‘Maybe they didn’t have a car. Maybe they panicked. What’s your alternative?’

  ‘That the hole was already there, of course. Dug by a detectorist in search of the crown jewels.’

  Oliver gave a grunt. ‘The police must have considered that.’

  ‘I doubt it. You saw Elias earlier. He barely even knew who King John was.’ She took out her mobile to call him, only to realise to her surprise that it was almost eleven o’clock. Morning would do fine. She put her phone away again, rested back her head and closed her eyes.

  ‘Hey,’ said Oliver, reaching over to tap her arm. ‘You can’t go to sleep just yet. Not before you tell me whether the history or the archaeology is right.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ she said. ‘The whole thing’s like a vanishing trick – except where did it all vanish to? Uncle Dun used to joke that it’s what Robin Hood stole to give to the poor.’

  Oliver squinted sideways at her. ‘He never told me that.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have. Like I say, it was a joke. Not fit for his book, and certainly not for the BBC. Though, to be fair, there really was an outlaw Robert Hod at the time. Robert was essentially the same name as Robin, and Hod was an alternative spelling of Hood. We also have a separate record for an outlaw called Robert of Wetherby, who may well have been the same man, only designated by where he came from rather than by his surname. John’s son Henry III had the Sheriff of Nottingham hunt him down and then hanged, which is very unusual, as kings didn’t typically concern themselves with individual outlaws. But if word had got around that he’d been the big brain behind the hijacking of his father’s baggage train…’

  ‘Doesn’t sound that crazy to me.’

  ‘I know. But it doesn’t really hold up. There were a few outlaws living in the Wash. All the fish and birdlife made it good for foraging, and the sheriffs tended to leave them be, because the place was so rife with malaria, plague, dysentery and the rest. But it couldn’t have supported large groups like the Merry Men. Even if it had, they still wouldn’t have had the numbers to overcome an escort and hijack a baggage train two miles long. You’d have needed several hundred skilled warriors for that, armed with excellent inside information, not a bunch of starving, rheumatic misfits.’

  ‘Then…?’

  ‘How many times must I say it? I don’t know. No one does. If you forced me to take a position, I’d guess that a cart or two got stuck in the mud, blocking the ones behind even as the tide turned and came rushing in. Then it would have been everyone for themselves, taking whatever they had with them, because the war looked lost by then and John was the kind of king who’d have hung the ones that did show up to work off his rage at the rest.’

  ‘That’s how your uncle saw it too.’

  ‘I know. We talked about it a lot. It’s not as if a fenland farmer and a sixteen-year-old Manchester girl have a huge range of shared interests. History was it. And it was fun. For us both, I think. Uncle Dun had been brooding on it for years, but he’d never really had anyone to talk to about it. And you know how setting out your case gets you to see the weaknesses in it, so that you have to rethink it and make it stronger? So he found it helpful too, I hope. But then of course I headed off to university and he put it in his book instead.’

  The hotel was locked up by the time they made it back. Anna tapped in the key-code. The reception lights were dimmed and there was no one behind the desk, just a sign inviting them to ring the bell if they needed service. They went upstairs together. Oliver’s room was to the left; Anna’s to the right. ‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘That was fun.’

  ‘No need to sound quite so surprised.’

  ‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d hidden it better than that.’

  ‘Mind if I see you to your room?’

  Anna gave him a wry look. ‘I think I’ll be safe from here.’

  ‘I’ll bet you thought that last night too.’

  It was meant as a joke, a way to prolong their time together. But suddenly those men from last night were in her mind again, the way the tall one had twirled his screwdriver in her face. She didn’t protest, therefore, when Oliver walked her to her door, or even when he went in first, checking her bathroom, wardrobe and beneath her bed. ‘Ah, well,’ he said, getting sheepishly to his feet. ‘Better safe than sorry.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

  He returned to the doorway where she was still standing. Its narrowness forced them together, so that they almost touched. He stopped in front of her, his proximity disturbing. When she’d called him old that day at Bolingbroke Castle, it had been less a comment on his age than on the gap between them, given that she’d been just nineteen at the time, and him in his late twenties. But that gap didn’t seem so large anymore, not least because her abduction by Harry Kidd had left her feeling old and soiled. In truth, Oliver was an attractive man, with gorgeous pale blue eyes, a good-humoured mouth and a strong jaw that glittered with evening stubble. She’d shut down that part of her life so completely that it had been two years since she’d even kissed a man, and the sudden physical longing she felt for him was powerful enough that she had to turn away her face.

  He smiled gently, as if realising her confusion. He put a hand on her shoulder and pecked her chastely on her cheek. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘Goodnight, I guess.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, stepping inside the sanctuary of her room and making to close the door. ‘Goodnight.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  For the second morning in a row, Anna woke with a start. But there was no banging door to blame this time. No howling storm. It was an idea instead, prompted in part by yesterday’s check-in, but even more so by last night’s conversation with Oliver. She threw back her duvet and sat up, half expecting it to fade away into nothingness under closer scrutiny, as night-time inspirations so often did.

  Not this one.

  It was too early to call Elias, and, besides, his manner yesterday still rankled. Her curiosity wouldn’t wait, however. She washed and dressed, went downstairs. Breakfast wasn’t yet open, though she could hear the jangle of cutlery. She pinged the reception bell then apologised to Priya for the ungodly hour as she came padding out of a back room in slippers, oversized blue pyjamas and a white dressing gown. She looked bewildered when Anna told her what she wanted, but shrugged it off and led her to a storeroom containing bikes, trowels, spades and metal detectors, then invited her to take her pick. She chose a trowel and the simplest-looking of the detectors, then asked how much.

  ‘No charge,’ said Priya, with her charming warm smile. ‘Our honoured guest, remember?’

  Oliver gave a muffled groan when Anna knocked on his door. She called out warning then went on in. He was lying face down on his pillow, his arms thrown up above his head like he was doing the fifty-metre fly. ‘I need you,’ she told him.

  He turned bleary eyes upon her. ‘Where was this attitude last night?’

  ‘Downstairs, quick as you can. Bring your camera.’

  He pushed himself up onto an elbow, his curiosity piqued. ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Come down and find out.’

  Breakfast had now opened. She helped herself to a banana, toast and coffee. Oliver appeared a few minutes later in baggy black jeans and a navy guernsey, his green canvas camera bag slung over his shoulder. She went to meet him at the door. ‘Follow me,’ she said.

  ‘How come you get breakfast and I don’t?’

  ‘Don’t worry. We won’t be long.’

  It was still dark outside, though dawn was lifting like a slow grey curtain away to the east. Anna took out her phone for its torch, but it proved such little help that she put it away again. They jumped the drainage ditch then forced their way through a gap in her uncle’s hawthorn hedge, taking a few scratches and getting spattered by morning dew. Patches of pale thin mist lingered like lazy ghosts in the hollows all the way up to the seawall. The grass verges were still squelchy from the storm. Her old trainers quickly grew wet and cold.

  Anna had hated it here when she’d first arrived. It was so flat and bleak and featureless. So chill and grey and open. Nowhere did windswept quite like this stretch of the south Lincolnshire coast, particularly when the weather was coming in off the Arctic. After Manchester, it had seemed an alien, friendless and lifeless world, miles from anyone or anything remotely interesting.

  Uncle Dun had let her grieve a while, but eventually he’d grown so exasperated by her sullen refusal to help out that he’d grabbed her by her wrist one freezing evening and dragged her out with him on his nightly round, ignoring her teenage screeching as he’d named the various crops he’d be cultivating that year, describing their virtues, vices, needs and idiosyncrasies, their life-cycles, treatments and likely future market values.

  He’d done the same the following morning and evening too, interspersing his lectures with questions designed to see how much she’d taken in. Her tantrums had done no good. There’d been no one around to hear. She’d taken to sulky silence instead. He’d dragged her out the next day too, changing his questions slightly, testing not just her memory but also her ability to reason. She’d been too proud to give answers out loud, of course, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself from working them out in her mind, and it had given her a thrill whenever she’d got one right.

  The rounds had become routine. The exercise had put colour in her cheeks, muscle in her legs. Winter had thawed into a gorgeous spring. The farming year had got underway in earnest. Weekends and holidays meant gruelling long days in the fields which had left her tanned, sore and exhausted, her hands calloused, her feet so blistered it had pained her even to walk. Yet there’d been rewards too.

  He’d taught her how to drive in his old van and then had trained her on his tractor, his ditch digger and various other bits of machinery. The seasonal workers had arrived for the harvest. Many of them had already known one another, and there’d been a great spirit of camaraderie. Best of all, she’d got to see the fields bloom with crops that she herself had helped to sow and care for. It had been a wondrous sensation, provoking strange new feelings of motherhood inside her, so that sometimes – despite her exhaustion – she’d slip out on her own before breakfast or after dark, and wander proudly among her fields. So it had been that, some eighteen months after arriving, she’d woken one Saturday morning filled with unexpected joy at the prospect of a whole weekend on the farm, and she’d realised she’d come to love it.

  ‘Woah,’ said Oliver, when he saw the ribbons of police tape fluttering ahead. ‘Isn’t that where your uncle…?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna. She turned on the metal detector as she walked, sweeping it this way and that, just to get a feel for it.

  ‘Is that where we’re going?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But… won’t that be, I don’t know, tampering with evidence or something?’

  Anna laughed. ‘The police are finished with it. Besides, that’s what your camera’s for. To prove I didn’t do anything dodgy.’

  ‘Making me an accessory. Nice.’

  ‘Go have breakfast then, if you must. But you’ll miss the highlight of your documentary.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Turn on your camera and find out.’

  He sighed but complied, holding it out at arm’s length to film himself first. ‘I’m only doing this under protest,’ he said, ‘and to create a record that otherwise wouldn’t have been made.’

  ‘Coward,’ said Anna.

  ‘Damn right. You don’t have to deal with these people for work.’

  It had grown distinctly lighter by now. The silhouettes of the house and barn were black against the dawn. A mound of rich brown earth lay beside the pit. She ran the detector over it. Nothing. She got down onto her knees. The ground was cold and wet and muddy. The pit was maybe four feet across and almost as deep. Uncle Dun had been found curled up in the foetal position at its foot, his skull cleaved in two by a single massive blow. She put a hand on the ground to support herself then reached the detector down with the other. Almost at once, it began to screech. It happened so quickly, indeed, that she suspected some kind of malfunction. But it fell silent when she raised it back up a little, then screeched again when she lowered it once more.

  ‘My god,’ muttered Oliver. ‘What’s down there?’

  ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘Then how did you know to look?’

  ‘I told you last night. It made no sense, someone digging a pit to bury my uncle. It would have taken too long. And surely they’d have stopped to think about what they were going to do with the van once they were done. The only way it made sense was if the pit was already dug. I mean, can’t you see it? Some nighthawk out with their metal detector and spade. They have to do it in the dark, of course, or they’d be certain to be seen. They get a signal on their detector and start digging. But Uncle Dun catches them at it and comes to confront them.’

  ‘Only they get the better of him,’ murmured Oliver. ‘They kill him and bury him in their pit.’

  ‘Exactly. Clearly they panicked, or they’d have checked for his keys first. So maybe they abandoned their treasure hunt too. In which case whatever they were digging for will still be here.’

  ‘Any idea who they were?’

  ‘No. That’s for Elias to find out.’

  ‘You’re going to call him?’

  ‘In a moment,’ said Anna. She clambered down into the pit, taking with her a small landslide of the loose wet soil that made Lincolnshire so fertile. A team of university geologists had once taken core samples from various fields around here. They’d drilled down through thirty feet of silt before finally hitting a layer of sand and seashells, with bedrock deeper still. Back in 1947, just a few miles from here, five World War II landing craft had been swallowed whole during a bad flood. One had since been recovered, but the other four were still missing. That was why it was just about possible to believe John’s treasure was here, despite the lack of finds; because thirty feet of silt could swallow a baggage train whole and keep it beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated remote-sensing devices. ‘Uncle Dun had been searching these fields all his life,’ she said, digging with her trowel. ‘He never found all that much. But maybe his detector was just too old. Some of the latest models can see far deeper. They can distinguish between metals too, so you won’t waste time on can-pulls and nails and bottle tops. You only dig this deep for something really worth the effort.’

  ‘A precious metal of some kind?’

  ‘That would be my guess,’ said Anna. She sifted the silt through her fingers before tossing it aside. She’d barely been at it a minute before she found a shard from a broken pot of some kind, followed almost instantly by a second shard, and then, a little deeper, by a first metallic glint. Her heart gave a thump. She crouched for a closer look. A round thin greenish object the size of her thumbnail. She cleared its face of silt then leaned back for Oliver to film.

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered, squatting down low. ‘What is it?’

  She picked it up carefully between her fingertips, turned it around to inspect both faces. ‘A silver penny.’

  ‘What date? Tell me it’s John. Please tell me it’s John.’

  She brushed away the rest of the soil. It was tarnished, but not too badly. The pot must have spared it from any worse, only for it to be shattered by her uncle’s deep-ploughing, making the silver easier for the metal detector to pick up. Yet the morning was still so gloomy that she had to hold it at an angle to see. ‘See this?’ she asked, indicating the lettering around its face. ‘It reads Henricus Rex. That’s for Henry II, as it happens. John’s father.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Not so fast,’ said Anna. ‘This will seem weird, but all early Plantagenet coins were stamped this same way. Even after Richard took the throne, and then John after him. And of course John was succeeded by his son Henry III, and the world made sense again.’

  ‘Like not changing your clocks until summertime comes back around?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Anna. ‘So you can’t tell who was king just from that. You have to look at the portrait, which did change with each king. John was the only one of them to have himself shown in three-quarter profile. The others were all face on.’

  ‘And? Don’t tease me like this.’

  ‘It’s John.’ She grinned up at him in delight. ‘We may just have found the first trace of his lost treasure.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Elias was brushing his teeth in the field across from Warne Farm when his mobile rang. It was still so early that he suffered a spike of panic that something had happened to the twins – but then he saw it was Anna Warne and calmed down again. ‘What?’ he asked. He listened in increasing disbelief as she told him about her morning. He rinsed out his mouth, pulled on a fresh shirt then drove across the lane to find her crouched down in her uncle’s burial pit while being filmed by Merchant. ‘What the hell?’ he said furiously, slamming his door and marching up to them. ‘This is a crime scene. Your uncle was murdered here. Is this any way to honour him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna. She stood up and held up her left hand to show him three shards from an ancient small pot and five small coins, two of them stuck fast together by their tarnishing. ‘I just found these here. They may help catch whoever killed him. And you idiots missed them.’

  Elias stared at the coins in shock. ‘That’s no excuse for contaminating the scene,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Contaminating the scene!’ she scoffed. ‘You were done with it. You know you were. These would never have been found if I hadn’t thought to come looking.’

  Her phrasing caught his ear. ‘You thought to come looking?’

  Anna nodded. ‘I realised something at dinner with Oliver last night. Why bother burying my uncle without moving the van? A pit this deep would have taken ages to dig. Surely in that time they’d have checked for keys. So the only way it made sense was if the pit was already dug. And who else would have dug it in the middle of the night except a treasure hunter? It was obviously possible that my uncle had surprised them before they’d recovered whatever it was they’d been digging for, so I borrowed a metal detector and came to look.’