I stepped into a shop that was selling a range of Arthurian clobber, standing aside to let a man go by. Ajapanese man. The same one or another?
"Get a lot of Japanese tourists round here?" I said to the big man behind the counter. He was dressed circa the launch of breakfast TV-a brightly patterned pullover with bobbles hanging off it.
"It's the chivalry thing," he said in a strong American accent. "It links to the code of honor of their whatsit-Yakuza?"
"Samurai?"
"Samurai, right. I love that `Seven Samurai'-you probably never seen it, but it was the basis for a big Hollywood movie-you know which one?"
"Magni-"
"Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," he said.
"No, no," I protested. "That was The Rape of the Sabine Women."
He frowned.
"That's not a Japanese movie I ever heard of. But I don't mean Seven Brides for Seven Brothers either. Damn, my memory's definitely going. No, `Seven Samurai' became The Dirty Dozen? Can't be right. If it only took seven Nips you think it's gonna take twelve of our boys to get the job done?"
I thought it was time to change the subject.
"Interesting shop. All these swords." I was looking at a glass cabinet in which a dozen long, carefully decorated broadswords were displayed side by side. They each had names. There was Excalibur, but there was also a Lancelot, a Guinevere, a Viking, and even an Ivanhoe.
"Do people actually buy these?"
"You bet. Had an old guy in the other day, lives in a bungalow in the next village. He bought the Excalibur, said it would look terrific over his mantelpiece. But most of them are bought by re-enactors. They buy them with scabbards, of course."
"Re-enactors?" I queried.
He pointed to a poster on the back of his door advertising a three-day re-enactment of Arthur's last battle in Tintagel at Easter.
"But nobody knows what happened-" I started to say, then my attention was diverted by the appearance of a cowgirl in jeans, plaid shirt, cowboy boots, and a Stetson hat at the other end of the shop. He followed my glance.
"My wife," he said.
"You're from Texas or somewhere out West?" I said, puzzled.
"New York," he said, looking equally puzzled. "As I was saying, there are re-enactors from every age. Ronan legionnaires, Norman knights, medieval jousters, roundheads and cavaliers, veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, troops from the two World Wars-though by law World War II people can only wear German or American uniforms in this country."
His wife tottered over on her high-heeled cowboy boots. "Bunch of weirdos they are," she said in a strong Welsh accent. "Dressing up to play games." She cocked a thumb at her husband. "Him and his mates are bonkers for it."
Somebody tapped on the window. There were a half dozen more cowboys and cowgirls peering into the shop. I looked from them to the American's wife.
"There's a lot of demand for battle re-enactments," he said, giving his wife a dirty look. "We've done film work. And we do weddings. Wherever anyone wants a fight basically."
"He's off in the woods every chance he gets," his wife said with a snort, sticking her hands in the back pockets of her jeans.
"Just an ordinary bunch of men getting together. We hold pagan feasts, sing songs around the campfire, and have trials of strength." He gave me a sincere look that reminded me of Hughie Green in his heyday. "Please ignore the popular rumors. We do not flay sheep over the fire or paint ourselves in blood."
"So you say," his wife said. "I'm off. See you later."
I watched her walk out and totter down the street with the other cowhands. They were all wearing finely chiselled cowboy boots except for one man who looked rather sheepish in a pair of trainers.
"Every week we have kit-making sessions," the shop owner continued. "We use templates of Saxon clothes and old methods wherever possible. Some people cheat and use sewing machines, but I sew everything by hand. Hand-dyeing too, with things like onion skins."
I indicated the glass cabinet. "Where do you get the swords from?"
"Toledo, Spain. Rolled steel. The real thing. The hilts are either gold or bronze. They're produced by old established swordsiniths who make ceremonial swords for navies and other branches of the military around the world. They have spare capacity so they started these as a sideline. Sell them all over-re-enacting is big in Scandinavia and Germany too-all that rape and pillage."
"And you've got one?"
"Of course. But to be honest I'm more interested in the acting than the actual battles." He smiled coyly. "I do a pretty good impersonation of a bloated battlefield corpse."
"I'm sure you do," I said politely.
He leaned over conspiratorially.
"I'm in big demand. And I think it's important to do it properly because it encourages the others. One of the problems with re-enactments is that hardly anybody volunteers to fall."
"To fall?"
He mimed taking a sword in the stomach, his face contorting in agony. He wasn't bad actually. As suddenly he straightened and jerked a thumb at the poster.
"That's why it takes three bloody days. You can understand it really. Why get all dressed up to lie hot and still-or, worse, to freeze your nuts off-for most of the afternoon? But it means the battles can go on for an absolute age. Tempers get quite frayed. `I just killed you, you're dead.' `No, I'm not, it was only a flesh wound.' `My sword went right through your body.' `No, really, I feel fine."'
I backed out of the shop soon after and crossed the road in the rain into a cozy-looking pub. A log fire was burning and the first bar was pleasant enough, if you could ignore the photos of Lester Piggot on the wall.
I wanted some time to review matters. I'd also brought with me a couple of books to find out more about Arthur's tomb. My main preoccupation was to wonder if I had survived an attack by the Camelot Killer. I was trying to recall if there were any Pre-Raphaelite paintings to do with drownings. Maybe it was enough that it was Merlin's Cave. I recalled a Burne Jones painting about Merlin bewitched by Nimue.
As I sipped my orange juice and mineral water-a pint, mind, nothing effete about me-I wondered too about Faye. A strange look had crossed her face when I'd spoken about the man following her. Could she have been meeting somebody?
That reminded me of the sight of Askwith talking to someone in the shadows at the college the evening he died. And that, of course, reminded me that I'd seen Faye drift across the quad on her own.
My Faye involved in murder? I couldn't believe it. Not, that is, the Faye I used to know. But it was some years since I'd seen her and I'd been struck at the time by how cool she'd been when Lucy died.
I thought about Lucy. The Fair Maid of Astolet had died for love of someone. Lucy had had a fling with Rex, according to Faye, but I wondered too about Reggie Williamson. He was married with kids, but didn't researchers always have affairs with their MPs? I decided that I couldn't use such tabloid presumptions as the basis for my investigations, journalist or no.
Thinking about Lucy reminded me that I'd brought her papers with me. I wasn't feeling tired. As a matter of fact I was feeling amorous and wishing Genevra was here. (I was also missing Faye. Go figure.)
I resolved to take a look at Lucy's things when I got back to the guest house. For now I ordered a vegetarian dish and sat in the corner of the pub for an hour examining the history books I'd brought with me.
I drove back to the guest house around ten, got the box out of the boot, and started to let myself in. The door swung open. My landlady was standing there, dressed as a cowgirl.
"People still do line dancing down here?" I said, as I edged past her again.
"Still?" she said, puzzled. "It's only just got here."
When I got to my room I put the TV on. A debate was taking place between the Wiltshire and the East End Messiahs. I tipped the contents of the carton onto the bed and opened the first folder.
As I leafed through the papers-lists of births, deaths, and marriages-not sure what I was looking for, the debat
e got pretty heated. There had been unconfirmed reports in the tabloids that the Wiltshire Messiah (or the Wiltshire Dipstick as his rival referred to him) was a jobbing actor who had learned his scripture in touring companies doing Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. It was further rumored that he took the "Suffer the little children" bit of his preaching too much to heart and that he had a criminal record for assaults on under-aged girls.
I'd just opened the second folder and drawn out a sheet of University of Nottingham letterheaded paper when violence erupted in the TV studios. The apostles of the East End Messiah had begun singing `Thank Heaven for Little Girls" and the Wiltshire Messiah's own apostles had gone for them.
I got up to turn the TV off as the program was brought to a hurried end and the credits started to roll. I took a step and fell over. I reached down with one hand and unzipped the elephant's foot. Well, it was a cold room.
I realized I was still clutching the letter, now rather crumpled, in my hand. I shuffled back onto my bed and began to read. It was from a technical lab at the university and concerned the delivery of some bones for dating. The letter itself was dated the previous December.
I lay back cautiously, aware of the lump on my head. December was the month when Lucy had discovered Arthur and Guinevere's tomb. But surely these bones couldn't be from there-I distinctly remembered Rex saying they'd decided against carbon dating the bones. Had he been lying?
At nine the next morning I phoned the university and got through to the labs. I explained to the woman who answered the phone that Lucy had died and I was trying to make sense of her papers. We spoke for ten minutes.
When I turned off my mobile, I sat in the jeep and looked out to sea.
Curiouser and curiouser. Lucy had sent a sample of half a dozen bones for testing. She told the university only that they were from a crypt, although she indicated that she was curious about one bone that did not look the same as the others in terms of discoloration and other signs of antiquity. The lab had analyzed the six bones. Five were from two people who had died at roughly the same time, somewhere between 2000 B. C. and 1000 A. D.-nothing like a margin of error when you don't want to be tied down. The sixth bone was from a third person. That there was a third person buried with Arthur and Guinevere came as a surprise, although I remembered now thinking, just before I was disturbed by Nanny, that there were an awful lot of bones in the sarcophagus.
That this third person had been buried with them within the last fifty years was even more of a shock.
Driving back to Montacute I thought again about Lucy's death. Although I couldn't find a second letter from the university in her files, they had written to Lucy only the previous week. She would have got the letter the day she died. That and my re-reading of Malory got me puzzling over another letter.
Elaine, the Fair Maid of Astolet, had written a letter that had been found with her body. It explained why she had taken her life. If a serial killer were really copying the manner of her death, wouldn't he too have left a letter?
My phone rang just as I was approaching a lay-by. I pulled in. It was Faye phoning from Montacute.
"Nick, what you were saying yesterday about someone threatening our lives," she said without preamble. "I've just been talking to Bridget. She says you think there's a serial killer on the loose. You're not going to go public with this theory, are you? Because I think that would be very foolish and could cause immense damage to our project."
I sighed and touched the back of my head.
"Bridget blabbermouth, eh? I have no proof. It was just an idea." I saw again Lucy lying in the bottom of the boat. Then I had an image of Faye leaning over her. Of her turning and thrusting her hands deep into her pockets.
"You know when we found Lucy's body?" I said. "You didn't take anything from it, did you?"
"Like?"
"A letter?"
"Why would I do that?" she said coldly.
"I don't know," I said carefully. "I just wondered."
"Let's talk when you get back," she said, and rang off.
I switched the phone off and started the engine. She was making a habit of deferring conversations. You might say we'd been deferring one for the past fifteen years.
When I got back to Wynn House, Buckhalter was holding forth to Rex and Faye.
"If we get into bed with local developers we can put in big stores, smaller shopping units, hell, the Camelot Casino and parking for seven hundred people."
He noticed me out of the corner of his eye-and gave me a sour look. Rex saw me, too.
"Nick, good to have you back. Come and give us your view of the PR implications of Lucy's death."
"Well," I said, taking a seat. "I'd say the PR implications aren't good."
"And they'll be even less good if you start mouthing off with harebrained theories about a serial killer on the loose," Buckhalter said.
"It's a possibility I don't think we should ignore," I said calmly. I looked from one to the other. "Look at it this way. If it wasn't a stranger, then she was killed by someone she knew."
Rex sighed and shook his head. "What a nightmare," he muttered.
"What do you think about the rival discoveries?" I said.
"We don't have to worry about the Arthur found buried with his horse," Rex said. "A terrific find but it isn't Arthur. "Burials like that were particular to the Saxons, not the Britons."
"Who's Joseph of Arimathea?" Buckhalter said.
"He's supposed to be the bloke who lent his tomb for Jesus to be buried in," I said.
"In the twelfth century some storyteller decided Joseph had got the beaker used at the Last Supper and filled it with Christ's blood, brought it over to Britain, founded Glastonbury Abbey, and buried it here."
"So this farmer could have dug up the Grail?"
"No, no," I said impatiently. "There's no proof that Joseph of Arimathea came here. There's no evidence whatsoever that he even existed. And he certainly didn't bring the Grail over. The Grail originally was a horn of plenty or even a flat stone in Celtic myth."
"Who gives a fuck?" Buckhalter said. "If it brings more tourists into this area it can only be good for us. No problem."
"You do have another problem though," I said. I looked over at Rex. "Didn't you say you hadn't had the bones dated?"
"That's right," he said absently.
"Well, Lucy did."
He looked at me sharply.
"How do you know?"
"I found some correspondence between her and Nottingham University."
"The results?" he said, leaning forward in his seat.
"No, but I phoned the lab and got them."
"And what does it say?" Buckhalter asked.
"Oh, given the margin of error they're more or less the right age. Well, most of them."
"Most of them?"
"Analysis shows that there was a third body in the sarcophagus, one that wasn't nearly so old."
Rex frowned. Faye looked puzzled. Buckhalter impatient.
"I don't know what you're saying," Buckhalter snapped.
"I'm saying that a dead body-or most of it-was put in that sarcophagus somewhere between fifteen and fifty years ago."
"Most of a body?" Buckhalter said. "What the hell does that mean?"
"Well, there's no skull, for one thing. I don't know what other parts of the skeleton are missing."
"So why couldn't some other bones have got mixed up with our King and Queen by accident?"
"Because the crypt hasn't been used for burials for over a century," Rex said slowly. He smiled grimly. "So if there are any bones there it seems likely they are a result of-"
"Of foul play," Faye said, relishing the phrase though her face was even paler than usual.
"Somebody's bumped someone off and dumped the corpus delicti in Arthur's tomb. Jesus." Buckhalter looked at me. "Well, if this is your serial killer and that's his killing rate, at least nobody is in immediate danger."
He rubbed his eyes. "So what do we do? Toss `em in the
river?"
"Not a chance," I said. "We tell the police."
"We have to tell the cops?"
I nodded. "You bet. If we don't, the university will. We hand all the bones over for analysis. There's no way for us to know which are the new bones, which the old."
"Shit," Buckhalter said. "This could delay the opening."
"True," I said. "But every problem is an opportunity, so I'm sure you'll sort that. And there is a more intriguing matter."
"And that is?" Buckhalter said fiercely.
Faye cleared her throat.
"Whose bones are they?" she whispered.
I needed fresh air so I went to the chapel by the outside route. Once in the crypt I looked down at the bones laid out in the sarcophagus. No wonder they were piled haphazardly-fitting three lots of bones into two skeletons would have taken a lot of imagination.
I had a torch with me and I shone it into the shadowy recesses of the crypt. I was half-expecting Nanny to be sitting there but this time I was alone.
I was wondering if there could be a way the newer bones had got into the tomb by accident. Among Lucy's papers I'd found notes in which she'd described her discovery of Arthur's sarcophagus. When she'd begun, the crypt had contained some thirty tombs and wooden coffins. After years of flooding, the coffins were scattered all across the floor.
Some were on their sides, others piled haphazardly on top of each other. Several stone tombs had lost their lids, which lay in pieces on the floor. There were bones scattered everywhere.
The lid of the black marble tomb had lain across the sarcophagus at an angle, exposing either end. There were fragments of cloth rotted by immersion in flood water, which suggested Arthur and Guinevere's remains had originally been carefully wrapped. But when Lucy found them, their bones were scattered across the bottom of the sarcophagus.
So it would have been easy enough, when the crypt flooded, for other bones to have got mixed up with them. Except that, as Rex had pointed out, this crypt had not been used for some hundred years. There was no reason for more recent bones to be there, unless they had been put there under suspicious circumstances.
The Once and Future Con Page 11