The Fantonys decided to stay in Farne until Sunday and take their time about driving home to Roehampton. Barry drove over to his brother's home in the evening, leaving Jean busy arranging her new china souvenirs and some shells from Farne. Michael took his brother into his study and listened to Barry's idea with a thoughtful expression. Then he put on a frown.
  "I'm not happy about this idea of using the Internet, Baz. It could leave a trail. One minute we're asking for information about the sort of thing Vikings nicked, the next minute we're finding it."
  "Oh! Soon as that?" mocked Barry.
  "You know what I mean, Baz."
  "We could make a fortune out of some good plates and bowls and stuff."
  "If you're prepared to wait until Pete can make them."
  "Shit!" said Barry.
  "Although there might be something in your idea. If we can look at magazines in libraries with pictures of what the things should look like, that might help Pete to get the bits to look right enough to fool an expert."
  "Talking about libraries, I had a scout in the one at Farne. When the bugger was open. Did you know two big Spanish ships sank there? And if you get a really big storm with lots of powerful waves, it churns up the sea bed and washes coins ashore. After the storm tide, this book said, ‘the beach will be carpeted with gold.' Except the carpet will be wearing a bit thin by now."
  "Really?"
  "Yeah, there's a local saying," Barry put on a bad West Country accent. "After a good blow, the sea will give up its harvest – bones or gold."
  "All very interesting, but we're trying to unload silver."
  "Talking of silver." Barry tossed four silver discs in plastic wallets onto Michael's desk. "Those are your actual pieces of eight. They call them that because they've got these grooves on them, dividing them up. So you can use a chisel to cut them in half to make two pieces of four and so on."
  "Oh, yes. I can see that."
  "There were lots of those on these Spanish ships."
  "Ah!" said Michael. "And you're thinking of making some and finding them with your metal detector?"
  "This bloke Haig finds them all the time."
  "And knocks them out to tourists on the QT?"
  "No, he turns them over to the coroner. Then this Colonel bloke says they're lost property and gives them back to him."
  "Simple as that?"
  "He has to wait a bit, but he gets them in the end. Legally his. So I was thinking, you know that idea you had of people finding things in caves? Why don't we get Pete to knock out some of these and say we found them in a cave?."
  "We still have the problem of what they were in, Baz."
  "Yeah, but we don't need to say they've been hidden for a thousand years. They could have come out of the sea in the last couple of hundred years. What if someone cleaned them up and stashed them, but he never came back for them? And there's no bloody hallmarks on them. Shit!" Barry ground to a halt.
  "What?" said Michael.
  "That bloke Haig was telling me about treasure trove. If someone stashes something but doesn't come back for it, that makes it treasure trove and the Queen gets it."
  "I see what you mean. I don't think Her Majesty needs any pieces of eight from us, Baz."
  "Shit! And it looked so easy. Just make a mould off these and cast some more like them. And as for what they were in, you just say it was an old box that you didn't keep. Or it got swept away by the tide. Because all you were interested in was the coins, not what they were in."
  Michael picked up one of the coins and examined it closely. Its battered condition made it look decidedly second hand and easy to reproduce. "I think there's a germ of an idea in there somewhere, Baz. We just have to think about it a bit more. Can you leave these with me?"
  "Two of them. I got one each, me and Jean, and you and Beryl."
  After his brother had gone, Michael put on a disposable plastic glove, took the piece of eight out of its wallet and examined it with the magnifying glass from his desk drawer. His idea had started to develop. Barry might just have come up with a way of keeping himself busy, of converting some of the silver to cash and getting himself off Michael's neck while Michael completed work on their find of ‘Viking' snip silver.
  What he needed to do was wait until there was a violent storm then send Barry off to some isolated beach and let him pretend to find his own shower of silver from the sea. It was a pity that they had not stolen gold bullion, which, weight for weight, was seventy-one times more valuable than silver at the current price. But converting silver into cash would take up more of Barry's time. And the beauty of the idea was that it was Barry's. Any delays, such as waiting for the storm, would be his ‘fault', not his brother's, because they were following Barry's plan.

Having thought about it over the weekend, Michael Fantony was coming to believe that it would be a lot better to have gold rather than silver. Gold, he knew from consulting an encyclopaedia CD on his computer, is a pretty unreactive metal and resistant to acids and alkalis in soil and the effects of sea-water. Finding articles made of a metal that is less liable to corrosion involves less messing about when the ‘finder' pretends that he has cleaned it up.
  A discovery of gold coins or jewellery, assuming the metal was fairly pure, would look pretty much in original condition. There would be none of the unidentifiable, blackened lumps that Barry had described when talking about pieces of eight straight from the sea. Any discovery of silver would have to include badly corroded and possibly damaged pieces, which would involve a lot of faking, which would leave the fakers more open to exposure by an expert.
  The main problem, Michael felt, was the size of the find. Barry wanted something big and impressive that would yield a large lump sum. His brother was convinced that a gradual approach would give them fewer problems. Pretending to find perhaps fifty or even one hundred antique Spanish coins on a beach after a violent storm seemed a more sensible way of going about things than pretending to find a couple of thousand coins and a large haul of eighth or ninth century hack silver.
  Michael took his problem to Peter Wells' workshop on the Monday after the inquest in Farne. He found the silversmith at his lathe, on which were spinning a wooden former and a disc of silver. Wells was using a blunt chisel to push the silver disc back so that it would eventually take the shape of the cup-shaped wooden former. Wells stopped the lathe after Michael had been watching him for a couple of minutes.
  "Don't let me interrupt the good work," Michael said.
  "No, I have to stop every so often to anneal the silver to keep it soft," said Wells. "The heat of working it by pushing it into shape makes it go hard and brittle. And if it breaks, you're screwed and you have to start all over again."
  "Oh, right."
  Michael let Wells get on with the process of heating and cooling the part-formed silver cup. Then he produced the pieces of eight that Barry had given him. "What do you reckon to casting some of these? It should be quite easy to make a mould of them."
  "Except these coins were die-punched, not cast."
  "Ah! And are you telling me that's a much more complicated process?"
  "I could make you some. There's no problem about that, but it would be quite a lot of work. Not as cost-effective as the other things I'm working on."
  "How much more work? What's involved in the process?"
  "The first thing you have to do is carve out steel dies for the obverse and the reverse of the coin. Then you hammer them; you put the die on a coin blank and hit it with a bloody big hammer to mould the impression into the metal. You also need some device for stamping discs out of a sheet of metal. The blanks that you turn into coins. Then it's just like the regular process for the other stuff I'm making. You bung the coins in the old electric cement mixer and knock them about a bit to age them."
  "So it's something you could do?"
  "Well, yes, I suppose so. Your brother been going on at you again?"
  "Something like that," sighed Michael.
  "I wish he could get his head round the idea that what we're doing is an ideal alternative to antiques. Snip silver, old coins and even pieces of plate are all produced by basic technology. All you need is a plenishing hammer, the anvil, a few metal punches, files, tin-snips for cutting sheets of silver up to make rings and that's it. No hallmarks, no special equipment."
  "Apart from the cement mixer."
  "And the furnace, and so on. But the point is, there's nothing lying around that you wouldn't normally have in a workshop like this."
  "Like dies for faking pieces of eight, for instance."
  "Right," nodded Wells. "Or a cement mixer."
  "So you'd be even less enthusiastic about making gold sovereigns?"
  "What, you've got some gold now?"
  "Just an idea. You'd have to make dies and everything?"
  "And you'd have to use a bit more equipment. Sovereigns are more like bulk-manufactured goods than one-off pressings made by whacking something with a hammer."
  "How much more equipment?"
  Wells sucked in air in the classic car-mechanic gesture. "Well, I suppose you could use something like one of the old screw-head presses. Like what they used to use for printing books. Where you make a sandwich of the printing plate and the paper and some sort of pad on top of the paper, put it in the press and wind a handle to screw down the top plate of the press. You'd have to arrange things so you have a weight on the handle so you could spin it and bring the press down fast, concentrating all the force in a small area. That way, you'd be able to turn out a regular product. Each one looking exactly like the one before. You serious about this, or what?"
  "I've just been thinking about our two big problems. Barry wanting to do something and the problem of how to find something without having to come up with thousand-year-old leather bags."
  "Can your brother scuba dive?"
  "I shouldn't think so."
  "It's the wrong time of the year to do it now, but if I made a big pile of pieces of eight, all he'd have to do is go out in a boat and dive about a bit somewhere, then come back with the goods. And if anyone asks him where he found them, he can tell them to bugger off. Which is exactly what you would do if you'd found a wreck with some treasure in it."
  "Except you'd have the archaeologists' Mafia on your neck."
  "Unless you did your diving after a summer storm. And say you just happened to find this stuff on the sea bed. I mean, you could show them the spot. You could even leave a couple or three coins behind. And if they don't find anything else..."
  "...it's because the storm shifted things around," finished Michael. "It's a brilliant idea except for two snags. One, Barry can't scuba dive, and two..."
  "...you'd have to wait until next spring to work it. And your Barry will be up the wall and half-way across the ceiling by then."
  "Correct."
  "So what do you want me to do?" Wells gestured to the half-formed silver cup on his lathe. "Press on with this or do something with the Spanish coins?"
  "You could make the dies for pressing them?"
  "Oh, yes. No problem."
  "Right, well, I'll have a think about it. It's just occurred to me that if I suggest learning to scuba dive, Barry's liable to go charging off to somewhere like the West Indies to learn right away, then he's going to be insisting that we come up with some scheme for smuggling thousands of Spanish coins half way across the world so he can find them over there."
  "It's certainly going to confuse anyone wondering where the silver came from." Wells did not know the source of Michael Fantony's silver bullion, but he assumed that it had come from somewhere illegal and unaccountable. "And if you're going to take it all the way over to Jamaica, why bother making coins? Why not just cast the sort of bullion the Spanish used. Bloody big bars of it."
  "Christ! Don't mention any of this to Barry," grinned Michael. "This whole thing's starting to sound like something that could work."

The steady stream of visitors over the weekend had kept the tower's residents busy and given their visitors an incentive to go out for the day. Pru had spent her weekend with Nigel Faraday. Andrew and Milos Valnik had borrowed Haig's van to visit Plymouth on Saturday and Land's End on Sunday.
  Each evening, Vanessa reported to Haig the number of men; young, middle-aged and old enough to know better; who had asked her for a date. She was wise enough to realize that most of them were interested only in what they could get out of her. It had been just the same when she had been working at her summer job at the newsagent's before she had moved to the tower. People want to know you if you've got money; and especially if you've had a major share in gold coins worth half a million pounds, as some newspapers had reported.
  As a matter of policy, Haig had decided not admit that there were any sovereigns available for viewing at the tower. Vanessa had suggested charging extra for admission to a display in the Fall-Out Shelter, the way Madame Tussaud's charges extra for the Chamber of Horrors, but Haig had decided that the security risk was too great.
  He had visions of a couple of idiots with shotguns riding up to a relatively isolated building on motorbikes, expecting to head for the sunset as rich men; and getting violent when they realized that the haul was worth a thousand pounds or so, not several hundred thousand pounds.
  The tower's residents were ready to collapse at dinnertime on Monday evening after a very busy day. The visitors had collected a takeaway Chinese meal on their way back from a day out in Bath. Haig, Mikki and Vanessa were quite content to sit at the dining table with glasses of wine and let their guests serve the meal after the containers had spent a little time in the oven to heat them up.
  "So, everyone have a bracing day at the seaside?" smiled Pru as she watched her nephew acting as the wine waiter.
  "I think this place needs a lift," groaned Vanessa.
  "Where would you put it?" said Haig.
  "Running up and down the outside, the way they do on modern hotels," said Mikki.
  "I can just see that getting planning permission!" laughed Haig. "A Victorian relic with a glass lift on the outside."
  "You would have to charge a little more for your tours to pay for it," remarked Milos Valnik. "Say, five or six hundred dollars."
  "Hey, I like this idea," grinned Vanessa.
  "I don't think two bottles is going to be enough," said Andrew hopefully.
  "Not if you're planning to drink one on your own," said Vanessa.
  "I wonder if you can use wine for shampoo, like beer?" Andrew said thoughtfully
  "Don't you dare waste my good wine," warned Haig. "Go on, get another one. You know where they are."
  "You look very tired," Milos told his daughter.
  Mikki sat up straighter. "It's all good experience, Dad."
  "We had the public health inspector around this afternoon." Haig made the sign of the Cross with his chopsticks. "Mikki embarrassed him properly by quoting updates on regulations that he hadn't even bothered to read."
  "So we're safe, then?" said Pru. "Eating in the Fullerton's Folly Tea Room?"
  "Depends where you got this Chinese," said her brother. "But the bloke had to admit that he rarely saw a kitchen as well-run as Mikki's."
  "He was quite a nice man, actually," said Mikki. "One of the sort that wants to be helpful instead of doing his level best to get you shut down. And you know what Jay told him? When the inspector said Jay doesn't really need to spend any of his sovereigns on improving the kitchen, he said he'd buried them again for safe-keeping."
  "And I bet he believed him," scoffed Andrew, returning with a bottle of sparkling rosé wine.
  "Jay said they were safe for over a century when they were buried and you don't have to shell out for rental on a bank deposit box or insurance," said Mikki.
  "That sounds weird enough to be reasonable," said Pru.
  "And you know the cat?" added Mikki. "I found out where he lives when he's not here."
  "Where?" said Haig.
  "I saw him sitting on a garden wall when I was coming back from the supermarket this afternoon. At one of those cottages at our end of the village. There was an old lady sitting in the garden and she seemed quite surprised when Biffo let me stroke him. She said he usually growls at people who come too close when he's with her."
  "He never does that here," said Haig. "Even when Van's late with his meals."
  "Anyway, the lady at his other home is a retired teacher. She calls him Hodge after Dr. Samuel Johnson's cat. She said he started visiting her about a year ago, so I don't know where he was going before then. She was very interested to hear where he spends the rest of his time."
  "Maybe we ought to invite her over," said Haig.
  "I don't think so," said Mikki. "She was in a wheelchair."
  "Yeah, right, our stairs aren't too wheelchair-friendly," nodded Haig.

After the meal, Mikki's father volunteered to do the washing up and Andrew was shamed into helping him. Vanessa and Mikki retired to the study to enter the day's takings into the accounts program on the computer and to work out how much profit they had taken. Haig and his sister went up to the roof, where Pru could smoke an after-dinner cigarette.
  "I think Andrew quite fancies, Vanessa," Pru remarked when she had sprawled herself comfortable in a lounger with a sunshade attached.
  "Based on how he keeps being rude to her?" grinned Haig.
  "And a little embarrassed because she's sleeping with his uncle. You know she winds him up something rotten, don't you? Telling him things like he'll have to call her Auntie if you two get married."
  "I'm not sure we're planning to have anything to do with the dreaded M-word<.i> in the near future."
  "Andy would be relieved to hear that. I think he's worried about his friends winding him up if they find out his uncle is married to a girl just three years older than him."
  "Yes, I can see how embarrassing that could be."
  "And I think he's worried about Van's threats to get herself pregnant so you'll leave all your money and this place to her and the baby, not nieces and nephews in Edinburgh."
  "Amazing what money-grubbers the young are."
  "And I'm sure you're properly ashamed of being just like them at their age."
  "Definitely."
  "You're in a very agreeable mood tonight," Pru said suspiciously.
  "Isn't it amazing how crabby some sisters can get in their old age?"
  "Cheeky sod!"
  "I just thought I'd better be nice to you in case I need to recruit you as an emergency tour guide. Seeing Andrew's off home tomorrow and the girls are disappearing off to London for a fortnight with Mikki's dad."
  "Not until you get your lift installed, buster," grinned Pru. "I might help you out as the canteen manageress, dispensing canned drinks at shocking prices but I'm buggered if I'm going up and down your stairs all day."
  "I'm shocked! I didn't know you knew language like that."
  "One of the disadvantages of being shut away in a backwater is you lose touch with the real world," laughed Pru.

Having thought the idea over for a couple of days, Barry Fantony had decided that the brothers needed to steal some gold bullion as a matter of urgency so that they could create their own storm tide. Michael had admitted that the idea was attractive because they would be able to convert their goods to cash quicker. Ounce for ounce, gold would concentrate the raw material value of an article seventy-one times. And yet Michael could find no fault with their long-term plan.
  His discussions with Peter Wells had broadened the whole concept of finding a hoard of silver. Wells had pointed out that there was no need to restrict themselves to finding Viking loot. Their discovery could be just a collection of bits and pieces from a wide range of different origins and time periods. It would be obviously that their hoard was loot but they would leave the problem of sorting out where everything had come from, and who had assembled the loot, to the over-active imaginations of archaeologists.
  As a subsidiary plan, to come into effect when the main hoard had been ‘discovered' and declared, Michael was also planning to sell Viking items to dishonest collectors at a premium price. The story would be that someone involved in the discovery had found some small entire pieces among the snip silver and kept them back. Such items could be marketed secretly as loot of the sort that is never for sale legitimately to a private collector.
  As far as actually discovering the hoard was concerned, the draft plan was for Barry to build something; a workshop, a garden shed or something else that involving digging out proper foundations.
  Barry's story would be that he had checked the area with metal detector before starting to dig to make sure that there were no pipes in his way. To his surprise, he had found a strong signal. His first thought had been of an unexploded bomb left over from World War Two. In fact, he had found buried silver that had been in the ground for eleven or twelve hundred years.
  There were a lot of details left to be sorted out to put flesh on the bones. The first of them was establishing that the place where Barry wanted to build his shed or whatever had remained substantially undisturbed for so many centuries. Peter Wells had pointed out that he would require substantial prior notice of the location so that he could to check the soil at the site in order to arrange the right sort of decay patina on the silver. Michael was also worried about container problem.
  Involving Barry in the problems of making a credible hoard of buried silver had turned his thoughts away from instant profits. Michael was keeping a scheme involving diving for Spanish pieces of eight in reserve. In the meantime, he was working on a plan to concentrate their huge weight of silver to a more manageable commodity.

With low tide coming during the middle of the morning, Haig had called a halt to his expeditions with the metal detector. Somebody as locally famous as himself could not hope to get on with any serious prospecting with people wanting to speak to him. And there would be too many others spying on him and rushing to his favoured areas to do some prospecting on their own account.
  Biffo deprived him of a long lie-in on a grey Thursday morning. Something treading all over him and loud purring ripped Haig from a dream at just after seven o'clock. The cat had come to his alternative home for breakfast and he was not to be denied.
  Haig was past the window before the moving shapes registered. He looked out again. Three people seemed to be probing his garden with thin metal rods. They were doing it quite methodically, totally absorbed in the task, working in a semi-crouch that put them below the level of the wall so that they could not be seen from outside the garden.
  Haig rushed up to the study and unlocked the cupboard containing his video camera. Then he hurried out onto the roof and knelt beside the low wall. Zooming down to ground level was an alarming experience. The garden rushed up so fast that he had a momentary feeling of falling.
  Haig let two minutes go by, using the time indicator display in the view-finder. Then he stood up and refocussed. A loud, two-tone whistle turned three faces in his direction. They stared up at him for a moment, squinting at the dark shape against a bright, morning sky. Then, the two men and a woman left the garden with provocative slowness, knowing that Haig had a hell of a lot of steps to descend and that they would be long gone by the time he reached ground level.
  Haig locked the roof hatch and took the video camera down to the kitchen. Biffo was sitting beside the fridge, looking indignant. Haig gave him some milk to get him started and opened a tin of cat food. Meaty chunks with turkey disappeared at high speed into a hungry cat. Haig settled for tea, toast and a boiled egg.
  Breakfast over, he went out into the garden. Apart from an odd footprint where someone had strayed off the paths, there was no sign of disturbance. The intruders had been prodding the soft areas of the flower beds rather than the hard-baked territory around the low bushes. If not for the video record, there was no evidence of trespassers.
  An hour and a half later, Pru joined her brother in the ground-floor workroom. She had a mug of coffee in one hand and a videocassette in the other.
  "I found this with a yellow rose on it on the breakfast bar," she announced.
  "And?" said Haig.
  "And what?"
  "Did you look at the video?"
  "Not yet. Not having the combination to the cupboard where the VCR is locked away."
  "I left it open for you."
  "Now, he tells me."
  The Haigs went up to the drawing room. Pru watched the four-minute video in silence.
  "Well?" said her brother, pressing the rewind key on the remote control.
  "It's not going to win many Oscars. What was going on?"
  "Do you reckon our health inspector has three friends? Who really believe I buried the sovereigns again?"
  "That sounds daft enough to be true!" laughed Pru. "What are you going to do? Turn your tape over to that nice copper in the village and get them arrested?"
  "No, I think I'll get in touch with that reporter from the North Devon Advertiser. Let him embarrass the buggers."
  "Like it," grinned Pru.