morning he announced he'd found the gold.'
'A tractor?' Audley frowned. 'It wasn't in the house, then?'
Digby looked at him in surprise. 'Oh, no. It was in the kitchen garden, over by one of the gun-bastions along the north rampart—right out in the open, so Cotton says. He was dummy5
one of the first outsiders to see it.'
'What happened, exactly?'
'That morning? Well, Ratcliffe had it all organised, that's for sure. The first thing Cotton knew about it was when Ratcliffe phoned him up, about ten o'clock. Cool as a cucumber, Cotton says. He simply said he'd found his family treasure, and would Cotton kindly telephone the local coroner because it was his job to take it in charge now, for the time being anyway. And he'd better phone his divisional HQ as well, because once the coroner had taken it then there'd be a security angle.'
'And what did—ah—Cotton say to that?'
'He asked what the treasure consisted of. And Ratcliffe said it was gold, about a ton of it, give or take a hundredweight or two.
'He said that?'
Digby nodded, deadpan. 'Cotton reckons he'd dug it up bit by bit over those three days, and then worked out exactly what he intended to do. Because by the time he got there on his bicycle there were a dozen of Ratcliffe's longhaired friends standing guard over it— he'd seen some of them drive through the village that morning, before the phone call. And he had others patrolling the grounds to keep people out as well, and they weren't there the previous day. Or not in the village, anyway.'
'His long-haired friends?' Audley considered the dummy5
possibilities. 'Meaning Ratcliffe's regiment of the Roundhead Wing, I take it?'
Digby shrugged. 'I don't know. But . . . probably.'
'So he kept everyone out of the castle grounds, did he?'
'Not everyone. He let in the people he wanted—he'd phoned a Sunday newspaper, and the others caught on double-quick.
Cotton says it was a nightmare, the next week or two, with journalists and sightseers. But when they found they couldn't get into the grounds unless they went in through the front gate they cleared off—the sightseers did, anyway.'
Audley stared at the dashboard. Cool as a cucumber and bloody well organised, Charlie Ratcliffe had been, sitting day after day on a steadily increasing pile of gold ingots—and night after night, alone in the midst of his ancestral loot.
The gold of the Indies. King Philip's gold. Captain Sir Edward Parrott's gold. Colonel Nathaniel Parrott's gold. And then nobody's gold for over three hundred years.
And now Charlie Ratcliffe's gold by every law and every custom that made any sense. It was hard not to be on Charlie's side, even with the as yet unproved—and probably unprovable—suspicion that he had played most foully for it.
Because there was a much older and crueller law which applied to gold, a law which transcended every other one: those who had the guts to find it and the wit to keep it were its natural owners. Once it would have held force of arms as well as wit, now it took law as well. But unless Charlie dummy5
Ratcliffe could be proved a murderer public opinion would be on his side, no matter what his politics.
'But now there are only two of them looking after the place?'
'So Cotton says.' Digby nodded. 'It was a nine-days' wonder
—and apparently there's nothing much to see now but one damn great hole in the kitchen garden, like a bomb hit it. You won't have any trouble finding it, he says.' He glanced shrewdly at Audley. 'If you still want to.'
There was nothing here for him— for either of them—
thought Audley. But Digby didn't know about the secret Nayler had dangled in front of him over the telephone, which was a private matter, having nothing to do with gold or politics or murder.
'I still want to—yes.'
Self-indulgence.
'All right.' Digby was deadpan again. 'Cotton will go along to the house and talk to the handyman, and I'll go to the pub and talk to the gardener. That should give you a clear run for an hour or so.'
The young sergeant had come to the same conclusion, that Swine Brook, not Standingham, was their only hope; and that this side-trip was either pointless or the product of some information which Audley was keeping to himself. If it had been Paul Mitchell sitting beside him there would have been signs of rebellion, or snide comments at the least; but Digby, mercifully, was better disciplined.
dummy5
'How do I get into the castle grounds from here?'
'Ah—now I've got you something that may help there.' Digby produced a tattered booklet from his coat pocket. 'I borrowed this from Cotton. There isn't any modern guide-book to the castle, because it's never been open to the public.
But there was this old Methodist minister who wrote a history of the place back in Victorian times, and there's a map in the back which shows the layout . . . it's a bit out of date, but the castle part hasn't changed—the village has expanded to the south, that's all, Cotton says—'
He opened the booklet carefully and spread out a dog-eared and yellowing map on his lap. 'We're just about
