Time Enough To Die (19 page)

"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.

Matilda looked back at the hotel. The students who'd decided not to stay with the dig were trudging up the street toward the bus station. Jason, not surprisingly, was in the lead. He'd sputtered all during breakfast about suing the Corcester constabulary for unlawful arrest. Even after Matilda had pointed out he hadn't been arrested, he'd been helping the police with their inquiries, he continued to fire random shots at everyone who crossed his bows. “Let him rant,” Matilda had whispered to Ashley. “He's trying to repair his damaged manhood."

"Like he has much to repair,” she'd returned. “You almost have to feel sorry for him."

Matilda had assured the defectors that she and Sweeney would arrange some sort of course credit for the work they'd completed. Not that she'd bothered to consult with Sweeney before telling them that. She was less irritated with him for setting up a situation where students could be in danger than with herself for going along with the idea.

She turned back to the dig to see Ashley putting Jennifer to work sketching several broken glass vials. Matilda was gratified the girl had decided to stay—most timid people hid a kernel of stubbornness. Bryan was staying too, just to give her a little extra motivation. Not that she was paying any attention to him. She was trying to act cool in front of Gareth, probably. Bryan stood holding a meter stick and eyeing the back of Ashley's head, frowning slightly.

A slight frown had been Gareth's expression this morning. Matilda couldn't speak for Bryan, but she knew what Gareth's problem was: He was waiting for her to take last night's moment of vulnerability and bludgeon him with it. With a grimace, Matilda picked her way into the Miller ravine.

Gareth stood, hands in pockets, glumly surveying the trampled mud and caved-in banks concealing his carefully-excavated apse of the Mithraeum. “Trust Sweeney to fall just here."

"It looks like a hippopotamus wallow,” Matilda agreed. “But the paramedics had to do their job."

Pulling his trowel from his pocket, Gareth squatted down and began scraping at the mud-splattered stones. “I'll have at go at Dunning tomorrow, if Sweeney's back by then."

"He should be, unless he's developed complications overnight."

"Watkins tells me that Clive is a nephew of our Mr. Clapper—so we'd better start watching what we say in front of him. Although if the lad's in the area, he's keeping a low profile. You don't suppose it was him driving the bus that almost had you off the road, do you?"

"Elvis Presley could've been driving that bus,” said Matilda.

"Right. Watkins agrees that it's time to bring Nick in for questioning—again."

"I doubt if they'll have a lot to say to each other. Maybe I should go out to the camp and look helpless or something, try to win his trust."

"Yes.” Gareth's trowel grated across the rock.

That wasn't what I was doing with you,
Matilda said silently, and added to herself, odd, how sometimes the best way to help a relationship along is to pretend it doesn't exist.

She turned away and inspected the trench. Between the rain and last night's stampede, its sides looked as though they'd been chewed and spat out. Column drums thrust themselves from the muck. Bits of mosaic tile lay among the weeds. Blocks of masonry in several different shapes lay scattered in no discernible pattern.

As the excavators peeled away the layers of dirt and time the ruins were opened not so much to the light of day as to the perceptions. It was like opening the doors of a concert hall, so that anyone who cared to stop and listen could hear the music inside. Matilda half-closed her eyes, conjuring the place as it had once looked.

Faintly, like an image on smoke, she saw the foursquare Roman temple before the perimeter wall. The stones of its foundations, skewed slightly from the wall, were larger and dressed more roughly than the Roman masonry. Those stones were relics of the temple to Epona, the Celtic temenos, razed by the conquerors as though tearing down a building would destroy the deity within. The entrance to the underground Mithras temple lay just outside the largest stone in the foundation. Inside was something else, a cellar room, perhaps, a crevice that rang hollowly like deep water....