To Dream of the Dead

danger of damaging the credibility of their profession by allowing the core disciplines of archaeology to be undermined by fashionable fads and the drivel spouted by gullible New Age cranks determined to prove spurious links between ancient civilisations and all kinds of sad psychic shit.

The last thing archaeology needed, Bill Blore said — glancing with this kind of cold affection at Jane — was a following of cranks… however cute they might appear.

Remember that.

All the time, the other camera focusing implacably on Jane, like some gleaming evil eye, and there was nowhere to hide.

When it was over, and the cameras were switched off, Bill Blore had seemed so much more relaxed. Loosened up, smiling at people. Finally, moseying over to Jane, looking down benignly, squeezing her arm. Well done, girlie.

Patting her once on the shoulder before strolling away, followed by his entourage, like some high-powered surgeon in a crap hospital drama who’d just saved somebody’s life against impossible odds.

Wicked stuff, Bill, the director guy had murmured, within Jane’s hearing. And all done in one take.

Jane followed the lamp into the orchard. Still some old frost-rotted apples lying on the ground, winter rations for the blackbirds

‘Girlie?’ Eirion called after her. ‘He called you girlie?’

Coops had been sympathetic, of course. He’d said Blore was a shit anyway, everybody knew that, and when you caught a shit on a bad day you just put it down to experience, wiped it out of your head. Coops just hadn’t realised, and she hadn’t even told him what she was now trying to explain to Eirion.

‘This is going on TV, right?’

‘Well, it… I mean Trench One…’ Eirion shuffling about, trying to make it better. ‘It hasn’t got a really big audience.’

Even he hadn’t quite put it together.

‘But what it has got…’ Jane’s throat was parched ‘… is an audience of archaeologists? Almost certainly including professors of archaeology at, like, universities?’

‘Oh,’ Eirion said.

‘Are they going to forget the gullible, airy-fairy, cranky girl who got lucky against all the rules? Ever?’

‘They’ll probably just… feel sorry for you,’ Eirion said.

‘Yeah, right, you put your finger on it there, Irene. They’ll feel sorry for me.’ Jane rocked back against a rotting stump. ‘Are you kidding? They’ll despise me. Totally. Terminally. I’m finished with archaeology before I even started.’

She was feeling physically sick. The humiliation would go on reverberating down a corridor as long as the rest of her life.

SUNDAY

The Atheist is a Prodigious miracle in

this world, a walking carcase in the

Land of the Living…

Thomas Traherne The Fourth Century.

34 Recovery Space

Life always speeded up before Christmas. Not yet dawn, but the top end of the secret bypass was already a red river of tail lights.

Bliss could remember when all this used to be country, but good flat land didn’t stay green-belt for long. North-west of the city, a mesh of unexplained roads had appeared. No signposts, but what it amounted to was another unpublicised back way round the city, and housing had sprouted around it like pink fungi.

These were the more expensive properties, detached and set back from the road but still built too close together, with shared driveways. Bliss and the van parked round the corner.

As they walked up the drive, a landing light came on in a central upstairs window. Soft red walls, a glimmering in the bubble glass in the front door, and you knew all the radiators would be coming on, and those reassuring standby lights in the big, tidy kitchen.

Bliss thought of his own cold, messed-up kitchen, the heating clock he’d never had to master before. He wiped his mind, like with a wet cloth, and pulled himself into the situation.

Dawn raid. The go go go stuff. Coppers in face-shield headgear like international cricketers. The front door splintering under the enforcer. Police! Police! Police! Like the FBI without the weaponry.

Some part of Bliss would have quite liked all that. Meanwhile, in the real world…

Under his porch light, Mr Banks-Jones, up surprisingly early after last night’s party over at Tupsley, was struggling with the Sunday papers, a too-thick bundle rammed into a too-thin letter box. Clearly unable to pull them through from the inside, he’d come out.

‘Idiots. Nobody takes any care at all any more. Look at the way the Observer’s torn all the way—’ He looked over his shoulder, exasperated, then quickly straightened up. ‘Oh. I’m so sorry, I thought you were my neighbour.’

‘West Mercia Police, sir,’ Bliss said. ‘Are you Gyles Banks-Jones?’

One of the uniforms was already round the back, on the off chance that Mrs Banks-Jones was on her way down a drainpipe with a carrier bag full of recreational drugs. Gyles stood there in the rain, in his dressing gown, a thin, studious-looking guy in early middle age.

‘Oh, lord. I knew this would happen one day. But… Christmas?’

‘Life is unfair, Mr Jones,’ Bliss said. ‘All right if we pop inside?’

‘Look… I’ve got two young children.’

‘Snap. DI Francis Bliss, my name, and this is DC Wintle, who attended the same party as you last night. Undercover.’

‘How do you do. I, ah…’ Gyles Banks-Jones swallowed, moistened his lips. ‘Any chance we can be civilised about this?’

It wasn’t a lot, really. Bliss wasn’t well-up on current street prices, but he reckoned no more than about six grand. Plastic bags in the velvet linings of jewel boxes stacked in Gyles’s workshop extension, back of the house.

He’d showed them where to look, then had sat down next to his wife on the sofa downstairs. His kids had slept through it all.

Now, in the interview room. Gyles, gardening fleece over his denim shirt, was telling Bliss that while it wasn’t all for personal use, he would certainly object very strongly to being called a dealer.

‘If it’s just for your friends,’ Bliss said, George Wintle silent at his side, ‘you seem to have quite a wide social circle.’

‘Inspector Bliss,’ the solicitor said, ‘I believe my client has told you—’

‘And I don’t believe him, Mr Bilton,’ Bliss said.

The solicitor looked about nineteen. Glasses, puppy fat, new briefcase and an earring. He’d materialised