The Lost Shrine Read online

  Margaret placed the figure carefully back in the van and put her sunglasses back on before turning to face the man.

  He asked, ‘Satisfied?’

  Margaret said, ‘There is no doubting the antiquity of these pieces.’

  He sniffed. ‘Or their quality.’

  Margaret inclined her head towards him in recognition of the truth of his statement. ‘Or their quality.’

  The man bent as if to start rewrapping the objects, but Margaret placed a hand on his arm. ‘There’s one more thing I need to be sure of.’

  As he straightened up Clare could see he looked distinctly unimpressed. ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘What sort of provenance do these have?’

  ‘Provenance? Like I said on the website, they come from Bailsgrove.’

  Margaret said, ‘Yes, yes, I know that’s what it says on the website, but what proof do you have of where they come from?’

  The man’s face flushed bright red from top to bottom. ‘Now, look here, if you’re trying to say you don’t think this lot are kosher, you can sling your hook.’

  He turned, flung the travel rug over the top of the objects and slammed the doors of the van. Margaret wasn’t having any of it. As he started to move round to the driver’s side door she blocked his way. Clare followed, but stood by helplessly, feeling totally unequipped to deal with the situation that was developing in front of her.

  He stood nose to nose with Margaret and yelled, ‘Get out of my way!’

  But Margaret, seemingly completely unperturbed, stood her ground. And in a quiet but implacable tone said, ‘I think you’ve mistaken my meaning.’

  He leant back, arms crossed. ‘I’m all ears.’

  Margaret said, ‘I’m a serious collector. A very serious collector. And I’m willing to pay very highly for exactly what I want. I really don’t have the slightest interest in how you came by these pieces. If I did, do you really suppose I would have agreed to meet you in a car park in the middle of nowhere? But as I say, I am a serious collector. And, like all collectors of any note, what I have to be absolutely sure of is where the pieces in my collection have come from. Provenance is all. If the pieces are right and the provenance is right, I’m willing to reward the seller very handsomely. But I have my reputation to consider. I can’t run the risk of diluting the quality of my collection with inferior material.’

  He looked Margaret up and down, apparently considering his options. And after a few moments’ deliberation he said, ‘Alright. I need to get something out of the van.’

  Margaret moved to one side and he retrieved an A5 envelope from his glove compartment.

  Passing the envelope to Margaret, he said, ‘There you go. Take a look at those. If these aren’t the real McCoy I don’t know what is.’

  Margaret withdrew a small sheaf of paper. On them were printed a series of photos of a selection of the objects, including the sword and the figure of a man, lying in the bottom of a series of freshly dug holes. She showed them to Clare. The holes might have been anywhere, except that in a number of them you could clearly see they sat within an open trench, and in one of them you could see not only the trench but the Portakabin that was now their site office in the background.

  He added, ‘That number at the bottom is the GPS location. If you’ve got any doubts you can check it out.’

  Clare reached into her pocket and brought out her phone to take a shot of the coordinates.

  He grabbed her wrist and shook his head. ‘No photos. If you want the GPS coordinates, write them down.’

  Clare nodded and punched in the numbers from a couple of the photos, though she and Margaret were only too well aware of where the site was. Margaret stuffed the photos back into the envelope and handed it to him.

  He asked, ‘Satisfied now?’

  Margaret nodded. ‘As soon as we’ve checked out the coordinates we’ll be back in touch to make the necessary arrangements.’

  They turned and walked away. Climbing into the Range Rover, they could see him return to the back of the van to rewrap his goods. As Margaret drove past him, windows down in the late evening sunshine, they could hear him whistling what sounded for all the world like ‘We’re in the Money’.

  ‘Cheers, Margaret! You were sensational. I never knew you had a thespian streak.’ Clare raised her glass in congratulations.

  Margaret laughed. ‘Thank you, my dear. I have many streaks. The majority of which are, thankfully, little known. But don’t underestimate your part in setting up our little performance.’

  Clare smiled. ‘We don’t make a bad team, do we?’

  There was no doubt in Clare’s mind now about where the finds had come from. And if nighthawks had been sniffing around Bailsgrove when Beth had been digging there, had they somehow been part of the reason why Beth had taken her own life? But whatever had driven Beth to suicide, Clare was desperate to find out what Margaret had made of the artefacts. And Margaret had steadfastly refused to tell her until she’d had a drink.

  Not wanting to take the chance of being overheard, they’d decided not to risk the King’s Arms in Bailsgrove. Instead they now sat in the slowly descending darkness of an early summer evening in the near empty beer garden of the George Hotel in Birdlip, only a stone’s throw across the valley from their rendezvous point.

  Clare studied her friend as she took a leisurely sip of her whiskey.

  Margaret put down her glass. ‘That’s better.’

  ‘So, are they real or fake?’

  ‘Oh, there’s no doubting they’re real. They are a truly remarkable collection of artefacts. It was a privilege to hold them.’

  Clare couldn’t hide her excitement. ‘So, Beth was right. There was a shrine at Bailsgrove in the Iron Age.’ Seeing the look on Margaret’s face, she added, ‘Or do you think it might have been some sort of high status cemetery?’

  Margaret shook her head. ‘The local tribe round here were the Dobunni and their graves are pretty thin on the ground. Though, curiously enough, where we’re sitting now is within a spit of one of the richest of them.’ She waved her hand vaguely into the rapidly cooling night air. ‘Somewhere out there on Barrow Wake they found the Birdlip Lady. She was buried with a stunningly decorated mirror, a brooch and two bronze bowls.’

  ‘But couldn’t we have something similar at Bailsgrove?’

  ‘Well, there were a couple of male burials found near here that had swords that might not be out of place with the ones we saw tonight. But I don’t know of any cemeteries that have the range of artefacts to match what was on display this evening.’

  And one thing was for sure, if Margaret didn’t know about them, that meant they didn’t exist. So Bailsgrove couldn’t have been a cemetery.

  ‘So surely it must be a shrine, then. And an important one too, if what we’ve seen were all offerings.’ Despite being half-terrified by the prospect of Paul Marshall’s reaction, the archaeologist in Clare wanted to punch the air.

  But much to her dismay, Margaret shook her head again. ‘Not a shrine site. Or at least these finds don’t help us in establishing whether it is or isn’t.’

  The exasperation in Clare’s voice was plain to hear. ‘But I don’t understand, Margaret. What other sort of site could possibly produce finds like these?’

  Margaret sighed. ‘That’s just the problem. I really have never seen an assemblage of artefacts like this one. And most definitely not from a site in Britain. All of these finds, without exception, have been made in continental Europe.’

  ‘In Europe! So, what are you saying? We have some kind of trading post? Like the one at Hengistbury Head, but higher status?’

  ‘No, though it would be rather wonderful to find another site like Barry’s. I’m afraid our problem is considerably bigger than that. The truth is that, much as I’d like to say otherwise, there is no way that those objects originated on our site.’

  ‘But how can you be so sure? Maybe Bailsgrove is truly exceptional.’

  ‘It may
very well be, my dear, but those artefacts were created across the length and breadth of Europe. The closest things I’ve seen to that beautiful dagger and the little figure come from a chieftain’s burial in Hochdorf in Germany. The geometric decoration is unmistakably Hallstatt, I’d say from around the sixth century BC. But both of the swords are La Tène. They date to the very end of the Iron Age, three or four hundred years later. And the little figure has obviously been broken off from a krater.’

  Clare asked, ‘A what?’

  ‘A sort of giant punch bowl, used for mixing wine and water. It’s clearly continental. Admittedly it’s just conceivable that some of the brooches could have come from Britain, but I think it’s highly unlikely.’ She paused to take a slug of her whiskey. ‘But our biggest problem, the insurmountable issue that means that whatever those photographs appeared to show, the finds can’t have originated from our site, is that the figure and both of the swords have been chemically treated to prevent corrosion.’

  Clare’s head was spinning. ‘But there were still traces of mud on the figure. I saw it for myself.’

  ‘Exactly. And there was mud on the hilt of one of the swords too. I’m not saying that those finds have never been on our site. Those photographs prove that they have. But that is most definitely not where they started life. And nor is it where they have been until relatively recently.’

  Clare lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I really don’t understand what’s going on now, Margaret. Why on earth would anyone go to the trouble of burying a whole collection of genuine finds, worth a fortune on the antiquities market, on an archaeological site that had police crawling all over it and then dig them up again? It doesn’t make any sense.’

  Margaret drained the last few drops of her drink and replaced the glass firmly on the table. ‘Indeed it does not, my dear. But that is most definitely what appears to have happened.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  The walk from Temple Meads station to Bristol University’s archaeology department was considerably longer than Clare had remembered. She’d forgotten how steep the hills were in Bristol. And with the mid-morning sunshine beating down, she realised she’d significantly overestimated the beneficial effects of the odd bit of pickaxing now that she could no longer afford a gym subscription.

  Trudging uphill, she tried to conjure some sort of sense out of what they’d discovered about the auction site objects. On the plus side, it might at least mean they were less likely to suffer raids from nighthawks. Though given that they had no clue why the objects had been planted on the site in the first place, much less why they’d been dug up again, they couldn’t even be certain about that. And it still left them with a substantial portion of their site that had already been wrecked.

  She’d decided, and Margaret had agreed, that there was no point in involving the police. And, given the fact that David already knew someone had been digging holes in the site, there wasn’t much to be gained from telling him about what they’d discovered just yet. Anyway, what would they tell him? Someone had broken in, buried some of the most spectacular finds she’d ever seen and then taken them away again.

  Whatever might have been going on at Bailsgrove, she was still no closer to knowing whether Beth had been right. Had it been the centre of some sort of cult before the Romans arrived? Or was it pure fantasy? Of course, there was still that dedication to Mercury. But when all was said and done, on its own it proved nothing. And if there had ever been any evidence of a shrine on the site, there was every possibility that their man in the car park or his supplier had put paid to any trace of it.

  She paused for a moment to catch her breath. Standing in front of her, securely tucked behind iron railings, was a little brick building. Across the top of its facade ran Hebrew lettering. It must be a synagogue. Set back from the road and unassuming, she wondered how many people even noticed it was here. She smiled. ‘Head in the clouds, but feet on the ground.’ That was what her mum used to say about her when she was a kid. And in Clare’s experience it was exactly how most archaeologists spent their lives. Bringing the obscure, the overlooked, the people who lived in the cracks into the light. But often missing what stood right in front of them – in plain sight.

  In the end that’s why she’d come to the conclusion that she needed to do the obvious thing. If she was going to have any chance of discovering whether Bailsgrove had been a major ceremonial centre, or if it was just the product of Beth Kinsella’s deranged fantasy, she needed to speak to the one person who had known her better than anyone. She glanced down at her watch. Five past eleven. She hated being late.

  Ten minutes later she found herself outside the office door of Dr Stuart Craig, Beth’s ex-boyfriend. She took a moment to straighten the collar of her blouse and then knocked. No reply. She waited and knocked again. Still nothing. He must have given up on her. He hadn’t waited long, had he? Caught between being angry with Craig and mad at herself for being so disorganised, she headed back downstairs to reception to see if she might be able to catch him later.

  But as she stood talking to the receptionist there was a tap on her shoulder. She turned to be greeted by a figure she recognised instantly from his photo on the university website.

  Stuart Craig was shorter than she’d imagined, with a thick head of hair and a neatly trimmed beard. In fact, her overwhelming impression was one of neatness and control. And though she couldn’t have explained why, there was something about him that reminded her of a shop window mannequin.

  He offered an unpleasantly damp and clammy hand. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. You must be Mrs Hills.’

  ‘Clare, please.’

  He inclined his head in recognition and gestured to the mug of coffee in his hand. ‘My caffeine addiction waits for no one, I’m afraid, Clare.’ He smiled. ‘Shall we go up to my office?’

  She would have killed for a coffee herself, but there was no way she was going to ask for one when she was the one who was late. His office, when they entered it, was anything but neat. It made David’s look like the epitome of minimalist chic. In front of them was a desk with a chair on either side. But all three surfaces had been engulfed in an avalanche of papers and books. Where did he work?

  He pointed to two chairs wedged tightly together between filing cabinets in one corner of the room. ‘Take a seat.’

  He sat down beside her, apparently oblivious to the discomfort their physical proximity was causing her. These weren’t the ideal conditions in which to ask someone whether their recently deceased ex had been a genius or certifiable.

  He slurped noisily at his coffee. ‘So, what was it you wanted to see me about? In your email you said you’d taken over the site Beth had been working on.’

  ‘Going through her site journals and talking to some of her staff, Beth seems to have made some claims about the site that I’m having trouble verifying at the moment.’

  ‘You do surprise me.’ Craig made no attempt to disguise the sarcasm in his voice.

  ‘You and Beth had been colleagues for a long time before she left Sheffield.’

  ‘No need to beat about the bush, Clare.’ He smiled. ‘I take it you know that Beth and me were an item.’

  Clare nodded. ‘Neil Fuller mentioned it.’

  ‘Neil Fuller. What’s he got to do with it?’

  ‘He was assisting Beth on the dig.’

  Craig’s face flushed red from bottom to top. ‘Really? Didn’t take him long, did it. He always did have a bit of a thing for Beth. Even in his undergrad days. But I wouldn’t have figured she would have considered him up to her sort of standards. Just goes to show what people will stoop to when they’re desperate.’

  From what Neil had said, she’d thought that the two men had gotten on well, but apparently not. At least not as far as Stuart Craig was concerned. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest there was anything going on between them. Neil’s married with a young baby.’

  Craig said nothing. He was obviously less than entirely convinced. Was there a chanc
e Clare had misjudged things? It was clear that Neil had hero-worshipped Beth. Was that all it was? He wouldn’t be the first man to have an affair while his wife was at home changing the nappies.

  Very little had gone the way she’d envisaged it so far today. She needed to get things back on track. ‘When you and Beth were at Sheffield you worked on a number of projects together.’

  ‘That’s right.’ His eyes flicked distractedly around the room as he spoke; he was barely taking in a word she was saying.

  ‘Were you surprised when Beth killed herself, Dr Craig?’

  ‘Yes. No. I’m not sure.’

  He stood up and, pushing a pile of papers out of the way to make room for his coffee on top of one of the filing cabinets, started pacing the floor. He stopped abruptly and looked up at her.

  ‘Do you really think Neil Fuller is a happily married man?’

  How could she answer that? She’d come here with every intention of being the one asking the questions, but now the boot appeared to be firmly on the other foot. ‘Yes. I think so. I haven’t seen anything to suggest he’s not.’

  He stood in the middle of the room, staring at the carpet and nodding his head, apparently conducting some sort of internal monologue that she wasn’t privy to. ‘Hmm.’ Then all at once he looked up and said, ‘Frankly I’m not sure what Beth was or wasn’t capable of. I thought I knew her; I lived with her, I worked with her and yet I don’t think I ever understood her. And to be honest now I’m glad I didn’t.’

  ‘You can tell me it’s none of my business, but why?’

  ‘Because she never cared about anyone or anything except her bloody work. Her theories, her mad bloody ideas. She was always chasing the ultimate answer. Her work always came first. Do you have any idea how it feels to play second fiddle to someone who’s been dead for two thousand years?’ He shook his head. ‘Everybody had to support Beth, understand Beth. Beth the great bloody genius.’