Triskellion (18 page)

Y
ellow light from the tallow candles flickers round the circular walls of the hut, dancing across the wooden beams and making the hanging furs seem alive
.

The man stands in the doorway, holding back a heavy curtain, a helmet under his arm. His angular face is anxious, his green eyes adjusting to the gloom of the smoky dwelling. He puts his helmet on a bench; his focus fixing on the wooden pallet where the maiden lies, drained and exhausted. Her eyes are shut, but she tosses, turns and mutters, caught in a troubled sleep. Her chestnut curls are damp and stuck to her face
.

The man steps further into the room, barely seeing the old woman who emerges from the deep shadows. She is holding something. A baby. No. Two babies, wrapped in cloth – bandaged almost, like tiny mummies
.

The old woman holds the infants out to the man, who takes them in his arms and looks down at their tiny faces: eyes the same colour as his own, twinkling, alive. Alive and perfect
.

The man looks over at the sleeping girl and smiles, tears rolling down his smooth cheeks…

Adam looked at his sister, asleep in the bed opposite. Her hair was spread across the pillow and her eyelids moved as the eyes darted beneath them. The skin on her face twitched as though she were in pain and her lips mouthed random words.

He shook her shoulder, but she was fast asleep.

He watched as she muttered and thrashed about, and knew that she was having the same dream that had just woken him. A dream of twins; a dream of the distant past. A dream in which an ancient version of Rachel appeared to be married to Gabriel…

The Star was uncharacteristically busy for a Monday night. The television crew, though unpopular with many of the villagers, was undoubtedly good for Tom Hatcham’s business. Not only were the presenter and his producer staying in the rooms upstairs, but so were the cameraman, soundman and half a dozen other people. Hatcham had no idea what they all did, but they all had an apparently insatiable appetite for pub food and beer, and compared to most of The Star’s customers they didn’t seem to care how much it all cost.

“Probably got expense accounts,” a customer muttered from his vantage point on a bar stool.

“They get paid more than what I do, and that’s the truth
of it,” said another. He punctuated his point by draining what was left of a glass of beer, nearly three quarters of a pint, before banging his glass down ready for another. Hatcham served him automatically as the kitchen door swung open and a flustered barmaid brought out what seemed like the hundredth plate of breadcrumbed scampi that evening. She looked to Hatcham for guidance.

“Over by the window.” Hatcham nodded towards his largest table, in the corner, where the genial host of television’s
Treasure Hunters
, held court in a loud voice.

“So Noel says, ‘Why don’t you do the show yourself, if it’s such a good idea?’ And you know what? That’s exactly what I damn well did. The rest, as they say, is history … or archaeology!”

All but one of the people at the table with Chris Dalton collapsed into convivial laughter, while Laura Sullivan, his all-round producer, researcher and right-hand woman rolled her eyes. She had heard the story many times before. It was true, up to a point; Dalton had certainly popularized TV archaeology. But each time the tale was retold, it showed him in an increasingly flattering light. The show’s popularity had made Chris Dalton very rich, but it didn’t make him any easier to work with.

He picked up a large chip from the plate that had just been put in front of him, dipped it in mayonnaise and bit into it. “Bloody chips are cold,” he said to no one in particular. He looked at Laura as if she ought to be doing something about it.

“I think they’re a bit hassled,” Laura said. “I guess they’re not usually this busy.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Try not to complain, Chris, will you? We don’t want to upset anyone here. Charm offensive, remember?”

Dalton was perfectly capable of creating a major stink over a few cold chips, but he knew Laura was right. It was a sensitive business going into these villages and digging up their past. Some of them welcomed the publicity and the temporary brush with fame, but others saw it as an unwelcome intrusion that had nothing to do with preserving the past and everything to do with making money.

It was clear to Laura that this village was the latter kind. The parish bigwigs had done all that they could to stop the TV show filming in Triskellion, and the local MP had done everything in his power to prevent the dig on the moor. However, the county council had overridden the villagers’ objections. They had argued that
Treasure Hunters
was a popular TV show and that bringing it to Triskellion would be a huge boost for tourism in the area and a much needed source of income for local businesses.

When the barmaid arrived at the table and asked if everything was all right, Dalton turned on his most dazzling show-business smile. “Absolutely superb,” he said. “My compliments to the chef.” When she shyly asked if he would mind signing an autograph, he happily scribbled on a napkin for her.

“Is that Kelly with a ‘Y’, or with an ‘IE’?”

Dinner over, the table began to break away. The cameraman got up to play darts with the sound engineer, while Amanda, the production assistant, yawned loudly and said something about turning in early as she was pregnant.

Laura leant over to Dalton. She had made sure that all the paperwork was in place to make the dig legal, but something else was bothering her.

“Chris?”

“Yis, me old cobber?” Dalton said. He never missed an opportunity to mimic Laura’s Australian accent with a very bad version of his own.

“I have one big worry about this. OK, we’ve got permission to dig, fine. But there’s absolutely no evidence that there is anything under the chalk circle. It’s really not typical of Bronze Age burial barrows.”

Dalton shrugged. “But this bee guy, Honeybum or whatever he’s called, is absolutely convinced. How many letters and emails has he sent me? How many parcels of bloody fossils?”

“Sure, there’s
some
stuff there,” Laura said patiently. “It’s an ancient site. But if we go crashing around in our size nines, dig it up and find nothing
major
, it’s us with lots of egg on our faces.”

“Laura…”

“It’ll set us back for anything else we want to do.”

“Laura, Laura, Laura…”

Laura took a deep breath. She knew she was about to be patronized.

Dalton sighed. “Laura, love. How much have you learned about telly since you’ve been with me, eh? You are a
fantastic
producer. You’re organized, you’re thorough…”

“I did actually study archaeology
properly
for seven years before I joined this circus, you know?” Laura gave him a good hard look, making sure, as she always did, that her credentials as a serious archaeologist were noted. Despite two years working with her, Dalton had a habit of forgetting that she knew her stuff.

“I know, I know,” Dalton said. “You are a
top
archaeologist.” There was a twinkle in his eye suddenly. It was one he’d turned on for the cameras a hundred times over two series of
Treasure Hunters
. “And you’re not a bad-looking one either, when we see you on screen…”

“Oh, shut up.”

Laura hated it when Dalton did this. It annoyed her, knowing that he would
never
have employed her, would never have put her on screen, had she looked like the back of a bus. As it was, she knew she looked better than
that
. At twenty-seven, she was tall and willowy: honey-skinned, with a mass of curly red hair. But she was so much more than that. She was tough: she had trudged through the outback alone for days on end. She was smart: she had taken all the major prizes at the University of Western Australia for her work on Aboriginal dreaming sites, and her thesis on Bronze
Age societies had been published to critical praise.

And now Chris Dalton was doing his “little lady” act on her.

Dalton could see he was annoying Laura, and quickly changed his tone. “Listen, here’s the deal. We’ve got fabulous countryside to film, a picture-postcard village, a church with a crusader tomb and an amazing artefact. We’ve got a local nutter in a patched-up coat who has a knack of finding stupid amounts of coins with a cheap metal detector. Get him down on tape spouting his theories about burial sites, corn circles or whatever, I’ll do a re-enactment as a Bronze Age druid burying my wages for luck …
bingo
, we’ve already got TV gold.”

Laura looked across the table at Dalton’s shiny, enthusiastic face. He was right. It was hardly rigorous archaeology, but it was already sounding like a very watchable TV show.

“And…”
Dalton continued, “when we dig under the circle, we’ll do it live. Build the tension. We’ll have the whole country watching. Then, if we
do
find something, we’ve hit pay-dirt, publicity, global fame. We’re talking a bagful of BAFTAs here.”

Laura laughed at Dalton’s confidence. “And if we find nothing?”

“All the above.” He smiled when Laura looked confused. “We expose Honeybum as a crank who’s wasted our time and we still end up looking like the caring professionals we are. We can’t lose, whichever way things turn out.” Dalton
winked at Laura, balancing his hands in the air to describe his perfectly thought out win/win scenario.

Laura drank the last of her fizzy water. “OK, Chris. You’ve sold me, but I’m not going to victimize anybody if it doesn’t work out. It’s a show, but I don’t think it’s right to string up the poor guy who put us in touch with all this. If there is nothing there, it’s our risk, OK?”

“Whatever you say.”

Laura stood up. “I’m going for a bit of fresh air. I might stroll up to the circle, see what sort of vibe I get from it.”

Dalton stood up and put on his leather jacket. “I’ll come with you. These streets are not very well lit.”

The look on Laura’s face told him in an instant that he was not especially welcome. He made an elaborate yawning gesture and looked at his watch. “Actually, I think I’ll turn in,” he said. “Got a few calls to make anyway and we’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”

Laura nodded and strode away towards the door of the pub.

“Don’t talk to any strange men,” Dalton called after her, jokily. He gave a general wave to the bar, and another to his crew playing darts, before slapping a wad of notes down in front of Tom Hatcham. “Thank you, landlord! Charming hostelry. Excellent victuals. Good night, good sir.”

Dalton nodded to the stern military-looking man, who sat by the bar sipping brandy. He leant down to pat the head of the giant wolfhound at the man’s feet, then went up to his room.

“Seems like a decent enough bloke,” Hatcham said, sweeping up the pile of cash from the bar.

“I thought he was an idiot,” Commodore Wing growled. “Nice-looking girl, though.”

Hatcham grinned at the commodore’s evaluation of Laura, and was about to add one of his own, but was pulled up short by the old man’s steely glare.

“Just make sure we don’t get any more of this kind of interest, Tom. We’ve lost the fight on the archaeology, but I don’t want them snooping around anywhere else. They’ll dig up all sorts of stuff that doesn’t need digging up. Clear?”

“Don’t worry; Honeyman’s had a very serious warning. I don’t think he’ll be saying too much more to anyone about the village.”

Wing slammed a palm down on the bar. “I don’t just mean Honeyman,” he said. “I don’t want
anyone
talking to them. Understand?”

F
rom the comfort of her bed, Rachel watched a bee slowly circle the ceiling light in the bedroom, its wings working barely enough to keep it in the air. Did they hibernate, she wondered? There were certainly fewer of them hovering about the roses in front of the cottage, now the weather had cooled.

She would ask Jacob. He could tell her.

It had been a week since that terrible day in the forest, and though the morning sun still shone through the bedroom window, there was a hint of autumn chill in the air. This time of year always made Rachel think of study. She usually got butterflies in her stomach thinking about the start of a new school year, but now everything had changed. The American school term would start soon and this year she was looking forward to going back. Back to the regularity, and the security.