Now Ruth puts some shopping down on the round kitchen table. It’s one o’clock and she wonders whether Cathbad and Kate will already have had their lunch. Should she make a salad, just in case? Put on some potatoes to bake? She is trying to take her turn with the cooking but Cathbad is so much better at it than she is. Last night he made a wonderful vegetarian lasagne and, when she opens the fridge, she sees that another delicious dish is already in there, neatly covered in clingfilm. Really, Cathbad would make someone a wonderful husband.

As the house is quiet, she decides to do a bit of work. She opens her laptop and clicks on her inbox. She has sent messages to a few labs that she knows, hoping that Dan might have used them for his isotopic analysis. Maybe one of them will have answered. But there are only two new emails: one from Max enclosing a jokey picture of his dog, Claudia, in a hard hat and one from a company called University Pals. Where has she seen that name before? She clicks onto the message. ‘Hi Ruth! Your friends from University College London, Archaeology 89 miss you. Why not get back in touch? Just click on the link below.’

Ruth looks at the email with its cheery message of emotional blackmail. Why does it give her a slightly uneasy feeling? Because she first heard from this company the day after she heard of Dan’s death? Because it brings back memories, not only of Dan, but of Caz, Val and Roly, the friends who were once central to her life but have now, somehow, become lost to her? She is going to see Caz tomorrow. Maybe that will help put things in perspective. They can talk about Dan, maybe find a way in which they can resurrect their old friendship or, better still, forge a new one. Ruth bets that Caz would never join a site calling itself ‘University Pals’.

She is so deep in the past that when her phone rings she assumes it must be Caz. But it’s Max.

‘Hi, Ruth. How’s it going?’

‘Hi, Max.’ She starts to relax. Max sounds so cheerful and normal that she’s suddenly incredibly grateful to him for not being a shadowy figure from her past or a sinister one from her present. Besides, she wants to tell him about Dan’s discovery.

Max is fascinated, as she knew he would be.

‘I’ve never seen a temple dedicated to a raven god but the Romans were good at this, taking a local religious cult and making it their own. It’s one of the ways they assimilated. Sometimes they even combined a Roman and a native God, Minerva and Sulis, for example, in Bath. How old is your temple?’

‘Dan thought mid to late fifth century.’

‘Interesting.’ Ruth can hear a genuine note of excitement in his voice. ‘The Romans banned ancient religions in 391 AD and Christianity became the established religion. But, of course, by 410 AD they’d left. There must have been plenty of belief in the old religions left. And, of course, the further north you go, the less Roman people were. Up there, you’re near the very outposts of the empire. They might have had Roman roads and Roman engineering but they were still natives at heart.’

‘What about the inscription? Could it really be King Arthur?’

‘Depends who King Arthur was,’ says Max, echoing Clayton Henry. ‘But certainly some historians think he was a Romano-British figure. Also the raven link could fit. There’s a tradition of Britishness about ravens; think of the legend that if the ravens leave the Tower of London, Britain will fall. Your Roman chap could be using the raven as a symbol of British unity against the Picts, the Celts and the Saxons.’

Rex Arthurus, thinks Ruth. Britannorum Rex. King Arthur. King of the Britons. Aloud, she says, ‘There’s a legend that Arthur’s spirit left his body in the form of a raven.’

‘There you are then. It all fits. Have you seen the bones?’

Ruth explains about the two sets of bones. ‘My guess is that the original skeleton is missing and these other bones were put in its place.’

Max whistles. ‘But why?’ he says. ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Ruth. ‘But I do know that someone wants to stop me looking at the bones, Arthur’s bones. I don’t know why or even who’s behind it. There’s lots of weird stuff going on at the university.’

‘It sounds a bit serious,’ says Max. ‘Look, I can come up next week if you want. I could take a look at the bones, maybe scare off the bad guys.’

Ruth is silent for a moment, watching two seagulls fight over the crumbs Cathbad put out in the garden that morning. Why doesn’t she want Max to come to Lytham? Is it because she still doesn’t want to surrender Dan’s discovery to his expertise? Is it because he used the words ‘bad guys’ as if the whole thing is some silly children’s game? Or is it just because she doesn’t want to see him? Not enough, anyway.

‘Let’s talk about it nearer the time,’ she says at last. ‘I’d better go now. I think I can hear Kate and Cathbad coming back.’

CHAPTER 15

Caz lives in St Anne’s, the posh part of Lytham where the houses all look as if they are made out of Lego. It’s quite a long walk, but since Cathbad has taken the car to visit Pendragon Ruth has no choice but to stride out with Kate in her pushchair. When Cathbad first asked if he could have the car, Ruth had quite fancied the idea of a long, bracing walk, but when Tuesday morning dawned it was a grey blustery day with the promise of rain in the clouds.

‘Are you sure you don’t mind walking?’ asked Cathbad at breakfast. ‘What if it rains?’

‘It’ll be OK,’ said Ruth heartily. ‘Kate won’t shrink, will she?’

She didn’t want Cathbad to change his plans. She knew he was worried about Pendragon and, besides, she didn’t want to be the sort of pathetic woman who can’t walk for half an hour in the rain. Her own mother has never learnt to drive but Ruth remembers, as a child, accompanying her all over London, on buses and trains sometimes, but usually on foot. ‘Come on, Ruth,’ she’d say. ‘Best foot forward.’ Ruth used to wonder which was the favoured foot, as her mother never specified, but, it has to be said, in those days both feet worked pretty well.

Now, she checks that the rain cover is on the pushchair and sets out, intrepid in her yellow cagoule. It’s not quite the sophisticated image that she wanted to present to Caz but you can’t have everything. Cathbad has already driven off in the Renault. ‘I’ll be back this evening,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Pendragon is OK really. It’s just that he seemed worried, all that business with the gun …’

‘He’s got Thing to protect him,’ Ruth pointed out.

‘That dog’s as soft as they come,’ said Cathbad. ‘Still, I’m glad Pen’s got some company. He’s a funny bloke, a bit prone to black moods.’

He’s a druid, Ruth wanted to say, of course he’s odd. He wears white robes and leaves gifts out for a witch who died four hundred years ago. But she didn’t say any of this because, despite being a druid, Cathbad had unblocked the sink that morning. As she trudges along the coast road she thinks about the phrase ‘black moods’. Isn’t there another phrase, about having a black dog on your shoulder? A black dog sounds a bit like a witch’s familiar. She remembers Max once telling her that the Romans sacrificed black animals, particularly dogs, to Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. Black birds too, she remembers, thinking of the Raven God and the birds’ bones found in the temple at Ribchester. Animals and birds are everywhere in language and mythology, something that probably started as soon as the first primitive man and dog decided to team up together. Cats too. As far back as the Egyptians, cats have been found buried with honour. Ruth thinks of her own familiar, her beloved Flint, now being looked after by Bob Woonunga, a man who believes that the world was created by a sacred rainbow snake. Maybe humans need animals to help them understand the world. Certainly it’s hard to see what else cats do for humans, aside from looking cute and killing the odd mouse. But then, thinks Ruth, pushing her untidy hair back inside her cagoule hood, looking cute has always had too high a value in society.