Elizabeth smiled sweetly at Halfords in general. Everything was romantic in Britain.
CHAPTER
3
The National Museum of Antiquities, on Edinburgh's Queen Street, across from Scotland's National Portrait Gallery, was to be the setting for the first meeting of the archaeologists working on the Banrigh project. The museum's principal exhibit at the moment was "I Am Come Home," a tribute to Charles Edward Stuart that featured some of the Bonnie Prince's own personal possessions, including his silver mess kit for "roughing it.'' With the possible exception of the American members of the expedition, everyone would give that room a miss in favor of the more ancient relics of Scotland.
Derek Marchand had arrived early for the dig's organizational meeting because he believed in being punctual. After he had checked out the meeting room upstairs, he had gone back to the first floor of the museum to have a look around while he organized his thoughts.
The St. Ninian's Isle treasure was popular, as usual. Crowds of people were milling about the glass cases looking at the silver bowls and penannular Pictish brooches that had been found on Shetland in the 1950s. A professor from Aberdeen University had been excavating on the small island to locate and plan the medieval church that had once stood there. A schoolboy volunteer on the dig had turned over a broken stone in what had been the nave of the church and had found the larchwood box containing treasure: twenty-eight decorated silver objects—and the jawbone of a porpoise. No doubt the Picts had hidden their valuables beneath the church floor during a Viking raid and had never reclaimed the box.
Marchand smiled. This was most people's idea of archaeology: finding heavily carved silver jewelry stashed away in the earth. He had been a schoolboy himself when Howard Carter found even gaudier treasure in the grave of Tutankhamen in Egypt. Perhaps that story had awakened his own passion for archaeology. If so, he had long outgrown such romantic notions. Now, as a man of seventy, choosing archaeology as the avocation of his retirement, he preferred knowledge to trinkets. A few handfuls of wood ash or a trowel of bone fragments could offer more information than a trunkful of silver-gilt brooches. He was no longer interested in treasure troves.
Marchand bent over a case containing stone axes and flint microliths. The tools of ancient Britain still fascinated him, and made him feel a kinship with those early engineers, perhaps more so than with their modern counterparts. Having served with the Royal Corps of Engineers in World War II, Marchand knew what it meant to accommodate your structures to nature, just as the old ones did. These days young civil engineers had the money and the technology to change the environment to suit their needs: level the mountain, divert the river. They hadn't done it that way in Greece in 1943. The war had deprived them or the luxury or time and technology. They d had three days to build a bridge, and they had to put it where nature would permit. Yes, he understood the Celts: using makeshift tools to negotiate a truce with the elements. He admired them for it.
He rather thought he might resemble one of tie ancient Celts. He was just over five feet seven but still fit, and with a mane of silvery hair, a bit thin on top. He didn't suppose many of them had lived as long as he had; seventy was nearly double the life expectancy in prehistoric Britain. Still, he felt it would have been a good time to live. He could think of few things in the twentieth century that he would miss. Certainly not telephones, automobiles, or television sets. He was pleased that the dig site would have none of those modern inconveniences. Their absence would make him feel closer to the ancient builders; perhaps it would bring them luck.
Because the Scottish Museum had been closer to Buckingham Terrace than he'd expected, Owen Gilchrist was twenty minutes early for the organizational meeting of the Banrigh dig. If he hadn't been carrying camera equipment, he would have walked instead of taking a cab, but he had wanted to photograph the house. Owen wished he'd had the nerve to go up and knock on the door, but the place was obviously a private home, and perhaps its occupants didn't even know that a murder had been committed mere fifty years" ago. Owen knew—because his hobby was murder.
In 1926 the sandstone row house had been home to John Donald Merrett, an Edinburgh University student who had shot and killed his mother—one of the few matricides ever recorded in Scotland. The facade of the house seemed unchanged from the photographs Owen had seen in his crime books. He wondered about the interior, but he was too shy to seek admittance.
The infamous Merrett house was not listed in any of the cheery paperback guidebooks Owen had purchased back in Ohio to prepare for his summer in Scotland; all of them recommended the conventional fare for visitor: the castle, the Royal Mile, and the art gallery. Owen's taste in tourism was quite different, but fortunately he was well versed in his specialty and needed no assistance other than the city maps provided by less sanguine guidebook writers.
Owen had spent the three days before the start of the dig in an absolute orgy of crime—all vicariously experienced, that is. He had paid his respects to the skeleton of Burke the Body Snatcher, on display at the Royal College of Surgeons, and on a side trip to Sir Walter Scott's home at Abbotsford he insisted upon seeing the bit of Burke's tanned flesh that Scott supposedly kept in a stamp box. (The grandmotherly guide had disavowed all knowledge of such a barbarity in strangled tones suggesting that she wouldn't mind having Owen similarly displayed with a placard reading: touristus americanus.)
He had had lunch in Deacon Brodie's Tavern, a pub named after the original model for Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and he had toured Edinburgh's famous old prison, the Tollbooth, happily reminiscing about the Porteous Riot and the Heart of Midlothian executions.
Owen Gilchrist knew that his hobby was a bit unusual, but he did not consider himself at all strange. Scores of people his age and younger went to "dead teenager" movies, sitting through an evening of axe murders or chainsaw massacres in living color, and no one seemed to worry about their mental health. He, by contrast, simply combined the adolescent fascination with gore with an interest in history; to him the stories were the more exciting for being true.
Owen Gilchrist didn't encounter much excitement in the ordinary course of his life. Owen, who had been accused of being born middle-aged, was having a sedate time at college, with none of the wild parties and romantic escapades experienced by college students in films. He was a pudgy, bespectacled teddy bear to whom sex was still a branch of philosophy, and his major in anthropology suggested an interest in people that was as impersonal in his private life as it was in his course work. His acquaintances considered him timid and a trifle immature, and so he was; but he could be quite merciless when tracking a serial killer through the pages of a true-crime biography. He had studied all the major murderers of the twentieth century, and he would go on about "Ted" or "Ian and Myra" as if they were his dearest friends. Perhaps they were. Certainly they provided him with more entertainment and less hassle than those he met in his everyday existence. Sometimes he imagined the jock types in his dorm being dismembered by a crazed psychopath, or an unattainable sorority member bound, gagged, and terrified in a lantern-lit cellar, awaiting the pleasure of Owen-the-Ripper. But he wouldn't actually do it "in real life"; dear me, no. It was a harmless form of fantasy; Owen was always unfailingly polite to his college classmates. He must have lost a dozen pens a month because he was too shy to ask for the return of them. His fantasies, though, were his own business.