The Maltese Herring

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘So why did you decide to dig yourself?’

  ‘I just wanted to confirm that that was what had happened. That there was no point in further digging to locate the Madonna, because Barclay-Wood had taken it. When it was quiet, I went over the old chapel with what technology I had – a cheap metal detector. My theory was that Barclay-Wood wouldn’t just dig up the Virgin – he’d leave something behind too.’

  ‘And did he?’

  Polgreen opened a drawer in his desk and took out a clear plastic bag. He spilled the contents onto his desk.

  ‘Pennies,’ I said. ‘Edward VII.’

  I picked one up. They’d been common enough when I was a child. The familiar profile on one side, Britannia, and the date on the other.

  ‘Not just Edward VII,’ said Polgreen. ‘They were all minted in 1902. The leather purse they were in had rotted, but the coins are in a good condition, bearing in mind they’ve been buried for over a hundred years. I don’t think they were ever in circulation. Their sole function was to date, to the year, when the ground had last been disturbed.’

  ‘Barclay-Wood telling you that you were on the right track,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t tell me it’s just a weird coincidence. Over the years, I’ve got to know Barclay-Wood and what he found amusing. The moment I checked the date on the first coin I knew what I had discovered. The question is: are there further clues somewhere else or is that it?’

  ‘But you know where the Madonna is … or was,’ I said.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You dug it up,’ I said.

  Polgreen shook his head and looked at me as if I had not been paying attention. ‘I’ve told you. It was just the pennies. There was nothing else there. That’s the whole point of my story.’

  ‘I mean in my garden.’

  Polgreen’s gaze was now completely blank. ‘Why on earth would it be in your garden?’ he asked. ‘That would have been just fields in the sixteenth century.’

  ‘So, it wasn’t you?’

  ‘It wasn’t me doing what?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘The Madonna was actually buried at the Priory, just like the story says. Iris’s grandfather dug it up. He hid it in the ice house, where Iris later found it. She gave it to Professor Cox to value, and possibly sell. Joyner stole it from Cox and buried it under my roses. Somebody – I had assumed you – then removed it.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not me … Bloody hell. Iris knew all that and never told me? You knew that and never told me?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  We looked at each other for a while.

  ‘I’m sure Barclay-Wood found it at the Abbey,’ he said. ‘So that must mean he then reburied it at the Priory … Yes, of course. He could have done that. It’s no distance to the Priory from the Abbey. But why would he do that? Even by his standards, it makes no sense at all.’

  ‘Well, there’s no doubt it was at the Priory by 1959, waiting to be found. But I think you may be wrong about Barclay-Wood moving it there. Iris thinks Barclay-Wood never saw the Madonna at all. She conversely has seen it and says the description in his book – all the rubies and lapis lazuli stuff – is just plain wrong. If that’s true, then your supposition that he ever found it at the Abbey must be wrong too. Maybe he buried the pennies for some other reason that he found equally amusing.’

  ‘Then why does he stop digging when he does?’

  ‘He just lost interest,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps he was looking for something else entirely and did find that.’

  Polgreen shook his head. ‘What else could it have been? He was obsessed by the Madonna. He wrote about it. He spent almost ten years digging for it. I’m telling you, he found it. He saw it. It doesn’t surprise me that he sexed the statue up a bit. That’s what he did all the time. For an evangelical clergyman, he was a liar of quite exceptional ability.’

  ‘All right, then why – and how – did he then bury it at the Priory? I suppose the how is the easy bit. He had about forty years, between 1902 and his death, to walk or ride or drive over to the Priory and hide it there. But it still leaves the why.’

  ‘He just found it amusing,’ said Polgreen grimly. ‘He’d clearly worked out where it was and decided it was too easy to find. So he moved it somewhere less likely, where it could do no harm.’

  ‘But the Priory? That was the other place everyone thought it was.’

  ‘I suspect that generations of owners have declined to have their garden dug up – especially since the treasure might prove to belong to the Crown and not them. So, the Priory may have actually been safer than most places.’

  I shook my head. It still didn’t feel right. But Barclay-Wood was always the joker in the pack. As long as he was involved almost anything was possible.

  ‘Do you think Joyner knew all this too?’ I asked. ‘He had all the evidence. I think it was the Priory where he really wanted to dig.’

  ‘He seems to have done,’ said Polgreen. ‘But you say he actually had the Madonna at that point. So, why dig at all? What was he doing looking in the well for something he knew was buried in your garden?’

  ‘Iris said the same thing, more or less. Why did he come to West Wittering when he had the object he was supposedly searching for? Perhaps he knew something that we still don’t know. He had put together quite a collection of papers, including what seems to be the original inventory of the Abbey – or a very early copy.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind seeing that. It’s been missing since Barclay-Wood’s time. How did Joyner get it?’

  ‘I’ve wondered about that,’ I said. ‘He told me that he used to take his aunt to boot fairs round here, years ago. Maybe her interests extended to auctions and antiquarian bookshops. He seems to have ended up with a collection of books owned by Barclay-Wood and papers belonging to the Abbey.’

  ‘So, in one place or another, he stumbled across Barclay-Wood’s library being sold off?’

  ‘Something very much like that. The collection doesn’t look very exciting unless you know how to read sixteenth-century handwriting. He did.’

  ‘But that would be an odd coincidence – he’s interested in the Abbey and he just happens to find a collection of papers on it.’

  ‘More likely the other way round, don’t you think?’ I said. ‘A chance find at a boot fair years ago led to his researching the background to the dissolution of the monastery.’

  ‘Those papers really belong here,’ said Polgreen. ‘By rights.’

  ‘Probably,’ I said.

  ‘And the Madonna, if it’s out there.’

  ‘If you really want it,’ I said. ‘I can’t see why you would. Barclay-Wood made up a great deal, but he was right about it being cursed. It certainly brought Joyner no luck and he probably had it only for a few days.’

  ‘True,’ said Polgreen. ‘Though falling down the well seems to have been entirely his own fault.’

  ‘Where were you when he fell?’ I asked.

  ‘On the far side of the garden, probably,’ he said. ‘I certainly never went near the well after we all left together. Actually, I scarcely saw anyone from the moment we left the well to the moment we all got back to the terrace. I ran into Elsie and Anthony Cox, but that was all.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s just that I saw somebody in a white jacket. I thought it was Joyner, then I lost sight of the person, then I came across Iris and assumed it was her that I’d seen. But you were wearing a white jacket too.’

  ‘I’m a bit taller than Iris or Joyner.’

  ‘It was only a brief glimpse. A flash of white. Thinking about it, it could have been any one of the three of you.’

  ‘And where was that?’

  ‘Near the ice house. Not far from the well.’

  ‘What are you saying, Ethelred? That you think I came back and pushed Joyner down the well?’

  ‘That’s Sly’s theory.’

  ‘I bet it is. And what is my motive supposed to be?’
/>
  ‘To save your reputation. He gave quite a detailed description of you by the well, including the moment you gave a guilty start, but I think, like Barclay-Wood, he has a rather gothic imagination.’

  ‘I’d better get back to the garden,’ said Polgreen. ‘I’m supposed to be deadheading, not dealing with Abbey business.’

  I nodded. I was divorced myself, but I knew that most marriages operated on delicately negotiated, often unspoken, compromises. It was, in my experience, unlikely that Mrs Polgreen shared Henry’s enthusiasm for archaeology or considered it more important than timely garden maintenance. He needed to be seen deadheading something and quickly.

  ‘I’ll email you my application to join the committee,’ I said. ‘Will just a quick statement of my wish to join plus a brief CV and contact details do?’

  He nodded. He was no longer quite so sure he wanted me. That was progress of a sort.

  ‘I’ll pass it on to Iris and Tertius Sly,’ he said. ‘Sly’s bound to want some kind of formal vote amongst the three of us. He always does.’

  I walked back down the path to the main road and turned right, in the opposite direction from Brighton. I needed to check something in Barclay-Wood’s journal. Not the printed book but the manuscript version that Joyner had felt so worthwhile bringing with him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ethelred

  To my right was a large mug of coffee. To my left was my copy of Happy Recollections. In the centre of my desk was Barclay-Wood’s original journal.

  I had always suspected that Happy Recollections was largely fiction. In the event, about half of it was true – or at least half of it was as true as the journal.

  The published book began on a jolly note, with Barclay-Wood moving into the vicarage in Selsey on a sunny April morning and his giving thanks to God for being able to serve a parish in such a beautiful part of the country. He recounted an amusing conversation with his churchwarden, Mr Cornwallis, and a bracing walk along the beach with seabirds flying overhead. The journal, from which the book was supposedly derived, told a very different story. Barclay-Wood was despondent at having to live, as he put it, amongst congenital idiots and miles from any sort of civilised society. He deeply regretted having turned down the opportunity to run a mission amidst the bright lights of Omdurman. He hated the vicarage, which was damp, too large and inconveniently situated. He hated the church, which was not quaintly mediaeval, and which possessed not only a job lot of alabaster images of saints but also an incense burner recently manufactured in Wolverhampton. He intended to take a hammer to the lot at the first opportunity. He despised his churchwarden, who clearly approved of everything his Romish predecessor had done. He loathed the sound of the sea and the constant rush of pebbles up the beach, which, alternating with the rush of pebbles down the beach, would continue until Judgement Day. He set out, in some detail, his plans for buying a gun to send the seagulls back to Satan, whose minions they undoubtedly were.

  Reading the two texts in parallel provided many insights into the true meaning of the published work, which had previously escaped me. It was, for example, now much clearer what he meant when he had said that the previous vicar and the churchwarden had fully deserved each other. And when he said that the choirmaster had taught the boys to sing almost as well as he did himself. And when he said that the vicarage was every bit as beautiful as it was comfortable. And possibly when he said that the church authorities in Chichester (with whom he would later have the protracted legal dispute) were as wise as they were devout. After a while you looked for a double meaning in almost every sentence, and usually found it.

  His account of the excavations at Sidlesham was, as might be expected, fuller in the manuscript journal. Though Polgreen had implied that Barclay-Wood dug at random, the journal showed him working his way systematically through the herb garden and the cloisters, stopping when checked by the foundations of some building, then renewing his carefully planned progress across open ground. Each find was meticulously recorded, but it was clear from his notes at the end of each season that he had not located what he was after. In 1899 he had started on the nave of the chapel. Again, this was no amateur at work. He identified each tomb with some accuracy, often from a few fragmented Latin phrases on a coffin. His treatment of the bones, however, reflected his increasingly bitter correspondence with the Dean of Chichester. His reburial of the remains of past Abbots (as recorded in the journal, anyway) was haphazard and perfunctory. He had no time for senior clerics of any sort.

  The 1902 excavations ended in Happy Recollections with the words: And so another season comes to its conclusion, I having discovered more than I could have hoped for. I resolved to allow the bones of the pious monks to sleep undisturbed next year. May God bless and watch over them all! But the entry in the journal for the same day was slightly different.

  And so my work here comes to an end, having discovered more than I could have hoped for, after so much wasted effort and idiotic advice from the rest of the committee. The question is now what to do with what I have discovered. I shall conceal them in the place that people will least suspect – a place where they deserve to be and can do no further harm.

  Conceal them. So, whatever he had found, he had more than one item to hide? If Iris was right and he had never seen the Madonna, then he might conceivably have meant the pyx and, say, the chalice. But how could they do any harm? More likely, especially in view of his reference to the ruby drops of blood, he had unearthed not only the Madonna but the statue of Christ as well. Then, for the Madonna to have been found in West Wittering in 1959, he must have buried that and quite possibly the second statue at the Priory. Joyner, having doubtless conducted a comparison similar to the one I was engaged in, would have known this. But nothing in the remaining pages of the journal mentioned such a burial or gave details of which location at the Priory he had chosen – it annoyingly stopped soon after the discovery of the treasure. Either it had been discontinued or the later volumes had been lost.

  The printed version of Happy Recollections did record two later visits to Wittering Priory, either of which might have allowed him the necessary leisure to bury the loot. The first entry that mentioned the Priory was brief and gave no clue as to what he might have done there. The second, however, was slightly more expansive. And, checking Joyner’s copy, I saw there was a slip of paper already marking the page.

  The food and conversation were every bit as good as on my last visit to this interesting house. But, fortunately, West Wittering is too far from Selsey for me to come here often. After dinner, my host again pleading his infirmities, I had a chance for a stroll alone in the gardens, where the monks of Wittering once took their exercise. I spent some time on the flower beds and paused for a while by the quaint old well, which must have been in use in King Henry’s day. Thus, I unburdened myself of some of my troubles.

  The first time I had read that, I had assumed ‘fortunately’ was a printing error. Now I was no longer so sure. But it was the final phrase that really caught my eye. I had previously skipped over it, assuming it meant no more than that the visit to the garden had allowed him to forget temporarily some of his problems with the Bishop and with his churchwarden. But, with the other information I had, I placed a very different interpretation on Barclay-Wood’s reference to unburdening himself of his troubles at the well.

  I could see why Joyner, with exactly the same information, had felt that it was worthwhile searching where he did. You could never be quite sure, of course, when Barclay-Wood was telling the truth. But I felt I had just read the passage that had lured Joyner, already in possession of one statue, to his death in pursuit of the other.

  ‘So, in summary,’ said Elsie, ‘your mate Henry denies killing Dr Joyner and you believe him?’

  ‘Yes, I do believe him,’ I said. ‘Your unconcealed scepticism is noted, however.’

  ‘And you believe that in spite of his having admitted a motive – that is to say that he had been conducting illicit ex
cavations, which would have been detected as soon as Sly, backed by Joyner, began work again. He would have had to resign from the committee. The Abbey is pretty much his whole life.’

  ‘He also gets to deadhead roses,’ I said. ‘At least in the summer.’

  ‘He’d have had to watch Sly take over as chair.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have elected Sly, not so long as Iris was on the committee.’

  ‘I’m surprised Iris thinks she can stay on the committee,’ said Elsie, ‘once the others know she’s sold off silverware that originally belonged in Sidlesham. They could scarcely approve of that.’

  ‘They don’t know.’

  ‘I bet it would all have come out the moment they announced the discovery of the second statue. That would have raised all sorts of awkward questions. Maybe Iris had more to worry about than we thought.’

  ‘Yes, but I still believe her. She didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Like Polgreen?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So, neither of the people with really good motives killed Joyner. That’s nice to know, isn’t it? It was actually Sly who decided to randomly bump off his only friend.’

  ‘Yes. If anyone killed Joyner, it was Sly.’

  ‘With deductive skills like that, Ethelred, it’s no surprise that you’re constantly at the top of the bestseller lists,’ said Elsie.

  ‘I’m not at the top of the bestseller lists,’ I said.

  ‘No, you’re not, are you?’

  ‘I’m going to take a trip to Selsey,’ I said.