I should have followed my instincts and begged Elsie to let me stay in London for a while. It would have been a small reciprocation of her frequent visits to Sussex. But I reluctantly took the train back to Chichester and, having missed the last bus, paid twenty pounds for a taxi to take me from Chichester Station into West Wittering.
Sure enough, the following morning I had a visitor.
‘You’ll forgive the intrusion,’ said Sly with unjustified confidence.
But it was not as if there were any other options on offer. He’d already intruded. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Sly?’ I asked.
‘Tertius, please,’ he said, though it was clear that he felt his membership of his parish council entitled him to be addressed more formally if he so chose. ‘As to what you can do for me … I understand you wish to join the Abbey preservation committee?’
‘Yes,’ I said cautiously. I had no wish to be churlish.
‘Well, I’d be happy to support your application,’ said Sly, with what he clearly imagined was great generosity. ‘We need men of your calibre, Ethelred, to carry forward our important work. I’m assuming, of course, that we are of much the same mind?’
‘I’m sure we must be on some things,’ I said.
Sly looked dubious. He had not expected qualification of any sort. ‘If I’m to give you my support, Ethelred – my full and unreserved support – I’d need to be certain that our views were wholly aligned. I realise that Henry Polgreen is a friend of yours, but you have already conceded that his activities are illegal. We now need to work together to have him unseated. Once I am chairman, I would be happy to relinquish the secretaryship to you, Ethelred. You could act as my deputy, working to support me as best you could. Of course, at your age, you couldn’t expect to succeed me as chairman, but I can assure you that secretary of the Abbey preservation committee is a position of considerable power and influence and not just in West Wittering. As you are aware, it gives me a certain kudos throughout the entire Manhood Peninsula: East Wittering, Bracklesham, Sidlesham – even Selsey. It would do the same for you. You would gain respect that you couldn’t possibly have under normal circumstances. For somebody like you, it is an amazing opportunity. So, Ethelred, do we have an understanding?’
I sighed. Perhaps churlishness was the better option after all.
‘I haven’t yet decided what to do,’ I said, ‘but thank you for your offer of support, should I choose to join.’
Sly looked disappointed in me. ‘You need to make up your mind,’ he said. ‘You’ll never get anywhere in life if you dither like this. Look at me. When there was a vacancy on our parish council, I threw my hat straight into the ring. Carpe diem, as the Bard so rightly said. Carpe diem, Ethelred.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said, as I so often said to Elsie, and with equal conviction.
He sat back in his seat. As with most of my visitors, it was taking him some time to come to the point. The real point.
‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ I asked.
‘Well – I’m just curious – have you had any further discussions with your policeman friend?’
‘Joe? No, not lately.’
‘You don’t have the low-down on what they are thinking? About Dr Joyner?’
‘Only that it was an accident. I told you that.’
‘You did, Ethelred, you did. I thought our discussion was very interesting, and I hope you found my advice helpful. But they’ve had no second thoughts?’
‘None that they have told me about.’
‘You didn’t put your idea to them that it might have been Henry Polgreen who killed him, with Iris Munnings’ help?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I decided not to.’
‘But you must agree that was what happened? Dr Joyner’s book, when he’d finished it, would have exposed Polgreen for what he is. A man of Joyner’s integrity would not have been bribable. Polgreen had to stop him any way he could. So, he had to kill him.’
‘I think that’s very unlikely,’ I said. I had no intention this time of making myself unclear in any way.
Sly frowned. ‘But consider, Ethelred. Surely what happened was this? The rest of us were touring the garden. Dr Joyner had remained by the well. Polgreen returned, crept up behind him and smashed a brick into the back of his skull as he knelt there. He gave Dr Joyner a gentle push and then watched as his body tipped forwards and plummeted helplessly to the bottom of the shaft. There was a muffled splash. Polgreen gave a guilty start and looked behind him, but nobody had seen or heard a thing. So, he breathed a sigh of relief. He crept away, shaking, and rejoined the group as if nothing had happened. Doesn’t that fit the facts as we know them?’
‘If the police say anything at all along those lines, I’ll certainly let you know,’ I said.
‘Thank you, Ethelred,’ he said. ‘That’s kind of you. Any little snippet that you hear – even if you do not entirely understand its significance yourself. Just tell me, all right? Well, I’d best be on my way. Lots to do when you’re on two committees, and secretary to one of them, as you will discover yourself, if you play your cards right.’
‘Of course, Councillor Sly,’ I said.
‘Tertius,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for formality between us. Do you know, Ethelred, I think we’re going to be great friends.’
I decided that it was my turn to drink coffee and lie about my intentions. Accordingly, I took a stroll to the edge of the village and walked up the front path of a small, modern bungalow, built of anonymous beige brick, with a nice display of roses in the garden. I didn’t need to ring the bell. Polgreen suddenly emerged from behind a large buddleia, glasses balanced on the end of his nose, a pair of secateurs in his hand.
‘Ethelred!’ he said. ‘This is a pleasant surprise!’
‘I was just passing,’ I said.
‘Really? On your way to where?’
‘Brighton,’ I said.
He looked at me oddly. ‘That will take a day or two on foot.’
‘Unless I’m stretching the truth slightly, Henry. As you seem to be.’
He quickly glanced round. ‘Let’s go to my study,’ he said. ‘We can talk privately there. My wife’s pruning the wisteria over the back. A technically more difficult task, so she tells me. She’ll only want to make you coffee if she knows you’re here.’
He led me along his hallway and into what had probably been intended as a nominal third bedroom. Inside the cramped space was a desk, some bookshelves stuffed with local history books and several heaps of lever arch files on the floor. He peered out of the small window, then closed the blinds as a precautionary measure. He sat down in the typist’s chair in front of the desk and motioned me towards the only other seat in the room – a vinyl kitchen chair that had already acquired a few dents before The Beatles released their first EP.
‘So, why do you think I’ve been lying to you?’ he asked.
‘Everyone else has,’ I said. ‘But more to the point, much though I dislike Tertius Sly, there is usually some small grain of truth in what he says. He’s convinced that you are conducting illicit excavations. If I’m to join your committee, I’d like to know the truth. Tertius, as I must apparently now call him, will support my application only if he and I are of one mind. In that singular mind that we must now share, you’re guilty as charged.’
Polgreen looked at me for a long time. I wondered if he was going to speak at all. Then he said, ‘Yes, he’s right. For what it’s worth, I’ve done a bit of digging on my own account. But he’s wrong that that’s the reason why I don’t want further excavations carried out.’
‘So what exactly have you done, Henry?’
Polgreen got up and went to his bookcase. He extracted a battered copy of Happy Recollections of a Sussex Clergyman.
‘You’ve read this strange little volume, I take it?’ he said.
‘As with Curious Tales of Old Sussex, I’ve dipped into it,’ I said. ‘I can’t claim to have read it all, or even most of it. I suspect, with both books, that Barclay-Wood made a great deal of it up.’
‘But you know that it is put together in the form of a diary, each entry dated?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And you know that, during some of the period covered, Barclay-Wood was busy excavating the Abbey site?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, a lot of the references to the Abbey might not have meant much to you, if you read those sections, but they did to me. I could follow his fieldwork almost yard by yard. And, to the trained archaeologist, it made little sense. Recent digs have been to establish where the monks’ dormitory was, where the kitchen was, what the monks ate, how the Abbey expanded over the years, and so on.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said.
‘Barclay-Wood’s excavations on the other hand showed a complete lack of curiosity for facts such as these. The earliest – this would be the early 1890s – was right in the middle of what he would have already known was the monks’ herb garden.’
‘Not a lot to find there, I would imagine.’
‘That took three summers of painstaking labour. He then switched his attentions to the cloisters – not the buildings around the quadrangle, but the centre, where we believe there was a rose garden. Do you see any pattern emerging?’
‘So, it was the vegetable garden next?’
‘I’m not sure there was one within the Abbey – though there would have been fields beyond it, of course, for that sort of thing. No, he started to dig right in the middle of the Abbey church, where we know some of the Abbots were buried. That took several years, and did result in the discovery of bones, a couple of rings and a crozier. Then in 1902 he suddenly stopped. For the next forty years there was no excavation of the site at all. What does that suggest to you?’
‘He’d found whatever it was he was after,’ I said.
‘Precisely. So, let’s consider where he’d looked: herb garden, rose garden, tombs.’
‘Places where the Madonna might have been buried to hide it from the King’s commissioners,’ I said. ‘And in 1902, he found it.’
‘That’s what I think too.’
‘What does Tertius Sly think?’
‘I haven’t discussed it with him. Not worth the risk. Think about it, Ethelred. Archaeology has advanced enormously since I studied history. Ground-penetrating radar. Shallow geophysics. X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy measurers. Light detection and ranging technology. Google Earth. You can do so much these days without even lifting a trowel. Quite a bit without even leaving your own study. You don’t need to destroy the soil in order to find out what’s underneath the surface. Best we leave things, as much as we can, for future generations with even better techniques. The last thing I wanted was for Sly to decide that, where one valuable object was found, there must be a lot of other loot to dig up.’
‘So why did you decide to dig yourself?’
‘I just wanted to confirm that that was what had happened. That there was no point in further digging to locate the Madonna, because Barclay-Wood had taken it. When it was quiet, I went over the old chapel with what technology I had – a cheap metal detector. My theory was that Barclay-Wood wouldn’t just dig up the Virgin – he’d leave something behind too.’
‘And did he?’
Polgreen opened a drawer in his desk and took out a clear plastic bag. He spilled the contents onto his desk.
‘Pennies,’ I said. ‘Edward VII.’
I picked one up. They’d been common enough when I was a child. The familiar profile on one side, Britannia, and the date on the other.
‘Not just Edward VII,’ said Polgreen. ‘They were all minted in 1902. The leather purse they were in had rotted, but the coins are in a good condition, bearing in mind they’ve been buried for over a hundred years. I don’t think they were ever in circulation. Their sole function was to date, to the year, when the ground had last been disturbed.’
‘Barclay-Wood telling you that you were on the right track,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell me it’s just a weird coincidence. Over the years, I’ve got to know Barclay-Wood and what he found amusing. The moment I checked the date on the first coin I knew what I had discovered. The question is: are there further clues somewhere else or is that it?’
‘But you know where the Madonna is … or was,’ I said.
‘Do I?’
‘You dug it up,’ I said.
Polgreen shook his head and looked at me as if I had not been paying attention. ‘I’ve told you. It was just the pennies. There was nothing else there. That’s the whole point of my story.’
‘I mean in my garden.’
Polgreen’s gaze was now completely blank. ‘Why on earth would it be in your garden?’ he asked. ‘That would have been just fields in the sixteenth century.’
‘So, it wasn’t you?’
‘It wasn’t me doing what?’
I took a deep breath. ‘The Madonna was actually buried at the Priory, just like the story says. Iris’s grandfather dug it up. He hid it in the ice house, where Iris later found it. She gave it to Professor Cox to value, and possibly sell. Joyner stole it from Cox and buried it under my roses. Somebody – I had assumed you – then removed it.’
He shook his head. ‘Not me … Bloody hell. Iris knew all that and never told me? You knew that and never told me?’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
We looked at each other for a while.
‘I’m sure Barclay-Wood found it at the Abbey,’ he said. ‘So that must mean he then reburied it at the Priory … Yes, of course. He could have done that. It’s no distance to the Priory from the Abbey. But why would he do that? Even by his standards, it makes no sense at all.’
‘Well, there’s no doubt it was at the Priory by 1959, waiting to be found. But I think you may be wrong about Barclay-Wood moving it there. Iris thinks Barclay-Wood never saw the Madonna at all. She conversely has seen it and says the description in his book – all the rubies and lapis lazuli stuff – is just plain wrong. If that’s true, then your supposition that he ever found it at the Abbey must be wrong too. Maybe he buried the pennies for some other reason that he found equally amusing.’
‘Then why does he stop digging when he does?’
‘He just lost interest,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps he was looking for something else entirely and did find that.’
Polgreen shook his head. ‘What else could it have been? He was obsessed by the Madonna. He wrote about it. He spent almost ten years digging for it. I’m telling you, he found it. He saw it. It doesn’t surprise me that he sexed the statue up a bit. That’s what he did all the time. For an evangelical clergyman, he was a liar of quite exceptional ability.’
‘All right, then why – and how – did he then bury it at the Priory? I suppose the how is the easy bit. He had about forty years, between 1902 and his death, to walk or ride or drive over to the Priory and hide it there. But it still leaves the why.’
‘He just found it amusing,’ said Polgreen grimly. ‘He’d clearly worked out where it was and decided it was too easy to find. So he moved it somewhere less likely, where it could do no harm.’
‘But the Priory? That was the other place everyone thought it was.’
‘I suspect that generations of owners have declined to have their garden dug up – especially since the treasure might prove to belong to the Crown and not them. So, the Priory may have actually been safer than most places.’
I shook my head. It still didn’t feel right. But Barclay-Wood was always the joker in the pack. As long as he was involved almost anything was possible.
‘Do you think Joyner knew all this too?’ I asked. ‘He had all the evidence. I think it was the Priory where he really wanted to dig.’
‘He seems to have done,’ said Polgreen. ‘But you say he actually had the Madonna at that point. So, why dig at all? What was he doing looking in the well for something he knew was buried in your garden?’
‘Iris said the same thing, more or less. Why did he come to West Wittering when he had the object he was supposedly searching for? Perhaps he knew something that we still don’t know. He had put together quite a collection of papers, including what seems to be the original inventory of the Abbey – or a very early copy.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t mind seeing that. It’s been missing since Barclay-Wood’s time. How did Joyner get it?’
‘I’ve wondered about that,’ I said. ‘He told me that he used to take his aunt to boot fairs round here, years ago. Maybe her interests extended to auctions and antiquarian bookshops. He seems to have ended up with a collection of books owned by Barclay-Wood and papers belonging to the Abbey.’
‘So, in one place or another, he stumbled across Barclay-Wood’s library being sold off?’
‘Something very much like that. The collection doesn’t look very exciting unless you know how to read sixteenth-century handwriting. He did.’
‘But that would be an odd coincidence – he’s interested in the Abbey and he just happens to find a collection of papers on it.’
‘More likely the other way round, don’t you think?’ I said. ‘A chance find at a boot fair years ago led to his researching the background to the dissolution of the monastery.’
‘Those papers really belong here,’ said Polgreen. ‘By rights.’
‘Probably,’ I said.
‘And the Madonna, if it’s out there.’
‘If you really want it,’ I said. ‘I can’t see why you would. Barclay-Wood made up a great deal, but he was right about it being cursed. It certainly brought Joyner no luck and he probably had it only for a few days.’
‘True,’ said Polgreen. ‘Though falling down the well seems to have been entirely his own fault.’
‘Where were you when he fell?’ I asked.
‘On the far side of the garden, probably,’ he said. ‘I certainly never went near the well after we all left together. Actually, I scarcely saw anyone from the moment we left the well to the moment we all got back to the terrace. I ran into Elsie and Anthony Cox, but that was all.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s just that I saw somebody in a white jacket. I thought it was Joyner, then I lost sight of the person, then I came across Iris and assumed it was her that I’d seen. But you were wearing a white jacket too.’
‘I’m a bit taller than Iris or Joyner.’
‘It was only a brief glimpse. A flash of white. Thinking about it, it could have been any one of the three of you.’
‘And where was that?’
‘Near the ice house. Not far from the well.’
‘What are you saying, Ethelred? That you think I came back and pushed Joyner down the well?’
‘That’s Sly’s theory.’
‘I bet it is. And what is my motive supposed to be?’
‘To save your reputation. He gave quite a detailed description of you by the well, including the moment you gave a guilty start, but I think, like Barclay-Wood, he has a rather gothic imagination.’
‘I’d better get back to the garden,’ said Polgreen. ‘I’m supposed to be deadheading, not dealing with Abbey business.’
I nodded. I was divorced myself, but I knew that most marriages operated on delicately negotiated, often unspoken, compromises. It was, in my experience, unlikely that Mrs Polgreen shared Henry’s enthusiasm for archaeology or considered it more important than timely garden maintenance. He needed to be seen deadheading something and quickly.
‘I’ll email you my application to join the committee,’ I said. ‘Will just a quick statement of my wish to join plus a brief CV and contact details do?’
He nodded. He was no longer quite so sure he wanted me. That was progress of a sort.
‘I’ll pass it on to Iris and Tertius Sly,’ he said. ‘Sly’s bound to want some kind of formal vote amongst the three of us. He always does.’
I walked back down the path to the main road and turned right, in the opposite direction from Brighton. I needed to check something in Barclay-Wood’s journal. Not the printed book but the manuscript version that Joyner had felt so worthwhile bringing with him.