‘It was quite a haul, wasn’t it?’ said Anna.

  ‘Amazing. Just amazing. Which makes it rather stressful, to be honest. All those coins are one thing. They were made to be robust, and we’ve dealt with plenty of them before. But those brooches and rings, the goblet and the saucer and my god your bowl…’ She shook her head. ‘You only get one first shot at pieces like these, and who knows what damage we might cause by getting it wrong? Striving to better, as the great man put it.’ The overhead lights kept flickering on as she led them along a gloomy corridor with shabby worn red carpeting, only to turn off again once they’d passed by. There were storerooms with partially glassed doors on either side, offering glimpses of dusty artefacts on metal shelves, broken statues and great slabs of monumental stone. ‘So I’m afraid I made an executive decision earlier. I called an old colleague of mine who now works at the British Museum. She’s terribly good. She flies all over the world, advising museums on best practice. I rather downplayed what we’d found, because I didn’t want word getting out. But she got so snotty about it, telling me how frightfully busy she was, and how she might be able to spare me an afternoon the week after next, that I’m afraid it got under my skin a little. So I sent her some of our photographs. From the squealing and yelping that came down the line, I rather think she now has a very nice litter of kittens to look after.’

  Anna laughed. ‘How very satisfying.’

  ‘Indeed. But of course it only made her go the other way, demanding I ship it all up to her. As if! Honestly, once that place gets its hands on a piece, you’ll never get it back. Just ask the Greeks.’ Her jaw trembled as she fought off another yawn. ‘But I did promise to lock everything away until she and her team get here first thing in the morning. It’s probably for the best, to be fair, seeing how knackered we all are. I had to send Dave home after he walked into a wall. And Anish and I will both be off home ourselves, the moment we’ve seen you lot off.’

  ‘Oh god, of course,’ said Quentin. ‘We’re keeping you up.’

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I absolutely didn’t mean it like that. It’s wonderful to have you here. Truly. A privilege. Besides, strictly between you and me, I managed to shut my eyes for a couple of hours while Anish was beavering away on his computer; but I don’t think he noticed, so please not a word. The little wretch does like to rag me about my age. I let him have his fun, because frankly there’s no way I could do what he does. Old dog, new tricks, all that. But he’s done marvellous things, I must say.’ She pushed open a door and turned on the lights to reveal something between an office, an IT suite and a sitting room, with a line of darkened computer monitors and audiovisual equipment to their left, and a pair of armchairs and a sofa around a coffee table to their right. ‘You can tie a rock to your social media and digital currencies and all the rest of it. Toss them in the deepest ocean, see if I care. Just leave me all this wonderful new imaging technology. When I think of the photographic equipment we had to work with in my own student days…!’

  ‘They had cameras back then?’ muttered an unshaven young man curled up on one of the armchairs.

  ‘And hand-axes,’ retorted Pam. ‘We knew how to use them, too, believe me.’ She nodded in his direction. ‘Anish, in case you couldn’t guess. I’m cutting him some slack this morning, because of his magnificent efforts overnight. But at some point that will end, and I’ll have him fired.’ She went to sit at the workstation, invited them to pull up chairs alongside. ‘So, then, yes. What can one even say? The hoard as a whole, wonderful, just wonderful. We’ve cleaned it as much as we trusted ourselves to, and we’ve taken scans and photographs too. I’ll email you a selection of the latter, if you leave me your details. But that’s where we left it, I’m afraid. As I say, we didn’t dare risk doing any damage, particularly to your bowl, if it even is a bowl… Dave thinks we should call it a cauldron, thanks to its size; but I always imagine cauldrons as being used for stewing soup and the like over open fires, and I can’t imagine anyone ever hanging this over an open fire. It’s far too precious and too beautiful. Besides, there’s no sign of a handle, or of any scorching. No. The gemstones strongly suggest it was a mixing bowl of some kind. Most likely for wine, what with all those amethysts.’

  Elias frowned. ‘How does that follow?’

  ‘Forgive me, detective. I keep forgetting you’re not one of us. Amethysts were the stone of Dionysus and of Bacchus, gods of booze. They were supposed to prevent excessive drunkenness, though I road-tested that theory myself at university, and I can assure you it doesn’t work. Yet they studded their goblets with them nonetheless. Your bowl or cauldron too. A masterpiece, of course. That goes without saying. Anyone who’d commission a piece this grand would only ever use the very best artists. And virtually unique too. The closest parallel is clearly Gundestrup, which is why I suspect Dave is right that it will end up being called a cauldron, even though that was double-walled and had a separate silver band around its top that was crimped into a rim to hold it together. Whereas with yours they folded the top of each leaf back upon itself instead, making a rim that way, while also creating a hollow tube into which they inserted a series of short iron pins between the neighbouring leaves to provide extra structural support that way. I tell you that because it’s significant for a reason I’ll come back to. What else? Yes. The Gundestrup cauldron was seventeen inches tall. We think yours was probably a little taller, though that depends on exactly how it fitted together. Also, Gundestrup was first century BCE, whereas yours looks like early fourth century CE, give or take a hundred years. And Gundestrup was repoussé too, of course.’

  ‘Repoussé?’ asked Elias.

  ‘It means the designs on it were created by hammering the metal from the inside, to make them bulge out, like a sculpture in relief. Yours is engraved instead, both around the top of each leaf and on its base plate too.’ She paused to pour herself a glass of sparkling water, took a long and grateful swallow. ‘You wouldn’t have been able to make the engravings out last night, not beneath all that mud and dirt, but we cleaned them up enough for Anish to work his magic.’ She tapped a key to bring up a photograph of the torn, crumpled and filthy mess they’d recovered from the ground last night. ‘This is what Dave brought us,’ she said. ‘And now here is Anish’s first attempt at recreating how it might have looked fresh out of the workshop.’ She tapped another key and a new image appeared, of a golden cauldron that swelled out from its base before contracting again towards its rim, its lower parts studded with brilliant gemstones topped by a double band of pearls, while the upper part was decorated with a series of etchings or engravings.

  ‘Dear god,’ said Anna. ‘That’s our bowl?’

  ‘It’s kind of your bowl,’ said Anish, yawning massively as he wandered over, not bothering to fight or hide it. He took the mouse from Pam to rotate the bowl 360 degrees, then he tipped it forwards and back again to show them the insides and underneath. ‘A crude first pass, let’s call it. What I did was, I photographed it from different angles under different lights and using multiple filters. Then – to get all technical – I splodged the photos together with my image processing software.’ He paused for another gigantic yawn, then slapped himself across the cheek to stir himself back awake. ‘After that, it was just a matter of playing around with it, smoothing out the leaves, rejoining them along their seams, generally tarting it up. A lot of guesswork involved, as I’m sure you can imagine, and a fair bit of cheating too. This double band of pearls, for example. There was a double band of something, we’re sure of that, but we’ve had to guess that they were pearls, because they were completely eaten away, which of course can happen to pearls in acidic soil. I’ve made the gemstones larger and more colourful than they really are, so that they’re easier to tell apart. I’ve thickened and deepened the engravings too, for the same reason. So a working model, like I say, not a replica.’

  ‘You’ve made it gold,’ protested Quentin.

  ‘It was gold,’ said Pam. ‘Or gilded, at least, though only on the outside. Most of it has rubbed off, but we’ve found enough traces to put it beyond doubt. The only oddity is that you’d expect a piece this splendid to be mercury-gilded. The Romans were masters of the art, after all, and it gave off such a wonderful gleam. But I’m not sure that mercury-gilding was even possible with items like this. No doubt Rebecca and her British Museum chums will know. Anyway, whatever the reason, they went for gold leaf or cold gilding instead, which is why it’s almost all rubbed off. I suspect it was mostly gone even before it was buried, in fact, simply from all the polishing it would have got. It still would have looked amazing, though. Silver and gold together have a way of playing off each other that makes them all the more dazzling.’

  ‘Those engravings?’ asked Anna, squinting at the screen. ‘Are they buildings?’

  ‘Some are,’ said Pam. ‘Most notably the one on the base plate, which looks to be a rather substantial Roman villa. If so, of course, it ties it even more closely to the one you’ve found nearby.’

  ‘And the others?’

  Pam nodded. ‘The bowl originally consisted of a base plate and eight separate leaves, of which we’ve only recovered seven so far. Each of those seven is engraved with a different landmark of some kind. Two are stone circles. Two look like hill-forts. And three appear to be towns or small cities. Our best guess right now is that it was kind of a statement of domain by the lord of the villa.’

  ‘Like a cat marking out its territory,’ suggested Elias.

  ‘A touch less pungent, but yes, essentially.’

  ‘You said there was something significant about its rim,’ prompted Anna.

  ‘I did, yes. Well remembered. We think it may explain the missing leaf, you see, because the lack of corrosion where it was joined to the base plate suggests it only became detached quite recently. Years or decades, I mean, rather than centuries – though of course we’ll need to do proper testing to be sure. From what Dave told us, the top of the missing leaf would have been only a foot to eighteen inches beneath the surface of the field, yet above the battlefield layer, which obviously is an oddity in itself. So our current best guess is that it wasn’t buried at all.’

  ‘Aren’t hoards buried by definition?’ asked Elias.

  ‘Almost by definition,’ said Pamela. ‘But not invariably. Imagine it’s midwinter, say, and the ground is frozen solid. You get word that the enemy is barely a dozen miles away, and approaching fast. You don’t have time to bury all your valuables, not with the ground so rock hard. You don’t have time to flee with them either. So what do you do?’

  Elias shook his head. ‘Well?’

  ‘This is obviously only an hypothesis, you understand? But wouldn’t one option be to gather everything up in your cauldron then tie it up in a sack and take it out to one of your farm buildings, to hide it in the thatch, meaning to recover it once the danger’s passed. But something goes wrong, of course. It always does, with such hoards. Maybe you’re driven off for good. Maybe the only people who know where it is get killed. So there it remains, in the roof of an abandoned and then derelict outbuilding, until finally it collapses. Wouldn’t that explain why it was above the battlefield layer? And wouldn’t it explain how, if the field was deep-ploughed at some point, the tip of one of the blades might have snagged upon the rim of its topmost leaf, ripping it away and dragging it a foot or so underground before dropping it off again.’

  Quentin frowned. ‘You’re saying it’s still somewhere nearby?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s certainly worth a look.’

  ‘My god. We need to get back there. Before anyone else finds it.’

  ‘It should be safe enough for the moment,’ said Elias. ‘What with all the police around.’

  ‘Oh hell,’ said Quentin, mortified that he’d forgotten his friend so quickly.

  Pam took the mouse back from Anish, set the bowl slowly rotating. ‘It’s going to be world famous once word gets out, of course,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘The Badbury cauldron from the Badbury hoard. More to the point, though, it would have been famous back then too. Pieces this spectacular acquired a tremendous mystique, all the more so because it would undoubtedly have had an important social and ceremonial purpose. Sharing was a key part of Celtic culture, as you know, and this is exactly the kind of vessel that kings and chiefs would have served their peers out of at the sort of tribal gatherings where they’d have given their oaths and formed their bonds. Can’t you just picture it, the high priest or the king of kings holding it up in front of a great assembly, late at night, so that it glittered with the light of a hundred bonfires. No doubt there’d have been bards and storytellers there too, both to entertain the guests and to memorialise the event. And little doubt, either, surely, that those bards and storytellers would have been inspired by the sight to use the cauldron in the new songs and poems they went on to compose.’

  ‘Dear god,’ muttered Quentin.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ said Anna.

  ‘What am I missing?’ said Elias, noticing the stunned looks on both their faces. ‘What do you all know that I don’t?’

  Pam gave a mischievous little quirk of her lips. ‘A cauldron or mixing bowl like this… It was what the French came to talk of as a gra’al.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  There were too many people in the museum foyer and on the street outside to make conversation wise, so Elias waited until they were safely back in the Leaf and on their way north out of Devizes before turning to Anna and Quentin. ‘Are you guys seriously telling me that you’ve found the holy grail?’

  ‘No,’ said Anna firmly. ‘And even if we have, we haven’t.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, what was the holy grail?’ she asked. ‘According to legend, it was either the cup from the Last Supper or the one that caught the blood that flowed from Jesus’s side after he was stabbed with a spear. The story goes that Joseph of Arimathea or maybe his followers brought it to Glastonbury at the end of the first century CE when they established Britain’s first church there. And whatever else our cauldron might be, it has nothing to do with that. It was made at least two hundred years too late, for a start. More likely three. And those two stone circles on it are surely Avebury and Stonehenge, which makes it a very Romano-British artefact, not a Levantine one.’

  ‘Then why all the excitement?’

  It was Quentin who answered this time. ‘Because the Joseph of Arimathea holy grail was only added to the Arthurian canon late on, by a Breton poet called Robert de Boron. But there’s a different kind of grail in early Arthurian lore. Not holy, exactly, and with zero connection to Jesus or even Christianity, but with quite a potent aura all the same. I don’t know how you’d describe it exactly. The mystic grail, maybe. The revered grail. The sacred grail.’ He pulled a face, unhappy at each of these descriptors. ‘Help me out here, Anna. What’s the word I’m looking for?’

  ‘Hallowed?’ she suggested.

  ‘Yes. Perfect!’ He rolled the words around his mouth. ‘The hallowed grail. It appears first in a poem called Preiddeu Annwfn that’s attributed to a Welsh bard called Taliesin who lived in or around the sixth century. It’s a deliberately obscure piece of work, very hard to understand. It has rather the flavour of a masonic ritual, if you’re familiar with those. Essentially it tells how Arthur led three ships of men into the Celtic otherworld in pursuit of a magical cauldron.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Elias.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Quentin. ‘This same cauldron also appears in another early Welsh poem, only now it’s able to heal serious injuries, even bring people back from the dead. Unfortunately, we have what you detectives might call a break in the chain of evidence at that point. So the question is, can we make a plausible link between a seventh century Welsh cauldron and a French holy gra’al.’

  ‘And? Can we?’

  ‘Yes. I believe we can. Though we have to go back a little, to Arthur’s defeat at the Battle of Camlann. It led to a dark period for the Britons, during which the Saxons pushed them further and further back, ultimately penning them into Wales and Cornwall, while also driving a great many others overseas instead, primarily to Brittany – which is how the province got its name, of course, and why the people there came to be known as Bretons. These three populations all essentially started out the same, with a shared history, language and culture, only separated by geography, allowing them to evolve in different ways. Now let’s skip forwards a few centuries to when William the Conqueror set about earning himself his nickname. A Norman, yes, but with a disproportionate number of Bretons in his army, not least because they believed they were reclaiming their rightful home. And more Bretons followed the conquest, too, very possibly including a husband and wife who settled in Monmouth with their son, who grew up to become a monk and write a book called The History of the Kings of Britain.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Elias. ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth.’

  ‘Exactly so. His book, of course, included a very extensive section on Arthur, for which there’s precious little corroborating evidence, and which he claims was largely based on a source that has conveniently disappeared. It reads as immensely fanciful too, which has naturally led most of my colleagues to dismiss it as largely the product of his imagination. But I don’t see it that way. I don’t see it that way at all. I believe instead that Geoffrey did the very best he could with the materials he had to hand. You can tell from all the nonsense in it.’

  Elias laughed. ‘That’s a bit back to front, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. No, it isn’t. It sounds strange, but nonsense can sometimes be a sign of integrity. Take his claim that the Britons got their name from Brutus, a refugee from the Trojan War. Rubbish, right? Except that it was a common belief among fourth century Romans like Juvenal. So it seems likely that that’s where Geoffrey got it from. Which isn’t a strike against Geoffrey’s honesty. It’s a strike for it. Or how about the way he describes Caesar invading Britain three times, when we know he only did so twice. A close reading of Geoffrey makes it clear that he has two separate sources for Caesar’s first invasion, only written from such different perspectives that he assumed they were describing separate events. A similar thing happens with that merry old soul King Cole, who appears twice in Geoffrey’s book, though under slightly different names. It’s the same thing with King Lear of Shakespeare fame. Every time something like this happens, it shows that Geoffrey was working from multiple sources, and that he was doing his level best to make sense of them all. There’s a particularly infamous passage about Britain being invaded by an army of one hundred and sixty thousand Africans. Surely that, at least, was fantasy on Geoffrey’s part. Except Britain was constantly being harassed at that time by a marauding Irish tribe called the Attacotti, who vanished long before Geoffrey was born. Now put yourself in his shoes. You’ve got an ancient document to interpret, written in a script whose lettering you have difficulty making out. Attacotti would have meant nothing to you. But Affricani would.’