Celtic Fire. Alex Archer

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       Chapter 7

      The museum was closed.

      Annja had moved her car from the pub to the hotel, checked in, dropped off her bags and, despite the lure of the big comfortable bed, turned around and headed straight back out again. She’d hoped to get a quick look around the museum before it closed for the afternoon, but when she got there she saw a makeshift sign on the door that said it was closed for the day, so it’d have to wait until tomorrow.

      She peered through the long window, pressing her face up to the glass. There were lights on inside, and she could just about make out the shadow-shapes of a handful of people milling around. She tried to shield more of the window from the sun, cupping her hands around her brow as though peering through binoculars. She saw a woman talking to a policeman. There was another man—dressed in overalls measuring up the size of one of the display cabinets. The woman saw her face pressed up against the window and mouthed the words Closed and Sorry, shaking her head before she returned her attention to the policeman with his notebook poised.

      It wasn’t exactly difficult to put the pieces together: a man measuring up a display case, a policeman taking a statement; there’d obviously been a robbery. It was surprising that a local museum would have any particularly valuable exhibits, though. Normally these rural sites just offered a few fairly interesting treasures dug up from the site, a few battered coins and rings, with the most precious golden torcs and such being spirited away to London for the British Museum’s collections.

      The brochure the landlord had given her mentioned a cache of small Roman coins, which would be both difficult to sell and unlikely to fetch a great deal of money—certainly not enough to make the effort worthwhile—so the theft was more likely to be a case of petty vandalism, probably bored kids looking for a thrill than any international criminal masterminds at work. Kids would have no idea as to the value of anything inside the collection and probably thought it was all priceless.

      Hopefully no one had been hurt.

      Annja turned her back on the museum and crossed the quiet road.

      A handful of cars had driven by while she stood there. Was the place always this quiet? A woman passed her with a buggy. It took Annja a second to realize it was the same woman she had seen in the beer garden earlier, proving just how small a town it really was. The woman smiled at her, clearly enjoying the momentary respite her sleeping baby offered.

      Annja proceeded along the road. An old lady weighted down by straining bags overfilled with shopping nodded at her as she shuffled off toward her home, stockings rolled down around swollen ankles. It was like something out of an L. S. Lowry painting, only she wasn’t a matchstick. This was a sleepy little town where strangers smiled at one another in the street. She was from a neighborhood where the guy in the apartment across the landing didn’t say hello, never mind a complete stranger. Her commute involved people crowded in on the subway too scared to make eye contact because they never quite knew what was going on in the heads of their fellow passengers. It was a different world. As much as she enjoyed the hustle and bustle of big cities and the anonymity that came with them, there was something special about quiet places like this. She couldn’t live here, she’d go out of her mind after a week, but for a couple of days it was a great place to recharge.

      A signpost shaped like a finger pointed down a narrow lane, promising her that it led to the amphitheater. She’d followed the same lane to move her car from the pub to the rear of the hotel.

      Time to go exploring.

      Annja walked past the cluster of cottages on the left and realized that it was in the garden of one that the most recent discoveries had been made. She tried to recall what she’d read. There was some kind of preservation order on the buildings that was supposed to prevent people from digging too deep. But the urgent removal of a tree teetering due to severe storms had exposed earth that had never been excavated and led to all sorts of wonderful finds. Sometimes life was funny like that, in order to preserve one way of life another had been kept hidden for over a century and it had taken a brutal act of nature herself to change that. Annja skirted the gardens, following the lane down toward the ruin.

      It wasn’t the first time she’d seen an amphitheater, but there was something incredible about seeing it here, right out at the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire.

      Beyond the houses the lane opened up, providing more room for school buses to negotiate the track down to the ruin. The camber was quite severe, allowing the rainwater to sluice away without eroding too much of the track. She saw a row of buses parked on the right with a cluster of teenagers milling around them, waiting to board. The kids were full of noise. A few others made their way to cars parked on the other side, no doubt to drive home with parents who’d chaperoned the visit.

      Annja kept close to the fence, looking for a gate into the site. What she found looked СКАЧАТЬ