“You’re going to find buried treasure. You’re going to dig up something very very precious.”
It had been my wife Claire’s idea to go to Madame Svitlana, the ‘fortune teller of fortune tellers’ as it said outside her tent.
This flamboyant old lady had been the whole shebang: closeted in a tiny tent at the funfair, wearing a colourful headscarf, long gypsy-style dress, rings covering every finger, the biggest earrings I’ve ever seen and huge brown eyes that exuded knowledge, wisdom and mystery. As she stared into her crystal ball on the rickety table with a tablecloth depicting the countries of the globe, I despaired at the naivety of my wife, who was in thrall to all this razzmatazz. After reading my fortune, Madame Svitlana then went on in her quavering sing-song voice with Claire’s reading, with the usual predictable guff about going on a journey, seeing new sights, making decisions for the future and resolving problems from the past. I paid up and thanked her for the claptrap, grateful to be back out in the fresh air and sunlight, reflecting that holidays are often as much a time for silly nonsense as they are for relaxing and having fun.
As we drove back to the Penzance hotel, Claire and I argued, but I could never stay angry with her for long.
“Okay, I know what with you being a police detective sergeant, seeing the seamy side of life all the time makes you cynical,” Claire wittered on. “But I thought what she said was very interesting indeed. She really seemed to know what she was talking about.”
“Interesting, yes,” I replied, enjoying the drive on the winding country road in Cornwall, aware of the lovey scenery, the views of the sea nearby, and the lively sea breeze. “But she was talking utter rubbish wasn’t she? Me, finding buried treasure? For goodness sake I wouldn’t even know where to look! If I was a detectorist, like on that marvellous TV series, where those men go around with metal detectors and find old Roman coins and things, then maybe it might make sense. But the only reason I go out on grassland is to play football with the lads, or help old Mr Smith with his gardening.”
“Well, maybe she meant something metaphorical,” Claire waffled on, determined to believe in Madame Svitlana’s clairvoyant talents. “Maybe it’s not actual buried treasure, but something valuable that’s hidden and you’ll find it. Like a talent you didn’t know you had. Or a winning lottery ticket you thought you’d lost.”
“But I don’t have any hidden talents and I never play the lottery.”
“Oh you! You’re determined to sneer at her talents. Just because you don’t believe in clairvoyance.”
“Does anyone? How the hell can you predict the future when it hasn’t happened yet?”
“Well, it must be nice to be so sure of things! Honestly, why can’t you accept that there are things we just don’t understand?”
And it all might have ended there.
Except that a week after we got home from holiday, a very strange thing happened.
One Saturday, we visited a little village we’d never been to before, and in a side street Claire discovered a lovely antique shop. The small writing desk drew her like a magnet, and, I confess, I loved it too. The price was pretty steep, but the shop owner assured us that it was a genuine Victorian antique, that he’d acquired at an auction of property at a nearby stately home that was up for sale.
When I got it into our front room, Claire was delighted, and opened every drawer and stared at it from all angles. As she was inspecting what looked like woodworm in one of the drawers, she accidentally pressed a button, and a tiny drawer sprang open. Inside there was what looked like a very old piece of paper folded over and over.
We took it out, unfloded it carefully and laid it on top of the desk to examine it.
It looked like old parchment: thick material, yellow with age, the hard-to-decipher black writing curling and swirling, the ‘s’s looking like ‘f’s. There was a beautiful drawing of a field with several trees, all in a neat line, seven of them, the largest one at the end, with a large house behind them. Underneath the lovely drawing there was some text in large copperplate handwriting:
Ye dig at the foot of the middle oak tree, on the southern side. The box contains Diamonds, Emeralds, Gold coins, Cromwell’s dastardly troops are getting closer now, we have to run, so all we can do is bury our fortune in the hope of returning to it later, God Willing, or for any friend who finds this note to Retrieve our Fortune for yourselves . . .
“Good heavens!” Claire said, transfixed with amazement. “That antiques dealer said this desk came from Saxby Hall near here. I read that the lord of the manor during the civil war was a cavalier, on the side of the king, when the Roundheads took over. He fled the hall with his family in a panic, but the roundheads caught up with him and he was imprisoned, or maybe he died. It looks like he buried his family fortune, and left this map behind so that his relatives could get it later on. He must have hidden it in this secret drawer.”
“Impossible,” I told her, intrigued in spite of myself. “This desk is Victorian, so it was made 300 years after the Civil War.”
“Well then, someone hid this map later.”
“Why would they do that? If someone found a map guiding them to hidden treasure they’d dig it up themselves, wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mind you,” I told her, staring at the map, “Saxby Hall is only a mile away from here, and it has a pretty interesting history. I once visited it as a boy, and I remember this row of trees in the grounds, it’s certainly recognisable. As the antique dealer said, the hall is unoccupied now, and there’d be no harm in going to look around.”
We went home and came back next day armed with spades, sheepish smiles and a few tentative stories to use if anyone questioned us. I knew that the grounds of Saxby Hall had been acquired by the local council, and as far as I knew, it was public land. Whether it was legal to dig up public land I didn’t actually know, but as long as no one saw us, where was the harm? And according to google, if you find buried treasure, there’s a law that says as long as you declare it to the authorities, you can claim finders rights or something, and are legally entitled to half its value.
Luckily there was no one around at six in the morning, and we got to work. I checked which side of the tree was south and we dug down at least four feet, encountering a lot of roots. Worried about getting the angle to the tree wrong, we ended up digging all around the tree. Still nothing.
By lunchtime we’d attracted a few onlookers, but my idea of wearing high-vis jackets, so as to look like council workers, paid off, and most people didn’t wait around long.
But by then we had to admit defeat.
In the end, Claire and I had to laugh at our stupidity. If there had been no clairvoyant prediction of finding treasure, I very much doubt if we’d have taken the note seriously, and taking the note seriously was our big mistake. If the note was genuine, then obviously someone must have dug up the gold and jewels long ago. In fact, Claire found out more about Saxby Hall, and discovered that Lord Bragalot had in fact returned to his ancestral home after the Civil War, so obviously he retrieved his family fortune himself.
But there’s a sting in the tail of this story.
Summer turned to winter, and I’ll always remember that ghastly day at work when we got a phone call to the police station from a distraught woman, saying that she had overheard a violent quarrel between the married couple next door, which was a regular occurrence. But the lady was concerned that since that last row the neighbour’s house was unusually quiet, and, ominously, the neighbour’s wife had not been seen by anyone, when as a rule she went out to work every morning.
When you’ve been a copper as long as I have you get a nose for trouble, and I had a bad feeling when me and PC Jenny Warrender called round and interviewed the husband, Jacob Swallow, a small, sorry looking fellow with a huge nose, a disquieting cross-eyed stare and a twisty thin-lipped mouth that had been designed for snarling profanities.
We looked around the house, and my heart sank when I saw traces of blood on the floor in the kitchen. Further enquiries of all the neighbours revealed that Jacob Swallow had been seen at midnight two nights ago, digging in the garden, yet when we looked there was no sign of a hole.
After arresting Mr Swallow we bought in tracker dogs, who homed in on one particular spot at the bottom of the garden. Which is how we found the body of Jacob’s wife in her shallow grave.
Jacob eventually admitted to the murder.
It’s not generally known, but police officers do frequently form strong attachments to some of the people they come across, sometimes we even make lifelong friends. In the weeks following Jackie Swallow’s murder we had indeed made friends with members of her family – a devoted sister Pam, brother Luke and her best friend Rachel. Jenny and I had been involved in the case from the start, and so it seemed only natural that we should attend Jackie’s funeral.
Horrible as funerals always are, this one was sadder than most, especially as we discovered what a thoroughly lovable person Jackie appeared to have been – we wondered how on earth she had come to marry such a monster as Jacob Swallow.
After the service I was chatting to Jackie’s sister in the crematorium car park, and she was reminiscing about her sister, and how close they had been growing up.
“Jackie was a sweet little girl,” she told me. “Good as gold all the time, never any trouble to anyone, always a joy. My mum and dad, sadly they’ve passed away now, they used to have a nickname for her. They called here Treasure. ‘Treasure.’ they’d say, ‘You’re so precious to us.’ And from then on, that used to be her nickname in the family. We always called her Treasure from then on.”
Treasure?
My heart skipped a beat as I suddenly thought back to Madame Svitlana, and what she saw in her crystal ball.
It’s a funny old life, isn’t it?