‘Bloody hell. It weighs a tonne.’

‘Not quite a tonne. But it is pretty hefty. It’s all of the kit that’s strapped to it. It has to be pretty robust.’

David smiled. ‘Shall we put it to the test?’

Thirty minutes later Clare and David were standing staring at a laptop screen in the back of David’s Land Rover. Changes in the pitch of the thrumming that was coming from overhead were the result of Flyboy’s acrobatic manoeuvring of the drone above the now empty cuttings.

Clare said, ‘It’s difficult to see from this angle with the light on the screen.’

David said, ‘Don’t be a half-wit all your life, Clare. Come and stand here in front of me. Then we can both see it.’

She shuffled awkwardly into position.

One hand on the mouse, David half turned to yell, ‘Hey, Flyboy, can you adjust the focus on that thing?’ his arm drawing her closer to him in the process.

She suddenly became uncomfortably aware of the rise and fall of his chest as they both struggled to pick out the image on the screen in front of them.

He adjusted the angle of the screen. ‘That’s better. There it is.’ He pointed with the cursor. ‘Do you see, Clare?’

She leant forward, peering at the image, grateful to have something that demanded her attention. ‘Yes. Yes. It’s as clear as day.’

David said, ‘It’s wheels within wheels.’

‘A wheel within a square to be absolutely accurate,’ Clare corrected him.

He laughed. ‘Pedant! But there’s no doubt in my mind now. That thin, circular feature looks like a foundation trench for a wall of some kind. And the square ditch around it is much larger in scale and proportion. It’s exactly like the one they found on Hayling Island. Even down to the pits with the votive deposits in the temenos.’

‘The teme what?’

‘The temenos. The precinct that surrounded the holy of holies. When this thing was in use no one but the priest or Druid would have been allowed inside the inner part.’

‘It still makes me shudder to think about what happened to those children.’

‘You’ve got to remember it was a different world then. Their values weren’t our values. And human sacrifice wasn’t common. As far as we can tell it only seems to have been practised in the most dire of circumstances. Given the radio carbon dates we’ve got for the infant burials, there’s every possibility that our infants met their fate when the Romans were first making their presence felt in these parts. Can you imagine what it must have been like when the Iron Age people round here first saw the legions marching towards them? The local population must have been scared witless. Perhaps they felt their only way out was a triple death.’

Clare said, ‘You think that’s why there were three infants sacrificed?’