Dan thought the Ribchester temple, the Raven God temple where the body was found, was late 400s, which would place it at about fifty to eighty years after the withdrawal of Roman troops. We don’t know so much about the post-Roman years. There are fewer written records. But I think Ribchester would still have been important. It’s on the river, not far from the sea, and there was a major road running through here.’

They are approaching Dan’s excavations. As they get nearer they see that a couple in hiking gear are already there, bending down to examine a section of mosaic. The woman looks up and smiles at Ruth.

‘Not much to see here,’ she says.

Only the tomb of the Raven King, Ruth tells her silently. But she is only too happy to see the hikers hiking off in search of more interesting ruins.

Cathbad, in contrast, seems enchanted with the place.

‘This is sacred ground,’ he says. ‘I feel it.’

Ruth looks at him with mingled irritation and affection. Cathbad is apt to declare any isolated spot sacred ground, and if you add a pagan temple a psychic experience is more or less guaranteed. But, on the other hand, he has just lost his friend in horrible circumstances. Surely he is allowed some kind of spiritual leeway? And it can’t be denied that the site is looking its best in the afternoon light. The hills are dark against the sky. The tourists seem to have vanished and the river runs wide and lonely across the marshes. In the distance, Pendle Hill rises up out of the flat landscape like the hull of a vast ship. As Cathbad stands, head up, eyes shut, absorbing the psychic energies, a flock of geese flies overhead, calling plaintively.

‘That’s a sign,’ he says.

‘Of what?’ asks Ruth. She is trying to stop Kate digging in the mud. The child’s a born archaeologist.

‘Geese were sacred to the Romans,’ says Cathbad evasively. ‘It’s a sign of something.’

‘Everything’s a sign of something.’

‘Too true, Ruthie.’ He looks sideways at her, wondering if she’s noticed the nickname. ‘Is this where the body was found?’

‘Over here. Clayton thought it would have been below the altar.’

Cathbad lifts a corner of tarpaulin. ‘There’s a really strong presence here.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Yes.’ Cathbad straightens up. ‘You know, I understand some of what Pendragon must have felt. The druids were a real focus of resistance to the Romans. To know that King Arthur was buried here, in such a Roman spot . . .’

‘After the Romans had left, though.’

‘Yes, but it’s a Roman place. It still feels like a Roman place today. A Roman cavalry fort. To Pendragon, Arthur was a mystical British figure, a pagan, a shaman. To find him here, in a Roman grave, to think that he might just have been another Roman cavalryman. It must have been like discovering that Merlin was in the SS.’

Ruth smiles, but the mention of the SS reminds her that Pendragon, for all his harmless mysticism, had some very strange bedfellows, people who, presumably, believed in the master race and the subjection of others. She remembers Dan’s diaries and the letters calling him an ‘upstart Jew’. Somewhere along the line the shamans have got mixed up with the bad guys.

She turns to check that Kate isn’t trying to eat the soil and finds that the little girl is standing stock still, staring at something across the river.

‘Funny lady,’ says Kate.

Ruth follows her gaze and sees a figure moving steadily along the riverbank. Contrary to Kate’s description, it’s impossible to tell if it’s a man or woman because the person is dressed in a long white robe and hood. As Ruth, Cathbad and Kate watch, the robed figure turns to look at them. There is a black void where the face should be.

‘A mask,’ says Cathbad. ‘It was obviously a black mask.’ It is evening and Kate is in bed. Ruth and Cathbad are eating a Chinese takeaway in the kitchen. Neither of them had wanted to alarm Kate so it’s the first time that they have discussed the sinister figure on the riverbank. Not that Kate had seemed frightened. Both Ruth and Cathbad had found her silent acceptance of the apparition rather chilling. She had simply put her hand in Ruth’s and said ‘Home now’. And they had all, the two adults, the child and the dog, turned for home. Even Thing had seemed subdued. Now Kate is asleep and Thing is happily eating prawn crackers under the table. Cathbad refills their glasses.

‘It gave me a bit of a shock,’ he admits.

‘Me too,’ says Ruth, taking a gulp of wine. ‘The cloak, the hood, the mask. The way it appeared so suddenly. It was terrifying.’

‘Do you think the show was for our benefit?’

‘How could it be? No one knew we were going to Ribchester this afternoon.’

‘Do you think it was—what do they call him—the Arch Wizard?’

This is exactly what Ruth has been thinking but she feels the need to squash this idea. The idea that the leader of the White Hand should materialise like that, right by the grave of King Arthur, it’s too spooky to contemplate.

‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘It was just some random druid. Someone like you. After all, you must give people shocks sometimes, wandering around in your cloak. It probably wasn’t anything to do with the site or King Arthur.’

‘I don’t know,’ says Cathbad. ‘It felt staged to me. The way it turned and stared at us.’