by Amy Myers
Keith’s contribution to the day consisted of about a dozen young students, plus Silas and someone who was probably his son Ken, an army of tools that would make an iron-age worker jump for joy, some businesslike machines and a dump of flasks and picnic stuff to keep the troupers going.
‘That’s Kelly.’ Keith pointed out a blonde girl about Daisy’s age who looked too slight to hold a trowel let alone the unwieldy machine she was moving around with the help of a young toughie exerting himself by holding the cable. ‘She’s in charge of the machine that checks the resistance in the ground, such as walls or other blockages, or indicates the contrary in the form of ditches and cavities.’
‘That sounds good for a burial mound search.’
‘Not if the land’s been ploughed or dug a lot over the years. Can’t always tell. Silas says that, apart from the bit we first looked at, it’s hardly been disturbed in his time, though, because the ground’s too sloped, too uneven and too near what was probably always woodland.’
I could see another two of his party going round with metal detectors, with Silas enthusiastically in charge of a third. All reservations as to their use had clearly been forgotten. ‘Any luck with them?’ I asked Keith.
‘Not much so far, only one soft buzz. No gold brooches, no coins, no Ringlemere cups yet. But don’t despair. There can always be reasons why things don’t register.’ He glanced at me. ‘Come and have a look at the rez machine.’
I duly peered over Kelly’s shoulder as she reached the area we’d first looked at, on which I was still pinning my hopes despite someone having been there before us. I admitted there didn’t seem much logic to that because anything of value would undoubtedly have been removed, and if there hadn’t been anything in it, it wasn’t worth the effort of re-digging. Nevertheless, Keith was still adamant that this was the spot his father had picked on, and the fact that it had been disturbed reinforced that conviction. That was why he wanted to check it again. Why did I? Call it sheer obstinacy.
Keith peered at the rez machine over Kelly’s other shoulder. ‘These aren’t too good on metal, but it likes this patch at least. Good reading for cavities. That could be the result of the loosened soil, of course. Let’s have another go with the metal detector.’
He picked up his own detector as I watched, hardly daring to hope. That was wise because even I could tell that the one faint buzz it emitted was hardly likely to indicate that the Crowshaw Collection was beneath our feet. Nevertheless, Keith didn’t seem perturbed and continued to supervise the rez readings round the rest of the area marked out by the stints. It was a painfully slow operation, one of which I felt Len would have approved, but eventually the digging itself began.
Keith had extended the original area to cut an oblong trench of about ten feet by four. I didn’t query why; he knew what he was doing and wouldn’t want an impatient amateur breathing down his neck. Even so when the chalky topsoil was eventually out and they were down to a depth of two feet, the digging was clearly getting harder, and I found it difficult not to keep peering down in the hope of spotting the odd buckle or golden cup. There’s a child inside all of us, and mine was wreaking havoc with my patience. Every so often something would be extracted from the shovelfuls and then trowelfuls of earth, examined and put on one side. I hadn’t a clue what for, but none of the finds looked like the Crowshaw Collection.
Keith worked on keeping the trench level throughout and they were down to about three feet when he yelled an urgent: ‘Stop,’ and climbed out of the trench together with the helpers.
‘Found something?’ I croaked. A cliché, I know, but we all speak in clichés when we’re too choked with emotions to sort out something better.
‘This is as far as the initial area was dug, and the detector’s still giving that gentle buzz at one spot. We’ll go easy now.’
The words Crowshaw and King Egbert were on the tip of my tongue but I held them back. Hope sprang inside me, though, like the firing of an engine on the fifth crank. Keith’s call had brought all the students gathering round. Up here the birds were chirping and the whole world seemed to be still and waiting. With our little army of students I could almost imagine that any moment Saxon or Viking hordes might come storming up to take the ridge. What was I hoping for? I couldn’t even focus on that. King Egbert’s grave? His grave goods?
‘Here’s what I found,’ Keith told me, showing me what was in his hand.
It was only a piece of heavy cloth, but Keith was not happy about it. Then, only then, did he get back into the trench, where he set to work with his trowel while the rest of us watched. I could hear my heart beating as I watched him reveal more pieces of cloth. Could this be a blanket put by Ambrose round the Crowshaw Collection to protect it? No, the metal detector would surely have picked up such a hoard. I was sick with tension as my imagination ran riot.
And then imagination stopped. It wasn’t needed now. Something was poking through the cloth. A bone.
‘A sheep, Chris?’ one of the students asked uncertainly in the dead silence as Keith worked further, gradually pulling the pieces of cloth away.
‘It could be a sheep,’ he agreed.
I knew he thought it wasn’t. Not with that cloth around it. Cloth that could not have dated back to the seventh century and King Egbert’s death. I wasn’t going to let him bear this alone, so against orders I climbed down to the far end of the area some three or four feet away from him and, on my knees, reached out to pull away a few pieces of the cloth myself. He didn’t object, until suddenly he shouted: ‘Out!’
I obeyed instantly and grabbed his hand to pull him out after me. The rest of the cloth had come away in one piece and now we saw what it had covered.
It was a skeleton, more or less intact, and it was human.
My turn to take control, though I’d never felt less like doing so. ‘I’ll ring the police,’ I said. My mouth was very dry. The skeleton could well be within the seventy-years limit when the coroner has to be called in. No prehistoric burial this, given the circumstances.
Keith did not comment as I did so, but we must both have been thinking the same thing – Ambrose’s question: ‘Are you going to take me to Eastry?’
We all had to wait now. I wondered what the metal detector had picked up and peered in, trying not to think of that skeleton as a human being. I didn’t have far to look. There was a wedding ring still hanging from that skeletal finger. Silas had noticed that the site had been disturbed not long ago, but no way could these sad remains be as recently interred as that.
At last Keith began to speak. ‘This may not have anything to do with my father.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘But you think it has?’ he said furiously. ‘Is that why you started this charade?’
‘I had no idea that this would be the result.’ So much for buried treasure. So much for the Crowshaw Collection.
‘It’s not my mother,’ Keith said aggressively. ‘She died in hospital.’
‘I hadn’t thought it was.’
‘Who then?’
I had to force myself to put it into words. ‘I think it could be the late Mrs Joan Wilson.’ Poor Joannie. Where was her flirting, her love of life now?
Ambrose. Everything centred on him. Right from the beginning when Carlos had made that first call and spoken to Josie, not Ambrose as he had intended. Whatever answers were to be found started with him. The rest of that long day at Eastry was a nightmare, with neither Keith nor I able to talk freely: Keith because of his undoubted realization that his father must have been involved; I because of unjustified (I hoped) guilt that the dig had turned out so disastrously. We had parted silently, both perhaps wanting to talk but unable to find common ground.
Only Brandon’s brief words to me had helped: ‘Thanks, Jack. This might lead somewhere.’
A step forward in our relationship, I felt. Only two things seemed certain to me: Ambrose’s involvement, and that there had been a third party present at that recent dig. In the wor
ld I chiefly move in, cars, all the pieces fit. I only wished this case was the same. Here I was the assembly line, and the engine had been Ambrose. And still there were missing pieces.
It took two weeks to identify the skeleton as Joannie’s, even though Tony had identified the wedding ring. All I had to do was to juggle the missing Crowshaw Collection with three murders. Eva was still in prison, and the weeks were marching on towards autumn and the fifteenth of January.
‘What’s niggling you?’ Cara asked, no doubt tired of my gloomy face as she was just off to drive back to the farm. ‘Still the case?’
‘Ambrose Fairbourne.’
‘You should go after that son of his,’ she declared in dictatorial mood. ‘Something odd there.’
‘Keith would hardly dig up a site in order to reveal his father’s involvement with a murder.’
‘Why not, if he wanted you to find it?’
I glared at her, and she hastily added, ‘This Josie then. Carlos spoke to her on the phone, and she spread the word to the Charros.’
‘Who spread it to Frank Watson,’ I finished crossly. ‘Been there, done that …’
‘I’m trying to help,’ she shouted at me. ‘Start again.’
‘With Frank Watson?’ I yelled back.
‘No. Go to Wychwood.’ And she marched out.
Wychwood House seemed to be contemplating me with its evil eye as I drove up. I’d taken the Gordon-Keeble for luck, as I was beginning seriously to hate this place. Even in the sun it looked eerie and on a day such as this, which was definitely not sunny, it looked downright sinister. By referring to Wychwood, Cara had perhaps been thinking still of Ambrose, but seeing it before me I realized it had a wider scope. Could it be housing the Crowshaw Collection somewhere, whatever Keith claimed? I faced the fact that he could have been lying when he said he’d searched. I couldn’t take that theory seriously though. Had it been hidden by Ambrose so carefully that Keith had missed it? No again. Whether this was in the house or at Eastry, had he confided the hiding place to somebody else, such as Keith or Josie or—
Matt Wright?
The Charro whose life had been ruined by Carlos, the man in the background who did odd jobs in Wychwood House itself as well as the garden. The man whom no one noticed very much – Chesterton’s postman again. The man who was interested in Ambrose’s archaeological collections.
My assembly line did a ninety degree turn so quickly I felt almost physically sick – and even sicker as the Gordon-Keeble purred gently to a halt outside Wychwood House. I parked it right next to Matt Wright’s van, and there was no sign of Josie’s Polo.
The murders were linked, and Matt was the murderer. It was glaringly obvious now that Frank Watson was out of the picture. Matt had good reason to kill Carlos when he heard he was back. He would know when Josie’s day off was and, having concocted a plan to steal a Morris Minor to take Ambrose to Eastry, he had dug at the place to which Ambrose took him, King Egbert’s grave. But when he found no golden goblets, no ornate belt-mounts, no golden buckles or state helmets, what then? Or had he found them?
The evil eye of Wychwood seemed almost to wink at me. Its message seemed to me: what now, Jack?
I had three options: find Matt Wright, possibly hunting in the house for the collection, having got Josie out of the way; call Brandon; go home. Option three was out, and so was option two. Brandon wouldn’t believe me, so I had to be on surer ground. Which left option one.
I was only armed with an iPhone, so all I had was bravado with which to burst cheerily in upon a double murderer. Easy – in theory, at least. I pressed the bell and heard it ring in the dark corridors of Wychwood House. I rang again when no one answered, and again no one came. The house had that empty look about it. Next, the garden. Matt might be looking for Ambrose’s hoard there, buried in the earth or under a shed. I walked round the side of the house and saw windows open but no sign of movement inside the house. Nor in the garden either. The flowers waved merrily at me in the breeze, but no human being stirred.
The garage? I thought. Or, better still, that old barn. If Matt Wright had used it for Melody, perhaps he had for the Crowshaw Collection too. If he returned with it from his expedition in Melody with Ambrose, he might have buried it there. I walked up the track, thinking of my last trip along it, and the memory was not pleasant.
The barn door was not padlocked, and I opened the door half fearing what I might find. There was nothing here, however. No dead body, no Matt, no trunk marked ‘King Egbert’s Property’, no sign of where anything could conceivably be hidden. Relieved, I walked into the barn to double-check.
And then I turned and saw the gun in Tony Wilson’s hand.
‘You would come, wouldn’t you?’ he said as I stared at it in disbelief. ‘You should have left well alone, Jack. I’m too old to go back inside now. They’ve taken DNA from Joannie’s family. No use my saying it wasn’t her ring. It was. I brought this shooter to dump here, and so now I’ll have to dump you with it. You’re in the way. You know about Carlos and Joannie.’
‘Do I? Blind panic was all I knew until I took command of myself. I had to. I would be dead otherwise. Not Matt Wright at all. Tony Wilson – with as much access to Wychwood as Matt, and he was going to kill me. At least I now knew why none of the Charros gang had betrayed Frank Watson. It hadn’t been Frank whom Tony had been hunting, much as he had tried to direct us otherwise. It had been Carlos.
‘You thought Carlos had run off with Joannie and the Crowshaw Collection,’ I said matter-of-factly.
‘Yeah, but he told me down at the lock I was wrong about the stuff. Said Ambrose had taken it. He saw him taking it out of Joannie’s car and loading it into his bloody little Morris Minor. I believed him.’
‘So why did you kill Carlos?’ Daft as it sounded in my situation, I really wanted to know why Eva had had to go through this nightmare.
‘He went off with her and wouldn’t tell me where she was. Kept saying he didn’t know. I loved that woman, I did. Killed him for Joannie’s sake. I told him this story about a boat being moored round the bend in the river just a bit along the towpath, and I went prepared to give him the frights if he didn’t come clean. He smirked all over his greasy face, telling me he’d done well out of the May Tree, what with the woman he’d run off with and screwed and then blackmailing Ambrose. Then when I found that skeleton in that hole and knew Ambrose had done it, not bloody Carlos, I went spare. The stuff wasn’t in the hole, only my Joannie – so I brought him back here to at least get the gold from him. No joy there either. I came here today to turn the place over, but there’s no sign of it. He got his comeuppance all right.’
I felt very cold ‘That was my wife Carlos said he’d run off with. In 1991, not after the shoot-out.’
For a moment Tony faltered and the gun shook slightly, but it didn’t drop. ‘When I saw her skeleton … Well, I loved her, Jack. Still do. That creep Fairbourne. It was me took him out to bloody Eastry expecting he’d at least remember where he buried the stuff. He went straight to that hole, and I dug it like crazy for him. Until I got to the skeleton and saw that ring. I choked. Knew it was Joannie’s right away. So he had to go. No choice. He must have killed her right after the shoot-out. Why?’
‘It was the Crowshaw Collection,’ I said. ‘Joannie must have argued with him, so he killed her. He thought the collection should be returned to King Egbert’s grave.’
‘There was no stuff there,’ Tony said savagely. ‘It was only Joannie’s grave. But the old fool’s gone now, and so’s the gold. You too, Jack. You should have known Joannie, then you’d understand.’
There were tears in his eyes, but whenever I made a move his grip on the gun tightened.
‘You really think killing me is the way out?’
‘You know the whole story. There’s no way out for any of us now, except Betty. She’s a survivor. Didn’t know anything about this deal. Believes any rubbish I tell her. But I’m not going back inside. Not at my age. Not without J
oannie. Or you, mate.’
He raised the gun, turned it on himself and pulled the trigger.
The sound cannoned through me as though I were the victim not him. As I looked at the bloody mess on the ground, as I saw his blood spattered on my clothes, I seemed to be standing apart looking at myself, a lifeless lump of flesh. Then I felt my lips trembling and gradually my body and knew I was alive. I got my phone out and dialled 999.
I walked to the tree trunk where Josie and I had sat not so very long ago and hoped that she and Matt – if they were together – would not return until the police had arrived. The barn was once again a crime scene, and this time I was not just a witness, I was part of it. Prints, DNA, the machine would go into action and it had to be endured.
Death spreads ripples in its wake and they depart only slowly. During the next few weeks, the police unearthed sufficient forensic evidence in Tony’s car (parked well out of view of the house) and home, which, coupled with the gun and my statements, gave the CPS enough to drop all charges against Eva.
There was only one downside to that. The last ripple. Eva herself.
Cara had returned to Suffolk, but now she came back to take charge of Eva when she was released – although thank heavens they weren’t staying at Frogs Hill. But one benighted morning I was in the Pits as Cara’s car drew up. It contained not only Cara but Eva too.
‘Sorry, Jack. I had no warning,’ Cara called over to me.
‘Jack, thank you, my darling.’ A thud as Eva hit my body with her own, arms flung round my neck so tightly that I fought for breath. She smelled of her favourite French scent – at least, it had been her favourite during our marriage. It seemed out of place in a Kentish farmyard, especially one that usually smells of petrol with that indefinable whiff in the air that announces classic cars are around. And so was Eva. I took them into the farmhouse, glad I had Cara as back-up. I took advantage of Eva’s absence in the bathroom to ask Cara what her plans were.
‘I’m taking a few more weeks off,’ she told me. ‘Harry’s OK with it.’