The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More(21)

        In the beginning, all he had wished was to be away from it, and to leave it behind him and be done with it for ever. But after he had gone a few hundred yards or so, he began to slow his pace. At the gate leading out from Thistley Green, he stopped.

        ‘What in the world is the matter with you, Mr Gordon Butcher?’ he said aloud to the howling wind. ‘Are you frightened or something? No, I’m not frightened. But I’ll tell you straight, I’m not keen to handle this alone.’

        That was when he thought of Ford.

        He thought of Ford at first because it was for him that he was working. He thought of him second because he knew that Ford was a kind of collector of old stuff, of all the old stones and arrowheads which people kept digging up from time to time in the district, which they brought to Ford and which Ford placed upon the mantel in his parlour. It was believed that Ford sold these things, but no one knew or cared how he did it.

        Gordon Butcher turned towards Ford’s place and walked fast out of the gate on to the narrow road, down the road around the sharp left-hand corner and so to the house. He found Ford in his large shed, bending over a damaged harrow, mending it. Butcher stood by the door and said, ‘Mr Ford!’

        Ford looked around without straightening his body.

        ‘Well, Gordon,’ he said, ‘what is it?’

        Ford was middle-aged or a little older, bald-headed, long-nosed, with a clever foxy look about his face. His mouth was thin and sour, and when he looked at you, and when you saw the tightness of his mouth and the thin, sour line of his lips, you knew that this was a mouth that never smiled. His chin receded, his nose was long and sharp and he had the air about him of a sour old crafty fox from the woods.

        ‘What is it?’ he said looking up from the harrow.

        Gordon Butcher stood by the door, blue-cheeked with cold, a little out of breath, rubbing his hands slowly one against the other.

        ‘The tractor left the plough behind,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s metal down there. I saw it.’

        Ford’s head gave a jerk. ‘What kind of metal?’ he said sharply.

        ‘Flat. Quite flat like a sort of huge plate.’

        ‘You didn’t dig it out?’ Ford had straightened up now and there was a glint of eagles in his eyes.

        Butcher said, ‘No, I left it alone and came straight on here.’

        Ford walked quickly over to the corner and took his coat off the nail. He found a cap and gloves, then he found a spade and went towards the door. There was something odd, he noticed, in Butcher’s manner.

        ‘You’re sure it was metal?’

        ‘Crusted up,’ Butcher said. ‘But it was metal all right.’

        ‘How deep?’

        ‘Twelve inches down. At least the top of it was twelve inches down. The rest is deeper.’

        ‘How d’you know it was a plate?’

        ‘I don’t,’ Butcher said. ‘I only saw a little bit of the rim. But it looked like a plate to me. An enormous plate.’

        Ford’s foxy face went quite white with excitement. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll go back and see.’

        The two men walked out of the shed into the fierce, ever-mounting fury of the wind. Ford shivered.

        ‘Curse this filthy weather,’ he said. ‘Curse and blast this filthy freezing weather,’ and he sank his pointed foxy face deep into the collar of his coat and began to ponder upon the possibilities of Butcher’s find.

        One thing Ford knew which Butcher did not know. He knew that back in 1932 a man called Lethbridge, a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at Cambridge University, had been excavating in the district and that he had actually unearthed the foundations of a Roman villa on Thistley Green itself. Ford was not forgetting that, and he quickened his pace. Butcher walked beside him without speaking and soon they were there. They went through the gate and over the field to the plough which lay about ten yards behind the tractor.