Maxwell's Grave Read online

  MAXWELL’S GRAVE

  M. J. TROW

  To my favourite archaeologist – you know who you are!

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  About the Author

  By M.J. Trow

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Five days before All Saints’ Day, in the Year of our Lord 899

  Eadric Clayhand stalked the ridge against the darkening sky, a silhouette in the coming night, black on purple. The rough basket had long worn the left thigh of his leggings so that the wicker chafed his skin. At least the load was lighter now as he scattered the grain by the handful, the strap cutting less deeply into his shoulder.

  The rain had stopped driving from the south west, but his hair still clung to his forehead, matted and cold under the leather cap. His feet still squelched in the Wessex mud, lifting the sucking clay with each stumbling step he took. One by one they had left him, calling their farewells and wending their way homeward as dusk fell and the last rays of light had died away to the west. As he trudged his furrow, he had watched them, the men who were boys when he was a boy, their hoods pale against the darkness of the Downs, disappearing over Staple Hill.

  Then he stood alone, silent before the stars came out, feeling the wind in his face. The strip fields fell away from him to the sea, a slab of cold silver waiting for the moon. He heard the last gulls call as they wheeled over the shingle headland. They would not be back before dawn and by then, perhaps, the wind would have blown soil over his precious seeds and God would be in His Heaven and his family would eat for another season. His shoulders ached, his back felt like a ridge of iron. Time to go home; to make his way down Staple Hill to the little hut smoking in the darkness – to his dogs, to his children, to his wife.

  Then, suddenly, Eadric was on one knee in the cold clay, his eyes trying to focus in the darkness of the valley below him. He counted five, six helmets in the lower field, moving steadily down the winding road that led to the ford of the Leigh. Men on horses. He could hear the jingle of their bits now, the wet thuds as their hoofs chewed up the ground. He could see their spear points – two, was it? Three? He checked the dagger in his belt – four inches of iron against six mailed men. He didn’t like those odds. Iron men on horses were always trouble. His father had spoken of them, and his grandfather. Men with hoarse voices and foreign tongues who came to raid and burn, loot and pillage. They spread-eagled women on the hayricks and split men’s skulls in their laughter. No priest, no king was safe from them. No babe in the cradle. He could hear their muffled voices, not what they said, but how they sounded – secret, furtive, guilty. They spoke Eadric’s language, but it was not a dialect he knew. Mercian? He’d heard it once. It was not the tongue of Wessex and he was wary of it. He watched the horses splash across the silver, twisting ribbon of the river before it turned one last time to rush headlong for the sea. The dark riders reached the stand of ash trees that flanked the west bank and they dismounted. Those trees were sacred to Eadric’s grandfather. The mad old man had worshiped wood and stone before the Lord came to him, in a vision one night. There were spirits there, men whispered, elfin circles in the coarse grass. Eyes looked out from knot-holes and ghosts huddled together in the branches, their dead breath stirring the leaves. Eadric didn’t like the ash grove. He had forbidden his boys to play there and no one tilled the strips that ran the woodland’s edge.

  Horses snorted in the blackness. He could see their nostrils flaring wide, their breath curling away as the evening dews developed and the cold of night took hold. Eadric was lying on his front, giving no tell-tale outline on the headland of Staple Hill. His basket lay forgotten, the seeds that were all that separated his family from starvation fending for themselves under the stars. His knife was in his hand, blade-naked, ready. The horsemen were all on foot now, one holding the animals’ reins, patting flanks, soothing necks. The others, he could just make out in the cluster of trees, were carrying something – a bundle, wrapped dark and heavy. They laid it on the ground, beyond the tangle of the tree roots and they began to dig. Two of them worked, grunting with the exertion, spades biting into the unforgiving clay. He knew what that felt like. This was his land, this stretch of upland called the Downs, this little corner of Wessex above the drift of the Leigh. He saw them take off their helmets and unsling their cloaks and swords, swearing and cursing. They wouldn’t feel the night cold with the job they had. They were burying a man, not as men should, by the light of day, with a mass-priest intoning the service for the dead and the bells tolling. They were burying him in the darkness, out of the sight of God, a grave deep enough to hold a man’s soul, deep enough to outwit the scavenging wolf. Deep enough to find a way to Hell.

  And Eadric did not hear the footfalls padding behind him and above. He did not see the tall horseman wander away from the rest and creep up the hillside to his left. He did not see him swing his axe to the sky with both hands. And he was still watching the gravediggers at work when the great iron blade sliced through his hood and parted his hair and split his skull and hacked through his brain. The dull-bladed knife flew from his grasp as the blood spurted and gushed into the clay.

  The seeds blew away on the wind. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.

  March 16 2004

  Arthur Wimble stalked the ridge against the darkening sky, a silhouette in the coming night, black on purple. All evening, he’d been scanning the field on Staple Hill, listening for the longed-for, tell-tale click of his metal detector, fiddling with the dials, fine-tuning his way to the fortune he’d always hoped would be his one day.

  Arthur Wimble was an anorak. He was an anorak before they’d invented anoraks and he’d spent a fortune over the years investing in more elaborate and high-powered detectors. He’d faced the lot – furious farmers, angry archaeologists, copulating couples – in his quest for the Great Find. Let them scoff; let them chuckle over their pints when he walked into the pub; let the women snigger in the supermarket queues. One day he’d make it. Make it big. There were hoards out there, he knew. He’d read all about them. Celtic torques at Snettisham, silver coins in Jorvik – more than enough for a man to retire on. What would they say then, in the council offices where he checked their cars in and out? Where would those chuckles go when he bought a round for everybody in The White Ferret? No, when he bought The White Ferret? And those women in the supermarket, what would they be whispering then?

  ‘There’s that Arthur Wimble. He’s a millionaire, you know. Found some buried treasure with his metal detector.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Straight up.’

  ‘What a brilliant bloke.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s been made Honorary Professor of Archaeology at Wessex University, you know.’

  ‘Well, fuck me!’

  And he was still smiling at the thought, was Arthur Wimble, when his foot landed awkwardly on a flint outcrop and he stumbled forward, detector clanking to the ground, anorak flying over his head.

  ‘Shit!’ He’d twisted his ankle and both hands were slimy with the wet clay he’d g
ouged into. But there was something else – a sharp edge under his left wrist. He sat upright against the scudding clouds over the headland, looking left, looking right. Below him the lights of Leighford twinkled into life at the end of a spring day, the cars heading homeward along the flyover; a sleepy seaside town shaking off the cobwebs of winter and hanging out its shingle for the season to come. He fumbled in his pocket, risking a torch on the blackness of the Downs.

  Its beam flashed on the ground. It was a knife blade outlined there, old, iron, badly corroded. It was a knife; not a dagger, exactly, nothing as exotic as that. But a knife, nevertheless, and old. Encouraged, he crawled further, edging his way down in the gathering darkness to the stand of ash trees on the uneven mound. Here was the centre of the dig that was about to be – a give-away exploration trench.

  Arthur Wimble had been hanging around archaeologists for years. He knew how their minds worked. Box systems, grid systems, horizontal approach, open area, narrow trench, vertical approach, frozen sites – these were just jargon to outsiders, but Arthur Wimble understood every word of it. He had a book on the subject.

  He never knew, when they asked him in the days and weeks ahead, what made him cross the first trench and climb the ancient embankment below the trees. The ash trunks rose before him like silent sentinels, watching the intruder in their midst. Perhaps he felt drawn to them in an odd, inexplicable way he couldn’t put into words. And it was here that he found it. Virgin, untouched. Before the archaeologists got to it. Something that had lain undisturbed for centuries. He scraped away the wet soil with his free hand, peering over the rims of his glasses at what he’d found. It was stone – or was it marble? It was smooth certainly and rectangular, most of it under the tangle of roots he was sitting on. And there was writing on it. He teased the ochre clay out of the carving with the old knife blade, still clutched in his left hand. It was words all right, but it was gibberish. He spelt out the letters aloud, one by one – ‘H-i-c j-a-c-e-t A-l-f-r-e-d-u-s-…’

  ‘Oi!’

  He hadn’t heard the footfalls padding behind him and above. He had not seen the tall black figure loping over the ridge of Staple Hill and swing his shotgun to the level with both hands. He was still trying to make sense of the carving when he felt the kiss of both barrels against his neck and a voice hissed in his ear.

  ‘What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?’

  ‘So,’ the teacher had his back to the class, his gaze on the sunlit sea and the silken sails and the happy hunting ground of early retirement. One day, he’d be there himself; in the Never-never land of lump sums and enhancements. ‘Picture the scene.’ He swivelled back to the class, the bright eyes of Year Nine focused on him, the guru, the éminence grise, the fons et origo of all their historical wisdom (except that Year Nine didn’t understand any of those words).

  ‘October, 1940. The Battle of Britain is over. If you’d been here then, you’d have seen it all – lazy vapour trails in the cloudless blue that marked the lines of battle. A thousand dog fights, Spitfire against Dornier; Heinkel against Hurricane. The Few against the Many. The bottom line, my children, is that our young men shot down more of their young men than vice versa. England one, Germany nil – where’ve you heard it before?’

  The bell shattered the moment. The damn bell sans merci. No one moved. He folded his arms, leaned forward and said softly, ‘So Winston rang Adolf and said “Does this mean you’re not coming over?”’

  He was Peter ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell, a legend in his own lunchtime. And he was wasted here. Four hundred years of his life he’d given to Leighford High School and here he was, in another late spring that was turning to early summer, throwing pearls before swine. He smiled and nodded. They closed their books, chattered among themselves, made their plans, passed the minutes of their lives.

  Charlie put on his hood, the badge of the oddball, the misfit, the weirdo. He’d pick up his skateboard from the Front Office on his way out and terrorize little old ladies on his way home, rumbling along the tarmac like the tanks that Mad Max had talked about. See, Charlie had been listening all along. Jade was away fast. She had to feed her siblings, catch Home and Away, get tarted up and down the Front by seven. Maybe she’d meet Lars again, just like she had last night. It never occurred to her that Lars was 27, with a wife and kids; he was nice to her – that was enough. Bought her saveloy and chips and a vodka and Coke. And if he got his hand down her front a few times, well – it was a small price to pay. Sarah smiled as she waddled past her favourite History teacher – she was all dimples and smiles – ‘Bye, sir.’ But she was always careful not to do PE, so that she wouldn’t have to show the purple weals her stepdad gave her when he came home drunk. And that was most nights now that he’d lost his job and nobody talked to him any more.

  ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell watched them go – the rag, tag and bobtail that was Nine Ex Four. Their massed IQ wouldn’t reach room temperature, but he loved them, in his old-fashioned, never-admit-it kind of way. And he’d teach them some History if it killed them all. He wandered to the window of Aitch Four, the room with a view he called his own. It was his Tardis, his padded cell, his kingdom. In the car park below, Newly Qualified Teacher Edwin Lapidge was having no luck at all stemming the tide of herberts streaming out of the wrong gates. Perhaps he was talking Swahili to them; perhaps they were deaf. Someone – Karl Marx wasn’t it? – had once told the masses they had rights. And, sillies that they were, the masses believed him. So it was their right to go out of the wrong gate. Nine Ex Four had Advanced Vocational Certificates in Rights. But don’t ask them to die on some long-forgotten Marxist barricade – that smacked of a Responsibility. And Nine Ex Four didn’t do Responsibility. Come to think of it, neither did most of the world. Wasn’t that why Mr Blair, that great Headmaster at Number Ten, was introducing citizenship?

  Maxwell could hear his phone ringing in his office and trotted along the corridor, past the fluttering notices of the History Department. Cambridge was offering essay prizes again. And a new course was burgeoning at Thicko University – Double Honours History with skateboarding. The queue must be round the block. Maxwell caught sight of the cleaner out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘These bleedin’ kids get worse, Mr Maxwell,’ he heard her grunt between inhalations, No-Smoking school though this was. ‘I could fill a slot machine with the bloody chewing-gum they leave behind – and the toilets! Well, you don’t wanna go there, honest you don’t.’

  ‘They do indeed, Mrs B.,’ Maxwell waved at her without turning round. ‘Yes, I’m sure you could. No, I’m all right at the moment, thanks – bladder like a battleship, you know the type.’ Mrs B. doubled up as Maxwell’s cleaner on the Mezzanine floor at Leighford and his private apartments at home; what that woman didn’t know about Peter Maxwell could be written on the back of a UCAS form. ‘Hello?’

  He tried to do that thing all women and most men can do, cradle the receiver between his shoulder and his ear. It fell out, but he caught it with a dexterity surprising in a man who would never see fifty-five again, a dexterity born of the Slips and Silly Mid On. Long years ago Peter Maxwell had indeed been a flannelled fool at the wicket. Now, he was just a fuddled oaf in a hole.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ a male voice said.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Mr Peter Maxwell, Head of Years Twelve and Thirteen at Leighford High?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Peter Maxwell who is in the History Department?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maxwell’s tether-end was never terribly far away. ‘Look, who…?’

  ‘I’m so sorry. This is Dr David Radley,’ said the disembodied voice. ‘Wessex University. Would you be interested in a corpse at all?’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Well, I have to admit,’ Dr David Radley was saying, ‘there is an ulterior motive.’

  ‘Which is?’ Peter Maxwell passed him a coffee mug.

  ‘Recruitment. Retention. Resources. The new Three R’s of the twenty-first century.’

&n
bsp; ‘Say on.’ Maxwell lolled on the nasty L-shaped piece of county-bought office furniture they’d let him have back in the heady days of 1975. Radley had rung the Great Man only yesterday and here he was, bearded, fresh-faced, the epitome of everything everyone expected from an archaeologist of international repute, except he wore shoes rather than sandals and seemed to be able to afford a tie. ‘I assume,’ Maxwell went on, ‘we’re talking bums on seats?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it. The more budding archaeologists we can have, the more of the research grant cake we get. Cynical, but the way of the world. You must have the same problem.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Peter Maxwell was the Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High School. He’d seen it all, done it all for all those years that he’d clung to the chalkface. He’d begun as an oik in a grammar school History Department, making the tea, doing the marking. Taking the classes nobody else wanted – the Remove and Lower Classical Six Ex. Then, Wham! The Maoist revolution, a little red book and the great leveller called comprehensivization. It had come later to Maxwell’s school than many, but it had come nevertheless. The more stoic of Maxwell’s superiors had stuck it out for a while, but they had been no match for the egalitarian explosion of flower power and free love and people bonking in Hyde Park. They’d quietly done the decent thing and shot themselves and Peter Maxwell found himself as a Head of History in a bog standard comp (as people who didn’t teach in them called such schools). His drift into the Sovereignty of the Sixth Form was another story, but it gave him the nicest job and the nicest office in the school. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘we have this little scam called EMA – an old-fashioned bribe to keep the hopeless off the streets and out of the dole queues for that teensy bit longer.’

  ‘You sound disenchanted, Mr Maxwell,’ Radley said, gazing at the film posters that filled the man’s office walls. Was that Clark Gable holding up a snow-swept Loretta Young in The Call of the Wild? And surely Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor weren’t canoodling on Waterloo Bridge? In a similar vein, Gene Tierney and Don Ameche had clearly decided that Heaven Can Wait. ‘Do I detect a man who has rather missed his way?’