I was in my office when my mobile phone rang. It vibrated in my pocket and chirped merrily like a polyphonic songbird. I screwed the top back on the bottle of water I had been drinking from and squeezed the device from my jeans.

It was Martha.

She seemed distracted when we spoke, but we arranged to meet for a drink. She had been shopping with the money Ty had provided. Although persuading her to take it had not been easy, she did concede that there were a lot of things she needed.

On the drive from Pebble Deeping that morning Martha and I had discussed who could have known about her father's work. She had given me a series of names; mostly academic colleagues and a journal editor or two. I had spent my morning phoning round these people and asking if they had been aware of what the professor had been working on before he died.

The results had not been promising; many of the academics poured scorn on everything Wimple had worked on, and derided his mental faculties in general. One even laughed out loud at the mention of his name.

It occurred to me that had I just spoken to a potential murderer, then he or she would have lied. However, I was less than convinced that a rival academic was masterminding a campaign of death and intimidation in order to be first to find treasure that the bulk of opinion thought to be a fairy tale.

I finished the brief phone call with Martha, she gave me directions to a trendy coffee shop and I said I'd be there soon.

I shuffled some notes into a buff folder, then dumped it on a pile on the floor. A small puff of dust rose from the impact like a mushroom-cloud testament to laziness; a sign of how little use my office had got in recent times.

I had become so entwined in Ty's life that my already pitiful standing in the firm was suffering, and if it went on much longer I thought I might find myself frozen out completely.

I balanced the possibility of losing my place in the business, and with it the last link to my past, against my inextricable ties to the Edge case. I included in this calculus the fact that I needed the money, and that I had been party to various illegalities.

Then there was Martha, of course. She required help, and the way my mind was at the moment I would have done anything to provide it.

I gathered my phone, donned my jacket, and patted my back pocket to check my wallet was there. I had to pick my way deliberately back out of the room, tip-toeing between the piles of files and old newspapers and magazine clippings. When all of this was over, I promised myself that I would tidy the cubby hole up and make it a little more professional.

"Off again so soon, Satchmo?" Joan inquired, her voice thick with sarcasm. "We were so enjoying your little stay. When can we expect to see you here again? Christmas?"

I wasn't in the mood to bandy barbed comments with her, so I smiled wanly and strode for the door before one of the Yeoman twins caught me.

"I hope you know what you're doing!" she called after me.

In that, at least, we were agreed. I hoped that I knew what I was doing too.

*

I sat in a deep black leather sofa; the seat low to the floor and the arm rests perturbingly high. I cradled a large mug of hot chocolate in both hands, the surface of which was pleasingly frothy and sported a single marshmallow that melted in the middle like an iceberg in the Caribbean.

I don't drink coffee, and the bewildering array of options chalked onto the board above the serving counter made me question the sanity of the world. What was the point of a mocha-choca-latte, with the option of any combination of seven flavoured syrups and a dusting of your choice?

I drink to survive not to display the depths of my pockets or the breadth of my erudition.

The place was all over-stuffed black leather furniture, low lighting and warm wood. Two bored-looking teenage girls offered service with a sneer from behind a polished black mock-marble counter.

The under-sprung seat of the sofa, combined with the proximity of an equally diminutive table, meant my knees rose high above the level of my lap, and I was forced to lie back on the considerable padded cushion to gain any comfort. The whole ambiance was a frightening mix of dolls' tea party furniture and high-fashion drinks.

The clientele of the shop was largely female, chiefly middle-aged, entirely middle-class and exclusively over made-up. I imagined that each deluded herself into believing they were in a gigi little place in New York, Rome or Paris, maybe on the set of Friends or Sex in the City, but certainly anywhere but the heart of the West Midlands.

This was not my idea of a watering hole, and I hoped it never would be.

Across the table from me Martha was curled in an enormous leather armchair like a cat.

Her shoes lay on the floor, and she had tucked her feet up under her behind. One elbow rested on her hip, the other on the arm rest, and her hands were clasped around a steaming mug, contents unknown, whilst she stared over the rim and out of the window behind me.

She pursed her lips and blew gently into the cup, rippling the surface, then she bowed her head and took a tentative sip, the now-familiar strand of chestnut hair escaping from behind her ear and coming to rest against her fingers.

I had filled her in on my morning of failed lead-chasing. She took it in silently until a raucous cackle arose from a coffee house coven by the door and snapped Martha out of her reverie.

"So ... I went to the bank with my father's will and a letter from our solicitor," she said, breaking her over-my-shoulder stare for the first time.

"It seems that the funeral provision my father had made emptied all of his accounts. Everything." She sounded calm and morose in equal measure.

"This is a surprise to you?" I asked a somewhat rhetorical question.

"My father always had money; cash, bonds and some shares. He planned. He was careful. Now, I have inherited a sizeable debt from a bank loan, plus an overdraft and a mortgage on Holly Corner." She was taking it very well, her tone remained flat and unnaturally calm.

"The bank are liaising with my solicitor, whom I can't afford to pay, about the possibility of releasing my father's last account statements." Her eyes began to dampen with the first signs of tears, a pink flush appeared on her cheeks, and she started to swallow and blink.

"I see..." I said, realizing that she was effectively bankrupt.

"Of course, this needn't have been a problem. I could have sold Holly Corner and used that money to clear the debt and mortgage. But it's not exactly in a saleable condition at the moment! That naturally wouldn't be so bad if I had the insurance pay-out to bring the house back into habitability, complete with period features ..." she sighed and resumed her stare through the steam rising from her drink.

"But there was no insurance, and now I am fucked," she concluded.

Her use of invective shocked me a little. It didn't suit her. Or it didn't suit my idea of her. Either way, it jarred.

Around Martha's chair were piled the products of her morning of shopping; A cluster of plastic bags from high street shops containing the simple paraphernalia of life which we forget we need until we no longer have it. She saw me looking at the collected purchases and reached for her purse, pushing a tightly folded wad of unspent notes across the table towards me. I struggled upright and returned it hurriedly back.

"Jesus! Don't wave that around in public. This isn't Pebble Deeping," I exclaimed, looking quickly around to see if any coffee-swilling ne'er-do-wells had seen the chunky clutch of notes. Her hand closed back around the money.

"Besides, I think you are meant to keep it. Give it to your solicitor, I continued in now-hushed tones.

"Yeah. It will just cover one of his letters and five minutes of the time he spends scratching his balls," Martha snarled bitterly.

"It's better than scratching his balls yourself," I quipped, regretting the words as soon as they were past my tongue. She tilted her head in agreement, but I didn't manage to bring a smile to her lips. Instead, she took another shallow sip of coffee.

"So, until we hear back about your father's financial comings and goings, we are none-the-wiser," I suggested.

"Satchmo... It seems to me that we have spent the bulk of our time together being none-the-wiser," she replied, and with that single comment she managed to sum up the duration of my stay upon God's Earth.

*

Tyrone Edge knelt on all fours over the patch of bare dirt near the cowshed. His shoulder blades were pronounced and moved like pistons every time he shifted his weight. His feet tapped a rhythm on the floor that seemed vaguely martial in nature.

The sun was low in the sky and looked as if it had melted somewhat, like orange ice cream smeared across the heavens as it bathed Pebble Deeping in a glow that made everything seem more alive somehow.

Ty worked from left to right, poking deep holes in the soil with a conical wooden implement, then dropping a seed into the hole before covering it and tamping down with his thumb. I had already asked him what he was planting, and he informed me that it was a crop of root vegetables; carrots, parsnips, beetroot and swedes. He had an air of total contentment about him, as if he were never happier than when in contact with the soil.

I was beginning to understand Ty a little better. At least, I was constructing a series of thoughts and half-baked theories that I could pass off for understanding in a pinch.

He had a complete and unshakable view of his place in creation. It was almost holistic and religious. Natural is a more accurate way to describe it. Give Ty a blade, and he would survive quite cheerfully in the wilderness with none of the trappings the rest of us cling to. He would live from the land; taking what he needed and never anything that he did not.

I suppose it was how we had all once lived before television, double glazing and Tupperware. Personally, I was very fond of my Tupperware; it stretched my chicken madras into two nights without making my fridge smell like a Bombay backstreet.

I could no more live like Ty than fly to the moon. Some part of me envied him though, I had enjoyed the simple pleasures he had shown me; fire and fish, crafting things from nothing.

What I did not envy was his apparently simplistic view of right and wrong, nor the way he dealt with what he saw as amiss. To him violence was nature's elegant and inescapable response to ill, and it was a response he seemed particularly adept with.

Ty finished his planting and rose, beaming like the Cheshire Cat. He proceeded to water the rows of planted seeds from a dented aluminium can with the air of a new father tucking his progeny into bed. I watched him walking the length of the bed; he moved like a predator with the effortless grace of a creature in tune with its environment. For a fleeting moment I wondered if he ever had doubts, if he was ever unsure or scared. I could not even begin to imagine him scared.

He finally acknowledged my presence, torn away from his buried children at last, and sat beside me in the last of the sun's warmth.

"Where's Martha?" he asked

"She's in the house, checking the stuff she found against some books she got from the library." I replied.

"Library?" He was surprised.

"Yeah, believe it or not, tomes on mid-Roman pottery and implements are not in great demand from Wolverhampton Central Library," I snapped, eager to defend the honour of one of our fine civic institutions.

"I'm amazed they have anything on it at all," Ty muttered, rubbing his hands together to clear some dirt.

"Yeah, they had one or two, but I was shit out of luck. All the Mills and Boon were out," I replied.

He smiled.

"If you are short of reading material, I've got a few technical manuals in the 'rover. They offer a seat-of-the-pants, white-knuckle ride around the hydraulics and wiring of a Defender," he offered, joking.

"Be-still my beating heart." I muttered, closing my eyes and catching the sun's rays on my lids.

*

Martha sat at the kitchen table, poring over two large books. Spread around her were fragments of pottery and other dirt-encrusted lumps that she had unearthed. The double page she was studying had two sizeable glossy prints of artefacts arranged to resemble a museum exhibit. Each item was numbered, and a terse description was listed underneath in miniscule type.

She wore a tight white T-shirt that had ridden up tantalizingly, showing an inch of golden stomach where she bent over the table-top. The shirt fit her like shrink-wrap, and it was as much as I could do not to stare at the curve of her breasts. In fact, it was more than I could do.

Luckily, she was totally absorbed in the book.

"Hi guys," she said absently as we entered, her eyes never leaving the page. She held a russet lump in one hand and was chiselling mud from it with her short and varnished thumb nail.

"What do we have, then?" Ty asked.

"Well..." she began, looking up at us at last, her eyes bright. "Most of it is Roman, or Roman-type. Unguent pots, wine and oil jar fragments." She waved at a curved object about four inches long. "That is probably a broken pilum head."

She put down the pottery fragment she was holding and turned to look us each in the face. "There is one thing, though," she reached for a small and intact jug about the size of a clenched fist.

"This is not Roman. In fact, I have no idea what it is." she said and handed the article to me. The small pot was made of clay and had an extremely narrow neck. I shook it lightly, something rustled slightly inside. I passed it to Ty.

"There's something in it," I said, stating the obvious.

"Yes. It's a bit of a mystery. The pottery shows few signs of age. It has not been enamelled, nor fired to the standard of Roman earthenware. Plus, what is it for? That neck is far too narrow for it to be practical for anything." Martha said.

"Maybe it's ornamental," I replied, flexing my detecting muscles.

"Satchmo, the Romans did not make A present from Londinium plates, neither did they hang flying ducks on the walls of their villas," she snapped.

"There is also an inscription on the base. A number which, you will notice, is depicted in the Arabic numeral system that we use today, rather than the Roman numerals that it should have," she observed, running her hands across her head, tugging her ponytail back to tautness in a fluid motion that spoke of habit.

Ty turned the jug over and examined the inscription. Seconds later he was smiling, then laughing out loud.

"What's so funny?" Martha asked, taking his laughter as an affront to her academic abilities.

"This," he said and dropped the jar.

It fell to the floor and shattered into a dozen shards that flew and skittered across the flagstones in all directions. Martha gasped, I just stared. Ty bent down and fumbled among the remains of the jug, delicately picking a small roll of paper from the pieces.

"What have you done?" she hissed, incredulous.

"The number. It was Morgan's service identifier. He must have made that jar and buried it where he knew we would look," Ty explained.

"Where my father knew I would look ..." Martha's face lifted.

"Absolutely," Ty replied.

He handed the tight roll of paper to Martha who carefully spread it on the table. Written in the same hand that I had seen earlier among Morgan's papers were two words.

Luca Brasi.

I was a little nonplussed; something stirred in the back of my brain but I wasn't sure precisely what. Some flicker of recognition. What was it? A name? A place? The more I grasped for it, the more elusive the answer became. Judging from the blank looks on the faces of both Martha and Ty, they were as confused by this development as I was.

"What the bloody hell does that mean?" Ty asked.

"I don't know," said Martha. "Maybe it's a place, the name of a Roman battle maybe? If it is, I have never heard of it."

"I've seen that before. I just can't place it. It must have something to do with the gold," I said.

"Most of my reference works are ash. I'd have to ring the librarian at Birmingham University and see if I can get access," she replied.

"Luca is an Italian name, isn't it? Is it Roman?" said Ty.

"I'll see what I can find out. In the meantime, can we eat?" They both looked at me and smiled. I was thoughtfully rubbing my stomach through my T-shirt. "And while we do that, perhaps we could all think about the most glaring aspect of all of this."

"Oh yes?" Ty raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

"Why have Morgan and Professor Wimple conspired to leave a trail of clues that only you two could follow. What can they possibly be leading to, and why did they feel the need to conceal anything at all?"

"They did find something..." Martha whispered. I nodded.

"...and they felt the need to hide what they had found," Ty added. I nodded some more.

Martha prepared a fresh salad with thick chunks of granary bread and strong cheese. Ty sat at the table staring at the small roll of paper in his hands, it was a tangible link to his uncle for whom he had yet to grieve, as far as I could tell, and there was sadness as well as puzzlement in his dark blue eyes.

After we had eaten, I retreated to the hayloft to make some calls. I left messages with some contacts and spoke to others in an effort to establish whether Luca Brasi was a person, and if so who and where they were.

None could offer me any information until I got lucky with Walker. As ever, Walker Pelc whipped the ringing phone from its cradle before the first chime had finished. He was always desperate for another slice of life's shit pie, and another chance to make money.

"Whadda you want?" he wheezed down the line.

"Walker, it's Satchmo."

"I knew you'd be back, you fuck. Now what you want? Can't you do nothing on your own?" his voiced croaked with faux anger.

"Nah, I'm too good to do all the small shit. I'd rather pay you for it," I bandied back at him.

"What's the job then smart-arse?" He emitted a series of racking coughs that rattled his chest so violently that it suggested that it had shaken something loose. I wondered if it was his conscience.

"Standard name check please. One Luca Brasi."

Walker made a strangulated sound that sounded like an elephant drowning in a mud hole, its duration suggested that it was some kind of laugh.

"What?" I said. Still, the noise continued; a phlegmy hacking in my ear.

"For fuck's sake, Walker. What?" I shouted, annoyed now. Finally, the laughing died down.

"Are you taking the piss, Satchmo?" he managed to say, struggling for breath. I could imagine him wiping the tears from his eyes with the filthy sleeve of his 1970s vintage sports jacket. He came back on the line, but his voice was different.

"... You come to my house, on the day of my daughter's wedding... and you say to me 'Don Walker, what do you know of this man.'"