She sighed, glad she’d not known before about the unlocked gate. Relieved in the same breath that the men who’d come to the house probably didn’t know about it either or they’d probably have come through that way. Patrick had been certain that there was no sign of anyone entering the garden that way, he’d had to clear long grass from the foot of the gate before they had been able to pass through.
Patrick was back with her now. ‘It’s getting dark, isn’t it?’ Naomi asked.
‘You can tell that?’
‘Not exactly. I’ve just noticed that the air round here feels damp in the early evening once it starts to get dark. I remember it used to get that way when I stayed on the coast. Where’s Napoleon?’
Patrick called to him. ‘He’s over there. Your left. He seems to be rolling in something.’
‘Oh great. That’ll mean a bath.’
They wandered over to where the black dog wriggled happily. The damp grass released the heat of the day, fragrant beneath their feet and Naomi caught the warm scent of wild thyme and chamomile beneath her feet. It reminded her of the day they had gone to the Peatlands.
‘Looks like he’s been digging,’ Patrick commented.
‘Digging? Sure it’s not moles?’ Napoleon, in her experience, was not a digger. He caught frisbees and rolled in unspeakable things and occasionally poked his nose into something that made him sneeze, but he didn’t normally dig.
‘Not moles,’ Patrick said. ‘There are molehills, but not just here and they don’t look like this. No, someone’s been digging. With a spade, that kind of digging. Shift over, Dog.’ Unceremoniously, he moved Napoleon out of the way. ‘The earth’s soft and still loose, so not long ago, I’d say. I can get my fingers right down. Call Napoleon will you, Naomi, he’s trying to help.’
She called the now disappointed black dog back to her side. ‘Any idea how deep it might be?’
‘Hard to say. Deeper than I can easily scoop out anyway. We should get some lights out here and a spade. You OK here for a minute while I run back to the house?’
Naomi thought about it. Was she fine about that? ‘Sure,’ she told him, still not totally convinced. She heard his feet on grass then on brick as he went back through the gate and on to the garden path. Then she listened to the silence. There was a soft wind breathing through the trees but little in the way of birdsong, only a lone blackbird defining his territory before he retired for the night, and then the faint lowing of cows in the neighbouring field. Funny, she’d only ever thought of cows mooing, not the male animal. Cars. Two or three of them passing on the narrow road. Two or three together almost amounted to gridlock round here, Naomi thought.
Then the less defined sounds, rustles in the hedgerow, and the faint whirring and clicking as something insect-like but mysterious to her ears buzzed close by.
As always when she focussed on what she could hear, her sense of smell seemed to increase. Overlaying the scent of thyme and chamomile, crushed now beneath her feet and releasing its almost apple fragrance, was the damp air that she had mentioned to Patrick. It carried its own earthy smells, faint must and moist soil, newly turned now by Patrick’s digging. Drawn by the scent, she moved cautiously forward, Napoleon at her side. She knelt down where she guessed Patrick might have done, reached out, felt grass and a stray, sneaking bramble runner; drew her hand back from the pain of grasped thorns. She reached out again a little more towards her left. Her fingers sank this time into soft earth that had been churned by the boy’s fingers, granular and friable beneath her fingers. A tremor of excitement ran though her belly, though she could not have explained exactly why. Maybe it was all that talk of buried treasure that chimed so readily with her childhood fantasies when she and her sister had dug up half the beach searching for pirate hoards.
She wormed her fingers deeper into the hole, then drew back, almost in alarm.
There was something there. There really was.
‘Naomi?’ she heard Alec calling to her. ‘Where the devil are you?’
He couldn’t see her? Of course, it must be fully dark by now and the overgrown garden was shadowed by the thick hedge. It was funny to think of him at such a disadvantage.
‘Over here. Don’t you have a torch?’
‘Torch but no batteries. Patrick’s gone upstairs to find his. Reckons he’s got a little Maglite packed away somewhere.’
She heard him swear as he stumbled over something in the dark. ‘Watch yourself, there are nettles that think they’re Triffids and brambles sneaking about in the grass.’
‘Thanks. I know that. Now.’
She stood up and a moment later he had his hand on her arm. ‘I can see you now,’ Alec said. ‘Eyes getting used to the dark. Not often I’m in a place with so little light pollution. You can’t even see the house from here. You said you found something?’
‘Yes.’ She squatted down again, taking Alec’s hand and drawing him down beside her. ‘Here, dig your fingers down into the mud.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘Don’t be a baby. Here, let me show you.’ She found the place again, feeling for the scooped earth and then guided Alec’s fingers into the hole she had made.
‘You’re right. Something hard, like the edge of a box. Hey, Patrick, bring that light over here.’
Naomi could hear Patrick running across the grass, Harry following behind.
‘Shine it there. You’ve got something to dig with?’
‘Didn’t know where to find a spade or anything, but I’ve got a paint scraper from the kitchen drawer and a couple of large spoons.’
‘That will do, it isn’t very deep, whatever it is.’
‘There’s really something there? Here, Naomi, can you shine the torch while we dig?’
Before she could voice any objection she might have had, he had placed the torch in her hand and positioned her arm so that the light shone down upon their little excavation. Harry joined them, accepting his spoon. Alec had taken possession of the scraper.
‘Er, you realize this is a silver spoon,’ Harry stated.
‘Well, I guess it’ll wash. You take that side and Patrick, you start there. I’ll go down where Naomi found whatever it was.’
She listened as they set about their task; the occasional scrape of metal on stone or a shuffle of feet and knees as someone changed position the only sounds that told her anything about their progress. Even Patrick had forgotten to commentate.
‘Do you see anything?’ she asked at last.
‘I’ve got an edge,’ Alec told her. ‘Something plastic, wrapped in a supermarket bag and …’
‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ Naomi could hear the excitement in Patrick’s voice. ‘It’s Rupert’s laptop. That’s why no one could find it. He’s buried it out here.’
Eighteen
It seemed such a bizarre thing to do; bury a laptop and, it turned out, it wasn’t just a laptop Rupert had sunk into the ground.
They carried the bags back to the house and laid the contents out on black bin bags spread across the kitchen table.
‘This has to be what they were looking for.’ Patrick’s excitement was obvious.
‘We don’t know that …’ Harry, cautious as always.
‘No, we don’t but it’s a definite possibility,’ Naomi agreed with Patrick. ‘But why bury it? That’s the sort of action that indicates a real and immediate threat.’
‘Marcus said Rupert was frightened.’
‘Then … I don’t know … why not remove the hard drive and mail it to a friend?’ Naomi wondered
‘Um, two possible reasons I can think of.’ Harry was the surprise respondent this time. ‘He’d have had to explain to the friend and that might have led to all sorts of questions Rupert didn’t want to answer. And it’s a laptop. It isn’t like an ordinary PC. I’ve got a little caddy thing for mine so I can take the hard drive out any time I need to.’
He sounded quite proud of his grip on technology, Naomi thought.