At the time she’d felt more than a little hurt by the decision. She’d never really taken to James when Stephen was alive. Looking back now she could see that maybe she’d even been a touch jealous of the amount of time the two men had spent together, at work and on the golf course. But he’d shouldered the bulk of the responsibility of sorting Stephen’s estate out without a hint of complaint and, frankly, without his legal know-how she would have been sunk.

She typed the words ‘Bailsgrove’ and ‘Iron Age sword’ into the search engine and the page that Sheila Foggarty had shown her popped up. There were already a couple of bids on the sword. She searched the auction site for other items from Bailsgrove and it didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for. There was a whole scree of them; most of them smaller items than the sword, but all metalwork and all looking as if they were in pretty good condition. If what Sheila Foggarty had said about these coming from their site was true, then there was every chance that Beth Kinsella had been right. Bailsgrove could very well have been an Iron Age shrine, or at the very least a major site of some kind. From the research she’d already done she knew that swords didn’t pop up just anywhere; as well as shrine sites and sanctuaries, they were found in burials. And Iron Age cemeteries were all but unheard of in this neck of the woods.

Under any other circumstances it would be a major coup for the unit. But Paul Marshall wouldn’t like what it might mean one tiny little bit: there was every possibility the site would be Scheduled. And with Bailsgrove legally protected, his chances of being able to build his houses would be non-existent. He’d have a totally worthless, if stunningly beautiful, slice of Cotswold countryside on his hands. And whatever she might have told Sheila Foggarty, the uncomfortable truth was that right now Paul Marshall’s money was the only thing standing between the Hart Unit and closure.

‘But that’s great, Sal. Isn’t it?’ David looked at Sally, who appeared to think it was anything but great. She looked tired and flat. He’d never seen her like this. She was normally such a bundle of energy he’d begun to worry that she might start to dwell on the twelve-year age gap between them. But this morning he’d have been hard-pressed to have said who looked older. An observation he thought it wise to keep to himself.