‘There.’ He inhaled. ‘Right there. I should have made the connection earlier.’
‘Eloise said not all the gold was found.’ Hugo scratched his jaw. ‘She said it twice.’
Miriam frowned. ‘Once the hoard was uncovered, the area was scoured for signs of more. There’s no chance anything was missed.’
‘She also said,’ Hugo added, ‘that some of it had already been found and moved elsewhere.’
‘There’s never been any suggestion that was the case,’ Mark said. Hugo only shrugged.
‘What about the biblical quote she mentioned?’ I tried to remember it. ‘Surge Domine…’ My voice trailed off. ‘Something about the Lord rising up and enemies scattering?’
Hester filled it in. ‘Surge Domine et dissipentur inimici tui et fugiant qui oderunt te a facie tua.’
I blinked at her in surprise. ‘I know my Latin. So what?’ she said sourly.
Mark flipped open the nearest laptop, tapped the keys then sucked in a breath. ‘One of the items found at the Staffordshire hoard was inscribed with that very quotation.’
The fizz in my blood intensified. Everyone else simply looked confused.
‘Athair wants you to go and look more closely at the Staffordshire Hoard because there are some items that haven’t been located yet,’ Becky said.
‘Seems that way,’ I answered.
Hugo eyed me. ‘He knows you like hunting for treasure so he’s providing you with a hunt.’ He glanced at the map. ‘Thirty-two treasure hunts, in fact.’
I smiled broadly. ‘Yep.’
Miriam nodded. ‘He wants to please you, to deepen your relationship and prove that you’ll benefit from a continued association with him. Complete the first treasure hunt and he’ll provide details for the second, and so on. He’s mapped it all out.’
‘Literally,’ Hugo murmured.
‘We should ignore him, right?’ Slim asked. ‘His end game is to make Daisy a fiend. We don’t want to do anything that might play into that.’
‘Definitely,’ Otis agreed. ‘And Daisy doesn’t want to make him think he’s controlling her, not even for a second. There’s plenty more treasure to be found. We don’t have to go searching for the stuff that Athair shows us.’
‘That’s where you’re all wrong,’ I said.
Rizwan wrinkled his nose. ‘You want to go looking for Athair’s treasure? Really?’
I felt Hugo’s eyes on me, watchful and intense. ‘What is it, Daisy?’ he asked. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘Take a step back and look at the map again,’ I said. ‘There are thirty-two spots all over Britain. Presumably each one will lead us to treasure of some sort. Athair’s been around long enough – he’s bound to know where a lot of stuff is buried. Maybe he even buried some of it himself.’
‘So?’
‘Every corner of the British Isles is covered by Athair’s marks apart from one.’ It had taken me a long time to work out what was peculiar about the map but it seemed glaringly obvious once I’d seen it. We weren’t looking for what was on the map, we were looking for whatwasn’ton it.
The others squinted at the map until, one by one, they saw the same as me. ‘There’s nothing marked in either Lincolnshire or North Norfolk,’ Rizwan said. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘And yet,’ Mark murmured, ‘those areas are amongst the most popular for metal detectorists because they often contain the most treasure.’
‘There’s a reason why lots of treasure is found there,’ Hugo said. ‘The Vikings, the Romans, the Normans, the English Civil War – those places are steeped in history.’ He glanced at the Primes. ‘How many times have we been to Lincolnshire?’
‘Half a dozen at least,’ Slim said.
Hester flitted up to the map. ‘It might be a coincidence.’
I nodded. ‘That’s always possible. But if this map is what we think it is, then Athair wants to send me – to sendus– all over the country. It’s not that long since we found that bejewelled dagger and you set up that hunt because you wanted to keep me busy.’ I pointed at the map. ‘I reckon this is the same. Athair is providing us with work that he thinks will endear me to him, but he also wants to control what that work is and where we go. And he doesn’t want us to go to Lincolnshire.’
