The Nine-Spoked Wheel, page 10
‘Of course I wouldn’t mind. But I can’t very well come with you, because I’m needed at the dig. And you won’t be able to see much, because the site is still under strict police guard.’
‘I understand that. And I’m sure that you will understand that I’d really rather be alone. Paul was an old friend, and I feel I’m making a sort of pilgrimage.’
*
At the camp they separated to wash and clean themselves up. Marryat went to the telephone box and arranged to meet Revers at Avebury at three o’clock.
*
After the work party had gone back to the dig, Marryat gave the young man on Mess duty a hand with the washing up – he was glad to see that it was a man today, and that there was no sex discrimination about putting women in the Mess, a principle of fair shares that he practised scrupulously in his own digs. With the washing up out of the way, he got his car and drove to Avebury. There were archaeological maps in the Mess hut of various sites in the vicinity, and he’d already located on the map the stone that fell on Paul – it was numbered Stone 29. He left his car in the village car park and walked to the stone. Revers was there before him and came to meet him as he walked up.
‘So you managed everything all right?’ Revers said.
‘Yes. It wasn’t difficult, and I got away quite naturally. But it was necessary to put in a morning at the dig first. I’m glad I did that – and it’s given me a lot to think about.’
‘Well, come and think about some more.’
They walked round the fallen stone. Revers said nothing, and Marryat found himself near to tears. ‘Where, exactly, was Paul found?’ he asked.
‘He was almost completely covered by the stone, with his head lying inwards, towards the base of the stone.’
‘I’ve seen megaliths fall from time to time – and helped to re-erect them. They don’t, as a rule, fall suddenly: they overbalance, teeter for a moment or so, and then subside, the earth at the base acting as a brake. Paul was quick-witted, and fit. It seems extraordinary that he didn’t jump out of the way. But, of course, you can’t generalise. I suppose this stone did collapse suddenly, though I don’t see why it should. And how on earth would Paul come to have his head lying towards the stone? I should have thought it would have knocked him over backwards.’
Revers did not reply directly. They walked to the back of the stone, and he indicated the pit. ‘This is the shaft leading to the underground chamber,’ he said. ‘The excavation is not as Paul Clayton left it – his work had not gone far. Most of the digging was our work afterwards.’
‘May I go down the shaft?’
‘Of course. It’s quite shallow. We went down by a ladder belonging to Dr Arbolent’s expedition. The wooden ladder there now was fixed by the police. You’ll need a torch.’
Revers had brought a powerful lantern torch. He gave this to Marryat, and Marryat climbed down. The removal of the urn and the little pile of loose stone plaques found with it had left the chamber empty. Marryat shone the torch over the walling, and studied an inscription cut on the face of one of the wall stones. It was in a script similar to that in the Great Barrow tombs, and also seemed to indicate a name and title. The title here appeared to be ‘Zilats’ and the name ‘Porsna’. There was nothing else to see, and he climbed up again.
‘What do you make of it?’ Revers asked.
‘At the moment, nothing. Burials under or near a megalith are not uncommon – they were sacred stones, and it was like burying somebody in a cathedral. But walled tombs underneath a stone like this are rare. The inscription is quite baffling – so are those at Wansdyke. I was looking at one there this morning, which appeared to commemorate a certain Lauchmis, near enough to the Etruscan word Lauchme which means king. This inscription commemorates a Zilats, again nearly similar to the Etruscan Zilath, who was roughly similar to the Roman consul, or chief officer of state. The similarity, of course, may be deceptive, though Dr Arbolent obviously attaches much importance to it as indicating a proto-Etruscan background to the people of this culture. I find the clash of periods simply bewildering. If you were not a policeman I’d say I don’t believe it. As it is, I say only that I can make no comment.’
‘Perhaps I don’t believe it either,’ Revers said slowly. ‘But I have only instinct to go on. You have knowledge and training.’
‘Better leave it at instinct for the moment. Ah, here’s the famous nine-spoked wheel!’ Standing on the lip of the shaft, Marryat leaned over the heel of the fallen stone. Like the inscriptions and other carvings, the outline of the wheel was cut fairly shallowly in the stone. ‘Is it as significant as Dr Arbolent says?’ Revers asked.
‘It certainly signifies something, but just what I don’t know yet. Because a wheel is circular, and can be used to symbolise so much of human life, there’s always been a lot of folklore about wheels. Some of it is nonsense. For instance, it’s popularly supposed that wheels should always have an even number of spokes, but odd numbers are not uncommon, even in antiquity. Nine spokes are unusual, and Arbolent is quite right in saying that the best-known nine-spoked wheel is from an Etruscan chariot of the sixth century BC. I’m less sure if the nine-spoked wheel was really a general symbol of Etruscan culture. And again, the periods are baffling. This stone was erected not later than 1600 BC, perhaps some centuries earlier, and since the carving is near the base of the stone and buried with it, presumably it was cut before the stone was set up – incidentally, it’s worn remarkably well for something buried for near 4,000 years. You have a gap of at least 1,000 years between this wheel symbol and the known Etruscan wheel. Arbolent is entitled to his views, but it seems to me that he is using facts to fit his theories rather than devising theories from the facts. But that’s his business. Hullo, what’s this?’ Marryat pointed to the hole that perforated the heel of the stone a little below the outline of the wheel.
‘It’s just a hole,’ said Revers. ‘It goes right through the stone – I’ve pushed a bit of wire through.’
‘It’s very puzzling indeed. If it’s natural, it’s most unusual, for, as I’ve said, these megaliths were sacred stones, and a stone with a hole through it would be considered defaced or deformed in some way, and would almost certainly not have been erected in a stone circle. It’s possible that it’s an artificial boring, made to take a rope during the process of erection, but again, that would be most unusual. And it would be a formidable job to bore through a stone of this thickness without a modern drill.’ He peered at the hole, and shone Revers’s torch into it. ‘Yet it is remarkably even for a natural hole.’
Revers had not given any thought to the hole since finding it. Now he, too, studied it closely. It was still half-full of earth, and this made it look smaller than it was. Cleaned out, it would be somewhat over an inch in diameter. It seemed to run straight through the stone, which rather suggested human boring: water-worn holes, where some core of softer material than the surrounding stone has gradually been washed away, tend to be erratic, following the vein of soluble matter and not a straight path.
‘May I make a suggestion?’ Marryat said. ‘I take it that the police are still in charge here – that the site hasn’t been handed back to Arbolent?’
Revers nodded.
‘Then I think you should cover the exposed base of the stone with tarpaulin to protect it from rain, and have a very thorough scientific examination made of the hole, its edges, and the earth inside it. Look particularly for traces of tungsten on the walls. If you take scrapings, the presence of tungsten can sometimes be determined spectroscopically –that would show whether a tungsten-steel bit has been used to bore it. I strongly suspect the antiquity of that hole. What it’s there for, I haven’t the least idea, but it’s alien to the rest of its surroundings, and I feel that we should find out what we can about it. What happened to the cremation urn?’
‘Dr Arbolent took it away with him – it was photographed for the newspaper, as you probably saw. I had no reason to connect it with Paul Clayton’s death in any way, and I’d been instructed not to interfere with archaeological investigations.’
‘Quite. I’d be interested to see it though. What did you yourself think about it?’
‘I didn’t think anything very much. It was rather like a big, two-handled flowerpot, with one handle broken. Dr Arbolent said –’ Revers referred to his notebook – ‘that it related to an early Villanovan culture.’
‘Yes. Villanovan is the term used for a pre-Etruscan culture in Tuscany. The burial of cremated ashes in earthenware jars was a customary Villanovan practice, and one handle of the jar seems frequently to have been broken, apparently deliberately, presumably to symbolise some aspect of death. But the periods don’t fit. Villanovan funeral rites were practised in Italy around 900–750 BC. This was a burial apparently 1,000 years earlier in England. It’s a weird mixture of cultures. If you say that one was the prototype of the other, it’s extraordinary to find the later practices cropping up in the earlier culture in almost their final form. I don’t begin to understand it.’
*
The Sunday Examiner believed in exploiting success. Having profited magnificently from a not very large – by its standards – investment in Dr Arbolent’s dig, its management wanted to move on quickly to the next phase of the adventure. This was Dr Arbolent’s projected voyage in a reconstructed proto-Phoenician ship to show how the blue stones from the Prescelly Mountains in Wales could have been shipped across the Bristol Channel for Stonehenge. When Dr Arbolent had first suggested this the editor had been cautious: shipbuilding was likely to be much more expensive than financing a dig with most of the work done by unpaid students. But that was before the brilliant discoveries at Wansdyke and Avebury. Now everything was different. Dr Arbolent had proved himself worth backing, and the whole world was reading about the Sunday Examiner’s triumph in helping to bring to light a wholly unsuspected ancient civilisation in Britain. No expense need now be spared: the ship must be built and the voyage made, as soon as possible, while the public was still avid for news of Britain’s extraordinary prehistoric achievements. Dr Arbolent’s press conference was called to announce his plans.
‘We are here,’ he told the large gathering assembled in the conference room of London’s newest and most glittering hotel, ‘to discuss what may be called Phase Two in vindicating my belief that most of the major arts of civilisation originated in the west. Through the far-sighted generosity of the Sunday Examiner I have been able to show conclusively that alphabet-writing was being used in England at least 1,000 years before its appearance in the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, that writing is fundamentally the same as the alphabetical script hitherto attributed to the Phoenicians, and later adapted for the Greek and Latin alphabets. It is my belief – I think I can say that it is now proved – that the mystery of the origins of the Etruscan people has been solved. They came into Italy neither from the east, nor from the north: they came from England, being a branch of the same race that went also to Tyre to teach seafaring to the people there who became known to history as the Phoenicians.
‘Too many archaeologists, ladies and gentlemen, have ignored the sea. Early in my own career I decided to add the study of naval architecture to the subjects more customarily associated with archaeology, and it is this study which has enabled me to interpret the discoveries I have made. I have shown that the arts of civilisation did come from the west: that was Phase One. It is now necessary to show how they were transported from the west to the world of the Middle East. The answer is the sea.
‘Much ingenuity has been put into trying to solve the problem of how the blue stones at Stonehenge, which originate in the Prescelly Mountains of West Wales, could have been brought to Salisbury Plain. We have been assured that they must have been taken overland to the South Wales shore of the Bristol Channel and then shipped across the Channel on rafts. Ladies and gentlemen, all this is nonsense. In the tomb-carvings of Wansdyke Great Barrow I have found pictures showing how they were brought from Wales. The natural clue is in the River Gwaun, which offers a good, river valley route of less than ten miles from the hills to Fishguard Bay. There was no need to haul them to South Wales at all. From the place that is now called Fishguard they were shipped by sea – in ships, not rafts – right around the coast of West Wales, round Strumble Head and St David’s Head, to the tidal limits of the Avon, where Bristol now is. Thence they may well have been rafted up the Avon. You may ask how I know this. Ladies and gentleman, the tomb pictures have shown it to me! There, you can see ships as advanced as anything the Phoenicians ever had – almost as advanced as the Arab dhow – actually loaded with great stones! There can be no possible doubt of this.
‘I have the authority of the Sunday Examiner to tell you that, in the furtherance of knowledge, that newspaper has acquired a boatbuilding yard near Fishguard, and that the whole resources of this yard are now devoted to building a boat, to my design, that is a replica of the boats shown in the tomb pictures. The vessel will be ready before the end of this summer. When she is launched, I shall load her with a cargo of blue stones and sail her from Fishguard to Bristol. That, surely, must satisfy any doubts that old-fashioned archaeologists may still have about the interpretation of my discoveries. I am happy to add that I have obtained the permission of Lady Penelope Cawprint, the wife of the distinguished chairman of the Sunday Examiner, to give the boat her name. She will be called Lady Penelope.’
Dr Arbolent sat down to a degree of applause quite unusual at press conferences. His story really had touched people’s imaginations, and the newspaper-reading public had their minds taken off current problems by the comforting reflection that although Britain might have lost an empire she had found – or rather, Dr Arbolent had found for her – an unexpectedly magnificent past. He answered a number of questions with – for him – exceptional affability, and the journalists were then supplied with a useful handout, prepared by the Features Staff of the Sunday Examiner, containing a summary of Dr Arbolent’s theories, and drawings of the Lady Penelope. She was to be some sixty feet on the waterline, with a beam of twenty feet, giving her a displacement (Thames Measurement) of about eighty-five tons. She was to have a single mast, rigged with a lateen sail.
VI
Another Death
THAT EVENING REVERS had a long session with his superintendent. He reported his various meetings with Marryat, and explained what he thought might be the implications of what Marryat had said.
‘Are you satisfied this man Marryat is on our side, John?’ Macleod asked.
‘I’m on no one’s side,’ Revers said. ‘I was brought up as a policeman largely by you, Super, and if I weren’t talking to you, I might say something about a belief in justice.’
‘OK John. So you think Clayton was murdered?’
‘Yes, I do. There’s a possible motive, and I think I can see how it was done, though a court would take a lot of convincing.’
‘There’s a woeful lack of evidence all round.’
‘There’s more evidence than there was. He won’t say so yet, because he’s a cautious professional man – also, I think, he’s a very fair-minded man – but I’m pretty sure Marryat believes that the whole thing is a gigantic fraud. Suppose Clayton found out what was going on – there’d be reason enough for putting him out of the way.’
‘I’m not disagreeing with you, John. But you’ll be taking on the Sunday Examiner and all the rest of the Press if you try to prove it. People don’t like being taken in. And it’s asking a hell of a lot to accept that all this highly scientific talk about proto-Phoenician alphabets and the rest is nonsense.’
‘There was Piltdown man.’
‘There was, but the academics fought that out for themselves. They didn’t need to gang up against the bloody ignorant police. And they didn’t have to prove it in a court of law.’
Revers said nothing, and Macleod went on, ‘But maybe the police aren’t so ignorant after all. Nobody got murdered over Piltdown – at least, not so far as I know. This is different. If somebody was murdered here – I say “if” because although there’s a lot of funny circumstantial evidence, we’re still a long way from being able to prove that Clayton was murdered – then it’s our job to see that the murderer doesn’t get away with it. I’m not taking you off the case, John, and I’ll back you to the hilt. But you know that. What have you done about the hole in the stone?’
‘I’ve done what Dr Marryat suggested, and arranged to have the whole area round the base of the stone covered by tarpaulin. I’m going to get advice from the forensic people. Normally, we’d send something we want tested to them, but they wouldn’t thank us for unloading a thirty-ton block of sarsen on them. I’ve been on the phone to them already, and a soil-analyst and a masonry expert are coming out tomorrow morning.’
‘Good. And now it’s well after office hours, what about a wee dram, as they say in my own country?’
*
The forensic scientists were prompt, and Revers took them straight out to Avebury. He showed them the hole in the stone, and explained his problem. ‘Has this part of the stone been buried for centuries?’ the soil-analyst asked.
‘It’s supposed to have been.’
‘Then you’d expect a core of earth inside the hole to be impacted hard. Did you find it like that?’
‘No, I didn’t. I got a piece of wire through quite easily.’
‘Well, there could be reasons for that. But there are several things we can do to check on the relative conditions of the earth inside and outside the hole. Suppose a hole like this gets filled with earth and stays buried and undisturbed for a very long time: you have different conditions inside the hole, and in the surrounding earth. Ordinary soil is porous, but the earth inside the hole would become almost completely airless, so you’d get different forms of soil bacteria inside and outside the hole – the inside might become virtually sterile. On the other hand, if I find the same forms of bacteria inside the hole and in samples of the surrounding soil, the implication would be that the hole has been filled with earth comparatively recently. Another point is the actual physical composition of the soils. Some components that were once in the outside soil may get washed away, whereas they might remain in the inside core. I can test for all these things, but I’m afraid it will be a couple of days before I can let you have all the results. I’ll take the samples now.’
