Deception Read online

  The other curious part of this curious law is this: it is the person who discovers the treasure in the first place who gets the reward from the government. The owner of the land gets nothing – unless of course the finder is trespassing on the land when he makes the discovery. But if the finder of the treasure has been hired by the owner to do a job on his land, then he, the finder, gets all the reward.

  In this case, the finder was Gordon Butcher. Farthermore, he was not trespassing. He was performing a job which he had been hired to do. This treasure therefore belonged to Butcher and to no one else. All he had to do was to take it and show it to an expert, who would immediately identify it as silver, then turn it in to the police. In time, he would receive from the government one hundred per cent of its value – perhaps a million pounds.

  All this left Ford out in the cold and Ford knew it. He had no rights whatsoever to the treasure by law. Thus, as he must have told himself at the time, his only chance of getting hold of the stuff for himself lay in the fact that Butcher was an ignorant man who didn’t know the law and who did not anyway have the faintest idea of the value of the find. The probability was that in a few days Butcher would forget all about it. He was too simple-minded a fellow, too artless, too trusting, too unselfish to give the matter much thought.

  Now, out there in the desolate snow-swept field, Ford bent down and took hold of the huge dish with one hand. He raised it but he did not lift it. The lower rim remained resting on the snow. With his other hand, he grasped the top of the sack. He didn’t lift that either. He just held it. And there he stooped amid the swirling snowflakes, both hands embracing, as it were, the treasure, but not actually taking it. It was a subtle and canny gesture. It managed somehow to signify ownership before ownership had been discussed. A child plays the same game when he reaches out and closes his fingers over the biggest chocolate éclair on the plate and then says, ‘Can I have this one, Mummy?’ He’s already got it.

  ‘Well, Gordon,’ Ford said, stooping over, holding the sack and the great dish in his gloved fingers. ‘I don’t suppose you want any of this old stuff.’

  It was not a question. It was a statement of fact framed as a question.

  The blizzard was still raging. The snow was falling so densely the two men could hardly see one another.

  ‘You ought to get along home and warm yourself up,’ Ford went on. ‘You look frozen to death.’

  ‘I feel frozen to death,’ Butcher said.

  ‘Then you get on that tractor quick and hurry home,’ said the thoughtful, kind-hearted Ford. ‘Leave the plough here and leave your bike at my place. The important thing is to get back and warm yourself up before you catch pneumonia.’

  ‘I think that’s just what I will do, Mr Ford,’ Butcher said. ‘Can you manage all right with that sack? It’s mighty heavy.’

  ‘I might not even bother about it today,’ Ford said casually. ‘I just might leave it here and come back for it another time. Rusty old stuff.’

  ‘So long then, Mr Ford.’

  ‘’Bye, Gordon.’

  Gordon Butcher mounted the tractor and drove away into the blizzard.

  Ford hoisted the sack on to his shoulder, and then, not without difficulty, he lifted the massive dish with his other hand and tucked it under his arm.

  ‘I am carrying,’ he told himself, as he trudged through the snow, ‘I am now carrying what is probably the biggest treasure ever dug up in the whole history of England.’

  When Gordon Butcher came stamping and blowing through the back door of his small brick house late that afternoon, his wife was ironing by the fire. She looked up and saw his blue-white face and snow-encrusted clothes.

  ‘My goodness, Gordon, you look froze to death!’ she cried.

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘Help me off with these clothes, love. My fingers aren’t hardly working at all.’

  She took off his gloves, his coat, his jacket, his wet shirt. She pulled off his boots and socks. She fetched a towel and rubbed his chest and shoulders vigorously all over to restore the circulation. She rubbed his feet.

  ‘Sit down there by the fire,’ she said, ‘and I’ll get you a hot cup of tea.’

  Later, when he was settled comfortably in the warmth with dry clothes on his back and the mug of tea in his hand, he told her what had happened that afternoon.

  ‘He’s a foxy one, that Mr Ford,’ she said, not looking up from her ironing. ‘I never did like him.’

  ‘He got pretty excited about it all, I can tell you that,’ Gordon Butcher said. ‘Jumpy as a jack-rabbit he was.’

  ‘That may be,’ she said. ‘But you ought to have had more sense than to go crawling about on your hands and knees in a freezing blizzard just because Mr Ford said to do it.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Gordon Butcher said, ‘I’m warming up nicely now.’

  And that, believe it or not, was about the last time the subject of the treasure was discussed in the Butcher household for some years.

  The reader should be reminded that this was wartime, 1942. Britain was totally absorbed in the desperate war against Hitler and Mussolini. Germany was bombing England, and England was bombing Germany, and nearly every night Gordon Butcher heard the roar of motors from the big aerodrome at nearby Mildenhall as the bombers took off for Hamburg, Berlin, Kiel, Wilhelmshaven or Frankfurt. Sometimes he would wake in the early hours and hear them coming home, and sometimes the Germans flew over to bomb the aerodrome, and the Butcher house would shake with the crumph and crash of bombs not far away.

  Butcher himself was exempt from military service. He was a farmer, a skilled ploughman, and they had told him when he volunteered for the Army in 1939 that he was not wanted. The island’s food supplies must be kept going, they told him, and it was vital that men like him stay on their jobs and cultivate the land.

  Ford, being in the same business, was also exempt. He was a bachelor, living alone, and he was thus able to live a secret life and to do secret things within the walls of his home.

  And so, on that terrible snowy afternoon when they dug up the treasure, Ford carried it home and laid everything out on a table in the back room.

  Thirty-four separate pieces! They covered the entire table. And by the look of it, they were in marvellous condition. Silver does not rust. The green crust of oxidation can even be protection for the surface of the metal underneath. And with care, it could all be removed.

  Ford decided to use an ordinary domestic silver polish known as Silvo, and he bought a large stock of it from the ironmonger’s shop in Mildenhall. Then he took first the great two-foot plate which weighed more than eighteen pounds. He worked on it in the evenings. He soaked it all over with Silvo. He rubbed and rubbed. He worked patiently on this single dish every night for more than sixteen weeks.

  At last, one memorable evening, there showed beneath his rubbing a small area of shining silver, and on the silver, raised up and beautifully worked, there was a part of a man’s head.

  He kept at it, and gradually the little patch of shining metal spread and spread, the blue-green crust crept outwards to the edges of the plate, until finally the top surface of the great dish lay before him in its full glory, covered all over with a wondrous pattern of animals and men and many odd legendary things.

  Ford was astounded by the beauty of the great plate. It was filled with life and movement. There was a fierce face with tangled hair, a dancing goat with a human head, there were men and women and animals of many kinds cavorting around the rim, and no doubt all of them told a story.

  Next, he set about cleaning the reverse side of the plate. Weeks and weeks it took. And when the work was completed and the whole plate on both sides was shining like a star, he placed it safely in the lower cupboard of his big oak sideboard and locked the cupboard door.

  One by one, he tackled the remaining thirty-three pieces. A mania had taken hold of him now, a fierce compulsion to make every item shine in all its silver brilliance. He wanted to see all thirty-four pieces laid out o