War Game (12 page)

“You’ve been quick,” said Audley encouragingly.

“Had a bit of luck,” said Digby breathlessly, jerking his head back towards the Police House as he spoke. “PC Cotton—I worked with him before he was posted here, when I was a DC, so I didn’t have to mess around explaining things. And he knows this patch like the back of his hand.”

“Including the castle?”

“You bet. Only two men there now. Caretaker-handyman—name of Simmonds —for the inside, and old Burton the gardener for the outside. Caretaker’ll be there now, but Burton’ll most likely be in there—“ Digby nodded towards the Steyning Arms.

“Charlie Ratcliffe not in residence, then?”

Digby shook his head. “Doesn’t fancy the place at all, apparently. He didn’t even stay there when he was treasure-hunting— stayed at the pub most of the time. At least, stayed until the last two or three days before he found the gold—then he must have camped on the site, Cotton reckons.” Digby paused. “All by himself.”

“By himself?”

“That’s right. When his uncle was alive there was a housekeeper and a trained nurse as well as the handyman and the gardener. After the old man died he paid the two women off and kept the men on. But when he came down to look for the gold he packed them off on holiday—told them to keep away until he sent for them. Which was about three weeks, Cotton says.”

“So he found the gold single-handed, you mean?”

“He hired a tractor with a front scoop from a local farmer, but otherwise he was alone right up until the morning he announced he’d found the gold.”

“A tractor?” Audley frowned. “It wasn’t in the house, then?”

Digby looked at him in surprise. “Oh, no. It was in the kitchen garden, over by one of the gun-bastions along the north rampart—right out in the open, so Cotton says. He was one of the first outsiders to see it.”

“What happened, exactly?”

“That morning? Well, Ratcliffe had it all organised, that’s for sure. The first thing Cotton knew about it was when Ratcliffe phoned him up, about ten o’clock. Cool as a cucumber, Cotton says. He simply said he’d found his family treasure, and would Cotton kindly telephone the local coroner because it was his job to take it in charge now, for the time being anyway. And he’d better phone his divisional HQ as well, because once the coroner had taken it then there’d be a security angle.”

“And what did—ah—Cotton say to that?”

“He asked what the treasure consisted of. And Ratcliffe said it was gold, about a ton of it, give or take a hundredweight or two.

“He said that?”

Digby nodded, deadpan. “Cotton reckons he’d dug it up bit by bit over those three days, and then worked out exactly what he intended to do. Because by the time he got there on his bicycle there were a dozen of Ratcliffe’s longhaired friends standing guard over it— he’d seen some of them drive through the village that morning, before the phone call. And he had others patrolling the grounds to keep people out as well, and they weren’t there the previous day. Or not in the village, anyway.”

“His long-haired friends?” Audley considered the possibilities. “Meaning Ratcliffe’s regiment of the Roundhead Wing, I take it?”

Digby shrugged. “I don’t know. But … probably.”

“So he kept everyone out of the castle grounds, did he?”

“Not everyone. He let in the people he wanted—he’d phoned a Sunday newspaper, and the others caught on double-quick. Cotton says it was a nightmare, the next week or two, with journalists and sightseers. But when they found they couldn’t get into the grounds unless they went in through the front gate they cleared off—the sightseers did, anyway.”

Audley stared at the dashboard. Cool as a cucumber and bloody well organised, Charlie Ratcliffe had been, sitting day after day on a steadily increasing pile of gold ingots—and night after night, alone in the midst of his ancestral loot.

The gold of the Indies. King Philip’s gold. Captain Sir Edward Parrott’s gold. Colonel Nathaniel Parrott’s gold. And then nobody’s gold for over three hundred years.

And now Charlie Ratcliffe’s gold by every law and every custom that made any sense. It was hard not to be on Charlie’s side, even with the as yet unproved—and probably unprovable—suspicion that he had played most foully for it. Because there was a much older and crueller law which applied to gold, a law which transcended every other one: those who had the guts to find it and the wit to keep it were its natural owners. Once it would have held force of arms as well as wit, now it took law as well. But unless Charlie Ratcliffe could be proved a murderer public opinion would be on his side, no matter what his politics.

“But now there are only two of them looking after the place?”

“So Cotton says.” Digby nodded. “It was a nine-days’ wonder—and apparently there’s nothing much to see now but one damn great hole in the kitchen garden, like a bomb hit it. You won’t have any trouble finding it, he says.” He glanced shrewdly at Audley. “If you still want to.”

There was nothing here for him— for either of them—thought Audley. But Digby didn’t know about the secret Nayler had dangled in front of him over the telephone, which was a private matter, having nothing to do with gold or politics or murder.

“I still want to—yes.”

Self-indulgence.

“All right.” Digby was deadpan again. “Cotton will go along to the house and talk to the handyman, and I’ll go to the pub and talk to the gardener. That should give you a clear run for an hour or so.”

The young sergeant had come to the same conclusion, that Swine Brook, not Standingham, was their only hope; and that this side-trip was either pointless or the product of some information which Audley was keeping to himself. If it had been Paul Mitchell sitting beside him there would have been signs of rebellion, or snide comments at the least; but Digby, mercifully, was better disciplined.

“How do I get into the castle grounds from here?”

“Ah—now I’ve got you something that may help there.” Digby produced a tattered booklet from his coat pocket. “I borrowed this from Cotton. There isn’t any modern guide-book to the castle, because it’s never been open to the public. But there was this old Methodist minister who wrote a history of the place back in Victorian times, and there’s a map in the back which shows the layout … it’s a bit out of date, but the castle part hasn’t changed—the village has expanded to the south, that’s all, Cotton says—“

He opened the booklet carefully and spread out a dog-eared and yellowing map on his lap. “We’re just about
here
—on the fold—on the north edge of the village by that dotted line. …”

Audley studied the map. The village in the old queen’s day had been huddled around the river crossing, with the castle on the hillside above—

“What’s this other castle?” He pointed to the map.

“That’s nothing. Or there’s nothing there, anyway—that’s the old castle site, it says,” said Digby dismissively. “It’ll all be in the book—this is our castle
here
, and you can get to the line of the old ramparts up that track beyond the pub
there
—“ he pointed ahead across the car bonnet “—just by that bus stop. If you follow the ramparts round you’ll come to the kitchen garden on the north side, but you’ll be out of sight of the castle all the way.”

It was on the tip of Audley’s tongue to suggest that he could read a map as well as the sergeant, if not better, having been reading maps since before the sergeant was out of his nappies. But there had been nothing in the sergeant’s voice except helpfulness, any more than there was nothing now but politeness in the way he offered the old guide-book once he had folded the map back into it. So perhaps young police sergeants naturally took senior Home Office officials to be doddering incompetents when it came to practical matters.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” he said with equal politeness. “I’m sure I shall manage very well now.”

Digby regarded him doubtfully for a moment. “Well, it’s half-past now. Cotton can ring the caretaker, that’ll pin him down. And then I’ll deal with the gardener in the pub.”

“If he’s there.”

“If he’s not, then he’s on his way. Half an hour every night without fail, Cotton says, and I can make him stay longer. Will an hour be enough for you?”

Five minutes.

Audley looked down at the venerable guide-book which, according to Digby, would answer all his questions about Standingham Castle.

The History of the Village and Castles of Standingham. By The Reverend Horatio Musgrave, BA, Resident Minister of the Methodist Congregations of Standingham, Worpsgrave and Long Denton.

On the next page the Reverend Musgrave himself frowned up at him out of a luxuriant frame of hair and side-whiskers and beard, the very pattern of the late Victorian clergyman.

“The felicitous tranquillity of Standingham in our own peaceful and enlightened times conceals a sad history of fratricidal warfare and intermittent pestilence which cannot but provoke the reflection that the blessings of education and scientific progress, sustained and advanced as they have been by the proper study of the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ, have conferred on the British Nation signal benefits which are nevertheless insufficiently understood by the generality of the population.”

Evidently the Reverend Musgrave was determined to use his history to point a moral, if not to adorn a tale, in the best Victorian tradition. Which, in the circumstances of less peaceful and felicitous times, his latest reader might be allowed to skip—

“That same happy juxtaposition of highways and waterways in the midst of an industrious and prosperous agricultural community which has lately resulted in the extension of the Great Western Railway’s passenger and goods services to the district served to identify the earliest settlement at the confluence of the rivers Irthey and Barwell as a place of some importance—“

More paragraphs to skim across. Anglo-Saxon ploughman, marauding Danes, iron-fisted Normans with the tax-man’s Domesday Book in their baggage, adulterine castles going up like mushrooms when the kings were weak—and coming down smartly when they were strong … the Black Death wiping out the original settlement beside the Barwell, and the new settlement beside the Irthey being burnt during a peasant rising … well, no one could say that the Reverend Musgrave was really exaggerating the horrors of everyday life in rural Standingham in the good old days—

“It was in the early fifteenth century that Sir Edward de Stayninge was granted the right to crenellate his manor on the ridge above the Barwell, on the site of the earthworks of the earlier castles; of which there yet remains not one stone upon another to testify the feudal pride before which the might of France crumbled at Crecy and Agincourt. For having espoused the cause of the wicked Richard Crookback, slayer of the innocent Princes in the Tower—“

Well, that figured. Because if there was one thing for which the lords of the manor and the villagers of Standingham alike could be relied on, it was to back losers. If there was a lost cause to hand, or a disaster of any sort going, then Standingham was first in the wrong queue; it was only to be expected in due course that Sir Piers de Stayning, having lost the “e” off his name, should also ride to Bosworth Field in 1485 with the wrong army and lose the rest of it.

A cycle bell roused him from the contemplation of late medieval lawlessness to catch twentieth-century law in all its majesty: whether it was because of the price of petrol or from a wise return to old-fashioned police methods, PC Cotton’s superiors had provided him with a bicycle rather than a car. And for a bet, the sight of a large, properly-helmeted policeman on a tall bicycle moving steadily and silently round his patch under his own power did more to deter the local lads from petty crime than an anonymous car driver in a bus conductor’s flat cap.

Just a couple more minutes of the Reverend Musgrave, then—and he could finish the sad history on foot anyway …

“It was not until the second decade of the sixteenth century that a collateral descendent, Sir William Steyning, having secured the reversion of his uncle’s estates, commenced the construction of the great house on the Irthey Ridge, across the pleasant open valley of the Willow Stream. Using stone from the castle ruins, he raised a residence in the Tudor manner which, though still taking the style ‘castle’, was yet an edifice at once more commodious and more comfortable than the frowning fortresses of earlier times, testifying both to the greater confidence of the gentry in their security of tenure and to the power of the monarch to impose his will on their feudal ambitions. It was to be a tragic irony of history that this gracious home, with its noble aspect and high-mullioned windows, was to feature in the most famous and melancholy chapter in our brief chronicle of former days.”

Audley shook his head at the text. It was maybe tragic, but hardly ironic that Standingham had received a bloody nose during the Civil War; the village was simply running true to form. Even the fact that it had been staunchly Parliamentarian, following its lord of the manor as so many places had done, and yet had still managed to ruin itself although Parliment had won the war, was a predictable occurrence. He could only hope that in reviving the family fortunes Charlie Ratcliffe had also reanimated the slumbering fiend who turned every Standingham event into a misfortune.

The track beside the bus stop sported a mouldering notice-board bearing the legend NO THROUGH ROAD, but, if the Reverend Musgrave’s map could be relied on, it led nevertheless straight up the ridge to the old sallyport beside one of the bastions along the south rampart.

“Had the Lord of the Manor of Standingham been young and vigorous when King and Parliament parted from one another on the great issue of England’s liberties in the year 1641, then he would have assuredly have followed his inclination toward the banner of one or other of the belligerent parties—“

Very true. The Reverend Musgrave could no more resist stating the obvious than he could pass up the chance of using a ringing adverb or adjective.

“And, conversely, had he been old and unversed in the arts of war he would doubtless have stood aloof from the fratricidal strife which then ensued—“