Celtic Fire. Alex Archer
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bored kids looking for a thrill than any international criminal masterminds at work. Kids would have no idea as to the value of anything inside the collection and probably thought it was all priceless.
Hopefully no one had been hurt.
Annja turned her back on the museum and crossed the quiet road.
A handful of cars had driven by while she stood there. Was the place always this quiet? A woman passed her with a buggy. It took Annja a second to realize it was the same woman she had seen in the beer garden earlier, proving just how small a town it really was. The woman smiled at her, clearly enjoying the momentary respite her sleeping baby offered.
Annja proceeded along the road. An old lady weighted down by straining bags overfilled with shopping nodded at her as she shuffled off toward her home, stockings rolled down around swollen ankles. It was like something out of an L. S. Lowry painting, only she wasn’t a matchstick. This was a sleepy little town where strangers smiled at one another in the street. She was from a neighborhood where the guy in the apartment across the landing didn’t say hello, never mind a complete stranger. Her commute involved people crowded in on the subway too scared to make eye contact because they never quite knew what was going on in the heads of their fellow passengers. It was a different world. As much as she enjoyed the hustle and bustle of big cities and the anonymity that came with them, there was something special about quiet places like this. She couldn’t live here, she’d go out of her mind after a week, but for a couple of days it was a great place to recharge.
A signpost shaped like a finger pointed down a narrow lane, promising her that it led to the amphitheater. She’d followed the same lane to move her car from the pub to the rear of the hotel.
Time to go exploring.
Annja walked past the cluster of cottages on the left and realized that it was in the garden of one that the most recent discoveries had been made. She tried to recall what she’d read. There was some kind of preservation order on the buildings that was supposed to prevent people from digging too deep. But the urgent removal of a tree teetering due to severe storms had exposed earth that had never been excavated and led to all sorts of wonderful finds. Sometimes life was funny like that, in order to preserve one way of life another had been kept hidden for over a century and it had taken a brutal act of nature herself to change that. Annja skirted the gardens, following the lane down toward the ruin.
It wasn’t the first time she’d seen an amphitheater, but there was something incredible about seeing it here, right out at the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire.
Beyond the houses the lane opened up, providing more room for school buses to negotiate the track down to the ruin. The camber was quite severe, allowing the rainwater to sluice away without eroding too much of the track. She saw a row of buses parked on the right with a cluster of teenagers milling around them, waiting to board. The kids were full of noise. A few others made their way to cars parked on the other side, no doubt to drive home with parents who’d chaperoned the visit.
Annja kept close to the fence, looking for a gate into the site. What she found looked like a rusty old turnstile from a ballpark. She slipped through, keen to be away from the critical mass of teenagers.
She stepped into a huge open field, its grass clipped as short as a playing field, which maintained the illusion of having entered the ghost of the old stadium. In the center, instead of a diamond, she spotted an information board. She walked over to it.
As she approached the board, the excavated amphitheater was revealed by the subtle change in elevation. It was easy to imagine how the remains had been hidden beneath earth and grass not so long ago. She walked in the footsteps of history, following a line of Romans and Britons before her to the excavation, eventually reaching the center. At this point, she imagined the wooden structure that had once stood above these stone foundations and how it must have towered above anyone down in the arena.
The acoustics were interesting; the stone sides cut out the external noise. Despite the fact they were no more than a couple of hundred meters away, she couldn’t hear the kids who had still seemed so loud before she’d gone down into the heart of the monument. It was a curiously intimate moment of tranquility.
Not that it lasted.
Her cell phone’s ringtone ended the peace.
She glanced at the display before answering.
“Garin,” she said. He only ever seemed to call when it was bad news. That had become the nature of their relationship. Save a girl once, she’d joked, and you think it gives you the right to ruin her life. “What can I do for you?”
“Ah, Annja, sweetheart, how I’ve missed your dulcet tones,” he said, making no effort to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “Not missing me too much, I hope?”
“I’ve not even been here a day—besides, it’s hard to miss you.” She checked her watch and tried to work out what the time was where he was, but then realized that she had no idea where he was in the world.
“Well, according to this little gadget I’m looking at you’re in Wales of all places.”
“Spying on me?”
“Hardly. It’s just this new box of tricks we’re trying out that tracks back signals when they bounce off satellites. It’s a refinement on the old caller ID. You never know when it might come in handy.”
“I’m not sure I want to think about why you’d need to know exactly where someone’s calling from—mainly because every reason I imagine will probably be suspicious if not illegal.”
“Oh, ye of little faith.”
“So what can I do for you? Got some relatives you want me to visit?” She looked across the fields at a flock of sheep nuzzling along the barbed wire of the perimeter fence, and pushed a toe against a pile of rotting cigarette butts. She could never understand why people would litter in a place like this.
“Ask not what you can do for me, ask only what I can do for you.”
“What on earth are you babbling about?”
“I’m nearby, someplace they call London. Ha! I figured if you were at a loose end I could nip over and entertain you.”
“Entertain me?.”
“I’m a lover of beautiful women, Annja, you know me. I don’t discriminate—black, white, in color—doesn’t matter, beauty is beauty. And I like to collect beautiful things.”
“And vacuous ones.”
“Oh, you wound me...though I will admit to a weakness for the odd dumb blonde. I can’t help myself. That isn’t a crime. So, let me entertain you.”
On a bucket list of wants and desires, that was right down there on the bottom of Annja’s bucket along with the dregs. But for all his lecherous ways, Garin was charming, and good company, hence the ease with which he took to womanizing. “I’ll give the offer its due consideration, but right now I’m hoping for a couple of days of me time.”
“Well, if you change your mind...”
“You’ll be the first to know,” she replied.
“Excellent,” he said. “Have fun and try not to miss me too much.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, but he’d already killed the call.
A boy peered over the edge of the grassy bank, looking down at her, Roman emperor to her gladiator waiting in the pit. He disappeared back behind the edge without giving her the thumbs-up.
Annja left the amphitheater, climbing the hillside that would have been banked seating back in the day. She then spotted her Roman emperor; he’d moved on to the shelter of a hedge at the end of the field with a couple of his friends. They were huddled together. She saw the spark of a lighter, which therefore explained the cigarette butts.
Behind the boys she could see a lonely spire.
She left them to smoke