‘Of course,’ said Oliver. ‘But come on! Surely a quick look first. In and out. Thirty seconds. Just to make certain it’s what we think.’

  ‘What else could it be?’ asked Anna. Yet she couldn’t deny the tug. ‘You’ll have to stay up here,’ she told him. ‘In case anything goes wrong.’

  ‘Nothing will go wrong.’

  ‘No. Because you’ll be up here to make sure.’ She sat on the edge of the shaft then turned onto her side to feel for a rung with her foot, gradually increasing her weight upon it until she was confident it would hold. Yet it still gave such a wobble when she committed herself to it that she had to claw at the earth to save herself.

  Oliver had to fight back his laughter. ‘Maybe I should do it,’ he said.

  ‘In your dreams,’ said Anna.

  ‘I’m only thinking of your safety.’

  ‘You’re only thinking of your documentary.’

  His teeth flashed. ‘Can’t blame a man for trying.’

  She tucked the phone into her waistband to give herself some light while leaving her hands free. Then she began her descent, feeling out each rung with her foot, slowly delivering herself into the gut of this monstrous serpent. The soil had that rich and pungent wet earth smell, and looked to be kept from collapsing in on itself only by the chaotic mesh of yellow roots that her uncle had sliced through with his augur. The shaft grew narrower and narrower. Her breathing echoed unnervingly loudly back at her and she could feel the thumping of her heart. But then she reached the point beneath which it had collapsed, and it immediately opened up wide. She paused to shine her torch around. Its feeble beam was little match for the huge space in which she now found herself, yet it was still strong enough to make out a colonnaded hallway with an arched ceiling supported by two rows of fat pillars, creating aisles either side of a taller central spine. An ambulatory, perhaps, around which Knights Templar would have walked in quiet contemplation or in murmured conversation.

  She completed her descent, stepped off the bottom rung onto the mound of fallen moist dark earth in which a number of limestone blocks were mixed, each the size of a farmhouse loaf and trapezoid of shape, the better to fit together to form the vaulted ceiling. She bedded the ladder’s feet a little more securely into the earth then looked around once more. The walls on either side bulged alarmingly from the pressure of the surrounding land, but thankfully were buttressed by sturdy ribs every few paces, each one sculpted with gargoyles both beautiful and grotesque. This place would have been built during the first great flowering of cathedral architecture, of course, from which it had doubtless borrowed techniques and designs. It looked as though it would have been well lit back then, for she could see the rusted traces of iron beckets on the walls, as well as several niches at chest height in which a few clay oil lamps still remained.

  A soft, discordant tapping caught her ear. It took her several moments to work out that it was water dripping at different tempos from various fissures in the ceiling, which presumably was why the floor was gently cambered, to channel such leaks into the gutters that ran alongside either wall, to be drained from there into cisterns or maybe the earth beneath. The moisture meant that the carpet of dirt and earth had taken beautiful impressions of her uncle’s footprints, and had held them almost perfectly since his visit. On one side, they led away along the central spine before returning down the left-hand aisle. On the other, by contrast, there were too many to make sense of, as though he’d been back and forth at least half a dozen times. The latter, then, looked the more promising; but the former seemed easier to rule out, so that was where she headed first, filming as she went.

  Her shoes and socks grew damp, giving her the graveyard chills. A cobweb caught in her face and throat and hair. She brushed it away then checked herself for spiders. The darkness began to play upon her nerves. The ancient stone creaked like an old house, and she kept sensing movement out of the corners of her eyes, absurd though she knew that to be. She felt twelve again, spooked by the ghosts in the local woods when moonlight had played upon the trees.

  She reached the end of the ambulatory. An arched doorway would have led into the next chamber along, or perhaps to a flight of stairs, except that it had been bricked up centuries ago. She was taking photographs of it when a bloom of light behind her gave her a start. But it was only Oliver, of course, approaching with his camera on his shoulder, its lamplight bright in her eyes. ‘You promised,’ she said.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘That poxy phone isn’t up to a job like this. And how else will you prove you behaved?’

  ‘People will trust me,’ she said.

  ‘People will trust footage.’

  She scowled, but he had a point. And his lamp was a comfort in this profound and ancient darkness. ‘Fine,’ she said, leading back the way they’d come. ‘Then follow me.’

  SEVENTY-SIX

  The road split ahead, offering Elias a choice between Nettleham HQ and home. Both filled him with such profound dismay, however, that in the end he opted for a third. If Priya Kapur’s testimony held up, it would seem to clear Gregory Scott of Dunstan Warne’s murder, and lead to his likely release without charge. And Anna deserved to be told this in person rather than learning it from the news.

  Merchant wasn’t home, however. Nor was his car in its spot. He tried Anna’s mobile, in case she’d managed to retrieve it somehow, but got only voicemail. Same with Merchant. They were probably out for a drink or a bite to eat. Or maybe he’d taken her to see her uncle’s solicitor. There were all kinds of possibilities.

  He was in no great rush to get anywhere so he parked in Merchant’s spot and left a note beneath his wiper for them to call him. Then he wandered down to Westgate and Lincoln Cathedral, as good a place for contemplation as a man could wish for.

  Evensong was underway. He could hear the singing from outside. He turned his phone to vibrate before going in, then took a pew at the back. His wife had been a believer, and had insisted on bringing the kids up that way too, so that at one time he’d come here often. But then their son had died, and he’d stopped. He closed his eyes, bowed his head and rested his chin upon his clasped hands, for all the world in prayer, but in truth still brooding on the case – though perhaps that was prayer too, after a fashion.

  Priya Kapur might well be flat-out lying about Gregory Scott having spent the night with her, of course. People would do that for the ones they loved. More likely, though, she was shading the truth a little, perhaps about what time he’d left. If he’d headed off at five-thirty, say, he could have heard or seen something in Warne’s fields that had prompted him to investigate. If so, he might have caught Warne digging his hole to plant his silver pennies. Except that the pennies would already have been planted by then, covered by several inches of silt. So why kill him?

  The organist and choir started on a new hymn, flooding the great space with their gorgeous music. I will lift up mine eyes they sang, prompting Elias to do just that, gazing up at the stained glass windows for which the cathedral was so justly famous. He was too far away to make out their detail. They simply gleamed with colour instead, as though handfuls of rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other such gemstones had been tossed haphazardly into a set of bowls. And only then did he realise what should have been obvious: those forty-six silver pennies might not have been all that Warne had brought home to plant. He might have had hundreds more. And not just coins, indeed, but other kinds of treasure too, intending to bury it at various spots around his fields, so that he might rediscover it at appropriate intervals. A knapsack full of that would most certainly have been worth killing for.

  Elias could almost picture the scene, indeed, with Scott gazing down at it all in disbelief, demanding to know where it had come from, while Warne told him angrily to get off his land. Easy to imagine them coming to blows, a pair of medieval knights hammering at each other with their spades, until Scott had caught Warne with his killing blow, leaving him little choice but to bury him and flee.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. It was Quinn. He hurried back outside before answering, surprised by the new chill of the night air.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, hugging his jacket tight around himself. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve found your fields,’ she told him. ‘At least I’ve found fields of roughly the right shape alongside a pair of oaks and a cobbled lane. But please understand that the satellite photos I’m comparing them to were taken in the summer and from a different angle too. Everything looks a bit off, so I can’t be one hundred percent—’

  ‘I get it,’ said Elias. ‘It’s hard. Where?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the other thing. It’s between a village called Wellingore and a place called Temple Bruer. We took the boys there for a picnic a couple of years back. It used to be this great big Templar estate, so they say. And that was Mr Warne’s kind of history, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Elias. ‘Brilliant work. Thanks.’ Temple Bruer. Dunstan Warne had had some kind of pamphlet or paper about it on his desk, which Anna had boxed up and taken away with her. What was more, he’d driven right by it barely an hour ago, on returning to Lincoln from Fenton Airfield, following exactly the same route that Anna and Oliver would most likely have taken themselves. Was it possible, then, that she’d realised its significance, and that that was where she and Merchant were right now? She had all the information she’d have needed, and she was most certainly sharp enough. He briefly considered sending a car to look, except that it could embarrass her or even get her into trouble. Yet he could hardly stand by while they trampled over a site of potential material importance in the investigation of her uncle’s murder.

  He hurried back to his car and set off south.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  The ladder glittered silver in their lamplight as Anna and Oliver returned towards it, as if to indicate the way out they really ought to take. But neither was in any mood for retreat now that they were down here, so they clambered back over the mound of fallen earth and rubble without a word, then continued onwards to the far end of the ambulatory, from which a narrow stone staircase led down, its steps so steep and badly rutted that they had to turn sideways to focus on their footing – which perhaps explained why Anna was already at the bottom before she noticed that this section wasn’t built from limestone blocks, as was the ambulatory above, but rather had been hewn out of bedrock.

  Oliver arrived behind her with his better light. They set off along a passage. It kinked right after a few paces, taking them down a flight of three shallow steps into a chamber with unfinished walls, so that it looked more like a cave or grotto than a burial vault. Yet a burial vault was what it unquestionably was, with three raised tombs on either side of its central aisle, each topped by the effigy of a Knight Templar.

  Five of these were neatly groomed and dressed in chain-mail, with solemn or even beatific expressions on their faces, and their hands pressed together in prayer. But the sixth was very different. He had unkempt long hair and a huge beard that lay like a bib over his chest, as well as a fat scar that ran from his hairline down to his right eye. He was missing most of his right ear too, though that might simply have been an accident, or the passage of time. He looked to be well into his fifties, or even older, yet he had a Templar shield strapped to his left arm and was drawing his longsword from its scabbard with his right hand. His legs were similarly captured in motion, his left sinking into the tomb beneath him, while his right was raised as if striding into battle, so that their lamplight brought him to a kind of life, causing Anna to put a sympathetic hand upon his arm. But the stone was rough and cold and still, and the spell was broken.

  Another short flight of steps led up to a second crypt, dedicated to a single Templar grandee. His tomb and effigy were to their left, but it was the wall to their right that caught the eye, for the stone had first been smoothed flat and then sculpted in relief into a battle scene that commemorated what presumably had been the great moment of the man’s life, leading a mounted charge against the infidel.

  A third chamber followed, this one more like a morgue, with columns of loculi cut into its walls, and crude yet evocative portraits painted on the plaster seals. Several of these had fallen away over the centuries, exposing the skeletons within, their broken grins and dully glowing skulls patched with dessicated hair, and their leg bones folded up beneath their jaws to fit into the cramped, boxlike spaces.

  A labyrinth of more such crypts followed, all linked by short passages and flights of steps set at odd angles to one another, sometimes splitting off only to rejoin again further along, or turning into dead ends from which they had to retreat. Anna was beginning to think that this necropolis was all there was when they passed through a narrow opening into a longer passage that ended in a fan of steps down into a large domed chamber whose floor was submerged beneath a foot or so of water, at least to judge from how high it reached up the legs of the four granite tables that were set in a diamond pattern at its centre, and the stone blocks on either side of them on which wooden planks would presumably once have rested, to turn them into benches. There were three other doorways too, one at each point of the compass, though the mouth of the one directly across from them was completely blocked by earth and broken brickwork that spewed well out into the chamber, suggesting that whatever lay beyond had collapsed in the distant past, allowing all this rainwater to seep through its imperfect filter ever since, and gather here.

  There were tall marble niches in each of the walls too, though the statues they presumably had once housed were long gone, leaving only their empty shells behind, casting ghostly reflections on the water’s surface, which was flat as a silvered mirror, save only for a few tiny ripples provoked by skippers and other insects.

  Anna sat down on the steps to remove her shoes and socks. Oliver likewise. She dipped in her toes. It was cool rather than cold. She rolled her trousers up above her knees to test its depth, her foot pale and shimmering as a fish as it sank some six or seven inches through crystal clear water before hitting the sludge beneath and stirring up an ugly dark cloud.

  The doorway to their left looked the more inviting. She waded over to it, setting off waves that threw rippling bands of lamplight onto the walls. It led to a long corridor with partly flooded storerooms on either side, some with crude shelving cut into their walls, but all empty save for a few earthenware vessels of various shapes and vastly different sizes, but all broken or at least badly cracked, making it ever clearer that this place had been deliberately abandoned, with everything of value removed.

  The passage sloped gently upwards. Soon they were out of the water. Anna stopped to brush dry her legs. The floor here was worn almost smooth by ancient feet, yet it still felt as scratchy as fine sandpaper on her bare soles. There was enough dust on it, too, to see the tracks Uncle Dun had left. It touched her disproportionately to see the little dabs left by his toes.

  They reached a pair of armouries, still sparsely stocked with broken swords, rotted shields and the concentric rings of rusted iron hoops left behind by a wooden barrel that presumably had once contained arrows, to judge from what remained – not only barbed arrowheads but others like tiny baskets designed to be stuffed with pitch and set alight before being fired at haystacks or thatched roofs. Helmets too, a pair of greaves, even a suit of chain-mail, all long-since rusted into uselessness, though that couldn’t disguise the wretched state they’d been in anyway – mend-and-make-do equipment just about good enough for practice, but not for the crusades.

  The passage grew narrower and lower, until first Oliver and then even Anna had to watch their heads. A relief, then, to reach the final storeroom. She shone in her torch, expecting to find it as empty as the others – and so it was, after a fashion, save for a broken pot or two, including a number of shards that looked very much like the ones she’d dug up with the silver pennies. It was smaller as well – the same breadth and height as its predecessors, but barely half as deep. Yet the explanation for that was instantly apparent, and it stopped her dead; for its far wall wasn’t hewn out of the bedrock, as were the others, but built instead from stone blocks that had been plastered over and smeared with grime. Time had since done what time will do, cracking the plaster badly enough that clumps had fallen away to reveal the brickwork behind. And Uncle Dun had clearly spotted this for himself, for he’d knocked a hole in the wall at around chest height, plenty large enough for a man his size to have clambered through.

  She felt light-headed as she made her way towards it, torn between shame for what her uncle had done and excitement at what he’d discovered. For where else could those silver pennies have come from? Yet she still wasn’t prepared for what she found, the floor of this secret chamber packed tight with baskets and caskets, with bowls and chests, each filled to the brim with treasures of one kind or another, all in fine condition too, kept so by their hermetic seal, and thus glittering, gleaming and sparkling in their twin beams, which themselves were given extra potency by the pair of huge silver platters leaned up against the facing wall, each large enough to hold a haunch of beef, and still bright enough to act like tarnished mirrors.

  There were two half-tubs of rotted oak directly beneath the hole. The first contained a high mound of silver pennies, hollowed like a quarried mountain at its peak, thanks to the fistfuls Uncle Dun had taken home to plant – far more than the forty-six so far recovered. But it was the second tub that shocked her, not only because it was filled with ancient brooches, buckles, rings and clasps, but because it too had clearly been plundered. And where the hell had all that gone?