Quid Pro Quo

Chapter Twelve

Jonah Elias Saddlebury hung like a dead pig in a butcher's window. I retched until my stomach, long since emptied, hurt. Ty knelt beside me and draped an arm across my shoulder.

"Don't mind me. Cut that poor bastard down," I wheezed between gasps.

"I don't have my knife, remember?" he replied, rising from my side and moving to the body in order to examine the rope that was drawn taught around Jonah's ankles.

After a few moments of tackling the knots, Ty had untied the binding and the corpse hit the ground with a thump. The dead eyes looked right at me, turning my stomach and setting me heaving once again.

"How did it happen?" I asked. It was a stupid question, but I just wanted to hear something other than the obvious truth.

"Well it wasn't an accident, Satchmo," Ty murmured as he bent over the body, examining it intently.

"Maybe a six-inch knife, one of those showy combat knives with a serrated section near the haft. See the scrape marks on the vertebrae?" Edge pointed at the gaping wound on Jonah's neck.

"No. Thankfully my eyesight doesn't extend that far," I replied. Nor was I even looking.

"Hmm... There must have been three of them," he continued. He had rolled the corpse's sleeves up to further his investigation.

"He was held on each side by a strong man, both taller than him, and killed by a third from the front who was," he turned the head towards him to inspect the wound, "Right-handed."

"How can you tell that?" I asked, my curiosity defeating my nausea.

"See these bruises?" Ty indicated a series of thin blemishes high on Jonah's arms. "You have to hold someone pretty hard to bruise them. The position and size show that each mark was made by two hands, thus two men, and they are up near the shoulder."

"So?" I didn't follow.

"Grab my arm," he instructed. I did as he asked, grabbing him just above the elbow "Now, look at the natural comfortable bend of your arm and shoulder. You would never normally hold someone with straight arms. So, we know that both men were much taller than Jonah as the level of their grasp was so high up his arm," Ty concluded.

"OK, how can you tell the killer was right-handed?" I asked.

Edge paused, fixing me with a chilling stare. "Practice," he replied.

"It looks like his disguise didn't help much," I said, quietly.

"That's not funny, Satchmo," Ty chided me.

"I wasn't joking. Maybe someone was after him after all. Your uncle, the Professor and now Jonah. All dead," I stated the obvious.

"Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you. Bad things happen to people who go looking for gold," I continued, looked at him. I still wasn't sure about the story of hidden treasure, but something had led to the murder of one man and the death of two others.

"Come on, you look like you could do with a drink," Ty said, heading back towards the bridge.

"Shouldn't we do something about him?" I pointed to the lifeless form of Jonah, lying bent in an unnatural position beneath the shade of the trees.

"He's not going anywhere, Satchmo," he replied.

Tyrone Edge really did not seem at all perturbed by the sight of a dead man swinging from a tree. That lack of apparent concern perturbed me for damn sure.

*

We sat in the snug of The Sickle where I nursed a double whiskey. I hated neat spirits, but the situation seemed to demand more than a half of shandy.

The more I thought about it, the more alarmed I became at the way Ty had taken in his stride the discovery of a dead man hanging from a tree. He gave the air of having seen nothing unusual, and maybe for him this was perfectly normal. After all, what did I actually know about this man?

"Are we going to call the police?" I asked. The question seemed rhetorical to me, but Ty looked at me and shook his head infinitesimally.

"No Satchmo, not least because we may have been the last people to see him, and in a very public place, he was found on my land and my fingerprints are now all over the body," he explained.

"Doesn't he deserve justice? He was murdered!" I snapped.

I knew in my heart that Ty was right, the last thing I needed was to become embroiled in a murder investigation. The Yeoman twins would have me out of the business before you could say 'innocent until proven guilty'. The irony of the situation struck me: In order to avoid becoming involved in the investigation of a crime that I did not commit, I was contemplating committing a crime by covering up a murder.

"You do understand this, Satchmo?" Ty asked and I nodded, not happy but compliant. "Jonah was killed for a reason. It might be that the death of Morgan and the Professor are not as innocent as they seem," Edge said, swigging his own drink.

"You never thought they were innocent, that's why you hired me," I replied in a flat tone, staring at the liquid swilling in the bottom of my glass.

"True. But now it looks like I was right," Ty smiled.

Yes, I thought, it was beginning to look ominously like that. I finished the whiskey with a single gulp. It burned my throat, but along with the lining of my tongue it also carried away the acrid taste of bile. I screwed my eyes tight shut and coughed.

"Another?" Ty asked. I nodded.

Edge strode to the bar and I headed into the gents. I splashed some water on my face and smoothed my hair down with my wet hands. I looked myself in the eye in the mirror.

"What have you got yourself into here?" I said aloud.

It was clear that there was no easy way out. Even if I tried to pull strings with my father's friends in the police, I suspected that the weight of the body lying in the woods would slice those strings as surely as a blade.

I was also sure that I didn't want out anyway. There was challenge in this case, a challenge I had never before felt in my work.

I felt the urge, stood at a stall and waited. Suddenly a thought struck me in a true urinal epiphany. If the three old guys had been killed because they knew too much about some buried gold, then anyone else who knew about it was in danger too.

That potentially meant Dr. Martha Wimple, and that made me feel deeply uneasy. Of course, it also implied that Ty and I could be in peril, but I'd worry about that another time.

I exited the gents hurriedly and briefly outlined my fears to Ty, who listened carefully.

"Hmm, maybe you should go and see what she knows while I sort out things at home," he said, his voice betraying no emotion.

"Things?" I said, forgetting the reality of a corpse on his land.

He raised an eyebrow and handed me the glass with my new whiskey in it. I lifted it to my lips and threw the dark liquid straight down my neck. Then I rose and stumbled out of the door in a fit of coughing and worry.

*

Dr. Martha Wimple answered the door on the second knock. She wore a long denim skirt and a tight off-the-shoulder white top which showed the edges of thin cream bra straps against her lightly tanned skin. Her chestnut hair hung in a serpentine ponytail that bobbed against the nape of her neck. She looked up at me with those wide green eyes, accentuating the warmth of the whiskey in my empty stomach and leaving me feeling somewhat fuzzy.

"Hello. Satchmo, isn't it?" she greeted me. I nodded and held out my hand. She took it shook perfunctorily; her grip cool and dry with a light squeeze.

"Call me Martha," she said.

I smirked; reduced to behaving like a schoolboy, and a half-cut schoolboy at that. "Well, come in please," she urged after a moment's uncomfortable silence.

She held the door open for me and I stooped low, brushing past her to enter the cottage, inhaling a lungful of a clean, fresh scent she was wearing.

She closed the door and ushered me to the study at the end of the corridor, the sleeves of her top were scrunched up over her elbows and there was the smell of polish in the air. Martha had been busy tidying the interior, and there was little remaining hint of the chaos the place had been in when I had first been here.

"Please have a seat," she offered, pointing at the leather sofa which now had a bright throw covering up the slashes.

"What can I do for you?" she asked, perching on the edge of the desk that dominated one wall of the study.

"We, err, I think you might be in danger," I fumbled over the words in the short distance between my brain and my mouth. Her almond-shaped eyes widened, and she clasped her hands firmly in her lap.

"Why might that be?" she asked with a little tremor in her voice.

"Did your father ever mention the possibility of buried gold to you?" I blurted out.

Smooth, Satchmo! I silently chided myself. I suppose this was one way to ascertain the validity of the theory that the trouble in Pebble Deeping was related to some sort of treasure.

"He was an eminent professor of archaeology. It was one of his major topics of conversation," she responded. Her tone was dismissive, or patronizing, it was hard to tell and harder to know which was worse.

"I see... What I mean is, did he ever talk about the possibility of finding gold here, in Pebble Deeping?"

She let out a deep sigh, broke off eye contact and bit her lower lip slightly. She was obviously weighing up whether to open up or not. Perhaps there was something to this after all.

"I suppose it can't hurt to talk about it, not now that he's gone," she paused and raised her eyes heavenwards. "Sorry Dad..."

She looked back at me, her resolve firm now.

"My father was brilliant; he provided papers for every journal in the field, reviewed and wrote books, and taught at Birmingham University for over thirty years."

She pulled a weighty tome from the shelf over the desk. I couldn't help but admire the curve of her behind as she leaned up to reach it. Very uncool, Satchmo, I scolded myself and resolved to do better.

"Unfortunately, he was also driven and not a little eccentric. He practically lived in his office, searching archives and records for proof," Martha continued.

"Proof?" I interrupted.

"He called it his Sutton Hoo. He was obsessed with the story of the votive sword and shield of the Ordovices," she explained.

The blank look on my face cannot have been too hard to read.

"It's a myth that originates from the scrap of a letter written around 60 A.D. by a Roman legionary to his wife. The tale involves the soldier describing a great battle against the druidic Ordovices, claiming that he witnessed the high priest wielding the sword and shield," she tried to explain.

"So?" I asked, more than a little bemused.

"Much of the academic world believed that this letter was just a young soldier inventing stories to impress his wife and family. My father spent years trying to find proof that the story was true, that the battle took place, and that legendary votive sword and shield were real. He visited countless sites, attempting to tie them into what he knew of the history.

He began to take more and more time away from the university, and when he was there, he lectured on the possibility of finding the shield and very little else. The governors asked him to leave just over a year ago, but not before he made his breakthrough," Martha paused and began to thumb through the book she had retrieved.

"What breakthrough?" I interrupted again.

"Please Satchmo, I'm getting to it! By chance, he came upon a medieval map detailing the location of Roman remains across Wales and the old Kingdom of Mercia. The map was made by an enthusiastic monk in the late 1200s and showed the locations of many fortlets that had not previously been known, some that held a Roman garrison of only a cohort for weeks or months.

Right in the middle of the map was a fortlet marked as being on a river under a hill, exactly as described by the legionary.

The fortlet is right here, in what is now Pebble Deeping. My father bought Holly Corner and, with the help of Morgan Edge, began living his dream of excavating the fortlet to look for the sword and shield. He started a fortnight ago and now all of this has happened."

She flipped the book around to show me. The open pages bore a monochrome photo across a double-page spread of an old parchment map. It was indecipherable to me; it could have been a Dark Ages game of Pictionary for all I could tell.

"The mound on Ty's land?" I muttered.

"... Is what remains of a Roman fortlet, circa 62AD. But I don't understand why that might put me in danger," she inclined her head a few degrees inquisitively.

I paused for a moment; wondering how much to say. I returned her gaze, she had recovered her composure and was trying to carry an air of confidence. I decided that putting all my cards on the table might encourage her to do the same.

"Your father thought he had discovered this gold, he is dead. He located it on Morgan Edge's land and enlisted his help. Edge is dead," I paused, watching her face.

"The pair of them were forced to involve a local eccentric called Jonah. Jonah was murdered, we found him today. His body was no more than a hundred metres away from that mound."

She took a sharp intake of breath and the blood drained from her face. The knuckles of her hands turned white where she grasped the edge of the desk.

"Murdered?" her voice was quiet and tremulous, like that of a frightened child.

"So, it seems that people who were involved in your father's Sutton Hoo are prematurely meeting their maker," I concluded indelicately.

"Are you suggesting that my father's death, and that of Morgan were not natural?" she said, her voice quivering.

"I don't know, and I certainly can't prove anything one way or another. But it is a hell of a coincidence that all three should die within such a small space of time. I do know that Jonah was murdered and that he had told us that someone was after him." I scratched at my stubble, pausing again to observe Martha and tell myself it was to assess her reactions rather than just to stare.

"So, the question is; how much do you know about your father's work, and more importantly who else knows about it?"

I was assuming that Martha was not involved in the deaths. Assuming and hoping in equal measure. She was far too beautiful to be a multiple murderer.

"I was party to all of his research, but his latest notes, site maps and journal pages are all missing," she whispered, wringing her hands nervously.

"The burglary, did the person who broke in find them?" I asked.

She looked at me, a little shocked.

"Martha, it was clearly no normal break in, nothing of value was taken and the cottage was comprehensively searched," I explained.

"No, I don't believe they did find the missing documents. I had examined the place just as thoroughly before the break in," Martha replied, her voice strong again.

Then there was a good chance they were still here somewhere, I concluded.

"You had better tell me the whole story of this gold then," I said.

She re-opened the book written by her father and, flicking back to the series of double page photo spreads, she handed it to me.

It showed a close-up of a large oval shield and a short sword. The shield was made of a wood that had aged poorly. It was rimmed with brass strips that crossed diagonally through a sizable circular boss in the centre. The metal was ornately engraved with swirls and symbols and was quite beautiful. The sword in the opposite picture was fashioned from bronze and, again, the haft was embossed with fine filigree, the dull blade was chipped and dented along its entire length.

"This is the treasure?" I asked. It was fascinating and all, but it looked pretty beaten-up.

"No. That is an example of a druidic votive sword and shield. It's to give you some idea.

The legendary sword and shield of the high priest of the Ordovices has never been found. It is believed to be made entirely of bronze, not the oak you see on this one. The surface of the shield is covered with fine gold metalwork, which is said to have taken the finest craftsmen fifty years to complete. The shield is studded with mother-of-pearl and pearls and shows scenes of sacrifice to the great gods.

The accompanying sword is supposed to be a feat of smithing in itself. It is gold with a hollow haft to make it light enough to wield. The blade was reputedly honed on the thighs of a goddess to keep it ever-sharp and whetted with the blood from the sacrifice of the daughter of the first Ordovice chieftain," she said, leaning across to point at the picture of the sword in the book as she described it. A little crackle of electricity seemed to bounce up my spine and I sub-consciously held my breath.

"Nice..." I eventually muttered, conscious not to breathe whiskey fumes all over Martha.

"Indeed. The votive sword and shield were used in all of the sacred rituals of the druidic cult and kept safe by the high priests of the order. If the legend of the Ordovice votives is true, they would have been the most venerated objects belonging to the tribe," she explained.

I was beginning to think that she had followed her father's footsteps into archaeology or ancient history. That, or she had paid a lot of attention to his bedtime stories as a child.

"What would they be worth?" I asked.

Martha stood tall and placed her hands on her hips and arched her back a little, stretching in thought. The motion pushed her chest up and out a little. I tried, and failed, not to notice.

"As irreplaceable cultural and historical artefacts of the British Isles, they would be absolutely priceless in the truest sense of the word. If the gold were to be melted down, I suppose it would be worth in the region of five-to-ten million pounds," she replied.

"What about the legend then? Tell me what your father believed," I urge her.

She took the book from me, replaced it on the shelf and sat next to me on the sofa. I wanted to know, but I also just wanted to hear her tell it.

"Are you sitting comfortably?" she asked. I nodded and smiled at her.

"Then I'll begin."