Time Enough To Die (13 page)

Gold votives gleamed next to carefully mended bowls and platters of Samian ware. An amphora leaned in the corner. Tiny black symbols crawled across crumpled and stained slivers of wood, rare examples of Latin cursive writing. “Are these the letters Howard wrote about in
Letters from Roman Britain?"
Matilda asked.

"Yes,” Ionescu replied, “these are the originals. Or some of them, rather. He's saving the rest for another book. Of course he's very busy with other work just now."

"He has a finger in every pot, doesn't he?” Matilda allowed herself to be hurried along.

They emerged in a windowless room whose stainless steel ambiance reminded her of the morgue photos of Linda Burkett. But this room smelled more of disinfectant and formaldehyde than of raw mortality. Here death's sting was blunted, and the grave's victory made academic.

Ionescu brought two boxes from a refrigerated room, placed them on a bench, and removed the lids. He made the gesture of a maitre d’ indicating the best table in the house. “There you are."

"Thank you.” Matilda bent over the smaller box.

The hand was delicately molded, the nails smooth, the flesh stained brown. It rested palm upward, fingers gently curved. Matilda was reminded of Linda's hand, lying mute and suppliant on Durslow's vibrant rock. This hand, though, had come from the Moss. If Durslow was the Earth's bony brow, then the Moss was its throat.

Matilda barely kept herself from reaching across time and clasping the severed hand in her own. “What have you learned?” she asked.

"It's female,” Ionescu replied. “First century A.D., probably. The calluses on thumb and forefinger indicate that she worked a spindle, making yarn. The hand fits the body perfectly."

A spindle?
With a nod toward the infinite patterns of existence, Matilda touched the ancient spindle in her pocket and looked into the other box. The headless body did not have the compelling humanity of the hand. Its bones had dissolved over the centuries, and the flesh had become leather. Now it resembled a squashed brown satchel, with the arms and stumps of legs as straps. Its odor reminded Matilda of sad dark pools in an antediluvian bog.

"She was in her twenties,” said Ionescu, “healthy if fine-boned for a Celt. Her stomach was empty except for a bit of baked and burned barley-cake. A ritual last meal, Dr. Sweeney thinks. We could tell by the smoothness of the cuts about the neck that she'd been deliberately decapitated, after having been bashed from behind. And there's a cord, a garrote, well up beneath her chin.... “He stopped dead. His pale skin went faintly green. “Oh bloody hell, I wasn't supposed to tell about that, Sweeney will have my own head, right enough."

"I won't tell him,” Matilda said soothingly. “So her head turned up, too? When?"

"Three weeks ago, at the beginning of the month. Dr. Sweeney didn't have time to study it properly before he went off to the dig."

"May I see it, please?"

Ionescu looked around nervously, as though expecting Sweeney to leap out of a filing cabinet and crow, “Caught you!” Sucking on his teeth, he shuffled off to the storeroom and returned with another box.

The woman's head, too, was stained a deep brown. Her features had collapsed, making her grimace—although not in pain, Matilda thought, but in ecstasy. Long strands of hair colored red from the peat still clung to her scalp. As Ionescu had pointed out, her skull had been crushed from behind.

Squinting, Matilda could just make out the cord that was twisted around the severed neck. The furrow caused by the ligature didn't curve upward in the back, so it wasn't a noose. Someone had thrust a stick through the knot at the base of her skull and turned it, tightening the cord and choking the life from the hopefully unconscious woman.

"Howard's right,” Matilda said. “She was a ritual sacrifice, killed three ways and given to the bog. Are there local legends about Shadow Moss?"

Ionescu blinked at her, thinking she'd changed subjects in mid-paragraph. “Legends? I'm a scientist."

Matilda desisted. She could get that type of reaction from Gareth. She spent another few moments looking from hand to body to head and back. The human shell, torn from its earthy womb, was drained of feeling. She sensed only that the woman had gone willingly to her death, surrendering her soul to the Otherworld without a backward look. The Druids had preached the immortality of the soul. The woman had believed in eternity. And here she lay, her hand not a relic of dead time but a message from a living past.

"Thank you,” Matilda said. “I'll find my way out."

Musing on humankind's perverse taste for death, Matilda drove further into the city and left her car in the Borley Arcade car park. The Victorian wrought-iron and glass building brought a smile to her lips. There was not a straight line in all the polished exuberance of the place. The Antiquary's Corner occupied a space on the second floor, its windows presenting tasteful oddments of gold and porcelain as befit an exclusive shop in an exclusive neighborhood.

Matilda stepped inside. Baskets of soaps and potions exuded a rich floral scent that wiped away the odor of formaldehyde still clinging to her sinuses. A Chopin etude wafted from hidden speakers. Royal Doulton and Waterford lay temptingly to hand. She put her hands in her pockets.

The artifacts inside a row of glass-fronted cabinets seemed almost shabby. Matilda identified a bronze Saxon brooch, several Roman oil lamps, a glass vial, clay votive figures, an ivory crucifix, and a scattering of verdigris-encrusted coins that Dunning had been wise enough not to pretty up. Discreet white cards with prices stood before each item. Matilda winced.

A woman emerged from the rear of the shop. Her perfectly made-up face was crowned by a pouf of white hair. Her lavender suit was a designer model, tailored to her sylph-like figure. Her smile was gracious but cool. She'd already sized up Matilda, in her denim skirt and bulky sweater, as a lump of coal. “May I help you?"

"Mrs. Dunning? I'm Dr. Matilda Gray. I'm working with Howard Sweeney at the excavations at Corcester."

"I'm afraid I'm not acquainted with Dr. Sweeney."

"But you know he's a Ph.D."

Celia's smile stiffened. “As an antiquities dealer it behooves me to know who the experts are."

From the back of the shop stepped a girl no older than Ashley. In fact, she looked like a thin, brunette Ashley gone to seed. Her lipsticked mouth was turned down in a pout. She carried a stack of cardboard boxes and a roll of brown paper.

Celia turned toward her. “Make sure the receipt in the box matches the mailing label, Emma. If you send the wrong item to the wrong place again, I'll dock the return postage from your pay."

Emma bobbed up and down. “Yes, ma'am. Very good, ma'am.” It didn't take psychic skills to catch the sarcasm in the girl's voice.

Celia turned back to Matilda. “What can I do for you, Dr. Gray?"

"I've been involved with a case or two of antiquities looting back in the States. I'm interviewing dealers here in Britain to see how they handle the situation. Which can sometimes lead to murder, I hear. Your own assistant.... “Matilda paused delicately.

"Dreadful business, that,” Celia said. “Nothing to do with me, though. I don't deal in stolen antiquities. I buy only from the legal owner after he's completed the proper paperwork. I sell only those things for which I can obtain a proper expertise."

"And that's why your prices are so high?"

"Yes. Authenticity comes dear."

"Do you solicit the owners,” Matilda went on, “or do they come to you?"

"I'm a well-known legitimate dealer. I don't have to—solicit."

And yet Linda, Celia's employee, had been soliciting Reynolds. Had Linda been working for herself? Matilda wondered. Or was Celia playing her cards very close to her fashionable lavender chest? A falling-out among thieves often led to murder.... The woman was impossible to read. Matilda felt as though she were facing the ice-wall of a glacier. The tip of her nose was growing cold.

"It's a shame you couldn't sell Adrian Reynolds’ statuary for him,” she essayed. “But the looters got there first. Fortunately the statuary turned up safe in Canada."

"Adrian Reynolds?” Celia asked.

"He owns the land in Corcester where the site of Cornovium is located. Surely you've heard of the stolen Romano-British statuary."

"Not at all,” said Celia. She took two steps forward.

Matilda didn't retreat. “I imagine it was smuggled out of the country with forged papers. Pity, isn't it? If people refused to buy antiquities then the looters would have no market. A lot of sites would be saved. Antiquities belong in museums."

"No museum can afford to buy every antiquity that appears,” said Celia. “Honest people who buy well-attested artifacts save them from destruction by the ignorant. Even artifacts that go to museums are likely to be bundled into a dusty corner. Private owners have the resources to properly appreciate our cultural heritage."

So that was her rationale, Matilda thought. And yet she had no reason to believe Celia guilty of anything underhanded, let alone murder. Matilda simply didn't trust people who had no emotions.

Emma rustled brown paper and gazed out at the two women from beneath penciled brows. A well-dressed couple strolled into the shop and starting inspecting the Waterford, exchanging comments in French. Celia's nostrils flared. “Please excuse me, Dr. Gray.” She didn't wait for Matilda to respond. She advanced on the customers murmuring obsequious French.

And merde to you too,
Matilda thought at the woman. She turned toward Emma and smiled.

Emma smiled tentatively back.

"Emma,” snapped Celia. “Bring out the Edinburgh Thistle champagne flutes."

Shrugging, Matilda left the shop and, after a bit of window-browsing, Borley Arcade. She should turn Gareth loose on Emma—after separating her from the Snow Queen.

It was well past noon, and she was getting a headache. Matilda walked past a crowded pizza pub and a beef carvery and within a couple of blocks found a Greek restaurant tucked into the ground floor of an old brick office building. The posters of olive trees and ancient temples in the windows were curled and faded. The place had been there a while. Above the posters was painted the legend, “Acropolis Cafe. Constantine Veliotes, owner and manager."

She found a booth by the window and ordered a vegetable plate from the solitary waiter. From Mr. Veliotes himself, she corrected, when he rushed from the swinging door of the kitchen to the cash register and started making change for a departing customer.

Family photographs filled the wall behind the counter. Matilda traced the owner from a slender dark-haired youth with a fierce black moustache to his present incarnation, a man broadened by the inexorable pull of time and gravity, both head and facial hair dulled to gray. The woman who stood with him holding a baby in the oldest picture never reappeared, although the baby apparently grew into a handsome young man with a 200-watt movie-star smile. An even-armed Greek cross dangled from a photo of him standing before the shiny facade of Borley Arcade.

"Is that your son?” Matilda asked Veliotes when he set a bowl of lentil soup before her.

The man's burst of sorrow, anger, and fear almost gagged her. “I have no son,” he said. “No son, no longer."

"I'm sorry.” Matilda gulped and stared down into the soup bowl. That was interesting. Perhaps the wife had died. Perhaps the son had, too. Or was in prison.... Well, he was certainly estranged from his father. She sipped at the soup and told herself to mind her own business, which was already booming.

She hurried through her lunch, her appetite no longer quite so keen. While the dolmas, falafel, and tabouli were delectable they seemed to taste very faintly of ashes.

Soon she was out of the city and back on the country road. The afternoon darkened as black clouds crowded up the western sky. Gusts of wind bent the trees shuddering toward the east. The first raindrops splattered on the windshield as Matilda passed the lay-by where she'd stopped that morning. A good thing she'd taken the opportunity to empty her mind. Now it was teeming. Her thoughts jostled each other like shoppers at a sale searching for items that fit.

Rain poured on the roof of the car, streamed down the windshield, swished around the tires. The countryside seemed to melt, its colors running. Matilda slowed. The road had no shoulders—she couldn't stop. She crawled around one bend and then another. To her left the land fell away into a silvery-green blur. A bus approached in the right, inside, lane.

Her windshield wipers sliced the scene into slivers of time. She saw the bow wave ahead of the bus's tires. She saw water spewing from its hood and roof. Only one wiper flopped back and forth on its streaming windshield. The bus's radiator loomed directly before her, sodden insects caught in its teeth.

She wrenched her steering wheel, turning the car toward the side of the road. A metal barrier stood where a shoulder should have been. Beyond that was nothing but flooded air.

Her tires skidded. The left side of her car screeched along the barrier. The bus grated along the other side.

And then, suddenly, the road before her was clear, a drenched strip of black tarmac lined with nettles. She braked, lightly, and looked in all her mirrors. The dark blur of the bus was gone. After the squeal of metal on metal the sound of the rain seemed soft and soothing.

It was at least a mile before Matilda started breathing again, two before she blinked, three before she loosened her white-knuckled grip of the steering wheel.

She drove on into Corcester by rote, thinking nothing, feeling nothing except the ebb of adrenalin from her body. The rain slowed and stopped, and a Jacob's ladder of sunshine broke through a rift in the clouds.

The clouds had burst in Corcester, too, she saw as she pulled into the parking lot beside the hotel. The gutters ran full and the flowers in the gardens across the way were drooping, beaten down by the rain. Sweeney had no doubt rushed all the students inside. The green mound of the fort gleamed pristinely. She hoped the trenches hadn't collapsed.

Matilda crawled from the car. She shut and locked the door and put the keys in her bag. Her knees were trembling. Slowly she walked across the street toward the dig.