After a few minutes of digging, with no success, Jake felt his arms tiring and his back aching.
‘There’s nothing here,’ he announced bitterly.
‘There is,’ said Andy confidently. ‘Woody’s never wrong. You need to put more welly into it. Dig deeper.’
‘And faster,’ said Michelle, focusing her camera on the hole that Jake had excavated. ‘Robert can’t keep Weems talking for ever.’
Jake grimaced, then returned to the task. Despite the urgings to go faster from Michelle and Andy, Jake dug carefully; worried in case the blade of his spade might puncture the leather casing around the book and release whatever might be inside. The image of the man who’d turned into a vegetable at the construction site in Bedfordshire still haunted him.
‘There it is!’ said Michelle excitedly.
On hearing her exclamation, Andy hurried over, keen to see what was happening. Jake stopped digging and peered into the hole. Yes, there did appear to be something poking out from the earth. He dropped the spade to one side and picked up the trowel, and began to carefully scrape around the dark object he could see. Gradually, a shape was revealed: a small box-like rectangular shape. Jake scraped away more of the earth, and finally exposed a black leather packet embossed with a letter M with a snake writhing through the letter. The symbol of Malichea. He’d found it! He’d found one of the books!
‘Stand away and put your hands in the air!’
They all turned, and saw two men standing glaring at them, one old and one young. They looked like father and son. The older of them was holding a shotgun pointed directly at Jake.
Woody may be a great dog for sniffing out things, but he wasn’t much of a watchdog, thought Jake bitterly. But even as he thought it, Woody growled and bared his teeth, and Jake was sure that if the dog hadn’t been held tightly on a lead, he’d have hurled himself at the man with the gun. Andy made a clicking noise with his tongue, and the dog settled down, but kept his eyes all the time on the man with the gun.
‘Hand it over,’ snapped the man with the shotgun.
‘Hand what over?’ asked Jake, looking up at the men from his position inside the hole.
The man with the shotgun scowled.
‘That thing you’ve just dug up,’ he said grimly.
As Jake straightened up and turned to face them, stepping out of the hole, he slid the package down inside the back of his jeans.
‘We haven’t found anything yet,’ he insisted.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ grunted the older man. ‘Just hand it over.’
‘Do you have a licence for that shotgun?’ asked Andy, speaking with a note of confidence in his voice that surprised Jake.
The older man frowned.
‘Yes I do, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘And you’re trespassing and illegal treasure hunting. This is my land.’
‘We’ve got permission to dig from the landowner,’ put in Michelle.
‘That don’t matter,’ snapped back the older man. ‘This was my land before they took it over and there’s things here that belong to me and mine.’
He’s a Watcher, thought Jake. Weems must have alerted him after he found us.
‘That may be,’ said Andy, ‘but we’re not here for treasure.’ He reached into his pocket and produced an identification card. ‘Search and rescue, working with the police. We’re looking for evidence of a crime.’
The older man looked at them, puzzled, and Jake noticed the look of concern that crossed the young man’s face.
‘What crime?’ asked the older man.
‘That’s official business,’ said Andy crisply. ‘And at the moment you’re committing another one, pointing a loaded gun at plain-clothes police officers.’
‘It ain’t loaded!’ burst out the young man.
‘Shut up!’ barked the older man at him.
So, thought Jake, definitely Watchers, come to scare us off and stop the book being taken, but not using real violence; just a threat.
Andy pushed his ID card at the young man.
‘Take a proper look at that if you don’t believe me,’ he said.
The young man took Andy’s ID card, looked at it, and compared the photograph on the card with Andy, then offered it towards the older man.
‘That’s what it says, Dad,’ he said. ‘Search and rescue.’
As I thought, father and son, mused Jake. Handing down the Watcher tradition.
The older man spat on the ground.
‘Cards like them don’t mean anything,’ he said. ‘People make ’em up on computers.’
‘There’s a phone number on it,’ said Andy. ‘Phone and check. And then put down that gun and let us get on with the job we’re here to do.’