Our Man in Camelot Read Free

it offended him. “ The Archaeology of Post-Roman Britain…A Gazeteer of Early Anglo-Saxon Burial Sites . Just those two set him back—nearly 25 dollars. Cash money.”
    “Cash money.” Merriwether echoed the words happily.
    “Sure. It says ‘cash’ down here.” Finsterwald consulted the list. “As of this moment he owes just 38 pence—30 for the pamphlet and 8 for the postage.”
    “Exactly right, man. He paid cash money for everything he bought—that’s what his cheque counterfoils say. And from the dates on that bill he must have called at that bookshop almost every week to pick up what he’d ordered. Only the last time he must have asked for a full list of what he’d bought—‘as per your instructions’ it says. And when he didn’t turn up last week the bookseller just popped the latest thing in the same envelope and brought him up to date with the news.”
    Finsterwald nodded. “Okay—so what?”
    “Harry—“ Merriwether spread his hands “—so this is probably the first letter Barkham ever wrote to him. If he called in every week, and paid cash for what he bought, there wouldn’t be any need to write to each other. And the guys who cleaned this place out must have known that. They just didn’t know there was a letter in the post.”
    Finsterwald opened his mouth, then closed it.
    “The guys who—? What guys?”
    Merriwether waved his hand, for the moment ignoring him. “I knew there was something wrong with this place—it’s got a wrong feel to it, like ‘who’s been sleeping in my bed, man?’. Only I was dumb, and I just had to go looking for something that ‘ud tell me I had the right feeling.”
    “For Pete’s sake—what guys?” Finsterwald pleaded.
    “Who knows what guys? The ones who stopped Davies’s mouth. The guys from Nijni Novgorod, maybe, I don’t know. But for sure someone’s been here before us.”
    “How do you know?”
    Merriwether pointed. “That piece of paper you’re holding tells me how. Because there’s not one of the books on that list in this house but those five bird books—“ He thrust four chocolate fingers and a chocolate thumb at Finsterwald. “So where those books go? They didn’t fly away like birds, man. ‘And good luck with your continuing researches’—what researches? There’s not one scrap of paper in his desk says he was researching anything, nothing… And you can’t tell me someone who buys all those books doesn’t make a single note ‘bout what he’s working on.”
    Finsterwald stared at the list.
    Keller: The Conquest of Wessex.
    “There must be forty—fifty—books here,” he said finally.
    “Not here now, there aren’t. Just five—on bird-watching.” Merriwether’s derision was unconcealed. “And we nearly bought it, Harry. We came looking for a pilot who watched birds, and that’s what we got, and that’s what we were meant to get. Until the mailman delivered the mail.”
    “But for God’s sake—“ Finsterwald lifted the list “—what would anybody want with this lot? It’s crazy.”
    “Not to somebody, it isn’t. Looks like the Major researched into the wrong piece of history.”

The Tale of Sir Mosby
and King Arthur
    I
    IT WAS LIKE they said: the seventh wave was often the biggest one.
    The last big one had slopped over into the castle moat, smoothing its sharp edges. Then there had been six weaker ones which had all fallen short. And now came the fatal seventh.
    Mosby had watched it gathering itself out in the bay. At first it hadn’t looked much, more a deep swell than a conventional wave like its white-capped predecessors. But where they had broken too early and wasted their strength in froth, the seventh had seemed to grow more powerful, effortlessly engulfing the first fifty yards of the line of saw-toothed rocks to the left and only revealing its true nature when it burst explosively over one tall pinnacle which until now had remained unconquered.
    As the pinnacle disappeared in a cloud of