I woke late and awash with a thick sweat. The morning was hot and humid, unusually so for early summer, and the air heavy with squadrons of flies; each seeking a tasty vein for breakfast.

I had shared the knowledge of Luca Brasi with the others last night. We had talked through the possibilities and the meaning of the message Morgan Edge intended us to find. When the fire in the hearth had burned low we retired to bed, unsure but feeling on the cusp of doing something remarkable. Martha in particular was in electric mood as she closed in on the archaeological find of a lifetime. We all now believed that Morgan and Professor Wimple must have recovered the votive sword and shield and had stashed them away for some reason.

I rolled out of the hayloft and enjoyed a brief shower, the water lukewarm and refreshing in the early morning heat. Once dressed, I found a note attached to a loaf of bread left in the kitchen.

Martha's solicitor had managed to secure the release of the professor's bank statements. Ty had taken her into town to get hold of them, and maybe pick up a few more items she needed.

I lit a small fire in the grate and toasted several slices of thick granary bread, spreading them with honey that Edge had bartered from a farmer who kept bees on his land at the edge of the Pebble Deeping. I was still peckish, having eaten only a salad the previous evening, and I really fancied an egg. I wandered through the village, nodding and saying a few hello's to folk who were out walking dogs, or dead-heading their rose bushes.

The dented brass bell above the door tinkled merrily when I entered the Post Office-cum-General Store. Eliza Petunia Emery-Stanthorpe, the decrepit shopkeeper, shuffled out from behind a mountainous pyramid of assorted tins like the mummy from a 1930s B-movie; all stiff joints and moaning. She peered towards me, screwing her eyes up in an effort to focus.

"Hello there, Eliza!" I called, overly-loud but conscious of the fact that she was as deaf as a post. She lifted the thick-lensed glasses hanging around her neck which, with its dangling flap of wrinkled skin, made her look like an ancient turkey.

"Oh, it's you Satchmo. How are you today? Hot is it?" she blinked lethargically, the action pronounced and magnified by the powerful lenses of her glasses.

"Yes, a real belter." I theatrically mopped the beads of sweat from my brow. The shop itself was cool, partly due to the thick stone walls that comprised the old building and partly due to the heavy velvet curtains that were drawn across the shop's two small windows. The atmosphere inside was gloomy and a little musty.

"I can't stand it, me. It ain't natural," she muttered and turned back to the pile of tins which she had been stacking. She bent tortuously to retrieve two more cans from a cardboard box that had yellowed with age, before creaking back into an upright position and straining to reach the top of a pyramid that must have taken her marginally longer to build than the pharaohs.

I crossed the shop floor and took the cans from her, placing them gingerly atop the pile. I was conscious that if a shaky hand brought the lot down, it would swallow Eliza's tiny frame like a mudslide. I had visions of her spindly stocking-clad legs jutting from beneath a mound of tins in a photo on the front page of the local paper.

"You're a good lad, Satchmo," she patted me on the behind. "What can I do for you today?" She asked.

"I fancy some eggs please," I replied. Eliza muttered, doddering to the back of the store where she ferreted about beneath the counter, finally placing a cardboard carton in front of me.

"Duck. Fresh this morning," she said. I opened the box to inspect them for cracks and Eliza nodded her silent approval at my customer nouse. I imagine caveat emptor would be carved on her headstone, although at the rate she was going she may well outlive us all and I'd never find out.

"There was a man in today asking about that nice young Dr. Wimple," she said, watching me with darting eyes.

"Really?" I asked, not paying much attention.

"Yes, bad egg ..." she chortled at her own joke. "Shaved head. I told him I had never heard of her. I don't like those city types. Sold him some chocolate, though."

"Did you get his name? What did he want?" I asked, immediately both alarmed and curious.

"Oh, I don't know..." her voice faded away as her mind danced to another place. "That's a pound to you, Satchmo," she said, returning to the present with a snap of lucidity. I fished in my pocket for some change.

"Course, it won't last..." she said, absently.

"What?" I replied.

"Oh, the heat, it won't last. No, there's a storm coming." She sniffed audibly at the air. I smelled dust. Evidently, Eliza could smell rain clouds approaching. "That'll freshen things up, let me tell you."

I paid for the eggs and made to leave the shop. I briefly entertained the thought that, in times gone by, Eliza would most likely have been burned as a witch. Very little slipped past her; be it village news or the divination of ailment and weather.

"I like a nice drop of rain, me... Oh yes, storm's definitely coming," she pronounced darkly as I left the shop and emerged into bright sunlight beneath a cloudless sky.

*

I sat in the shade, beating duck eggs in a bowl with a little fresh cow's milk. The golden yolks danced as I whisked them ferociously with a large fork. I wondered who had been asking after Martha in the shop. Maybe it was her solicitor, or perhaps an old acquaintance of her father had come to the village to pay his respects.

Then there was the possibility that it was the man who had burned her house down.

That was the option I was least fond of, but it had to be considered. I pondered the mystery of Luca Brasi sleeping with the fishes again and drew no nearer to solving it.

I scrambled the eggs with plenty of melted butter and ate them straight from the pan with wedges of bread. By the time I had eaten, the sun was high in the sky and the heat and humidity had risen appreciably. I ambled down the meadow and sat on the riverbank, took off shoes and socks, and dangled my bare feet in the water, making little splashes by wiggling my toes. The air was alive with the buzzing of small insects, and I could see the ripples made by the mouths of fish when they rose to the surface to take any flies that had crash-landed.

I lay back on the bank, my hands cupped behind my head, looking up at the powder blue sky that was now dotted here and there with puffy white clouds. I took a deep breath and held it.

Something was off; out of place. The air was sweet as I had come to expect, but it was tainted by something; an acrid tang that caught the back of my throat slightly.

I sat up and looked around. It did not take me too long to identify the source of the smell.

Piled a few metres down the bank were the guts of a fish that Ty had cleaned at some point. The knotted innards were thick with a layer of fat black flies who were earnestly working across the surface. The heat had made the flesh decompose quickly, and the odour was high.

I didn't know why, but I felt the urge to do something with the remains; to clean them away out of respect for the animal, or the freshness of the air. Burying it seemed fitting as the rest of the fish had served me well, but not well enough to compel me to walk back up the meadow to find an implement to dig with.

I supposed that I could cover it with some undergrowth, but after some time I decided merely to flick it back into the river with a suitably sturdy stick, thus sending it back from whence it came.

Burial at sea.

I would just need a tiny Union Jack to slide the remains out from under and to try and remember the words to Abide With Me.

Having found a good twig, I began to prod gingerly at the stinking guts; rolling them centimetre by centimetre back towards the water. Disturbing them was doing nothing for the smell and I covered my nose with the cloth at the base of my T-shirt.

I stopped abruptly when something caught my eye among the congealed blood and dried innards. There, again, something had glinted in the sunlight.

I passed it off as a piece of fish hook or lead shot weight and resumed prodding, but sure enough something gleamed again. This time I was certain that it had been yellow. No, not yellow, Gold.

I fell to my knees and took a closer look. A large internal organ the size of a baby's fist had been split and spread open. Presumably it was the stomach, as among the dried matter inside I saw grass and what looked like chewed flies.

Ignoring the smell, I stuck a digit into the cavity and dipped it into the contents. Smearing the muck between finger and thumb, I was amazed to see very noticeable grains of copperish coloured metal.

Luca Brasi, I thought to myself. Perhaps he actually did sleep with the fishes.

The gold, the treasure, was buried somewhere in the river.

In a flash, the synapses connected in my brain, and I was suddenly quite sure. The Professor and Morgan Edge had found the ancient cache up on the site of the old fort, and some pressure had made them hide it once again from the eyes of the world.

Fearing that something might happen to them, they had left a series of pointers that only their children could find, and it all led back to the crisp water of the river that ran serenely through the property.

Forgetting the stench, I spread the guts and remains out on the bank, scattering even the most persistent of the flies that clung to it. I attempted to estimate which of the fish we had eaten was smeared before me in an effort to remember where it had been caught.

I failed. No doubt Ty not only knew which species it was but also its favourite food, its star sign and the pet name its fishy girlfriend had called it. Unfortunately, he wasn't here, and I was so excited by the closeness of the discovery that I could almost taste success.

Undeterred, I stood and walked downstream to the wooden bridge. Treading slowly and carefully I picked my way along the bank looking down into the green tinted water trying to find a suitable hiding place for a stash of 2000-year-old loot.

I had thought the process would be simple. How many places could something like that be hidden in a river? Within three paces I realized just how wrong I was.

There were dozens of possibilities; sunken tangles of tree roots, thick beds of weeds that swayed in the current like hair, rocks and boulders, dark holes in the bank that might contain some watery creature waiting to sink its teeth into a juicy hand. The options grew rapidly as I moved downstream.

The thought struck me that I had seen the fragments of metal in the fish's stomach, and that it might have ingested them whilst nuzzling grubs from the soft silt at the bottom. If the gold were buried under the riverbed, I would never find it. Only Ty would hold the key to the location, unless a further clue had been left with Morgan Edge's possessions.

I remembered the newspaper and the postcard with the picture of the white-walled fort. Neither seemed obviously relevant to the feeding habits of a thoroughly deceased fish.

I paced the bank, looking for anything markedly out of place, perhaps a black leather bag emblazoned with the word 'swag' in six-inch-high letters and weighed down with a breeze block. No such bag was anywhere to be seen, and neither was anything else which might have contained the treasure. I got as far as the boathouse before the pain in my neck from constantly staring down got the better of me.

The heat had risen again and the day was blazing hot now, the hottest I could remember for this time of year, and sweat sluiced off my shoulders and back. I sat and unzipped the bottoms of my cargo trousers, turning them into shorts. While dangling my feet once more into the deep pool next to the boathouse, I attempted to do some serious thinking.

The votive sword and shield would have been the primary concern for the professor. Indeed, they mattered so much that he had abandoned his career to go in search of them. If he and Morgan had found the ancient druidic artefacts buried on this land, Wimple would never have allowed them to be placed where any harm could come to them.

I waggled my toes in the water and tried to estimate the strength of the current. Gold was dense and inevitably the items would have been weighed down, but even the heaviest rocks are moved along the bottom of rivers to be washed out to sea eventually. The professor would have made sure that the votives were placed somewhere where they would not be reclaimed by nature, though I imagined that Morgan would have done the actual concealment.

That ruled out hiding places tucked under submerged roots or at the bottom of banks of reeds. Maybe they were hidden in an abandoned burrow dug into the riverbank. That would keep the votives relatively dry, but I wasn't convinced. Riverbanks crumble and collapse, a heavy boot placed accidentally above the tunnel might damage the structure. This might at best conceal the hole from those meant to find it, and at worst open it up to those not meant to find it.

I stared back into the water, so still and inviting in this area, and tried to think where I would hide the most valuable items in my life.

I would weigh them down well. In fact, I would make sure they were held securely beneath a pile of rocks.

Rocks ... I had caught a fish in this very pool that had been feeding around a cluster of rocks. Ty had even suggested that was where I should fish, meaning that Ty must know that those fish lived near those rocks, and if he knew then Morgan would surely know ...

Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. The fish fed around those stones.

I was off the bank and into the water before my brain had even finished working it through.

I half-walked, half-swam the few metres to the other side on the pool. The water was pleasantly cool and brought goose bumps out on my arms as I splashed about. I felt with my feet and located the edges of a large pile of good-sized stones but couldn't get any to shift. I was a decent swimmer and with no thought I upended into a duck-dive, sticking my feet in the air and sending my body plunging under the water. It was clear enough for me to make out each individual stone that had been piled against the bank to a height of at least thirty centimetres.

I grabbed the top one firmly in both hands and worked my fingers under it until I could roll it away from the others. As my breath ran out, I saw beneath it another large rock wedged snugly in. I blew out my lungs and surfaced, sucking in air. It occurred to me that the pile of stones could hardly have been naturally placed. After all, the rest of the bottom of the pool was covered in a single layer of pebbles, rocks and silt, and they were all smaller than those comprising the structure above which I floated.

My heart skipped a beat and a surge of adrenaline pumped through me. Diving again, I brushed aside several pebbles before heaving a large rock free from the top of the pile. Beneath this was the definite shape of a lumped leather duffel bag, still securely weighed down with stone. I broke into a broad grin underneath the surface of the water.

In five minutes I had the bag cleared off, but it soon became clear that whatever was inside, it was probably not the votives. I doubted that it was big enough to conceal a sword, and certainly not a full-sized shield. Never-the-less, my heart was pumping when I finally broke the surface with the prize in my arms and began wading back to the near bank.

The bag was heavy, heavier than any of the rocks, and it exacerbated the feeling of numbness that the cold water had produced in my limbs. I clung to it as if it were my firstborn and struggled in ungainly fashion across the pool. I was breathing hard as I hefted the duffel onto the bank and dragged myself wearily from the water.

I lay panting on the grass for several moments then peeled off my sodden T-shirt; the heat of the afternoon gradually warming the blood in my veins. I moved the leather duffel into a patch of light and noticed for the first time that an area of material had been nibbled away when river water flowed freely from the gaping hole.

This was it! The unfortunate fish had been dining on the most expensive meal in the river prior to finding himself on our menu.

I gingerly undid the two brass poppers and zip which kept the hold-all closed and peered inside. Within the bag were several tight rolls of muslin that had turned a greenish-brown from exposure to the water. I lifted the top one from the duffel and unwrapped it on the bank. It tinkled pleasingly as I rolled open the material and spilled a cluster of coins out onto the thick grass.

I picked one up, holding my breath, and examined it. It was dark brown, bore a head with a distinguished hawk-like nose, a laurel wreath, and was very definitely marked with Roman numerals. I closed my fist tightly around the coin and lay back on the grass once more smiling broadly. After a few seconds of the find sinking in I began to laugh deeply and loudly.