Celtic Fire. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 like a rusty old turnstile from a ballpark. She slipped through, keen to be away from the critical mass of teenagers.

      She stepped into a huge open field, its grass clipped as short as a playing field, which maintained the illusion of having entered the ghost of the old stadium. In the center, instead of a diamond, she spotted an information board. She walked over to it.

      As she approached the board, the excavated amphitheater was revealed by the subtle change in elevation. It was easy to imagine how the remains had been hidden beneath earth and grass not so long ago. She walked in the footsteps of history, following a line of Romans and Britons before her to the excavation, eventually reaching the center. At this point, she imagined the wooden structure that had once stood above these stone foundations and how it must have towered above anyone down in the arena.

      The acoustics were interesting; the stone sides cut out the external noise. Despite the fact they were no more than a couple of hundred meters away, she couldn’t hear the kids who had still seemed so loud before she’d gone down into the heart of the monument. It was a curiously intimate moment of tranquility.

      Not that it lasted.

      Her cell phone’s ringtone ended the peace.

      She glanced at the display before answering.

      “Garin,” she said. He only ever seemed to call when it was bad news. That had become the nature of their relationship. Save a girl once, she’d joked, and you think it gives you the right to ruin her life. “What can I do for you?”

      “Ah, Annja, sweetheart, how I’ve missed your dulcet tones,” he said, making no effort to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “Not missing me too much, I hope?”

      “I’ve not even been here a day—besides, it’s hard to miss you.” She checked her watch and tried to work out what the time was where he was, but then realized that she had no idea where he was in the world.

      “Well, according to this little gadget I’m looking at you’re in Wales of all places.”

      “Spying on me?”

      “Hardly. It’s just this new box of tricks we’re trying out that tracks back signals when they bounce off satellites. It’s a refinement on the old caller ID. You never know when it might come in handy.”

      “I’m not sure I want to think about why you’d need to know exactly where someone’s calling from—mainly because every reason I imagine will probably be suspicious if not illegal.”

      “Oh, ye of little faith.”

      “So what can I do for you? Got some relatives you want me to visit?” She looked across the fields at a flock of sheep nuzzling along the barbed wire of the perimeter fence, and pushed a toe against a pile of rotting cigarette butts. She could never understand why people would litter in a place like this.

      “Ask not what you can do for me, ask only what I can do for you.”

      “What on earth are you babbling about?”

      “I’m nearby, someplace they call London. Ha! I figured if you were at a loose end I could nip over and entertain you.”

      “Entertain me?.”

      “I’m a lover of beautiful women, Annja, you know me. I don’t discriminate—black, white, in color—doesn’t matter, beauty is beauty. And I like to collect beautiful things.”

      “And vacuous ones.”

      “Oh, you wound me...though I will admit to a weakness for the odd dumb blonde. I can’t help myself. That isn’t a crime. So, let me entertain you.”

      On a bucket list of wants and desires, that was right down there on the bottom of Annja’s bucket along with the dregs. But for all his lecherous ways, Garin was charming, and good company, hence the ease with which he took to womanizing. “I’ll give the offer its due consideration, but right now I’m hoping for a couple of days of me time.”

      “Well, if you change your mind...”

      “You’ll be the first to know,” she replied.

      “Excellent,” he said. “Have fun and try not to miss me too much.”

      “I’ll do my best,” she said, but he’d already killed the call.

      A boy peered over the edge of the grassy bank, looking down at her, Roman emperor to her gladiator waiting in the pit. He disappeared back behind the edge without giving her the thumbs-up.

      Annja left the amphitheater, climbing the hillside that would have been banked seating back in the day. She then spotted her Roman emperor; he’d moved on to the shelter of a hedge at the end of the field with a couple of his friends. They were huddled together. She saw the spark of a lighter, which therefore explained the cigarette butts.

      Behind the boys she could see a lonely spire.

      She left them to smoke their coffin nails and went to check it out.

       Chapter 8

      “I don’t mean to be difficult—” which of course was exactly what he meant to be “—but what exactly are you are planning to do with this thing now?” Geraint tilted his head slightly, making a show of thinking about it. “I suppose it could make an interesting flowerpot. Maybe you could turn it into a water feature?”

      “Or I could hit you over the head with it,” Awena said. Her twin was proving more obstinate and much less enthusiastic than she had hoped he’d be, but then it hadn’t been his idea to steal the stone in the first place, so perhaps it was all just a case of sour grapes. The important thing was that he agreed with her—the stone wasn’t what the museum curator had thought it was. Unfortunately, he didn’t agree that it made it any more important than a well-preserved whetstone. That it had been used to hone blades rather than crush grain made no difference to him.

      She took a deep breath, refusing to let him wind her up.

      “Do I really have to spell it out to you?” She shook her head.

      “Spell away, dear sister. I’m clueless.”

      And he really was. He couldn’t see why she’d been compelled to steal it before it was consigned to some dank storage area in the bowels of the museum, never to be seen again.

      She wanted him to be as wrapped up with possibilities as she was, not just humoring her. It might have been her idea, but he was her other half and she didn’t just want him to be in this with her; she needed him to be part of it.

      “Don’t laugh, but I’m ninety-nine percent certain what you are looking at is the Whetstone СКАЧАТЬ