“Now push upwards on the metal piece.”
I did so, and felt that length of the ledge lifting clear. Holmes watched me closely as I brought it out.
“If I were to choose a hiding place,” he said thoughtfully, “I should choose also to make the object appear part of the structure of the building or the mechanism. An item that is regularly seen and therefore never examined. Something that, even if examined, would in this case appear as part of the clock case.”
I could feel that a man of modest ability as a carpenter might cut away as much of the wooden ledge at the rear as would accommodate the strip of metal I now held in my hand. Even someone who inadvertently lifted it out might think that it had been inserted merely to brace the inner support.
The length of corroded metal which now lay on the log-book table looked like a piece of scrap which had suffered from wind and weather. Corrosion had left the ends rough and uneven. It was a strut of some kind, six or seven inches long, an inch or so wide and a little less than that in depth. It was dirty and darkened. To judge by three regular indentations it appeared to have lost some screws which had presumably held it in place. It was too corroded to tell what metal it was made of. It might almost have been a neglected chisel with the end of its blade broken off. The rust of years had pitted the surface.
“I should hardly bother to hide that! It would disgrace the tool-bag of the most slapdash workman! One might almost think that the rats had been at its ends!”
“Precisely,” said Holmes, turning it over. I now saw a groove across the back, about a third of the way down, where a cross-piece might have fitted it. Plainly, this had been no chisel. I imagined the missing piece in place. It might have been many things but the image I had in mind was still in the form of a cross or, to be more accurate, a crucifix.
“How long had it been hidden there?”
Holmes shrugged.
“Not long, I should imagine. It might be a few years, perhaps a few months. Not before the Chastelnau brothers became keepers of the light.”
Keepers of the light! Combined with the idea of a crucifix, his description had the sound of a religious order!
I looked again and saw that what I had thought to be holes for screws were merely three depressions in the tarnished and corroded metal. Holmes took from his pocket a small wash-leather bag. He withdrew the blue stone-the “Chastelnau pebble,” that is-and placed it in each depression in turn. It fitted best at the head. Another, its hue resembling the mud on the beach and retrieved from Roland Chastelnau’s pocket, filled a second depression where the cross-piece might once have been fixed to the upright. A third, of the same muddy appearance, rested lower down in the upright. The remaining two he placed at either side, where a cross-piece might have been. I felt how chill the night air was in that unheated place.
“Why was this village called Sutton Cross?”
Holmes looked at the pattern he had created.
“Because it was where the river could be crossed-forded-before a bridge was built. Or perhaps because it was here that an item of royal treasure was believed to be lost, found, and then lost again.”
“Which item might that be?”
“According to one of the court parchments known as Pipe Rolls, when the tide and the quicksands overtook King John’s baggage train in October 1216, he had been engaged in a long war with his barons. As Mr Gilmore describes it, the king had commandeered treasure from all over the land. Among this was said to be the Chester Cross, a gold and sapphire pendant worn from a sash round the waist. It had formerly belonged to the Bishops of Chester. The cross was more than a thing of beauty, if we believe the chronicles. It had the reputation, when in the hands of a holy man, of performing small miracles of healing. There was a legend that it had been handed down from the time of Edward the Confessor.”
“Are we to assume that this unprepossessing piece of metal is part of the Chester Cross?”
Holmes shook his head.
“Alas no. I shall assume nothing. Imitations and fakes, masquerading as treasure trove from the baggage-train, were all too common after the disaster, according to the Pipe Rolls of the time. Yet I would give a great deal to know what either of the Chastelnau brothers assumed it to be.”
I glanced at the window and saw that a half-moon was braving the horizon clouds of the North Sea.
Early that morning I took my story of the brothers’ disappearance to Inspector Albert Wainwright, at the police office in Sutton Cross. I had been over it in my mind and I knew it was the only explanation that fitted the facts. From having felt the cold fear of being lost in the soft mud at night with a tide rushing in, I knew how easily a victim might be decoyed in that river estuary. There was no love lost between Abraham and Roland Chastelnau, yet it was surely Roland who contrived the death of his brother, not the other way round. It was Roland who had previously slipped those pebbles into his pocket and had adjusted the iron shutters before he left the Old Light. On the darkening beach, he had fired the shot which brought Abraham to him. There was a quarrel and afterwards, by accident or design, Roland was drowned. His brother, innocent or guilty of that death, even unaware of it, was drawn into the quicksands of the estuary as he followed the false promise of the altered lighthouse beam. How could it be otherwise on the evidence before us?
On Holmes’s instructions, I said had nothing to Wainwright or the Freiston keeper about the curious strip of corroded metal and the pebbles. Perhaps these had been the cause of a fight to the death between the two brothers but there was no evidence of it. Before such fragments could be evidence of anything, we needed proof of what they were.
7
Our last visit to the Reverend Mr Gilmore was no less convivial than the first, although somewhat more frustrating. It was eleven o’clock on a sunny autumn morning. The brightness touched his churchyard yews to make a shadow pattern of garden geometry. Its reflection sparkled on the tide at low water. The rector’s maid in her starched apron had brought a silver tray, upon which stood a cut-glass decanter of Blandy’s Madeira, Solera 1868, three glasses, and three plates with slices of yellow seed-cake upon them. If Mr Gilmore had distanced himself from Trinity College, Cambridge, he had certainly not forgotten its agreeable mid-morning ritual.
When the glasses had been filled with their sweet-smelling amber fluid, Holmes came immediately to the point.
“It must happen from time to time, Mr Gilmore, that items are discovered which may be claimed as part of the lost treasure of King John. The sea having receded a mile or two since the year 1216, some of the debris might now lie quite shallowly underground.”
The rector smiled the smile of one who has heard this story before.
“I doubt whether many such claims have been made good, Mr Holmes. Certainly not in recent years. As I said before, most of the baggage-wagons and their contents probably lie buried under the fields and pastureland, inland from this village. A few items of jewels and metalwork, if they had fallen loose, might have been carried here and there by the tidal currents at the time of the disaster and left closer to the surface.”
“And therefore might be found?”
Mr Gilmore chuckled.
“And therefore might be counterfeit. In the later Middle Ages, from the time of King John to the coming of the Tudors in 1485, there are records of rewards paid in the Court of Exchequer to men and women who had found certain trinkets and surrendered them to the Crown. They did not amount to very much. The Plea Rolls tell us of a man receiving as much as twenty shillings for precious stones from a collar worn by King John himself.”
“And there has always been a history of fabricated treasure?”
“To such an extent that after the disaster to the baggage-train, the scribe of the royal Patent Rolls was charged to make a careful inventory of all that had been lost. For some years subsequently, when it was claimed that an item was found, it was possible to check the description minutely against the entries in the parchments.”