‘I didn’t know he was working at Pendle,’ she says stupidly.

‘Nor did I. It’s just round the corner from me.’ Of course, Caz lives up north.

‘It was awful,’ Caz is saying, ‘I just read it in the local paper. Archaeologist Daniel Golding found dead in his Fleetwood cottage. I didn’t even twig at first because I’ve never thought of him as Daniel.’

‘How did the … what happened?’

‘The article just said that he’d died in a house fire. The place was completely gutted apparently. They think it was caused by faulty electric wiring.’

Faulty electric wiring. Could Dan the Man really be destroyed by a bit of flex, a badly earthed plug, a few pluses and minuses going the wrong way? It just doesn’t seem possible.

‘Are you sure it was him?’ asks Ruth with sudden hope. ‘Our Dan?’

‘Yes,’ says Caz sadly. ‘I rang his sister. You remember his sister Miriam, two years above us?’

Ruth dimly remembers a darkly glamorous presence at some of their parties. Miriam Golding. She had heard rumours that she became a model.

‘How did you track her down?’

‘It was easy enough. She’s on Facebook.’

Ruth has never got to grips with Facebook. It’s another aspect of the modern world that seems beyond her. She can’t understand why you’d want to update your friends every time you make a cup of tea. In any case, her friends are a small select group. Smaller now.

‘The funeral’s tomorrow,’ Caz is saying.

‘So soon?’

‘It’s the Jewish tradition, Miriam says.’

Ruth had never even realised that Dan was Jewish. They didn’t talk much about religion when they were students – the meaning of life, yes, everyday beliefs, no. In any case, Ruth had been in full-scale flight from her parents’ evangelism. The G-word would have sent her running for cover.

‘I wish I could be there,’ she says, meaning it.

‘I know. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to send flowers or not, but if I do I’ll send them from both of us.’

‘Thanks, Caz.’

‘Good to speak to you, Ruth. It’s been too long.’

‘Yes, it has.’

‘Maybe you’ll come up to Lytham some time?’

Ruth laughs. ‘Maybe.’ Secretly she’s thinking that, after the events of the past few years, she needs to take Kwells if she goes further afield than the Chinese takeaway.

‘Maybe you’ll come to Norfolk,’ she says.

Now it’s Caz’s turn to laugh. ‘You never know. Take care, Ruth.’

*

As Ruth makes supper she thinks about the fact that Caz, in the north of England, seems further away than her neighbour, Bob, who’s currently in his native Australia. It’s more than distance, surely. The truth is that when Caz got married (to Pete, another university friend) and had her children, she began to move away from the single, childless Ruth – just as, some eight thousand years ago, the sea levels rose and Britain was separated from the European landmass, the channel river widening into a sea – so that, now Ruth feels herself almost a different species from her erstwhile friend. True, Ruth now has a child of her own (interesting that Caz had forgotten, but then Ruth herself sometimes still finds it hard to believe) but she still doesn’t feel that she is a Mother (capital letters) and certainly she’s never been a Wife. She has her work but Caz, along with most of Ruth’s other classmates, long ago abandoned archaeology for a more lucrative career.

There is something quixotic, almost eccentric, about carrying on digging and sifting and lecturing on flint hand-axes. Come to think of it, Dan was probably the only other member of the class of ’89 still involved in archaeology. Ruth and Dan were the only two students in their year to get firsts but Ruth feels now that she wasn’t really passionate about archaeology until she did a post-graduate degree and met the brilliant and charismatic Professor Erik Anderssen, Erik the Viking. Well, Erik is dead now, and though he still haunts her dreams he does so less and less. But Ruth is still plugging away at archaeology. It is just a surprise that Dan was doing similar badly paid, unglamorous work. And now he, too, is dead.

Ruth makes pasta and they eat at a plastic table in the front garden, a sensible precaution given Kate’s predilection for smearing food over all surrounding surfaces, but also a real joy on evenings like this. It is still light but there is a soft, diluted feel to the air. Beyond Ruth’s fence the long grass is tawny and gold, with the occasional flash of dark blue water as the marsh leads out to the sea. In the distance the sand glimmers like a mirage, and further still the sea comes whispering in to shore, heralded by the seagulls flying high above the waves. Ruth has lived here for thirteen years now and she has never tired of the view, the lonely beauty of the marshland, the high-arching wonder of the sky. The situation is isolated in the extreme; just three cottages perched on a road to nowhere. One neighbour, Bob Woonunga, is an Indigenous Australian poet who spends much of the year on the other side of the world. The other cottage is a holiday home owned by a couple who seem to have forgotten its existence, although their son and his university friends sometimes come down for noisy weekends of surfing and partying. Ruth finds herself quite looking forward to these weekends, although Flint hates the smell of dope and Kate is kept awake all night by N-Dubz remixes.

Bob will be back in July but Ruth knows that this June is probably as good as it will get. By August the sky will be grey and the streets of King’s Lynn full of bored school-children looking for distraction. But now, in term-time with exams in full swing, the unfeeling sun shines for day after unbelievable day. Ruth feels sorry for the children but the good weather has come at the perfect time for her. June is the month of their annual university dig which, this year, is taking place at a Roman site near Swaffham. Ruth teaches forensic archaeology, her students are mainly postgraduates from overseas, and it seems unfair to expose them to Norfolk in the winter or even the spring. So the June dig will be their first practical assignment. For Ruth, too, it’s her first dig for a while and one which is close to her heart. The Roman remains, which promise to be part of a sizeable settlement, were first discovered by Max Grey, an archaeologist at Sussex University and Ruth’s … But, as ever, at the thought of defining her relationship with Max, Ruth’s mind skitters away in a panic.

Kate has finished throwing her pasta around and she totters off to look for Flint. Ruth follows, glancing at her watch. Seven o’clock. If she can keep Kate busy for another half hour, she’ll sleep well tonight. Ruth feels pretty tired herself. It’s been a long time since she’s spent the whole day in the open air. She enjoys teaching archaeology but her real love is digging. She loves the mixture of painstaking order and backbreaking work, hauling earth about like a navvy one minute and dusting the sand away from a shard of bone the next. She loves the sight of a neat trench, its sides perfectly straight, the soil below exposed in clear layers. She remembers the moment, here on the Saltmarsh, when she found the body of an Iron Age girl, a bracelet of grass still around one wrist. That was the day when she first met DCI Harry Nelson.

Kate discovers Flint in the back garden and chases him through the blackberry bushes. Ruth sits on the grass and watches them. She thinks of Max and Nelson and Dan. She was never in love with Dan but, right now, their friendship seems sharper and sweeter than any love affair. She can picture Dan’s face perfectly whereas she would have difficulty recalling the features of Peter, the man she lived with for almost ten years. Similarly, her university years suddenly seemed bathed in a light much brighter than the dusky twilight glow in the garden. She thinks of Gordon Square, the University of London Union, beer at a pound a pint, the night bus, Bilal’s kebab shop, the sound of a radio playing on a still afternoon, Sonia singing ‘You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You’. Why hadn’t she kept in better touch with Dan? She knows that as a working-class girl from South London she had always felt slightly in awe of him, the son of wealthy Islington intellectuals. She remembers that Dan had played the piano to almost concert standard, had been able to tell off-colour jokes in several languages, had spent a year teaching English in Japan. They had been friends and classmates, but in other respects they were worlds apart. When did she last see Dan? She thinks it was at Caz’s wedding. She recalls Dan jamming on a piano with a glamorous girl draped around him like a stole. ‘Keep in touch’, he’d said, scribbling his number on a page ripped from a cheque book. She’d kept the page for years (cheque book! who writes cheques now?) but had never dialled the number.