Time Enough to Die

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Emma bobbed up and down. “Yes, ma’am. Very good, ma’am.” It didn’t take psychic skills to catch the sarcasm in the girl’s voice.

  Celia turned back to Matilda. “What can I do for you, Dr. Gray?”

  “I’ve been involved with a case or two of antiquities looting back in the States. I’m interviewing dealers here in Britain to see how they handle the situation. Which can sometimes lead to murder, I hear. Your own assistant. . . .” Matilda paused delicately.

  “Dreadful business, that,” Celia said. “Nothing to do with me, though. I don’t deal in stolen antiquities. I buy only from the legal owner after he’s completed the proper paperwork. I sell only those things for which I can obtain a proper expertise.”

  “And that’s why your prices are so high?”

  “Yes. Authenticity comes dear.”

  “Do you solicit the owners,” Matilda went on, “or do they come to you?”

  “I’m a well-known legitimate dealer. I don’t have to—solicit.”

  And yet Linda, Celia’s employee, had been soliciting Reynolds. Had Linda been working for herself? Matilda wondered. Or was Celia playing her cards very close to her fashionable lavender chest? A falling-out among thieves often led to murder. . . . The woman was impossible to read. Matilda felt as though she were facing the ice-wall of a glacier. The tip of her nose was growing cold.

  “It’s a shame you couldn’t sell Adrian Reynolds’ statuary for him,” she essayed. “But the looters got there first. Fortunately the statuary turned up safe in Canada.”

  “Adrian Reynolds?” Celia asked.

  “He owns the land in Corcester where the site of Cornovium is located. Surely you’ve heard of the stolen Romano-British statuary.”

  “Not at all,” said Celia. She took two steps forward.

  Matilda didn’t retreat. “I imagine it was smuggled out of the country with forged papers. Pity, isn’t it? If people refused to buy antiquities then the looters would have no market. A lot of sites would be saved. Antiquities belong in museums.”

  “No museum can afford to buy every antiquity that appears,” said Celia. “Honest people who buy well-attested artifacts save them from destruction by the ignorant. Even artifacts that go to museums are likely to be bundled into a dusty corner. Private owners have the resources to properly appreciate our cultural heritage.”

  So that was her rationale, Matilda thought. And yet she had no reason to believe Celia guilty of anything underhanded, let alone murder. Matilda simply didn’t trust people who had no emotions.

  Emma rustled brown paper and gazed out at the two women from beneath penciled brows. A well-dressed couple strolled into the shop and starting inspecting the Waterford, exchanging comments in French. Celia’s nostrils flared. “Please excuse me, Dr. Gray.” She didn’t wait for Matilda to respond. She advanced on the customers murmuring obsequious French.

  And merde to you too, Matilda thought at the woman. She turned toward Emma and smiled.

  Emma smiled tentatively back.

  “Emma,” snapped Celia. “Bring out the Edinburgh Thistle champagne flutes.”

  Shrugging, Matilda left the shop and, after a bit of window-browsing, Borley Arcade. She should turn Gareth loose on Emma—after separating her from the Snow Queen.

  It was well past noon, and she was getting a headache. Matilda walked past a crowded pizza pub and a beef carvery and within a couple of blocks found a Greek restaurant tucked into the ground floor of an old brick office building. The posters of olive trees and ancient temples in the windows were curled and faded. The place had been there a while. Above the posters was painted the legend, “Acropolis Cafe. Constantine Veliotes, owner and manager.”

  She found a booth by the window and ordered a vegetable plate from the solitary waiter. From Mr. Veliotes himself, she corrected, when he rushed from the swinging door of the kitchen to the cash register and started making change for a departing customer.

  Family photographs filled the wall behind the counter. Matilda traced the owner from a slender dark-haired youth with a fierce black moustache to his present incarnation, a man broadened by the inexorable pull of time and gravity, both head and facial hair dulled to gray. The woman who stood with him holding a baby in the oldest picture never reappeared, although the baby apparently grew into a handsome young man with a 200-watt movie-star smile. An even-armed Greek cross dangled from a photo of him standing before the shiny facade of Borley Arcade.

  “Is that your son?” Matilda asked Veliotes when he set a bowl of lentil soup before her.

  The man’s burst of sorrow, anger, and fear almost gagged her. “I have no son,” he said. “No son, no longer.”

  “I’m sorry.” Matilda gulped and stared down into the soup bowl. That was interesting. Perhaps the wife had died. Perhaps the son had, too. Or was in prison. . . . Well, he was certainly estranged from his father. She sipped at the soup and told herself to mind her own business, which was already booming.

  She hurried through her lunch, her appetite no longer quite so keen. While the dolmas, falafel, and tabouli were delectable they seemed to taste very faintly of ashes.

  Soon she was out of the city and back on the country road. The afternoon darkened as black clouds crowded up the western sky. Gusts of wind bent the trees shuddering toward the east. The first raindrops splattered on the windshield as Matilda passed the lay-by where she’d stopped that morning. A good thing she’d taken the opportunity to empty her mind. Now it was teeming. Her thoughts jostled each other like shoppers at a sale searching for items that fit.

  Rain poured on the roof of the car, streamed down the windshield, swished around the tires. The countryside seemed to melt, its colors running. Matilda slowed. The road had no shoulders—she couldn’t stop. She crawled around one bend and then another. To her left the land fell away into a silvery-green blur. A bus approached in the right, inside, lane.

  Her windshield wipers sliced the scene into slivers of time. She saw the bow wave ahead of the bus’s tires. She saw water spewing from its hood and roof. Only one wiper flopped back and forth on its streaming windshield. The bus’s radiator loomed directly before her, sodden insects caught in its teeth.

  She wrenched her steering wheel, turning the car toward the side of the road. A metal barrier stood where a shoulder should have been. Beyond that was nothing but flooded air.

  Her tires skidded. The left side of her car screeched along the barrier. The bus grated along the other side.

  And then, suddenly, the road before her was clear, a drenched strip of black tarmac lined with nettles. She braked, lightly, and looked in all her mirrors. The dark blur of the bus was gone. After the squeal of metal on metal the sound of the rain seemed soft and soothing.

  It was at least a mile before Matilda started breathing again, two before she blinked, three before she loosened her white-knuckled grip of the steering wheel.

  She drove on into Corcester by rote, thinking nothing, feeling nothing except the ebb of adrenalin from her body. The rain slowed and stopped, and a Jacob’s ladder of sunshine broke through a rift in the clouds.

  The clouds had burst in Corcester, too, she saw as she pulled into the parking lot beside the hotel. The gutters ran full and the flowers in the gardens across the way were drooping, beaten down by the rain. Sweeney had no doubt rushed all the students inside. The green mound of the fort gleamed pristinely. She hoped the trenches hadn’t collapsed.

  Matilda crawled from the car. She shut and locked the door and put the keys in her bag. Her knees were trembling. Slowly she walked across the street toward the dig.

  Someone came out of the hotel behind her. Gareth. He had been waiting for her.

  The fort was silent, its long grasses and the plastic sheets over the trenches rippling in the wind. Transparent human shapes moved among the ancient stones. Maybe Gareth would call them corpse candles.

  Matilda passed the bowling green and skirted a puddle in the depression beneath the gate. The grass squeaked w
etly beneath her feet. She felt as thin as the shapes before her, scraped like vellum, ready for a new message. Reaching into her pocket, she grasped the spindle.

  The room that materialized in her mind’s eye wasn’t defined as clearly in the daylight as it had been at night. Still Matilda saw implications of furniture and window shutters. Marcus reclined on a couch, not comfortably but warily, as though expecting a centurion to call him to action at any moment. And yet he was dressed in a simple tunic and cloak. He wasn’t on duty. He was watching Branwen spinning.

  The thread spun between her thumb and forefinger and the spindle danced. Marcus rose from the couch. Slowly, his face set in a grimace of pain, he walked to Branwen’s side. He raised his hand, palm up, fingers curved, and stroked her thick plait of red hair where it lay across her shoulder.

  Her hand clasped the spindle, stopping it. She looked up.

  He touched her cheek, and bent over her, and her lips parted for his. . . .

  “Matilda!”

  The image blinked out, snatched into another dimension.

  “Matilda!” Gareth grasped her arms and shook her. “Are you all right? What happened to your car? Did you have a crash?”

  “The hair on the severed head,” Matilda said, “isn’t red because of the peat. It was red in life. In her life. . . .” She started coughing as though she’d swallowed the wrong way, even though she had no memory of swallowing at all.

  Gareth put his arm around her shoulders and guided her through the wet grass back into what he fondly believed, no doubt, to be reality.

  Chapter Nine

  At first Gareth suspected that Matilda was leaning against him more to complete the scenario than because her knees had gone wonky. She’d seen the ghosts again, eh? Pull the other one!

  She wasn’t faking. Her face was stretched tight, so pale it seemed translucent in the thin evening light, and her blue eyes were dull as the overcast sky. Judging by the scraped sides of her car she’d had much too close an encounter with another vehicle on her way back from Manchester. He had the queasy feeling the encounter hadn’t been an accident. He should never have let her go alone.

  Ashley, Courtney, and Jennifer came bounding down the staircase as Gareth and Matilda plodded up. They gathered round, cooing like pigeons in St. James’s park. “She’s all right,” Gareth insisted, “she had a bit of a scare on the road, a cup of tea and some sandwiches would be lovely, Ashley, if you’d see to it. . . .”

  The girls swept on down the staircase and across the lobby, Ashley throwing a nervous glance back over her shoulder.

  “A bit of a scare on the road.” Matilda’s shudder of self-possession made a seismic wave in Gareth’s arm. He loosened his grip.

  Her room was number 7, between 15 and 2. She fished her key out of her bag and after three tries got it into the lock. Gareth stepped inside and turned on all the lights. Her room was much nicer than his, with a four-poster bed and a bay window containing two chairs and a table. No one was hiding beneath the bed or in the wardrobe or adjoining bathroom. Neat rows of personal items, a few lotions and a lot of books, emitted an aroma that reminded him of a summer’s afternoon spent reading in a rose garden. Beside the bed sat a photograph of a fair-haired young man with his mother’s Mona Lisa smile.

  Matilda sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and closed her eyes. Through the window behind her Gareth saw the turf billows of the fort looming dimly through the dusk. Two people were walking about the excavation. Quite corporeal people, thank you, a man and a woman, probably Jason and Caterina. Gareth pulled the curtains shut.

  “The incident in the London Underground might have been an accident,” Matilda said. “So might the incident on the road this afternoon. But you can only stretch coincidence so far. Then it becomes deliberate action.”

  “The killer must want you out of the way, right enough, to have another go at you.” Shaking his head, Gareth sat down and pulled out his notebook.

  Matilda opened her eyes. Their blue was once again breaking through the clouds. “It was on that high, narrow stretch of road just before Wormsley. It was raining torrents. I had my lights on. There was a bus in the inside lane. It might have skidded, I suppose. Whatever, it almost forced me over the edge.”

  “There’s a guard rail, is there?”

  “A very sturdy one, thank goodness.”

  “Describe the bus.”

  “I only caught a glimpse of it. An older model, I think, with the engine forward of the body. A radiator full of bugs. Only one windshield wiper was working, the one. . . . No, it was the one on the driver’s side. He could see out.”

  “Were the bus’s headlamps switched on?”

  “No. It seemed to spring out of the rain, coming straight at me.”

  “Did you sense anything?” Gareth couldn’t believe he asked that. But whilst she might have copped a peek at the Burkett reports before their visit to Durslow Edge, she had yet to mess him about with crystal balls, tarot cards, and ectoplasm. Her common sense covered a multitude of sins.

  “Yes, I sensed it was going to kill me. . . .” Matilda frowned. “No, now that you mention it, I didn’t sense anything beyond my own emotions. If it had been an accident you’d think the bus driver would have been surprised and scared as well.”

  Gareth duly noted that in his book, with a question mark. “Who knew you’d be on the road today?”

  “Half the people at the dig, to begin with. I was talking to Clapper over breakfast. Reynolds saw me leaving. Ionescu at the University. Celia Dunning and her assistant. The man in the restaurant where I ate lunch. There wasn’t any reason to keep my movements secret, even if I wasn’t being entirely honest about my motives.”

  “Stick as close to the truth as possible,” agreed Gareth. “It makes the—er—distortions easier to remember.”

  Matilda didn’t manage a laugh, but her chuckle sounded almost human.

  Gareth realized that the light tap-tap-tap he’d been half-hearing was someone knocking at the door. He hurried across the room. Ashley stood outside, both hands laden with a tray, tapping at the door with her foot. He wondered what, if anything, she’d overheard. They hadn’t been talking loudly, though, and the clash and clatter of the dining room echoed up the stairwell.

  Ashley set the tray on the table. “There’s tea and everything, and Mr. Clapper made you some tomato and cheese sandwiches. He says he’s sorry to hear, quote, you aren’t quite the ticket, and he hopes the rozzers tear strips off the clot what did it. Unquote. Bryan says it looks like two diesel engines tried to make a sandwich out of your car. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, thank you. It was just a fender-bender in the rain.”

  “Sometimes it can be scarier afterward than during.” Ashley poured a cup of tea and handed it to Matilda.

  “Thank you,” Gareth said, and tried to urge Ashley on her way with his most charming smile.

  Her return smile was oddly glazed. She sidled toward the door. “Oh—er—Mr. Clapper called P.C. Watkins and told him about the accident and he said he’d come by later on and make out a report. And Manfred went to tell Dr. Sweeney, but he and Caterina are checking the trenches for mud. We’ll make sure he knows.”

  Gareth grimaced. He could hardly debrief Matilda in the midst of a circus.

  The tea was drawing the color back into her cheeks. Matilda settled back in her chair like a queen awaiting an audience. “I appreciate your help, Ashley. You’re very efficient.”

  “I’ll go wait for P.C. Watkins and show him the way up here.” Ashley and her blond ponytail whisked away.

  She was a pretty little thing, after all. Gareth shut the door and turned back to Matilda. “Tell me about the rest of your day.”

  “Not much to tell. First I went to the university. Sweeney’s assistant Ionescu—my son would call him a geek—showed me the hand and the body. And the head, which just turned up, but we’re not supposed to know about that.”

  The last things Gareth wanted to know about were
body parts belonging to the uncanny hand. “Sweeney’s keeping it under wraps, is he?”

  “So he can present it with an academic dog and pony show after the dig, no doubt. He doesn’t realize it has any significance for the dig itself.”

  “Is that what you were going on about tonight?”

  “Yes. The hand belonged to a Celtic woman who was given to the commander of Cornovium in its early days. That he was the commander then is proved by the stele. What I don’t know yet is why she died as she did.” Matilda ate half a sandwich. The lines in her face began to ease.

  Gareth nodded, committing himself to nothing. “And you talked to Celia Dunning?”

  “If you can call it talking. She makes you look positively loquacious.”

  “Excuse me?”

  This time Matilda managed a dry laugh. “I tried to start a conversation about collecting, looting, and dealing. I even said something about Linda’s murder, which she shrugged away. Dunning claims she does everything legally, and that it’s better to have artifacts appreciated by collectors than neglected or destroyed. Which is a debatable point, not that we actually debated it. You might make more headway with her by flashing your warrant card, but I doubt it. We should tackle the clerk. Dunning tyrannizes her and she resents it.” Matilda ate the other sandwich half. “I can’t see Dunning dirtying her shoes at Durslow, let alone being so careless as to drop a receipt. And logically it’s the person who bought the vase who dropped the receipt. They got out of Dunning’s shop for only eight pounds. That’s quite a feat.”

  Gareth wrote “Dunning—assistant.” “Did you catch the girl’s name?”

  “Emma.”

  “Emma. Now that’s interesting. Clapper mentioned a local girl named Emma who was involved with the travelers. He said she was working in a posh shop in Manchester.”

  “Even if it is the same girl, it might be only coincidence. . . .”

  “Deliberate action,” Gareth reminded her. “We know that Linda Burkett knew the whereabouts of illegal antiquities. Were they in Dunning’s collection? In Reynolds’s? Is Reynolds using the travelers to help him dig or to smuggle artifacts? If we could make a connection between the travelers and Dunning. . . .”