Blood Ties (15 page)

Idly, he picked up a newspaper from the top of a pile and flicked through it, noting that the same people seemed to be killing one another as they had when he had left Pinsent twelve days before. He had lost the daily habit of newspaper reading since being down here and not really missed it. He dropped the paper back, noting that the one below was of local news. He'd seen it at the B&B. He flicked through that as well, growing steadily more impatient with the length of time Blezzard was requiring him to wait.

An item on the seventh page caused him to pause and look more closely.

‘
Murder of a gentle man
', the headline said, and it seemed to Alec that the header itself was unusual. A picture of Eddy, holding a pole while some children, standing on boxes, peered into or at a theodolite, told him who this gentle man was.

Eddy, it seemed, was well known in the local area for visiting schools and showing his finds. For spinning great yarns that captivated the local kids. Tales of the Pitchfork Rebellion, led by the Duke of Monmouth and defeated by the king's men. Of buried treasure and the little finds that kept seekers like Eddy going year after year. One of the teachers called him inspiring. A Dr Matthews – the history guy, Alec reminded himself – noted him as a major influence in local groups. The picture, it seemed, showed Eddy helping out a group of archaeologists who had invited fifty schoolchildren to a dig site and were explaining everything from initial surveying techniques to washing the mud encrusted finds. The children in the picture were laughing, clearly excited, and Eddy was smiling. A very different Eddy to the one Alec had seen in The Lamb.

‘He talks,' Susan had told him. Once you started him off, he talked for England. Only in The Lamb did he prefer to just listen to the company, to be the quiet man sitting alone with his treasure maps and endless speculations.

Alec glanced at the byline. The tone of the article suggested that the writer, Adam Hart, knew the old man well. He folded the paper and tucked it into his coat pocket just as the door to the inner sanctum opened and Blezzard came back through.

‘You can give him a lift home, should you want to. I imagine his brief will be heading back to Bristol. He's costing someone enough already without him charging for being a taxi service.'

‘You're letting Kevin go?'

‘For now. For what it's worth, we've seen the CCTV footage from the petrol station. If he'd just killed someone then he's a damn good actor or he's so cool he's a bloody psycho. He chats for a good five minutes to the cashier; seems they were at school together. Then he leaves and turns his car like he's going home and we pick him up again when he passes the bank in High Street. He could have gone back, of course.'

‘But you no longer think so?'

‘I'm keeping an open mind. Take him home to his mother. If I want him back, I'll know where to find him.'

Kevin was brought through by his solicitor a few minutes later. He looked pale and tired and shaky and touchingly glad to see Alec, a man he'd not even known before that day but who now seemed to be regarded as his agent of salvation.

The solicitor nodded to Blezzard, shook hands with Alec and patted Kevin on the arm. Then glanced at his watch and was gone.

‘I wanted a word with him,' Alec said.

‘Can't we just go too?'

‘Of course. Naomi's in the front with me, so you'll have to share the back seat with Napoleon. Hope that's OK.'

‘You could have a full sled team in there and I'd happily squeeze in. I just want to be home.'

Alec nodded his farewells and led Kevin back to the car, moving the big black dog over and seating Kevin inside. It was still pouring with rain.

‘Was the solicitor helpful?' he asked as they drove away.

‘Mr Tolliver seemed to be doing a good job for me, but I wouldn't know a bad job. I've got nothing to compare it to. Hope I never have anything else to compare it to, neither.'

‘Blezzard says he's keeping an open mind, but you're off the hook so far as he's concerned, I'm sure of it.'

‘I hope so. I'm not cut out for this. He kept going through stuff in the diary, like I knew what he was talking about. Reading bits out and such. That and the notebooks. I mean, I knew some of the stuff that was in the notebooks, so he made a big thing about if Eddy found something and I wanted it, but I told him, if we found anything good, any of us, we'd be knocking on Dr Matthews' door like a flash.'

‘So, how does this work, this small finds thing?' Naomi asked, joining the conversation.

‘Portable Antiquities Scheme,' Kevin said proudly. ‘Well, it's like this. You're meant to catalogue all finds. Most of us photograph them, and Eddy and me and a lot of the others, we use GPS as well, so anyone will know where and when we've found anything. It's got to have a context, you see. It's no good just picking up a musket ball or a bit of harness and not knowing where it comes from, cos then you won't know how it might have got there or who it belonged to. The real value is in the context, that's what Eddy taught me.'

‘And most of what you find, you get to keep, yes?'

‘Sure, we record and report and make it available for research, but Eddy had a collection and so do I. It's good, cos then you can compare, you know? Then you know if what you're finding is more of the same or something more exciting. I go field walking too, with a local group. Eddy came along some of the time.'

‘So, that's a sort of surveying, right?'

‘Yeah. We do it in winter or when there's nothing growing in the fields. Just after ploughing is good. The machinery turns up new finds every year.'

‘And these entries in the books, you said you didn't recognize them?' Naomi enquired.

‘Not all of them, no. And the way he'd annotated them? It wasn't like he usually does. It wasn't using the GPS, but he knew he could always borrow it if I weren't there. Instead, he did it the old-fashioned way, taking a compass bearing off what he could see round him, like trees and church spires.'

‘So, he didn't borrow the GPS and he didn't tell you he was going out,'

‘No, that's right.'

‘So, back to this, what did you call it, Portable Antiquities Scheme.'

‘Right. If we found gold or silver, precious metals, we'd report it, and if there was any value to the find then it gets sold and the proceeds split between finder and landowner. It means, if any of us find something that might be worth money, we'd go to Dr Matthews.'

‘And you don't think Eddy would keep anything like that secret.'

‘No. Not from me, any road.'

‘But he didn't talk to you about the books,' Naomi pointed out.

‘But he would have done, if he'd found anything. I know he would. Eddy were like that, honest as the day, and he knew
I'd
have told him. Straight away. That's why I went to see him that night, tell him what I found in Bakers Field. We'd been up there together and when I went back I struck out.'

‘What did you find?'

‘Coins. Well, not really coins, more like medallions that's been struck to commemorate something. Two – one silver and one gold – and I reckon there'll be more. Dr Matthews thinks so too.'

‘Commemorate what?' Naomi asked.

Kevin laughed. The first time that day he had shown any emotion other than despair or fear. ‘That's the thing, you see. They commemorate something what never happened. Dr Matthews reckons as how the Duke of Monmouth had them made to celebrate his victory, but of course he never had a victory. The king won, everyone was hanged or worse, and that was that.'

Alec frowned, recalling something he had read in the pamphlets on the battle of Sedgemoor. ‘I thought Monmouth's lot were short of money,' he said. ‘That they couldn't afford to pay their army or provision it properly.'

‘Yeah, that's the odd thing. Why spend money getting medals struck when you could be paying for more troops? Eddy and me, we talked about it and we reckon it was a sympathizer round here that had them made ready. When it started going badly, maybe he sent the medallions to the Duke so he could fund the invasion. Gold is still gold and silver is silver. He could melt it down, do what he liked with it, but it never got to him. Either that or Eddy reckoned they might have hidden it after the battle, when they knew Monmouth had lost. It's not the kind of thing you want to be found with.'

‘Eddy's treasure?' Naomi asked.

Kevin laughed again, sadly this time. ‘No, it weren't the hoard he were looking for,' he said. ‘That was part of a different story, but I think he'd have settled for this 'un. It would have been a nice end to his story, wouldn't it, even if it wasn't the one he'd been looking for? Better than he got at any rate. Much better than he got.'

SIXTEEN

I
t was three or so hours later by the time Alec managed to get on to looking at Eddy's notes. They had dropped Kevin off, had had to explain to his mother what was going on, then had briefed Susan and fed an increasingly huffy Napoleon before getting an evening meal for themselves. Speculation in The Lamb had been rife, and Alec and Naomi had listened as Eddy was discussed and his life and death dissected. They had gratefully escaped, only to be waylaid by Bethan and Jim, understandably anxious and curious.

Only after reassuring them had Naomi and Alec finally managed to escape to their room, taking a tray of tea with them.

‘Right,' Alec said. ‘So where do we start?'

‘Earliest entries,' Naomi said. ‘So, with the diary.'

‘Right you are. OK, so she must have had the diary for Christmas, but she didn't actually start to write in it until her birthday, February the twenty-sixth. She says, “
Now I am seventeen, only a year to go until I'm officially an adult so I'm going to record this last year of being a kid, just so I always know what I felt like back here and now so that when I have kids of my own I'll remember and I won't be so hard on them just because they've not grown up yet
.”'

‘Interesting. Do you think she thought her dad was hard on her?'

‘I think we all do. It's part of being seventeen.'

‘She goes on, “
So I'm writing in my diary. My dad gave it to me for Christmas as a sort of joke. When I was a little girl I wanted a secret book and he brought me a bright pink fluffy book with a funny little lock on it and I was always losing the key. Then I lost the book. I don't think I ever wrote much in it, I don't really remember. But I took it to the park one day and lost it and I remember how much I cried. At Christmas he brought me this one and he tucked it into the pocket of my new dressing gown because that's what I used to do with the pink fluffy one and he said this was the last ‘little girl' present he would ever get me because I was almost grown up now. And then we cried because it was another Christmas without mum and we always cry when we open our presents and see where hers should have been underneath the tree
.”'

‘Sounds to me as if they were really close,' Naomi said.

‘It does, doesn't it? She finishes there, but the next day she talks about a boy she fancies at school who has a girlfriend with spots, and then about a teacher who is “
a complete bitch
”, though she doesn't say why, and she's got the results of her mocks and is heading for high grades in her exams. Presumably her A-levels.'

‘Anything there that might—'

‘Have to do with Eddy's death? No. She's seventeen; most of the time she seems to be happy. On the eighth of March she says that they are breaking up for the Easter holidays in just over a week and: “
We're all going to stay at Jill's house for the first weekend. It'll be sooo good. Proper time together. Oliver will be there, I suppose, but he's OK. Not what I'd have thought she'd have gone out with. He's got a hell of a nose! But Jill says he's really good fun. Anyway, he's just passed his test! So we can all go out without having to bother the parents all the time
.

“
I wish Jill didn't have to move away. It's all so wrong. She's like my sister not just a friend. I wish I had a sister, but if I had then I suppose there'd be one more person to miss mum and I guess it's bad enough me and dad missing her. You'd think it would kind of get less painful, but it hurts me just as much and I know he hurts such a lot too. Why do people have to die? If I could have one wish I'd bring her back. I'd never have let her go away
.”'

‘Sad,' Naomi said. ‘And she was dead just over a week later. That's just tragic, isn't it?'

‘Very,' Alec agreed. ‘There are a couple of other small entries. One seems to be a homework reminder. It says, “
Hand in project!!!
”, and there's a phone number with the name Steve written under it, but that's all.'

‘When does Eddy start to write in it?'

Alec flicked pages. ‘July,' he said. ‘The year after. The first entry reads, “
I took flowers to both graves today and when I came back I thought I'd just sit in Karen's room for a while. The need to be close to her was terrible. It feels like my heart has been breaking into smaller and smaller pieces every day since she died and for some reason it was so much worse today
.

“I drove past the school last night and saw the kids all going into the Leavers Dance. All of them dressed up and laughing and so alive. The young have no comprehension of how beautiful they are or how fragile. My Karen was so beautiful and oh so fragile in the end
.

“She would have taken her exams by now, soon she'd have been off to University, and tonight she'd have got herself all dressed up and I'd have driven her off to meet her friends and I'd have teased her about coming to pick her up at ten, like I always did
.