Treasure in a Dead Man's Chest

In many ways, Jerry Mason preferred his uncle Julian dead. He’d always been a rather odious character while he was alive; his love for his own voice accommodated perfectly by his tendency to throw the most woeful dinner parties at his chintzy mansion in the Sussex countryside. Jerry would often find himself stuck to the man for hours, listening to some anecdote about world politics (or a chastisement regarding Jerry’s financial situation) while trying to distract himself from Julian’s halogenic breath by counting all the different variations of argyle on the upholstery. Yes, he was not much going to miss the man - this was made all the easier to digest by the fact that all he had received at the reading of the wills earlier that week was a smug-looking china piggy bank containing small change from most of the countries that had made up the British Empire. Half of them weren’t even in circulation anymore! A fiscal dig from beyond the grave, from a man who seemed to have a bottomless bank account nonetheless.

Jerry was busy mulling this over while queueing to view the body at the funeral. Of course Julian had gone for an open casket: even in death, he wanted to be the center of attention. He was getting bored, who even were all these people so interested in seeing his dead uncle’s grotty body? He didn’t recognize half of them, not even from the dinner parties. He reached the front of the queue and looked down upon his uncle’s remains. He looked at peace. A sad little smile broke out across Jerry’s face, and it was then that he noticed something poking out of Julian’s breast pocket. It was barely noticeable, but it struck Jerry as a rather odd thing to be buried with. There amongst the ruffle of flowers and tuxedo was the smallest sliver of a little black notebook.

Jerry’s interest was piqued. Why would his uncle Julian have something like that kept with him all the way to the end? What was inside? The man standing behind him gave a disgruntled cough, and Jerry realized his time was nearly up. He took one more look at the notebook, panicked, and leaned down to give his uncle a kiss on the forehead while simultaneously slipping the book out of the jacket and into his pocket.

Jerry made a swift exit from the funeral, giving the vicar a customary “cheers” at the chapel door. He walked to the edge of the graveyard, sat on a memorial bench (in loving memory of Granny Prudence, may she be immortalized on this piece of garden furniture), and tentatively pulled out the little black book. He had a moment of guilt-ridden contemplation. It wasn’t too late, he could go and pop it back in the tuxedo and be none the wiser. Then he remembered that Julian was as dead as a dormouse and Jerry didn’t believe in the next life. He cracked open the book, slowly, and was met with a list of numbers. He turned the page to something very similar. Throughout the book, everything was the same until he got to the final page.

3251 Kingston Lane

Lewes

'Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life,

So thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife.'

Jerry was stunned. He couldn’t make heads or tails of this last section, so he flipped back to the beginning. Each page contained some numbers. The longest ones were split by commas, which made him think they were perhaps coordinates. The others were split into four groups of four and an extra three. After some confusion whereby Jerry compared these to the alphabet as if they were some sort of code, he suddenly became very excited as he realized they could be card numbers with a CVC. He jumped up with glee, doing a little jig - taking this notebook may have been the smartest bad decision he had ever made in his life. He rationalized his sense of morality by equating that Julian must have surely left the notebook for some smart family member such as himself - why else would all this be there, so close to his heart? The quote to him only justified this.

Jerry decided to pursue the leads one at a time. Typing the first coordinates into his google maps and the location of a building society just two miles down the road popped up as a pinned location. Jerry let out a squeak of satisfaction. Tripping over himself as he ran towards the graveyard gate, slowing only to pass by the front of the chapel again, he caught the bus towards the center of town.

Arriving at the building society, he walked in and gave the clerk the first set of bank details. She tapped them into their archaic computer system, and Jerry’s heart sunk as she raised a single thin eyebrow. She explained monotonously, “I’m going to need your phone number and your two security answers”. Jerry spluttered out the phone number on the first page, and couldn’t believe his luck when the two questions were "what was the address of the house you grew up in" and "name the tools in the 100th Sonnet." He gave the address from the last page and dutifully read out the quote, to which the clerk stared at him in silence until he bashfully realized that she only needed “scythe” and “knife”. She sighed, then excused herself for a moment.

Jerry bit his thumbnail in anticipation, worrying that perhaps he’d come on too strong and she had gone to get security. She returned holding a brown paper parcel. Jerry’s eyes lit up. She handed him the parcel and, unable to contain his excitement, he unwrapped it right there at the counter. His face melted as he saw not a large stack of banknotes, but a dull set of keys. Anger rose up into his throat, and he guffawed, “what the fuck do these open then?” The clerk looked taken aback and shrugged while looking pointedly towards the door. Jerry gawked at her for a second, then took the hint and walked out onto Lewes high street.

He stood at the bus top and stared at the keys. This ordeal had left him more confused than when he only had the notebook. He decided that the keys must only be a small part of a much larger mystery. It would take him a couple of days at least to visit all the coordinates in the book, so he called his boss at the greyhound stadium where he was supposed to be working tomorrow evening, and told him he needed some time to grieve. His boss, who was a sentimental man-child who had barely shaken off his acne, Sounded practically broken up himself and told Jerry to take as much time as he needed. Jerry then set about diligently working out how he was going to get through this bloody book.

Over the rest of the week, Jerry traveled around Sussex and visited over 30 different banks and building societies. If finding the keys had left him perplexed, what he found at the rest had driven him to the edge of his sanity. There was, amongst other things, a heavy leather suitcase full of clothes; four different passports for men Jerry didn’t recognize; a rusty old watch; and a single plane ticket to Bolivia set to leave at the end of the week. What made this all so much more frustrating to Jerry was that there was no money or anything of value. He felt embarrassed at his stupidity for thinking that he had stumbled across his uncle’s secret fortune, and anger at his uncle for writing so romantically in that blasted notebook, which was clearly just Julian’s diary for safekeeping his assortment of tat. Exasperated, Jerry decided to go to the address at the end of the notebook. Perhaps he could find something there that would tie all this crap together. At the very least there might be a safe that could be opened by those keys, that now sat at the bottom of Julian’s packed suitcase after Jerry had turned it upside down in a frantic search for one of either clues or money.

3251 Kingston Lane. The place looked abandoned. Jerry had hauled everything he had found along with him, squashed into a Morrisons shopping trolley which he now leaned on to catch his breath. When he saw the state of the house, with the door hanging by its hinges and the paint peeling off the walls, he broke down into tears. The house was as dead as his uncle, and his adventure had just died alongside. He cried out as he furiously pushed the trolley with all his might into the garden hedge, petulant with rage. Even the bush was long dead, and it bore less resistance than Jerry had expected, leaving him lying on the floor with twigs in his hair and the trolley capsized beside him. In destroying the bush, Jerry had brought into view a robust garden shed, out of place amongst a house that had clearly been destitute for some time. His heart rose once again; he hurriedly grabbed the keys from the selection of tat on the ground and slid one of them into the padlock. After a few wrong tries, the lock slid off and Jerry delighted as the door creaked ajar. He opened it to reveal a set of stone stairs leading down into gloomy half-light. He fearfully trod down them, reached the bottom, and turned a corner. He let out a gasp of surprise as he saw what was in front of him.

His uncle Julian was smoking a cigarette, sitting on a crate of gold bars. His eyes bulged practically out of his wizened skull as he saw Jerry in front of him.

“You. Why you little, thieving, cowardly, brainless half-wit,” he said, flicking his cigarette pointedly at the ground and stamping it down. “It was you who stole my bloody notebook!”.

Jerry was still staring at the gold bars. It all made so much more sense now, in a way. On the other hand, it made no sense at all.

“What is going on? Aren’t you dead?”, Jerry asked, struggling to galvanize his gaping jaw to get the words out.

Julian didn’t answer what was clearly a stupid question. Instead, he jumped straight to explaining in the manner of a teacher who cannot bear his student’s lack of intelligence.

“I’m assuming you followed the clues in the notebook. They were not particularly well coded, I did not factor in my insufferably nosy family members. In doing so I’m sure you collected up my supplies. How you haven’t worked it out yet is beyond me. I’m a member of British Intelligence. I was a member anyway. Things got tense on my last mission in Switzerland, and long story short I ended up with a dead colleague and all this damn gold. I’d been thinking about retiring, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity. So naturally, I faked my own death, and the plan was to rendezvous with one of my agents at the funeral who would collect my supplies and put me on a plane. He’s probably been running around like a headless chicken looking for that book, bless him. Well, now you’re here. You did bring everything, didn’t you? The plane ticket and all?”

Jerry nodded. Julian stood and waited. Jerry looked at Julian, smiled sheepishly, and looked at the crate. The penny dropped for Julian, as he rolled his eyes and muttered a bitter stream of expletives as he handed over one of the bars. Without a second to stop and stay farewell, Julian pushed past Jerry holding the crate and disappeared up the stairs. Jerry gazed fixated at the bar, cradling it in his arms. What must this be worth? 10 grand? 20? Commiserations, uncle Julian. Good luck in your next life.