Episode 1 - Mr Sloane

Thursday November 1st  then Friday

Cleo Hurley had just settled comfortably on the little sofa in front of a log fire crackling in the grate when the doorbell rang.

Cleo wasn’t expecting anyone. The babies had been fed and changed and were passing the time happily either in the large playpen that was a permanent feature at the cottage, or in their rocking cradles. Getting a few quiet minutes was quite a feat considering there were no less than three sets of twins under three and PeggySue, a lively four year old. Charlie, Gary’s 14 year old daughter from his previous marriage, and Grit, Gary’s mother, were keeping an eye on everything while Cleo closed her eyes for five minutes.

“Don’t answer it, Sweetheart,” Cleo called out to Charlie. “It could be anybody. I’ll get it.”

”Alright, Mummy,” Charlie called back. “It’s a man. I can see him through the side window.”

“It could be the milkman,” Cleo speculated.

The doorbell rang insistently.

“Hold your horses!” said Cleo as she opened the door to find a complete stranger standing there.

“I’ve come to see a M-M-Mrs H-H-Hurley,” the man mumbled.

“There are two,” retorted Cleo. “Mother and wife. If you actually want to speak to Mr Hurley, go to Police Headquarters in Middlethumpton.”

“The S-S-Superintendent sent me here.”

“Did he now? Then you’d better come in, if you don’t mind a house full of kids and mothers-in-law.”

Wondering just how many kids and mothers-in-law Mrs Hurley had, the stranger walked in ahead of Cleo.

“Who are you, anyway?” said Cleo, pressing the emergency button on her cell-phone to get a direct link to Gary.

“Hi, Sweetheart! I expect you meant to call me sooner,” she said into the phone, pretending that she had been rung up.

”He’s a harmless crank,” Gary replied. “I’ve been expecting your call.”

“Thanks a bunch for warning us,” said Cleo.

“Keep him happy. I’ll be home in half an hour.”

“I hope you don’t mean the first part of that advice literally. I’ll make coffee, and get moving, Mr Hurley.”

***

Thinking that this coloured woman was probably the nurse with special privileges at this nursery establishment, the stranger excused his visit, saying he hoped Mrs Hurley was OK.

“I’m Mrs Hurley,” said Cleo.

“But I th-th-thought ….” the stranger stuttered.

“I give my husband a title when he annoys me,” said Cleo. ”What’s your name, Mister?”

Anyone who has not been confronted by Cleo’s Chicago drawl is discomforted by the experience. She sometimes uses it as a weapon. It puts people in their place and amuses Gary to pieces.

“M-M-Mark,” stuttered the man. “M-M-Mark S-S-Sloane.”

Mark Sloane was intimidated. The drawl had worked.

“I’m Mrs Hurley,” said Cleo. “I think that you must have thought I was the domestic help, Mr Sloane, didn’t you?”

Mr Sloane stuttered “of c-c-course not” and blushed with embarrassment.

“Do you want milk in your coffee?” Cleo drawled.

“Yes, p-p-p-lease, and t-two lumps,” the man replied.

“You can sort out the lumps by yourself, Mr Sloane. I just wanted to know if you like your coffee black.”

Grit left the little ones in the playpen to their own devices. She’d been listening to the stilted dialogue.

***

“How do you do, Mr Sloane,” said Grit, rescuing Cleo from this tedious man.

Sloane kissed Grit’s hand, or at least made a motion towards doing so. He was very glad that this older Mrs Hurley did not drawl.

“My name’s Grit Stone, by the way,” she said, offering him her hand for a second time.  “It was Hurley, but I’m newly married now.”

“H-H-How do you do, Mrs S-S-Stone,” said Sloane.

Cleo was glad when Charlie interrupted the painful scene by asking Mr Sloane if he was any good at arithmetic.

“N-N-Not bad,” he said, also glad of any relief from his blatant faux pas of thinking this Latino woman was a servant.

Charlie wasted no time in getting this strange person to help, as if she needed it.

“If five fruit-pickers take two weeks to pick twenty rows of strawberries, how long will it take ten fruit pickers to pick forty rows of strawberries?” Charlie read.

“That’s s-s-silly,” said Sloane. “Who s-s-set you that p-p-problem?”

“The maths teacher.”

“Well, j-j-just write that you n-n-need to know h-h-how long it takes one f-f-fruit picker to p-p-pick the s-s-strawberries off one p-p-plant and how many s-s-strawberries are on each p-p-plant.”

“They’re all the same,” said Charlie.

“No two s-s-strawberry plants are alike,” said Sloane, now taking it all very seriously.

“I’ve got to as-as-assume they are all the same,” said Charlie, imitating poor Mr Sloane’s turn of speech.

“O-O-K. S-s-so if it takes f-f-five pickers t-two weeks, h-h-how long w-w-would it t-t-take t-two and a h-h-half pickers?” said Sloane, enunciating his words with care while Charlie waited patiently for Sloane to get through his argument, but with a facetious grin on her face.

“Four weeks,” said Charlie. “But there’s no such thing as half a fruit-picker.”

“V-v-very cleverly ob-bbbbserved,” said Mr Sloane, now in his pedagogic element. “F-f-forget the h-h-half-pickers! Let’s m-m-move on to the t-ten fruit-pickers instead.”

“That’s twenty half-pickers,” said Charlie.

“Charlie, behave!” said Cleo warningly.

“I’ll ignore that, Ch-Ch-Charlie,” said Sloane.

“Anyway, there are twenty whole fruit-pickers in the answer,” said Charlie.

Since Sloane was sitting with his back to the door leading to the front door, he was not aware that Gary had entered quietly and was highly amused by Charlie’s mathematical onslaught. He had already had an opportunity to assess Mr Sloane and had not been impressed.

“So there are t-t-twice as many f-f-fruit-pickers,” said Charlie.

“S-S-So they can do the work in ha-ha- half the time,” said Sloane, satisfied that he had solved the issue.

“Not if there are twice as many s-s-strawberries,” said Charlie, triumphantly, though she knew she was in dire trouble for mocking this grownup.

Gary applauded and Cleo gave him a highly disapproving look.

“Don’t be blinded by science, Mr Sloane,” he said. “Charlie likes baiting visitors. You got off lightly.”

“D-D-Did I?”

Cleo went into the kitchen to laugh where Charlie could not see her. The guy was in serious trouble with his stutter, she decided, but Charlie had taken an unfair advantage. She would have to have a talk with that young lady.

***

Half an hour later, Charlie had been persuaded to go next door and finish her homework with Lottie, Gary’s twin brother and Joe’s elder daughter. The relief on Sloane’s face when the girl left was unmistakeable.

“Tell my wife your story,” Gary commanded. He thought Cleo should now come down to earth. She could be like a spider in a web sometimes with her Chicago drawl and exotic looks. She’d caught him, and he had thought he was immune. It was now time to let Mr Sloane take the scene. Charlie had been sent next door to help make this eccentric guy feel more comfortable.

“Sure. I’m curious,” said Cleo, her eyes bright and searching. She judged her effect on this guy to be rather mesmerizing. Cleo was not a man-eater (her mother had been). She tended to raise men’s hopes without intending to, or that’s what Gary liked to think. Sloane was fairly gobsmacked.

“It’s about the monks at Monkton Priory, Cleo,” said Gary, giving Sloane time to recover from Cleo’s sensuous effect on him, which he had found amusing, given that Mr Sloane was a rather weedy specimen of manhood and seemed daunted by his wife.

“I told Mr Sloane that you could talk the owner into giving permission for a dig,” Gary explained.

The hidden message was that he had not told Mr Sloane that the priory property actually belonged to Cleo, an ancestor of whom had won it at cards after it had earlier belonged to a loyalist. That guy had supported Henry VIII in his mission to establish a new church with licence to divorce and been rewarded with the gift of the priory and the lands belonging to it. A later head of the family had lost the priory lands to an ancestor of the Hartley family and it had finally come down to Cleo.

***

“Mr Sloane read the priory  story in a history book,” Gary explained.

“Wow,” said Cleo. “So you know all about the ecclesiastical treasures that disappeared with the monks, do you?”

“I-I-I suppose the t-townsfolk could have s-s-sold them, couldn’t they?” said Mr Sloane.

“I’m sure they didn’t,” said Cleo. “That would have given the game away.”

“HEXactly,” aspirated Mr Sloane. “So where are they now, Mrs Hurley. Where are they now?”

This outburst of drama came as quite a surprise, needless to say. Even Mr Sloane was surprised. He usually spoke quietly to disguise his stutter, and here he was, declaiming without a hint of hesitation.

“You should shout more often,” said Cleo. “Stuttering is often a result of faulty breathing and your breathing was perfect when you shouted, Mr Sloane.”

As if Cleo had rebuked rather than praised him, Mr Sloane fell back into quiet speech and stuttering.

“D-D-Do you think so?”

“Of course. Say that again loud, but breathe in first!”

Mr Sloane’s breast swelled before he declaimed “Do you think so?” without the trace of a stutter.

He smiled at Cleo in recognition of the New World she obviously came from.

After sucking in a lot of air he aspirated “HI’ll remember that,” and hardly stuttered at all for the rest of his visit.

***

Gary reflected that Nigel, his industrious assistant at HQ, would enjoy hearing about that incident. Nigel had already hinted that Sloane was probably a nutcase. Gary had retorted that it took one to know one, and Nigel had told him to send the guy to Cleo as she knew better how to deal with nutcases.

***

“What exactly do you want to do, Mr Sloane?” Cleo drawled. “I need to know exactly what to explain to the owner.”

Mr Sloane got up. He could best explain his plans by walking up and down.

“I’ll use a metal detector first,” he shouted, mindful of his stutter. “I need to locate where to start my excavations.”

“With a Geiger counter? Awesome!”

“Not exactly, Mrs Hurley. I only want to find metal, not radiation.”

“Awesome!” said Cleo again.

“It’s all based on electromagnetic induction, you must understand,” shouted Mr Sloane and demonstrated his next utterance with his arms. “Inductor coils inside the gadget interact with metallic elements on the ground. A current applied to the coil induces a magnetic field. It’s all quite simple, really.”

“Like when I go through security at the airport,” said Cleo.

“C-c-correct,” said Mr Sloane at almost normal volume with only a trace of a stutter. “Any m-metal nearby will show up.”

“And then you can dig for it,” said Cleo.

“Yes, even though we don’t know what we will find or how far down we will have to dig, Mrs H-H-Hurley.”

Cleo gestured to him that he should breathe between sentence. He nodded gratefully.

“We have to assume that the treasures were buried so far down that they were not detected at the time and are still there – STILL THERE.”

Mr Sloane sat down. He had finished shouting his justification.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Cleo. “Who is funding the project?”

“I asked the National Trust, but they weren’t interested,” declaimed Mr Sloane. “So I’ve been asking around and have quite a tidy sum stashed away.”

“That’s really impressive, Mr Sloane,” Cleo praised.

“One or two museums are interested, Mrs Hurley. They will help to fund the excavations if they can get publicity from it.”

“That should not be a problem, though the owner will not want to be revealed,” said Cleo.

“That’s such a pity,” wailed Mr Sloane. “Perhaps you can persuade him.”

The whole conversation was now being carried out above room volume. It was, as Gary later commented, side-splitting.

“I’ll try,” replied Cleo. It was clear that Mr Sloane did not suspect her of being the owner. “I’ll get you a signed document to make sure you have evidence of permission to dig.”

Gary wondered how Cleo was going to manage that without revealing her name.

“Mrs Casey will be delighted,” Cleo invented, much to Gary’s astonishment. “She lives a very reserved life, but she wants the priory to thrive and finding the treasure will help.”

“Are you staying for supper, Mr Sloane?” Gary asked.

“N-n-no, b-b-better not. I must get or-or-organized,” he replied, and Gary showed him out after the explorer had buckled and kissed Cleo’s hand.

“Don’t forget to breath, Mr Sloane,” said Gary.

“Goodbye!” Mr Sloane called.

He should be on the stage, thought Gary.

***

“Well, Mrs Casey, that was quite a performance,” was Gary’s first comment when Sloane had left.

“Mrs Casey is a retired gentlewoman, Gary. She would not want to be bandied about.”

“Whatever you mean by that, my love, I am going to start supper.”

“I’ll feed some of the kiddies,” said Cleo.

“So it’s back to normal, is it?”

“For a day or two. I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing a lot more of Mr Sloane.”

“Heaven forbid,” said Gary.

“But he almost forgot to stutter. Did you notice?”

“It’s probably the first time anyone’s taken an interest,” said Gary.

“I wonder what he does for a living.”

“He hinted that he’s an architect,” said Gary.

“Not an archaeologist?”

“Does it matter, Mrs Casey?”

“Not a jot!”
***

Friday

When she came in from next door, Charlie was astonished to hear her Daddy call her Mummy Mrs Casey.

“Who’s Mrs Casey, Mummy?”

“Mrs Casey owns Monkton Priory,” said Gary.

“No, she doesn’t!” Charlie protested.

“Mr Sloane thinks she does.”

***

“Mummy! You told a lie!”

“A little white one, Charlie. What do you want for supper?”

“How little white?”

“Little white enough for us all to keep a secret,” sand Cleo. “And don’t call me Mrs Casey.”

“Who is that anyway?”

“A figment of my imagination, Charlie.”

“Is a figment the same as a fib?”

“Occasionally.”

“I quite liked Mr Sloane. I’d like to have stayed,” said Charlie, “but you threw me out!”

“No, we didn’t, Sweetheart,” said Gary. ”But Mr Sloane was inhibited by your presence.”

“You make it sound like politics, Daddy. Can I have beans on toast for supper, Mummy?”

***

Mr Sloane wasted no time in getting his act together. Next day he braved the sharp November wind and set off with his metal detector and a piece of chalk to mark off the land he wanted to excavate. He rather hoped the weather would hold until his assistant had installed some red and white striped tape before the inevitable rain washed his chalk away.

Mr Sloane was used to joining digs as a volunteer in hot countries during his summer holidays. This was his first attempt at going it alone and he had not considered every eventuality.

He had, however, thought better of marking off the graveyard, a small, sad area with weathered old gravestones lined up in front of the priory church. That could come later if at all, he mused. He did not think the monks would have desecrated the last resting places of the dead by digging them up and replacing them with ecclesiastical trophies. The cemetery could wait. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Mr Sloane was not going to be quite alone in his endeavours+. He had engaged an assistant named Albert after Queen Victoria’s husband. Albert’s parents were keen fans of The Proms, which were held in a huge auditorium designed by Prince Albert and  for which the Medocs bought season tickets at a horrendous price. Their Albert was – they explained – a memorial to good music.

Albert, or Al as his friends liked to call him, was not into good music. He wore headphones all the time to listen to brainwashingly loud rock music on his mobile. The only consolation Al’s parents had was the introduction of streaming from websites somewhere in the ether onto cell phones. Up until quite recently Al Medoc had carried a booster around and everyone had been forced to listen to his favourite music if they were within earshot. Modern technology was a blessing.

Albert was a big disappointment to his parents.

But their disappointment did not end with Albert’s point-blank refusal to attend a classical concert. Al had left school as soon as it was legal to do so and had not even tried to get an apprenticeship, let alone stayed at school long enough to get qualifications for university, where his parents had dearly wanted Albert to learn to be a professor, possibly in history or philosophy. They would have footed the bill gladly, but Al insisted in so many words that he was an innate musician and would practise his bass guitar until he found a vacancy in a rock group. Failing that, he would start one and call it ‘Al’s Memorial Band’. He would increase his chord repertoire from three to four and maybe five and be unstoppable on stage in front of his screaming female fans.

To be honest, Al Medic wasn’t interested in excavating anything except his father’s bank balance, but he had answered the call of an appeal pinned by Mr Sloane on the PTP board at the youth club where Al practised with other rock musicians. If you waited till after the regular youth meetings, you could play at top volume until the caretaker (who also cared for the junior school on Thumpton Hill) chucked you out, and that was often not at all since the caretaker liked a dram or two and was thus as often as not otherwise occupied until he fell asleep somewhere.

Al’s youth club belonged to St Stephen’s parish church in Upper Grumpsfield and was the brainchild of the incumbent curate, Mary Baker, who was quite a dish when she left off her dog collar.

“The kids have to go somewhere,” she insisted. “If they can’t go, I go!”

Mary Baker got her own way. She was young, compassionate and forward-looking. She had not yet given up on humanity, though it was sometimes a close shave, and she did draw in a better crowd to the church services than could be recalled in living memory. She was a sort of Joan of Arc in a community that had almost lost its bearings.

Once he knew that a financial remuneration was in the offing. Al was quite happy to help Mr Sloane, who by five on Friday afternoon had marked off an area behind the priory church ready for Al to hammer in stakes all around it and festoon them with the tape bought at a pound shop and used to mark off sites where felonies or accidents had occurred. Tent herrings, also from the pound shop, served as tape-holders.

Mr Sloane thought his site must once have been where the monks’ living quarters had stood. They would have had cells with earthen floors and straw rather than carpets (carpets were reserved for dignitaries and walls in the old days), so digging holes at dead of night would be convenient way of hiding stuff in those days.

Mr Sloane decided that there must have been more than one hiding place, however, and quite possibly close together. Churches always had a lot of treasures, since people paid for them in return for going to heaven. The holes would have been used to bury the treasures thus protecting them from Henry VIII’s marauding army and any other hangers-on, and the holes were then covered with soil trodden flat and a layer of straw.

But of course, over the centuries, the monks’ housing had decayed and disintegrated. Any stones would have been taken away by people doing house improvements of their own or to build new cottages. Mr Sloane had read all about it in history books. Rustics were not always sure what was theirs and what wasn’t, in the old days.

***

After Al had photographed the scene at the priory on his no-name smart phone, he and Mr Sloane departed. They would meet again in two days’ time. Mr Sloane would make it all right with him and gave him ten pounds to start off with.

Al had transported himself there on a moped. Mr Sloane got into an old wreck of a car and drove to Cleo’s cottage, regretting that the saucy little girl from last night would already be home from school.

But he was in luck. Miss Plimsoll, perennial sports teacher and hockey coach at Middlethumpton Comprehensive, had commanded a long training session in view of the coming match next day.

Friday was not the usual day for extended hockey practice, but the girls had played so badly at their last match that it was deemed essential, not least to call up the team spirit. So Charlie was not home yet and Miss Plimsoll was still lording it over a pack of frozen hockey players.

Fortunately, Gary had arranged to collect Charlie and as many of her Upper Grumpsfield teammates would fit into the family van. He witnessed the final ten minutes of the training and was horrified. Miss Plimsoll had to go!

The girls agreed with one voice.

***

After his work at the dig site, Mr Sloane visited Cleo and assured her that work could start on Sunday. His assistant Al had taken photos and they would be added to his report, which he was secretly hoping to turn into a book. He would remember to take his faithful old camera next time, he shouted,  but he would have to buy a film roll first.

Cleo immediately offered him the use of one of the Hartley Agency digital cameras. Mr Sloane’s gratitude was almost as embarrassing as his stutter had been; a glance out of the window at the state of Sloane’s boneshaker confirmed to Cleo that he was not affluent, though he spoke with a refined accent that was now blessedly stutter-free thanks to enormous gulps of air and shouting.

“How are you going to pay an assistant?” Cleo queried, being sure that Mr Sloane was not being truthful about the funding of his enterprise.

“I’ll manage,” he called out. He had indeed forgotten that he had told Cleo there was a research fund.

“I can help,” said Cleo as she realized that in the long run Mr Sloane would have to know who owned the priory if she was going to finance the project, so she told him about Mrs Casey.

“I didn’t really believe in her,” Mr Sloane fibbed, since he did not want to be thought gullible. “But I won’t tell anyone your secret.”

“I trust you, Mr Sloane, so this dig will be on the house,” said Cleo. “We’ll start with 50 pounds, shall we? Just give me your bank details and I’ll send you the money while you’re here. After that, you’ll have to keep a record of all your expenses as the investigation – and that’s what it is, after all – will go on the expenses account of my agency. You are now an official investigator, Mr Sloane, so I’ll pay you the going rate for the work you are putting in. Can you live with that?”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” cried Mr Sloane, touched by the compassion he saw in Cleo.

“We stand to gain, Mr Sloane, and I will enjoy paying back the National Trust for their lack of interest in the property.”

***

Mr Sloane left in a whirl as Gary arrived and three screaming teenage girls got out of the van complete with sports bags, satchels and hockey sticks. The third of the trio was Cecilia, possibly the most aggressive of the three, and certainly the loudest.

“They’re not all mine,” Gary shouted. “Cecilia lives just down the road and Lottie is my brother’s daughter.”

Cecilia marched off swinging her hockey stick in an alarming fashion and thanking Mr Hurley over her shoulder for the lift.

“Cecilia literally squashes any opponent she comes across,” said Gary. “If you want a lesson in character-building strategies, come to the hockey match!”

“It’s tomorrow at eleven,” said Charlie. “You’ll enjoy it and Joyce will there.”

“Who’s Joyce?” Gary asked.

“Miss Plimsoll’s retiring and Joyce is taking over.”

“Miss Joyce will have her hands full,” said Gary.

“Not Miss Joyce. Just Joyce. She doesn’t want us to call her Miss Greenwich, or Miss anything. We are to be her friends.”

“Did you say Greenwich?” shouted Mr Sloane.

“Yes,” said Lottie.

“I was at school with her,” shouted Mr Sloane. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Are you cross with us?” Charlie wanted to know.

“No” said Mr Sloane, shaking his head vigorously.

“Then don’t shout!”

“You l-l-look like t-t-twins,” said Mr Sloane, not sorry that he could leave before Charlie could puzzle him with maths.

“Miss P-p-plimsoll can’t tell us apart,” said Lottie.

“I p-p-probably couldn’t, either,” said Mr Sloane as he got into his car.

“You look a lot older than Joyce,” said Charlie.

“Some women wear better than men,” hissed Lottie.

Mr Sloane wound down his window.

“See you tomorrow,” he shouted.

“We can push you if your car won’t go on its own,” said Charlie.

“Sorry about that, Mr Sloane,” said Gary. “They both happen to be Charlottes and otherwise it’s a long story. Have you sorted things out with my wife?”

“Oh yes,” gushed Mr Sloane.

“What about Mrs Casey,” Charlie piped up.

“That’s s-s-sorted, too,” said Mr Sloane, starting the disgruntled engine and moved off slowly. Charlie mimed pushing and Gary mimed being furious with her.