‘So, what is it you need to tell me?’

Clare put her mug down and reached over to extract three context sheets from the ring binder on her desk. She spread them out in front of him. ‘Take a look at those.’

David examined them. ‘Three pits. So what?’

‘Three pits with absolutely no finds in them except for some modern plastic. And none of them with any record of having been there when Beth was working on the site.’

‘So Beth wasn’t the world’s best archaeologist. We all miss things from time to time.’ He hesitated. ‘And we do know that things weren’t quite right with Beth. After all, she did kill herself.’

David sincerely hoped that was true. Ever since Sally had mentioned the narrative verdict at the inquest he’d been worried about the prospect of leaving Clare up here on her own if there was even the slightest possibility that Beth’s death was less than entirely straightforward. He’d toyed with the idea of mentioning it to Clare, or at least to Jo. But if he told Jo she would only tell Clare. And in the end he’d decided he was worrying about nothing. If the police weren’t concerned, then all he’d succeed in doing by mentioning it would be to make Clare more nervous about the place than she already was. But there would be no harm in making that call to Margaret even if he didn’t tell her about the inquest.

Clare said, ‘Beth Kinsella’s mental health may have been in a questionable state before her death, but none of her team seem to think it ever affected the way she dug. Neil says she was a brilliant excavator – it was just that she sometimes took her interpretation of what she found a bit far.’

David snorted. ‘Made things up, you mean!’

Clare shrugged her shoulders. ‘Whatever. What’s important is that it didn’t affect her ability to recognise an archaeological feature. And more to the point, from what I’ve seen, the team we’ve got digging out there are bloody good at their jobs. There’s no way they’d have missed something like this.’

‘So, what are you saying? Someone deliberately vandalised the site before we started work here?’

‘That woman you nearly mowed down’ – David wasn’t entirely happy with that description but now didn’t seem the moment to argue about it – ‘is Sheila Foggarty. She lives locally. She says she’s a parish councillor.’

‘She sounded to me like she was saying quite a lot of things, not all of them entirely complimentary.’

‘No. In fact she was bloody rude. But that’s not important.’

‘It might be if she ends up writing to the vice chancellor.’ Clare’s face reddened. ‘What was she so upset about?’