turn of speed. Root returned briefly to check on the JCB driver, a better colour beginning to return to his pasty, green-jowled face. No heart attack, no serious distress, he told himself. “Just stay there, Owen,” he ordered. “You’ll be right.”
He strode quickly back and reached inside the cab of the earth-moving dinosaur and turned off the power. Then he stood back, again careful to avoid contaminating the area. “Been there some time,” he found himself muttering aloud. “Just bones and cartilage and rags of skin. And what is that?”
He looked more closely at the find. A rusted knob of once-highly-finished black-lacquered metal poked through the disturbed soil, much like the handle of an early Hoover. “Odd,” he said aloud. “Bones and metal, and all buried under Anglers Kop for God knows how long. Or why.”
“You got it worked out, Arthur? What it is?”
Gary was back sooner than Root had anticipated. He was looking down at the find. “It’s part of an old metal-detector. Electropulse. Sends a signal in a cone down about eight inches. Be about a couple of hundred quid twenty years ago. Before ground-penetrating radar units, but pretty good. Could be an Arado. They cost real money.”
Old technology? Root had seen their like in use before. “You’d know. Didn’t your dad buy you one when you were a kid?”
“Buy! Doubtful, that, Arthur. I got it for a ninth birthday present. He’d gone for mum again, and this was his way of getting back into the house. And at mum’s benefits and allowances. And her money from that skivvying job, and anything else he could lay his hands on. He’d have nicked the detector from somewhere. Maybe robbed some kid out in the fields looking for Roman coins, like the rest of us. Only thing he ever gave me that I wanted to use. Gave me a taster of what was to come, I suppose.”
“Yes. Basra. You’d do a course on mines, then, that kind of ordnance? In UK?” said Root, thinking that Gary had seen a hell of a lot for a twenty-three year old South Yorkshire lad.
“There wasn’t time. We got rushed out quick. More or less learned on the job. By then it wasn’t mines. No time for detection—they had all the remote control technology they needed from over the border.”
Root shook his head. Someone had been looking for ancient treasure here. What else would they bring a mine detector for? And where would that lead him, Constable Root?
“It’s going to be a messy business,” he said. “It gets a lot of publicity, this sort of thing. Everyone wants in on it. Easy money, they think. Make your fortune with a turn of the spade.”
“Or a buzz from the magic wand. Some people get lucky.”
“He didn’t. Poor sod.”
“So what next?” said Gary.
“Hang about. You’ll be used to that, I expect. Do nowt till you’re told, then just say what you’ve seen, short and clear and maybe we’ll get to the clubhouse before all the crumpets have gone.”
“So what’s happened here, do you think, Arthur?”
“Not for me to say, lad. Nor you. But we’ll find out. We always do.”
A loud voice hailed them. The voice of command. “Anything else, Arthur?” A man of two distinct persuasions, thought Root: lowering and jovial, mercurial and morbid. That was the nature of Major Alfred Wynne-Fitzpatrick, MC and well earned so it was said. This was a man who had commanded a biggish force back in the Falklands campaign; not that he ever spoke of it.
“I don’t want any sightseers, Major!”
“Any what!”
This was not a parade ground, Root told himself. He prodded Gary’s well-muscled shoulder. “Get yourself across again and explain that I respectfully ask the major as Captain of the club to make sure that no one comes out here. Say I said it’s official business. And tell him he’s in charge. Now, off.”
And soon I won’t be, thought Root, for here came the forerunners.
A natty new Ford Focus, bright blue, swished along the newly-asphalted drive, not fast, investigative officers come to establish a presence with no fuss at all: two, no three, for the one in the back was small. Old Owen Burroughs watched the car till it was hidden by the sycamores at the end of the drive.
“This the poliss, is it?”
“Expect so,” said Root. “We’ll just wait and see. All right?”
“I just want out. Skulls aren’t in my job specification, right? I just use heavy tools. Who, for Michael and Mary’s sake did I dig up?”
This was for the experts, thought Root, empathizing.
“Not our worry, Owen.”
Soon, there’d be a CID contingent, an ambulance and the Home Office pathologist and as much and as many of the Support Services as headquarters deemed necessary. Root wondered how the various officials and employees would be coping up at the clubhouse.
Secretary Phil Church would have to handle it. And how would he cope?
Not well at all at first. Right. And who would begin the investigation?
Root thought he knew one shape in the recently arrived police car, a dedicated real-ale fancier called Strapp. He rather hoped that it was Sergeant Strapp he had glimpsed, Izzy Strapp from Welwyn Garden City. South Yorkshire fitted him like an old worn glove, the beer, the barbed and lateral bleak humour of the locals, and the cheap housing.
“A puzzle for you Izzy,” he said aloud. “And me.”
Arthur Root looked again at the marrow-like skull, with its shreds of leathery skin still clinging to the lower jaw. Who were you? he asked. And why here, at Wolvers?
So, at the clubhouse: what?
* * * *
“Oh, bugger,” the pro was saying, hearing his assistant yelling his name. Young Tony Beevers knew quite well where he was and what he was doing. “Sounds important, my love.”
“Bugger too,” said Mrs. Angela Knight, gathering garments. “Anyway, it’s coming on to rain and my hair’s going to be a right mess, you and your big hands, Mick. Can’t say I like the sound of this.” She knew about sudden emergencies, and had had quite enough of them. “This is serious, is it? I mean, the lad knows better than to come here, doesn’t he? What, you off?”
“Back in a second or two.”
“Left alone again,” she said. “Poor little Angie.”
Trouble?
Mick Summers hugged her briefly, then tore out of the thicket that concealed the interior of the folly from a casual inspection, and called back to his assistant,
“Panic over, Tony, I’m here.”
“It isn’t. You’re wanted in the bar, right away. Phil’s there. And some others, all in a stew. Want to know why?”
* * * *
“Couldn’t be worse,”
