He smiled. ‘I know. Ironic, isn’t it, given what happened. But she used to hold us spellbound in her Celtic studies classes – it was the one session you could guarantee people would leave the union bar for. And she was a brilliant excavator too. My first dig was with her. At Wrackley Cop.’

Clare said, ‘I’ve heard of that. It’s a hill fort, isn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘Up in the Peak District. Without Beth I’d never have got into this game in the first place.’

‘She sounds inspiring.’

‘She was. She was so passionate about everything – like it really mattered to her. Like it was personal. Maybe in the end that was the problem.’

‘How do you mean?’

He raised his eyes towards the ceiling, avoiding her gaze. ‘Look, I’m not sure—’

‘Neil, I’m not here to judge anyone. I just want to know what we’ve got ourselves into here. Was there something Beth was involved in that I should know about?’

He shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t like that. It’s just that Beth was so soaked in the world of the Celts and the Iron Age that she took things a bit far sometimes.’

‘You mean she was making it up.’

‘She wouldn’t have seen it like that. She would have said everyone else wasn’t reading the evidence right. She was convinced this place was the site of an Iron Age shrine.’

‘Wow, she genuinely thought it was a temple! Marshall told me she did, but I thought he was having me on.’

‘Well, it would have been “wow” if there’d been a scrap of evidence to support it. But the less we found, the more convinced Beth was that she was in the right place. She’d found some reference in a journal article from 1800 and God knows when to a Latin inscription that was turfed up around here somewhere. She reckoned it proved the place had been a sacred site before the Romans arrived. After that everything we found just made her more convinced she was right.’

‘It must have made her difficult to work with.’

‘I never had any complaints. It wasn’t as if she asked us to tamper with the records or anything. But not everyone thought like me.’

‘Did some of the rest of the team have a problem with her?’

‘Not here – our lot all loved her. She wasn’t like some site directors; she’d get stuck in with the rest of us. But …’

He hesitated.

‘But what?’

‘Well, I’m not sure exactly what went on, but I don’t think she left Sheffield by choice.’

‘You mean the university sacked her.’