“Listen,” Cassie said soothingly, “I know you’ve had a bad shock. Just take your time and walk us through it, OK? Start with what you were doing this morning, before you went up to the stone.”

Damien took a deep breath, licked his lips. “We were, um, we were working on the medieval drainage ditch. Mark wanted to see if we could follow the line a little further down the site. See, we’re, we’re sort of cleaning up loose ends now, ’cause it’s coming up to the end of the dig—”

“How long’s the dig been going on?” Cassie asked.

“Like two years, but I’ve only been on it since June. I’m in college.”

“I used to want to be an archaeologist,” Cassie told him. I nudged her foot, under the table; she stood on mine. “How’s the dig going?”

Damien’s face lit up; he looked almost dazzled with delight, unless dazzled was just his normal expression. “It’s been amazing. I’m so glad I did it.”

“I’m so jealous,” Cassie said. “Do they let people volunteer for just, like, a week?”

“Maddox,” I said stuffily, “can you discuss your career change later?”

“Sor-ry,” said Cassie, rolling her eyes and grinning at Damien. He grinned back, bonding away. I was taking a vague, unjustifiable dislike to Damien. I could see exactly why Hunt had assigned him to give the site tours—he was a PR dream, all blue eyes and diffidence—but I have never liked adorable, helpless men. I suppose it’s the same reaction Cassie has to those baby-voiced, easily impressed girls whom men always want to protect: a mixture of distaste, cynicism and envy. “OK,” she said, “so then you went up to the stone . . . ?”

“We needed to take back all the grass and soil around it,” Damien said. In the Woods 39

“The rest of that bit got bulldozed last week, but they left a patch round the stone, because we didn’t want to risk the bulldozer hitting it. So after the tea break Mark told me and Mel to go up there and mattock it back while the others did the drainage ditch.”

“What time was that?”

“Tea break ends at quarter past eleven.”

“And then . . . ?”

He swallowed, took a sip from his mug. Cassie leaned forward encouragingly and waited.

“We, um . . . There was something on the stone. I thought it was a jacket or something, like somebody had forgotten their jacket there? I said, um, I said, ‘What’s that?’ so we went closer and . . .” He looked down into his mug. His hands were shaking again. “It was a person. I thought she might be, you know, unconscious or something, so I shook her, her arm, and um . . . she felt weird. Cold and, and stiff. And I put my head down to see if she was breathing, but she wasn’t. There was blood on her, I saw blood. On her face. So I knew she was dead.” He swallowed again.