The Roman city of Aurae Phiala remained closed to the public next day, and for several days following, an apologetic notice on the gate making known the fact to a largely indifferent general public. The enclosure was never exactly crowded, even in the height of the summer. On the riverside, where the pathway could not be closed, a uniformed policeman paced imperturbably, and occasionally moved people along if they tended to congregate and linger too long. The natives, markedly, did not. They passed, apparently oblivious, intent only on their own business; but hardly a soul in the village failed to pass at some time during that day, and not one missed a detail of what was there to be seen.
Operations had begun early. Breakfast was not yet over at the curator’s house when Orrie came to announce that the police were in occupation, and beginning to stake out the ground. Paviour left his coffee without a word, and went rushing away to protect his beloved site, and the two girls followed in slightly apprehensive curiosity. Three uniformed men were there with spades and sieves, and three or four more in plain clothes, with George Felse at the head of operations. More surprising, and to Paviour more confounding and conciliating at the same time, was the presence of Gus Hambro, busy with a large clip-board, charting on squared paper the patch of ground to be taken up, and sketching a hurried but accurately proportioned elevation of the exposed vault of the flue. He had a coloured pencil behind either ear, and a couple more in his breast pocket.
‘I knew you wouldn’t mind,’ said Bill Lawrence, hurrying to account for the phenomenon, a sheaf of plastic sacks and fine brushes under his arm. ‘He came along to copy some lettering in the museum, not expecting the place to be closed, of course. When he heard why, naturally he was interested. It was my idea, asking him if he’d like to lend a hand on doing what recording
‘Naturally,’ said Gus diplomatically, ‘I regard myself as under your orders, sir. If there’s any possibility of anything to be gained from this operation—and in the absence of the kind of labour you’d prefer to have on a job like this—I thought an extra pair of hands might be welcome.’
A faint look of baffled pleasure crossed Paviour’s harried face and vanished again instantly. However carefully and reverently the job was going to be handled, obviously he expected nothing but disaster. He hovered about the site restlessly, like one barefoot on thorns, all the while they were removing the debris of sagging, uprooted broom bushes, which Orrie phlegmatically loaded into a handcart and wheeled away along the riverside path to be unloaded and burned as far as possible from the sacred precincts. The care with which they examined and photographed those bushes before allowing them to be removed brought Paviour quivering to the spot. With straining eyes he watched small fragments, meaningless to the lay eye, delicately extricated from the tangle of earth about the roots and the soft turf beneath them, cased in plastic, and labelled.
‘Not your relics, I’m afraid,’ said George, meeting the baffled and frantic gaze. ‘Ours.’
He dared not ask, and was not told more. But he could not tear himself away. The operation proceeded methodically once the bushes had been cleared, though the spots where the mysterious fragments had been found were carefully tagged and covered with plastic. The broken fringes of grass were lifted off and stacked well out of the way, the spades began to clear the ground downwards from the arc of russet brickwork, warily because of sinister little trickles of loose earth that drifted down the slope at every movement. Layer by layer the narrow strata of brick and rubble were laid bare. Bill Lawrence, his eyes gleaming with the hunting passion, pounced on the fragments of encrusted ceramic and bone that were left behind in the police sieves, and Gus industriously entered their location in his graph, and sketched in each layer of masonry as it emerged.
Detective-Constable Barnes, large, rustic, intelligent and benign, put down his spade and went to work lovingly with a soft brush on the exposed uprights of the flue, whisking away loose, moist soil that abandoned its hold with revealing readiness. ‘Look at that, now! That stuff’s only been dropped here a few days. Watch that brickwork dry off in the sun, it’ll be as pale as the arch, here, in ten minutes. I reckon there was eighteen inches or so of this passage open till the bank gave way.’
They had just passed that level now, and the darkness that yawned within the flue was black and inviting. Barnes reached a long arm over the ridge of fallen soil that remained in the mouth of the hole, and groped experimentally around within.
‘Drops a foot, inside there. The bushes covered it. Nobody walks on a slope like this for choice, only sheep, and they don’t let sheep graze this lot. Reasonable folks walk on the level—either up top, or down below.’
‘What’s it feel like, as far as you can reach?’ George asked. ‘Still silted over, or any traces of flooring? Tiles? Stone-work?’
‘No, rubble. But still dropping. I’d say you’d get clear flooring a yard or two inside there.’
Lesley, watching in fascination from the sidelines, said with conviction: ‘You’ve done this before! I know the signs.’
‘Only once, miss.’ Detective-Constable Barnes turned his benevolent gaze upon her with pleasure. He liked a pretty girl. ‘I went on a dig with a bunch from Birmingham University. They had me brushing out post-holes on some rubbish dump they said was a castle. Not my idea of a castle. We never turned up nothing like this. My dad was a mason —I reckon he’d have been right interested in these bricks. There’s a colour for you! Spot-on what you mean when you say “brick”.’
‘What’s it like above? Never mind further in, how about the first couple of feet?’
‘Feels sound as rock. Arched—shallow, like.’ His stretched knuckles tapped as far as they could reach. ‘Barrel- vaulted, but low. Could be brick, could be stone. But I’d say brick. I can feel the courses.’ He withdrew a hand like a shovel, and spread fingers black with the fine dust of centuries and a mere veiling of cobweb. ‘Not much for seventeen hundred years, is it?’
The opening loomed before them, sliced into the bank, brushed relatively clean, a narrow, erect oblong of darkness with a rounded roof and pale, red and amber jambs rooted in deep green turf. And within was empty darkness, fenced off by no more than a ridge of soil. George looked round his team, and they were all massive countrymen, well in advance of the minimum police requirements. The slightest person present, leaving out the girls, was Gus Hambro, busy pricking in on his diagram the latest minor find.
‘Care to take a look inside for us? You’re the ratling.’
‘Loan me a torch, and I’ll have a go,’ said Gus. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘Whatever you see. Structure, condition—and anything that looks out of place.’
‘Right! Hang on to this,’ he said to Bill Lawrence, and thrust the clip-board and its records at him. He shed his array of colour pencils, dropping them haphazard into the grass, hesitated whether to shed his tweed jacket, too, and then, considering its worn condition, buttoned it closely for protection instead. The dank darkness had a chill
