From London Far by Michael Innes

to be a hush-hush hunt for oil, which came to much the same thing. But then we suddenly got a bit of an advertisement. Sir James Presland, who lives in Edinburgh and is no end of a swell in that sort of archaeology, used to come out sometimes and give an eye to the affair. He gave a hand, too – for although he has a great white beard and must be about eighty he just loves going at it with a spade and pick – terribly recklessly, I may say, after the fashion of digging folk of that generation.
    ‘Well, there was little doubt in the end that we were bang on the site. And out came Sir James brandishing his pick as if plumb determined to send it straight through a cinerary urn or a faience goblet. What he did put it through was a skull, and the skull turned out to be embarrassingly recent. In fact, the eminent Presland had unearthed some rather nasty mid-nineteenth-century crime. It was in all the sensational papers, and there was even a decent little column in the Scotsman . As a result, everybody knew just what was on and that quite a find might be expected any day. The publicity didn’t seem greatly to matter, even though the dig had as often as not to be left deserted during the week. What we were likely to find might have considerable intrinsic value – there might be gold and jewels, that is to say – but the general impression would be that we were eager to dig up a few old swords and helmets… I’m afraid I’m making this story frightfully long.’
    ‘You are making it distinctly intriguing.’ Meredith chuckled at what he conceived to be his very modish use of this word. ‘I would beg you not to retrench in any way what may appear to you to be the superfluities of your expression.’
    Jean Halliwell gave him a momentary wary glance, such as elaborately facetious dons are accustomed to receive from their pupils. ‘Well, we were working away one day – cautiously and without Sir James – and suddenly we came on the whole thing. The clue, whatever it was, had led to something very considerable indeed: piles and piles of treasure thieved from all over the place. And there we were, four women and one man, ladling the stuff out as if from a bran pie. We had the use of a shed nearby and we stacked things there for the first night. We had arranged with the nearest police-station for a guard if necessary, and one of us went off on a bicycle and found the bobby assigned to the job. In the end we left both him and the man of our party camped in the hut until various transport arrangements could be made next day. The bobby was a decent chap in a dour Midlothian fashion, and two of his kids came along to see him settled in for the night. And our own man was a decent chap too – minus a leg which he had left in Lybia, but able to give a thoroughly good account of himself if there was trouble. It seemed all right.’ Jean Halliwell paused. ‘The next bit isn’t at all nice.’
    ‘They were attacked?’
    ‘On the following morning there was nothing but a crater, bomb fragments, four bodies, and a lot of archaeological debris.’
    ‘God bless my soul!’ Meredith was horrified. ‘But those things did fall just anywhere.’
    ‘That is what everybody said. But just consider. That one of the beastly things should land not only just there but just there on that particular night is a very big coincidence. And why the bodies of four men – two of whom were never identified? It was a pretty hectic month that, one way and another, and I don’t know that the technical check-up on the incident was particularly thorough. Anyway, I had to come back south and hadn’t much time to think about it. But when I did think I saw more and more clearly that it was queer, and I wrote once or twice to the people who had been in on it. They had managed to collect quite a lot of interesting stuff from the rubble, but when I saw finally that these remains were far more scanty than was natural I definitely began to view the thing as a crime