Twenty minutes later, Haig opened the front door to a man in a very fashionable, if unsummery, pinstripe suit. Nigel Faraday was fashionably slim, an inch taller than Haig, which made him six feet two, and greying steadily. Outer layers of Haig's longer, blond hair concealed the effects of time, except in a high wind.
  Nigel, a keen squash player, was starting to worry about the effects of violent, competitive exercise on men approaching forty. Haig, lacking Nigel's social circle, had been spared the sight of young colleagues being hauled away from the squash club in an ambulance after over-exerting themselves. He was content to be idle or active as circumstances required.
  Haig outlined the events of the last hour. The solicitor listened with an air of glassy-eyed abstraction. Vanessa and Mikki had adopted a systematic approach to counting the sovereigns. They were matching a twenty-five high reference pile and grouping new piles into units of four to make up larger units of one hundred.
  Nigel Faraday looked at seven whole and one shattered jug. He examined the numbered scraps of paper and read the note from number eight. Then he looked at the excavation in the garden while Haig told him about Mikki's project. Still at a loss for words, he followed Haig back into the tower to watch the counting.
  "Bloody hell!" he remarked at last, reverting to the local accent. "There have always been stories about old Fullerton hiding his loot but we've always assumed they were sour grapes from his relatives. Some of them refused to believe he managed to spend most of it. How much is there, for heck's sake?"
  "About five thousand, assuming six hundred and some per jug," said Haig. "Roughly six months' expenditure at the old boy's usual rate, if I remember my history right. Just pocket money, really. But that's something you'd know all about. You handled the old boy's legal affairs, didn't you?"
  "Not me personally. My great-grandfather."
  "Well, your firm. And that's something else I wanted to talk about. Whether there's any conflict of interest if you act for me. You see, I'm planning to drag this lot over to the bank when the girls have finished playing with it. Then, when it's off my hands and out of the reach of burglars, I'll phone the local coroner. He might want to have a treasure-trove inquest."
  "You mean, you're expecting a rush of old Fullerton's descendants, eager to get their hands on the loot?"
  "Bastards!" muttered Vanessa.
  "They're bound to have a crack at it, even if I have a piece of paper saying it's all mine. Or all ours," Haig added quickly before his workforce could object. "Are you likely to have any samples of Fullerton's handwriting in your archives to compare with this note?"
  "Let's see, when did he die? Eighteen ninety-four, wasn't it?"
  "June of ninety-three, if I remember rightly."
  "I should think we've still got plenty of documents gathering dust in the sealed file boxes."
  "You see, the point is, treasure-trove inquests have to rule whether finds like this are lost property or someone buried it and planned to dig it up again at a later date. In that case, if the line of ownership can't be traced, it belongs to the Crown. The obvious exceptions are objects that were never intended to be dug up again, like the relics found in the burial ship at Sutton Hoo."
  "Yes," nodded Nigel, "as I recall, in the case of your famous find in Yorkshire, all the bits and pieces were ruled to be lost property and you and the farmer were free to keep it or sell it for full market value."
  "As much as you can get the full market value of items that are beyond price," remarked Haig. "Anyway, the point is, I have a piece of paper, to quote Mr. Chamberlain, that says who buried the jugs, why he did it and who the loot is supposed to go to when it's found."
  "Yes, an interesting point," Nigel agreed, still staring at the marching piles of gold coins. "If old Fullerton buried that lot, as proved by the note, the relatives will try to set the content aside while claiming it's proof the coins belong to his estate."
  "Exactly. I'm anticipating a lot of legal double-think by lining up my own solicitor right from the start. If there's no conflict of interest for you?"
  "I doubt it. As far as I recall, the relatives used a firm of solicitors from the Bristol area at the finish, not us. They didn't appreciate what Arkady and Hawksworth did for the old boy in his declining years in the way of showing he was compos mentis. They wanted him declared incompetent to stop him from zooming through their inheritance."
  "I suppose that's reasonable if you're a grasping relative; but not if you're still in your right mind and it's your cash."
  "Well!" said Nigel. "What would you like your legal representative to do first?"
  "Just observe for the moment. And take charge of photocopies of the notes and, maybe, a video of the jugs and where we found them. How's the counting going, slaves?"
  "You're right," sighed Mikki. "It's going to take years."
  "Are we going to let them weigh them at the bank, then?" Haig said.
  "I think we'd better," said Vanessa.

Haig's bank manager had been warned by telephone to expect a party with valuable goods to be deposited in his strongroom. The presence of a local solicitor with the owner of the most famous building in the area and his young lodgers helped to convince the bank manager that the callers were in earnest.
  A stunned counter clerk scooped sovereigns onto an electronic balance to weigh out batches of 250, which she transferred to tough, plastic bags. The callers left the bank with a collection of empty plastic lunch boxes, and a receipt for 5,149 sovereigns and the originals of the documents found in the jars.
  As soon as the visitors had gone, the manager telephoned the bank's security service to arrange a pick-up. He wanted to move the fortune in his strongroom to the larger branch at Barnstaple, fourteen miles away. Even though just half a dozen people knew about the sovereigns, he felt nervous about keeping them on the premises. It was Friday afternoon. His nice little country bank, he felt, could make a tempting weekend target for a gang of armed and destructive criminals.
  His over-active imagination replayed all sort of robberies seen on the television, concentrating on those in which a gang had held the family of a senior member of the bank's staff hostage. The gang was then able to gain access to the strongroom when the time-lock released the door and escape before the alarm was raised.
  His nervous attitude communicated itself to the staff. Anyone who came into the bank in the period before the security van arrived received slow, careful service from staff who were ready to press the panic button at the slightest sign of danger.
  Unaware of the panic that they had caused at the bank, Haig and his companions headed next for the offices of Nigel's firm. They were shown straight into the senior partner's rooms. Robert Faraday had cleared his desk and he had been planning an early getaway.
  Nigel's father was in his middle sixties, grey and distinguished, and Haig's height. He had developed a slight stoop when standing in order to put his ears nearer to a confidential murmur from one of the midgets that made up the rest of the population.
  Years of practice in maintaining a poker face allowed him to take in his stride the invasion of his office by young women in light, summer dresses and a tale about one of them digging up a fortune while creating a winter herb garden. He sent one of the staff down to the basement to recover a wallet of documents while he studied a photocopy of the late James Fullerton's note. The brown cardboard wallet was two inches thick, tied with blue ribbon and enclosed in a self-sealing plastic bag to isolate it from a destructive environment. There was no rush of ancient dampness when Nigel's father opened the plastic bag. Haig felt vaguely cheated.
  The Faradays compared the note with samples of James Fullerton's hand from the period toward the end of his hectic life. Pondering the evidence, they pointed out particular characteristics in the writing and looked for matches. Eventually, the reached a decision.
  "Yes," said Robert Faraday, "while we can't claim to be expert graphologists, we'd say the note was written by Mr. Fullerton. Or an expert forger."
  "Well, if anyone tries to make any trouble, I can always get an expert to look at it," said Haig. "And I can have the paper and the ink checked, the way they did with the Hitler Diaries. I've just been reading the book about them."
  "Amazing what you can get away with when people want to believe you," nodded Nigel. "I hope you made a better job of this note than Konrad Kujau."
  "What about Colonel March, the coroner?" said his father. "I should think we have to phone him as a courtesy."
  "Already done," said Nigel. "Mr. Haig did it. It certainly made the Colonel's day. There's nothing he likes better than a good treasure trove. Oh, if you'll excuse me, he asked me to give him a call back a little later on, when he'd sorted something out." Nigel headed for the door.
  "Except that this doesn't look like a case of treasure trove to me," his father said to his retreating back. "Should we have some coffee?" he added to his guests.
  "If we're not keeping you from anything?" said Haig.
  "Nigel keeps telling me to slow down towards a graceful retirement," smiled Robert Faraday. "He can hardly complain if I spend the fag end of a Friday afternoon listening to a fascinating story from one of his clients." He used the office intercom to order coffee and biscuits for five. "You're the chap with the metal detector, yes?" he added to Haig.
  "A chap with a metal detector," Haig said.
  "But you didn't think to use it in your own garden?"
  "I've heard all the stories about old Fullerton's hidden loot but I never took them seriously. I just assumed the relatives would have found anything if there'd been anything to find. They went right through the tower from top to bottom, you know. From fall-out shelter to roof. It cost them a fortune to put the floorboards and the woodwork back properly when they came to sell the place."
  "So the young lady just happened to dig in the right spot?" There was a note of routine incredulity in the solicitor's voice, as if he was rehearsing a witness for cross-examination.
  "There was no happen about it," chuckled Haig. "Mikki spent ages working out where to put her herb garden."
  "It's a project for college," Mikki added. "Growing herbs under glass in winter with just enough heat to keep the frost away. I had to work out which spot got the most sunlight with the best shelter from the wind."
  "What she's saying was it was like winning the lottery with the wrong numbers," said Vanessa.
  One of the staff delivered a tray with cups of coffee, a jug of hot milk, brown sugar and a generous selection of plain and fancy biscuits. Nigel returned a few moments later, carrying his own cup and saucer.
  "Right," he announced. "Your bank manager is having the loot moved to Barnstaple, which offers better security. Colonel March will be over there on Monday morning for a look at it and the notes, with Jeremy's permission. And he'll probably want a look at where you found the loot, and the jugs and your video."
  "Nice day out for the old boy," remarked Haig. "I hope it keeps fine."
  "The Colonel agrees with the common opinion that the sovereigns aren't treasure trove, but he feels he'll probably have to have an inquest anyway to underline that ruling."
  "Yes, Paul does tend to make a meal out of a good treasure trove," smiled Robert Faraday.
  "Does he get many?" said Vanessa. "Good ones? Ours never turn him on. All he does, if he says stuff we find in the bay is treasure trove, is say we can have the cash value or keep it if the museums don't want it."
  "Of course, you're regular customers," nodded Robert Faraday. "The metal detectors. And probably the only ones in the area who report their findings."
  "Well, if you're honest about the little bits and pieces, no one expects you to be keeping quiet about decent finds," Haig remarked. "That was a joke, by the way," he added into a shocked silence.
  "Very nearly," grinned Vanessa.
  "Thinking back, I think the Colonel's had about four decent treasure troves since I qualified," said Nigel. "The last one was about four years ago. Someone was supposed to have found a cache of gold coins that came out of the sea after the Great Storm at the start of the seventeen hundreds, I think."
  "Twenty-seventh of November, seventeen oh three," said Vanessa. "Certain people talk about it so much, you'd think it was last week," she added defensively, embarrassed by showing off her knowledge.
  "If the last one was four years ago, I should think the Colonel feels entitled to make a meal of this one," said Haig. "On thing, are there likely to be any of old Fullerton's relatives still living in the area? I don't fancy having them hanging around, making a nuisance of themselves."
  "I doubt it," said Robert Faraday. "His people were from the Bristol area. He came here to get away from them. I should think they stayed long enough to search your lighthouse from top to bottom a couple of times then pushed off home to get a Bristol firm of solicitors to sell the place as a snub to us. I'd imagine Farne is too much of a backwater for them."
  "I bet they all come rushing back again when the news gets out," grinned Vanessa.

Mikki was installing the frame of her herb garden four days later when a car stopped at the tower. A stranger got out and leaned on the garden wall. Vanessa, carrying a coffee mug, appeared in the porch. She had seen the car approaching from the window at the kitchen door.
  "Lost something?" she remarked to the driver. "Or are you just a dirty old man?"
  "Hello, lovely." The man turned from contemplating Mikki in a pair of gardening shorts and put on a friendly smile. He was in his mid-twenties and a student of NYU, according to his tee-shirt. "This where you've got the gold mine?"
  "The what?" Vanessa said unhelpfully.
  "Well, the bucketful of gold coins you found the other day."
  "Who told you that silly story?"
  "An informed source. Five thousand, wasn't it?"
  "Who are you, anyway?" said Vanessa suspiciously.
  "Billy Gordon. From the Advertiser." The man offered an identity card, which showed a colour photograph of someone who looked vaguely like him and confirmed that the owner was an employee of the North Devon Advertiser.
  "How do you know your famous informed source wasn't having you on?" said Vanessa, unimpressed.
  "Come off it, lovely. There's only one lighthouse around here. Bought by a Mister Jeremy Haig on the proceeds of some Viking silver he found. How many gold coins was it you found?"
  "If I did find any gold coins, d'you think I'd tell a reporter about it for free?" scoffed Vanessa.
  "Papers don't pay for news stories," smiled Gordon.
  "What, you mean they're not paying you for coming here? You're doing it for free?"
  "Shall we start with your name? Miss Haig, is it? Or Mrs?"
  "I've got things to do. I can't waste my time talking to you."
  "Well, we can always wait for the inquest and get the story then."
  "All right, why don't you?" Vanessa challenged.
  "Wouldn't it be better for you just to tell me your story and get it out of the way? People are going to keep asking until you do."
  "They say that on telly, like it's a threat. But we don't have to say anything to these other people, either."
  Gordon gave her a long, level smile. "We might be able to pay for a picture."
  "Oh, well, we could let you take a picture of the exact spot where we found the coins for about fifty pounds."
  "Fifty quid? Have a heart, lovely."
  "Sixty quid. And it'll be seventy quid if you call me lovely again."
  "Have a heart, lov..." Gordon cut the word off short.
  "Or you could drive all the way back where you came from with nothing."
  "I don't think I've got sixty quid on me."
  "There are two banks in Farne village. Both with a cash machine. And a phone box so you can okay it with your editor. And if you don't want to buy the story, there's all these others you were talking about."
  "Don't go away," smiled the reporter. He hurried back to his car to turn it round.
  "No rush," Vanessa called after him. "Give us time to work out a good story for you."
  "You sod!" Mikki said, approaching the wall as the car drove away. "Fancy winding him up like that."
  Vanessa shrugged. "Like Jay says, people don't value something if they get it for nothing."
  "Does this photographing mean you want me to move my frame? And dig the hole out again?"
  "I don't think we'll have time." Vanessa grinned. "We'd better make sure we get the cash before we tell him you filled the hole in. And I'd better tell Jay what's going on."
  Mikki returned to the task of bolting together the sides of her small greenhouse and bedding them into the soil. Haig had been over the rest of the garden with his metal detector without finding anything of value. Colonel Paul March, an energetic, rounded, former Guards officer with a bushy moustache, had inspected her excavation the day before and given Mikki permission to go on with her project; which she had intended to do anyway.
  Ten minutes later, Billy Gordon divided a dozen crisp £5 notes between the girls and signed a document giving them fifty per cent of the proceeds of the sale of his pictures to other news organs. Then they let him photograph them kneeling inside Mikki's frame, each holding one of the jugs in which the sovereigns had been buried.
  They were wearing jeans and ‘lighthouse' tee-shirts. Vanessa had put on her tour-guide cap. Haig's official portrait showed him sitting at his workbench, surrounded by seven whole jugs and examining the fragments of the eighth. An unofficial picture captured Biffo sniffing suspiciously at one of the pieces.
  Gordon was disappointed to find that the only sovereign in the place was the one that Vanessa was wearing as a necklace. When putting together a story to go with his pictures, he accepted without comment the news that Mikki was a student and a paying guest, and Vanessa was Haig's tour guide and marketing assistant. The arrival of a party of visitors put an end to the interview.

All three pictures were featured in the Advertiser when it arrived in Farne on Wednesday morning. A steady stream of locals decided to take a half-mile stroll out to Holland Point during the morning. That walk gave them two opportunities to try to look over the tower's garden wall in passing. Vanessa had to recruit Haig as an assistant tour guide to cope with the demand when the tourists started arriving. Inevitably, they wanted to hear all about the great gold strike.
  The girls had been outraged by Haig's lack of excitement after Mikki's find. He had found it difficult to explain that there was none of the thrill of the chase in an accident. His first big strike had been the product of careful research and systematic exploration. Like Hannibal Smith of the A Team, a group of Vanessa's favourite people-cartoons, he had been able to enjoy the satisfaction of seeing a good plan come together.
  By the Monday after their big strike, the girls had become impatient to get their hands on some of the money so that they could dash out and spend it. They were also full of frustration because Haig's experience promised a long drawn-out legal process between discovery and payment.
  Haig had taken pity on them and given them an advance of £250 each as mad money to calm down an overheated domestic atmosphere. Vanessa had blown most of her advance on a shopping spree on Tuesday, which had included an order for a further supply of tee-shirts and ‘lighthouse' postcards. Mikki had put £50 of her advance in her savings account for emergencies before spending the rest, mainly on clothes and books.
  By the middle of the week after the discovery, the girls had become as blasé as Haig about their expected wealth; and as resigned to a long wait before they saw any more of it. Tourists provided them with an opportunity to make some money immediately. Once people were inside the tower, they were exposed to the temptation to buy additional postcards, tee-shirts and Mikki's drinks and snacks.
  A silly-season lack of news put the story and one or more of the pictures in the national newspapers on Wednesday or Thursday and the Sundays found space for it too. Haig noticed a familiar pattern developing in Farne. Some people made a point of saying hello to him and hanging around near him in the pub, hoping to be treated. Others were reluctant to be seen talking to Haig and the girls in case they were thought to be scroungers. A third category, which had not applied after Haig's first find, was the admirers, who tried to get to know Mikki and Vanessa, hoping for the second prize of a one-night stand if they failed to achieve the first prize of getting their hands on some of the money.
  Frequent repetition, in a suitably bored tone, allowed Haig and the girls to drive home the message that the coins were locked away in a bank vault and that they were a long way from receiving the law's blessing and a chance to sell them. This information had been included in the story in the local weekly paper but not in the national dailies or the Sunday papers.
  The initial burst of publicity was over by Monday. The story was old news, replaced by fresher silly-season trivia, and Devon was a bit far to send a London-based journalist. A steady downpour was keeping all but the most persistent tourists away from the coast, but channelling those who braved the rain to indoor attractions, like Farne Lighthouse.
  The ‘public' rooms of the tower had been extraordinarily tidy for some time. All small items had been locked away to spare larcenous visitors the temptation to walk off with an free souvenir and the display cabinets were carefully locked too at the start of every working day.
  The tide had been going out for two hours when Haig and his black van took the road to the south in the middle of the morning, leaving Vanessa and Mikki in joint charge of a party of middle-aged Austrians. He had arranged to meet his sister at eleven o'clock at a small airfield to the east of Barnstaple. He had cast doubt on the wisdom of flying in a light aircraft in such murky weather, but Pru had seemed confident enough of her pilot's bad-weather skills.
  Five minutes late, a twin-engined Cessna dropped out of the overcast, took a look at the airfield and then touched down on wet grass. Haig drove out to meet it on ground that felt remarkably firm despite a good soaking. He took Pru and her luggage aboard through the back doors at high speed, helped by a friend of the pilot's, who was expecting a lift into town. Haig dropped the passenger at the post office on Cross Street and turned toward North Road.
  "Well, how the hell are you, Prune?" Haig asked when they had shed the inhibiting presence of a stranger.
  "Absolutely cream crackered, Jezzer!" Prunella sagged dramatically against the restraint of her seat belt. She was tall, her hair was the same shade of blonde as her brother's and her height made her look on the skinny side. "I've got a good mind to retire and come and live with you. Now you can afford it."
  "All the dashing about getting too much for you?" grinned Haig. He was used to seeing his twin arrive worn out, recover through a holiday and then leap off to another exhausting job.
  "The older one gets, the more one tends to miss home comforts. It's all very well roughing it in your twenties, but it tends to lose its novelty after a while."
  "How did you like the home comforts of Edinburgh?"
  "I don't know how Dot and Eric stay sane with three teenage kids leaping around. The noise level can be quite punishing, for a start. Mum and Dad sent their love, by the way. And a ration of parental disapproval for getting yourself in the Sunday papers. Someone was kind enough to pass on a copy of the News of the Screws, I gather."
  "Yes, I had some of that by phone on Sunday evening. You'd think they'd done a dirty vicar story about me."
  "I don't think any of their friends mentioned it," chuckled Pru, "but it must be terribly embarrassing to have their middle-aged son living in sin with two nubile, twenty-year-old girls. Eric's mates in the pub seemed quite envious last night."
  "I'm only living in sin with one of them; and as they're both over eighteen and have minds of their own, so what?"
  "I'm surprised some of the papers didn't concentrate more on that aspect of the story, instead of just on how you found your crock of gold. I felt quite let down."
  "I see you've brought enough luggage with you." Haig glanced over his shoulder for a moment. "It's a wonder your plane was able to take off."
  Pru had brought three suitcases, a tackle bag and a rucksack in addition to two carrier bags. "I brought you a bottle of Finnish fire-water," she smiled. "And a present."
  "I wonder what?" laughed her brother.
  Previous presents had included the complete Sherlock Holmes stories in Czech, the complete works of Shakespeare in Russian, a book of Welsh poetry in Welsh, the works of Robert Burns in Gaelic and an Arthur C. Clarke novel in Japanese. In revenge, Haig's last birthday present to his sister had been a Georgian snuffbox full of Polyfilla.
  "A very interesting book on the polar voyages of Roald Amundsen. In the original Norwegian, of course."
  "No home should be without one. I hope it's got a few pictures in it."
  "Is this the best your weather can do?" Pru frowned at the raindrops that were keeping the windscreen wipers busy.
  "Well, it is the British summer, Madame."
  "Oh, yes. I forgot. Okay if I have a smoke?"
  "Yes, if you open your window to let the noxious fumes out. This rain isn't supposed to last. The weatherman swore on the head of his unknown father it'll brighten up this evening."
  "Good! I'm planning to spend a lot of time in a deck chair, doing nothing at all."
  "In a bikini with white sun-screen on your nose, to give the tourists a lot of bleached flesh to stare at?"
  "Oh, sod! I'd forgotten you're a stately home. Are you getting much in the way of trade?"
  "We were rushed off our feet when the story came out. We had a queue going half way back to Farne village on Saturday afternoon. Putting the price of the tour up to three quid didn't seem to deter them."
  "Capitalist!" laughed Pru.
  "Don't blame me. That's down to the official tour guide and her partner-in-crime. Still, I suppose it'll calm down to the usual level now all those papers have become chip-wrappings. Not that the girls are complaining. They're starting to accept it'll take a good while for the law to take its course on the sovereigns, so they're quite happy to take a small fortune off tourists in the meantime."
  "How many punters are you getting?"
  "We had five hundred through the place last Thursday."
  "Bloody hell!" gasped Pru. "They must have worn your stair-carpets out."
  "It got Van out of bed in the morning for once. Nothing motivates young persons like the prospect of making some money; as we've known since our paper-round days."
  "Getting any begging letters?"
  "We got the first one by first-class post on Thursday; the day after the story was in the local paper and some of the nationals. And we actually got one by air mail from southern Spain this morning."
  "What, the Italians are a bit slow this time?"
  "Yes, there were the first off the mark after the big find in Yorkshire, weren't they?."
  "I suppose you're also getting all sorts of business opportunities and chances to buy things at very reasonable prices?"
  "Yep. The girls are finding the junk mail highly amusing."
  "I bet you're glad you kept your phone number ex-directory."
  "Too right!"