Too Clever by Half

by Will North

  “Cause of death is suffocation, the wounds incidental,” she finally said into her recorder, stepping away from the table after midnight and making room for Thomas to return the organs and rib cage and sew the body back together.

  “But clearly not accidental,” Davies said. She’d returned from the staff room.

  “Not with those wounds, no.”

  “He didn’t bleed to death?”

  “No; the cuts are shallow, deliberate, and irrelevant to cause of death. A swipe in the right place—neck, leg, any major artery—would have killed him quickly. These wounds were intentional and designed to maim, not kill.”

  “It could have been torture, then?”

  “Maybe. Or punishment. Same thing, really.”

  West cocked his balding head and smiled. “You moving up to detective, Jennifer?”

  “You call that moving up?”

  Like an actor in a silent film, West winced, hands up as if for protection. Davies and Thomas both laughed.

  “Remind me, Jennifer, why we have you under contract?” West countered.

  “Because I’m the best you’ve got.” Then, tired as she was, she threw a runway model’s pose: “And so decorative.”

  “I won’t contest that.”

  She shot him a look: “Which?”

  “That shall be my secret.”

  Davies had run out of patience. She wanted to go home, have a vodka tonic or three, and slump into her bed. “There’s a Major Crime Investigation Team meeting with DCI Penwarren at the Falmouth nick tomorrow morning at nine. You’ll attend, Jennifer?”

  “Live bodies or dead?”

  “Live. Mostly.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Six

  “SO I MAY know of a chappie, down Bristol way…” Reg Connor said.

  It was Wednesday morning, fourth April, and Archie was on his tractor bumping up a stone walled, single lane track to another of his fields. He pulled into a layby, switched off the throbbing engine, and pressed the mobile to his ear. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Goes to these rare coin shows around the country, he does. Buys stuff found by detectorists…”

  “Who?”

  “Detectorists. Guys who go ‘round the countryside with metal detectors looking for buried coins and such. Popular hobby, I hear. Anyway, this chap buys the stuff from finders and then sells it on to dealers and collectors who don’t ask too many questions about provenance.”

  “Provenance? Who’s that when he’s at home?”

  “Place it came from, is what that means, Arch…where it was found. Detectorists are not supposed to dig up this stuff on someone’s land without permission. Some of them do anyway. Night hawks, they’re called. They dig at night. You need to get up to speed on this, Arch.”

  “Found this stuff on my own land, I did.”

  “You weren’t roamin’ around somewhere with a metal detector?”

  “Sod you, Reg; hit it with my tractor, didn’t I?”

  “Works for me, friend.”

  “So who’s this chap and where do I find him?”

  “Name’s Richard Townsend. Goes by ‘Dicky,’ if you can credit it. There’s a coin show at the Grand Hotel in Bristol this Saturday, the seventh. He’ll be there.”

  “Bristol’s hours away.”

  “Inconvenient, innit? Look Archie, you got something to sell? You go where they’re buyin’, see what I mean? And Arch, my lad, this ain’t peddlin’ naughty videos, you know.”

  “Yeah, I get that.”

  “I don’t think you do, Arch. You’re into heavy territory. Keep your head down, okay, pal?”

  THAT SATURDAY, ARCHIE Hansen stepped into the lobby of the Grand Hotel on Broad Street in Bristol just before eleven, after an hours-long drive north lugging along in the slow lanes of the A30 and M5 in his aging Land Rover Defender. It was a farm vehicle, not a motorway rocket. He was wearing his best and only suit—an out-of-fashion navy blue worsted, shiny in the seat and worn at the elbows from too many boozy weddings and wakes. Within moments of stepping through the hotel’s revolving doors, he was approached by a mincing young man in a tight-fitting black suit with the hotel’s name and crest embroidered in gold on the jacket’s chest pocket. A slender badge above the pocket said, Concierge, which meant nothing to Archie and sounded suspiciously French.

  “May I help you, sir?” the young man oozed, his right hand smoothing back slicked blond hair too white to be natural, while at the same time noting Archie’s suit and shoes with subtle disapproval.

  “Coin show,” Archie mumbled.

  The concierge was visibly relieved, this alien visitor now slotted into an acceptable pigeonhole: “Ah yes: that would be the Cavendish Room, second level, left out of the lift,” he said, taking Archie’s elbow and whisking him out of the sparkling lobby toward the elevators at the back.

  The Cavendish Room was like nothing Archie had ever seen before, except perhaps in shows on the telly about stately homes. He stood at the door and marveled at its high, coffered ceiling supported by six towering ivory and gold striped Greek columns with fanciful leaf patterns at the top. Three huge, pear-shaped chandeliers with hundreds of crystals hung along the center of the room, sending shards of light in every direction. Soaring multi-paned windows trimmed in the Georgian style flanked two exterior corner walls and were framed and capped with triangular pediments and draped in slate-blue fabric. The ruby red walls opposite the windows were hung with large, age-darkened landscape paintings. The carpet, in a vaguely oriental pattern, was of a matching red and slate blue. Arrayed along the walls of the long and crowded room were at least two dozen linen-draped tables belonging to dealers in coins and other antiquities. At each, modest printed signs of folded white poster board announced their names. The dealers, mostly men, lounged in chairs behind their tables and eyed each visitor, as if estimating the size of their wallets, rising and bowing to anyone who looked promising.

  They ignored Archie.

  It took him several minutes of elbowing among the well-dressed collectors and visiting dealers before he came upon Townsend Antiquities. The chap behind the table was short, a bit more fit than Archie, and balding at the temples, his hair grey there but ash blond elsewhere. He wore a sagging corduroy jacket the color of mud and an open-necked white dress shirt in need of pressing. A black jeweler’s loupe dangled from a braided leather lanyard around his neck. He had no customers. He gestured to the artifacts displayed on his table:

  “Something here of interest, my good man?”

  “Yourself, I reckon,” Archie said, his hands clasped behind his back in the manner of a browser.

  “Oh, yes?”

  “You Townsend, then?” Archie asked without lifting his eyes from the items displayed on the table. They looked very old and ill-used.

  “Was last time I checked. And you’d be…?”

  Archie ignored the question. “Pal of mine, Reg Connor, put me on to you, he did.”

  The dealer stood and extended his hand: “Dicky Townsend.” The man’s head was large and nearly bulbous, out of scale with the rest of him. Archie reckoned him late forties.

  “Did he, now? Good old Reg!”

  “He did. Old business partner, Reg is, you see. We go way back, right? Said I could trust you.”

  “And you most certainly can,” Townsend said. He had the rumbly voice of someone bigger and he pitched it just below the hum of the crowd at the other tables. “But with what, is what I’m wondering, Mr….?”

  Archie hesitated for a moment. No use lying; Reg would have put the chap wise by now anyway. “Hansen,” he answered finally. “Archie Hansen. From down Cornwall way.”

  “Ah,” Townsend said, as if that explained much. “And how may I help you, Mr. Hansen?”

  “Found some items on my farm. Reckon they’re old.” Archie looked around at the other people milling about the display tables. “You get a break for lunch or something?”

/>   “Did you have something to show me, Mr. Hansen? Something of interest?”

  Archie stuffed a hand in his suit pocket, pulled out a dirty handkerchief, unfolded it, and revealed a tarnished bronze brooch cupped in his palm. Just as quickly, he returned it.

  Dicky Townsend nodded, flipped his dealer’s card face downward on the table, scooped the few items he had on display into a shiny black briefcase, spun its combination lock, and said, “The Commercial Rooms pub is just around the corner on Corn Street. Good food, good beer. Better than this bloody hotel. You wouldn’t sleep in a restaurant, I always say, why would you eat in a hotel, eh?”

  A few minutes later, Archie stood outside The Commercial Rooms gazing at the building’s façade as if rooted to the pavement.

  Dicky smiled. “Bloody gorgeous, innit?”

  To Archie the pub looked more like a museum, or maybe a fancy old bank building. In the midday sun its limestone façade and pillars glowed as if coated in honey.

  “One of the first neoclassical buildings in Bristol. Built 1810,” Townsend explained. “See that triangular pediment over the entry with the four columns supporting it? That’s high Georgian, that is. Most of central Bath, just up the road, looks like this, but Bristol was a working port. It took another thirty years for culture to arrive.”

  “And this is their idea of a pub?”

  Dicky laughed and guided Archie up the worn stone steps to the door. “That’s only lately, my friend. It was built first as a sort of private club for the wealthy shipping merchants of the day. Even had a special weathervane on the roof so they’d know when the wind was right to bring their ships up through the Avon River gorge to the docks.”

  Archie stepped through the door and gazed at the soaring interior, even more richly carved and decorated than the building’s façade. The walls were easily eighteen feet high and divided by ornate Grecian pilasters into panels painted a pale yellow, outlined in deep burgundy red. Above the center of the room, a yellow- and orange-painted dome soared even higher, its sides ringed with glass segments and its summit supported by twelve columns in the shape of Greek goddesses. Like a tour guide, Townsend pointed it all out.

  “How d’you know all this?” Archie asked.

  “Read history at Oxford until I chucked it, didn’t I? Decided I’d starve as a scholar and moved on. Been dealing in antiquities, more or less, ever since.”

  They secured a small round table and Townsend swept up three plastic cards that were wedged into a slot in a metal tray holding catsup, mustard, and HP Sauce. He palmed the one from which he’d learned the building’s history and passed Archie a menu with pictures of the offerings. He’d been here before. The pub, despite its historic location, was now part of a chain: the beer good, the food execrable.

  “My shout, Archie. What’ll it be?”

  Archie looked at the pricey menu and jammed it back into its holder. “Pint of Doom Bar and a bag of ready-salted crisps will do me.”

  “No Doom Bar in this house. But if you like Doom, I’d go with Old Speckled Hen. Similar, it is, creamy and amber.”

  Archie nodded and Dicky set off for the bar like a waiter expecting a big tip for his haste. When he returned, he had Archie’s pint in one hand and a double whisky on ice in the other. The bag of crisps he held in his teeth, which were uneven. He sat, took a sip from his glass, and smiled so unctuously that he reminded Archie of an over-eager tractor salesman.

  “So, about that item in your pocket. Might I have a closer look? No one in here will know or care, believe me.”

  Archie pulled out the brooch and passed it to Townsend, who immediately popped the jeweler’s loupe in his left eye and squinted. After a moment, he looked up. “You an MD?”

  “Doctor?”

  “Metal detectorist.”

  “Don’t be daft; I’m a farmer. Came upon this and more while working a field.”

  “More, eh? Your own land or leased?”

  “What’s that matter?”

  “Somebody else’s land; somebody else’s property.”

  “Mine, then.”

  Townsend smiled. “And there are others like this?”

  “Yeah, a few pins, big gold necklaces, bracelets, a buckle or some such, that sorta thing.”

  “So, why are you talking to me about this?”

  “’Cause Reg said you could be trusted.”

  “Yeah, but why haven’t you reported this to the Crown under the Treasure Act? You could be handsomely rewarded.” Dicky had read up on the law.

  “And be dead of old age before they get around to a valuation? Oh aye, I looked into it, I did. Takes forever, that does. Bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush is what I’m thinkin’.”

  “I hear you, Archie. But here’s the problem as I see it. Take that bronze brooch for example. Lovely piece, that is, especially with that abstract horse decoration on the face.”

  Hansen nodded.

  “This piece here, I’m thinking, is pre-Roman. Romans always stamped the image of their emperor on stuff like that, like coins. Not abstract horse images like this one.”

  “So what?”

  “The ‘so what’ is that, to the British Museum, that single piece, if it is indeed pre-Roman, might be worth anywhere between five hundred and five thousand pounds. Hard to say.” Hard to say because, while Dicky had boned up on history, he had no idea about value. Yet.

  He watched Archie’s eyebrows jump.

  “No way of knowing the total value of your find till the museum and their lads evaluate it and, like you say, that could take years. Depends on rarity, in part. There have been other finds around the country over the years. They’re called hoards, because valuables like this might have been buried, or hoarded, in troubled times, like in underground safe deposit boxes.

  “Now, say you try to sell them to an auction house. Because these pieces are ancient and unique and unreported to the Crown, auction houses won’t take them on. Too risky, that. Violation of the Act. You following me?”

  “Already know that.”

  “Then, let’s say you sell them to me, yeah? When I sell them on, I have no legal responsibility to guarantee the provenance or the actual date when this stuff was discovered, see?”

  Hansen nodded.

  “But let’s say that you tell me your beloved granddad found these items way back in, say, the nineteen fifties, and your family’s just been holding on to them as, I don’t know, keepsakes, maybe? And now you need the money they might fetch to keep your farm afloat, yeah?”

  “Farm’s doing fine.”

  “I’m just sayin’, okay, Archie? This is what we might call a scenario, yeah? Hypothetical, it is. And let’s say that what your granddad passed down in his story was that this stuff he found while plowing was part of a burial chamber, items meant to accompany an old chieftain or whomever into the afterlife. It wasn’t just squirreled away for safe-keeping during, say, a conflict among tribes. Which is to say it wasn’t a hoard, it’s burial goods.”

  “Yeah. I get it. So what’s that mean to me?”

  “So under that scenario, you see, you and me, we can deal. And I can look for buyers for you. Now, let’s be clear: no way you'll get near what the Crown might offer, and here’s why: I have to find private collectors—very private—who want to acquire antiquities before the Crown gets hold of them, see what I mean? On the quiet. There are collectors who’d want to buy, don’t you fret about that, Archie. And I know them. They’re mostly in America, Switzerland, and Germany. Some in China, too. They’re greedy, rich, and they don’t ask questions.

  “So, if you have me sell these items for you, you’ll get maybe fifty percent of what you’d get from the Crown, maybe only twenty-five percent, depending on the item and the interest of the collector.” Townsend tilted his orb of a head and winked: “Except you’d get all the dosh now.”

  Townsend let this register and then leaned across the table.

  “So here’s my advice,” he said, just above a whisper, “if
you’re a patient man, report the find to your county coroner’s office. That’s what the Treasure Act says is your first step. Then they’ll get on to the Crown. No question you’ll have to wait, maybe a couple of years, but you might get full value in the end. Maybe. If all goes well. Who knows, eh? Plus there’s the other problem…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your farm gets listed as ‘archaeologically significant’ and the government decides what you can do with it...”

  Archie stared across the vaulted room. He thought about what he wanted and where he thought his life was going. Change was coming, that was already in the cards. A new life. That was his secret and it excited him. Made good money on the black market before, he thought, real cash in hand. Why not give it another go? To hell with the bloody Treasure Act. To hell with the government!

  He turned back to Townsend: “I’ve got other stuff, too.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Dull stuff, grey. Coins, I reckon, roughly round and stamped with images. Some of them kind of fused together, like.”

  Dicky Townsend’s heart leaped but he maintained his bland frog-eyed gaze.

  “I can’t say as I’d hold out much hope for the dull stuff, as you call it,” Dicky lied, “but I’d be happy to have a look-see. Perhaps we should set up an appointment for a private viewing?”

  Archie was wary: “Have to think about that, I will.”

  “You think our pal Reg would have put you on to me if I wasn’t your man?”

  “That’s as may be; you’re the first dealer I tried.”

  “And the best.” He leaned forward again, looked left and right, and added: “Thing is, another dealer might report you. I won’t.”

  While Archie thought about that, Townsend looked off across the room. “Cornwall, eh? Used to holiday there as a lad. Down Newquay way. Great beaches there.”

  “That’s the north of Cornwall, that is. Full of them surfers now. I’m in the southwest, Channel side.”

  “Where’s that?”

  But Archie figured he’d already said too much.

  Townsend reached into the pocket of his old jacket and pulled out a business card, crisp as new money.