“The bit you see reproduced most frequently,” said Matilda, “shows a Roman soldier brandishing the menorah from Solomon’s temple, a treasure indeed. Very good, Ashley. That’s helpful.”
Gareth frowned. “You mean whoever coshed Sweeney and the girl thought there was treasure buried beneath the inscription?”
“There’s some sort of Jewish temple in Manchester, right enough,” Clapper offered. “I never heard of any of them candlesticks around here. We’re mostly C. of E., those that go to church at all.”
“I suppose,” Watkins said firmly, “that the thieves thought there might be more of them Roman-British statues or whatnot.”
“Or some kind of booty, at any rate.” Matilda brushed her hair back from her forehead. The harsh light, Ashley thought, made the older woman’s face look pale and seamed. “We can speculate about this later on. Right now I need to follow that ambulance, make sure Howard and Caterina are all right. Constable, please make sure someone is keeping an eye on the fort the rest of the night. Mr. Clapper, please ask around here, I’m sure Jason’s movements can be accounted for.”
“Here, here, what’s going on, my horses aren’t half cut up. . . .” Reynolds came pushing his way through the crowd.
Gareth and Watkins exchanged a significant glance. “Mr. Reynolds,” the constable said affably, “could we have a bit of a natter?”
“See you later,” Matilda said to Gareth. And to Ashley, “Don’t worry, they’ll be all right.”
Ashley murmured something appropriate, turned away from the lights that were ruthlessly exposing all her romantic fantasies, and followed the other students into the hotel.
Chapter Eleven
By the time Matilda returned to the parking lot of the Green Dragon it was past midnight. Corcester had rolled up its sidewalks. The only human shape visible was the one leaning on the gate to the fort, spotlighted by the tiny spark of a cigarette. That the figure dared to light a cigarette reassured Matilda it was one of the constables from Manchester who’d been temporarily assigned to Watkins’s beat.
She turned off her lights and her engine and exhaled through pursed lips. She could hardly fault the paramedics for taking Howard and Caterina to Manchester—head injuries could be tricky. But she had negotiated the route back to Corcester with her heart in her throat, expecting a bus to dive at her from the gloom. Here she was, though, safely back at the scene of the crime.
The front door of the hotel was locked. Matilda rang the bell, waited, rang it again. After several minutes Clapper came lumbering forth, swathed in a terry cloth robe. “How are they, Dr. Gray?”
“They’ll be all right,” she replied. “Caterina has a mild concussion, but she’s awake and isn’t too confused. Howard is scratched and bruised, with a bump on his head and a wrenched knee. Neither one of them has any idea who attacked them.”
“Twere the travelers,” Clapper muttered darkly, and locked the door.
Maybe so, Matilda thought as she toiled up the stairs. She opened the door of her room. Gareth lay on the bed, a book open on his chest and his head lolling to the side. Other books were scattered around him. Matilda shut the door behind her with an emphatic click.
Gareth sat up abruptly. “Oh, there you are. Sorry, I had Clapper let me in.”
“So we can have yet another conference? Gareth, we have to stop meeting like this.”
He wasn’t amused. He was angry, she sensed, more at himself for not preventing the attack than at the person who’d actually done it. She understood that. If she’d so much as looked out the window she might have seen the assailant stalking his victims. But no, she’d been sitting with the dig computer, working her way through the dull but necessary details of the week’s work.
“There’re some sandwiches for you on the table,” Gareth told her. “I knew tea would get cold and lemonade warm, so I laid in a bottle of beer.”
“My hero!” She plopped down in the chair, untied her walking shoes, and peeled her socks from her aching feet. “There. I spent a couple of hours too many pacing the floor at the hospital.”
The sandwiches were the usual tomato and cheese, and tasted like ambrosia. Between bites Matilda gave Gareth the medical report, concluding, “As far as I could make out between Caterina’s accent and her addled condition, it was getting so dark she could hardly see the inscription when she heard Sweeney cry out. She looked for him. He was nowhere in sight. She called for him, took a few steps one way or the other, and then nothing. She doesn’t remember hearing any footsteps or feeling the blow. She’s still a bit shocky, not quite focused yet.”
“Someone pushed Sweeney and then coshed Caterina,” Gareth translated.
“Howard says he was standing there looking over the countryside, chewing his cud, I suppose, and he felt a tremendous shove from behind. I can sympathize with that.” Matilda made a face. “He was dazed and didn’t hear Caterina calling him. Or criminals stomping around, for that matter. He’s not dazed now. He’s reeking of offended dignity.”
“It doesn’t sound like the yobbo meant to kill, though either the fall or the blow could have done.”
“I’m afraid so. Howard’s sure it was Reynolds. He said the man was listening avidly while they were discussing the word ‘spolia’ Saturday night.”
“He always has an ear in.” Gareth nodded. “Sweeney’s trap turned the trick, then?”
Matilda took a deep swig of the beer. Its astringent taste matched her mood. “No. He caught himself and an innocent student. There’s no proof it was Reynolds who attacked them. The man isn’t stupid. Why would he make a move under circumstances that would point directly to him? Why not let us uncover some kind of treasure and then steal it?”
“Reynolds has neck for two,” Gareth asserted. “I reckon he intended Jason to take the blame—he heard the lad’s row with Caterina.”
“What did Jason tell Watkins?”
“He watched a football game on the telly in the sitting room and then chatted up one of the local girls in the bar. He’d put away several pints, no doubt of that, and the girl vouched for him.”
“What about Reynolds’s alibi?”
“He hasn’t one. He said he was at home all evening. When Watkins sent a W.P.C. to interview Della, though, she couldn’t knock her up.”
“The policewoman knocked on the door of the house but Della didn’t answer.” Matilda translated.
“That’s what I said. The W.P.C. fetched Watkins and Reynolds, who opened the door. Della was asleep. Out cold. When they finally woke her she said she’d gone to bed about five-thirty with a headache. There was a bottle of pain tablets by the bed, as well as a half-empty glass of gin.”
Matilda frowned. “She shouldn’t mix pain pills and alcohol. She could find herself taking a slow ferry across the Styx.”
“Excuse me?” asked Gareth.
“She could die. Greek mythology. Sorry, I’ll stick to Celtic.” Matilda put down the empty bottle and the napkin and contorted her knees into the chair, trying to reach and rub her feet.
Gareth turned a wry smile toward the books lying on the bed next to him. “There’s a good bit of Celtic mythology in these books of Dr. Sweeney’s. The Roman Conquest of Britain, Letters from Roman Britain, Everyday Life in Pagan Britain. The one with the letters mentions Corcester—Suetonius dedicated a temple here, to the victory over Boudicca, just before he went home to Rome.”
“Which event may have prompted the infamous inscription. I’ll have to re-read that book. Howard writes well, but he leaves the less glamorous parts to his students. He does the Druids, they do the plowshares.” Matilda almost unhinged her jaw with a yawn.
Gareth pressed on. “Watkins and Clapper are still on about the travelers. Nick and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all are perfectly capable of knocking Sweeney and Caterina about, but they have no motive. That we know, at the least. If they had a motive I could send Watkins to search the camp. As it is, I could only drive past several times this afternoon, and have another dekko
at Durslow Edge.”
“None of the travelers interviewed said they’d ever heard of Linda, but—well, I keep thinking there’s some connection we haven’t found yet.”
“You should have seen Nick with that knife. It was like he knows who I am, and was slagging me off.”
“I could have told you whether his confidence was real or sham. It would take confidence to murder someone with a pen knife, wouldn’t it? So deliberate. . . .” Matilda shivered. Not only would it be easier to detect a criminal filled with remorse, it would make her less nervous about doing the detecting.
“Linda may have been seen with Reynolds,” said Gareth, “but Della made a statement saying he was home with her the night of the murder. A night, Watkins told me when I asked, that was clear and cold. He never asked Della to describe the weather— why should he have done? The filthy storm she mentioned to me happened two days later, the night Linda’s body was found. I think that’s an important discrepancy. Watkins thinks it’s a natural mistake for poor stupid Della.”
“Della’s not stupid. If she killed Linda, over illegal antiquities or over her husband—there’s no accounting for tastes—she’s keeping it well-hidden.” Matilda tried another angle of knee and ankle. Gareth picked up her feet, propped them on his thigh, and started massaging them himself.
“Thank you,” said Matilda, and went on, “Then there’s the receipt from the antiquities shop, which could have gotten to Durslow in any number of innocent ways. Or it could have been planted there by someone else to throw suspicion on Celia or Della—Emma, for example. Didn’t Clapper say she hung out with some occult group among the travelers, who might, I suppose, be building fires on Durslow. . . . Of course, we only have Clapper’s word for that, don’t we?”
“He has his ear in too, doesn’t he? He as much as admitted to me he’s nicked an antiquity or two.”
“The question is, who’s doing what with or for or in spite of whom? Who stole the statuary, and God only knows what else, and bashed two people over the head and committed murder? It is all the same person, isn’t it?”
“God, I hope so,” Gareth said.
Matilda didn’t remind him of his avowed atheism. The room was so silent that the creaks and pops of the settling timbers of the building sounded as loud in her ears as her own heartbeat. “And I’ve got more for you. This afternoon Clapper was showing me a snapshot of last year’s May Queen. I’ve already met her. Emma. What’s very strange is that I’ve also met the young man, Clive, in the photo with her. He’s the one from the underground platform in London. The one who may have tried to push me under a train.”
Gareth’s hands pressed so firmly into her feet she winced. His eyes darted upward. “Bugger! You’re sure of that?”
“I’m sure. He might be one of the travelers now, his leaving town to look for a job being a convenient fiction.” She yawned again. “All the pictures you took of the traveler’s encampment, and I recognize a face in Clapper’s publicity shot. Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?”
“You’re the expert on coincidence,” Gareth said with a snort, and returned to his task.
Something in the back of Matilda’s mind whispered, just when does happenstance become coincidence? You’ve built a career on coincidence, on the congruence of time and space, thought and feeling. And now it’s not working, it’s not falling into order, it’s like a landscape after a tornado, straws driven through trees and clocks left ticking in the midst of ruin.
Gareth’s right thumb pressed into the ball of her left foot. The pressure both hurt and drained away the tension. His hands were warm and strong. His downcast lashes cast shadows above his red-stubbled cheeks. “You should have a look at Reynolds’s antiquities,” he went on. “I reckon half of them are fakes, as Sweeney said. They’re too pretty, all tarted up.”
“Very good, you’re learning.” Matilda nodded approvingly. “And then there’s Ashley.”
“Ashley?”
“I smelled alcohol on her breath tonight. She was with Bryan—he seems a nice enough boy, and he does like her. Still, you know what Ogden Nash wrote, ‘Candy’s dandy, but liquor’s quicker.’”
Gareth looked up, nonplussed.
“She’s vulnerable,” Matilda explained. “But then, who isn’t, on some level?”
“Should I sort Bryan out?”
“No, no, don’t interfere. Right now she’s hugging that romance like a teddy bear. And it’s not as though she had anything to do with the case.”
“Caterina didn’t have anything to do with the case, did she?”
“Thanks.”
A car passed outside. Someone walked down the hall—one of the students going to the W.C., probably. Gareth massaged Matilda’s feet. Frissons of delight played up her legs and she had to quell a sigh of pleasure. He was thinking of something else, something a long time ago and a long way away. His breaths were shallow but even.
“Which one of your relatives,” Matilda asked gently, “has—what do they call it in Wales, second sight?”
He shot her a flash of exasperation from beneath his brows.
She returned a wry smile. “You weren’t just skeptical about my skills, you were downright defensive. I suppose you still are, you’re just covering it better. Unless the fact that I haven’t demonstrated many skills. . . .” She cut off that line of reasoning. “I’m guessing there was some conflict about ESP in your youth.”
“What if I told you my youth is none of your business?” Gareth said, but without resentment.
“You’d be right. It isn’t.”
He emitted a part sigh, part laugh. “My grandmother had second sight. Half the folk in Aberffraw would come to her for advice. She was a good Methodist, mind you, but she loved the old ways. My mother would take the mickey out of her for it. My father—well, he was a teacher. He had work to do.”
“I see,” Matilda said.
“Gran told me all the old tales. My middle name is Thomas, but she always pretended the ‘T’ stood for Taliesin.”
“Taliesin, the bard? Aberffraw was the principal residence of the kings of Gwynedd, for whom he sang.”
“Anglesey—Mon— is mentioned in one of his verses: ‘There will come men to Mon to be initiated into the ways of wizards’. Or the ways of druids, if you like. I used to have whacking great stretches of the Cad Goddeu, the battle of the trees, off by heart. It’s all gone now.” Gareth stared down at Matilda’s feet, as though suddenly surprised to see them in his hands. He placed them gently on the floor. “Gran didn’t live to see me become a policeman.”
Matilda felt as though she were eavesdropping. She’d told Gareth she couldn’t read his mind, and yet, at that moment, she was doing just that. Her flesh tingled from the touch of his hands. His hands tingled from the touch of her flesh. Taken unaware, by subtlety rather than by force, he had lowered his drawbridge, opened his gates, and exposed the skeletons in his dungeons.
“I think,” he said hoarsely, not meeting her eyes, “I’d better pack it in. I’m knackered. We’re both knackered.”
“And we have ditches to dig tomorrow, Sweeney or no Sweeney. Good night, Gareth.”
“Good night, Matilda.” Still not looking at her, he walked stiffly across the room and shut the door behind him.
Matilda contemplated the flutter of her pulse and the random fall of her thoughts. This wasn’t the first time she’d been ambushed by libido and sentiment. It probably wouldn’t be the last. Not now, she told herself. We’re working.
Or Gareth was working. She hadn’t exactly been making professional points. She’d prefer to think that indicated the coolness of her adversary, not some defect in herself. This was no time to lose her self-confidence.
Matilda rooted among the books and found her own copy of the Cad Goddeu. Closing her eyes, she opened it at random and set her finger on a page. She found herself pointing to the last verse of the poem. Holding the book at arm’s length, she read:
O druids, in your wisdom
ask of Arthur who is more ancient
than I, in the chants!
Who is here
thinking of the flood
and Christ crucified
and the judgment day ahead?
Golden gem upon a golden jewel,
I am splendid
I am skilled in metal work.
Well, she thought. Druids and the passing of the old religion, the certainty of judgment and a hint of treasure. . . . The next few days would be very interesting indeed.
* * * * *
Clouds lidded the sky, seeming to compress the damp, still air against the earth. The excavation was a crazy quilt of green grass, black mud, and reddish-brown stone. Even though Watkins had reported that the malefactor hadn’t left any booby-traps in the trenches, the students tiptoed up the sodden sides of the hill and huddled like sheep at the top.
“It’s like getting back on a horse after you’ve fallen off,” Matilda told them. “Start digging.”
“How many times have you fallen off a horse?” Gareth asked from his post at her shoulder. “It’s right painful.”
“Don’t step on my lines,” she said. “Ashley, I want you to take Jason’s place as group leader. The rest of you stay in your original groups. I’ll take over the inscription. Gareth, you can go on working in the Miller trench, if you like.”
He tipped her a salute that was every bit as wary as the steps of the students and clambered downwards.
Ashley stood stock still. “Me?”
“Yes, you,” Matilda said.
“Oh well—sure—I can do it.” Ashley shouldered her shovel. “Come on, gang, we need to uncover the rest of the bathhouse. If the caldarium was over there, the hypocaust must be about . . .” She led her group away. The other two groups exchanged shrugs and returned to their assigned spots.
Time Enough to Die Page 15