Lessons in Solving the Wrong Problem - Charlie Cochrane Page 0,18

then simply and left. The nurse—who’d been asleep all that time under her parasol in the sunshine and so missed most of the fun—took Edward to clean him up. Richard got out the trap and drove straight away into Bury St Edmund’s to make a report to the coroner.”

“I believe the Romans liked to drop something valuable into water,” Beatrice said. “Perhaps appeasing or asking the favour of the local river god. Or maybe simply for luck, as we might throw a halfpenny in a well.”

“Indeed, my dear. Richard was certain the presence of treasure and the presence of the spring were related.”

“All seems clear so far,” Orlando observed. “Might I hazard a guess at what happened next?” After his host nodded, he continued, “when they returned to the scene, perhaps with the coroner in tow, they found the treasure had been dug up and removed.”

“A good guess, although not quite right, Orlando. Richard and I couldn’t return until two days later, the day after the discovery being exceptionally stormy and quite unsuitable for making such an outing. When we did venture out, accompanied by a local expert on all matters Roman, we couldn’t find the treasure at all, hide nor hair of it. We found no obvious sign that someone had been there and stolen it, although if they’d carefully covered the site back over again, that might have required a close inspection to notice the fact. We spotted what looked like one single, stray coin but before we could pick it up, a bolt of lightning struck a tree not fifty yards away and we decided discretion would be the better part of valour. Not more searching.”

“Did the storm affect the ground?” Orlando asked. “Could a landslip have covered it, or maybe the waters washed the treasure away down the slope? Into the old watercourse, perhaps?”

“I wasn’t misled about your logical powers,” Henry said, with an approving nod. “One might imagine you were there at the time. Yes, the field does slope, and yes, there was a landslip caused by the excessive rain. The area where Edward had been put to dig was near to the hedgerow—the one where his nurse had found a hawthorn tree to sit under. The tree itself moved a good two yards during the worst of the weather, so you can imagine the effect on the rest of the site. Richard and I asked ourselves a similar question, and he explored the area below where Edward had been, although not the culvert, because that was in the wrong direction. His search was to no avail, although admittedly this was many weeks later, during which time there had been more ground movement.”

Jonty had produced a notepad and was jotting down albeit meagre information they’d received so far. “Why was his search left until so much later? Was the ground unstable?”

“It was absolutely treacherous, although that’s not the cause of the delay. We had every intention of returning the day after our abortive visit, but events overtook us. It was another day of stormy weather, with barely a break in the clouds.” Henry stared into his glass. “My father was thrown from his horse that evening, on his way back from meeting a neighbour for his regular game or two of billiards. He was found by the gamekeeper who’d, thank the lord, worked out where he was likely to have passed.”

Orlando murmured sympathetically, mentally noting that if the weather had been so bad, why had the late Lord Byrd gone out for such a seemingly trivial reason?

Their host continued. “We were told he wouldn’t last the night, although he managed to cling on for two days, coming in and out of lucidity. He said he wanted to make sure all his affairs were straight and say goodbye properly. He wasn’t a demonstrative man, although at the end he softened. After that, going in search of buried treasure didn’t seem important for a while.”

“No, indeed.” Jonty shot Orlando a sympathetic glance: he also knew how awful it was to lose a father so young. Although Orlando didn’t have the consolation of his own father softening towards him at the end. “I suppose that people, once they thought it fit to talk of the treasure again, put the episode down as one of Richard’s jokes, there never being any treasure to start with.”

“You suppose correctly, especially as he’d had a bit of a run in previously with the local Roman expert I referred to, a man called