I woke some time later and sat up like a shot to see Adrian still behind the wheel. He appeared both wakeful and apprehensive, but also strangely composed, his gaze fixed unwaveringly on the road ahead. Wherever we were, it was not unknown to him. I looked outside.
The moon had set. On the eastern edge of the horizon, the night sky had taken on a violet tinge that gradually paled to green. Smooth hills and ragged stony outcroppings rose stark against the sky, as sharply defined as though they’d been cut from black paper. It all looked beautiful and unearthly, like a world under glass, or one of those intangible landscapes glimpsed inside a spun-sugar Easter egg.
There was no shoulder—the desolate road seemed only wide enough for a single vehicle. I rolled down my window. The cold air had a mineral scent, snow and raw earth, and the coppery tang of the sea.
I stared across the moor, overcome by a sudden yearning. Not for booze or Quinn or my own lost life; not even for the camera in my lap, the meticulously calibrated way it allowed me to experience the world at a safe distance.
Instead I was overwhelmed with longing for the world itself: the cold sting of air against my cheeks, the smell of diesel and the gradual play of shadow across the moorland, as the eastern sky brightened from beryl to gold. No camera could ever capture any of that.
I swiped a hand across my eyes and nudged Adrian. “Hey. Do you know where we are?”
“Padwithiel.”
“Are we near the ocean?”
Adrian nodded, yawning. “Yes—West Penwith. You’re never more than a few miles from the sea here. Land’s End is that way.” He pointed. “From there it’s only three thousand miles and you’re home. But you don’t want to wander off. The moor is dangerous. I need to stop and lock the hubs to put this into four-wheel drive. The way gets a bit iffy up ahead.”
Krishna was still asleep. The rats in my head were starting to claw. Adrian drove a few more miles before stopping to lock the hubs. I got out to stretch and see if I could get a mental map of where we were. It was tough.
One side of the narrow road was bounded by dense hedges, too high to see over. On the other, a low tumbledown wall gave way to barren moor and gray-green fields studded with a few stone farmhouses that looked like they’d stood for a thousand years. A seemingly random jigsaw of stone walls and hedgerows crisscrossed the fields, as though a drunken giant had attempted to draw a map across it. In the near distance I glimpsed a standing stone, man-high, surrounded by gorse still studded with a few yellow blossoms. The sun hovered just below the horizon, and patches of snow shimmered like phosphorescence.
In a place like this, a film like Thanatrope made perfect sense.
“That’s done,” said Adrian, straightening. The wind lashed his hair across his face as he turned to face the direction of Land’s End. I was startled by how much at home he looked here. A sort of fierce joy overtook his features and he turned to me again, his anorak hanging loosely from his lanky frame.
“You know how they say the past is another country? Well, this is it.”
I hesitated, then slipped a hand beneath my layers of clothing and withdrew one of the thaumatropes on its rawhide cord. “You freaked out when I showed you this back at your place. Did Poppy steal it?”
Adrian’s thin mouth tightened. “No.”
I dug Ellen Connor’s card from my pocket and handed it to him. “A cop cornered me at a pub in Camden Town. Europol or something.”
“‘International Commission on Traffic in Illicit Antiquities,’” Adrian read aloud. “Did she try to shake you down?”
“Yeah. I blew her off and got out. Is she for real?”
“Define ‘real.’ She’s former law enforcement, if that’s what you mean. But ICOTIA was disbanded several years ago. I’m not sure what Ellen’s doing these days. We’re out of touch,” he added delicately.
I scowled. “Well, she was pretty intent on giving me a hard time.”
“I suspect she’s working for a private collector.” Adrian inclined his head toward the bone disc. “Even if she was still with ICOTIA, you would have been safe. Any British artifact made of bone, or clay, or stone—as long as it doesn’t contain more than thirty percent gold or silver, you don’t need to turn it in to the authorities.”
“Authorities meaning the British Museum? Inspector Wexford?”
“Under the Portable Antiquities Scheme, if you discover something you’re supposed to report it. But the law’s almost impossible to enforce. That’s why you see nighthawks out with metal detectors at three A.M. They’re looking for treasure. Saxon hoards, Roman coins—something like that can set you up for life, if you sell it on the black market. Or go through the legal channels and sell to a museum. Usually nighthawks will strike a deal with the landowner and agree to share it with him. Sometimes they go it alone. But they’re looking for metal, not bone.”
I looped the cord over my head and held up the thaumatrope. “So something like this, you wouldn’t be required to report it.”
“That’s right.”
“But this isn’t from the UK, is it?” I ran a finger across the disc’s implacable graven eye. “I assumed it was from, I dunno. France or Spain, someplace like that. You know, with cave paintings. Ice Age stuff.”
“We had an Ice Age, too. Several of them.”
“Yeah, but were people here making things like this?” I wound the thaumatrope on the string and spun it. The ancient eye opened and shut, opened and shut. “Because that would backdate the British film industry about ten or twenty thousand years. That would be kind of a major scientific breakthrough, right?”
Adrian’s eyes cut at me sharply. I glanced into the Rover to make sure Krishna was still asleep. In a low voice I asked, “Where the hell did this come from?”
Adrian extended his hand to let his fingers brush the bone disc. “The fogou at Kethelwite.”
“What the hell’s a fogou?”
“An underground passage. Like a barrow. Fogous are a bit different—no one knows what they were actually used for. Some sort of Iron Age ritual, maybe. The one at Kethelwite has a long central passage with chambers branching off of it. I only went in there once—it scared me to death. There are ruins everywhere at Kethelwite; we played in them when we were kids. We were always digging up ax heads and flints.”
“Bones?”
“No. The soil’s too acidic—anything buried a few thousand years ago is peat now. But there were all kinds of other artifacts. We’d pretend we were knights in Middle Earth. When Morven and Mallo bought the place in Crouch End, they took a good many with them. I think Morven only wanted them as souvenirs, at first. The gallery and black market, that came later.”
I looked at him dubiously. “Kind of bizarre souvenirs. Is that what they sell in their shop?”
“The Boudicca shop’s mostly British antiquities—legal ones. They have suppliers out in the field; everything’s registered before they take it on to sell. But the grave goods from Kethelwite, that’s what they used to open the shop after Mallo got out of prison. Up until then it had all just been lying around their flat. Like I said, souvenirs. Tamsin was furious—she said the artifacts belonged to her, she thought of them as family heirlooms. She went into a red rage when she found out they’d been sold.”
“That’s when they all fell out?”
He nodded, and his fingers closed around the bone disc. I didn’t stop him from gently sliding it from my grasp.
“This,” he said, and held it up. “This was mine. I found it when I was ten, that time in the fogou, and I gave it to Poppy as a present. I wrapped it and everything.”
As he spoke, he turned the disc, tracing the eye on each side. “I just thought it was so amazing—an eye! The bizarre thing is that the few thaumatropes they’ve discovered in Europe predate our barrows by thousands of years. So how did it get here? Trade routes? Or did someone independently come up with the idea in West Penwith five thousand years ago?”
“You know an awful lot about some pretty obscure shit.”
“I grew up surrounded by it.”
“All those ruins—no one ever studied them? No excavations? Archaeologists, nothing like that?”
Adrian shrugged. “The barrows go back thousands of years. So yes, at some point someone must have explored them, a farmer or maybe one of Tamsin’s ancestors. Gentleman antiquarian. But archaeologists or treasure hunters? Absolutely not. That land was in Tamsin’s family for centuries, and they did not look kindly upon trespassers. So, no Victorian antiquarians raiding the tombs. No crazy hippie witches, except for Tamsin’s friends. Every cairn and field system in the UK is on the ordnance survey map, or in Julian Cope’s book—he begged Tamsin to let him look at the fogou. Every rock in this country is mapped—except the ones at Kethelwite.”
“What about Google Earth?”
“From the air, all you can see is moor—gorse, blackthorn, maybe some rocks. Everything’s hidden in plain sight.”
He handed the thaumatrope back to me. I looked at him in surprise. “You don’t want it?”
“If I’d wanted it, I wouldn’t have given it to Poppy.” After a long moment, he nodded. “No, you keep it. I think she would have wanted you to have it.”
I stared at him, then at the bone disc. Finally I slipped the rawhide over my head again. “She told me a fan gave her one of these after a show one night in Paris. This would’ve been before you and her … got involved. Did she ever tell you about that?”
He pondered before answering. “I’m pretty sure not—it’s something I would have remembered.”
“You’re kidding me.” My disbelief flared into outright suspicion. “Two different people gave her the exact same thing? The same prehistoric thing?”
Adrian smiled. “You know, it doesn’t surprise me one bit.”
He turned to gaze out at the moor. “Poppy didn’t believe in coincidence. She thought the world had a plot, even if we didn’t understand what it was. That there might be consequences to our actions that we’d never understand or even know about, but that would all make sense, if you could stand back far enough to see the pattern.”
He turned to me. “Haven’t you ever felt that way?”
“Never,” I said. But I was no longer sure that was true.