Time Enough To Die (3 page)

They stood in the corridor, looking at each other. Matilda's slightly amused blue gaze made Gareth feel as though his clothes were transparent and he had holes in his y-fronts. But when she laughed, lightly and wryly, it wasn't at him. “So I get to work with Howard Sweeney, for my sins."

"He doesn't believe in parapsychology?” Gareth asked hopefully.

"Oh no, he's a good scientist, he'll accept what he can see proven. It's just that you need a whip and a chair to deal with his ego."

Gareth had no comment on that. “Would you like a coffee?” he asked halfheartedly. He didn't want a coffee. He didn't want to work with Matilda, for that matter. What he wanted was to keep her as minor an annoyance as possible whilst he solved the case. Another successful case and he might be up for a promotion.

"No thank you,” she replied. “I need to go check some references at the British Museum. I'll be seeing you at the site in Corcester on—Sunday afternoon about two, shall we say? You can show me the area."

"And mind your back,” Gareth pointed out.

"If necessary.” Smiling ruefully, Matilda reached into her handbag. “Here's my card, with my cell phone number. Good morning, Inspector."

He thrust the card into his pocket without looking at it. “Good morning."

She walked off down the hall, stepping out briskly, back straight, chin up, not arrogant, he thought, but irritatingly self-confident. If she was a charlatan, she was also a superb actress. But acting ability was not something Gareth respected. It involved too much illusion.

He pushed open the doors of the incident room and sat down at his desk. The scene beyond the windows appeared unremittingly gray.

After three months in England, Ashley Walraven knew she'd better appreciate the clear afternoon while she had the chance. She stood in the town square and turned her face like a flower to the sun. Around her the citizens of Corcester slowed and dropped onto benches and steps as if they were melting in the unusual warmth.

The brick pedestrians-only area was more accurately a town polygon. At one side two ancient black-and-white magpie houses leaned together, erect more out of habit than out of structural integrity. Even though the ground floors were filled by an appliance store and Corcester's Job Centre, Ashley was charmed.

Opposite the houses stood St. Michael's church, its red stone buttresses mortared by lichen. A yew tree drooped over weathered headstones. Bells pealed from a crow-haunted tower. This was what a church should look like, Ashley told herself. The one her mother attended was disguised as a civic auditorium. The cross, tucked away in foliage at the rear of the stage, looked like an afterthought. When she'd commented about “MacChurch,” her mother had muttered darkly of disrespect verging on blasphemy.

Her mother. Ashley turned toward the building next to the two half-timbered relics. Mr. Clapper at the hotel had said—yes, there was a red mailbox pillar. She thrust her letter through the slot. Another Sunday, another letter home. She never thought she'd be grateful she hardly ever got a chance to check her e-mail and had had to leave her cell phone at home, but being reduced to snail mail had turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

It might take her mother's letters a few days to catch up to her, now that the students had moved from a dormitory in Manchester to the hotel in Corcester. Maybe for a few days she could get down off the co-dependency trip. Even though her mother did seem to be getting along all right without her—surprise, surprise. Still, her letters were full of the usual complaints, warnings, and commentary about Ashley's father's new wife—"almost as young as you are, Punkin, although you'd never know beneath all the make-up, calls herself a legal aide as though everyone didn't know she's a cheap little gold-digger...."

Her mother's voice was so clear Ashley tensed and looked around. The only people nearby were two young men scanning the notices in the window of the Job Centre. They wore shapeless jackets and heavy boots, and jostled each other as though sharing a joke. The more supple and slender of the two turned toward Ashley and smiled.

His black hair was too shaggy to be fashionable, and his jaw was darkened by more than a five-o'clock shadow, something like a ten-o'clock eclipse. But he wore an earring, and his smile was the devil-may-care grin of a romantic hero, alluring, challenging, dangerous. Ashley felt the heat rush to her cheeks.

"Eh,” he called, and jerked his head in a summons.

Oh yeah, right,
Ashley thought.

A policeman materialized from a side street. “Here,” he said to the men. “I suppose you're looking for employment, are you now?"

"Oh yes, Constable, that we are,” replied the one with the smile, while his friend stood in a sullen lump.

"And I'm the Archbishop of Canterbury,” said the bobby. “Push off, the both of you, get back to your caravans."

The young men strolled away, just slowly enough to be insolent.

The policeman turned, muttering something about travelers and caravans, and almost walked into Ashley. “Sorry, Miss,” he said. His round face was puckered around something sour, and she knew he didn't really see her. The dashing black-haired man had seen her.

Making an about-face, Ashley thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket and headed toward the narrow steps between the churchyard fence and some nondescript stone buildings. She plunged suddenly into shadow. Her steps echoed from the surrounding walls, faster and faster, until she popped back out into the sunlight at the foot of the hill. Beyond a battered wall built of brick-sized Roman stones stood the Green Dragon hotel. Its nucleus was an old black-and-white building only marginally more perpendicular than the ones opposite the church. Around that were cobbled together structures from various eras, Jacobean brick, Georgian stone, even a hideous modern annex that Ashley could only describe as bastard Swiss chalet.

A signboard above the door showed a kelly-green lizard gazing quizzically at a knight in armor, as though trying to decide whether to eat him or ask him to tea. Below the board gathered Ashley's classmates, all American students except for three Germans, a Swede, and an Italian.

"Where were you?” asked a tall boy with the brush cut and predatory white teeth of an American jock.

"Mailing a letter."

"The weekly chronicle to Mom? I bet you were asking for money."

"Like I'm going to ask for money when she's on a strict...."

Jason turned back to Caterina Rossi's overstuffed sweater.

Sorry mine aren't big enough for you,
Ashley told him silently. Not that she wanted to get anything going with Jason. If she'd ever met a use-her-and-lose-her sort of guy, it was him.

The heavy glass and brass doors of the hotel groaned open, emitting Howard Sweeney, his cell phone pressed to his ear. “Later,” he said into it, turned it off, and tucked it into his pocket. “Very good then, shall we be off?” Without waiting for a reply, he led the group of twenty or so students across the street almost under the grille of a delivery van.

They passed a recreation center where shirt-sleeved men were lawn-bowling, and skirted a couple of houses whose gardens were sprinkled with daffodils and early tulips. Once across another road and through a gate in a stone fence, Sweeney stopped and gesticulated. “Behold, ancient Cornovium. Mind your step. Cows."

To Ashley, ancient Cornovium looked like a lumpy pasture that sloped down to the trees edging the river Thane. She squinted, trying to see the settlement she'd studied.

The thick grass of the pasture lay like a quilt over the banks and ditches defining the military fort. The four gateways, north, south, east, west, were gaps in the embankment. The occasional masonry angle jutting from the sod looked promising, but the rubbish dump beside the road didn't. And yet the civilian settlement outside the fort had extended beyond the road, toward the hillside where an amphitheater had once nestled and that was now crowned by the church.

Ashley turned to look back at the town, imagining the ancient equivalent of fish and chips shops thronged with legionaries.... Jason was feeling up Caterina. She was simpering up at him.

Sweeney marched off through the knee-high grass. Rolling her eyes—really, she'd thought Caterina had better taste—Ashley hurried after him. She liked Dr. Sweeney. He was in his fifties, probably, with gray crisp-crinkled hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and the hunched shoulders of the scholar. An impudent grin revealed a gap between his front teeth. He wore ascot ties tucked in the necks of his shirts and sweaters. She'd never known anyone who actually wore ascot ties. Her father, when he'd been around, had worn giveaway T-shirts and watched “Hogan's Heroes” reruns.

"Supposedly this was once the site of a Celtic temple, Eponemeton,” Sweeney proclaimed. “Epona being the goddess of horses. T.J. Miller found a tessellated pavement, a double row of post holes, and some stone heads back in the 1930s, beneath the Roman layers. That, however, was only a quick and dirty test dig.” He indicated a ditch clogged with weeds and mud that cut across one quadrant of the fort.

"This area, Cheshire and points south and east, was the home of the Cornovii tribe. Their capital was at Viroconium, modern Wroxeter.
Corn
means
horn
in Latin—hence ‘unicorn.’ Probably the tribe owed allegiance to the stag god Cernunnos, although the Celts also had bull gods. Miller found a subterranean chamber he thought might be a Roman Mithraeum. The sun-god Mithras was originally from Persia. His influence spread because he was adopted by the legionaries. They liked the bit about slaying the bull, I daresay. Shocking what people will believe. True believers can be easily manipulated, can't they?"

Since that was a rhetorical question, no one answered. The group clambered up the crest of the eastern embankment. Several black and white cows regarded them incuriously. A chilly breeze rippled the grass, and the Thane glinted beyond its curtain of trees. A subtle scent of diesel and cooking grease was all that remained of modern Corcester.

Sweeney waved at a cluster of buildings and fences at the far end of the pasture, where a brown horse and rider paced sedately back and forth. “The land the fort is on belongs to the farm there. A horse farm, appropriately enough. Fortuna Stud. A lovely continuation of tradition, wouldn't you say? And when you consider that the Romans stationed here included a troop of Syrian cavalry, well then!” He spread his hands like a stage magician who'd just produced two doves and a rabbit. Ashley nodded appreciatively.

"Cornovium was an auxiliary fort. The primary fortress in this area was Deva, which is now the tourist haven of Chester. It was originally headquarters of the Legio II Adiutrix of which this was a cohort. Later Legio II Valeria Victrix moved north from Viroconium to Chester, and, we assume, here."

Two casually-dressed people came climbing up the northern bank behind Sweeney's back. The woman stooped, burrowed into a pothole at the base of a wall, and produced something that she showed to her male companion. He shrugged. She put the object in her pocket.

"Cornovium was established in 70 Anno Domini,” Sweeney went on, “only ten years after Boudicca's rebellion, and was a going concern by 80. Whether Boudicca was a traitor or a freedom fighter rather depends on your perception of the situation. Suffice it to say, our Romans here kept quite the weather eye upon the local Celts. In 83 Agricola led Legio II Adiutrix north. He duly conquered the Brigantes and then carried on into Scotland. At what point Cornovium ceased being a Roman fortress and commenced being a Romano-British town we're not sure. Perhaps about 300 or so. That's one of the questions we're after answering here.” Sweeney paced toward the center of the camp.

The students moved in a gaggle behind him, Ashley at point, Jason and Caterina self-absorbed at the rear. Manfred, one of the Germans, turned a cold blue gaze on the slackers. Two American girls, Jennifer and Courtney, nudged each other and giggled. “Throw a bucket of water on them,” muttered Bryan, his all-American freckles flaring indignantly. Ashley shot him a grateful glance.

"The headquarters building would have been about here,” said Sweeney, “at the intersections of the via principalis and the via praetoria, with the commander's house just opposite. The early houses were only wood and wattle and daub, mind you, but were quite substantial even so, with all mod cons. The first commander of the garrison might even have brought his wife out from Rome. What she thought of being summoned to a howling wilderness such as Britain, is, perhaps fortunately, unrecorded!” He laughed.

Ashley smiled. The imaginary Roman woman and her “mod cons"—modern conveniences—would've found Britain a green paradise. Of course, the neighbors had been rowdy types given to head-hunting.

"Right. Here's our datum point, this masonry corner. We'll plot a grid and dig test areas there, there and there—hope you've swotted a bit on your maths, this must be surveyed properly before we begin. Manfred, you're in charge of the first team, Bryan the second, Jason the third."

Jason looked up. “Huh?"

Ashley looked down at her boots. She had the highest average in the class, but Sweeney didn't think she was leader material.

"So then...” Sweeney made a sweeping gesture that took in the two newcomers. “Well, well, well, what have we here? Matilda Gray, is it?"

"Hello, Howard,” said the woman.

"Gareth March,” the man said, and exchanged a brisk handshake with Sweeney.

"Ah!” Sweeney's brows coasted up his forehead. “You're our reporter. Going to write up the dig, eh?"

"The
Times
Sunday magazine. Our Roman Heritage."

"And Mrs.—er—Ms. Gray.... “Sweeney began.

"Dr. Gray,” she corrected.

"Dr. Gray will be my second-in-command,” he announced to the class, “being a scholar of some note on the opposite side of the Atlantic."

Gray smiled indulgently at Sweeney, and in greeting at the students. “Hi."

The students murmured hellos warily, as though trying to decide whether Gray gave pop quizzes. She seemed like a nice lady, Ashley thought, about her mother's age. But Laura Walraven looked as though she'd spent the last twenty years having electroshock treatments. Gray might have spent the same time sitting in the lotus position.