I was happy.

The sun was shining, the birds were singing and I held Martha in my arms. In fact, I was swinging her around as her laughter fell about me like rain breaking a drought.

I stopped twirling and placed her feather-light frame back on the ground. She clung to me with a firm grip and giggled.

"Oh Satchmo, it's marvellous! However did you find it?"

I had already showed them the remains of the fish, and the pile of stones that I had removed from the pool. Ty had nodded sagely as he prodded among the guts, looking at me as a father would when his son scores his first goal for the school team.

"Tench," he nodded. This was high praise indeed.

Martha released me and dropped to her haunches to examine the contents of the soaking wet duffel bag. A rosy colour flushed high in her cheeks, and she was panting from a combination of exertion and excitement.

She tucked a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail back up behind her ear, and I noticed that she had somehow found the time to paint her nails a light shade of lilac. It's funny what you notice when you can't stop staring at someone. Ty unceremoniously kicked me in the shin and scowled, obviously I was gawking, but I didn't care.

I had made Martha happy and, deep down in a very childish way, that made me happy. Perhaps the way to a girl's heart is through a sodden leather hold-all containing two thousand-year-old coinage.

All-in-all, it was shaping up to be a good day.

Martha scurried into the farmhouse and began laying out the find on the kitchen table, unpeeling the muslin rolls and letting out the occasional breath or squeak of excitement.

Ty took my elbow and lead me through the stone corridor and out into the heat of the afternoon. "I'm glad you found that Satchmo. It was great work and very good timing," he said while walking me in the direction of the cowshed.

"Why's that?" I asked.

"We had some interesting and not necessarily good news from Martha's solicitor," he replied.

"Oh. The bank statements?" This wasn't good.

"Indeed. It seems that the old professor was in a large amount of debt."

"Loan? Credit cards?" I asked, wondering what the scale of the problem was.

"Hardly..." he withdrew a printed sheet of paper, a bank statement, and held it up for my inspection. "See here at the bottom? Wimple is overdrawn by just over fifteen hundred quid. Now, check the dates of these two withdrawals," he pointed near the head of the document.

"Regular. Direct debits?" I muttered.

"Yes, those are the mortgage repayments on Holly Corner, on the same date every month. Now look at these transactions taking him into the red. That is three days before another payment was scheduled." Ty was prodding lines in the statement with a grimy fingernail.

"So, he drained all of his cash just before the mortgage was due," I murmured. He nodded in confirmation.

"It turns out that he had defaulted on the payments before and was in serious danger of losing the house," he smiled grimly.

"But he didn't, right? So Wimple paid somehow," I concluded.

"Uh-huh." Ty produced another sheet. "Here is a cash deposit of fifty grand into the professor's account."

"Sweet Jesus! Where did he get fifty thousand in cash?" My mind raced. Wimple could have got a personal loan secured against something, but that would have been paid via a bank transfer, or cheque at the outside. Cash meant something else entirely.

"Well, it wasn't for his last journal article," Ty said sarcastically. "And short of making a withdrawal from Lloyds with the aid of a sawn-off and a hat made out of a pair of tights, that kind of money is hard to get hold of."

"OK, but that was several months ago. Where has it all gone?" I asked.

Ty read a list of a few withdrawals; utility bills, solicitors' fees, more mortgage payments to cover the arrears, construction tool rental companies. In all it was about twenty-five grand's worth of expenditure.

"But this, this is the clincher. You see this withdrawal of thirteen thousand? And this one two weeks later?"

I looked at the items Ty was pointing at. "Another thirteen..."

"What does that strike you as?" he asked. I looked at it, perplexed. Numbers and I regularly did not see eye-to-eye.

"A load of wedge," I said, totting it up. "Twenty-six thousand."

"I think that is two repayments on the original money. It looks like two ten-grand slugs at thirty percent interest," Ty explained.

"Who charges thirty percent on a two-month cash loan of fifty grand?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

"Loan sharks," he replied, confirming what I suspected. The professor must have been in deep shit to take the money from a shark.

"Does Martha know?" I asked.

"Not yet, and I'm glad you have found that bag of tricks to cheer her up, because this is potentially not good."

Only potentially? Ty's glass was half-full today.

The way I saw it this was bad, very bad. The professor had borrowed fifty, paid back half and spent the rest. When Mr. Loan Shark's next payment was due, Wimple's cupboard was bare. He must have thought that he would have hit the financial jackpot by then and been able to pay back the balance of the money.

The inevitable occurs when the third payday arrives; Professor Wimple is not in clover and finds himself unable to cough-up. Two weeks later, he is dead and I'm in the middle of this situation.

"So, who is this guy, Ty?" I asked with my mind racing.

"That I do not know. But I'm thinking that he might want the remainder of his money paid-up," he stared at me, his expression grave.

It was starting to make more sense now. The petty attempts at intimidation had come from Michaels and his two behemoths who hoped to acquire Ty and Martha's land, but he had had nothing to do with the arson. No, the torching of Holly Corner had come from a more sinister source.

"What I don't understand is why he burned the house down," I said. "Surely he is hampering the chances of the return of his loan by destroying Wimple's assets. What's more, if she dies then there's no money for him, either."

"You forget, Satchmo, that both my uncle and the professor are dead. Maybe this guy is trying to kill Martha too, or just doesn't care either way. Having people default on a loan and get away for it is bad for business and reputation. It encourages others to do the same." Ty was folding the sheets of paper and tucking them into a pocket.

"Either way, it is not good for Martha. If she is oblivious to this guy's existence, then why hasn't he been outright demanding the money?" Ty asked.

"Perhaps he assumes that the professor told her about their arrangement," I said.

"Maybe she does know, but she hides it well," he replied. "I think there's more to this, and we had better find out what it is."

*

Martha was tucked up snugly to the kitchen table, engrossed in her work and surrounded by small piles of rusted coins and assorted trinkets. The muslin rolls and long strings of toilet paper were strewn about her chair, intertwined like great white snakes.

She scanned each piece briefly, turning it over in her hands several times, handling it softly and lovingly looking at it from all angles before delicately placing it into an allotted pile. A smile was welded to her face and it formed tiny little dimples high on her cheeks.

Shafts of late afternoon sunlight flooded through the kitchen window, making her eyes flash with verdant fire and the small metal objects glint as her fingers deftly manipulated them. There was an air of restrained excitement and enthusiasm about her that made her all the more attractive, and I stood in the doorway and watched for several minutes.

Martha's system of piled coins spread further across the wooden surface of the table, her lilac nails darting here and there, checking and rechecking. She seemed very alive and precious to me, and though I was no man of action I resolved that nothing and no one would harm her while I had power left in my limbs. It sounds paternal I know, but that was how I felt and it was not something I was ashamed of.

"So, are we millionaires?" I asked from the doorway, her shoulders twitched slightly as she was so intent on her study that I must have startled her.

She laughed. "This is a large find of Roman and Celtic coinage and artefacts, dating from around the time of Paulinus' incursion into the Ordovice lands. The pieces are in good condition for the most part, many have been cleaned since excavation." She held out a small silver hued coin on the palm of her hand, it looked to have been worn almost smooth by the passage of time or the rubbing of an ancient thumb.

"But this is hardly the find of the century, Satchmo. It's not the votives, and although it is valuable for archaeological interest, it is nothing new."

"Oh..." I must have sounded disappointed because she bolted to her feet and placed both hands on my shoulders.

"Don't be silly, Satchmo, this is an amazing find and it proves that my father's theory was possible. There was a Roman fort on this land. I am ecstatic that you found it!" she reached up on tiptoes and kissed my cheek. My heart did a loop-the-loop and settled back somewhere in the pit of my stomach. A though occurred to me, and I tried to assuage it by asking a question.

"What's the approximate value of the find, Martha?"

She gave me a quizzical look. "Well, you don't exactly find this stuff in the Argos catalogue. Like anything, it is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Mostly objects like this are donated to museums or kept," she scanned the table, mentally accounting the hoard.

"If a private collector wanted to bid for the lot at an auction?" I persisted.

"Well, it's not my precise area of expertise, and I haven't been through it all yet. There might be some real rarities in there," Martha hedged, not wanting to be drawn.

"Fifty thousand?" I pushed her for an answer.

"It's possible, it could be less or much, much more," she conceded, "Why do you ask?"

"We need to have a chat about your finances," I said and called for Ty to come into the kitchen.

*

"I thought you might be angling for some kind of finder's fee," Martha whispered. "Now I wish that was what you meant!"