by F. G. Cottam
‘I know those tyre tracks,’ Martin said, quietly, so that the rest of the team, already digging and sifting below them, wouldn’t hear. ‘They weren’t here when we left yesterday evening. Grayling came back for some reason last night. He rolled up, parked over there for a bit, turned around and then exited the site the way he’d come.’
Jane nodded. Reading the ground was one of their incidental skills. A reasonably competent archaeology student couldn’t help but become a fair tracker. The heavy rainfall made it easier. And the Defender’s tyre tread was gnarled and distinctive. Her first thought was to wonder not what Grayling had been doing, but whether Adam had been in the Land Rover’s passenger seat alongside him.
‘Something’s up,’ Martin said. ‘I think they’ve found something here. I think they’ve found something significant.’
‘They?’
‘The Prof and lover boy.’
Jane decided she would ignore this taunt. Martin knew she fancied Adam because she’d confided the fact. It hadn’t occurred to her at the time, but it did now, that this might have been a tactless admission. On the other hand, he might just be hung-over. She had heard him come in the previous night as she drifted off to sleep, noisily drunk after a pub pool-fest fuelled by cheap lager.
She looked around. She peered over the edge of the deep excavation. Then, also speaking quietly, she said, ‘There’s nothing significant to find. No battles were fought here. No religious ceremonies were celebrated. The people who lived here did so at a subsistence level. Their lives were less a statement than an apology for existing at all.’
‘Agreed,’ Martin said.
‘That’s why Grayling chose the site, and you’ve seen the dreary evidence over the past fortnight for yourself. We are here to endure a test of our commitment. And to have it proven to us that archaeology is dirty and dull and not remotely glamorous or romantic.’
‘Or even remotely interesting.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Martin said.
‘Jesus, Martin, look around,’ she said. She drained the last of her coffee. ‘This was never even a route to anywhere. It isn’t as though something could have been dropped accidentally and lost. Get real, for God’s sake. No returning Crusade knights; no marauding robber barons and no outlaws, because there was never anything in this vicinity worth the trouble of stealing.’
He smiled and exhaled. His breath, in this proximity, smelled of the stale drink of the previous evening. It was one of the side effects of not smoking – and she had not smoked for over twelve hours now – your sense of smell quite rapidly improved. Objectively, Martin was very good looking, with his tousled hair and precise features. But he could be intellectually arrogant and that was an unattractive trait.
He began to walk away from the excavation and gestured for her to follow him. She did so, somewhat reluctantly. He was headed to where he had just said Grayling’s Land Rover had parked on its mysterious visit of the previous night. ‘You’re making the mistake of confining yourself to a single time frame,’ he said. ‘And you’re thinking in clichéd scenarios. How much do we actually know about the past?’
‘Quite a lot,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘But only in purely forensic terms. We know what people ate and weighed and died of. We know about bone density and tooth decay and rates of venereal infection and how tall they were. We know the type of textiles they wore. We’ve got X-ray and spectral analysis and of course, we’ve got carbon dating. But we know nothing, really. From the Neolithic period to the end of the Dark Ages is pretty much guesswork and speculation.’
‘There have been some significant finds,’ Jane said.
Martin nodded. ‘And all of them have raised more questions than answers. Take your father’s theory about Stonehenge. All very elegant and persuasive, but we don’t know. And I for one don’t think we ever will.’
Jane frowned. In the quiet of the dripping forest, in that ancient and slightly desolate place, Martin’s argument sounded convincing. But it also sounded weirdly defeatist. He was belittling what they did. He was saying that they were beaten before they began.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘That I’m on the wrong course, right?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘I think Adam stumbled upon something that confounded the professor. I think Grayling told him to keep the fact of the discovery to himself.’
‘And where do you think Adam is now?’
‘Well, he isn’t playing glorified postman, that’s for sure. Gone off to get a second opinion, I should think, as to the veracity of the find.’
Jane said nothing. She had not yet had a reply to her text. Her phone was in the bag over her shoulder. She would have heard it.
‘I think the past is stranger and more alien than we can imagine,’ Martin said. He looked at her. ‘That’s all, Jane. I think its mysteries are likely terrifying and probably quite beyond our scope. I think that Grayling was frightened by whatever Adam found. But the one thing I’m bloody sure of is that Adam found something.’ They had stopped. ‘Look at that,’ he said, gesturing. From inside her bag, her mobile signalled an incoming text. In front of her, there was a patch of disturbed earth beyond and framed by the boughs of the two ash trees flanking it. At its centre lay a litter of black feathers and the pink bones of something freshly picked over. She walked between the trees, on to the afflicted ground. Tufts of white, infant wool were all that was left of a pelt.
‘Carrion,’ Jane said. ‘That’s all. Strange, though.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Martin said. ‘There’s something going on here.’
‘You got drunk last night and you’re suffering for it this morning and in a grouchy mood,’ Jane said.
‘Guilty on all counts,’ Martin said. ‘But Adam found something, and I don’t think it should have been there for him to find.’
‘Let’s get back,’ Jane said. ‘The others will have us down as slackers if we don’t start digging soon.’ Martin looked at her and smiled and nodded. They turned to go. Jane took a last look at the remains on the ground before they did. She thought the arrangement of black feathers and pale bones and the whisper of downy wool there had a pagan, sacrificial aspect.
‘Perhaps you should ask him – your picturesque friend – when he returns.’
‘He’s your friend too. And it’s bitchy to call him that.’
‘Why? He is picturesque. Unless it’s his mind you’re attracted to.’
‘Shut up.’
She was surprised at this reaction in Martin to the development of the previous night. She had not even been sure of his sexual inclination. He’d never declared a preference. He was enigmatic, she had always thought deliberately so. She didn’t even know how he knew about what had happened.
Obviously he did. Someone must have seen them and told him this morning. Student hostels were places short on privacy and long on gossip. And it wasn’t as if their group had a cache of important finds to occupy their conversation. He was right, though. She should ask Adam about his absence when he returned. Because Martin was right, also, that there was something mysterious going on.
The problem was that Adam was not due back until tomorrow afternoon. Jane was not prepared to wait until then. She would ask Professor Grayling outright if anything remarkable had occurred. She would do so today.
She was curious too about the text she had just been sent. Careful to ensure that Martin could not overlook the display, she read the reply Adam had sent her from his seat aboard the train she now believed wasn’t taking him to Cambridge at all.
How would she tackle Grayling? Head on, was how. She would ask him about the tracks the Land Rover had left. He could either admit or deny it. If he admitted it he would be obliged to explain. If he denied it he would confirm that he was hiding something.
She couldn’t really imagine him doing that. It seemed totally out of character. He had never struck her as a cloak and dagger sort. Though he
was handsome and in great shape for a man of his age and had that deadpan wit, he was an academic, not a spy. But she had to concede that his clandestine visit to the site with Adam riding shotgun seemed, itself, improbable. She was looking forward to hearing a truthful account of exactly why it had occurred. Except that by mid-afternoon, Professor Grayling had still not appeared at the site.
At mid-afternoon, while Jane and her course mates sifted and searched through the rich Scottish loam of the forest, Grayling was still in his hotel room. He was not involved in some administrative task and his mind was a long way removed from the Bronze Age and the present goings-on at the site. He was not thinking about archaeology at all.
He was thinking about twentieth-century history and in particular about the origin and consequences of the Great War. Like every archaeologist, he was fascinated by the remote past and knowledgeable about ancient history. But he was also a lot better versed in military history than most of his peers. This was partly a consequence of his personal experience.
Grayling had come to archaeology relatively late. He had not taken his degree until he was in his late twenties since he had spent the first part of his professional life in the army. He was a young officer serving in military intelligence and seconded to a Middle Eastern posting when archaeology first began to fascinate him.
Jane was wrong about him in one vital particular. He had been a spy, of sorts. He knew a great deal about what she thought of as the world of cloak and dagger.
As Grayling continued to ponder on the cost and repercussions of the war, he thought about the way in which it reverberated through the following decades, triggering the other catastrophic events that made the century in which it was fought perhaps the bleakest in recent human history.
Estimates varied and statistics were never totally reliable, but the casualty figures Grayling had listed were not far wide of the mark. The Great War had left sixteen million dead and twenty-one million wounded, and many of those – the gassed and crippled and the amputees – were left permanently maimed.
Trench conditions, the overcrowding and absence of proper hygiene, had fostered the spread of the Spanish flu epidemic, and the soldiers had taken the virus home after the armistice aboard their troop ships. It had then killed another fifty million victims in its rapid spread around the globe.
The Great War had accelerated the unrest in Russia that led to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Bolshevism had evolved into Stalinism. And Stalin had killed over thirty million Russians with his five-year plans and ethnic cleansing pogroms.
The peace brokered at Versailles in 1919 had been seen as vindictive by the defeated Germans and engendered the unrest that eventually enabled Hitler to come to power. National Socialism required war. It was an ideological necessity. It cleaned the soul and fired the will of the nation. Hitler got his war and the death toll in that six-year, mechanized conflict had been seventy-eight million.
At his hotel room desk, in front of his laptop computer screen, Grayling shook his head as he sipped the coffee that he had allowed to grow cold in its cup. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to five. Adam Parker would surely have arrived in Brighton, but he would have to wait a while before his audience with Doctor McGuire.
Grayling would have been able to guess at the fencing and boxing without his pub interrogation. It had been part of his intelligence training. You looked for it in a potential adversary. You became sensitive to strength and balance and the capacity for swift and deadly movement.
Adam moved with a wary agility entirely at odds with the muddy, bookish discipline of archaeology, and his physical strength was obvious.
A week earlier one of the students had lost her footing on the lip of the deep excavation and after a moment of flailing for balance, she had toppled downwards, head first. Adam had risen from where he knelt and caught and righted her in what had looked like one deft movement.
It was genetic, this quality, Grayling decided. It could not be otherwise. It was about muscle and bone density rather than size. Burly was the last word he would have used to describe Adam’s physique. But the strength was there. And the professor thought that the boy would likely require every ounce of it over the course of what was going to confront him.
By six o’clock, Jane had just about tolerated enough. Martin had taken advantage of Grayling’s absence from the site and left at five. She rose and brushed dried mud from her knees. Almost everyone else had gone.
Martha Collier would drive the stragglers back in the minibus when they had cleaned and covered up, Big Martha who would have broken her neck the week before if Adam Parker hadn’t been so alert when her ample shape had toppled head first into the excavation.
The tidying and securing of the site would take about twenty minutes. Jane decided that she would go and take another look at that strange spot a hundred yards away that she had examined with Martin that morning. There was no one there now, she saw, as she climbed the ladder to ground level and looked across the forest floor.
The sun had shone palely above them for most of the day, and though dusk was approaching now, the ground was firmer under her feet than it had been in the morning. There was no wind and the ferns thickening about her as she left the clearing and approached the trees could have been frozen, so still were they in the absence of any breeze.
The odour of tree bark sharpened in her nostrils and she noticed how many of the trees were mottled by moss and lichen and how many were swollen at the bases of their trunks by parasitic blotches of yellow fungi. She had not previously thought of the forest as a place of death. She was thinking it now.
With every step she took the silence and gloom seemed to deepen, as though she was provoking both effects herself, simply by drawing nearer to the place. She had the strong intuition that the air would lighten and the forest sounds amplify back into life if she started to walk backwards in retreat.
She paused in her progress. She had an even stronger intuition that someone was observing her. She turned her head. She could still clearly see the paraphernalia of the dig, the metal posts that moored the plastic sheeting and the wooden warning sign that marked the excavation.
She had thought that perhaps Martha Collier was rounding up stragglers for the minibus ride back and had spotted her and she had sensed Martha’s scrutiny. But there was no one.
Jane started moving again. Her eyes focused on the spot between the two ash trees where the pagan litter of the morning had lain. The ground there was not flat, she observed. It formed a shallow, circular depression. It looked a little like a bomb or shell crater grown over and now barely noticeable.
She had seen such craters on battlefield sites years earlier on a school trip to Flanders. She did not know how she could have missed this feature in the morning with Martin. But Martin had missed it too. And this made her think with a cold suddenness that perhaps it had not been there then for them to see.
She was aware that her progress towards the spot had slowed. She felt that the silence had somehow thickened the air. It was as though she struggled through it, her feet trailing the ground heavily. She felt watched and weighed upon and almost overcome by a feeling of dread.
It required all her physical will to keep on approaching the place. The trees were in motion, she saw. Their leafless autumn branches were not moving, there was not even the whisper of a breeze to shift them. Their skins were moving, rippling under the moss and lichen in a manner impossible and revolting to witness.
A bark of laughter stopped her. It came from her left. She turned her head and looked. And she recognized Adam with a surge of relief that thinned quickly to fear and then to something close to horror.
The figure was that of a man. He was very tall. His hair was the exact chestnut shade of Adam’s hair but much longer, falling from his bare head to halfway down his chest. His face wore Adam’s features. But they were contorted into a leer of cruel amusement and the eyes fixed on hers, the familiar grey-green of Adam’s eyes, gazed so cold
ly they provoked a feeling of dismay that caused her to shiver uncontrollably. It was the look of a predator assessing prey. There was no mistaking it. And she was its focus.
She closed her eyes. She could move nothing else; her limbs were petrified. She waited for the loping sound of his stride through the undergrowth, growing louder as the figure approached. She wondered if she could summon a scream. But when she opened her eyes again, the man had gone.
She forced herself to walk to the spot he had occupied a moment before. She needed some proof of him for the sake of her sanity, she thought. She did not want to think herself capable of dreaming up so disturbing a creature.
And it was there. He had left no footprints. But in his absence there was a slight scent, an oily miasma that had no place amid the bark and bracken of an ancient wood. She had not imagined him. That fact provided a sort of relief. But she was halfway back to the dig before the needle pricks of terror stopped tingling in her scalp.
Grayling turned his wrist and looked at his watch. It was almost six-thirty p.m. The watch had been a gift, a parting souvenir from a German special forces colonel after a NATO exercise in the old Cold War days. It was a Sinn and he still wore it on a leather bund military strap. It was a clue as to his old life, but he did not think it one that any of his clever and observant students would pick up on. They lived now in the age of Polish plumbers and Russian oligarchs. It was as though the Cold War had never occurred.
His thoughts were on Northern Europe, but far removed from the power games played out against the old Soviet Bloc. Now he was thinking about the end of the fourteenth century, about the spread of the Black Death and the more subtle psychological and behavioural shifts that had followed the plague itself.
In some ways, Grayling agreed with the sentiments about the past expressed by Martin Prior in his conversation with Jane Dobb much earlier in the day. He thought that the people and events of the distant past were largely unknowable and that whatever scholarly research was carried out, remote times were destined to remain precisely that.