Too Clever by Half

by Will North

  Finally he emerged, crossed the forecourt, and came through the back door, whistling. When he entered the kitchen and saw her outfit, he grinned and slipped a hand high up her leg.

  She shivered, but slapped his hand away. “Go on, ya’ randy bastard, and wash the farm off your body. Plenty of time for that later!”

  That got him. Archie sloped off into the house to bathe and change. She had a pint glass of Sharps Special ale waiting on the little cricket table beside the fire when Archie came back downstairs. He settled into his favorite chair and downed the pint like a man who’d been lost in a desert.

  “What’s for tea, then?” he growled.

  “We call it supper now, in this century, Arch.”

  He made a face.

  “One of your favorites,” she continued, bringing him a refill. “Cumberland sausage smothered in caramelized leeks with potato and parsnip mash. Will that satisfy my Thor?” She bent at the waist to display breasts barely contained in her loose linen blouse.

  “Only one thing satisfies Thor. An’ Thor knows you like your sausage, he does. No wonder we call ‘em ‘bangers, eh?”

  She giggled. “But first, my lord, you must be fed, to renew your strength…”

  The play had begun. They knew their lines. And Charlotte knew that when he’d eaten and had his third or fourth pint he would either bend her over the table or haul her upstairs and make demands of her she was only too eager to fulfill…because she’d set the rules.

  She served and poured. This was going very well. One day, soon, he would be hers completely. Patience. Submission. Control. These were her weapons.

  Four

  ON MONDAY MORNING, second April, Archie Hansen gulped his coffee, tore off a bite from a buttered hunk of brown granary bread slathered with orange marmalade, and looked out through his kitchen window and across the yard to the building opposite. Not for the first time, he wished he’d had a proper enclosed barn. The stone outbuilding across the concrete yard was more a large slant-roofed shed, stone walls closing it on three sides but open to the sheltered courtyard. He didn’t have animals to protect or bags of perishable feed to store so the massive slate-roofed structure, its lichen-encrusted granite walls dating from the eighteenth century, was sufficient to keep his tractor and its accessories sheltered from the elements and protect the other supplies necessary for the crops he cultivated.

  But it was a poor place for hiding treasure.

  Still in his slippers, the leather of which was crackled like an alligator’s hide, he shuffled into his “office,” barely a pantry off the kitchen, which housed his aging desktop computer and, mounted on one wall, his collection of antique swords. He turned the computer on and, when the aging monitor finally awoke, pecked away at the keyboard, once ivory but now grimy from his farmers fingers. Normally he used the machine to check the weather forecasts, follow commodity prices, and order seed, bulbs, or equipment. But not this morning. This morning he was using it to search for dealers in antiquities. That was the word: antiquities; it had taken him a while to find the right search term. He peered at the screen, then pulled out his mobile and punched in a number.

  “Good morning, Bonhams London,” a young woman’s posh voice answered. “May I connect you with one of our departments?”

  “I, ah…I’m not sure which one.”

  “Was there something in our catalogue or auction schedule you wished to discuss?”

  “No, it’s to do with Roman jewelry, I reckon.”

  “Buyer or seller?” the chipper voice asked.

  “Seller, actually.” Archie was trying to sound posh, too, but feared his thick Cornish accent belied his efforts.

  “I’ll just connect you, then, shall I?”

  Archie wondered if it was really a question.

  He went through roughly the same drill with the next receptionist before being connected, finally, to a curator.

  “This is Hugh Edwards,” a plummy voice purred. “How may I be of assistance, Mr.…?”

  Archie blurted the first false name he could think of: “Tregareth.”

  “Yes, Mr. Tregareth?”

  “I have what I reckon may be some Roman stuff, in gold, and some other things, coins mostly. Found them plowing one of my fields. In the Southwest.”

  There was the slightest intake of breath. “I see. Yes, that would most certainly be of interest, Mr. Tregareth. You have reported these objects, of course, under the Treasure Act of 1996?”

  “The what?”

  A pause: “I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then, shall I?”

  Archie wanted to reach through the phone and throttle the poncey bastard.

  “You see, Mr. Tregareth,” Edwards continued, “one has a legal obligation to report finds of ancient artifacts to the county coroner’s office where one resides and to do so within fourteen days of one’s discovery. The coroner will hold an inquest sometime in the next six months. If the coroner’s inquest declares the artifacts treasure under the meaning of the act, then they, in turn, will contact the Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum, which will arrange a valuation.”

  “Yeah, but what about selling them straightaway?”

  “We could not possibly offer at auction the pieces you have found, sir—assuming they are genuine. That is illegal. On the other hand, under the terms of the Act, you could be due a reward equal to the full market value of the find, in which case no sale would be involved. The treasure reverts to the Crown and is held by the British Museum, you see.”

  Archie didn’t see and didn’t much care: “How long’s that evaluation take, then?”

  “Oh, it’s a meticulous process, as you might imagine with items of great antiquity and value. The museum will choose one or more experts…like myself”—Archie did not miss the tone of superiority—“to appraise the pieces, determine their authenticity, and ascertain their value. It involves much research and easily could take another year or two, depending on the rarity of the items. Our responsibility is to the Crown, you see, Mr. Tregareth.”

  “Mr. Tregareth? Hello?”

  But Archie had rung off.

  Hugh Edwards sat for a while in his richly-furnished, wood-paneled office and finally called a private number at the British Museum.

  “Roger? Hugh here. Just thought you should know I had some rustic give me a bell just now wanting us to sell what he claims are pieces of Roman jewelry and coins he’s found on his farm somewhere in the Southwest. No, he hasn’t reported it. Yes, I informed him, of course I did. Said his name was Tregareth; that’s all I got. I also got the impression he didn’t want to report and was looking to sell quickly. Of course I bloody well turned him down, Roger; what do you make me? No, I didn’t get more of his particulars; he rang off while I was in mid-sentence, if you can believe it. No, I didn’t bore him to death! Jesus, you stuffy old queen, why did I bother? Consider yourself forewarned.”

  Roger Montague, director of the British Museum’s Department of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities, stood at his rain-streaked office window overlooking Great Russell Street and very nearly sniffed, like a hound, trying to catch the scent of gold from the far-off Southwest. The game was on, there was treasure to be located and returned to the Crown. The problem with Hugh and Bonhams was all they cared about was what they could sell at auction. Crown treasure was nothing to them, but everything to him. His job was to do with heritage and history. It was a noble assignment.

  Tregareth. Strange name, he thought.

  ARCHIE HAD BEEN pacing his kitchen ever since his call to Bonhams, worried he’d given too much away. He’d chosen Bonhams simply because, alphabetically, it was the first dealer listed on Wikipedia. But the Treasure Act? Who’d ever heard of such a thing? Bloody government meddling in his private affairs, on his own land, is what that was. He voted Conservative to rid the country of this sort of officious meddling and look where it had got him!

  Then, he thought of eBay. But when he tried to list his finds, he hi
t an electronic stone wall, an eBay “Restricted” warning: Sellers listing items of potential Treasure found in England and Wales on or after 24 September 1997 should be able to provide proof that the items were reported under the Treasure Act.

  “Son of a bitch!” He kicked a leg of his desk, walked out into the kitchen, and stared across the courtyard to the shed. Then he picked up his mobile again.

  “Reg,” he said when the call connected.

  “Archie, you old Cornish knave, what rock you been hidin’ under? Wantin’ back into the dirty videos game, are you? One of our top distributors, you were, but that game’s over, my friend, done in by the bloody Internet, not that we haven’t adapted a’course…”

  “Like I don’t know? No, this is different. Bigger.”

  “Oh?”

  “I need somebody who deals in antiquities, Reg.”

  “Antiquities, is it? What’s that mean in English?”

  “Ancient jewelry and artifacts. Roman, I reckon.”

  He heard a whistled breath.

  “A bit out of my league that is, you know, Arch.”

  “But you might know someone?”

  A pause.

  “I might do.”

  Five

  “WEIGHT?" DR. JENNIFER Duncan demanded. On her home turf, the Royal Cornwall Hospital mortuary in Truro, the forensic pathologist did not mince words.

  It was early Thursday evening, seventeenth May, several hours after DI Davies had received the floater from the Coastguard at Newlyn. Scotty Thomas, the bearded and bearish mortuary manager, read the weight of the body, white and shiny as a huge slab of filleted Atlantic halibut, from the digital read-out at the head of the stainless steel trolley.

  “Eighty-three kilos, Doc.”

  “Height?”

  “One point seven three meters. Little chap.”

  Duncan laughed. “Only compared to you, you beast.”

  Thomas grinned. “Why thank you, ma’am. Didn’t think you’d taken notice of my splendid physique.”

  “I haven’t, you randy ape. Don’t get any ideas.”

  Duncan, one of two contract forensic pathologists serving the Devon and Cornwall Police, had worked with Scotty for several years now. They’d had a rocky start, principally because Duncan, though in her mid-thirties, was impossibly young-looking and, to make matters worse, a silken blond of very fine construction. Her forensic skills notwithstanding, it had taken her quite some time to be taken seriously by the old boys. But no one misjudged her any longer: she was all business. And the only thing sharper than her scalpel was her tongue.

  From a perch on a stool near the door, DI Davies smiled: Sisters under the skin, Jenn and I are…”

  “We await your convenience, Calum,” Duncan called now, her impatience echoing in the white tiled autopsy room.

  “Listen here, young lady,” crime scene manager Calum West said from atop the tall folding ladder from which he was taking digital record photos of the body, “my job is as vital as yours, just not as bloody, thank God.”

  “Don’t get all high and mighty.”

  “It’s the ladder.”

  “Then get down here.”

  “Patience is a virtue.”

  “Virtue is overrated and bodies deteriorate.”

  “You’re still single, am I right?” West said, finishing and climbing to the tiled floor.

  “What’s that to do with anything?”

  “Just suggesting you might be a bit more tolerant of the men in your life.”

  “Most of the men in my life are dead, Calum.”

  “Mine, too, Jenn,” said Davies from her perch, “but the difference is they’re still breathing.”

  Duncan gave Davies a thumbs up and chuckled.

  “Jaded, you ladies are, more’s the pity. Plenty of fine gents about.” This from Roger Morris, West’s best exhibits manager. He sat on another high stool beside a stainless table, ready to receive and preserve tissue and organ samples from Duncan. A trim, gentle fellow just turned forty, few women had been able to see past his face, which, thanks to rampant adolescent acne, looked like a bomb-cratered acre of the Somme from World War One.

  “Send me a list when you have a moment, Roger,” Duncan snapped.

  Theirs was a gruesome job, and their banter made it less so. They were, in fact, close friends and a well-matched team.

  West and Thomas, both dressed in green scrubs and blue paper booties like Duncan, Morris, and Davies, pushed the trolley across the room and lifted the blanched body to the autopsy table where Duncan waited. There were three such tables, just over waist-high, in the long room. Each high-rimmed ceramic platform was shoulder-broad at one end and ankle-narrow at the other, not unlike a lidless porcelain coffin with short sides. Each was supported by two white stanchions thick as tree trunks. West often wondered what sort of local calamity would require all three tables to be in use at once; his cases had only ever required one.

  Duncan had a small digital tape recorder tucked into the breast pocket of her scrubs. This was a new bit of technology; she’d previously taken written notes, shuttling back and forth from the autopsy table to a stainless steel counter where her paperwork lay. But that method was too inefficient for her now, a time-waster; she’d transcribe her oral observations later.

  “I begin with an assessment of what appear to be ante-mortem injuries,” she said into the recorder, “specifically, shallow linear slashes on the torso. There are no wounds about the face, as if that had been spared intentionally. Wounds are inconsistent with marine predator attacks. I suspect a straight or only slightly curved weapon. A machete, perhaps, but others are possible.”

  “Let’s say the chap fell overboard. Could those be propeller marks?” Calum asked from the opposite side of the table.

  “Thought of that when I first saw him, and called a pathologist at Cambridge who’s an expert on propeller marks. He was one of my teachers. He says not a chance.”

  “You were at Cambridge?”

  “Don’t look so surprised, Calum…”

  She returned to the tape recorder: “The buttocks and back are grazed as if the victim has been dragged across rough ground, concrete, or shingle. As for time spent in water, there is no sign of maceration of the hands or feet, no detachment of the skin, no bloating. No gull pecking on the back, either.” Leaning hard, Duncan compressed the chest and only the slightest drizzle of soapy foam escaped from the victim’s mouth. She crossed her arms and said nothing for a moment.

  “This is, without question, a dry drowning,” she said finally, “which is to say the victim, though alive, was unconscious and face-down when entering the water. The initial intake of seawater was small and his larynx spasmed. He suffocated. He did not ingest seawater. I believe the victim was in the water a very short period of time before being found. Not less than one hour, not more than four. Bloodstream diatom tests are unwarranted.”

  Taking up a scalpel next, Duncan cut a deep, clean incision down from each ear, around and beneath the jaw, stopping just above the sternum. From there, she drew the blade down the center of the chest, veering slightly to the left at the navel, then continuing all the way to the pubic bone.

  Calum had always marveled at the absence of blood in post mortems. Dead bodies don’t bleed.

  Using scalpel and shears, she cut through the connective tissue along each side of the chest, retracted the skin, and examined the ribcage.

  Next, she lifted the ribcage free, revealing the lungs and heart beneath. She set the chest cage aside to be returned to the body at the conclusion of the autopsy.

  Working quickly but methodically, she began removing organs, starting with the heart and lungs. The lungs evidenced no excess fluid, reinforcing her conclusion that suffocation, not drowning, was the cause of death. From the heart, she took blood samples which she shifted to Morris. These and several tissue samples would be sent upstairs to the hospital’s tox lab. With any luck they’d have results by the next day.

  Moving on,
Duncan removed, examined, and weighed other organs. Finally, she made an ear-to-ear incision across the top of the victim’s head, pulled the scalp both front and back as if peeling a fruit, and then used her Stryker saw to remove the top of the skull.

  As she always did at this stage, Morgan rose from her seat along the wall and left the autopsy room. She wasn’t squeamish, but there was something about opening the skull which seemed to her a profound violation. She didn’t hold much truck with notions of “the spirit,” even after the last case with that witch, Tamsin Bran, with its apparent visitations from the spiritual “Annown,” the after-world. She still hadn’t fully got her mind around that experience. But the brain was a sacred organ to her, the place where reason resided. And reason—clear, icy, almost mathematical—was the mechanism by which Morgan coped with the world she encountered as a policewoman. It was also how she’d coped with the traumas of her childhood, and it had sped her advancement in the force.

  Duncan cut free the victim’s brain and, after taking tissue samples, placed it in a container of formalin.

  As he assisted, much of this work seemed superfluous to Calum West. From his point of view as scene of crimes manager, the victim had died in the water. That was obvious, even if the man had not, technically, drowned. And the victim was assaulted, his body lacerated. That, too, was obvious. There didn’t seem to be much more to learn. His impatience, he knew, was due principally to the fact that he had no crime scene to investigate: no bloody room, no patch of turf in a park, no damp alley: just a naked anonymous body afloat on an empty sea. The body, in fact, was his only “scene.” Still, he respected Duncan’s commitment to procedure and held his tongue. As he watched her work, she reminded him oddly of a seasoned barkeep at a pub: she moved fluidly and continuously, without a single wasted motion: slicing, sampling, turning, and slicing again, as if choreographed. The only thing missing were the punters at the other side of the bar, their pint jars raised to signal for a refill.