Double doors faced the top stair, which was a good indication of a drawing room rather than a bedroom. Good panelled oak, maybe 1850, with the original handles. Reluctantly I opened one blade of the door. Even if you aren’t really scared you can frighten yourself by imagining all sorts. I slipped inside, closing the door behind me and simply standing there, my chest thumping and sweat on my forehead.
It wasn’t as dark as all that. A slender rib of light showed beneath a connecting door to the right. The three high grey rectangles directly ahead must be the windows. I felt my way towards the central one, hands slowly sweeping ahead of me in case I damaged a Chien Lung vase – more of a risk than getting caught in this place.
At first I thought it was a gun, mounted there on a swivel tripod with armrest and two chrome levers. The banked array of electronic gear, with its palpable arrays of knobs and sliders, gave it away as some kind of complex recording gear, maybe video-tape or the like. I stood as if to operate the gun thing, feeling along the barrel. Too thick for a gun, but like a . . . telescope? I put my eye to one end. Nothing. Yet it was directed at the summerhouse or very close to it. Apart from the flowers and the kiln there was nothing else to see down there.
Video-tapes are thicker than others. Feeling along the shelf, I naturally guessed the last one, fallen flat, would be the most recent. I inched my way across to the screen, thanking various electronic gods that screens pick up any old trace of luminescence to show intruders where they are. The only noise was the deep click when it slotted in and connected. I had the sense to turn down all knobs, and only rotate them slowly one at a time as the screen began to glow.
It was Lena all right. And me. By the time I got the picture right we were halfway there, and in glorious colour. Odd experience, watching your own body behaving in complete disregard of anyone. And you learn things, too. Lena looked as dazzling as I knew she was, but I was a revelation. I’d always assumed I was a gentle, considerate bloke to my birds, kind of polite. The screen Lovejoy was an animal.
Great. For a second I stood there in a fury, then switched if off and turned to go and almost started the whole lot crashing down by falling over a wire. My pathetic luck held. I made the door on hands and knees, regretfully feeling the carpet’s knottage – number of knots to the inch, measured along the fringe, though properly you compare oriental carpets by the
count:
knots per square inch. It felt as if it would count out at 250, maybe a Kashan. Somebody moved out in the adjacent room, probably Kurt the movie-maker getting ready, so I scarpered into the corridor.
Well, it seemed everybody in the vicinity was expecting a new performance of the Great Snogging Picture Show II, so what the hell. I strolled confidently downstairs, past my own landing, and on out of the main door. Naturally I made it look coy there, eeling outside after switching off the hall light. Give Kurt another smirk or two, that surreptitious touch. Let them think I hadn’t guessed.
Breathing a regret to Lena, I moved off the gravel among the beds of bushes and flowers. A particularly vicious cluster of heathers gave me a nasty moment, cracking and swishing like hell, but they were between me and the kiln so there was no way to avoid them. Nobody was around. I made the kiln – still warm it was – and clambered up to its roof, shelling my jacket. The flue chimney was metal of some sort. I held on to it to lean across the space between the kiln and the wall. A six-foot gap, and the wall topped with a crust of broken glass embedded in concrete. My rolled-up jacket lay across the glass, which was the best I could do. The trouble is, my hands cut easily on anything.
I was just about to risk the leap when something scraped over the wall and I practically infarcted, thinking, Sod it. One of Kurt’s armed men. Caught good and proper. I might make it to the summerhouse if I got my jacket and denied everything . . .
A voice whispered, ‘Would that be yourself, Lovejoy?’
‘Eh?’ I froze. The darkness thickened above the wall. Somebody’s head. ‘Who is it?’
‘Shush your noise, man. Is it yourself?’
Gerald
. It was Gerald. ‘What the hell are you doing here? Have you got a ladder? Grab my arm—’
‘No, Lovejoy. Wait. It’s the planting of some old trinkets they’ll be doing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ How the hell did he know that?
‘At Kilfinney?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sure, I knew it when I saw you wandering among those auld ruins.’
‘You were there?’ I’d have strangled the clown if I could have reached him. ‘Then why the hell didn’t you help when they nabbed me?’
‘Ah, it’s a terrible impatience you have on you, Lovejoy. Where’s your interest in the scheme of your fellow men—?’
‘Stuff that, you frigging lunatic.’ My throat was raw from whispering. ‘I’m imprisoned here. I want out. If you’re not going to help, then shift, you berk.’
‘What are the trinkets, Lovejoy? Those gold crusts the men were baking this morning?’
Oh hell. If he had seen the kiln fired on the gold torcs, he too must have seen me and Lena doing our stuff. ‘Yes.’
‘Then you play along with them. I’ve a plan.’
I hesitated fatally. ‘You have? And leave us in the clear?’
He grew lyrical. ‘As innocent as the snowflakes that, born in the high clouds of winter, descend to bless the earth with sweetness—’
I cursed him. ‘What about me, though, you nerk? They want me to do the plant early tomorrow. Heindrick’ll do the discovery bit.’
‘Ah, there’s a terrible temper you have, Lovejoy! But it’s a grand scheme, right enough. Do it, Lovejoy.’
‘Just as they say?’
‘That’s the thing.’
‘But what about me being frigging safe?’ I demanded. ‘Ah, you mustn’t let little things worry you, Lovejoy. I’ll be there to see fair play, or Sinead’ll give me a thick ear.’
‘You sure?’
‘On me auld mother’s blessed—’
‘Shut it. Is Shinny still here? They told me you’d gone to Dublin.’
‘Sure where else would she be? Now you go back, Lovejoy, and leave it all to me.’ The darkness where his head had been thinned.
‘Gerald?’ No answer, only that scraping. The swine had some sort of ladder there all the bloody time. He could have got me out. ‘
Gerald!
’
The gravel scuffed on the drive near the house balustrade. That would be Lena. I reached over, grabbed my jacket and made it to the summerhouse steps just as she flitted along the path.
Kurt would be warming up his cine-cameras now. I wondered which was my best side on infrared.
The lough made a soughing noise before dawn. Earlier, it had rained for a couple of hours, coming on while Lena and I, erm, met as planned.
That night we all must have had only about three hours’ sleep, and while it was still dark were on the road in an ordinary rather oldish dark blue saloon. A nice careful touch that, including the fishing gear ostentatiously loaded up for us on the roof rack. Me, Kurak who drove, and Kurt full of himself as always. He was all tweeds and raglan, the country gentleman out for early fishing. There are people who really love the desolate country dawn bit.
‘Where are the real anglers?’
Heindrick smiled at my question as we parked away from the vacant parking space and got out. ‘Ah, we’ll be spared those, Lovejoy.’
‘Back in East Anglia there’d be a hundred fishermen here at this hour.’ I’d been hoping to find enough innocent bystanders to mask Gerald’s presence. As dawn lightened the lake sky it became obvious there was no witness, no help, and no bloody Gerald either.
‘Light, Kurak.’
Kurt hooded the torch glass and flashed twice across the lough, twice again in the direction of the castle ruins.
‘That for Jason?’ I asked.
‘Possibly.’
‘We burying the sleepers in the castle ruins?’
Kurt waggled a finger. ‘Curiosity killed the cat, Lovejoy.’ He was holding this case, heavier than lead.
Depressed at all this military-style organization, I plodded after Kurt as he led the way to the right, Joe following, still doing his phoney Slav act.
A horse neighed once, the noise coming from near the crannog. Something clopped nearer, up ahead. There were other people in the countryside, all of them hostile. I dwelled on Gerald and Shinny with bitterness. Nobody lets you down quite as ruinously as friends, do they? Friends are famous for desertion and betrayal.
‘Ready, sor?’
One minute there had been the grey-green dawn, then suddenly there was this quiet bloke standing close by the wedge-shaped grave.
‘This it?’ I asked. They ignored me.
‘Yes. Ready.’
‘You’ll come then, and mind your feet.’
And he took us away from the lough, away from the grave, over to our right about a hundred uneven paces. We were at the turf digging.
‘All’s clear, sor.’
‘Very well.’ Heindrick dismissed the guide with courtesy. He nodded and faded into the hillside. The three of us were left alone.
‘What happens now?’
I didn’t much care for what little I could see of the turf digging. Narrow slabs of the stuff were slanted in rows, forming a barrier. Standing in the excavated hollow we could not be seen from the road. Even the hillside did not overlook us. A darker patch was evident on the side nearest the Bronze Age wedge grave. And it dawned on me.
‘I got it.’
‘Spread the leather, Kurak.’
‘Eees, m’sieu.’
Kurak unfolded a large chamois leather from its plastic bag. Heindrick began lifting the torcs in their individual chamois pouches from the case. Each was bagged in stapled plastic. He began counting them out on the spread.
I said, ‘If you can’t dig down or sideways into an archaeological site, you dig upwards. Am I right? You tunnel from below, starting some distance away. And plant the sleepers through a tube, a drillhole.’
Heindrick finished it for me. ‘Plugging the drillhole, of course.’
‘Having sucked the traces of drilling.’
‘Vibration restores the dust to its even, pristine condition, Lovejoy.’
‘Who does that?’
‘Eeesa mee.’ Kurak had uncovered a small boxed machine looking for all the world like a hurdy-gurdy without its support stick. It seemed handle-cranked and had a leather strap.
The sky was beginning to pale quite clearly now. Spatters of rain tapped us. The wind had shifted to the south. The dark oval in our hollow was now more distinct, about four feet across.
‘That the tunnel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it that wide all the way?’
‘Not quite.’ Trust the malicious sod to be smiling.
‘Got a diagram?’
‘As far as we’ve been able to visualize the burial chamber.’ Kurt brought out a paper and pencil torch. ‘Done for us by a research archaeologist, for a fee.’
‘Is he in on it?’
‘There’s that curiosity again, Lovejoy,’ he reproved, indicating the diagram. ‘The tunnel runs at the left side of the grave chamber’s narrowest part. You will deposit the genuine torc in the far right-hand recess.’
‘My arms aren’t that long.’
‘You’re provided with an extending arm. Kurak will carry that. The other torcs you will place beneath the adjacent compartment.’
‘One more thing.’
‘No, Lovejoy.’ The swine patted my arm sympathetically. ‘Just go.’
I needed to know. ‘Who goes first?’
‘You, Lovejoy.’
‘Having Kurak between me and the exit? No, thanks.’
‘Lovejoy.’ Rain speckled Kurt’s spectacles. He spoke with infinite patience. ‘If this is done exactly to my order, we succeed. You get the price as we agreed, a torc. Plus other benefits. You come on the payroll, exactly like Kurak. This scam will make a fortune, for you and the rest. You join the wealthiest antique ring in the history of mankind. Or you proceed no further. Which?’
Good old Gerald, with his promise of help. Well, there were enough ancient graves about for people not to notice one extra.
Swallowing, I shelled my jacket, took the torch and stooped into the entrance. ‘Let’s go.’ Kurak kept his hand partly raised in a chopping position. That was in case I made to flash the light anywhere else except into the tunnel.
From the level, the tunnel descended pretty sharply – too sharply for my liking, considering we were a million frigging miles from the grave. The aroma had a thick, curiously bittersweet character which made my throat clog up for a few moments. A tube ran along the trodden peaty floor, of the kind you use for garden hoses. Kurak gave me a push. I plopped on to all fours and began to crawl as the tunnel narrowed into a cloying wetness.
‘I’m going, I’m going for Chrissakes!’
‘Eeesa time-a du goow, Lovejoy.’
‘Shut your stupid teeth, Joe,’ I grumbled. The tunnel’s closeness was bringing the sweat out on me. ‘What’s that hissing?’
‘Air. There’s a battery pump back in the turf diggings.’ Kurak was Joe Bassington again, his corny accent gone.
‘Here, Joe. Do they know who you are?’
‘Sure.’ But from the way he said it, I began to wonder. Maybe Lena had procured his services by feeding him the same sort of promises she’d given me. Women are famous for that. It couldn’t be that the duckegg actually believed Lena and he were somehow to take over from Heindrick. Nobody could be that thick, not even a bloke crazed by Lena. I crawled on.
The tunnel narrowed further. I tried working out the incline as we moved deeper underground. Why the hell do they never teach you anything useful at school? Teachers are idle swine. Maybe one in thirty or so? That meant a depth of say ten feet after crawling a hundred yards. In the damp brown-black pungency the torchlight showed walls of rock and practically solid peat. Remarkable how hard the rotten stuff was, compressed into a fibrous woody texture. And wet, wet.
Carrying a torch when plodding on your hands and knees is difficult. You need a hand to hold the thing, yet you need that hand for your fourth corner, so to speak. Alternating on my wrist and knuckles I moved lopsidedly on. I could hear Joe pushing the gear ahead of himself, the box and that tube thing slithering on the tunnel floor.
By counting the number of moves I’d made since I crouched on hands and knees I reckoned we’d gone about fifty yards, counting one foot per movement. That was the point the tunnel suddenly compressed us further. To advance it meant a belly-crawl, elbows on the floor and wriggling like soldiers under fire. Grumbling at Joe – more of a whine now than a mutter – I led on, down into stickiness and mud, the roof such as it was showing more rock than peat. The hosepipe was still there, snaking ahead into the narrow black hole.