She’d taken refuge, and the opportunity to refuel, at a nearby hostelry. It was only just past noon and she sat alone, aside from a party of elderly tourists on a day trip, playing with the avocado on her salad. As she’d driven up on the Thursday evening she hadn’t been able to get Stuart Craig’s description of Beth out of her head. ‘She spent more time living in the Iron Age than she did in the twenty-first century.’ Had that really been true? If you looked at the way she’d died you certainly might be forgiven for thinking so. But was she as irrational as Stuart Craig had made out or was she simply a woman who knew her own mind? Excavating the infant burials at Bailsgrove and just now up on Wrackley Cop, Clare had begun to wonder how anyone could fail to have sympathy for the plight of those women and children. Was it so wrong to feel for their suffering? To want to show the world what they’d gone through and why? It seemed to Clare that, whether they’d met their fate last week or two millennia ago, somebody needed to speak for them.

Clare pushed her plate to one side. Despite her attempts to focus on the mystery that was Beth Kinsella this weekend, her appetite seemed to have diminished markedly since her chat with Jo and Margaret yesterday afternoon. Was it really possible that Paul Marshall could have been responsible for the break-in at her flat? She’d told Margaret and Jo that he was no more than a school-yard bully. But what if he’d taken things further than that? Sheila Foggarty certainly didn’t have any time for him, and Clare had put that down to the woman’s torpedo-like focus on stopping the housing development at all costs. But Sheila Foggarty had known Marshall longer than Clare had. As had Neil. And both of them seemed to share a similarly low opinion of him.

But the alternative – that the burglary might have been carried out by the nighthawks – was an even less appealing idea. And unfortunately, given that whoever had broken in had taken the laptop as well, it seemed by far the more credible scenario.

An awful thought suddenly struck her. If the nighthawks had targeted her, what was to stop them targeting Crabby as well? She’d been assuming that she and Jo were the only ones Crabby had told about his involvement. But Crabby had said that it wasn’t just Sheila Foggarty who’d shelled out the cash for the artefacts that he’d planted on the site. Several of the villagers had clubbed together to buy them. And if that was the case, the number of people who knew about Crabby’s involvement might be much wider than she’d first assumed.