We stood in the dark larder; I trained the slim beam of torchlight onto the floor where piles of sandy earth had been scraped aside and struggled to control my breathing. Ty knelt with his hands resting on his thighs, grains of sand stuck to the hairs on his forearms where he had dug feverishly for several minutes.

"Is that it?" I whispered, despite us being alone in the cool air of the old food store.

The artificial white circle of torchlight danced across an old leather suitcase in a rhythm matching the frenetic beating of my heart. I stood with my back pressed against the wall of the subterranean larder to leave room for Ty to excavate. The luggage lay about thirty centimetres below the surface, directly beneath where the line in the sand was etched. It was a medium-sized and dented dark leather object that might have been fashionable sometime in the mid-seventies, but it didn't look to have suffered too badly from its time underground.

"It must be." Ty grasped the edges of the case and tried to lift it. It steadfastly refused to budge.

"Still stuck..." He scraped further grainy earth from around the cracked leather corners, tossing handfuls aside.

"If this is it, the votives I mean, what are we going to do with them?" I wondered aloud.

"I don't know, but we are certainly not going to give them to Sharp," Ty replied. He motioned for me to bring the light closer and I obliged, focusing the beam on the shallow trench he had excavated around the case.

Edge got a firm grip on the handle and heaved the suitcase clear of the hole. I knelt next to him as he blew forcefully into the case's old metal fastenings to dislodge any grains that may have clogged them. I held my breath as he popped the clasps and opened the lid.

There before me in the bottom of the luggage lay the two most beautiful objects I have seen in my life.

A sword of about seventy-five centimetres in length, and whose blade tapered in the middle, rested atop an oval disc the size of a large tea tray. Both were encrusted in dirt but showed patches of burnished gleaming golden metal.

"Holy shit," I let the breath out of my lungs in a low whistle.

"Yes, quite literally. Hold that light steady," Edge admonished me. He lifted the sword from the case and held it up with the fingertips of both hands. The blade was five centimetres wide at its broadest and it melted into a hilt of intricately worked gold that was covered with winding patterns. Ty shifted the weapon and examined a neat hole in the bottom of the grip, then gently rubbed some dirt away from the swirling designs. He passed it to me, and I took it in one hand, immediately surprised by the dead weight of it.

"This weighs an absolute bloody tonne!" I exclaimed.

"It looks to be made mostly of gold. The blade and hilt might even be hollow," Ty replied, inspecting it even more closely.

"I think Martha mentioned something about them being hollow for the ceremonial use of blood," I remembered Martha's mini lecture.

"It would be incredibly hard to wield in battle, and gold is soft," he rubbed the edge where the uniform sharpness was marred by several dents. "But it looks like it was used."

He reached back into the case and withdrew the oval disc. It was far more ornate than the sword and was covered with twisted bands of metal in an immensely intricate Celtic pattern. Between these bands were inset areas of shining mother-of-pearl, some of which were obscured with mud, but others shone out like gems. Ty flipped the object in his hands and noted a pair of raised hoops.

"This is the shield; it probably had leather straps that have rotted away," he said.

"It's so beautiful," I said.

"The craftsmanship is unbelievable. I had no idea that the ancient Britons could make anything like this," Ty whispered. Neither did I, but in fairness my appreciation of what the ancient Britons were, and were not, capable of was minimal at best.

"It must have belonged to someone with serious power. Martha said it was a high priest. It would have taken years to craft it, look at the designs," I opined.

"Satchmo, these things are absolutely priceless. If she is right, then there is nothing like these anywhere, and they are a revelation in the ancient history of this country. We cannot let Sharp have them, whatever we do." Ty looked up at me, even in the dark I could make out the fierce resolve on his face.

"I agree, but I'd rather that he have them, and we get Martha back safe and sound," I replied sharply.

"She will be unharmed, I guarantee it," Edge said, definitively shutting me down.

I knew that he couldn't guarantee it, but hearing him say that made me feel significantly better.

"This stuff should go back into the ground until everything is sorted," I said, surprised at the determined tone in my voice.

Ty merely nodded and began of reburying the life's work of a dead man and the key to the future life of his daughter.

*

We sat out by the fire pit. Ty had spatchcocked a chicken and held it in place at the end of a long cleft stick. It was cooking slowly, the fat cracking and spitting as it ran from the meat. The smell was divine, and my stomach gurgled greedily; reminding me that I had neglected it in recent events.

He sat cross-legged opposite me, the submachine gun disassembled in front of him. Various parts were spread over a sheet like the contents of a psycho's Kinder Egg. He was carefully cleaning each piece with a toothbrush and oiling it from a small, dented metal can.

"Do we have a plan?" I asked, brushing my hair down with my palms as I often did when I was nervous.

"Hmm?" Ty's focus remained on maintaining and arranging the myriad odds and ends that comprise a high-end tool of destruction. He began clipping a few back together.

"I'll turn dinner, shall I?" I said sarcastically.

"M-Hmm," he replied, I rotated the chicken pole in its V-shaped rest, exposing the other side to the heat of the embers.

"Ty, I need to know how you see this thing going down. I really don't want to be going into this business blind. I don't much like surprises."

"Then you must find life unpleasant, Satch," a smile flickered across his lips, but he still didn't raise his focus.

"I'm fucking serious here, Ty," I insisted.

He put a newly reassembled trigger mechanism down and locked me with those blue eyes.

"You think I'm not, Satchmo?" There was a sudden venom in his tone. Again, I caught a glimpse of the other Tyrone Edge, the one who exacts vengeance according to his own warped code, the one who is happy to deal pain and, for all I knew, death.

I gulped.

"The truth of it is, I cannot tell you what is going to happen, because I don't know," Ty continued sternly.

"I understand that..." I replied, standing my ground.

"But you are right," he interrupted me. "A basic plan wouldn't go amiss."

"I'm glad you agree," I said with a note of relief in my voice.

"Better get thinking then, hadn't you?" Edge shut the conversation down once more and returned his attention to piecing the now-oiled weapon back together.

My brow furrowed with frustration, but I rapidly realized that our discussion was over. I decided to take him at his word and formulate a plan with the safe return of Martha, the minimum harm being visited upon me, and the preservation of Britain's heritage as priorities. In that order.

It was not easy.

Some time passed, and my concentration was broken with a soft metallic click as Ty pulled the trigger and checked the position of the sights on the submachine gun. Seemingly satisfied, he put the weapon down and retrieved the chicken from above the embers.

Withdrawing his ever-present knife from a hidden sheath, he pierced the meat and examined the colour of the juices that were released. He pronounced it safe to eat by tearing off a strip of flesh and popping into his mouth with a satisfied grunt, then sat down next to me and held the stick between us. We ate in silence for a while, and I was reminded again of the joys of simple food combined with Ty's knowledge.

"So, let's hear it then, maestro," Ty said eventually, licking his fingers.

"What?" I asked, confused.

"The plan-to-end-all-plans. How will the two brave heroes defeat the evil villain and rescue the fair maiden?" Sarcasm didn't suit him. That's what I brought to this relationship.

"Well, I got so far as to realize that we have cocked-up," I offered.

"How's that, then?" he replied.

"We forgot to hide the coins I found down in the river."

"Bollocks," Ty muttered his agreement.

We had just spent an hour covering the larder back up, nailing the planks back into place and then smoothing the topsoil back over. We had even patted and stomped the soil back down to blend it back into the surroundings, then pulled the scrub and plant growth back in place.

"Well, I don't know about you, but I don't feel like uncovering the larder, burying the coins and then recovering the whole fucking lot again."

The coins themselves were still in the piles and packets that Martha had sorted them into, following a taxonomy completely alien to me. They were dotted around the room in the farmhouse in which she had been staying.

"Well, it seems like the thing to do is to return them from whence they came," Ty mused.

"The river?" I asked.

"Why not?" he replied, heading into the house and up the stairs to retrieve them.

We gathered the coins and other artefacts into the same holdall I had pulled from beneath the rock pile in the boathouse pool. They tinkled and chinked as we swept them, without heed for the care Martha had taken, into the open mouth of the bag.

I followed Ty as he strode down the meadow with the holdall tucked under his arm. We trod the now-familiar path along the bank of the river, the tall weeds brushing against my calves. The surface of the water rippled in a faint breeze as if it were excited about the return of something so valuable. We broke into the clearing by the boathouse, Ty stopped and handed me the bag.

"All yours," he said, passing me the holdall. I sighed, rolled my eyes, and then realized that Ty wasn't going to change his mind, so I removed my trainers and socks then stripped to my boxers. I sucked in my gut a little, subconsciously feeling a little inadequate when standing next to Edge whose physique seemed as if it were chiseled by a storied Greek sculptor.

However, he paid me no heed, so I clasped the bag, and with one hand on the bank I slid into the deep water of the pool. My feet slipped on the treacherous stones on the bottom and momentarily my head went under. The water was cold and despite it being a relief from the clammy humidity, I spluttered back to my feet with some alacrity.

"Stop fucking about, Satch. You're not in there for a swim," he grinned.

I stuck two fingers up at him and pushed my damp hair from my eyes.

"That's the spirit!" he laughed.

I waded across to the far bank where the bag had lain under the pile of smooth stones and felt around with my feet until I found them. Replacing the treasure was no simple matter and it took me several efforts and plunges under the surface until I had the prize wedged firmly in place.

"Excellent job, Jacques Cousteau, now back to terra firma. There's work to do..." Ty called from the bank.

I sighed theatrically then half-swam across to him and pulled myself from the pool, making a point of dripping on his shoes while I gathered my clothes back up.

*

That evening the sky was a glorious smear of lilac hemmed with gold piping. The darting shapes of bats jerked above our heads; hunting remorselessly for moths who were drawn to the gleam of the chalky moon that shone high and lonely in the heavens.

A grateful cool fell across the meadow, like the earth itself letting out its breath after the heat of the previous day.

Ty was jungle-taping the sinuously curved magazines for the submachine gun; inverting one above the other and fixing the two in place with black electrician's tape so that the process of reloading simply entailed removing the clip, turning it upside down and ramming the fresh one home.

A silence had come over him as the sun had started to set and his actions had been more methodical and more calculated than ever. My stomach had begun to knot in anticipation at what had to be done tomorrow. I had always shunned conflict wherever possible, and the thought of actually going looking for it made me apprehensive in a way that I had never been.

Nervous energy made me want to talk about anything and everything, and it was unfortunate that this coincided with Ty's return to the silence he had shown when we had first met.

"Ty..." I attempted to begin a conversation for the tenth time.

"M-Hmm," he foiled me for the tenth time.

I watched the confident way he handled the weapon and wondered again exactly what I knew about this man.

"When you were in the Army..."

"I was never in the Army, Satchmo."

"No... But you were involved with something weren't you, beyond just training the courses?" I persevered.

"My uncle Morgan taught me everything I know, everything I knew. He spent a long time serving the country, Satchmo. You know he was in Germany at the end of the war, and then he got caught up with some bad elements.

When he returned home, he worked for British Intelligence for a while. They debriefed him on what he knew about East Germany, which led into him working closely with the SAS anti-terrorism and urban warfare units and, ultimately training them," Ty seemed to be almost rambling now.

"But you..." I tried to get him back on track.

"I always half suspected that he was even involved operationally with chaps in Hereford, but of course he never discussed it, and I was little more than a boy at the time. He spent a lot of time attached to embassies all over the place. You saw the papers..."

"OK, but what about you, Ty?" I asked once more.

He slid the magazine into the gun and drew the slide then fixed me with his medusa gaze.

"Satchmo, you have to understand this; my uncle carved out an enormous amount of respect among the people with whom he worked. Conflict and service were his life."

"OK," I said, patently not understanding.

"What did your father do, Satchmo?" The abrupt change of direction wrong-footed me.

"He was a policeman," I replied. "With the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad."

"He was good at his job, wasn't he? He had a name, his colleagues knew him and trusted him, didn't they?" Ty spoke with an emotion that I had never heard from him. His candour led to me reciprocating.

"Yes... Yes, he was an excellent policeman," I replied.

"And did you ever think of joining the police, Satch? Being a chip off the old block?" he asked intently.

"No. No, it would have been an impossible act to follow," I murmured, remembering vaguely my father's days in uniform and my mother smoothing the creases and the wayward lick of hair at his crown.

I remembered the authority with which he carried himself and the way his colleagues called him 'Sir', even when they visited our dinner table. I remembered my dad laughing and telling them to knock it off, and the look in their eye when they used his given name.

Nope, trying to emulate that, live up to that, would have been a one-way trip to disappointment.

"So, what do you do now, Satchmo? You are a private detective." I nodded and Ty smiled ruefully.

"Nearly, but not quite. So you do understand. We're not so different, you and I, Satchmo Turner."

"But..." I wanted to protest in some way.

"I was never in the Army," Edge punctuated his statement with a finality that doused any further questioning.

I sat with my arms splayed behind me in the long grass, enjoying the first drops of dew that had begun to form as the stars began peeking through the purple blanket of the heavens. Minutes passed and I pondered what Ty had told me, and what he had told me without even saying the words.

"Ty?" I asked.

"Yes, mate?" My mind jerked a little; that was the first hint of familiarity I had had from him.

"Have you ever killed a man?" I don't know why I asked that, I knew it was a bad idea as the words tripped across my lips. He paused, thinking his answer out with purpose.

"What makes you say that?" The reply was flat, his tone unconcerned and conversational.

"Dexter said you were the meanest motherfucker he had ever met..." more silence from Ty,

"... and frankly Dexter made me piss my pants," I continued. There was a small chuckle from Edge and I'm glad the moment was broken.

"Yes, I have killed, but never anyone who wasn't trying to do the same to me."

"How was it?" I asked in a small voice, again knowing that I shouldn't but I'd already gone too far.

"Whatever anyone tells you, killing is easy to do when you have to. Frighteningly easy. When you know it's him or you, you don't even think. Some part of your brain over-rides questions and doubts and you make damn sure that it's him and not you.

It's a fine line that separates the ability to do it when you have to, and the ability to do it when you don't. That is what scares you the most. You never forget," he tailed off and I wisely decided on another topic of conversation.

"Martha will be OK, won't she?" It was a rhetorical question, but I needed to air it regardless.

"I swear to you Satchmo, if Sharp has hurt her in any way he won't live to regret it," Ty replied.

I watched the bats swooping into clouds of insects above us, picking off their targets with ease.

Those moths fluttering about, driven to strive towards the moon, didn't stand a chance against creatures evolved and honed to hunt and kill them. They spun and danced, oblivious to the winged death that dived in among them and snatched them from the air with its jaws.

I was pretty sure that I was a moth, not a bat, and that was a thought that made for a most uncomfortable night.