The Detective Omnibus: 'City of Gold and Shadows', 'Flight of a Witch' and 'Funeral of Figaro'

They made the round of the place. A great deal of red glaze pottery, some glass vessels, even one or two fragments of silver; tarnished mirrors, ivory pins, little bronze brooches, a ring or two. Gus, tepid about the collection in general, grew excited about one or two personal ornaments.

‘See this little dragon brooch—there isn’t a straight line in it, it’s composed of a dozen quite unnecessarily complex curves. Can you think of anything less Roman? Yet it is Roman—interbred with Celtic. Like the mixed marriages that were general here. This kind of ornament, in a great many variations, you can locate all down this border. In the north, too, but they differ enough to be recognisable.’

She found the same curvilinear decoration in several other pieces, and delighted him by picking them out without hesitation from the precise and formal Roman artifacts round them.

‘Anything that looks like a symbol for a labyrinth, odds on it’s either Celtic or Norse.’

It was nearly closing time, and the school party, thankfully marshalled by its young leader, was pouring vociferously out into the chill of the early evening, and heading with released shouts for its waiting coach. The last and smallest darted back, self-importantly, to inscribe his name with care in the visitors’ book, which lay open on a table by the door, before allowing himself to be shepherded after his companions. On impulse, Charlotte stopped to look at what he had added in the ‘Remarks’ column, and laughed. ‘Veni, vidi, vici’, announced the ball-pen scrawl.

‘You should sign, too,’ said Gus, at her shoulder.

She knew why, but by then it was almost over in any case, for when was she likely to see him again? So she signed ‘Charlotte Rossignol’, well aware that he was reading the letters as fast as she formed them.

‘Now may I drive you back to the pub?’ he said casually, as they emerged into the open air, and found the studious young man of the kiosk waiting to see his last customers out, one finger still keeping his place in a book. ‘I’m staying there, too. And as it happens, I didn’t walk. I’ve got my car here.’

The car park was empty but for the elderly gentleman’s massive Ford, which was just crunching over the gravel towards the road, an old but impressive bronze Aston Martin which Charlotte supposed must belong to Gus—it sent him up a couple of notches in her regard—and the school bus, still stationary, boiling over with bored boys, and emitting a plaintive chorus of: ‘Why are we waiting?’ The driver stood leaning negligently against a front wing, rolling himself a cigarette. Clearly he had long since trained himself to tune out all awareness of boys unless they menaced his engine or coachwork.

And why were they waiting? The noise they were making indicated that no teacher was present, and there could be only one explanation for his absence now.

‘He’s lost his stray again,’ said Gus, halting with the car keys levelled in his hand.

‘Here he comes now.’ And so he did, puffing up out of the silvered, twilit bowl of Aurae Phiala, ominous at dusk under a low ceiling of dun cloud severed from the earth by a rim of lurid gold. A glass bowl of fragile relics closed with a pewter lid; and outside, the fires of ruin, like a momentary recollection of the night, how many centuries ago, when the Welsh tribesmen massed, raided, killed and burned, writing ‘Finis’ to the history of this haunted city.

‘Poor boy!’ said Charlotte, suddenly outraged by the weariness and exasperation of this ineffectual little man, worn out by a job he had probably chosen as the most profitable within his scope, and now found to be extending him far beyond the end of his tether. ‘Whoever persuaded him he ought to be a teacher?’

‘He’s not that far gone,’ Gus assured her with unexpected shrewdness. ‘He knows when to write off his losses.’

The young man came surging up to them, as the only other responsible people left around. ‘I beg your pardon, but you haven’t seen one of my senior pupils around anywhere, by any chance? A dark boy, nearly seventeen, answers—when he answers!—to the name of Gerry Boden. He’s a professional absentee. Where we are, he is most likely not to be. Sometimes with escort—chorus, rather! This time, apparently, without, which must be by his own contriving. I’m missing just one boy—the magnate himself.’

Between them they supplied all they could remember of the encounter by the roped-off enclosure above the river.

‘He never did come back to us,’ said the young man positively. ‘I always know whether he’s there or not. Like a pain, if you know what I mean.’ They knew what he meant. He shrugged, not merely helplessly, rather with malevolent acceptance. ‘Well, I’ve looked everywhere. He does it on purpose, of course. This isn’t the first time. He’s nearly seventeen, he has plenty of money in his pockets, and he knows this district like the palm of his hand. We’re no more than ten miles from home. He can get a bus or a taxi, and he knows very well where to get either. I don’t know why I worry about him.’

‘Having a conscience does complicate things,’ said Gus with sympathy.

‘It simplifies this one,’ said the teacher grimly. ‘I’ve got a conscience about all this lot, all of ’em younger than our Gerry. This time he can look out for himself, I’m going to get the rest home on time.‘

He clambered aboard the coach, the juniors raised a brief, cheeky cheer, half mocking and half friendly, the driver hoisted himself imperturbably into his cab, and the coach started up and surged ponderously through the gates and away along the Silcaster road.

Charlotte turned, before getting into the car, and looked back once in a long, sweeping survey of the twilit bowl of turf and stone. Nothing moved there except the few blackheaded gulls wheeling and crying above the river. A shadowy, elegiac beauty clothed Aurae Phiala, but there was nothing alive within it.

‘When did it happen?’ she asked. ‘The attack from the west, the one that finally drove the survivors away?’

‘Quite late, around the end of the fourth century. Most of the legions were gone long before that. Frantic appeals for help kept going out to Rome—Rome was still the patron, the protector, the fortress, even when she was falling to pieces herself. About twenty years after the sack of Aurae Phiala, Honorius finally issued an edict that recognised what had been true for nearly a century. He told the Britons they could look for nothing more, no money, no troops, no aid. From then on they had to shift for themselves.’

‘And the Saxons moved in,’ said Charlotte.

He smiled, holding the passenger door open for her. By this time he would not have been surprised if she had taken up the lecture and returned him a brief history of the next four centuries. ‘Well, the Welsh, over this side. Death from the past, not the future. A couple of anachronisms fighting it out here while real life moved in on them from the east almost unnoticed. But their kin survived and intermarried. Nothing quite disappears in history.’