“We’ll need to talk to each of you,” I said. “Please don’t leave the site until we have. We may not have a chance to get to all of you for a while, so please bear with us if we need you to stay a bit late.”

“Are we, like, suspects?” said Sculptor Boy.

“No,” I said, “but we need to find out if you have any relevant information.”

36

Tana French

“Ahhh,” he said, disappointed, and slumped back in his chair. He started to melt a square of chocolate onto the CD, caught Cassie’s eye and put the lighter away. I envied him: I have often wanted to be one of those people who can take anything, the more horrific the better, as a deeply cool adventure.

“One other thing,” I said. “Reporters will probably start arriving at any minute. Do not talk to them. Seriously. Telling them anything, even something that seems insignificant, could damage our whole case. We’ll leave you our cards, in case at any point you think of anything we should know. Any questions?”

“What if they offer us, like, millions?” Sculptor Boy wanted to know. The finds shed was less impressive than I’d expected. In spite of what Mark had said about taking away the valuable stuff, I think my mental image had included gold cups and skeletons and pieces of eight. Instead there were two chairs, a wide desk spread with sheets of drawing paper, and an incredible quantity of what appeared to be broken pottery, stuffed into plastic bags and crammed onto those perforated DIY metal shelves.

“Finds,” said Hunt, flapping a hand at the shelves. “I suppose . . . Well, no, maybe some other time. Some very nice jettons and clothing hooks.”

“We’d love to see them another day, Dr. Hunt,” I said. “Could you give us about ten minutes and then send Damien Donnelly in to us?”

“Damien,” said Hunt, and wandered off. Cassie shut the door behind him. I said, “How on earth does he run a whole excavation?” and started clearing away the drawings: fine, delicately shaded pencil sketches of an old coin, from various angles. The coin itself, sharply bent on one side and patchy with encrustations of earth, sat in the middle of the desk in a Ziploc bag. I found space for them on top of a filing cabinet.

“By hiring people like that Mark guy,” Cassie said. “I bet he’s plenty organized. What was with the hair clip?”

I squared off the edges of the drawings. “I think Jamie Rowan was wearing one that matched that description.”

“Ah,” she said. “I wondered. Is that in the file, do you know, or do you just remember it?”

“What difference does that make?” It came out sounding snottier than I’d intended.

In the Woods 37

“Well, if there’s a link, we can’t exactly keep it to ourselves,” Cassie said reasonably. “Just for example, we’re going to have to get Sophie to check that blood against the ’84 samples, and we’re going to have to tell her why. It would make things a whole lot simpler to explain if the link was right there in the file.”