*

As soon as she sees Caz, Ruth realises that she needn’t have worried about looking good. She’s clearly out of her league. Caz’s whole lifestyle oozes sophistication and laid-back style, from the rambling Victorian house to her beautifully cut jeans and crisp white shirt, to the photogenic offspring seen scattered in photo frames around the house.

‘How old are your children?’ asks Ruth, hanging her wet cagoule on a curly coat stand (it started raining roughly five minutes into her walk).

‘Fifteen, twelve and eight,’ says Caz. ‘Pete’s taken them sailing but they’ll be back after lunch. Pete’s dying to catch up with you.’

Ruth and Kate follow Caz into a dauntingly perfect kitchen, all islands and French windows and retro chrome. There is even a sofa and a piano, displaying a Grade 5 scales book. Ruth feels sunk into inadequacy. Not only has Caz got a fifteen-year-old child (something chronologically possible but, to Ruth, almost miraculous) but she’s got children who play Grade 5 piano and go sailing. Sailing! Who on earth does that on a Tuesday morning?

‘How is Pete?’ she asks. Pete was also at UCL; he studied maths and played rugby. But, even so, he wasn’t a bad bloke.

‘Fine,’ says Caz. ‘Going bald, longing for retirement. Aren’t we all?’

Ruth doesn’t know how to answer that one. She never thinks about retirement, except as a far-off dream involving a lake in Norway. She’s only forty-two, and at this rate she’ll have to carry on working into her seventies to pay for Kate to go to university. Are there really people who retire in their forties?

Caz gets out a basket of toys for Kate and she plays happily on the floor. Caz crouches down next to her, helping her assemble a wooden rail track. The trains are battered and chipped, obviously much-loved family heirlooms.

‘Oh, you are lucky, Ruth,’ says Caz. ‘Having one this age. I’d give anything to go back.’

Ruth takes this with a pinch of salt, looking round Caz’s perfect kitchen. If she had a baby, the house and Caz herself would probably look a bit different. Ruth reckons that those jeans are a size eight.

Caz makes coffee in a professional-looking machine that takes up half her working surface. She gets out carrot cake and animal-shaped biscuits for Kate.

‘So, Ruth,’ she says, perching on a chrome stool that looks like something from Happy Days. ‘What are you doing these days? It seems like ages since I saw you.’

Ruth feels uncomfortable. She’s always acutely aware of how dull her life sounds to others. ‘Oh, not much,’ she says, watching Kate enact a high-speed rail crash. ‘Still working at the university. The head of department’s a bit of a pain but the students are lovely and I get to do a few digs.’

‘How do you manage with Kate?’ asks Caz. ‘Have you got a nanny?’

A nanny? She’s speaking a different language again. ‘No,’ says Ruth, ‘but I’ve got a child-minder. She’s very good. Very flexible.’

‘What about Kate’s father?’’ asks Caz. ‘Are you still with him?’

‘No,’ says Ruth. ‘We were never really together but he does see Kate.’

‘Who was that I spoke to on the phone?’ asks Caz. ‘He sounded nice.’ When Caz rang up to arrange this meeting she had, of course, got Cathbad, who had talked at length about the magical powers of sea air.

‘Cathbad. He’s just a friend.’

Caz looks at her curiously, head on one side, the sun catching the expensive highlights in her short hair. Is my life as alien to her as hers is to me, wonders Ruth. All the same, it’s lovely to see Caz again. Within minutes they are off down memory lane, reminiscing about Dan and university and the day that Roly dressed up as a nun for rag week.

‘Dear Roly,’ says Caz. ‘I haven’t seen him for ages, have you?’

‘No, just cards at Christmas,’ says Ruth. ‘He’s living in Edinburgh now.’

‘Still with Christian?’

‘I think so,’ says Ruth. ‘Do you think Roly knows about Dan?’

‘I don’t suppose so. Why?’

‘Oh, just that Dan mentioned him in the letter he wrote to me. He asked about you, Roly and Val.’

‘Well, that was our group at uni, wasn’t it? The four of us.’

Ruth thinks about the four of them – sardonic Caz, sweet Roly, easy-going Val, earnest Ruth – how is it possible that they have lost touch like this? But Roly is in Scotland and Caz and Val lost to the land of marriage and motherhood. And Dan, Dan who was always too cool for their group, is lost forever.

‘It’s so strange that he wrote to you,’ says Caz. ‘Just before he died.’

‘I know,’ says Ruth. She doesn’t mention her recurring nightmare that Dan is calling for her help, trapped in some nightmare hyperspace between life and death. She thinks of his answerphone message: I’ll get back to you. Promise. She tries to rid herself of the notion that Dan will, in some way, get back to her.

‘It’s been odd,’ she says. ‘Meeting his colleagues. Looking at his archaeology. I keep thinking that I’ll be able to discuss it all with him.’

‘What was the great discovery?’ asks Caz, who is now putting together a gourmet lunch with what looks like superhuman ease. On the floor, Kate slams her trains into each other. She’s as bad a driver as her father.

Ruth hesitates. She has told Caz only that the university wanted her to look at a discovery Dan had made. She considers telling Caz the whole story, about King Arthur, the Raven God, the awful suspicion that Dan was murdered. But then she thinks of the text messages, the fear in Clayton Henry’s face. It’s better for Caz if she doesn’t know.

‘It was a temple,’ she says. ‘On the outskirts of Ribchester.’

‘There’s lots of Roman stuff there,’ says Caz. ‘I took the kids to the museum once.’

‘Yes, it’s a well-known site,’ says Ruth, ‘but this temple’s interesting for a few reasons. It’s in the Roman style but Dan thought it was built after the Romans withdrew from Britain. And it’s dedicated to a god in the form of a raven.’

‘An unkindness of ravens,’ says Caz.

‘What?’

‘That’s the collective noun for ravens,’ says Caz, drizzling oil and shredding basil. ‘Like a murder of crows.’

‘Jesus,’ says Ruth. ‘What is it about these birds?’

‘I don’t like birds,’ says Caz. ‘I think I saw that Hitchcock film at an impressionable age. I don’t like the way they gather on the telegraph lines. It’s as if they’re waiting for something.’

‘I live near a bird sanctuary,’ says Ruth. ‘They’re very beautiful sometimes.’ She thinks about her ex-neighbour, David, who was the warden of the sanctuary. He loved the birds; it was just humans who were the problem.

‘How are you getting on with Dan’s colleagues?’ asks Caz. ‘Are they being helpful?’

Ruth thinks about Guy and Elaine at the barbeque, Elaine’s antipathy and Guy’s bid for ownership. She thinks about Clayton Henry drinking champagne in the rosy hue of the marquee and staring glumly at his tea in the backstreet cafe.

‘They’re an odd bunch,’ she says. ‘The head of department only really cares about making money out of Dan’s find. One of his colleagues was really nice and genuinely devastated about his death. The others seemed a bit … I don’t know … I wondered how much they really cared about Dan. I was going to ask – were any of them at his funeral?’

Caz pauses, pine nuts in hand. ‘I think so. There was a man and a blonde woman. She seemed very upset. I remember wondering if she was a girlfriend. She didn’t come back to the hotel with the rest of us. I wondered if she didn’t want to meet Dan’s ex-wife.’

Guy and Elaine, thinks Ruth. Or Sam and Elaine. Was Elaine Dan’s girlfriend? It’s possible, she is glamorous enough in a hard-faced way. That might explain her attitude towards Ruth and her rather brittle behaviour at the party. At any rate, she at least had been sad at the funeral. And what about Guy? Where does he fit in? He seemed very close to Elaine, rushing over to comfort her when she was crying. Is he her boyfriend or just a devoted follower?