The Shadowy Horses Page 4

  I hadn’t yet made up my mind about Fabia. She was of an age with my sister Alison, not quite twenty, but where Alison was sensible and unaffected, Fabia Quinnell wore the deliberately bored look of an adolescent, and called her grandfather “Peter.”

  She was, as Adrian had said, a fetching young woman—quite stunning, in fact. And decidedly blonde. Her pale hair, baby-fine, swung against her soft jaw at an artful angle, leaving the nape of her fragile neck bare. Small-boned and doe-eyed, she looked nothing like her grandfather. Nor did she appear to share his hospitable nature. The greeting she had given me was anything but warm.

  I rather doubted she’d done anything to decorate my bedroom, despite what Quinnell had told me last night. More likely the old man himself had selected the curtains and coverlet, made things look comfortable. Fabia, I suspected, wasn’t the sort of young woman to concern herself with someone else’s comfort.

  It surprised me that she’d even noticed my bedroom light, last night.

  In answer to her question I replied, through a mouthful of cold toast, that I normally slept in the dark, like everyone else. “I just have a foolish imagination, sometimes—things that go bump in the night. Especially in strange houses. So I find it helps to leave the light on.”

  “Well, you gave me quite a turn, last night,” she said. “I thought it might be Peter, waiting up for me. He drinks, you know, and then he wants to talk.” She rolled her eyes with feeling. “A typical Irishman.”

  I wouldn’t have guessed Peter Quinnell was Irish. He had, after all, that beautifully elegant voice, with no trace of a brogue whatsoever—but now that I’d had the fact pointed out to me I could recognize that indefinable quality, the faint hint of horses and hounds, that marked a certain segment of the Anglo-Irish gentry.

  Taking another sip of coffee, I turned in my chair so I could see out the narrow kitchen window. From the treeless ridge behind the house a lush green field sloped gently downwards, bounded at its bottom edge by the thick tangle of thorn and briar that hid the road from view. Two men were standing in the center of the field, eyes fixed upon the ridge. One of the men was Peter Quinnell. The other was larger, broader about the shoulders, with curling jet-black hair. “They’ve started early,” I commented.

  “Who?” Her uninterested gray eyes flicked toward the window. “Oh, Peter and Davy, yes. They’re always puttering around.”

  “What does David Fortune do, exactly?”

  “He’s an archaeologist, the same as Peter. Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.”

  “But surely…” I frowned. “I mean, wouldn’t your grandfather prefer to manage the excavation on his own?”

  “I doubt it,” she said, flatly. “And anyway, he needs Davy. Or rather, he needs Davy’s name on his publications, to make the dig legitimate. Peter’s name simply doesn’t impress people, these days,” she explained, her tone offhand. “Most people think he’s past it.” Pushing herself away from the counter, she nodded at my empty plate. “Are you finished with that? Good. Come on, then—I’ve been ordered to give you the grand tour.”

  Shrugging on my crumpled anorak, I followed Fabia outside. The morning was crisp for late April, clear and sunny, with a brisk breeze blowing from the southwest.

  I turned my back to the breeze for a moment, and took a good long look at Rosehill, pleased to find it looked less ominous by daylight. Pinkish-gray plaster that in places didn’t cover all the rose-colored brick made the plain house seem prettier. A graceful flight of steps curved up sideways to meet the front door, trailing a delicate handrail that softened the sterner angles, and the narrow white-painted window frames held an abundance of little square panes that reflected the sunlight like glittering faceted gems.

  “Why is it called Rosehill?” I asked.

  Fabia Quinnell shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Peter about that; he has his own theories. There aren’t any roses, to speak of. Plenty of daffodils, though.” She pointed behind me, at the little hill that edged the drive. It was yellow with daffodils, hundreds of them, all nodding their heads in agreement. Like the daffodils that grew beneath my bedroom window, these gently blew beneath a spreading horse chestnut whose tender folded leaves were freshly green.

  Fabia idly plucked a leaf as we passed, and smoothed it between her fingers, turning her head to look beyond the house to a corner of the sunlit field just coming into view.

  “Did anything go bump in the night?” she asked me, slowly. “Last night?”

  I glanced at her. “Only the cats. Why?”

  “Just curious.” She pulled her gaze from the field with another shrug and let the flattened leaf fall from her fingers. “This way,” she said, and started up the hill toward the stables.

  Chapter 4

  The dark wooden stables crouched long and low on the ridge above the house. From their wide arched entrance one commanded a view that stretched forever, across the roofs of Rosehill and the little cottage by the gate, across the rolling fields and the narrow road and the river that wound through a purple mist of trees, all the way to Eyemouth’s distant chimneys and the icy blue North Sea.

  “No horses, anymore,” said Fabia beside me, gloomily.

  Pulling my eyes from that marvelous view, I followed her over the threshold. There hadn’t been horses for quite some time, I thought. The smell of them was gone.

  Still, I forgave Quinnell for their absence the instant my eyes adjusted to the indoor lighting. “My God,” I said, and meant it.

  He had worked wonders here.

  I was used to doing fieldwork in makeshift labs set up in tents, hauling water back and forth to wash the artifacts and battling my colleagues for table space. Now, as I looked around, I was made stunningly aware of just what sort of money was involved in the Rosehill dig. The cleaning of the place alone must have cost a minor fortune.

  To my left, the double row of wooden stalls had been stripped and refinished, their clay floors carefully leveled and swept pristinely bare. One stall, ringed round with freestanding metal shelves, held the microscopes Adrian had raved about—not just the ordinary sort, but a dissecting microscope as well, complete with its camera attachment. Another stall housed packing materials—boxes of all shapes and sizes, self-sealing plastic bags and bubble pack and even silica gel for packing metal. I was suitably impressed.

  “It’s all right,” Fabia conceded with a shrug. “Mind you, we’ve had no end of trouble with those computers. The programs keep crashing. And the—”

  “Good God.” I interrupted her, my head poked round a half-open door leading off the wide stone passageway. “You have running water!”

  “Hot and cold.” Fabia nodded. “That used to be the tack room, so there was already a sink in there, but Peter had to have a larger one, of course.”

  My admiration for Peter Quinnell grew stronger still. There would be no messing with hosepipes on his excavation, I thought. No tedious lugging of buckets and tubs. And while the hot water bordered on frivolous, the rest of the room was perfectly functional—the ideal place for washing and sorting artifacts. Quinnell had stocked it with dozens of screens, to dry things on, and brushes of every size and shape, right down to the tiniest toothbrush. Long tables had been set up along the end wall, and beneath them waited stacks of trays and shallow sorting boxes.

  “The finds room,” Fabia identified it, looking round. “Not that we’re likely to find much. I’d have had this for my darkroom only Peter thought it better if I had the cellar at the house. More space, he said, and not so dusty.”

  I felt a spark of interest. “Your darkroom? Are you the site photographer, then?”

  “Peter had to find some use for me, didn’t he?” Turning, she led me toward the dark end of the stable building, away from the refinished stalls. “And this is the common room,” she told me, flipping up a switch to flood the space with light.

&n
bsp; I stared. “The common room?”

  “For the students.”

  All the stalls here had been removed, and the walls painted bright creamy white above green pub-style carpeting. In one corner, a large television and video faced two angled sofas. A narrow bookcase held an assortment of paperbacks, board games, and jigsaw puzzles, and the wall beside sported a professional-looking dartboard. And at the center of the room a massive snooker table rested, rather smugly, as though it judged itself the most important furnishing.

  Fabia folded her arms. “Showers and toilets are out back.”

  “Showers?” I echoed, incredulous.

  “Oh yes. Nothing’s too good for the students, you know.” Her mouth quirked. “Not that we have any students working here. Peter’s little fantasy, that. He thinks he can convince the university to support his excavation.”

  Her tone implied that he might as well tilt at a windmill. I looked at her, curious. “But you said David Fortune’s from the university.”

  “Well, yes. But Davy’s known Peter for years; he’s hardly impartial. Having him associated with our dig might make us more respectable, but it still doesn’t solve Peter’s problem. To hire students for the summer,” she explained, “he needs the approval of the head of the department. And I’m told the head and Peter have a history.”

  “Oh, I see. Still, it’s not such an obstacle, surely? If your grandfather’s very determined, he could always hire regular workers to help with the dig. They don’t have to come from the university.”

  “Ah, but that,” she said, in a patronizing tone, “would mean he wouldn’t get the recognition he deserved. It’s his golden scenario, getting those students.”

  She’d lost interest in the common room.

  “Your office,” she said, “is down here, with the others.”

  I followed her back toward the renovated stalls at the other end of the stables, past the finds room, past the shelves and microscopes and packing boxes, to the last stall but one. It put me in mind of a monk’s cell, clean and efficiently organized down to the tiniest detail.

  The gray filing cabinet and metal-topped desk were gleamingly new, as was the state-of-the-art computer in the corner, and the orthopedic office chair, upholstered in soft green fabric that cleverly matched the desk accessories and litter basket. A calendar above the desk displayed a glossy yellow field of April daffodils.

  “It’s lovely.” I delivered my verdict honestly. “Really lovely. All of it.”

  “You’re right across from Adrian,” she pointed out. “And Davy’s office is in the corner, there, but he’s only here a few days a week.”

  David Fortune’s office looked abandoned, actually, and gave no clue as to the personality of the man who worked there. Adrian’s workspace, on the other hand, was easy to identify. He was not the most tidy of men.

  I shifted a coffee-stained cup from a stack of his papers, and peered with interest at the computer-generated image that topped the pile. It looked like something a child might produce by rubbing a stick of charcoal over a bumpy block of granite, only I knew it was nothing so amateurish. It was, in fact, a plotted section of a ground-penetrating radar survey.

  Adrian had already been here a few weeks, I knew. He’d have completed his initial topographic survey of the site, using the measurements to create a detailed contour map of the field where Quinnell wanted to dig. But digging, by its nature, was destructive, and archaeologists didn’t do it blindly. There were other ways to see beneath the ground.

  Geophysical surveying, Adrian’s speciality, relied on highly sensitive instruments to measure minuscule changes in the underlying soil. A resistivity survey passed a current through the ground to measure its resistance—walls and roads, much drier than the earth around them, showed up clearly. Where the soil was not well drained, as I suspected might be the case here at Rosehill, Adrian usually opted for a magnetic survey.

  But ground-penetrating radar was his favorite. It often proved prohibitively expensive, but then Adrian loved spending other people’s money. And he loved the high technology, the physical precision. I’d seen him spend days in a field, on his own, dragging the little wheeled radar device behind him like a child dragging a wagon, moving back and forth across the same bit of ground with a thoroughness that would bore most men rigid.

  The results were usually worth the effort. His readings could reveal fascinating things beneath the most uncooperative of surfaces. And when the results were plotted on a computer, they produced a stratified landscape of black, gray and white, like the one I was looking at now.

  Incomplete, the image showed a definite anomaly, a sharp dip spearing down through the black and gray bands. It certainly might be a ditch, I conceded. And those smaller blips off to the right could be buried features, as well. I picked the paper up and brought it closer for a better look. Funny, I thought, how these things all started to look alike, after a while. This one put me in mind of an image I’d seen only last year… they were very similar… very… and then I saw the tiny black smudge of a fingerprint to one side of the “ditch,” and I frowned.

  Not merely similar, I corrected myself—exactly the same. I’d made that smudge myself; I could remember Adrian ticking me off for doing it. This wasn’t an original printout at all. It was a photocopy, with printing on the top edge changed to read: Rosehill, Eyemouth, Berwickshire.

  “What the devil is Adrian playing at?” I asked, still frowning. I turned to Fabia. “Do you know anything about this?”

  Her eyes slipped warily away from mine, to the paper in my hand. “Yes, we think that may be some sort of ditch in the southwest corner. Adrian found it last week.”

  David Fortune’s voice surprised us both.

  “It’s no use, lass,” he advised Fabia. “She was in Wales last year as well, with Sutton-Clarke. She’ll not be so easily fooled.”

  We both turned round to see him standing square in the passageway, just inside the arched stable door, his arms folded complacently across his broad chest.

  Fabia Quinnell shot him an angry look, then turned to me, defensive. “It’s not… I mean, we didn’t…”

  “I’ll do the explaining, if you don’t mind,” the archaeologist cut her off. “Why don’t you go and keep your grandfather company? He’s back at the house, somewhere.”

  Defeated by the determined tone of his voice, she brushed past him, head high. David Fortune ignored the petulant toss of her fair hair. His eyes held firmly to my face.

  I looked down, feeling robbed. “I gather this is why you said I might not answer yes, when Quinnell offered. There is no Roman marching camp at Rosehill, is there?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But this,” I challenged him, holding up the incriminating image, “is a fake.”

  “Aye.”

  The fact that he didn’t seem at all put out disappointed me, and I held the paper higher still, accusingly. “Your idea?”

  “Fabia’s, I think.” He smiled, faintly. “Adrian shouldered the blame when I caught him, but it’s not the sort of thing he’d do on his own. And he has a hard time saying ‘no’ to Fabia.”

  I sighed, and dropped the paper to the desk. “You knew about this,” I said, slowly, “and yet you didn’t tell Quinnell?”

  “I didn’t see the point. He’d already seen the image, by the time I learned what Adrian had done. I wasn’t pleased about it, but since it didn’t do much harm…”

  “Didn’t do much harm?” I echoed, disbelieving. “How can you say that? Quinnell’s digging for something he’s not going to find.”

  “You don’t understand.” He shook his head, and with a tight-lipped sigh he looked away. “Ye no ken Peter Quinnell. He’d dig anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Robbie.”

  It wasn’t the first time I
’d heard that name. Quinnell himself had mentioned it, last night, and I struggled to recall the context. Something about Schliemann having Homer to guide him to the ruins of Troy, while Quinnell had only…

  “Robbie.” I repeated, shaking my head slowly as I tried to comprehend. “But who is Robbie? And what does he have to do with this?”

  David Fortune took a long time answering. He seemed to be weighing something in his mind. “Best come and see for yourself,” he said, finally, and with that invitation he turned and went out.

  I was plainly expected to follow, though it was all I could do to keep up with his long, rolling strides. As we passed the big house, moving on to the drive, I mustered enough breath to speak. “Where are we going?”

  “Rose Cottage,” he replied. “You’d have passed it last night, by the road.”

  Even in daylight, the cottage looked warm and welcoming, built long and low of some blood-colored stone. The path leading round from the drive to the back door was lovingly trimmed and kept clear. Daffodils grew here, as well—an explosion of yellow in the deeper green of grass, and David Fortune took care not to trample them as he stooped to knock at the white-painted door.

  The woman who answered the summons was young, my own age, with short chestnut hair and a fresh cheerful face warmed by freckles. Her large brown eyes widened in mild surprise at the sight of us.

  “Davy!” she said, in an accent as rich as his own. “Is something wrong? Is Peter…”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Is Robbie about?”

  “Aye.” She pushed the door wider, her gaze sliding past him to me, and the surprise melted to a quieter interest. “It’s Miss Grey, isn’t it?” she greeted me, extending a firmly capable hand. “I heard you’d arrived. I’m Jeannie. Jeannie McMorran. I keep house for Peter.” Before I could respond, she took a quick step backwards, shaking her head. “Och, I’m forgetting my manners. Come inside, the both of you.”

  David Fortune ducked his head to squeeze through the narrow doorway. The kitchen was narrow, too, and long, and though the sunlight couldn’t quite break through the small, old-fashioned windows, the lace curtains—so white it almost hurt the eyes to look at them—and gaily patterned china plates propped up along the old oak dresser, made the room homely and bright.