Bell Harry Read online

  It didn’t take Kate long to find the letter she wanted. Sir Anthony had written it to his steward three days after the outrage. He had made a throwaway remark while telling the steward about the damage the troops had done in the cathedral. It was the throwaway remark that had Kate skipping with excitement as she returned the letters to the desk and hurried outside to make a phone call.

  Alan Brent answered at once. He listened closely as Kate spoke.

  ‘It’s true, what Tyler says. Every word of it.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Every word. Right down to the three Roundhead skeletons under the cathedral. He’s not making any of it up.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘The skeletons. They were there, all right. I even know their names.’

  *

  Two weeks after Ezra Tyler’s death in Colorado, his grandson Chad was watching an old movie when he had an idea.

  The movie was a war film about American troops in Normandy after D-Day. It covered much the same ground as Chad’s grandfather had in real life. That was what gave him the idea.

  ‘Why don’t we go to Europe?’ he asked his wife, after the movie was over. ‘See where Grandpa fought. Why don’t we do that this summer?’

  ‘Europe?’

  ‘England first.’ Chad was thinking it through. ‘Then France. We could follow in his footsteps. Go wherever he went.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Sure, I’m serious. We can see the sights in London and then go to France. Just like Ezra did.’

  ‘We’ve never been to Europe.’

  ‘Neither had Ezra, until he went. If he could do it, so can we.’

  Chad’s wife was reluctant. She didn’t like foreign travel. They had never been to New York or Washington, let alone out of the country. But Chad was determined to go. The idea was growing on him as he thought about it.

  ‘We know where Ezra fought. It’s all in the 1051st’s history. We’ll just take the book with us and follow in his footsteps.’

  ‘Through Normandy?’

  ‘Why not? He did.’

  ‘This summer?’

  ‘The same time of year that he was there. D-Day was in June. We can follow Grandpa every step of the way. It’ll be perfect.’

  Mrs Chad remained reluctant, but she allowed herself to be persuaded. Chad was obviously set on the idea. So was his brother Jay, when Chad rang him to discuss it. If anything, he was more enthusiastic.

  ‘That’s a great idea. I’ve always wanted to see where Grandpa fought. It’ll give us closure, too. We can take Dad and go as a family.’

  Billy Tyler was as excited as his sons. He too had never been out of state, but there was always a first time for everything. Ezra’s service in Europe was a beacon to them all.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ he told his children. ‘In memory of your grandfather. If we don’t do it now, we never will.’

  *

  It was June as Kate Weldon, Alan Brent and the other Canterbury experts met again to discuss their findings. June was the best time of the year for people in the academic world. Exams were over for the year and the undergraduates had all gone away for the summer, leaving the professors free to get on with their own work at last. They were in a very good mood as they sat down to talk about Ezra Tyler again and find out what everyone had learned.

  Not much, as it turned out. Kate was the only one who had anything worthwhile to report. The others had all done their research, but without discovering anything new. Kate had their full attention as she stood up and told them about the letter Sir Anthony Reynard had written to his steward.

  ‘He was very angry about the destruction in the cathedral,’ she told them. ‘Several of his men had joined in without his authority. Three of them vanished into the cathedral and were never seen again.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘He thought they had deserted immediately after the incident, perhaps absconding with the loot. But I don’t think that’s what happened.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Have a look at his letter.’ Kate passed a copy round. ‘I’ve marked the relevant passage’:

  Three of our men, by name Will Ashenden, Tom Mullins and Angel Jackson, passed from my sight into the church and did not return therefrom. It is thought by Colonel Sandys that they will return whence they came, it being now harvest time. The knaves Ashenden and Mullins are from mine own estate, as wee knowe. Angel Jackson dwelleth hard by.

  ‘I don’t think they deserted,’ Kate said. ‘I think something happened to them in the cathedral and they ended up dead in the tunnel underneath the crypt.’

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘Quite possibly. I’ve been through the records and I can’t find any mention of them after the episode in the cathedral. Ashenden, Mullins and Jackson just vanished off the face of the earth, so far as Kentish records are concerned.’

  The others nodded. Kate was certainly making sense. They congratulated her on her discovery. A chance remark about three deserters going home to help with the harvest had turned into something much more, thanks to Ezra Tyler’s account of three helmeted skeletons under the cathedral. Kate had done well to put the two stories together.

  ‘I wonder if the skeletons are still there,’ Alan Brent said.

  ‘Not according to the cathedral. They say there’s nothing there at all.’

  It didn’t matter much. The skeletons were merely the confirmation of Ezra Tyler’s story. It was the French king’s ruby that had their attention as they wondered where they went from here. The really wonderful thing now would be to find where Branigan had buried it and dig it up. It was the sort of moment that historians live for.

  ‘I suppose metal detectors wouldn’t be any use?’ someone asked.

  Brent shook his head. ‘We could spend weeks going all over Canterbury with a metal detector. We’d find a lot of old tin cans, if nothing else. It would just be chance if we found what we were looking for.’

  ‘So really there’s nothing more we can do?’

  ‘Not really. Not unless we can think ourselves into Branigan’s mind and work out where he would have hidden the loot.’

  There was no chance of that. They all knew that buried treasure was hard to find. There were hoards of Roman coins all over England that lay undiscovered for two thousand years before someone unearthed them accidentally. It couldn’t be done by design.

  ‘The only thing we can do is go to Canterbury and have a look,’ Brent told his colleagues. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll find anything, even though we know what we’re looking for. But it would be a day out. Worth a try, at any rate.’

  The others were sceptical. The earth didn’t yield its secrets that easily. They were happy to go to Canterbury, though. It would be fun to see where it had all happened.

  A date was fixed for the following week. Brent offered to drive them down from London. They agreed to meet at the George Inn in Southwark and wait for him to pick them up in his car.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Bomb Disposal Squad

  The Tyler family flew to London from Denver. There were eight of them altogether, including Chad’s son Ward, a sullen teenager with his eyes glued to his phone. They took the underground train to their hotel and emerged next morning ready for two days of sightseeing in the English capital before following in Ezra Tyler’s footsteps to France.

  They had a good time in London. They went to see the Tower, and Buckingham Palace, and the Houses of Parliament. They stood in Trafalgar Square, looking up at the statue of Lord Nelson on his column, completely unaware that Benjamin Franklin’s old house was still there in the next street, less than a hundred yards away. Then the women went shopping while the men visited the Imperial War Museum.

  They had originally planned to hire a pair of cars in London and drive down to Dover, then across to France on the ferry. One look at London’s motor traffic, all of it on the wrong side of the road, persuaded them otherwise. The Tylers would never find their way out of the
city, let alone across to France. They decided to go to Dover by train instead.

  ‘Better to wait until we get to France before we hire a car,’ Billy Tyler said. ‘They drive on the right side of the road there. We’ll stay the night in Canterbury and go on to Dover tomorrow.’

  They went straight to the cathedral after checking in at their hotel. According to the 1051st’s official history, the regiment had been stationed in Canterbury for several weeks before D-Day. Grandpa Ezra must certainly have visited the cathedral while he was in Canterbury. His descendants would be following in his footsteps if they did too.

  They were following in Wat Tyler’s footsteps as well, if they had but known it. Their famous ancestor’s name meant nothing to them as they entered the cathedral and walked up the nave. The leader of the Peasants’ Revolt had stormed up the same nave at the head of a murderous mob, bent on mayhem of every kind. He had interrupted the mass from the pulpit, telling the congregation that the Archbishop was a traitor who would be beheaded as soon as the peasants caught up with him. He had been as good as his word.

  His descendants were a lot more sedate as they proceeded in the same direction. They had audio guides to tell them what to look at. They were all listening to the guides except for Ward, still glued to his phone. He was fifteen, determined not to be impressed by anything he saw in Europe.

  The Tyler family glanced around the choir, then drifted across to the Black Prince’s tomb. His shield, gauntlets, coat and helm still hung there, as they had ever since his funeral in 1376. Wat Tyler had admired them during his rampage through the cathedral. His descendants stood on the same spot as their peasant ancestor and admired them too.

  All except for Ward Tyler. He had done nothing but look at his phone ever since his arrival in England. He was beginning to get on his father’s nerves.

  ‘Hey, Ward,’ Chad said. ‘You see that helmet. That’s the Black Prince’s. It’s been hanging there for more than six hundred years.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you ought to look at it. Put your phone away and look at it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I say so. We’ve come a long way to look at it. Cost us a lot of money.’

  ‘I didn’t ask to come.’

  ‘Just put the phone away, Ward. I want you to look at the helmet.’

  Ward sighed. He put the phone away.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said.

  *

  The Tylers departed for France next morning without further mishap. Two days later, it was Kate Weldon’s turn to visit Canterbury with her university colleagues. They all knew the city well, but they were looking forward to a nice day out as they waited for Alan Brent at the George Inn in Southwark.

  The George was London’s last remaining coaching inn. Still with its galleries around the ancient courtyard, it dated from the 17th century, but that wasn’t why they had chosen to meet there. The George stood right next door to the site of the Tabard Inn, where Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims had gathered before their journey to Canterbury.

  The inn had burned down in the reign of Charles II. Nothing remained from Chaucer’s time, but Kate and the others were all agreed that it was still the right place to begin their journey to Canterbury. There was certainly nowhere better.

  Alan Brent arrived on time and they all got in. An hour and a half later, he parked the car in Canterbury and they got out again. It was only a short walk from the multi-storey to the cathedral.

  The Christ Church gate had acquired a new statue since the days of the Roundhead sharpshooters. The replacement Christ occupied the same space as the original but was obviously modern in design. Everything else about the gate looked exactly as it had done ever since its construction five hundred years ago, in the days of the Tudors. The academics eyed it appreciatively as they went in.

  ‘It’s probably the most historic gate in England,’ Alan Brent pointed out. ‘Everybody has been through here at one time or another. Pretty much everyone in English history.’

  Henry VIII certainly had, and Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More. So had Queen Elizabeth and Christopher Marlowe, and King Charles and his son. Samuel Pepys and Oliver Cromwell had been there, and Mozart, Jane Austen, Lady Hamilton, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Charles Dickens had put the gate in a book. JMW Turner had painted pictures of it. Mahatma Gandhi had been there as well. The list of famous people who had passed underneath the gate’s arches went on for ever.

  Kate and her colleagues joined them. Bell Harry was looking splendid in the sunshine as they went through. The good weather had brought the tourists out, many hundreds of them milling around the precincts with their guide books. Alan Brent led the way through the crowd and they went in to the cathedral.

  The Martyrdom was crowded too, full of people consulting their guides as they viewed the spot where Thomas Becket had been murdered. The door to the crypt lay right beside it. The academics filed in and went to see what they could find.

  The crypt was a dark, poorly lit place. It was full of nooks and crannies and little chapels dedicated to various saints. Its hidden recesses had concealed all sorts of secrets in times past. Parts had been bricked in and other parts walled off from the public. Nobody knew for sure what lay behind all the walls, or underneath the paved floor where so much had been hidden over the centuries.

  ‘What we’re looking for is a door of some kind,’ Brent said. ‘If there was a tunnel underneath the cathedral, where the Roundhead skeletons were found, it must have been reached from here.’

  ‘Or maybe a manhole,’ Kate suggested. ‘They could have gone down through the floor.’

  The academics looked about. There was no door in sight, nothing that opened onto a staircase leading down to a subterranean stream. No trap in the paving stones either. Not that anyone could see. If the tunnel had once been entered from the crypt, it certainly couldn’t be any more.

  ‘Perhaps the cathedral authorities are right,’ Kate conceded reluctantly. ‘They’ve said all along that there’s no tunnel under the cathedral.’

  ‘Or maybe they just don’t know. The door might have been bricked up in the past without their knowledge.’

  It was disappointing, nevertheless. The academics would have loved to find a door opening onto an ancient stone staircase. For all they knew, the Roundhead skeletons were still there, only a few feet from where they stood, just waiting to be rediscovered. But there was no way of telling without finding a way into the tunnel.

  They withdrew reluctantly and went out into the cloisters. It was a short walk from there through the Dark Entry to the Green Court. The buildings of the precincts were old and beautiful as they passed. The lawns were exquisitely manicured. It was hard to believe that the place had once been an inferno as German bombs rained down and the Luftwaffe tried to destroy Bell Harry. Impossible to picture bombs and explosions amid so much tranquillity.

  ‘The Luftwaffe commander was here,’ Brent told the others. ‘The one who commanded the bomber group.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘After the war. He came to Canterbury on holiday. Nineteen seventy-two, I think. Thirty years after the raid.’

  ‘What did he have to say for himself?’

  ‘He was in tears. Someone found him in the cathedral. He was sitting by himself, near the Black Prince’s tomb. He couldn’t stop crying, thinking about the raid and all the damage that had been done.’

  ‘The wretched man should have thought of that in the first place.’

  ‘It was a retaliatory raid,’ Kate said. ‘The RAF had flattened Cologne the night before. A thousand bombers. Lord Haw-Haw always said on German radio that the Luftwaffe would attack Canterbury if we attacked Cologne. They did, the very next night.’

  Kate was still feeling disappointed as they left the precincts. It was frustrating not to have found any trace of the three Roundheads anywhere, after she had so cleverly discovered their names. Yet it couldn’t be helped. Short of digging up the old bomb craters in search of a su
nken stream leading to the cathedral, there was nothing to be done about it.

  Her spirits revived after a pub lunch. They sat in the sunshine, enjoying the view of Bell Harry, and then strolled back to the car for their return to London. They were going to have a look at the old army barracks on the way, where Ezra Tyler and his companions had been stationed before D-Day.

  ‘It’s just up the road,’ Brent told the others, as he started the motor. ‘On the edge of town. Won’t take a minute to get there.’

  They drove around the cathedral and up Military Road. There had been a lot of new building since Tyler’s time, but the army training ground was still there, where the American troops had practised for D-Day and the invasion of Europe. The training ground was where Williams, Branigan and Tyler had buried the hoard from the cathedral, if their story was to be believed.

  There was a golf course next to it, with people enjoying a round in the good weather. Brent stopped the car for a moment and they all gazed searchingly at the rough terrain, wondering what Dutch Branigan had done with the jewels after he had dug them up. He had told Tyler that he had buried them again, presumably somewhere not far away. The only question was where.

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know now,’ Brent said. ‘It’s too long ago. We don’t have a thing to go on, except a dead man’s last confession, and that isn’t enough.’

  The others agreed. They all shared Brent’s frustration as he started the car again. So near and yet so far. The French king’s ruby was surely there somewhere, just waiting to be found, if they only knew where to look. All they needed was a place to look.

  ‘One day,’ Kate said. ‘The ruby will turn up one day. It’s bound to. It can’t stay lost for ever.’

  They drove back to London.

  Five years later, a mechanical digger was at work on the golf course next to the training ground when its driver spotted something unusual lying in the mud. He stopped the machine at once and saw that it was a box of some kind, churned up by the digger.