‘And where can we find you, Mr Colet, if there is any point on which we think you might be able to help us?’

I gave him my London address, saying that I was on my way to South Wales but would be keeping in touch with Miss Marrin since I should like to be present at the funeral.

Elsa had disappeared while we were talking and I now went to find her. She seemed to be distraught rather than mourning her uncle and begged me to keep in touch with her. I promised to do so. Her last words as I returned to my car were a whisper:

‘Dear, dear Piers, get me out of here!’

I shall, and please God I shall not be taken away from you or you from me.

I drove away to the silent brink of Severn, rippling with the wind against the tide, and considered my position. If the police ever began to suspect me, they would then want to know where I was staying after I left Broom Lodge and where I was on the night that Marrin died. I can’t account for my movements, and if I were a magistrate I should commit for trial this now-elegant economist with his pretended interest in ancient history by which he gained the confidence of the late Simeon Marrin. But, after all, why should the police investigate my movements? I was a respected and respectable academic, the understanding friend of the commune and eager to help them.

So, with luck, it should appear quite natural if I resumed occasional appearances at Broom Lodge as a casual visitor. That allowed me to keep our love alive and to whisk Elsa out of there if the commune dissolved into anarchy. Meanwhile she could relay to me as much as the police chose to tell her.

The only disquieting thought was that my life and liberty depended on the major, who alone knew of my secret movements. So long as he stayed in the district I had to keep in close touch with him. He was an admirable burglar – provided that he had worn gloves as he intended – but he was not a man to talk himself out of trouble.

So there it was! I still had no clue to the site of the hoard which Marrin had been robbing while putting up his smoke screen of alchemy, apart from the very valuable information that it was on the other side of the river. Also it was essential to get the cauldron out of the hands of the tonsured long enough for an expert examination. That should not be impossible. For example, there might well be an In Memoriam ceremony for Marrin which I could surprise. But if the wolf were to pad through the darkness behind those unsuspecting druidicals, the den was indispensable as his headquarters.

It was then that a compromise occurred to me: to adopt a dual personality. Outwardly I should remain the economist attracted by Elsa, which would explain visits to Broom Lodge. At the same time and chiefly at night I should be the secret investigator on the part of history and the public. Personality No. 1 would be Piers Colet, an innocent bystander whose life of learning and travel had been beyond reproach. Personality No. 2 would be the wolf hidden in its forest den, ready to track and to spring.

So I have returned to the den, where the major’s damned bag of golden bits and pieces is safely hidden. Elsewhere I keep the diving equipment together with a suitcase containing the clothes of Personality No. 1. Details of changing back to him have proved more difficult than I foresaw – for example, access to my car, neatness, telephoning Elsa supposedly from South Wales. Meanwhile I have been out every night – without any result – and during the day have written this simple and factual account of the events leading to Simeon Marrin’s death which, if it should ever have to be used in my defence, will not, I hope, be rejected as an ingenious fabrication. As I have said, his death was the last thing I wanted. What I do want is to recover the cauldron and manage a clear run so that I can take it to the British Museum for a verdict. After that can begin the search for what remains of Marrin’s find.

Chapter Two

All this and no nearer to the source of the gold! A week ago I was beginning to feel that Personality No. 2 and his precious den were quite unnecessarily dramatic, that there was nothing to prevent me carrying off Elsa to London and that the site of the burial where Marrin had found the bowl might be better investigated by archaeologists who were personal friends and knew me well enough to accept as much of my story as I chose to tell them.

But circumstances took over, such simple circumstances starting from my curiosity about charcoal and leading so rapidly to – well, among other things, another unfortunate accident. But I can’t deny that I intended the merciless hunting and haunting of these druidicals and that Elsa’s mention of sacrifice merely increased my contempt for them.

Her uncle had kept her very much in the dark. After all, church servants have more to do with dusting the pews than with doctrine. She thinks that Uncle Simeon joined this esoteric sect before Broom Lodge came into being and that it was to the sect that its former owner, the retired and heretical parson, left the place. The handful of druidicals was too small to run it, so Marrin hit on the fashionable idea of a working commune, the members of which would be sympathetic to reincarnation, meditation and fairly unorthodox Buddhism, and easily take him as their guru. These industrious and estimable innocents accepted that there was a higher state of spirituality into which one might be initiated when found worthy, but few were interested. I see an almost exact parallel, not religious but financial, in the machinations of a company promoter who registers a small company with nominal capital destined to act as the majority shareholder in a much larger concern to which an unsuspecting public has contributed the funds.

The druidicals had of course nothing in common with the Order of Druids which makes a nuisance of itself at Stonehenge and has no more to do with the original Druids than the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes has to do with buffaloes. Their religion was the real goods, so far as it could be reconstructed, combining the little we know of the supposed wisdom of the Celtic priesthood, reincarnation and all, with the natural animism of forest dwellers. Spirits were everywhere – under the earth, under the trees, under the tides of the Severn – and at the command of man if approached with the proper respectful mumbo-jumbo. Among them could be the spirit of a hero, not unlike a Graeco-Roman god, who had done great service to his fellows and remained in race memory. Above the divine spirits were archangels and above them, at the point where all religions merge, the absolute and eternal.

Some of this I had from the major who informed me that many of the beliefs could be contained within the early Christian heresy of Gnosticism. He was shocked by his old friend Simeon, but not as exasperated as an agnostic snorting at so much nonsense. After all, the Church accepts or did once accept angels and evil spirits, though I rather think it draws the line at spirits who are neither one nor the other, invisibly leading happy lives of their own.

When he did not turn up at Marrin’s funeral I hoped that the only reason was religious objection to the possible rites of sending the defunct on to godhead; but it could be that he was suffering from a sense of guilt and on the verge of confession. I called his home number to see if he was there. His housekeeper – no doubt of canonical age – said that so far as she knew he was still at Broom Lodge. So it seemed likely that my knight errant from the Horse Guards had gone off on pilgrimage to Glastonbury or some other Arthurian site, meditating stirrups or the Grail.

Myself, I did attend the funeral; a meeting of the whole commune with the usual speeches and unusual prayers. Marrin was then carted off and conventionally cremated without any further service at all. Let him rest in peace. He was a superb craftsman. The police had raised no objection to cremation, so I could hope that the fracture of the back of the skull had been ascribed to natural causes for the time being. Microscopic examination may have shown fragments of identifiable rock.