Haig and his party returned to the tower. They had two hours to fill. A salad lunch for seven was waiting in the fridge. The group ate their meal in the dining room as the kitchen was likely to feel overcrowded.
  "Well, how does the expert think it's going?" Pru asked Nigel Faraday.
  The solicitor took a swallow of white wine, then frowned thoughtfully. "There's a conspiracy in the making. Between Jay and Mikki. They seem to have excluded Vanessa to keep things simpler."
  "What sort of conspiracy?" said Mikki.
  "Don't take this personally, but they were trying to create the impression that you're a foreigner and therefore naïve, unused to our British customs and language, and possibly untrustworthy."
  "Who's a foreigner?" protested Mikki.
  "Anyone with a foreign name," said Nigel.
  "Anyone whose family hasn't lived here for ninety years," added Haig. "We're all foreigners here. Except Nigel."
  "So what's the conspiracy?" said Pru.
  "Their line is: Jay found the sovereigns, either in the lighthouse or in the garden, and he buried or reburied them in the garden. Mikki either dug her trench where he told her to or Jay manipulated her into digging in that spot."
  "This is all very diabolical," grinned Pru. "It doesn't sound much like the brother I know."
  "Yes, but the point is, the jury don't know him," said Nigel.
  "How come I'm not in on this conspiracy?" said Vanessa.
  "Because you weren't there when the first sovereigns were found. That's another possible alternative. Jay and Mikki could have buried them just before they called you to the scene as a witness, and then dug them out again just for your benefit. Thus giving the conspirators a completely genuine witness."
  "I can't wait to get back to hear what else they're going to dream up," laughed Pru. "Assuming you're right, Nigel."
  "I think it would be a good idea to put Mikki back in the witness box briefly to show her passport to prove that her nationality's British," said Nigel. "Apologizing to Mr. Valnik for the xenophobia. Come to think of it, I suppose you have dual nationality?"
  "Yes, she does," said Mikki's father.
  "I don't know if you happen to have your birth certificate handy?" added Nigel.
  "Yes, I've got it upstairs," said Mikki. "I needed it for college."
  "In that case, you can show that, too. And prove you were born; where was it?"
  "Thetford, in Norfolk," said Milos Valnik. "At about three o'clock in the morning, as I remember."
  "Good!" said Nigel. "All this has nothing much to do with finding the sovereigns, but I think it's important not to let the other side get away with spreading disinformation and false impressions of people."
  "So what would it matter if Mikki wasn't British?" frowned Vanessa.
  "It would be possible to suggest that she might be here illegally, perhaps by overstaying a holiday visa. Which would lay her open to blackmail by Jay."
  "Oh, sure!" scoffed Vanessa.
  "All right, it may sound daft to you," smiled Nigel. "But people will believe the strangest things if it suits them, and it may just throw some doubt into the minds of the jury about how trustworthy the three of you are."
  "One thing that puzzles me," said Milos Valnik, "is why it matters if Jeremy found the coins in his garden with his metal detector. If he had, surely he would have just dug them up and told the coroner, as he did when Mikki found them."
  "One purpose of going down that road is to attack Jay's credibility," said Nigel. "Given all the stories of hidden treasure around here, and his past experiences and successes with his metal detector, even I find it a bit hard to believe that he didn't give his own garden a quick once-over. It seems the sort of thing you'd expect him to do before the ink on the purchase contract was dry."
  "I have an idea there's an excellent idea why I didn't, but I can't remember it," said Haig.
  "It would help your case along if you could," said Nigel.
  "Even so; so what if he had been using his metal detector in the garden, or in here?" said Pru.
  "We're into more conspiracy theories," said Nigel. "What if Jay found the sovereigns in the house, just the sovereigns and no note, and forged the note to make sure they went to him rather than be considered part of James Fullerton's estate? What if Jay found the sovereigns somewhere else, totally unconnected with this place and James Fullerton, but he staged the find in his own garden to give himself a claim on them?"
  "Do you write detective stories, Nigel?" scoffed Pru.
  "No, but I read them," smiled the solicitor. "And I'm willing to bet the other side make a determined effort to prove that note from James Fullerton is a forgery. So that they can trot out a theory similar to the ones I've just suggested."
  "If it was me," remarked Andrew, "and I'd found five thousand sovereigns, I'd stash them somewhere and pretend to find them in the bay about twenty at a time. Gold isn't going to lose its value, so you're just giving up a bit of interest so you don't have all this messing about."
  "You can tell his dad's an accountant," laughed Haig. "Maybe we should have done just that."
  "What, and do us out of all this fun?" said Pru. "I can't wait to hear what the Colonel's handwriting expert has to say. He's supposed to be a bit of a character."

When the inquest resumed, Mikki went back into the witness box to show off her birth certificate and British passport, hoping to clear up any doubts as to her command of English, her right to be in the country and her integrity. Then the experts took over.
  Professor Morgan-Jones of Cardiff University had enjoyed a good free lunch and he was in the mood to describe his experiments in great detail. Consulting an A4-size laboratory notebook, he explained the tests that he had performed on the pieces of paper from the earthenware jugs. He had examined the structure of the paper and the chemical composition of the ink, and he had compared his results with those obtained from reference samples from the archives of Hawksworth, Faraday and Faraday, solicitors.
  The notes with the sovereigns came from the same stock as letters written to James Fullerton's solicitors. So did the ink. Continuity of the watermark showed that three of the pieces of paper came from the same sheet of foolscap-size paper. The professor suggested that the sheet had been folded in half and divided with a paper-knife rather than scissors. One half had been used for the letter and the other half had been folded and cut with the paper-knife to yield eight more pieces of paper, seven of which had been used to number jugs one to seven while the last one had been discarded.
  Computer analysis of the writing of the note in jug eight matched documented samples of James Fullerton's hand and, in conjunction with other evidence, proved that the note was genuine to within a vanishingly small probability.
  The Fullertons, Castles and Moorheads had their own experts, who did their best to introduce an element of doubt into Professor Morgan-Jones' results. He demolished their objections confidently and cheerfully, and shamed two of them into admitting that their reservations were trivial.
  Arthur Catesby, the solicitor for the Castle family, had brought as his expert on forged documents, a serious-faced, greying professor in her late forties. Dr. Arcady offered alternatives to some of Professor Morgan-Jones' conclusions and managed to introduce some possibilities into the debate, but she lacked his academic pedigree and she seemed to be arguing about small details rather than the whole.
  In the end, Professor Morgan-Jones won the day. He had a compelling presence and he could project the image of someone who was sure of his ground. Despite attempts to lead him beyond his results, he remained securely in known territory and chided his interrogators gently when they tried to lead him astray.
  Colonel March called a halt to the proceedings when each side had established its position on the issue of the notes. It had been a long day subjectively but surprisingly short in terms of the number of hours spent in Fullerton Hall actually doing something. The two-hour break for lunch had accounted for about one-third of the day's agenda. As they headed back to the tower for another conference, Haig and his party felt that they were winning but that victory could still slip away if the jury gave an eccentric verdict.

Barry Fantony spent the afternoon making notes on the tests conducted by Professor Morgan-Jones and Dr. Arcady's descriptions of how to make modern documents look old. His wife had given up after the morning session. She found the whole business of arguing backward and forward about the same detail utterly boring. On a bright, sunny, windless, early September day, with the temperature in the high sixties, Jean Fantony spent the afternoon lounging on the beach, topping up her tan and just enjoying doing nothing.
  Low tide came at three minutes past seven the next morning. It was too early for Jean to crawl out of bed, but Barry spent an hour in the great empty plain of Farnescombe Bay with his metal detector. He was approached half a dozen times by reporters, all eager for an interview with Jeremy Haig. Each of them had asked how he felt about the accusations of fraud before they had realized that a pale Londoner in his mid-twenties was smaller and younger than the central figure at the inquest.
  After breakfast, Jean caught a bus to Flynton for a look at the shops. Barry had an easier time finding a seat at the inquest than on the day before. A lot of people had been disappointed by that first day. They had not known quite what to expect, but they had been hoping for dramatic confrontations and witnesses breaking down under the thrust of skilled cross-examination. Colonel March had kept the proceedings too cosy and too much under control for an exciting courtroom drama to develop.
  The inquest resumed with more expert testimony. One of Professor Morgan-Jones' colleagues had carried out tests on the jugs in which the sovereigns were alleged to have been found. A thin, slightly nervous physicist with a brand-new doctorate baffled the jury with information on the ratio of radioactive to non-radioactive isotopes of carbon in the wax used to seal the jugs. His conclusion was that wax was of the right age.
  The solicitors for James Fullerton's descendants attempted to baffle the jury further with questions about the limits of error in Dr. Barrymore's measurements. They had been unable to find an expert of their own who could prove that the wax had been made within the last couple of years, but they did suggest that Haig could have sealed the jugs with old wax.
  Yet another expert, one commissioned by Nigel Faraday, offered more experimental evidence to prove that the wax had not been molten for over a century. The solicitors for the other side sniped at that evidence too, continuing their process of creating doubt.
  Oliver Fullerton, the oldest of the present Fullertons, took the witness box next to provide some background information. He sketched his ancestor's life in the Californian gold fields, his return in triumph to England with great wealth and his luxurious lifestyle to the end of his days. Oliver's point was that there could be no doubt that the sovereigns had been hidden by James Fullerton because he had been both wealthy enough and eccentric enough to keep a large amount of cash handy.
  Next came the various conspiracy theories. The Fullerton descendants attempted to argue that the sovereigns had been kept in the tower to cover unexpected expenses and that the amount was entirely reasonable for someone who lived lavishly. They had been James Fullerton's property, which denied the suggestion that Haig had found them elsewhere, they should have been part of James Fullerton's estate and they were now the property of his lawful heirs.
  The opposition wanted the note to be a forgery, but if it was genuine, they wanted it to apply only to jar eight. Their fall-back position from a genuine note was that the other seven jars contained sovereigns that Haig had found during a search of the tower, and which he had attempted to include with the jar containing the note.
  Even if Mikki was as English as anyone else present, she was involved up to her pretty neck in Haig's plot. Either jars one to seven, or all of them, belonged to James Fullerton's estate because they had been hidden in the house as a reserve fund against sudden expenditure. Haig's lack of reaction to the find was clearly proof positive that the discovery of the sovereigns had not been a surprise. Mikki's excitement was understandable. Any twenty-year-old would be wildly overjoyed by the prospect of sharing a small fortune, even if she had helped to bury it.
  In reply, Nigel Faraday produced Haig's records to prove that James Fullerton's relatives had inflicted major damage on the tower in their search for hidden treasure and that it was highly unlikely that eight jugs of sovereigns would have escaped their attention. Haig had also remembered why he had not searched his garden with the metal detector.
  He had rediscovered an album of photographs, which showed the tower throughout its life from construction until about five years before he had bought it. The garden and its wall had not existed until after 1934. The earlier photographs, including those that showed the original ‘conservatory' at the top of the tower, included a cobbled yard where the garden had been.
  The yard had a wooden fence and it had been used as a parking place for carriages and then motor vehicles. Sometime between 1934 and 1936, the current owner of the tower had decided to remove the cobbles, build an enclosing wall and a lay out a garden. A section of that wall had formed part of the garage when it had been built in 1940.
  Nigel argued that Haig had found the photograph album while looking over his new property and that he had concluded that he would find nothing more exciting than the odd modern coin if he searched the garden with his metal detector, certainly nothing worth the effort. Similarly, in view of the thorough search of the building after James Fullerton's death, it was unreasonable to think that the sovereigns had been found inside the tower.
  No, Nigel insisted, the sovereigns had been found by chance, exactly as his clients had described. Further, his clients had behaved honestly and responsibly after the discovery. Any suggestions that they had behaved otherwise were totally unfounded and completely disgraceful.
  After another two-hour lunch break, Colonel March brought the proceedings to a reluctant conclusion with his summing up to the jury. The verdict came as no surprise to the residents of Farne but it set the Fullertons, Castles and Moorheads muttering about appeals. The sovereigns were not treasure trove. They belonged to the finders under the terms imposed by James Fullerton in his note.

The media pack descended on the victors. Haig had warned his group not to be too free with journalists in case they felt free to ask all sorts of impertinent questions. Haig and the others met their interrogators with polite reserve and refused to answer cliché questions like, ‘How do you feel?' Eventually, they managed to get away. Back at the tower, Mikki and Vanessa opened the bottles of champagne in the fridge door. Nigel had to assure Pru that his legal meter was switched off before she would let him have a glass. Predictably, Andrew was the first to be ready for a refill.
  "Are we rich yet?" said Vanessa. "Or are we going to have to wait for an appeal?"
  "As I said, my legal meter's switched off." Nigel grinned in response to Pru's scowl. "No, I think that was just reflex sour grapes. The stakes are very high, but it would be very expensive to challenge today's verdict and it could be financially disastrous if they failed again and had to pay your costs, too. I expect their respective solicitors will tell them they've made a brave try but it's not worth going on."
  "In case anyone's wondering," said Haig, "we've decided to divide the sovereigns into eight shares, because there were eight jugs. All expenses, including solicitors, come off the top. Then it's two shares each for Mikki, Van and myself and one each for my sisters, Dot and Pru."
  The girls had frowned a little over Haig's plan, but he had asked them if they were ashamed of being so greedy and if they really deserved an even larger share of loot that had been found by accident on his property. After an extended period of discussion, they had agreed that original split was fair.
  "And, of course, bearing in mind the terms stated in Mr. Fullerton's note, it all has to be spent on the upkeep of Fullerton's Folly," Haig added.
  "Like hell!" scoffed Vanessa. "A bloke gave me his card on the way out of the inquest. He's a bullion dealer from London. He'll give us sixty quid each for any number of sovereigns."
  "The price I got out of the Financial Times is seventy-three pounds fifty for new sovereigns," said Mikki. "I suppose that's excluding VAT."
  "The twisting sod!" Vanessa took the card out of her pocket, ripped it into eighths and sprinkled them onto the table.
  "The price you get depends on how much of a hurry you are to unload them," said Haig. "You'll have to give some sort of a discount for a bulk sale, but not as much as Van's friend wants. Although antique sovereigns ought to be able to command a premium for their scarcity value. You'll get the most out of them if you sell them individually, either to visitors coming here or through Kitty Bishop at the Seadog."
  "And give her a commission," said Vanessa.
  "Which is the price of unloading more of them faster," said Haig.
  "I like the idea of selling them here,"said Vanessa. "We can have some cards made with plastic bubbles. Like the ones for the two-pound coins for the Manchester Commonwealth Games. And we can have them numbered as well. A special limited edition. The Farne Lighthouse Treasure. We can sell something like that for more than the sovereigns are worth. A hundred quid a time."
  "You can add my jug to the treasure," said Pru. "And I'll put the loot into my pension plan for when I really retire. I'll only get lazy if I can get my hands on it now. And there's a lot more good work in me yet."
  "Sounds like someone's got herself another job," said Haig. "After running up a huge phone bill."
  "I'm off to Holland at the end of the month," said Pru. "To join a year-long study of the land they recovered from the North Sea behind the West Scheld flood barrage. How the wildlife's established itself over thirty-odd years. The contract arrived this morning."
  "Guess who'll be getting a Rembrandt teapot without a spout for Christmas," said Haig.
  "A car," said Mikki thoughtfully. "I could get a Metro or something for going to college. And I'll need a car for after I graduate."
  "Make sure you haven't spent your share before then," warned her father.
  "Hey, that's what money's for," grinned Vanessa. "I think I'll get a Roller. A gold one."
  "And some driving lessons?" said Haig.
  "No, I'll just get a chauffeur," said Vanessa.
  Andrew filled his glass again with champagne while no one was watching him, wondering how generous his mother would be when a one-eighth share of the sovereigns reached Edinburgh.

His third morning on the beach involved even less of an early start, Barry Fantony was pleased to find. Low tide was at seven-thirty and Jean decided to join him on their last day at Farne. As he reached Farne Rock, Barry was pleased to see that Jeremy Haig, filthy rich or not, had resumed his prospecting. Out of courtesy, Barry decided not to interrupt Haig. He just waved a greeting and carried on exploring with his metal detector in an area well away from where Haig was working.
  "The tide's coming in," Jean warned eventually.
  "Head for the rocks, then," Barry said. "Over there."
  "Isn't that the long way round?" Jean protested.
  "If you try and get to the beach before the tide, you'll end up getting a soaking," Barry warned. "Come on."
  Reaching the shelf of rock along the eastern side of the bay involved heading right through Haig's search area. To Barry's delight, Haig picked up his bucket and fell in step with them.
  "How are you getting on?" he asked.
  "I've found lots of bits of silver paper and junk like that," said Barry. "I'm starting to see why people buy the more expensive detectors that can filter out things like aluminium and iron minerals in the ground."
  "It certainly saves a lot of time if you're doing a lot of it," nodded Haig.
  "We also had a look in on the inquest. It's amazing how cheeky some people are, coming crawling out of the woodwork to grab something, even though they didn't have anything to do with finding it. Did they offer you a split if you let them have the coins as part of that bloke's estate?"
  "We thought they might, but they must have been too sure of winning."
  "No problems like that with the Viking loot you found."
  "You don't know the half of it," laughed Haig. "We had academics from all over the place scheming to get their hands on the helmets and the swords and the pieces of clothing."
  "I thought they only had inquests on gold and silver?" said Jean.
  "That used to be the law of treasure trove," said Haig. "It used to apply just to gold or silver coins, bullion or plate that were buried or hidden some other way. As long as the owner intended to recover them, and the current owner couldn't be traced, anything found belonged to the Crown."
  "But some people get to keep things they find," said Jean.
  "Yes, but they're always lost property and things that the owner buried with no intention of digging them up again, like the Sutton Hoo treasure. Which was grave goods."
  "I read somewhere that would have been treasure trove in Scotland," said Barry. "Because they include articles buried with the dead."
  "True enough," nodded Haig. "And the original law also excluded archaeologically significant coins of base metals, helmets of iron and bronze, and so on. But all that changed in the Seventies, when metal detectors became affordable and popular. People were finding things after trespassing on other people's property; and upsetting the archaeologists by taking things out of their proper context. If a trespasser finds articles buried on somebody's land, they belong to the landowner. But there had to be a court case to establish the same applies to things found on the surface; such as coins and so on brought to the surface by ploughing."
  "Which is why you did the deal with the farmer before you looked for that ford," said Barry.
  "Exactly," nodded Haig. "You're in a much stronger position if you find something when you have a legally binding document in your pocket."
  "I was reading about the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act the other day" said Barry. "Which makes it an offence to use a metal detector without written permission in thousands and thousands of what they've called ‘areas of archaeological importance'; or on the site of any national monument like castles, cave systems, burial mounds, and the centres of historic towns like Exeter and York."
  "That seems a bit daft to me when they're all built up," remarked Jean.
  "It's all part of the creeping plan to stop anyone doing anything anywhere without written permission from some bureaucrat," grinned Haig.
  "But you don't need permission to look here, in the bay?"
  "Not yet. Find anything interesting?"
  "You tell me," grinned Barry.
  When the three had climbed up onto the shelf of rock, out of reach of the advancing tide, Barry dug into his carrier bag and brought out a blackened lump.
  "I see what you mean," nodded Haig. "The only way to find out what that is would to be to chip away at it with a dental pick to get rid of the encrustation."
  "And these." Barry produced several coins, none more than fifty years old, and more pieces of fairly shapeless metal.
  "There have been quite a few shipwrecks around here," said Haig. "There are quite a few interesting things, like navigational instruments, cutlery and so on around. And a lot of junk or fragments. This is the best thing I found."
  Barry looked at a scabby, black lump, then shrugged. "I suppose it's something valuable but I can't see it myself."
  "Me neither," added Jean.
  "These are probably pieces of eight stuck together," Haig explained. "The ones on the inside usually clean up nicely."
  "What, from the Spanish Main? That ship that went down in the fifteen sixties?"
  "Who can tell."
  "It looks like something I'd chuck away," said Barry.
  "Most of the silver you get out of the sea tends to be pretty unrecognizable. Unless it's been buried where it can't corrode and then thrown up by a storm tide."
  "I'll remember that. Do you ever have a look in the caves down the coast from the bay? Behind that beach."
  "Occasionally. But I'm more interested in the theory of tide circulation in the bay. I figure if I can tie down this area, I can go on to others without a lot of messing about."
  "Talking about silver, you know that clip silver you found in Yorkshire. I was going to ask you, was anyone able to put the bits back together to make the thing they'd cut up?"
  "People have tried it but it tends to be a long, involved job. I don't think they got too far with the stuff I found. But, come to think of it, there's more of that sort of thing going on now. Mainly by computer, using advanced imaging techniques to feed the shapes in and the sort of number-crunching power you can get with a Pentium or better. There are people trying to write programs to match up bits and reconstruct items. Some of them using neural-computing type network processes. The most difficult bit of the programming tends to be allowing for the distortion of the cutting process and subsequent rough handling, and fitting missing bits into the gaps."
  "Are there any books about it I could look at?"
  "I think it's mainly just papers in archaeological journals. The whole thing's a bit contentious at the moment. You get people saying they've reconstructed something and other experts saying it's just their imagination. Which could be just sour grapes because they're not clever enough to do it. If you have a computer and a modem, you could try the Internet. There's bound to be people with an interest in the subject eager to bore you to death with what they know. You might find that a lot more digestible than the journals, where the object is to impress you with how clever the people are and how good they are at computer programming. The actual reconstructions tend to be a bit of an afterthought."
  "I might try that, the Internet."
  "Does the landlady at the pub on the hill make necklaces out of pieces of eight?" said Jean.
  "She'll make a necklace out of anything people will buy."
  "I think I'll buy one and take the chain off and tell my brother I found it out here," said Barry. "He reckons all this is a waste of time."
  "You get some exercise out of it, if nothing else," said Haig. "I could sell you one I've cleaned up, if you like."
  "On the QT?" grinned Barry.
  "No, quite legally. I just take them to Colonel March, the coroner, tell him where I found them and he rules they're lost property, not treasure trove, and gives them back to me. It's all a total waste of everyone's time, but you know what fascist bastards our petty officials are. See a rule and enforce it mindlessly, is the way they work."
  "So you've covered yourself?"
  "Something like that," nodded Haig.
  "Well, whatever, I wish I had your luck."
  "That's point about luck; there's no rationing system for it. Although I'm sure the Labour Looneys would love to establish people have a Right To Luck along with all their other spurious rights. Or the Tory Looneys might try and write it into one of their charters. But when people go on about it being unfair for one person to have so much luck, what they forget is luck didn't come into the stuff I found in Yorkshire. That was the product of two years' work. I didn't happen to find those things because I was lucky enough to be in the right spot with a metal detector. I worked out where to look and explored the area systematically."
  "Okay, but the sovereigns were luck, though."
  "Right. As Vanessa said, it was like winning the lottery with the wrong set of numbers. But we're only talking about a third of a million quid, or so. People win lots more than that on the lottery every week. And Mikki had sound reasons for digging up the garden in that particular spot."
  "So to be fair, it's her luck, not yours?"
  "I suppose you're right," nodded Haig. "Nobody else seems to have thought of that. But you're right. I'm not a lucky bastard after all. Well, well!"
  "Hope you can live with it," grinned Barry. "I reckon I'll have me a couple of pieces of eight as souvenirs. After the bank opens and I've hit it for some cash." He assumed that Haig would prefer the money rather than a large cheque from a stranger.