She’d said, “So how did you find me? I know about the postcards. But how…? Who…?”

He said he didn’t know who’d phoned him, just that it was a bloke’s voice, telling him about the cigar shop in Covent Garden.

She’d said, “A man,” to herself, not to him. She seemed to be going over in her mind the various possibilities. There would, he knew, likely be many. Jemima had never gone in for friendship with other women in a big way, but men she had sought, men who somehow completed her in ways that friendship with women never could. He wondered if that was why Jemima had died. Perhaps a man had misunderstood the nature of her need, wanting something from her that far exceeded what she wanted from him. It explained in some ways the phone call he’d received, which itself could be described as a betrayal, a tit for tat as it were, you don’t do what I want and I turn you over to…well, to whoever seems to be looking for you because I don’t care who it is, I only want to balance the scales in which you and I do harm to each other.

He’d said, “Have you told anyone?”

“That’s why you’ve been looking for me?”

“Jemima, have you told anyone?”

“Do you actually think I’d want anyone to know?”

He could see her point although he felt it like a wound she was inflicting upon him instead of merely an answer to his question. Still, there was something in the way she said it that made him doubt her. He knew her too well.

“D’you have a new bloke?” he asked her abruptly, not because he really wanted to know but because of what it could mean if she had.

“I don’t see that’s any business of yours.”

“Do you?”

“Why?”

“You know.”

“I most certainly do not know.”

He said, “If you’ve told…Jemima, just tell me if you’ve told someone.”

“Why? Worried, are you? Yes, I suppose you would be. I’d be worried as well. So let me ask you this, Gordon: Have you thought how I’d feel if other people knew? Have you considered the wreck my life could become? ‘Just please give us an interview, Miss Hastings. Just a word about what it’s been like for you. Did you never suspect? Did you not recognise…? What sort of woman wouldn’t know there was something terribly wrong here…?’ D’you actually think I’d want that, Gordon? My picture smeared on the front of some tabloid along with yours?”

“They’d pay,” he said. “Like you said, it’d be a tabloid. They’d pay you a lot for an interview. They’d pay you a fortune.”

She’d backed off, white faced. “You’re mad,” she said. “If it’s even possible, you’re actually madder than you were-”

“All right,” he’d said fiercely. Then, “What’ve you done with the coin? Where is it? Where’s the stone?”

“Why?” she asked. “How’s that your business?”

“I mean to take them back to Hampshire, obviously.”

“Do you indeed?”

“You know I do. They must go back, Jemima. It’s the only way.”

“No. There’s another way entirely.”

“What way is that?”

“I think you might already know. Especially as you’ve been looking for me.”

That was the moment when he knew she did indeed have someone else. That was when he understood, despite her declarations to the contrary, how likely it was that the darkest part of his soul was going to be revealed to someone, if it had not already been revealed. His only hope-his guarantee of her silence and the silence of whoever else knew the truth-lay in complying with whatever she was about to ask of him.

He knew she was about to ask something because he knew Jemima. And his curse for the rest of his life was going to be the knowledge that once again he and no one else had put himself into a place of complete destruction. He’d wanted to return the coin and the stone to the earth in which they’d laid buried for more than a thousand years. More than that, he’d wanted to know that Jemima would keep his secret safe. So he’d put up those cards and in doing so he’d forced her hand. And now she was going to play it.

She’d said, “We need the money.”

“What money? Who’s we?”

“You know what money. We have plans, Gordon, and that money-”

“That’s what this is about, then? That’s why you left? Not because of me, but because you want to sell whatever’s dug up from the ground and then…what?”

But no, that hadn’t been it at all, not at first. Money was fine but money had not driven Jemima. Money bought things, but what it didn’t buy, could never buy, had never bought was what she needed most.

He said, understanding things further, “It’s the bloke. He’s the one, isn’t he? He wants it. For whatever your plans are.”

He’d known he’d hit upon the truth. He’d seen as much in the high colour that swept across her cheeks. Indeed, she had left him to get away from the truth of who he was, but she’d met another man in her inimitable fashion and it was to this other man that she’d told his secrets.

He said, “Why did it take you so long, then? All these months? Why’d you not tell him at once?”

After a moment in which she’d looked away from him, she said, “Those postcards,” and he’d seen how his own fear of discovery, his own need for reassurance, which was unlike her need and yet ironically identical to it, had brought about this very meeting between them. Any new lover of hers would have asked why someone was trying to find her. Where she could have lied, she had told the truth.

He said to her, “What do you want then, Jemima?”

“I’ve already told you.”

To which he’d said, “I’ll need to think.”

“About what?”

“How to make it happen.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? If you mean to dig the lot of it up, I have to disappear. If I don’t…Or is it that you want me found out as well? Perhaps you want me dead? I mean, we were something to each other for a while, weren’t we?”

She was silent at this. The day around them was bright and hot and clear, and the sounds of the birds intensified suddenly. She finally said, “I don’t want you dead. I don’t even want you harmed, Gordon. I just want to forget about it. About us. I want a new life. We’re going to emigrate and open a business and to do that…And it’s your own fault. If you hadn’t put up those cards. If you hadn’t. I was in a state, and he wanted to know, so I told him. He asked-well, anyone would-how I’d come to find out because he reckoned it’d be the last thing you’d tell anyone. So I told him that part as well.”

“About the paddock.”

“Not the paddock itself but what you’d found there. How I expected we’d use it or sell it or whatever one does, how you hadn’t wanted to, and then…well, yes. Why. I had to tell him why.”

“Had to?”

“Of course. Don’t you see? There aren’t supposed to be secrets between people who love each other.”

“And he loves you.”

“He does.”

Yet Gordon could see her doubts, and he understood how the existence of her doubts had also served a role in what was happening. She wanted to secure him, whoever he was. He wanted money. These desires combined to produce betrayal.

“When?” he asked her.

“What?”

“When did you decide to do this, Jemima?”

“I’m not doing anything. You asked to see me. I didn’t ask to see you. You looked for me, I didn’t look for you. If you hadn’t done any of that, there’d have been no need to tell anyone about you.”

“And when money had come up between you? What then?”

“It never did come up, till I told him why…” Her voice drifted off at that point, and he could tell that she was reasoning something out on her own, determining the possibility of something that he himself was only too able to see.

He said, “It’s the money. He wants the money. Not you. You see that, don’t you?”

She said, “No. That’s not the truth.”

He said, “And I expect you’ve had your doubts all along.”

“He loves me.”

“If that’s how you see it.”

“You’re a rotten person.”

“I suppose I am.”