‘I can’t explain. Well, if I do, you’ll think I’m crazy.’

‘Do you care what I think?’

She smiles. ‘In a small place like this gossip spreads really fast. I don’t want to be written off as the mad potter on the mountain just yet.’

‘Ah.’

‘Look, I’m not an academic, I haven’t studied the area for years like you have, I don’t really know anything about anything, it’s just that … well … there is something bad in that grave. Something really bad.’

‘And I’m setting it free?’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘But that’s what you said, when we were raising the stone. Those were your exact words, if I recall.’ He wraps his hands more tightly around his coffee and breathes in the steam.

He’s scared. My God, he hasn’t dismissed what I said as the ravings of a madwoman. Not completely.

She hesitates, and then asks, ‘Have you … noticed anything? Felt anything, while you were working on the site? Anything … strange?’

‘It would be easy to get spooked by the idea of disturbing a grave. It’s not something any of us does lightly. We try to treat the remains with respect. They were a living, breathing person, once. We are digging them up from their place of rest.’

‘Except that this one wasn’t resting peacefully, was she?’

‘It certainly looks as if she came to a highly unpleasant end,’ he agrees.

‘That’s putting it mildly. You think she was buried alive. And that the stone held her in place while they shoveled earth on top of her. It seems so terribly cruel, whatever she had done.’

‘It’s a mistake to read the past with our twenty-first century sensibilities.’

Tilda shrugs. ‘They are the only ones I’ve got.’

‘We’ve had some of the test results back from the samples Molly sent off to the lab. We can pinpoint the date of the grave, almost to the year.’

‘I know you’re dying to tell me.’

‘We think 910 to 920 AD. And the body is certainly that of a woman, aged between thirty and forty. She was healthy, in life. As we’ve already established, she didn’t die of natural causes. Her diet included fish, from the lake, of course, but also high levels of protein from grains and regular meat. She was not some lowly peasant, whoever she was. She must have enjoyed quite an important position on the crannog. Until…’

‘What did she do? What could she have done to deserve such a punishment?’

‘We will know more when we get to the grave beneath her. Once we know the identity of the person she was most likely accused of murdering, we will know more.’

‘He or she must have been important, you reckon?’

‘More than likely.’