Lovers and Newcomers (20 page)

She did manage a laugh now, a quick delighted wheeze of mirth that made Colin laugh too. They tottered in each other’s arms on the creaking landing.

‘I couldn’t deliver in the technical sense, remember.’

‘I’d prefer your company tonight to the hottest stud in the county, Col.’

Miranda crawled under the covers and Colin lay on top of them, wrapped in a quilt. They spooned together, listening to the wind, as warmth spread between them. It was the first time that Miranda had shared a bed since Jake’s death. She had almost, but not quite, forgotten the comfort it provided.

Colin stroked her hair. ‘Go to sleep,’ he murmured.

She did as she was told.

They slept until early morning, when the telephone started ringing.

A journalist from the local paper was first, quickly followed by two local radio stations and a reporter from the area television news. Dissatisfied with the stonewalling answers they received from Miranda on the phone, the reporters soon started to arrive in person. Amos opened the door of the cottage to a young woman who, he claimed later, doorstepped him with a radio mike. His comments, with the more intemperate sections edited out, made the lunchtime bulletin on the county station. Complaining about vandalism and citing property rights he sounded, as he put it himself later, like a puce-faced rural grandee whose croquet lawn had been trampled in the course of an audacious raid on his wine cellar.

‘Why didn’t you stop me making an arse of myself?’ he raged to Katherine.

‘When?’ she asked gently, but he wasn’t waiting for her answer.

Miranda telephoned the hospital. She was told that the security guard was severely shocked, but stable, and would be kept under observation for another night.

A pair of policemen interviewed Selwyn and Polly and Amos and Katherine, but all four of them had slept from bedtime to breakfast and had heard nothing.

‘Missed all the drama,’ Selwyn complained. ‘Why didn’t you wake us, Barb?’

The archaeologists returned to their ravaged dig, but it was cordoned off and guarded while the uniformed branch waited for the arrival of the forensic investigator and the CID. The neat sections of the grave’s walls and floor were a trodden pit of raw earth and heaped spoil, turning to mud as the day’s steady rain trickled through the hastily re-erected canvas shelters.

As Colin had predicted, outside interest in the story quickly gathered momentum.

The first local stringer for a national newspaper turned up, and several photographers lurked in the drive and on the field margins. The broadcast bulletins started mentioning Boudicca, and speculating about the glorious treasures the thieves might have spirited away. From being mentioned as a possibility, within hours it became accepted fact that the grave had contained the remains of a magnificent horse-drawn chariot complete with harness pieces and decorated terret rings, a series of iron weapons, gold and electrum torcs and arm rings, and a hoard of gold coins of the Iceni tribe. A well-known television archaeologist gave an impromptu telephone interview, widely quoted in all the subsequent bulletins, in which he offered the opinion that the stolen Meddlett treasure could well represent one of the greatest Iron-Age discoveries ever made, and that the loss of it was nothing less than a national tragedy.

The next day’s newspapers would be full of the Warrior Princess, and what was missing in hard fact would no doubt be supplied by imagination.

Amos declined any further contact with the press, although several reporters were eager for some more of the lively performance he had given on the radio. He left Katherine to answer the callers while he talked to the police. The most senior officer he could pin down, who despite all Amos’s insistence was several rungs on the ladder below the Chief Constable, smoothly assured him that every effort was being made to investigate the crime and apprehend those responsible. Amos also spoke to the managing director of the security company, who told him that all the guidelines had been followed and the guard on duty at Mead had been one of their best. He thanked Amos for his concern for the injured man.

Polly, Colin and Miranda drifted in and out of the kitchen. They answered the house telephone and listened with amusement or disbelief to the different versions of the radio news. Selwyn was mixing concrete out in the yard. He kicked the rubble of broken pot into the trenches where it disappeared between the piping. A grey river of concrete flowed on top of it.

The Griffin had been busy at lunchtime with a stream of locals who had looked in to trade the latest rumours with Vin. Several of the news reporters had called in too, asking questions of the pub regulars and keeping Geza busy in the kitchen. Jessie silently served them with ploughman’s or dishes of braised lamb shank.

A freelance photographer asked her what time she was going to finish work.

‘Not in your lifetime,’ she said, sweeping away his empty plate.

Some of the archaeologists came in too but they disconsolately took a corner table and talked in low voices, ignored by the reporters. Kieran was not amongst them.

By afternoon closing time all the outsiders had taken themselves off.

When Vin opened up again at half past five, the evening was turning cold and damp enough for him to kick some logs together in the open fireplace and coax a fire into life. Outside the kitchen door Jessie and Geza pulled up their hoods and smoked before the start of their shift.

‘It is a great shame to lose items that have history from the place where they should stay,’ Geza remarked, coughing tragically as he exhaled a grey cloud. ‘These thieves have done more than a crime like supermarket grab. It is bad for your country.’

‘Yeah,’ Jessie agreed, staring into the rain.

Two customers sat in the bar, one on either side of the fire. One of them was the local builder, the other was churchwarden and president of the bowls club.

The builder said, ‘They belong to this village by rights, all them necklaces and horse ornaments and the gold coins, don’t they? They was here long before the big estates and landowners taking over the country for themselves. The ancient peoples, these Iceni, they were our forebears. Right here in Meddlett, that’s where this treasure should be kept. Not in some museum the other side of the county, nor in the pocket of a rich bloke from London who’s got nothing to do with this place except he happens to be the new owner of an acre of land.’

Vin loomed over the pumps. ‘They haven’t ended up in either place, Stan, have they? Some nighthawk with his metal detector’s got the blooming lot. All our heritage’ll be going overseas, sold to some foreign collector for a fortune no doubt. I’m not all that chuffed about what’s happened, either. Even though it’s that lawyer who’s been robbed, which is what I call justice, for once. A bit more local history in Meddlett, not just the Fifth, that’d bring in a few visitors instead of them all going straight up to the coast. We had a good lunchtime with the journalists and that today, but it’s not going to last, is it?’

‘It’ll be them lot that’s took it, like they take everything else,’ Stan muttered, nodding in the vague direction of the kitchen curtain and Geza behind it.

This was by no means a new theme of his, and the other two ignored him.

‘That’s Mead land, where they found the treasure. Has been for centuries,’ the churchwarden put in. ‘Mrs Meadowe only sold it a few months ago to the barrister chap who was on the radio.’

Vin nodded. ‘She ought to involve herself a bit more in the village. I said as much to some of those newcomers who are living up there, they come in here once in a while for their glass of
waite waine
, but I didn’t get much of an answer.’

‘I expect she’s got her reasons,’ the churchwarden said.

‘And now the Fifth’s coming up again,’ Stan observed.

Everyone nodded.

The Fifth of November was a big night in the Meddlett calendar. It was the occasion for a costumed pageant with a huge bonfire.

In the early years of Jake and Miranda’s marriage the bonfire and the pageant were staged on one of the Mead fields, but one year there had been a drunken brawl and three men had been arrested. Nowadays the bonfire was built in the church field and the landlord of the Griffin laid on a hog-roast for the village. The Meddlett children regarded the present-day event as a second crack at Hallowe’en, for which the preceding week was only the warm-up.

‘My older one’s leading the Mauby procession this year. The vicar’s never been that keen on any of it,’ the churchwarden said.

‘Is he? Good lad. Vicar’s only been here five minutes himself, what’s it got to do with him?’ Stan answered. ‘Give us another one in there, Vin.’

Katherine kept her mobile phone close at hand all day, but there was no call from Chris. As the day began to fade into twilight she couldn’t stay in the house any longer.

Amos was in the second bedroom, which did duty as his study. He didn’t look up from his computer screen when she put her head around the door.

‘I’m just going for a little walk,’ she told the back of his head.

Selwyn was cleaning splashes of concrete off the cobbles, swishing the hosepipe behind him like a satanic tail. She pulled up her collar and found a pair of gloves in the pocket of her coat. The gate latch clinked as she gently closed it, and a shower of heavier drops from the branches of a tree fell on her face as she passed beneath. The air smelled cold and dense with moisture, but she was pleased to be out of the cottage. From the window it had looked almost dark outside, but now she was immersed in it the clouds to the west still swelled with greenish light and the wet boles of the trees looked like gleaming pillars in a dim, free-form cathedral. Raindrops steadily dripped on the path.

The police had warned them to keep away from the site, but she could see no reason why she should not take a stroll through the copse.

In the centre, where the trees were thickest, the last of the light was almost blocked out. She looked up once to see the fading glimmer of sky through the lattice of branches, and nearly tripped. Putting out her hand to the nearest tree to steady herself she heard feet swishing in the fallen leaves, and then saw him coming towards her. The hood of the North Face anorak was pulled down to keep off the rain, but she knew immediately that it was Chris.

He stopped, pushed back the hood to see her more clearly, then put his hands to her shoulders. He held on firmly, as if to stop her slipping out of his grasp. Even in the dim light, she could see how miserable he was.

‘Have they taken everything?’ she asked.

‘It looks like it.’

He lifted one hand off her shoulder and slid it into his pocket. He held up a small polythene bag. Inside she could just make out an irregular flat disc of metal.

‘A single coin of Icenian silver,’ Chris murmured.

He let go of her, rummaged again in a pocket and produced a small torch.

He focused the beam and through the bag Katherine saw on one side of the coin a human profile and on the other the primitive but unmistakable outline of a horse.

She would have liked to weigh the coin in the palm of her hand, then close her fist on it to keep it safe.

‘It’s Face-Horse type, quite a common early variety Icenian issue. The thieves must have dropped it, the police found it lying between the trench and the hut.’

‘And what about the rest? There would have been more, wouldn’t there?’

‘Yes, definitely. All gone.’

He clicked off the torch. The darkness intensified.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Katherine whispered. His dejection touched her. She was aware of the small distance that separated them, and of the rain, and the avenues between the trees, radiating from the point where they were standing like spokes from a hub.

‘I was just coming across to tell you and your husband and Mrs Meadowe the news.’

‘Thank you. Don’t worry about us.’

‘I didn’t call you. It’s been a very bad day.’

‘I understand.’

‘The television people were here to record an interview. I don’t know how to do these things. I’m an archaeologist, not Andrew Marr.’

‘They wouldn’t have been expecting otherwise.’

He said, ‘So I thought about you. Thinking about you made the difference, Katherine. It was like opening a window and seeing a new view, with a river and some hills and a glimpse of the sea in the distance. Do you mind me saying that? I’m sorry if you do. I don’t know how to go about any of this, except by being honest. I could try to pretend that what seems to be happening here
isn’t
, if that would be better?’

‘Perhaps we should stop apologizing to each other,’ she said.

A life in waiting, she was thinking. She didn’t want to wait any longer for she didn’t know what.

The distance between them somehow diminished and then disappeared altogether, and she found herself in Chris’s arms. The wet creases of his anorak rustled as he kissed her. It was strange to kiss a man with a beard; rough and silky at the same time. It was strange to kiss any man other than Amos, and she couldn’t even remember when Amos had last kissed her properly, with attention, the way this man was now doing.

‘I’m not sorry,’ Chris said, at length.

‘Me neither,’ she whispered. Maybe later, she temporized. Sorry, or guilty, or remorseful, maybe. But not now. Christopher Carr and she recognized a need in each other. She wasn’t going to deny that there was neediness.

‘Where were you going?’

‘I’m there. Here,’ she told him.

He kissed her some more.

Rain smeared her cheeks and blotted her eyes, and ran down their necks once it had soaked into their hair. Finally they acknowledged that they had better continue through the woods to the house. There would be a time and a place. It seemed now that they were both sure of that. He took her hand and drew her after him, but as they came out of the trees and the lights of Mead shone through the drizzle he squeezed her fingers and released them.

Katherine hesitated on her own doorstep. She twisted the ends of her hair and rubbed her fingers under her eyes to remove smudged eye make-up. Thinking about it later, she wasn’t sure how she had managed to look and sound like her ordinary self in the awkward half-hour that followed, but Amos didn’t give her more than a glance so she supposed she must have done.