Grave Goods (Tamara Hoyland Book 3) Read online

  But Tamara found it impossible to settle down with any of the books she found. She had made herself a hot drink, stood watching the falling snow out of the window, done some energetic exercises, read the invitation cards on the mantelpiece and the papers on the desk – and felt more wide awake than ever.

  What must Waldemar von Horn have felt when he received that communication from the untraceable Philip Ehrenstamm? Relieved that no rival to his title would turn up in later life? Angry that the treasure seemed to be gone for good? He had announced the death of Artemis and her son, whose disappearance must have been kept from the outside world during the intervening two years; half a century later he had employed a jeweller to make a copy of the treasure for his vault. Ironically, the jeweller used the sketches whose publication had so annoyed Prince Waldemar, as the best representation of what he was to copy.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘The satellite picture’s useful when it’s snowing,’ Olga Hoyland said.

  ‘You don’t have to apologise for watching your own television.’

  ‘Somehow one feels one has to in the morning.’

  The west country was said to be cut off by snow; drifts blocked the main railway lines and roads.

  ‘Cut off from where, I should like to know?’ Rob Hoyland asked. The satellite picture showed a broad band of white running from the English to the Bristol Channels, its edge to the east of Exeter. ‘Not cut off from anywhere I want to be, anyway.’

  The stock shots of snow ploughs; a list of emergency telephone numbers; more snow forecast.

  The local sky was a brilliant blue, and the ground merely powdered with white. Tamara said, ‘Can I take the Landrover? I want to go to Stockwell market.’

  ‘Of course. I’m not going in to the office.’

  An MP was calling upon the government to provide more cash for some vote-winning cause. An expert had claimed that the East Germans were cynically duping the West by sending fakes to be shown in the Great Exhibition.

  ‘Have a look out at the market for me, darling, I need a little antique fireguard for the spare bedroom, when Sandra’s here with the children,’ Olga Hoyland said.

  ‘And now for the Local News. Reports are coming in that an elderly woman pensioner has been battered to death in her lonely cottage on Dartmoor, and the house ransacked.’ Anyone who had noticed unusual activity in the neighbourhood of Stockcross was asked to get in touch with the Stockwell police. In the second such incident this year, thieves had broken into Stockwell Comprehensive school; it was not yet known what was missing.

  ‘You’re leaving early, Tamara.’

  ‘I want my pick of the market stalls.’

  ‘What about that message to call someone back in London?’

  ‘I did, last night.’ Mr Black had been unavailable again, but Tamara had recorded a detailed progress report onto his machine. Long since she had vowed not to become the type of heroine so popular in fiction, so infuriating in fact, who barged into obvious dangers without telling her friends what she was doing, and without any reason for not telling them. Ogden Nash’s ‘If she’d told the dicks how she got in that fix I’d be much apter to finish the chapter,’ was Tamara’s motto in her second profession.

  The radio warning about treacherous road surfaces had been as minatory as the gale warning for Portland and Plymouth, but the long-wheel-base Landrover was unaffected by the slippery surface. Tamara parked it, as muddy and battered as any local farmer’s, in a field entrance near the comprehensive school, made her way round the back of the building and retrieved the bag from its undisturbed nest in the snow. But there were all the signs of police and publicity at the front, when Tamara drove round.

  She pulled up, and said to a young uniformed woman, ‘Was there much damage?’

  ‘Only the pane of glass they broke, in the porch there.’

  ‘Might have been someone wanting a night’s shelter?’

  ‘They keep the radiators going twenty-four hours in there.’

  ‘It used to be freezing all the time at my school,’ Tamara said.

  ‘Mine too.’ The two young women smiled at their premature rendering of the ‘in my young days’ speech.

  ‘I suppose the road’s clear into town?’ Tamara asked.

  ‘Yes, the worst of the weather was further east. You can’t get out of the county.’

  The road to the market town led past the turning to Miss Christie’s bungalow. It was blocked by a police car, and when Tamara slowed, a constable waved her to go on.

  Would Kim Rice have found his way there if Tamara had not first done so? Surely the answer must be yes, but Tamara could not halt the wave of shame and sorrow that swept over her at the thought of Miss Christie’s death by telling herself it wasn’t her fault. When the ‘pensioner battered to death’, in that sadly well-worn phrase, became a personality instead of a statistic in one’s mind, then no vapid generalisations about the socialisation of the criminal seemed helpful or even sensible. Anyway, Kim Rice was by no stretch of the imagination deprived, disadvantaged, or idle. There could be no excuses for him.

  Stockwell was a market town enfolded in the moors, left behind by railway lines and main roads so as to have avoided the improvements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; indeed it had hardly changed from what Artemis and Clementine Bessemer might have seen if they were ever allowed to go there, until a reorganised district council had decided that its lack of modern amenities was a scandal and its ancient roads a danger. The twisting moorland lane that led to it spread into a dual carriageway at the outskirts of the town, where there were numerous boards advertising vacant advance factories on a modern industrial estate. Developments of bungalows and Georgian-style houses were creeping up the enclosing hills. Planning permission had been granted in the hope of providing homes for local newly-married couples, but the local papers regularly reported the purchase of blocks of them by the London boroughs putting their old people literally out to grass. Tamara drove into one of the modern roads and stopped in a turning circle. In one front garden a small boy was making and throwing meagre snowballs. Next door, an old man was scolding him.

  Tamara pulled her trophies out and spread them on her lap. She had taken a tin of polish-impregnated wool from the kitchen before coming out, and now she rubbed some gingerly on the inside of the stone-studded metal. A silvery gleam shone through the dull surface. Tamara touched the stones, the silver, the rusty edge of the broken sword. She weighed the crucifix in her hand, and peered at the fragment of wood, no larger than her thumbnail, that was set in crystal and filigree.

  This treasure would be put away in another vault while the litigation took its weary course. It might never emerge into sight again, for the owners of the nineteenth-century copy would bitterly resent it if their property were shown up as worthless by the original.

  The metal was warming in Tamara’s hand, though the stones remained as cold as icicles. This is more, she thought, than a national status symbol. It’s more than a symbol of financial value. If my work as an archaeologist, and even a scholar, has any meaning at all, then I have to recognise the significance of this lap-full, even if I can’t sense the emotional tug I had half expected. This is what archaeology is all about. Not status, not propaganda, not wealth, but knowledge, continuity, and an understanding of the ancient power of such venerable objects.

  Archaeology is often accused of concentrating on things, to the exclusion of what they can tell about people and societies. What else can that science do, without written records? But here was a thing that carried with it a record of its own, and a message legible to those with eyes to read it. It must be seen.

  The Saturday market in Stockwell opened at ten o’clock. Tamara put the ‘finds’ back into the scarf, and then into a plastic bag that she found under the driving seat. EAT MORE FRUIT was written on it in green capital letters. She drove on into the town and parked the Landrover in the section reserved for farmers. Another shopping bag, containing a couple of b
oxes of cat food, was in the Landrover, and with a plastic carrier in each hand Tamara walked past the pens of livestock, where steam rose from the animals into the chilly air, and the paving stones were thick with mud and sludge. Stall-holders were setting out their wares in the main market place. The stalls had recently been refurbished, so that each trestle table was now covered with a pink plastic canopy. The old stone fountain had been moved to make room for the public lavatories, and there was already a queue to use them.

  There seemed to be no arrangement of categories: old clothes, new clothes, fallen-off-the-back-of-a-lorry clothes; buttons, books, pottery, sewing thread; sports gear, motoring gear; cheese stall, meat stall, seven graded sizes of eggs; the waving banner of the Peace Movement flew above a red draped table, where Mrs Patel and two other women, surrounded by their children, were laying out their wares. All were encased in layers of anoraks, scarves and knitted hats. Steam billowed from their mouths.

  Jeremy Ellice was rummaging through the trays of jumble. Tamara stepped behind a barrow of brooms and buckets to listen.

  He said, ‘I am really looking for a pot to grow indoor bulbs in.’

  ‘It’s a bit late in the year for that, dear,’ Mrs Patel told him. ‘You’ll have to wait until next autumn now.’

  ‘All the same . . .’

  ‘What about this one?’ She held out a pottery bowl decorated with random lines.

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘What exactly were you wanting?’ Mrs Patel’s attention was distracted by another early customer, who bought a stainless steel toast rack. ‘We’re not really open yet. It’s still only ten to. Assad, can you fetch that box from the back of the car, and Deeba, I need some change, see if Mr Dunwoody can change this note. Now, sir, I’d like to help you, everything we sell helps the cause.’

  Jeremy Ellice’s hand traced a rough circle in the air. ‘Just a bowl, really. Metal, perhaps, with some kind of coloured decoration.’

  He obviously did not quite know what a chalice would look like.

  ‘Why don’t you come back later? Mrs Fletcher’s going to be bringing more boxes, she must have been held up in the snow. There might be something else. Or you could look over there, at Duxford’s bric-a-brac.’

  Jeremy Ellice mooched away.

  Tamara came behind the stall, and said, ‘Can I help, Mrs Patel?’

  ‘We can always do with an extra pair of hands, especially with Mrs Fletcher not being here yet. You could arrange these better.’

  Miss Christie’s bowl was in the middle of the table, lying between a Staffordshire dog and a hand-knitted tea cosy. It was too small to be really useful for bulbs, and could never have held more than a single hyacinth. It looked like dull brass, and the stones set on it were purple, green and dark red. The bowl was dented and misshapen, its rim bending erratically, and the splayed foot was too uneven for it to remain upright.

  ‘That’s what I’d call a white elephant,’ Mrs Patel said. ‘Can’t see what you’d do with that.’

  ‘Hideous, don’t you think?’ another woman said. ‘Ought to go for scrap, really.’

  ‘I rather like it,’ Tamara said, pulling out her purse. ‘What were you asking for it?’

  ‘There won’t be many people wanting that! Would ten pence be all right?’

  ‘Can I have these things too?’

  ‘I don’t remember them. What is it, a necklace or something? And a toy sword . . . couldn’t take more than a pound off you for the lot.’

  ‘I have got a bag,’ Tamara said, putting her purchases back into it again.

  ‘That is a help. One thing we’re always short of.’

  ‘Can I leave it under here a minute while I look round?’

  ‘Put it in here.’

  Jeremy Ellice came face to face with Tamara beside Duxford’s bric-a-brac stall.

  ‘You found it!’ He reached out his hands for the plastic carrier. ‘Can I see?’

  ‘This isn’t –’

  ‘Come on, girl, don’t give me that. This is a joint venture. Fair’s fair, half shares each, but even half shares shouldn’t . . .’

  ‘There’s no money in this for you, Jeremy.’

  ‘Of course there is money. What do you think I am, a philanthropist or something? I’m a trader, Tamara. Everything has its price.’

  ‘Anything I have bought here is mine, not yours. I’ve acquired title.’

  She saw the age-old greed of the treasure seeker on his crumpled face. She had found treasure indeed, she thought.

  ‘Title indeed,’ he said derisively.

  ‘That’s right,’ the woman serving at Duxford’s stall interrupted. ‘You buy it here, you own it, that’s the law.’

  Jeremy Ellice held out his hand greedily towards the carrier bag, and Tamara stepped backwards, and into another alley of stalls. She dodged past the hurdles set in the path of a hurrying shopper: children, dogs, groups of acquaintances chatting, groups of hagglers arguing. The empty fruit boxes of the greengrocery stall were piled in the footway, and she heard them tumbling, to a shout of anger from the stall holder, as Jeremy Ellice charged past them less nimbly than she had done. The open space in the centre of the market was taken up by a dozen schoolboys playing Christmas carols on brass instruments, and then it was in among the animals, where slow-moving farmers and doting children were the obstacles. She would lead Jeremy Ellice far away from the Peace Movement’s fund-raising stall at Stockwell market. Out onto the moors perhaps, where her four wheel drive vehicle could leave him stuck.

  The reigning Prince of Horn and Reiss and Drachensfeld was waiting beside the Landrover, his Saab, designed for winter driving, tidily parked to prevent her backing out. His perfect teeth gleamed in a smile. He said, ‘I thought I might find you here. Just as you guessed where to find me yesterday. It seems that we have interests in common.’

  ‘Many of them,’ Tamara agreed. She put the carrier casually on the bonnet of the Landrover. ‘Which one were you thinking of, in particular?’

  ‘We are both re-checking our sources, as all good researchers should.’

  It seemed curious that a man of whom one knew nothing could provide a supreme physical pleasure, when that man, revealed for what he was, caused those same nerves to crawl with revulsion.

  What did he really want? Not me, at any rate, Tamara thought coldly.

  He came round the end of his car towards her, and at that moment a hand from the concealed other side of the Landrover stretched out to grab the plastic shopping bag.

  ‘I’ll have that,’ Kim shouted. But Jeremy Ellice was already running with his trophy, dodging around the cattle lorries and tractor trailers.

  Kim chased after him, leaping and sliding on the slimy surface with the trained balance of a good skier.

  Tamara jumped onto the bonnet of her car, to get a better view. Jeremy Ellice had outpaced Kim, and reached his mini van. He tore open the door and started the engine in rapid motion, jerking backwards and around with hasty jerks, his tyres splashing out sprays of mud and slush. Kim Rice reached the door handle just as Jeremy revved up to drive out of the parking space, and just as a bedraggled dog, following his master towards the coffee stall, ran under the van’s wheels. The squeal of brakes and yelps of the wounded animal brought the normal buzz of the market to a sudden silence. Jeremy Ellice and Kim Rice were encircled by a group of slow-moving, angry, Devon farmers who appeared suddenly like any crowd attracted to an accident.

  From her vantage point, Tamara could not hear the individual words, but the gesticulations were explicit. The farmers were outraged by the wounding of the dog; or no, its death. One of the men took off his leather jerkin, and laid it over the small corpse.

  Kim Rice seemed to be simultaneously commiserating, apologising, and demanding the plastic bag. Jeremy Ellice, half out of the car, was holding onto it with both hands. For a moment the two men looked like children fighting over a toy. Then the bag burst, and a rain of small brown pellets fell to the ground: the dried cat food.
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  Kim, quicker than his rival to recognise facts, turned away with a gesture of disgust, but one of the farmers, a burly old man in gum boots and a green tweed coat, caught onto his arm. Tamara knew what he would be saying; you have to report it to the police if you run over a dog. ‘It wasn’t me,’ Kim would protest, and the farmer, supported by all his friends, would say, exactly as he would have said to two small boys, that he didn’t care whose fault it was, they could both come along with him and explain it to Mummy/the headmaster/the police.

  This was not an argument Kim Rice could win; here in Devon, not even one that a Prince of Horn could win. Tamara watched the two men escorted along the pavement. They were going quietly, but several of the local men went with them to make sure they did not change their minds.

  Jeremy was not the type to fight. He had made his try for wealth, and would be resigned to not achieving it. Kim Rice would not think it was worth the effort to avoid this immediate confrontation. An apology for the death of the farmer’s working dog, a payment in compensation, a beer together in one of the pubs that was open for drinking all day on market day, and it would be over. He was clever enough to have left no finger prints at Miss Christie’s bungalow or at the school. Tamara would tell the local police force to suspect him, but she knew already that he would never be convicted or even charged with murder. Like other things, that crime ran in the family.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  More snow was falling on the moor, and in her own car Tamara would probably not have been able to get home. She drove even more cautiously than the weather required, burdened by the responsibility for her freight. She was surprised by her own weariness.

  Her father was waiting for her, and behind him, a shadowed figure. ‘You have a visitor, Tamara.’