by police boots. Someone has put down planks, presumably for a wheelbarrow.
'Ruth,' Nelson greets her, 'how are you this morning?'
Ruth feels slightly embarrassed. Today she is the professional, the expert once more, she doesn't want to be reminded that last night she was sobbing over a dead cat.
'Better,' she says. 'Erik… you know, my ex-tutor, he came round after you left.'
Nelson looks at her slightly quizzically. But all he says is, 'Good.'
'Where are the bones?' asks Ruth. She wants to bring the conversation back to business.
'Round the back. The dogs found the place.'
The back garden is long and untidy, littered with old sofas, broken bicycles and a half-constructed climbing frame built, it appears, out of reclaimed timber. The sceneof-crime officers, clad in white jumpsuits, are clustered round a large hole. The sniffer dogs are straining at their leads, tails wagging madly. With a shock, Ruth realises that the Hendersons are here too. Scarlet's father and mother, standing silently by the back door. The mother is youngish, pale and pretty with long dark hair and a waifish look. She is wearing a purple velvet skirt and is barefoot, despite the cold. The father is older and has a slightly rat-like face, thin with watery eyes. In the garden three of their children are playing on the half-finished climbing frame, apparently unconcerned.
'This is Doctor Ruth Galloway,' says Nelson to one of the jumpsuited men. 'She's an expert on buried bones.'
Like a dog, thinks Ruth.
Ruth looks at the hole, which seems to run along the dividing line between the Hendersons' garden and the garden next door. Nearer the house, there is a timber fence but, here, at the end of the garden, there is only flint and rubble. A boundary, thinks Ruth. She hears Erik's voice in her head. It marked a boundary. We should have respected that.
'Did there used to be a wall here?' she asks. She addressed the nearest white suit but Scarlet's father must have heard because he steps forward.
'There used to be an old flint wall here. I took the flints about five years ago, to make a kiln.'
If there was a wall here, thinks Ruth, then the bones can hardly be new. She knows that she does not want the bones to be Scarlet's. She does not want the parents to be the killers; she wants Scarlet to be alive.
The white suits step back and Ruth, carrying her excavation kit in her backpack, moves forward. She kneels on the edge of the hole, takes out her small trowel and gently scrapes away at the sides. The digging is clean, she can see the marks of the shovels, and the soil is arranged in neat layers, like a terrine. A thin layer of topsoil, then the characteristic peaty soil of the area, then a line of flint. At the bottom, about a metre down, Ruth sees the yellow- white of the bones.
'Have you moved anything?' she asks.
The white-suited man answers. 'No. DCI Nelson told us not to.'
'Good.'
Wearing gloves, Ruth lifts a bone and holds it up to the light. She is aware of a collective intake of breath behind her.
Nelson leans forward and speaks into Ruth's ear. She smells cigarettes and aftershave.
'Are they human?'
'I think so, yes. But…'
'But what?'
'They weren't buried.'
Nelson squats down beside her. 'What do you mean?'
'A burial is a disturbance. It disturbs the layers.
Everything would be churned up. Look at this.' She gestures to the sides of the hole. 'Here's the grave cut.
Under all these layers. These bones were laid on the ground and, over the centuries, the earth has covered them.'
'Over the centuries?'
'I think they're Iron Age. Like the other ones.'
'Why?'
'There is some pottery there. It looks Iron Age.'
Nelson looks at her for a long moment before straightening up and calling out to the hovering sceneof-crime men.
'Right, that's it, boys. Excitement over.'
'What is it, boss?' asks one. Boss! Ruth can hardly believe her ears.
'The good news is it's a dead body. The bad news is it's been dead about two thousand years. Come on. Let's get out of here.'
An hour later, Ruth has bagged up the bones and sent them to the university lab for dating. Even so, she is sure they are Iron Age, but what does that mean? Because it wasn't buried in peat, this body has not been preserved, only the bones remain. Could these bones be linked to that other body, found on the edge of the Saltmarsh? And is there another link between bones, body, causeway and henge? Her mind is buzzing but she tries to concentrate on drinking herbal tea and talking to Scarlet's parents, Delilah and Alan as she has been instructed to call them.
She is not quite sure how she ended up here, in the Hendersons' chaotic kitchen, sitting on a rickety stool, balancing an earthenware mug in her hand. All she knows is that Nelson seemed very keen to accept the invitation on her behalf.
'We'd love to,' he had said. 'Thanks very much Mrs Henderson.'
'Delilah,' corrected Mrs Henderson wearily.
So now they are in the Henderson kitchen listening to Alan Henderson talking about dousing and to the Hendersons' youngest (Ocean) grizzling in her high chair.
'She misses Scarlet,' says Delilah with a resignation that Ruth finds hard to bear.
'I'm sure she does,' mumbles Ruth, 'How old is… er…
Ocean?'
'She's two, Scarlet's four, Euan and Tobias are seven, Maddie's sixteen.'
'You don't look old enough to have a sixteen-year-old child.'
Delilah smiles, briefly illuminating her pale face with its heavy fringe of hair. 'I was only sixteen when I had her.
She's not Alan's, of course.'
Ruth glances briefly at Alan who is now lecturing Nelson on ley lines. Nelson looks up and catches Ruth's eye.
'Do you have children?' Delilah asks Ruth.
'No.'
'What I'm afraid of,' says Delilah suddenly in a high, strained voice, 'is that one day someone asks me how many children I have and I say four, not five. Because then I'll know that it's over, that she's dead.' She is crying, but silently, the tears flowing down her cheeks.
Ruth doesn't know what to say. 'I'm sorry,' is all she manages.
Delilah ignores her. 'She's so little, so defenceless. Her wrist is so tiny she can still wear her christening bracelet.
Who would want to hurt her?'
Ruth thinks of Sparky, also little and defenceless and yet brutally murdered. She tries to imagine her own grief magnified by a thousand.
'I don't know, Delilah,' says Ruth hoarsely. 'But DCI Nelson is doing all he can, I promise you.'
'He's a good man,' says Delilah, brushing a hand over her eyes. 'He's got a strong aura. He must have a good spirit guide.'
'I'm sure he has.'
Ruth is conscious of Nelson's eyes upon her. Alan has briefly stopped talking. He rolls a cigarette, hands shaking.
Delilah gives a rice cake to Ocean who throws it on the floor.
Two dark-haired boys race into the room. To Ruth's surprise they head straight for Nelson.
