‘Then why hasn’t somebody had a go before this?’
‘Be yourself, man! The castle is on private property. Nobody would have dared to organise a dig for gold without permission, but now our lot have come along and begun the work, so the whole situation, so far as the natives are concerned, has changed.’
‘They’ve still no right to come and ruin Tynant’s work.’
‘Never mind about their rights. Of course they haven’t got any, but the fact that digging is being done, and quite deep digging at that, means that all the old stories will have come back to people’s minds. When I was getting the drinks at lunchtime today, the barman asked me whether we’d had any luck yet. “Luck about what?” I said. At that, he winked and laid a finger resembling a large pork sausage against his bulbous proboscis and then shook his head at me. Something has gone around and, if the next village has got wind of a treasure hunt, goodness knows what is seething underground in Holdy itself. I think we ought to take advantage of the moonlight to have a good look at the whole site while nobody else is about.’
‘I’m not too enthusiastic about being seen loitering about on the site at present. I think Tynant may suspect Saltergate is at the bottom of this destruction business. He doesn’t accept that it was done by louts or by Stickle and Stour. You remember that young Priscilla told us that Tynant and Saltergate had a bust-up last week. She heard Saltergate talking to Mrs Saltergate about it. I wonder whether my godmother has got the letter I posted this afternoon and what she will make of what I told her?’
‘Don’t change the subject. Are we going gold-digging or aren’t we?’
‘I thought I had made my position clear,’ said Bonamy. ‘However, reluctant as I am to underline such remarks as I may deign to toss at you as fancy dictates and my blood-pressure allows, I will make myself clearer. I don’t go anywhere near those ruddy ruins at night, treasure or no treasure. I don’t intend to be mistaken for one of the blighters who messed up those trenches. Tynant is nearly crazy with fury about them.’
‘Who’s to see us?’
‘Probably half the village would see us. There must have been a couple of dozen gawpers there when we got to the site this morning, so the word will have gone round to everybody by now and, for all I know, there may be a couple of hundred at the site at this very moment, rooting around like pigs after truffles. Tynant will have to pay nightwatchmen with guns and dogs if he wants to keep people off treasure-hunting now. It will be worse than the Klondyke gold-rush.’
‘Tynant is as sick as mud, I agree, but, whatever Priscilla says, I don’t believe Tynant really thinks Saltergate is responsible for the damage. Nobody who has even the slightest knowledge of him would think for an instant that he would be capable of ruining another man’s work. If the boot was on the other foot I wouldn’t be so sure. Tynant is not my favourite man and I think him quite capable of playing nasty tricks.’
‘You’re biased because of his interest in Susannah.’
‘Maybe. Anyway, Fiona thinks that he has put his luck to the test and that Susannah has turned him down. That was a strange business about her and the gamekeeper and the motorbike thing. I wonder what the idea was?’
‘The idea of leaving the bike in those woods? It makes no sense at all, unless Stickle and Stour were Veryan’s killers and ditched the bike so that they couldn’t be traced through its being recognised.’
‘I might accept that if they had cleared out directly they knew that the police were not going to accept that Veryan’s death was accidental, but they stayed on through all the police questioning. It’s only over the last few days that we haven’t seen anything of them.’
Mowbray had leant heavily on Goole when the police found the vehicle in the woods.
‘How did it come there?’
‘How should I know? It ain’t a part of the woods which concerns me and my work. Them trees and bushes isn’t nobody’s concern but the woodman’s, and he don’t have no call to go there till he’s told, and he won’t be told, not till the master gets back.’
‘The men who own that bike and sidecar have gone missing. What do you know about that?’
‘What men? I don’t know nobody what own a bike and side-car. Nobody don’t use them things nowadays. If I’d of found it, I daresay I’d have thought it belonged to the young lady.’
‘And if it had been hers, what were you going to do when she or a friend of hers came to claim it?’
‘I dunno. Just ’and it over, like, I reckon, so long as she could make good as it were hern.’
‘No doubt you would have expected to get something for your trouble.’
‘I don’t never think of no such thing. I’m honest, I am.’
‘All right, Goole, but you watch your step, that’s all. You’d be in dead trouble if the young lady had pressed charges of wrongful arrest, unlawful incarceration and improper intention to assault her.’
‘Garn!’ said Goole. ‘I on’y wanted to fritten her a bit.’
‘You threatened her with a lethal weapon.’
‘It’s my right if I cotches a poacher.’
‘Next time you catch a young lady in your woods, I’ll have you for behaviour liable to cause a breach of the peace if you dare to threaten her.’
‘She blacked my eye. It was her as breached the peace.’
‘All right, we’ll leave it at that. I suppose you can’t give me any idea what time of the day or night the motorbike (which you now know did not belong to the young lady) might have been left in the woods?’
‘It wouldn’t have been by night. I would be patrollin’ or if so be as I was a-bed, well, I sleeps very light and it would a-woke me. I reckon it must have been in daylight. Motors and tradesmen’s vans, and all that, comes up through the gates frequent, so I shouldn’t have tooken no heed to a motorbike, not in daylight hours I shouldn’t.’
‘All right, I’ll talk to you again later on.’
Mowbray returned to the Holdy Bay police station puzzled and dissatisfied. He could think of no reason why Stickle and Stour should have abandoned their means of transport, or why, having done so, they had chosen to disappear. The logical procedure, if they had intended to give up working for Tynant, was to have asked for any wages due to them after they had worked out their week’s notice, and gone off on the motorcycle combination as usual, this time with no intention of returning. A possible explanation, which, although it persisted in his mind, he was unwilling to accept, was that one of them had killed the other and ditched the recognisable motorcycle combination before making a getaway. Like the two young men, he connected the vandalism with treasure-hunting, and what more likely, he was beginning to think, than that Stickle and Stour had been the vandals and had fallen out with one another to the point of a fight to the death? He realised though, that, but for Veryan’s death, this explanation would not have occurred to him.
Dame Beatrice and Laura arrived in Holdy village soon after three and parked the car where the caravan had stood.
‘Well!’ said Laura, surveying the scene of devastation. ‘You’d think the place had been blitzed!’
‘Whoever the busy vandals were, they were in a very great hurry,’ said Dame Beatrice.