Robert Goddard - Sight Unseen

'Not until last night.'

'But… how can that be?'

How indeed? Umber truly had no answer to give. He was not sure he ever would have.

'David?'

It was, he realized with a shock, the first time Chantelle had ever addressed him by name. Something had changed between them. He was the Shadow Man no longer.

'David?'

It is a little after noon on the first Friday of April, 2004. Shower clouds are in chase of one another above the early spring landscape. Sunlight and shadow feint and dodge between the standing stones at Avebury. A short, tubby, middle-aged man dressed for hiking moves at a slow, reflective pace across the northern inner circle of the henge. He stares thoughtfully at the pair of stones known as Adam and Eve as he passes them, but he does not stop.

A few miles to the east, at Marlborough Cemetery, a burial is in progress. The mourners are gathered at the graveside, heads bowed, as the priest recites the prayer of committal. He is speaking softly, but in the prevailing silence his words carry across this other expanse of standing stones. 'Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed…'

Some miles to the south, a police cordon has been slung across the start of a track through Savernake Forest known as White Road. Two cars with Wiltshire Constabulary badges on their doors have pulled onto the grass verge of the main road next to a blue and white Volkswagen camper van. Three emergency vehicles have drawn up along the track itself behind a parked Bentley, which men in white overalls are inspecting with painstaking care.

Several miles to the east, at Ramsbury, a telephone is ringing in a picturesque cottage at the western end of the village. There is no-one at home to take the call. The answerphone cuts in. And the ringing stops.

Many miles to the south, off Jersey, a telephone is also ringing, in the master cabin of a vast, sleek-lined private cruiser as it noses out from St Helier Harbour into the sea lane. It is ringing. And soon it will be answered.

But not before British Airways Flight 714 to Zurich has lifted off the runway at Heathrow Airport and soared into the sky.

It began at Avebury. But it did not end there.

The known facts about Junius, the pseudonymous eighteenth-century polemicist, are faithfully represented in this novel. All quotations from his letters are accurate and the production of a specially printed vellum-bound edition of them for Junius's personal use is well documented. The historical consensus is that the letters were the work of War Office clerk Philip Francis, but certainty on the issue is impossible. The question of how Francis was able to deploy a handwriting style for Junius in such elegant contrast to his own, entangled as it is with speculation about whether he employed an amanuensis, and, if so, who that amanuensis might have been, has never been satisfactorily resolved.

So it is with the controversy over whether George III, while still Prince of Wales, secretly married Hannah Lightfoot and fathered by her a son, George Rex. A certificate of their marriage at St Anne's Church, Kew, on 17 April 1759, bearing the apparently authentic signatures of George, Hannah, Dr James Wilmot and, as one of the witnesses, William Pitt, at that time Secretary of State for the Southern Department, can be inspected at the Public Record Office, located, ironically, in Kew.

The certificate was denounced as a 'gross and rank' forgery by the Probate & Divorce Court in 1866 when considering a petition by Dr Wilmot's great-granddaughter, Lavinia Ryves, for recognition of her related claim to be the legitimate granddaughter of George Ill's younger brother Henry, Duke of Cumberland. But the verdict, which flew in the face of the testimony of the leading handwriting expert of the day, can hardly be considered conclusive, given what the consequences would have been of pronouncing the certificate genuine. In strict legal logic, Victoria would have been required to vacate the throne. Some things are not meant to be. And some things are not allowed to be.

One of many strange events bearing on the mystery is the theft of the parish records from St Anne's Church, Kew, during the night of 22/23 February 1845. The motive for the theft remains, as was presumably the intention of those who commissioned it, unknown.

As for the bizarre similarity between the topographies of Avebury and the Cydonia complex on Mars, all are free to make of that what they will.

Robert Goddard was born in Hampshire. He was educated at Price's Grammar School, Fareham (1966-1973). At Price's he gained entry to Peterhouse College, Cambridge where he read History. He worked as an educational administrator in Devon before becoming a full-time novelist.