It Takes a Thief

by Niels Hammer

  “The gold alloy must be cold by now.”

  He watched her saunter down to the garage – swinging – her happy hips – warmed by his burning-glass attention. Half a minute later she came back with the small lump of gold – silver and platinum in her hand – looking dewfresh and free – like the Summer wind that had been playing with her hair.

  “Do you feel nostalgic now saying farewell to your tools and to the way you used to live?”

  “Yes, I do. I’m both sad and relieved. I had to do it sooner or later anyway, and doing it because of you makes it easier, because it does not come as a loss or a deprivation. It’s a new prospect I’m embarking on, so I’m no longer all alone here contra mundum.”

  “I surmised that your strength would be a function of the extent to which you relied on yourself, for what struck me that night when you jumped out of the window was that if you had taken up such a profession you would be bound to have a high degree of self-assurance, but even more so a far greater degree of independence of mind; but I seem to keep telling you this.”

  “And I cannot help feeling pleased by your analysis; but now I rely on you.”

  Her smile was plain but with the same distinct touch of robustezza – so she did not leave him in any doubt about his future responsibility.

  “As I do on you, but that does not necessarily circumscribe your independence.”

  “It does in fact, and to rely on you as I do now also feels like a relief.”

  “But we could not rely on each other if we did not basically rely on ourselves in the first place.”

  I could not love thee – Deare – so much – loved I not Honour more.

  “Yes, that’s the corner stone, but instead of having one corner stone we have now two each.”

  “That’s also what I meant when I said you had an independent mind.”

  “Well, but if I have so have you, for it takes a thief to catch a thief.”

  “But who caught whom?”

  “You caught me and I caught you. I caught you, then you caught me. We caught each other.”

  Her laughter carried him away – just like it should – towards the Sea – to expand into thin air –

  “When I saw how you moved and felt your eyes in mine for that long fraction of a second and when you kicked me back into the bed I knew that I had no choice. It’s inexplainable.”

  “Then don’t try.”

  “It’s impossible to avoid trying. There must be a causal connection but it’s so elusive – ”

  “Perhaps only if you wish to remain within the confines of present day mainstream science?”

  “It’s this deepening of the perspective or the attempt to reach a more realistic world view that’s irresistible. The generally accepted patterns of Nature are incongruent with our conscious perception of Nature. So what is really real? The cognitively deducted theories or the immediate conscious experience? Consciousness is obviously the sine qua non, that which lies at the bottom of everything else. That much is evident, and as for the theories, well, the general and the special theory of relativity are both fundamentally opposed to quantum theory in whatever form you would like to express it, but mathematical léger de main obscures this incongruence, and apart from that there are the three dark horses of gravity, dark energy and dark matter, which constitute ninety-five percent of the universe, coming up fast on the inside track.”

  “But the Bohr-Heisenberg-von Neumann interpretation is nevertheless very successful.”

  “Yes, epistemologically, but it does not address the basic ontological problems, as both Schrödinger, Bell, Bohm and Einstein continued to emphasise.”

  Yawning she looked out of the window and as she turned her head he caught again a glimpse of her scar – but this time her mouth was so dark that he could not really see it. Luck or chance or absolute coherence – fused by causality – pico second by pico second.

  “I think that it would be best if we found a suitable place while it’s still day-light and then went back around midnight to dig. We might meet someone now, but at night we’ll be alone, and it’s twenty times easier to find a good place now.”

  “Yes, I’ve been thinking about the wood southwest of the Broad. Do you know it?”

  “It would be as good as any other place. It’s a Nature Reserve so no one digs up plants.”

  “I always dig a hole that's at least two feet deep. I’ll drive back to Lowestoft and fetch you here later?”

  “Then we can have lunch before we go.”

  He had moved the tires – the newspapers and all the other dusty bits and pieces of his yesterdays back into the garage when he heard the tires crunch the black and grey-white gravel – and a little later felt how her steps drummed the rhythm of her being in the world upon his naked skin.

  “That was it. Mister Harewood, the blacksmith, is such a fine old man. I gave him a small iron sculpture I had bought just to show him what I do. I’ve told him it’s a passion I have, and that mostly I use wood, but once in a while I want to use metal, and he was very pleased.”

  Footprints all over the place.

  “When you consider the ends to which you have to go, to cover your tracks.”

  “True enough, but they become second nature, and I’m perhaps far too careful.”

  She sat down in the chair to eat. Sudden hunger charged her movements with the will of life. Her thighs threatened to burst the cloth. She had made it too difficult for him to drown.

  “I would be just as careful or even more, I think.”

  “Of course you would, for your imagination, as I said, is far too fertile or even inflammable to let you evaluate such risks with the necessary detachment. If we ever wanted to tempt fate by another adventure you would have to disregard your own impressions and depend on my evaluation. You’re far too susceptible and mercurial even to be realistic.”

  “While we may be different in many ways, such as this, it’s only the visible tops of the icebergs that are conspicuous. Beneath the waterline we share the subconscious strata which we cannot really talk about as we’re only aware of the sporadic impulses, images and thoughts that erupt out of them to form the tops about which we are conscious.”

  Light from the window shimmered in her hair – an aureole – flashes of violet – chestnut –

  “Do you want any of this pâté de canard?”

  “No, I’ll have Heather honey and toast.”

  “That’s not suitable for lunch, only for breakfast, and not even for a real breakfast.”

  “What’s a real breakfast?”

  “Bacon and eggs, baked beans, sausages, grilled tomatoes, tattie scones, strong black tea; that was the breakfast of my childhood. You were there in May. Try coming in November or February. It’s the wind and the rain during the winter months that thin your blood.”

  “Then the Gulf Stream must have less of an impact on the coastal waters than I thought, but if you’ve finished we might as well get ready to share our secret with the wood.”

  He sat in the car waiting for her as he would probably do now once a day at least in all the years to come. It was either accidents or character that shaped life – or both in various combinations.

  “I’ve hidden everything in the compost heap.”

  “It’s certainly a fairly good place, though nevertheless rather obvious.”

  “It’s only till to-night. Do you know the way?”

  “Yes, but what’s that you’ve got there?”

  “Just another one of my minor mysteries. A walking stick as you can see.”

  “I’m sure that there’s more to this than I can imagine.”

  “It’s a foil really!”

  “Yes, but I use it to test the quality of the ground, to avoid roots and stones.”

  “But how could you investigate a house anonymously, like mine for example?”r />
  “When I want to know something about a house I use an internet café in London, and I very rarely use the same one. If I want information from the Land Registry for which I have to pay I ask a connection I have to do it for me. We communicate by anonymous prepaid phones.”

  “We can park here in the shade.”

  “And this system functions for all information which requires payment. I send money in letters. We have only lost two letters. And I must have sent at least fifty by now.”

  Holding her by the hand he led her down the path towards the Broad and the end of everything gone by and the beginning of everything to come. A most seamless transition if and only if –

  “Should the information I get make a house worth looking at I will place transmitters opposite the doors to get an idea about the pattern of the activity of the household as they transmit information about movements to a receiver in the vicinity. The day before you came and surprised me I removed both the receivers I had hidden in a hollow tree trunk by the river just south of her house, beside the hawthorn where I placed my bicycle when I retrieved the transmitter on her car; and the receiver to your door was placed further down the road in the stone fence; and by the way, it took me about a week of deliberation before I could make up my mind to come back here to remove the transmitter I had attached to the front wing of your car. As I had no response that night we met I felt certain that the house was empty.”

  “We were lucky or it simply had to happen. I had parked outside the church but had come halfway home without seeing or hearing the Owl when I gave up and decided to fetch my car in the morning. But why didn’t you at the same time take the transmitter on the Chestnut?”

  “I should have done so, but I didn’t really like to get so close to the house. Vestigia terrent. The only thing one can do is to minimise the risk; but in this way I am able to form a picture of the activity of the household, when it starts in the morning and when it stops at night, though it may take up to eight weeks before I can get a fairly comprehensive outline.”

  “That sounds pretty straightforward, but it leaves you potentially vulnerable on two fronts.”

  “Yes, but my connection is a woman. She’s lecturing at the faculty of English philology in Prague. Four years ago I put up a notice at the faculty of English there and asked for help with internet search. The interested parties wrote their telephone numbers as answers. I phoned her and explained what I wanted and how I would pay. So she has never seen me and she does not know anything about me either.”

  “If we go in through this thicket here we’ll be invisible both from the path and from the water.”

  “Of course there’s nothing illegal in what she does, but one of the next days I will phone her to say that for a while I will not want any new information, but that I will continue to send her some money. She has been very reliable.”

  He pulled her further in through the thicket. A faint reek of Fox and the feathers of a Pheasant.

  “This place is all right. We’re invisible from the path and we’ll just have to find a soft spot.”

  Unsheathing the foil she pressed it down into the earth so as to form the corners of a square.

  “There’s a very large root here.”

  “It may not be all that easy. Try a couple of inches further away from the tree?”

  “It’s just a question of having a little sweet womanly patience. Here, for example.”

  She placed a strip of reflective tape on three branches on the surrounding trees so that the point where a line from A to B met the shortest line from C marked the place she had chosen.

  “The reflective tape was a good idea, otherwise we might have had difficulties later.”

  “No, for I’ll take the bearing with a Global Positioning System although it’s only approximate. And when I have buried something I simply renew the Global Positioning System.”

  She began writing the coordinates down while he patiently waited for her to finish.

  “The accuracy is not very good, but the actual scatter plot will be smaller.”

  “Now, what’s a scatter plot?”

  “If you leave your system open to record all fixes, say within a period of twenty-four hours, you will receive a very large number of positions scattered over a certain area. And if there is no internal source of error in your system the mean will be the approximate location, and this is small enough to enable a precise pin-pointing of the burial site with a metal detector, especially as I always place one or two large rusty nails in the topsoil.”

  “To suggest the cause of the continuing signal. Now we’ll have to find a place for the tools.”

  “Preferably as far away from here as possible.”

  “Then we’ll turn left and follow the fringe of the forest for about one kilometre.”

  When they had crossed the bridge over the ditch she followed him as closely as she could for the narrow track was overgrown with clutching Brambles and overhung with Hawthorns. Her legs were bare and she had already got several long scratches whereas he had long trousers. So kneeling down he lifted her dress up and kissed the blood off her knees and shins. Iron and slightly salty sweat fused with the best bouquet – not only the smell of a woman – but with her smell – the smell that identified her as an individual.

  “What are you doing?”

  Laughter came bubbling up through her words – a turbulent spring stream – clear – glacial –

  “Protecting you from tetanus infection.”

  “The way you sucked suggested rather a Dracula-like infatuation with blood.”

  “Only your blood. I’m afraid of blood otherwise, as you know; and since I have led you out on this perilous journey I have to take responsibility for your wounds.”

  “I think it would be better to go back.”

  “Could you jump the ditch here?”

  She took two steps forward and leapt for joy like a kid to land in the tall grass on the opposite brink. He threw her walking stick up beside her and jumped – but as the soil close to the water was soft he slipped and stood for a moment swinging to and fro before she could catch hold of his hand and pull him up.

  “I had already imagined the splash I would make.”

  “Yes, and your wet clothes would not have been nice all the way back.”

  “Last time I came here, in April, the track was fairly open, and I forgot about the Brambles, but we can zig-zag our way forward among the trees while keeping close to the ditch.”

  “There’s dense undergrowth everywhere.”

  “That was why I preferred the track, though with a bit of dexterity we’ll come through, but to-night, armed with Wellingtons, we’ll brave the Brambles; but this entanglement of symbiosis and competition can give you an idea about the complexity of a jungle.”

  Progress meant going in and out – out and in – climbing across rotten tree trunks and dodging low-hanging branches but eventually – covered in sweat – cobwebs and broken off bark – they reached the path and began brushing their clothes clean of thorns – leaves and touchwood.

  “The place I have in mind is about half a kilometre further down here to the left.”

  “Try to imagine what it must have been like when trees covered the land everywhere?”

  “Almost unimaginable. It would have been ideal, an earthly paradise. There’s nothing as diversified, as overwhelming, as intricately fascinating as a virgin forest, a sacred wood.”

  “You’re hopelessly nostalgic, through and through.”

  Still he was forgiven and even appreciated for his other-worldly quaintness.

  “Genuine insight transcends the consensus illusions about romanticism. Forests are sacred; the Oak forest of Dōdōna, the Āraṇeyaparva of the Mahābhāratam, the Āraṇyakakāṇḍam of the Rāmāyaṇam; the worship of Oak Trees in Celtic religions, and the Norse perspective of Askr Yggd
rasils as the axis mundi. You have to be alive to how the trees speak to you. Trees have their own silent language which you do not hear with your ears but which you sense with your soul, and it’s really only in this way that you know that a forest is a holy place. No church and no temple can compare with a forest, for a forest is alive, the trees are spirits, which the simple Greek and Vedic notions of Ἁmμαδρυάδες and Vṛkṣadevatāḥ plainly indicate; but it’s about here that we should turn left. As far as I remember it’s very dense further in.”

  So she followed him – across a narrow trench – into a wilderness of dark and light green leaves.

  “The other place was rather easy to find but I think that this might prove to be difficult.”

  “So maybe we should see if we can find a place here for the jewellery?”

  “Yes, but look at that old Oak! Do you see what I mean?”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “There’s a cluster of young Beech Trees over there. Let’s see how dense it is from within.”

  After four of five metres they could not see the small glade from which they had just come and Caitlin began probing the earth with her foil. A Thrush – who had not yet become aware of them – turned the leaves over to look for insects less than ten yards away so he touched her arm and pointed. His movements with the bill were so quick that they gave an impression of impatience and the way he jumped from leaf to leaf seemed rather haphazard until he noticed that for a fraction of a second he stood still with his head cocked either to watch for a movement or to listen for a sound. Then he caught what looked like a large spider and as soon as he had swallowed it he continued searching and examining the brown leaves that covered the floor of the forest.

  “There is soft earth here. Let’s measure the distance to the oak and take a compass reading.”

  He began walking too and fro between the place she had found and the glade to get a direct bearing on the Oak while she determined the coordinates and attached a piece of tape to a twig.

  “I think this ought to do.”

  Crossing the glade he stretched the tape out and held it pressed up against the bark of the Oak. As it vibrated to the touch there were apparently no major obstructions. So attaching the tape to the middle of the stem with a string of marline he went back to make certain that there were no minor obstructions such as grass or leaves.