‘We’ll be holding a reconstruction later today, and giving out information to the public. I have some leaflets here, and I wondered if you might like to take them for your members.’
‘Of course.’
‘Shocking business,’ Orr said. Beside Mrs Rutter he looked lanky and craggy and slightly manic, tufts of grizzled hair sticking out of his ears and nostrils and forming the little beard which bobbed up and down as he spoke. ‘Was she seen here, then, on the day she disappeared?’ She had his accent now, clipped, Scottish east coast from Edinburgh or Fife.
‘That’s what we need to establish, Mr Orr. It seems probable from what else we know that she did come here on that afternoon or evening, but we need witnesses.’
‘Professor,’ Mrs Rutter said.
‘Pardon?’
‘Robbie is Professor Orr,’ Mrs Rutter beamed. ‘I thought I should let you know, but you must call us Robbie and Harriet.’
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘A highly distinguished man. A professor of archaeology.’
‘Former professor of archaeology, now retired,’ he said. ‘A mere amateur historian now, and thorn in Boadicea’s flesh.’
Harriet burst into more trilling laughter. Kathy guessed that this was rather excessive for her, brought on by Professor Orr’s presence.
‘I’m sorry, Kathy. You must excuse us. This is one of our little in-jokes. Boadicea is our name for the manager of this shopping centre. A harridan of a woman, whom Robbie puts securely in her place.’
‘Her ambition, do you see,’ Orr added, acknowledging the compliment with a smile that made his beard jump, ‘is to do, in shopping terms, to London and the Home Counties pretty much what Queen Boadicea did to Roman Britain-which is to say, lay it waste.’
More appreciative laughter.
‘Boadicea-Bo Seager; yes, very good.’ Kathy smiled.
‘You know her, do you?’ They looked at her in surprise.
‘I’ve met her, yes. And I can see what you mean.’
‘Robbie was here before any of us, fighting the good fight. Before the centre was even built.’
‘It was my last major project, Kathy-may I call you that? Sergeant seems wrong somehow. Whenever anyone uses the word sergeant I immediately picture my old drill sergeant, the most terrifying man in all the world. Conditioning, I suppose. You’re not too terrifying, are you, Kathy?’
His beard gave a playful little leap and Kathy thought, you’re a bit of a lad, aren’t you, Robbie?
‘ Well, tell Kathy about your work here, Robbie,’ Mrs Rutter scolded him.
‘Ah yes. Well now, would you be aware of the reason for the name Silvermeadow, Kathy?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘It’s like this. Do you know that great big ugly structure out there in the upper carpark, with illuminated advertisements for the films showing at the picture house and so on?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s hard to believe it now, but that used to be the edge of a small wood, a copse really, on the crest of the hill. And one hundred and seventy years ago, a farmer who was ploughing up there, extending his field into the wood, unearthed a hoard of Saxon silver.’
‘Really?’
‘Aye. It’s believed that it was buried by a nobleman fleeing from the Battle of Maldon, which was fought twenty miles east of here. Would you be familiar with the Battle of Maldon from your schooldays, Kathy?’
‘Er, don’t think I am. Must have been asleep during that one.’
‘Shame on you!’ he teased. ‘Not a huge battle by modern standards, of course, but a great battle for its time all the same, between the Saxons and the Viking horde. I’m talking here of the true Battle of Maldon, of AD 991, not the legendary battle of 994, said to have lasted for fourteen days.’
‘Right.’
‘Aye. Well, anyway, these shopping centre people had no knowledge of the origin of the name. They merely noticed it on their maps as Silvermeadow Hill, and I suppose the combination of images that it conjured up, of hard cash on the one hand and a pastoral fairyland on the other, must have had a strong appeal to them.’
He arched one bushy eyebrow at her, a slightly manic gleam developing in his eye as he made the point. ‘Their choice of name was completely cynical, of course, suggesting that their monstrous new construction had some sort of connection with this place. I’m quite sure they never even considered whether this miserable little hill might have had a history at all. To them, it was merely a suitably positioned piece of real estate that might as well have been in Illinois or Manitoba.
‘But the place did have a history, you see. For after the battle one of the Saxon noblemen and his party were pursued here by the victorious Vikings, as rapacious for silver as the developers of this shopping centre. Indeed, I have no doubt there is a strong genetic connection.’
‘What happened?’
‘The Saxon party arrived here in the late afternoon, exhausted and demoralised, and buried their precious silver in the wood. Then they came down here, where we are now, in the lee of the hill, and made a fire and a camp for the night. They must have thought themselves safe from pursuit. But the Norsemen had not given up, and with the first dawn light they swept over the hill and descended on the Saxons like wolves, slaughtering them, every one.’ Orr paused for effect, sweeping his hand about him. ‘Eight men and boys, all murdered here, their corpses buried on the spot. Here they lay, undisturbed, for precisely one thousand years.’ He leant towards Kathy and fixed her with a wild stare. ‘ Precisely, mind you, that’s the uncanny thing. One millennium, to the day, perhaps the very hour, until they were disturbed by a bulldozer beginning the construction of this place.’
Kathy nodded, imagining the effect of his theatrical story-telling on his lady admirers in the Silvermeadow Residents’ Association.
‘Well, they had to stop, of course, as soon as the skeletons came to light. A proper archaeological assessment had to be made. I was nearby, at the local university, and this was my period, the Viking incursions. I lived here on the site for months, in those site huts you can still see round the east end of the building, with a team of volunteers, students and young people from all over, trying to establish what else was here before they chewed it up in their great machines.’
The imagery struck Kathy as oddly apt, given what had happened to Kerri Vlasich. But then the whole of Orr’s tale, with his rather exultant account of past murder, had an uncomfortable resonance with Kerri’s death.
‘And was there anything else?’
‘No. Oh there were a few surprises beneath the ground for them-a hidden spring, a pocket of sand-but nothing for me. My volunteers left at the end of that first summer, but I returned, from time to time. The construction workers got to know me, the mad professor.’ He chuckled, eyes twinkling. ‘They adopted me, like a mascot, an old goat.’
‘And now he’s one of us,’ Mrs Rutter said. ‘One of our most distinguished members.’
‘Oh now Harriet…’ he admonished her.
‘You must enjoy coming here,’ Kathy said.
‘I should describe it as a love-hate relationship,’ she said. ‘It’s terribly convenient, and comfortable, and we meet all our friends here. But it’s also very crass, of course, so commercial.’
‘It’s worse than that, Harriet. It’s deadening, it feeds on life.’
‘How do you mean?’ Kathy asked.
‘I mean that it feeds on all the real places around here, all the real towns and villages that have been steadily growing and developing for a thousand years, and are now having the life-blood sucked out of them by this great hulking parasite!’ His eyes blazed at the word. ‘And I also mean that it takes the life out of people, too. It is an offence against our natures, Kathy. It sanitises us, deodorises us, and turns us into shadows. Look at them!’ he roared, sweeping an upturned hand like a claw towards the shoppers meandering past. ‘It’s turning a warrior race, the hammer of the Scots, the butchers of the Welsh and Irish, the ravagers of half the globe, into a docile herd of consumers who care for nothing but woolly jumpers and soft music.’
Harriet Rutter gave a delighted chuckle. ‘And yet we keep coming back, do we not, Robbie?’
