‘I hope you don’t mind me introducing myself but Professor Henry said that you were a friend of Dan’s.’

‘Yes, I was,’ says Ruth, thinking that the past tense is both sad and appropriate. She was a friend of Dan’s in the past, when they were both young.

‘I’m Sam,’ says the man, extending a hand. ‘Sam Elliot. I was a friend of his too. I just can’t believe that he’s gone.’

‘Nor can I,’ says Ruth. ‘I hadn’t seen him for ages but even so …’ Her voice dies away. Suddenly, surprisingly, she feels close to tears and has to cover up by checking on Kate, who is sitting on the very edge of the pink castle, rocking to and fro while the other children caper around her.

When she turns back, Sam Elliot is also looking sombre but he smiles when he sees her looking at him. His face isn’t made for sadness, all the lines go upwards. Ruth can easily imagine him being friends with Dan.

‘This is quite a party,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ says Sam. ‘It’s a yearly event, Clayton’s barbeque. He always has a big do at Christmas as well.’

Ruth tries to imagine Dan at one of Clayton Henry’s parties, playing the piano, drinking champagne, flirting with the prettiest women. She remembers him as something of a party animal and says as much to Sam.

‘Funny,’ he says. ‘I think of Dan as rather quiet. Always friendly but a bit aloof until you got to know him. Were you at university with him?’

‘Yes, at UCL.’

‘I was at Leeds,’ says Sam. ‘It seems a hundred years ago now. Mind you, a hundred years is nothing to an archaeologist, is it?’

‘Are you an archaeologist?’

Sam shakes his head. ‘I teach modern history. I was one of Dan’s colleagues. As Clayton may have told you, we cover everything from Boadicea to Adolf Hitler.’

‘I’m a teacher too,’ says Ruth. ‘I teach forensic archaeology at North Norfolk.’

‘I know,’ says Sam. ‘Clayton said you’d come to look at Dan’s discovery.’

‘Oh, do you know about that?’ asks Ruth, surprised. From Clayton’s manner, she had assumed that the whole thing was a deadly secret although, come to think of it, Dan could never have managed an excavation that size without some help.

Sam’s reply confirms this. ‘I was on the first dig with Dan,’ he says. ‘We were all volunteers then. Later he got a grant and was able to get the professionals in. It was really exciting though, when we first realised that there was something important buried there.’

Ruth knows this excitement well. She remembers when they had first discovered the wooden henge on the beach in Norfolk. The incredible feeling of something rising from the ground, something that had been hidden from sight for thousands of years, the sense of looking at the world through ancient eyes. All the same, she wonders exactly how much Sam knows.

‘Did he tell you about the bones?’ she asks.

‘Bones?’ says Sam. ‘Oh, they found a tomb, didn’t they? That was later. When I was digging Dan was just happy to have found the temple. The Temple of the Raven God. He was going to write a book about it.’

So Sam didn’t know about King Arthur. For reasons of his own, Dan had kept that quiet. But he had still been excited enough to think about writing a book. Did he start the book and, if so, where is it now? On the missing laptop, she supposes.

‘The Temple of the Raven God?’ says a mocking voice. ‘What nonsense are you talking now, Sammy?’

A man and a woman are walking towards them. They look like something out of Brideshead Revisited, the man in white trousers and shirt, the woman in a short, rose-patterned dress that makes Ruth feel about a hundred stone.

‘Hi, Elaine,’ says Sam without enthusiasm. ‘Hello, Guy.’

‘Aren’t you going to introduce us?’ says Elaine. Close up, she isn’t so gorgeous. Her hair is dyed blonde and her eyes are too close together.

‘This is Ruth Galloway from the University of North Norfolk.’

‘Oh,’ says Elaine, eyes widening. ‘The famous archaeology expert.’

Ruth registers the mockery but elects to take this at face value.

‘That’s right,’ she says.

‘You’ve come to look at the bones,’ says Guy. His voice is an elaborate upper-class drawl, with traces of Lancashire still clinging to the vowels. Ruth wonders if he was really christened Guy.

‘I didn’t know there were any bones,’ says Sam.

‘Sammy doesn’t know anything about real history,’ says Elaine to Ruth, ‘he only knows about the Second World War and the rise of communism in China. Stuff like that.’

Sam laughs but Ruth thinks he looks rather hurt.

‘It’s a really important discovery,’ says Guy. Something in his tone makes Clayton Henry, who is a few feet away, look over towards them. Ruth thinks that he is going to intervene, but at that moment Kate causes a distraction by falling off the bouncy castle and bursting into noisy tears.

*

Elaine and Guy are post-graduate students. Clayton explains this as they eat lunch in the marquee. There are tables inside too but Ruth elected for the outdoors in case Kate starts one of her food-throwing fits. At the moment, though, she is being angelic, eating potato salad and actually using her spoon. She looks like Little Miss Muffet.

‘We don’t get many graduate students these days, I’m afraid,’ says Clayton, throwing a piece of chicken skin to the drooling bichon frisé. ‘Young people just aren’t interested in history because there’s no money in it. But Guy is very able. He’s ex-Oxbridge actually. Could have had his pick of post-grad places but he chose us. Never really knew why.’ He laughs heartily.

‘What about Elaine?’

Clayton must have detected something in her tone because he looks up, the shrewdness of his expression not completely undermined by the blob of coronation chicken on his chin.

‘You mustn’t take Elaine the wrong way. She’s got an odd manner but she’s a dear girl underneath, a real sweetie.’

Ruth thinks she will reserve judgement on this but nothing in the prancing figure she can see laughing uproariously in the garden, surrounded by admiring men, makes her think ‘sweetie’ exactly.

‘They were talking about Dan’s dig,’ she says. ‘The Temple of the Raven God.’

‘Guy was very involved with the investigations. They both were.’

‘What about Sam?’

‘Sam Elliot? No, he’s a modern history man. He was great friends with Dan though. Devastated at his death. Well, we all were.’

Anything less devastated than the laughing, champagne-swilling crowd in the marquee would be hard to imagine. Still, Ruth supposes that they were upset at the time.

She takes another mouthful of salmon. The food is really delicious, though this hasn’t stopped Kate picking all the spring onions out of the salad and putting them on Ruth’s plate. Now Kate is feeding cocktail sausages to the dog.

‘Don’t,’ says Ruth. ‘It might make him sick.’

‘It won’t,’ says Clayton. ‘He eats what he likes. Spoilt little beggar.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Willoughby. Don’t blame me. It was Pippa’s idea.’

‘It’s a great name,’ says Ruth. ‘We met a dog called Thing the other day.’

‘Thing,’ repeats Kate, patting Willoughby on his curly top-knot.

‘How old is she?’ asks Clayton.

‘Nearly two,’ says Ruth. ‘Do you have children?’

‘Sadly not,’ says Clayton, looking anything but sad. ‘I’ve got a stepdaughter, though, Chloe. She’s away at uni at the moment but I’m a doting dad, I promise you.’

So Pippa was married before. Ruth tries, and fails, to imagine the path that led her to Clayton Henry. She also wonders what happened to Chloe’s father if Clayton can refer to himself as ‘Dad’. Maybe he died and Clayton provided a shoulder to cry on. It’s hard to imagine any other circumstances in which the affable, but distinctly rotund, Clayton would end up with the beautiful Pippa. Still, there’s no doubt that they look happy together and the house is fantastic (she’s had the tour). Cathbad had been delighted to discover that it was built on the site of an old plague pit. He’s probably off somewhere now, communing with the unquiet spirits. She hasn’t seen him for ages.