Quid Pro Quo

Chapter Seventeen

I was woken by a shaft of sunlight dancing across my closed eyelids. The new skylight Ty had installed in the hayloft was doing a good job. As usual there was no sign of him; the area of loft in which he slept was completely empty. From out in the farmyard I heard a protracted and high-pitched squeal, followed by a schoolgirl giggle.

Martha.

I crawled out of my sleeping bag, stretched, and stifled a yawn. I donned some clothes and went to see what the fuss was about.

I found her coming out of the cowshed, she was wearing a large bath towel wrapped just under her armpits. She was still damp from the cold water and the skin on her arms and shoulders was covered in goose-pimples.

"Morning," I said cheerfully.

"Wow! That was great. It really wakes you up," she said, giving me a beaming smile, which caused her teeth to chatter a little.

"But you could have gone home for a nice warm shower," I said, a little bemused.

"Ty said I should try this one out, and he was right. If you'll excuse me, I'm not getting any warmer!" she joked, padding past me and back into the farmhouse.

I felt a little dismissed, but then she was standing out in the air wearing only a towel. It's easy to take everything personally.

Ty sat on the cobbles of the farmyard, his back leaning against the wheel of the Land Rover. Laid out before him were an assortment of tools; a spade, the folding entrenching tool, some smaller trowels and a large bucket. He was honing the blade of the spade, intently sweeping a whetstone along its edge with smooth, even strokes. I had never seen, or even heard of, anyone sharpening a spade before.

"Good morning, Indiana!" he said breezily as he saw me approach.

"Look, there's no need for that. You are as much involved in digging for this treasure as me," I replied. He looked up at me, smiling.

"Yes, it is an unfair comparison. You would look stupid in the hat, and he always got the girl." Ty put the spade down and fixed me with a grin.

"Ouch," I said. "Besides, I don't know what girl you can be talking about," I smiled back at him. Nonchalant.

"That's the spirit. Now let's go and find some treasure," he said excitedly, tossing the tool to me as he rose to his feet from the cobbles.

*

Martha wiped the sleeve of her T-shirt across her brow, leaving a dark smear of sweat on the material.

"OK, Let's have a break," she said.

We had spent the first hour surveying the site. Martha had pointed out the bumps in ground that had comprised the defensive ditch that had run around the fort some two thousand years ago. She then compared the sketch from her father's journal with the lay of the land.

We had identified the sites previously dug by the Professor; banging stakes into them so that they could be seen clearly. Now she measured out the precise location of the last prospective site by consulting the diagram and attentively pacing out its distance in relation to the others.

"Why did your father choose these sites to dig? After all, the sword and shield could have been anywhere within the fort," I asked her.

"Not really. The votives were so valuable to the Roman cause that they would have been entrusted only to Titus, or possibly his closest centurion. There are only so many places they can have been," she explained, pointing her arm across the top of the mound upon which we sat.

"You see, the Roman army was an unprecedented force in its time, or for centuries after the decline of the Empire for that matter. It was fully professional, rigorously trained and disciplined in a way the world had never seen. They had ways of doing things, and they rarely deviated from them. Over there would have been the tents of the legionaries," she pointed again.

"In front of the gate would have been a small courtyard, on that side the food store and smithing supplies, and here would have been Titus' quarters," she concluded, swinging her arm around the top of the mound.

"Your father knew where to dig?" Ty asked.

"You can see the results of the trenches he dug." Martha handed over the pages of the journal and smoothed the excavation sketch out on the grassy ground.

"Over where the food store should have been, he unearthed the remnants of large wine and oil jars. Then nothing across the centre, but over here where the men would have slept, he found small clay prayer idols, the remains of some sandals and a small dagger," Martha said, tracing the bisecting trenches on the sketch with a grimy finger.

"It fits the typical pattern perfectly. The Romans were so dependable. Having worked out the layout of the fort, my father would then have dug small pits in the probable site of Titus' tent and that of his centurion. If he found evidence of such a location, he would have excavated the whole area," Martha concluded.

"That there are no references implies that none of the locations he tried were the officers' quarters," I said.

"Precisely, unless this last one proves to be it," she agreed, rising to her feet and walking to the patch of grass, which she had pegged out with string.

"Shall we get started?" she asked, hands on hips.

After numerous warnings from Martha that we must be careful, and that we were not just 'digging up potatoes', Ty removed several square metres of turf with some deft strokes of the entrenching tool, peeling it back like dead skin on a sodden foot. The earth beneath was dark, with few twigs or other detritus.

"Good, now carefully scrape the soil away in inch-thick layers," Martha instructed.

We did as she asked, placing the soil onto a large sieve. Martha pored over the clods, breaking them delicately to see if they contained any artefacts. It was time-consuming work and before long we swapped jobs to stave off madness.

"How deep do we have to go?" I asked.

"Well two thousand years can build up a lot of soil, but as this is elevated ground, I would have thought that a few feet would suffice," Martha replied.

The hours dragged by. The pile of sifted dirt that we had removed from the hole grew. Nothing was found. Not so much as a two-thousand-year-old earthworm.

We were just about to stop for a drink, when Ty bent over the pit, now nearly a metre deep. He rubbed some earth between his fingers then hung the upper part of his body down into the cavity.

"This is not right," he said, his voice muffled somewhat.

"What?" asked Martha as she looked up from the sieve.

"This soil is not compacted enough; it is too aerated. Look..." Ty pushed at the wall of the hole with his fingers; the loam gave and crumbled into the bottom of the pit.

"Let me see," said Martha. She stood over us, dirt caked her arms up to the elbow and streaks of grime ran across her forehead where she had mopped her brow. It looked damned sexy.

"Excuse me, Ty," she said, jumping into the hole and disappearing up to her chest. She bent over to see what he was pointing out. After a moment's inspection, she straightened up.

"Shit," she muttered. "That clay layer is disturbed."

Ty pulled a stone from the wall of the pit. "Look at this," he said, holding the rock triumphantly aloft to show that it was scored deeply on one of its faces, the mark bright through the dirt.

"What are you two talking about?" I asked. He lobbed the stone to me.

"That scratch has been made by a bladed instrument Satchmo, the mark is recent as it is not impacted with dirt like the rest of the surface," Ty explained.

"Plus, this clay layer is slightly out of place," Martha chimed in, running a finger around an orange band of soil in the hole.

"See here?" she pointed to an area where the ochre mud was darker and maybe an inch higher than the rest of the band. "Couple that with the earth being too aerated and it looks like this site has been dug. Recently."

She held her hands up towards Ty for assistance, not me. He lifted her out of the hole easily, as if she were a doll dropped by a child.

"You mean someone got here before us?" I said.

"Exactly, Satchmo," Ty replied. He sat back on the grass, supporting his weight with his arms stretched out behind himself. His forehead furrowed into a frown.

"Martha, how wide an area would your father have excavated?" he asked.

"If he thought this might be Titus' tent, maybe thirty square metres. But he didn't document having dug this site," she replied wrinkling her brow, perplexed.

Ty got down on his hands and knees and crawled about, his nose pressed close to the grass like a bloodhound.

"So, why would the Professor dig it and not record it in the journal?" I said to no one in particular.

Ty pulled gently at some tufts and uh-hummed quietly. "This grass has been lifted. The roots are split," he announced, pulling two clumps up and apart. There was an obvious divide between them.

"It may not have been my father who dug this site," said Martha.

"But it looks like it was done professionally, right?" I asked.

"Maybe the Professor did excavate the area and he chose not to record his findings," Ty said, rising to his feet.

"Why would he do that?" she asked.

"Because your father found something here," he explained.

"He would have recorded it. Hell, if it was the votives he would have danced naked down the street with them," Martha's voice was disbelieving.

"Intriguing, isn't it?" Ty mused.

"Curiouser and curiouser," I said.

*

We left Martha alone on the old fort mound. She was intent on excavating the hole further, widening it a little where she felt appropriate.

Ty and I thought it was a waste of time, but neither of us wanted to deny her this link to her father. It was mid-afternoon and a glorious summer day. It was building up to be drainingly hot and clouds of insects buzzed over the meadow like the Flying Circus. I lay in the sun with my hands behind my head and pondered developments.

It was odd that Professor Wimple might have excavated the last site and not recorded his findings, particularly as he then went on to conceal his notes. Perhaps there was nothing to be found; the disappointment of failure after all those years of searching might have broken him. But if that were the case, why would Morgan point us to the hidden documents? Why hide them at all?

No, there was more to this, but I couldn't quite piece it together yet.

"Get off your fat arse, Satchmo!" Ty shouted from the fire pit, where he had been clearing away the embers. "We need some firewood for a good burn tonight."

I knew what that meant. I had been avoiding the wood since we had discovered Jonah, and I was in no hurry to go back. Poor Jonah had plainly found himself in way over his head.

That made two of us.

"I'll go and look for some out by the boathouse," I replied.

"Just the deadwood," Ty yelled. I didn't know whether that was an instruction or a comment on my presence. Sighing heavily, I wandered down the meadow towards the river.

Halfway down, I realized that the boathouse lay on the other side of the fort and I could justifiably nip up and see how Martha was doing. Funny how the influence of women contorts the girders of logic.

Atop the fort, Martha sat cross-legged amid piles of earth and sods of turf. She was staring at something she held in her lap, her chestnut ponytail hanging down past her ear.

"What have you got there?" I called out.

She didn't look up "Pottery. Probably a small salve jar," she replied.

"Is it Roman?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," she mumbled, not very excited. "They are ten-a-penny. Like an archaeologist of the future digging up a rusty Coke can." Her shoulders were slumped a little.

"Oh, well I'm just off to try to find some firewood..." Hit her with the alpha male bit.

"Good luck, then," she replied, emotionless and distracted.

She still hadn't looked up from the grimy object in her hands and I sensed defeat. After a look of longing that would not have disgraced a child, nose-pressed to the sweet shop window, I slunk down the far side of the fort and into the undergrowth behind the boathouse.

It was like a jungle down there; covered in great swathes of nettles, brambles like the arms of Triffids and burdock that rose like mighty palms. There was little deadwood to be found until I fought my way into the belt of trees near to the river.

After half an hour collecting fallen branches and breaking them into manageable pieces, I was sweating like a turkey on Christmas eve and my back felt like it belonged to a 19th century chimney sweep. I carried my armful of firewood down past the boathouse to the riverbank. The water looked so clear and inviting.

I found myself back at the pool where I had caught my fish and here the dappled sunlight made the water glisten like liquid diamonds. I stripped down to my boxers and slipped into the river, the cold water loosening the stiffness in my muscles. The water was deep out in the middle, rising to my neck.

There was surprisingly little current in this part of the river, and I was able to stand on the slippery rocks on the bed without difficulty. After several long, relaxing breaths I lay on my back, floating slowly across the surface until I came to rest against the lip of the pool where the water flowed swiftly into the next stretch of river.

I don't know how long I floated there, watching the leaves rustle above me in a million shades of green.

After a while I could ignore the coldness of the water and I began to see shapes forming in the branches; faces, a dog, and a man with bright red hair and a golden sword. I was snapped out of this reverie by a chortle from behind.

"The fish are getting fatter down here!" Ty stood on the bank with Martha just behind him, my trousers hung from his out-stretched index finger, and he eyed them suspiciously.

"Bugger off, I'm communing with nature here," I retorted.

"That's all very well, Tarzan, but Jane and I would like to get the fire going and maybe land us some supper."

I shot him a fiery glare. That Jane remark was uncalled-for. Still, Martha hadn't seemed to notice. She was washing the mud from her hands and arms in the river. I swam to the side and hauled myself out of the water. Once on the bank I gathered my clothes, sucking my belly in and puffing my chest out.

"Here, take this." Ty passed me the jumper he had been wearing. I went to the boathouse and towelled down with my T-shirt, then going commando under my trousers and donning Ty's jumper, I returned to the riverbank.

They had moved downstream from the pool to a faster stretch of water. Ty was showing his Heath Robinson reel to Martha, dangling the fly so that it twisted in the setting sunlight.

"I told Martha what a demon fisherman you were, so you had better deliver, champ," he said when I approached them.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"To start the fire," he shot me a meaningful look. "Go get 'em tiger. Here's a little secret weapon," he said, handing me a small sandwich bag before leaving with the firewood in his arms.

I looked in the packet, it was full of Sugar Puffs.

"I thought you didn't need bait with a fly," I said, studying the dangling fly, looking for somewhere to hook the cereal.

"Ty said you use it as ground bait. Throw it into the river to encourage the fish to bite the lure," Martha said. I felt a little stupid.

"OK. Let's find some dinner." I unwound the line from the tin can and studied the water, looking for targets.

"I think there are some over there," she pointed to a bed of thick weeds on the far side of the river.

I nodded and handed her the bag of Sugar Puffs. She threw a handful upstream, and we sat down to wait, the fly line coiled around us.

Sitting side-by-side was awkward; I constantly had to jerk my head forward to stop staring at her. For her part, she occasionally tossed some more cereal into the water. After a few minutes some ripples began to appear amid the reeds as little hidden mouths gulped down Sugar Puffs.

Martha tugged on my sleeve and pointed, a dazzling smile on her face. I gathered up the line and started to swing it above my head as I had seen Ty do. When I had sufficient momentum, I cast the fly out to where the fish were biting. The tiny yellow lure plopped into the water and drifted among the cereal. It was too far downstream and passed quickly over the weeds.

"Further upstream!" she hissed in a loud whisper.

I reeled in the line and repeated the process, this time landing the fly ahead of the fish. Martha threw in some more bait which floated over the area with the line in its midst. Tiny ripples began to take the cereal all around the fly.

"Come on..." I muttered.

Suddenly the fly dipped below the water. Quick as a flash I jerked the line to set the hook and I immediately felt the pressure of the catch. It was smaller than the one I had caught in the pool and looked to be a different colour.

It took several minutes of tugging and winding to bring the fish close to the bank, and when I lifted it from the water its scales glistened in the golden sunlight.

"He's pretty," said Martha.

"He's not my type," I replied.

She laughed and her large almond eyes shone. I removed the fly and killed the animal as cleanly as I could.

"I don't think he'll feed three of us," she said. She was right, the fish was smaller than my forearm. I gave her the line so that she could try her hand whilst I took over Sugar Puff duties.

Martha sat cross-legged and gazed out into the trees on the far bank; a pre-occupied look on her face. The setting sun shone over our shoulders making her skin glow like burnished gold, picking out highlights in her chestnut ponytail.

"Satchmo..." she said, her voice faint and a little hesitant.

"Yes?" I answered.

"What do you know about Ty?" she asked. It was a good question, if a little unexpected. I took a moment to consider my answer. She didn't turn her head at all.

"Not much, actually. He's in his thirties..."

"No, as a person," she said, still staring out across the river.

"Well... He is a little eccentric, we met in his shed, you know? Rugged I suppose, capable and secretive. I was hired to find him," I replied.

"And you did," she said.

"Sort of..." I mused, remembering the encounter in the alley. There was a pause as she fiddled nervously with the line wound around the can. I absently threw some Sugar Puffs into the water, not liking where this conversation was going.

"But you would consider yourself friends?" she said breaking the silence. Across the river the ripples began to appear again.

"I don't know him very well. He strikes me as a loner, we haven't talked about anything other than the case..." I said. My mind flashed to my first meeting of Ty, his having bound me to a chair.

The gun... I decided not to mention the gun. If I genuinely thought Edge was dangerous, I wouldn't be here.

When I thought about it, there was very little I knew about Ty myself. I had no idea why he lived in a shed on wasteland. I couldn't fathom his paranoid response to my appearance, the fact that he was so hard to trace nor where he got the money to live on and to pay me. The only thing that made more sense now that I had spent some time with Ty was the squirrel on a stick, and by making sense I mean I know he probably intended to eat it, not that I thought it was a rational thing to have around.

"Why did he hire you?" Martha said as she tousled the luminous hairs of the fly between her fingers.

"He wanted me to look into the details of his uncle's death. Maybe he didn't want to let go, but it seems there was something amiss with the whole thing. Then we found out about your father, the gold..."

Martha sighed, "If he suspected foul play from the start why not involve the police?"

"I don't know. That's something to ask him," I replied curtly. In truth, it was something that I should have asked him.

"Is he married, is there a girlfriend?" she attempted to mask the interest in her voice and make it sound like an innocent enquiry, but there was no doubting it.

Oh no, my stomach sank.

"Not that I know of," I tried to say but my throat tightened, and the words came out in a croak.

"Oh..." she said, again failing to disguise a note of hope in her voice. She unwound the line from the can and flipped it across the water.

As the lure landed, she teased the filament in her fingers, making the fly jerk like a struggling insect and sending little ripples out across the pool. A fish took the fly at once and as Martha snapped the line back to set the hook, I felt something tear deep in my chest.

Hooked.

I knew how the fish felt.