Matilda put down the photos. Gareth was looking past the walls of the room, visualizing the murder scene. He’d been here three days and hadn’t yet solved the crime. He hadn’t even found any clues, other than the receipt from the antiquities shop in Manchester. If he could have produced a solution by sheer brain power, like calculating pi to the hundredth place, he would already have the criminal behind bars.
“And she lay there for two days until she was found,” Matilda picked up another printed page. “Very cold weather, that was helpful from the forensics standpoint. . . .” She looked up. “Gareth, her body was found February third. She was killed on February first. February first is Imbolc, one of the old Celtic quarter days. Now February second is St. Brigit’s day, one of those saints who used to be a god.”
He cocked his brows at her. “You think that’s important?”
“It might be. So might the fact that she was killed at Durslow, an ancient sacred site.”
“The murderer was familiar with the area, knew the ledge was an isolated place.”
“Great stretches of countryside are isolated, especially in the Peak District east of here.”
“Are we going back to the devil-worshipping nutters, then, with Linda as some sort of sacrifice?”
Matilda shook her head. “Rumors of evil conspiracies are no more than public paranoia. Satanists only prowl the streets looking for innocent victims in TV movies-of-the week, not in real life. One of the few genuine cases I’ve ever heard of was on the Mexican border several years ago. The leader of that cult was playing terrible games to impress his followers. You see the same thing happen in the odd Christian cult, unfortunately. It’s a variety of mental pollution.”
“Is there such a thing as authentic ritual?”
“Not to mention real magic? Yes, there is. In the world’s great religions you can trace an unbroken ceremonial path back for thousands of years. For modern pagan ritual, though—the varieties are not at all synonymous—the best you can do is combine educated guesses with a lot of imagination. Which is why it probably doesn’t matter that the ancient Celts would occasionally sacrifice a human being not on Imbolc but on Beltane, May first—the progenitor of Corcester’s happy little festival.”
“Would a group of nutters care about Imbolc or Beltane? They can make up the rules as they go along, just like the yobs in Mexico.”
“Exactly. That’s our variable in the case. If there’s some kind of relationship between Linda’s death and the rumors of devil-worship, there might be a relationship between the rumors and the stolen antiquities.”
“That’s a bit round the houses,” protested Gareth.
Matilda sighed. “The Maypole and the horn dances and the hobby horses that look like children’s games on the poster downstairs once had all the gravity, say, of Holy Communion to us.”
“I’m an atheist,” Gareth said.
“Even so, you’re not likely to trash out a church, are you?”
“No. What’s your point?”
“That just because you don’t believe in something yourself doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter. Whether something is real or not doesn’t matter, as long as a person believes it’s real and acts on his beliefs.”
“That’s as may be, but I’ll carry on believing in fakes and phonies, myself.”
“Fine,” Matilda said with a smile.
Gareth shifted his weight. The bedsprings creaked and the piles of paper slipped sideways. Voices rose and fell in the hall outside. A phone rang. A door slammed. “The case might be a perfectly simple one,” he said. “Linda was a confederate of Reynolds, he found out she was planning to grass on him, so he killed her. I’ll have a go at Della, see if I can break his alibi.”
“Be careful. She was very nervous talking to you tonight, and yet there was something—well—hungry there as well. She’s a desperate woman.”
“Super,” he groaned.
Matilda leafed through the transcripts. The police had interviewed Adrian and Della Reynolds and the stable man Jimmy. They had talked to various travelers who identified themselves only as Bob, Sanjay, Shirl, Nick, Gordon and DeDe—none of whom had ever heard of Linda Burkett. The truck driver boyfriend had an alibi. Celia Dunning had been shocked at the entire distasteful business. Linda’s relatives had been stunned into incoherence.
At last Matilda bundled everything into a pile. “Worse than a crossword puzzle, isn’t it? You don’t know what is a clue and what isn’t. All you know is that you don’t have all the clues.”
“Well I won’t say which one of us hasn’t a clue,” Gareth responded, but he grinned as he spoke.
Matilda whacked his thigh with a sheaf of papers. “I’ll talk to Ms. Dunning in Manchester.”
“That leaves me to the travelers and to Della. In the future one or the other of us should always be here, don’t you think?”
“Yes.” Matilda tucked her glasses away, stood and stretched. “Good night. Don’t dream of gods, demons, and forensics.”
“I rarely dream.” Gareth got up and opened the door for her. “Be sure to ask Dunning about the stolen statuary as well.”
Matilda looked at him pityingly.
He smiled. “Good night then,” he said, and closed the door.
* * * * *
By early Wednesday afternoon, Matilda realized she wasn’t going to get away that day. The spades and trowels of the students were turning up enough bits of pottery, metal, and stone to keep both her and Howard busy. Jennifer enlisted Courtney and Ashley to make preliminary drawings. Courtney dashed off a pile of indecipherable sketches. Ashley labored with her tongue clamped between her lips and after an hour’s work produced one smudged drawing of a six-sided die.
“I think that one’s about ready for the Tate Gallery,” Matilda told her.
Ashley laughed, easing the lines of concentration in her face.
Caterina was moving right along with the pieces of inscription. Her knowing some Latin helped, of course, as Sweeney told Reynolds during the owner’s tour of inspection. “She’s quite a bright little thing for a girl,” he went on, “but at the limit of her competence, I’m afraid.”
Matilda rolled her eyes upward, hoping Caterina’s Latin was better than her English. “This is treasure, yes?” the girl asked. “Il tresoro magnifico.”
“Better than gold,” Matilda told her, and added with a glance at Reynolds, “Although some parties wouldn’t think so.”
By quitting time the assembled letters read M Cornel Felix and deo invicto mytrae. So Marcus had dedicated a Mithraeum, Matilda thought. That fit in with the bits of a tall votive lamp Gareth had unearthed yesterday. She climbed down the collapsed sides of the Miller trench, avoiding projecting rounds of column drum, to see what he’d found today.
Gareth stood, dirty hands on dirty hips, surveying his work. Foundations emerged from the damp soil at his feet, the apsidal end of an apparently narrow building not much larger than a camper-trailer.
Matilda touched the damp stone of the apse. Men’s voices echoed in the rock. Torches flickered in her mind’s eye. She heard the bellowing of a bull and smelled the sharp coppery odor of blood. A firm believer in coincidences, she nodded and said, “This is the Mithraeum. It was an underground chamber in the first century, that’s why it’s so deep now. Any fragments of a statue of a young man killing a bull?”
“Not yet.” Gareth glanced over his shoulder. Ashley was the person closest to them, and she was several paces away at the top of the trench. Even so he lowered his voice. “Scientific inquiry is all to the good, and this is quite interesting and all, but I don’t feel as though I’m doing my job mucking about here.”
“Keep at it until you uncover something of value to use as bait for the looters.”
“Treasure trove? Here?”
“Those column drums in the side of the trench suggest that this chamber was beside and below the main temple. The Romans always kept their payroll money in a cellar below the headquarters. Maybe they kep
t. . . .” She stopped, suddenly aware that her voice was speaking without the guidance of conscious thought. “Sorry. I just went into Delphic oracle mode. Suffice to say there’s something here.”
“And I’ll know it when I find it, eh?” Gareth asked.
“Oh yes, you will.”
Ashley leaned over the lip of the gully. “Everybody’s going back to the hotel, and Dr. Sweeney says it’s his shout for the drinks. Are you coming?”
Gareth scrambled wordlessly upward, returned Ashley’s smile, and walked off. Matilda closed her mind to the long dead voices, and she, too, climbed back into the twentieth century.
* * * * *
Centuries of human touch had shaped the land with fields, hedgerows, and thickets of trees. Buildings nestled in folds of green. Roads stitched fences and streams into one multi-textured garment. Matilda stood beside her car and threw her senses onto the wind. She drifted with the clouds through a blue morning sky, flirted with daffodils and budding leaves, rode the wings of sea gulls that swooped down upon a tractor and plow. Her toes wiggled in the cool earth turned by the blade and her nostrils filled with its scent.
At last she reclaimed her perceptions. A chilly wind ruffled her hair. The tractor was so far away she could barely hear the noise of its engine. The gulls were wheeling white shapes behind it.
Matilda climbed back into the car, turned toward Manchester, and let herself think about the case.
There was only the one case, she was sure of that. It was like two skeins of yarn tangled together. When she pulled on a red thread of one, it tightened around a golden thread of the other. Dark strands ran through both, the ledge at Durslow and the severed hand from Shadow Moss, rumors of ancient gods and the passions of long-dead Romans. A knot in those threads had brought Linda Burkett to her death. A knot tied by Adrian Reynolds, perhaps, or by one or more travelers, or even by guileless townspeople such as Clapper, whose bar was information central.
All too soon the romantic country road fed into the maze of highway exchanges around Manchester, going from a man-molded landscape to a man-dominated one. Driving on the left made the interchanges mirror-images of the ones back home. Matilda concentrated on each turn until she arrived at the University, where she found and introduced herself to Ted Ionescu, one of Howard Sweeney’s acolytes.
“Ah yes,” he said, ejecting each word through prominent front teeth. “The American lady professor.”
“Real professors being British and male?” Matilda inquired.
Ionescu’s glasses glinted blankly. “Sorry?”
“I’d like to see the body and the hand from Shadow Moss, please.”
“Oh-er. . . .” He opened and shut his mouth. “Very good. This way.”
He was just the kind of assistant Howard would choose, Matilda thought, intelligent enough to make his boss look good, nervous enough to be easily intimidated, with too little personality to be competition. She followed Ionescu into a warren of offices and stopped dead beside a display case.
Gold votives gleamed next to carefully mended bowls and platters of Samian ware. An amphora leaned in the corner. Tiny black symbols crawled across crumpled and stained slivers of wood, rare examples of Latin cursive writing. “Are these the letters Howard wrote about in Letters from Roman Britain?” Matilda asked.
“Yes,” Ionescu replied, “these are the originals. Or some of them, rather. He’s saving the rest for another book. Of course he’s very busy with other work just now.”
“He has a finger in every pot, doesn’t he?” Matilda allowed herself to be hurried along.
They emerged in a windowless room whose stainless steel ambiance reminded her of the morgue photos of Linda Burkett. But this room smelled more of disinfectant and formaldehyde than of raw mortality. Here death’s sting was blunted, and the grave’s victory made academic.
Ionescu brought two boxes from a refrigerated room, placed them on a bench, and removed the lids. He made the gesture of a maitre d’ indicating the best table in the house. “There you are.”
“Thank you.” Matilda bent over the smaller box.
The hand was delicately molded, the nails smooth, the flesh stained brown. It rested palm upward, fingers gently curved. Matilda was reminded of Linda’s hand, lying mute and suppliant on Durslow’s vibrant rock. This hand, though, had come from the Moss. If Durslow was the Earth’s bony brow, then the Moss was its throat.
Matilda barely kept herself from reaching across time and clasping the severed hand in her own. “What have you learned?” she asked.
“It’s female,” Ionescu replied. “First century A.D., probably. The calluses on thumb and forefinger indicate that she worked a spindle, making yarn. The hand fits the body perfectly.”
A spindle? With a nod toward the infinite patterns of existence, Matilda touched the ancient spindle in her pocket and looked into the other box. The headless body did not have the compelling humanity of the hand. Its bones had dissolved over the centuries, and the flesh had become leather. Now it resembled a squashed brown satchel, with the arms and stumps of legs as straps. Its odor reminded Matilda of sad dark pools in an antediluvian bog.
“She was in her twenties,” said Ionescu, “healthy if fine-boned for a Celt. Her stomach was empty except for a bit of baked and burned barley-cake. A ritual last meal, Dr. Sweeney thinks. We could tell by the smoothness of the cuts about the neck that she’d been deliberately decapitated, after having been bashed from behind. And there’s a cord, a garrote, well up beneath her chin. . . .” He stopped dead. His pale skin went faintly green. “Oh bloody hell, I wasn’t supposed to tell about that, Sweeney will have my own head, right enough.”
“I won’t tell him,” Matilda said soothingly. “So her head turned up, too? When?”
“Three weeks ago, at the beginning of the month. Dr. Sweeney didn’t have time to study it properly before he went off to the dig.”
“May I see it, please?”
Ionescu looked around nervously, as though expecting Sweeney to leap out of a filing cabinet and crow, “Caught you!” Sucking on his teeth, he shuffled off to the storeroom and returned with another box.
The woman’s head, too, was stained a deep brown. Her features had collapsed, making her grimace—although not in pain, Matilda thought, but in ecstasy. Long strands of hair colored red from the peat still clung to her scalp. As Ionescu had pointed out, her skull had been crushed from behind.
Squinting, Matilda could just make out the cord that was twisted around the severed neck. The furrow caused by the ligature didn’t curve upward in the back, so it wasn’t a noose. Someone had thrust a stick through the knot at the base of her skull and turned it, tightening the cord and choking the life from the hopefully unconscious woman.
“Howard’s right,” Matilda said. “She was a ritual sacrifice, killed three ways and given to the bog. Are there local legends about Shadow Moss?”
Ionescu blinked at her, thinking she’d changed subjects in mid-paragraph. “Legends? I’m a scientist.”
Matilda desisted. She could get that type of reaction from Gareth. She spent another few moments looking from hand to body to head and back. The human shell, torn from its earthy womb, was drained of feeling. She sensed only that the woman had gone willingly to her death, surrendering her soul to the Otherworld without a backward look. The Druids had preached the immortality of the soul. The woman had believed in eternity. And here she lay, her hand not a relic of dead time but a message from a living past.
“Thank you,” Matilda said. “I’ll find my way out.”
Musing on humankind’s perverse taste for death, Matilda drove further into the city and left her car in the Borley Arcade car park. The Victorian wrought-iron and glass building brought a smile to her lips. There was not a straight line in all the polished exuberance of the place. The Antiquary’s Corner occupied a space on the second floor, its windows presenting tasteful oddments of gold and porcelain as befit an exclusive shop in an exclusive neighborhood.
Matilda stepped inside. Baskets of soaps and potions exuded a rich floral scent that wiped away the odor of formaldehyde still clinging to her sinuses. A Chopin etude wafted from hidden speakers. Royal Doulton and Waterford lay temptingly to hand. She put her hands in her pockets.
The artifacts inside a row of glass-fronted cabinets seemed almost shabby. Matilda identified a bronze Saxon brooch, several Roman oil lamps, a glass vial, clay votive figures, an ivory crucifix, and a scattering of verdigris-encrusted coins that Dunning had been wise enough not to pretty up. Discreet white cards with prices stood before each item. Matilda winced.
A woman emerged from the rear of the shop. Her perfectly made-up face was crowned by a pouf of white hair. Her lavender suit was a designer model, tailored to her sylph-like figure. Her smile was gracious but cool. She’d already sized up Matilda, in her denim skirt and bulky sweater, as a lump of coal. “May I help you?”
“Mrs. Dunning? I’m Dr. Matilda Gray. I’m working with Howard Sweeney at the excavations at Corcester.”
“I’m afraid I’m not acquainted with Dr. Sweeney.”
“But you know he’s a Ph.D.”
Celia’s smile stiffened. “As an antiquities dealer it behooves me to know who the experts are.”
From the back of the shop stepped a girl no older than Ashley. In fact, she looked like a thin, brunette Ashley gone to seed. Her lipsticked mouth was turned down in a pout. She carried a stack of cardboard boxes and a roll of brown paper.
Celia turned toward her. “Make sure the receipt in the box matches the mailing label, Emma. If you send the wrong item to the wrong place again, I’ll dock the return postage from your pay.”
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