Triskellion (24 page)

“Dalton’s paying Jacob,” Adam spat contemptuously.

Honeyman shambled across the moor towards Rachel, Adam and Gabriel and when, several metres away, he spotted them, he dropped his eyes to the ground. He waved, but stayed looking down until he reached them.

“Hi,” he said.

Rachel and Adam mumbled a greeting.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Honeyman said. “The discovery. The blade … the bodies …
everything
. What an amazing night.”

“So, where were you then?” Adam said, with characteristic bluntness.

“I watched on TV.” The beekeeper tapped his nose conspiratorially. “Too many enemies out and about at night.”

“Chris Dalton not being one of them,” Adam said. “What did he give you?”

Jacob looked guilty. “Services rendered,” he said.

“What services?”

“They paid me a few quid to film around the cottage and to borrow some of my artefacts, you know?”

“Oh, right,” Rachel said, digging Adam in the ribs to silence him. “Well, see you around, Jacob.”

Honeyman nodded, darting a look from one to the other, before pulling at the front of his bobble hat and shambling off.

The children watched him go.

“He’s sold us out,” Adam said. “He told them about the map, the blades … everything, I bet.”

“That’s unbelievable,” Rachel said. “I thought he was helping us, not helping some TV company expose all our—”

“All
our
what?”

Rachel turned at Gabriel’s question and saw that he was smiling. She realized that she – that they
all
– felt a strong degree of ownership over the circle. Over the artefacts.

Over the Triskellion.

“It’s fine,” Gabriel said. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. We needed someone like Jacob to get the ball rolling. We couldn’t have done it. We needed someone else to dig up the grave.”

“Why?” Adam asked.

“Well, apart from anything else, we didn’t have permission, or the right machinery.”

Rachel wasn’t convinced. “Is that all this is about?”

Gabriel smiled, like he was trying to decide how much to give away. “We need to understand as much about our past as we can,” he said. “It makes more sense of who we are, right? Now the third blade of the Triskellion has turned up, maybe the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle will come back together.”

“What jigsaw puzzle?” Adam asked. He was looking to Rachel for help, but Rachel looked as if she already understood.

Gabriel continued, patiently. “The puzzle of who we are. Why you’re here, why I’m here, and what has brought us together.”

Before Rachel or Adam could say anything else, Dalton came strolling across. He was sipping from a Styrofoam cup of coffee and did not look best pleased to see the kids turn up. He seemed particularly uncomfortable around Gabriel.

“Hi, you guys. Did you watch the show? Awesome, wasn’t it?”

“Totally awesome,” Adam said, almost mocking.

“Anyway, not really much to see here now.”

Dalton had moved a few steps to one side as he’d spoken, almost as though he were barring their entrance to the tent, or at least their view inside it. Rachel craned her neck and saw Laura Sullivan just beyond the entrance.

“Laura!” Rachel said loudly, hoping that once Laura had seen them, they’d be welcome.

The archaeologist poked her head out of the tent, looking pale and shaken. “Oh, hi, Rachel,” she said.

“We were just wondering how things were going?” Rachel said.

There was a distinctly awkward silence. Dalton looked at Laura and shrugged, then walked away to where the production assistant was watching some of the programme’s footage on a small screen.

“I thought you weren’t having anything to do with this?” Rachel said.

“More of a damage limitation exercise, really,” Laura said. “I couldn’t stand by and let that clown mess up a find of this importance. My duty as an archaeologist overcame my personal pride, I’m afraid. And I think I may have found something … unusual here.”

Rachel looked at Gabriel, who was staring off towards the trees as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

“So, are you going to tell us?” Adam asked.

Laura glanced off to her left. Dalton was walking back towards them. She chewed her lip. “Listen, guys, this isn’t really a good time,” she said.

“Please,” Rachel said.

Gabriel put his hand on Rachel’s shoulder, “Come on, Rachel, we’ll come back another time. It’s not going anywhere just yet.” He let his hand slide down Rachel’s arm until his fingers became entwined with hers and he led her and Adam away.

Laura watched them walk disconsolately back across the moor, while she waited for Dalton to arrive back at the tent. She stopped him as he made to walk inside.

“Chris,” she said, taking his arm. “Wait…”

“I’m waiting,” Dalton said.

“Can you and Amanda come in and see this, and get one of the other archaeologists? I need someone to look at this properly…”

Within a few minutes, Laura, Dalton, Amanda and one of the archaeologists who had opened the tomb stood in the pale light of the tent that had been assembled round the sarcophagus.

A faint mist from a spray constantly played across the remains inside the wooden log to keep them from drying out. The bodies still lay in their twisted embrace, but Laura had put measuring tapes alongside them and a camera was permanently mounted overhead to record every detail.

“Some of these differences could be genetic,” Laura said. “I know that, seeing as the corpse we’re looking at is so old. But we all know three thousand years isn’t so long in terms of evolution, and it doesn’t explain this.”

She pointed at one of the bodies and the others noticed that her fingers were shaking.

“Somebody please tell me that I’m not going mad.”

A
hooded figure presides over a burial, chanting and throwing handfuls of earth into a grave, its sides supported by green oak timbers. A mound of freshly dug earth by his side is garlanded with flowers and bowls of grain. Swords, arrows and shields are laid down in front of the mound
.

A small group of villagers stands in tattered, woven clothes, their heads bowed
.

Standing alone between the two groups of villagers are a young boy and a young girl holding hands. They are twins. They bear the olive skin and striking features that mark them out as different from the rest of the onlookers
.

They stare blankly into the hole, uncomprehending
.

Round each of their necks on a leather thong hangs a blade of the Triskellion
.

The hooded figure nods towards an old woman, who leads the twins away. When he sees that the children have gone, the man in the hood steps towards a raised platform on which two bodies are laid in a hollowed-out tree trunk
.

He lowers his hood, revealing pale, sunken cheeks and a hawk-like nose. He mutters an incantation as he leans over the bodies, removing the curved knife from the folds of his dark cloak…

Rachel looked up at the stained glass window. The meaning of the shocking images was beginning to come slowly into focus, but plenty was still puzzling.

“So this guy … a traveller, a knight or healer or whatever he was, comes to the village and meets this girl. This maiden. They meet, they marry and they have kids.”

“And then they die,” Adam said. “And get buried just outside the village. Seems pretty straightforward to me.”

“Straightforward?” Rachel looked at Adam as if he were mad. “Are you kidding?
How
did they die? I don’t know about you, but I saw a knife.”

“But they were already dead,” Adam said.

Rachel shook her head. Nothing was making any sense. “They had twins, like us, we know
that
much. But why was their burial place so special … and what about the shooting star? And the Triskellion? What does it mean?”

Adam plunged his hands into his pockets. “I’ve got another question for you. A big one.”

“What?”

“How come every time we have one of these dreams or whatever they are, it looks like you and Gabriel? I’m never in them.”

Rachel blushed. It was true. The knight and the maiden did look like her and Gabriel. She wondered if, maybe, that was just because, subconsciously, she wanted them to.

Adam leant across and patted the tomb of the crusader. “What I’d like to know is why they invented this Sir Richard de Whatever to cover up
this
guy’s identity?”

“They must have had something pretty big they wanted to hide,” Rachel said.

“How dare you?” The thin voice resonated about the church as Reverend Stone stepped out from the shadow of the side room.

Rachel gasped as the vicar’s face moved into the light; it was the face of the hooded man from her vision.

“I am surprised you have the barefaced cheek to come in here, let alone question the authenticity of the tomb. You two started all this. How can you come back in here after what you’ve done?”

Rachel and Adam looked blank.

“You deny it?”

“Deny what?” Rachel asked.

“Theft.” Reverend Stone’s lips tightened: white against a face that was rapidly reddening. His hands balled into fists at his side. “I don’t know how you have the gall to come back here. How dare you.”

“I’m sorry, but we don’t know what you’re talking about,” Adam said.

“You had better return what you stole immediately. There
are some very important people who will be after you for this. People who are very angry.”

“What is it you think we’ve stolen?” Rachel asked.

Stone could bear no more insolence. His face reddened still further and he began to tremble. He reached forward and grabbed Adam by the arm, his bony fingers digging into the flesh. Adam cried out and wrestled his arm free.

“Get out,” Stone screamed.
“Get out!”

The vicar’s voice echoed off the walls as Rachel and Adam ran out of the church and straight into the path of Chris Dalton and a concerned-looking Laura Sullivan.

“We were looking for you,” Laura said breathlessly. “We need to talk.”

Adam pointed back towards the church. “Well, I wouldn’t go in there. The vicar’s pretty mad.”

“I know,” Laura said. “Somebody stole something the other day. And I don’t think he was too happy with the questions I was asking about the inscription on the tomb, either.”

Dalton smiled. “Looks like we’re
all
in trouble.” He stepped across to Rachel, who was still a little shaky after the confrontation inside the church. He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get a coffee,” he said.

Having parked his black BMW on double yellow lines on the village High Street, Dalton commandeered the largest table in the Waverley Tea Room. The waitress silently took their order for scones and slices of toast and only spoke when
Rachel asked for a “latte”. The coffee was instant, she said, but she could make it extra milky if that was any use.

“So, what do you two know about these gold blades?” Dalton asked.

Laura looked taken aback. “Hang on, Chris. Let’s fill the guys in a bit first.”

“I’m sorry,” Dalton said, smiling at Rachel and Adam sincerely. “Listen, I know I’m a bit direct sometimes. It’s just my TV training, you know? Trying to get to the heart of the matter. You probably think I’m a bit of a…” Dalton searched for the word. “Pillock. You know, with all this TV business.”

Rachel and Adam had not heard the word before, but guessed its meaning and shook their heads out of politeness.

Dalton continued, his tone turning serious. “It’s just that I really care about this stuff, you know?” He stopped and leant back in his chair as the waitress arrived. She laid the plates of scones and toast on the table. Three mugs of coffee and a hot chocolate for Adam. Dalton thanked her as she left and turned back to Rachel and Adam. “This is a really important discovery.” He paused, letting what he’d said sink in. “I’m grateful you guys have been able to help us.”

Dalton had never spoken so earnestly to either Rachel or Adam and they were flattered by his attention. Away from the camera he was actually a lot nicer than either had taken him for. His concern for the dig seemed genuine, and the twins began to relax.

“What else have you found?” Rachel asked eagerly.

“Let’s just say that this burial is even more important than we originally thought,” Laura said.

Chris coughed and looked hard at her, but Laura continued.

“We need help here, Chris.” He shrugged, signalled her to carry on. “Look, we think there’s a really good reason why these two bodies were buried outside the village. A reason why the chalk circle was made to mark the spot.”

Adam bit hungrily into a scone. “So who do you think they were?”

Laura fixed him with an intense expression. “
That
we don’t know. Yet. I should tell you why we were excited about digging in this area in the first place.”

Dalton relaxed a little; he knew what was coming.

“About ten tears ago, a team of archaeologists were digging on a farm about thirty miles from here. The usual kind of thing: a standard round barrow burial, early Bronze Age, maybe four thousand years old. They found a body. A man. Nothing unusual in that, but exciting none the less. But like the bodies here, the acidity of the soil meant that enough bone and tissue remained to extract DNA from the body and get a genetic profile. You know what DNA is?”