Rogue Angel 50: Celtic Fire (4 page)

Chapter 7

The museum was closed.

Annja had moved her car from the pub to the hotel, checked in, dropped off her bags and, despite the lure of the big comfortable bed, turned around and headed straight back out again. She’d hoped to get a quick look around the museum before it closed for the afternoon, but when she got there she saw a makeshift sign on the door that said it was closed for the day, so it’d have to wait until tomorrow.

She peered through the long window, pressing her face up to the glass. There were lights on inside, and she could just about make out the shadow-shapes of a handful of people milling around. She tried to shield more of the window from the sun, cupping her hands around her brow as though peering through binoculars. She saw a woman talking to a policeman. There was another man—dressed in overalls measuring up the size of one of the display cabinets. The woman saw her face pressed up against the window and mouthed the words
Closed
and
Sorry,
shaking her head before she returned her attention to the policeman with his notebook poised.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to put the pieces together: a man measuring up a display case, a policeman taking a statement; there’d obviously been a robbery. It was surprising that a local museum would have any particularly valuable exhibits, though. Normally these rural sites just offered a few fairly interesting treasures dug up from the site, a few battered coins and rings, with the most precious golden torcs and such being spirited away to London for the British Museum’s collections.

The brochure the landlord had given her mentioned a cache of small Roman coins, which would be both difficult to sell and unlikely to fetch a great deal of money—certainly not enough to make the effort worthwhile—so the theft was more likely to be a case of petty vandalism, probably bored kids looking for a thrill than any international criminal masterminds at work. Kids would have no idea as to the value of anything inside the collection and probably thought it was all priceless.

Hopefully no one had been hurt.

Annja turned her back on the museum and crossed the quiet road.

A handful of cars had driven by while she stood there. Was the place always this quiet? A woman passed her with a buggy. It took Annja a second to realize it was the same woman she had seen in the beer garden earlier, proving just how small a town it really was. The woman smiled at her, clearly enjoying the momentary respite her sleeping baby offered.

Annja proceeded along the road. An old lady weighted down by straining bags overfilled with shopping nodded at her as she shuffled off toward her home, stockings rolled down around swollen ankles. It was like something out of an L. S. Lowry painting, only she wasn’t a matchstick. This was a sleepy little town where strangers smiled at one another in the street. She was from a neighborhood where the guy in the apartment across the landing didn’t say hello, never mind a complete stranger. Her commute involved people crowded in on the subway too scared to make eye contact because they never quite knew what was going on in the heads of their fellow passengers. It was a different world. As much as she enjoyed the hustle and bustle of big cities and the anonymity that came with them, there was something special about quiet places like this. She couldn’t live here, she’d go out of her mind after a week, but for a couple of days it was a great place to recharge.

A signpost shaped like a finger pointed down a narrow lane, promising her that it led to the amphitheater. She’d followed the same lane to move her car from the pub to the rear of the hotel.

Time to go exploring.

Annja walked past the cluster of cottages on the left and realized that it was in the garden of one that the most recent discoveries had been made. She tried to recall what she’d read. There was some kind of preservation order on the buildings that was supposed to prevent people from digging too deep. But the urgent removal of a tree teetering due to severe storms had exposed earth that had never been excavated and led to all sorts of wonderful finds. Sometimes life was funny like that, in order to preserve one way of life another had been kept hidden for over a century and it had taken a brutal act of nature herself to change that. Annja skirted the gardens, following the lane down toward the ruin.

It wasn’t the first time she’d seen an amphitheater, but there was something incredible about seeing it here, right out at the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire.

Beyond the houses the lane opened up, providing more room for school buses to negotiate the track down to the ruin. The camber was quite severe, allowing the rainwater to sluice away without eroding too much of the track. She saw a row of buses parked on the right with a cluster of teenagers milling around them, waiting to board. The kids were full of noise. A few others made their way to cars parked on the other side, no doubt to drive home with parents who’d chaperoned the visit.

Annja kept close to the fence, looking for a gate into the site. What she found looked like a rusty old turnstile from a ballpark. She slipped through, keen to be away from the critical mass of teenagers.

She stepped into a huge open field, its grass clipped as short as a playing field, which maintained the illusion of having entered the ghost of the old stadium. In the center, instead of a diamond, she spotted an information board. She walked over to it.

As she approached the board, the excavated amphitheater was revealed by the subtle change in elevation. It was easy to imagine how the remains had been hidden beneath earth and grass not so long ago. She walked in the footsteps of history, following a line of Romans and Britons before her to the excavation, eventually reaching the center. At this point, she imagined the wooden structure that had once stood above these stone foundations and how it must have towered above anyone down in the arena.

The acoustics were interesting; the stone sides cut out the external noise. Despite the fact they were no more than a couple of hundred meters away, she couldn’t hear the kids who had still seemed so loud before she’d gone down into the heart of the monument. It was a curiously intimate moment of tranquility.

Not that it lasted.

Her cell phone’s ringtone ended the peace.

She glanced at the display before answering.

“Garin,” she said. He only ever seemed to call when it was bad news. That had become the nature of their relationship. Save a girl once, she’d joked, and you think it gives you the right to ruin her life. “What can I do for you?”

“Ah, Annja, sweetheart, how I’ve missed your dulcet tones,” he said, making no effort to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “Not missing me too much, I hope?”

“I’ve not even been here a day—besides, it’s hard to miss you.” She checked her watch and tried to work out what the time was where he was, but then realized that she had no idea where he was in the world.

“Well, according to this little gadget I’m looking at you’re in Wales of all places.”

“Spying on me?”

“Hardly. It’s just this new box of tricks we’re trying out that tracks back signals when they bounce off satellites. It’s a refinement on the old caller ID. You never know when it might come in handy.”

“I’m not sure I want to think about why you’d need to know exactly where someone’s calling from—mainly because every reason I imagine will probably be suspicious if not illegal.”

“Oh, ye of little faith.”

“So what can I do for you? Got some relatives you want me to visit?” She looked across the fields at a flock of sheep nuzzling along the barbed wire of the perimeter fence, and pushed a toe against a pile of rotting cigarette butts. She could never understand why people would litter in a place like this.

“Ask not what you can do for me, ask only what I can do for you.”

“What on earth are you babbling about?”

“I’m nearby, someplace they call London. Ha! I figured if you were at a loose end I could nip over and entertain you.”

“Entertain me?.”

“I’m a lover of beautiful women, Annja, you know me. I don’t discriminate—black, white, in color—doesn’t matter, beauty is beauty. And I like to collect beautiful things.”

“And vacuous ones.”

“Oh, you wound me...though I will admit to a weakness for the odd dumb blonde. I can’t help myself. That isn’t a crime. So, let me entertain you.”

On a bucket list of wants and desires, that was right down there on the bottom of Annja’s bucket along with the dregs. But for all his lecherous ways, Garin was charming, and good company, hence the ease with which he took to womanizing. “I’ll give the offer its due consideration, but right now I’m hoping for a couple of days of me time.”

“Well, if you change your mind...”

“You’ll be the first to know,” she replied.

“Excellent,” he said. “Have fun and try not to miss me too much.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said, but he’d already killed the call.

A boy peered over the edge of the grassy bank, looking down at her, Roman emperor to her gladiator waiting in the pit. He disappeared back behind the edge without giving her the thumbs-up.

Annja left the amphitheater, climbing the hillside that would have been banked seating back in the day. She then spotted her Roman emperor; he’d moved on to the shelter of a hedge at the end of the field with a couple of his friends. They were huddled together. She saw the spark of a lighter, which therefore explained the cigarette butts.

Behind the boys she could see a lonely spire.

She left them to smoke their coffin nails and went to check it out.

Chapter 8

“I don’t mean to be difficult—” which of course was exactly what he meant to be “—but what exactly are you are planning to do with this thing now?” Geraint tilted his head slightly, making a show of thinking about it. “I suppose it could make an interesting flowerpot. Maybe you could turn it into a water feature?”

“Or I could hit you over the head with it,” Awena said. Her twin was proving more obstinate and much less enthusiastic than she had hoped he’d be, but then it hadn’t been his idea to steal the stone in the first place, so perhaps it was all just a case of sour grapes. The important thing was that he agreed with her—the stone wasn’t what the museum curator had thought it was. Unfortunately, he didn’t agree that it made it any more important than a well-preserved whetstone. That it had been used to hone blades rather than crush grain made no difference to him.

She took a deep breath, refusing to let him wind her up.

“Do I really have to spell it out to you?” She shook her head.

“Spell away, dear sister. I’m clueless.”

And he really was. He couldn’t see why she’d been compelled to steal it before it was consigned to some dank storage area in the bowels of the museum, never to be seen again.

She wanted him to be as wrapped up with possibilities as she was, not just humoring her. It might have been her idea, but he was her other half and she didn’t just want him to be in this with her; she needed him to be part of it.

“Don’t laugh, but I’m ninety-nine percent certain what you are looking at is the Whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd.” She let that sink in. The whetstone was one of their father’s obsessions. He’d spent most of his life chasing around the country in search of it.

Geraint stood in silence, running a finger over the stone. “Could it be?” What he really meant was: What makes you so sure that it’s one of the things Father wasted his life on?

And it
had
been a waste.

They’d grown up with the stories and knew all about the thirteen Treasures of Britain and their supposed properties. She’d grown up with the myths even if she hadn’t grown up with a father, as he’d spent most of their childhood and adolescence chasing shadows.

“Don’t do this, Awena,” he said finally, not unkindly. “Once you start on this trail it’s going to be impossible to stop. You know that, don’t you? Don’t let it steal your life like it stole his.”

“It won’t.”

“I’m serious. He can’t think about anything else. He’s obsessed. It’s like madness that’s worried away at him over the years, removing all trace of his personality. Now all that’s left is this compulsive need to prove he’s right. Take a good look at this thing, see it for what it really is.”

“And what’s that?” she asked guardedly.

“A lump of stone.”

“Of course it isn’t just a lump of stone. We’ve both read Dad’s notes. Look at it. Think about what he worked out.... This has to be
the
whetstone. It was found in the same area where Tudwal Tudglyd’s whetstone was last known to have been, and there’s no denying it was found with other relics from the same era. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“Can’t it? Or is that just what you want to believe? Dad spent his entire life looking for this. Do you really think he’d have missed it if it was simply sitting in a display case in a local museum? He isn’t an idiot, Awena.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. He
doubted
her. “Certainly it’s the real thing,” she snapped.

“Is it? Can you prove it? Is it supposed to have some kind of property that no other stone has?”

“If it’s used to sharpen a blade and a brave man uses the weapon, then it is guaranteed to draw blood. But if the blade belongs to a coward it won’t even sharpen.”

“But how do you prove that? Or do you have a convenient coward in mind? And who uses swords nowadays. It’s not exactly the weapon of choice, is it?”

“Blade. Not sword. There’s no shortage of knife crime in the city, is there?” She shook her head, refusing to be drawn into it. “It’s not about proving it and you
know
it. I believe that it’s the genuine article and for the moment that’s all that matters.” She prepared herself for a patronizing response, but surprisingly none came. It had been a while since their father had returned to the cottage, so by rights he ought to be home soon. He’d know just by looking at it and that was all the proof she would need. It was all the proof she had ever needed.

“The question remains—what are you going to do with it?” He still hadn’t conceded that it could be the real thing, never mind that it
was.
Awena hadn’t really thought much beyond liberating the whetstone.

“I’ll keep it safe until Dad comes home.”

“
If
he comes home, you mean.”

“He’ll be back,” she said. “He always comes back.” Which was true, but there was no way of knowing when. She was planning on accelerating the process by sending a photo of the whetstone to his cell phone. With luck it would be enough to bring him running.

Geraint covered the stone with the blanket. It was as though he didn’t want to have to look at it.

Awena decided that it might be for the best if she adhered to the old adage of out of sight, out of mind. If he didn’t keep being reminded of it, maybe they wouldn’t have to talk about it until they knew for sure she was right.

She tried hard to hide her disappointment by asking, “How was your trip?”

“Not bad,” he replied, nothing more.

When he’d come bursting into the house he’d been so full of life, desperate to tell her all about his trip; now it was just “not bad,” as though what had happened was suddenly unimportant. The theft had sucked all the joy out of his life. She hadn’t for a minute considered the prospect that he’d see it not as the beginning of some grand adventure they could go on together, but rather her catching their father’s particular madness.

The sooner the stone was out of sight, the better—that much was clear.

The best place for it was in their father’s study.

Geraint never went in there.

He wasn’t interested in reading the volumes and volumes of notes that made up Dad’s journals, the vast quantities of used and battered books he used as his points of reference for the great hunt, or the huge chart hanging proudly on the wall, tracing back their family tree to the last of the true princes of Wales.

The room contained a lifetime’s work, a lifetime’s obsession.

Geraint was right, though; she was in danger of following in his footsteps. She really was her father’s daughter. She was more than capable of becoming obsessed with the search, even though she knew most of them would never be found. There were worse things that might consume her life, especially now that she’d found one of the lost treasures. And didn’t finding one prove the existence of all of the others? In all the years her father had been hunting, he’d never laid his hands on a single one of them. And yet that only fueled his obsession. How would he react now, to actually hold one of them in his hands? To know he’d been right all this time. How would he take that vindication?

What he’d never said on those rare occasions when they’d talked about the quest was what he would do if he ever found one of them. What they did talk about was the history of oppression that was the foundation of Wales, how the English had beaten them down into submission and how these lost relics really were the inheritance of her people. They may have been called the Treasures of Britain, but they belonged to the Celts, not the invaders who came later. These treasures had nothing to do with the Romans, the Danes or the French who invaded their shores. Some of the treasures had their histories in Scotland, but the only documents which recorded their existence were in the
Welsh Triads.

They were the Treasures of Wales.

Something to be treasured by all pure-blooded Celts like her family.