Simisola by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: nld
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780099437314
Google: Gg1FPgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0099437317
Publisher: Bruna
Published: 1995-10-04T22:00:00+00:00

13

Kingsmarkham lies in that part of Sussex that was once the land of a Celtic tribe the Romans called the Regnenses. To its colonists it was simply a desirable place to live, pleasant to look at and not too cold, the indigenous population regarded only as a source of slave labor. Numerous remains of female infants unearthed by archaeologists near Pomfret Monachorum suggest that the Romans practiced infanticide among the Regnenses with a view to maintaining a male workforce.

As well as this grisly discovery, treasure was found. No one knew how this huge cache of gold coins, figurines, and jewelry came to be buried on farmland a mile or two from Cheriton, but there was evidence that a Roman villa had once stood there. A rather romantic suggestion was made that early in the fifth century the family who lived there,being forced to flee, had buried their valuables in he hope of coming back one day to retrieve them. But the Romans had never en back and the Dark Ages began.

This treasure was found by the farmer himself digging up a small piece of land, hitherto part of fields on which sheep grazed, with the intention of growing maize on it for fattening pheasants it was valued at something over two million pounds most of which he received. He gave up farming and went to live in Florida. The gold statuette he found of a suckling lioness and twin cubs and the two gold bracelets, one chased with a design of a boar hunt, the other of a stag at bay, can now be seen in the British Museum, where they are known as the Framhurst Hoard.

The result was to encourage prospectors. Looking from a distance as if slowly scouring the heathland and the green valley with vacuum cleaners, they came with their metal detectors and worked patiently and in silence for long hours at a time. Farmers had no objection—there was little arable farming in the area—and so long as they damaged nothing and did not frighten the sheep, they were not only harmless but might possibly be a source of untold wealth. Any successful prospector would be obliged to render up half his loot to the landowner.

So far there had been no more. The cache of which the lioness and the bracelets had been part appeared to have been a one-off. But the treasure seekers went on coming and it was one of these who, wandering somewhat outside the favored area, passing and repassing his detector across an area of chalky scree, had come upon firstly a coin, then the body of a girl.

It was where the downland began, between Cheriton and Myfleet. A narrow white road, without fence, wall, or hedge, ran between the foothills, and it was some twenty yards to the left of it, where the woodland began, on the edge of a wood, that she had been buried. While Colin Broadley was plying his metal detector the weather had been fine, the soil fairly damp from recent rains but not wet.

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