There was neither conviction nor passion in his voice. He was simply stating facts for Audley to accept or dismiss as he chose. Sir Kenneth might have used the same words. Faith had said it outright and Stocker had suggested it.
And now even Audley found himself wanting to believe it too.
Treasure–above all, treasure of gold–had always driven men to irrational acts. Cortes and Pizarro and all the victims of the search for the Seven Cities and the Gilded Man. Schliemann's treasure had been enough to tempt Steerforth to risk five lives and lose his own.
It had killed Bloch quickly and Morrison after half a lifetime.
But was it enough to haunt a man like Panin?
He realised with a start that he was staring direetly at Roskill, and staring that young man out of countenance. And there was something else—
It was the hotel manager, standing at his elbow, now beautifully dinner-jacketed and still sleekly out of place against the dark oak dummy4
beams.
'Excuse me, Dr Audley.'
And marvellously out of place in Newton Chester too, thought Audley. The sleepy place could have seen nothing so Mediterranean since the Roman legion from Lincoln had come marching by to build its practice camp down the road.
'Excuse me for interrupting you, Dr Audley, but Mistaire Warren, of Castle Farm–he was looking for you this afternoon here. He left a package for you which I have.'
The man took each aspirate like a show-jumper on a tricky course of fences, landing triumphantly on the final full stop for a clear round.
Butler already had an airfield map, but Audley suddenly wanted to get away from them all–to consider Panin for a moment by himself and to collect his thoughts again. This was a sufficient excuse.
He followed the manager out into the hall, where the fellow darted into his office and reappeared flourishing a large envelope so exuberantly that Audley thought for a second that he was going to spin it across the hallway.
But the flourish was converted into an elegant little bow, and Audley felt honour-bound to open it there and then as though it was a document of the highest importance.
There was a note pinned to the folded map, biro-scrawled in a childishly copperplate hand.
'Dear Dr Audley–I enclose my father's map, as promised. I'm sorry it isn't quite what I thought. The runways are marked in pencil dummy4
though, but none of the buildings. My father was very interested in
—'
The next word stopped Audley dead in mid-sentence.
Carefully he unfolded the creased section of the large-scale ordnance survey map. It wasn't luck really, he told himself. He would have come to it himself in the end, sooner or later. Indeed, he could see the signposts pointing to it along the way, which he had left behind only half-read.
And there it was, of course: Steerforth's treasure neatly and precisely marked for him. Marked as exactly as if it had been Steerforth, and not Keith Warren's father, who had recorded it.
As for luck, though–if any man had had good luck, and then equally undeserved and final bad luck, it had been John Steerforth.
XVI
For the second time Audley watched the water tower sink slowly into the tarmac skyline behind him. He did up another button on his raincoat. Roskill was driving with his window down, and the Land-Rover was draughty; it was another unseasonable morning, clear enough, but grey and unfriendly. One of those mornings when spring hadn't even tried to break through, even falsely.
Morning had purged the old airfield altogether of the atmosphere it had possessed on Sunday evening: it was no longer melancholy and forlorn, but merely bleak.
dummy4
But it was a good morning for digging–that had been Butler's only comment as he dumped the spades in the back. And Butler, in navy-blue donkey-jacket and baggy gardening trousers, had undeniably come prepared to dig.
Roskill's confidence was not so complete; or perhaps it was simply that his equally ancient tweeds still retained a lingering elegance.
As he had explained unapologetically the night before, he had no garden of his own, and consequently no gardening clothes.
Audley superimposed the ribbon of runway and the waving sea of grass on the map which was now etched on his memory. At about this point, on the left, there should be the break in the grass which marked the concrete base of the safe deposit hut.
'Stop here for a moment.'
He climbed out of the cabin and took in the whole circuit of the surrounding landscape. Ahead of him the taxiing strip stretched away, narrowing until it merged with the trees in the distance.
Behind him the slow incline of the Hump obscured the old built-up area of the field. On each side the prairie lay wide and open. It was still a lonely and naked place, with only the distant racket of a tractor out of sight to the right: Farmer Warren was busy cutting his Italian rye grass for his wife's uncle's silage.
Audley climbed back into the cabin, pointing out to Roskill the low, irregular line of hillocks ahead and off the tarmac strip to the left, insignificant in themselves, but perfectly discernible in their level surroundings.
