Elly Griffiths - The House At Sea’s End

There is already a neat trench in the narrow gap between the tall cliffs. Nelson looks at it with pleasure. Annoying though archaeologists can be he admires their way with a trench. His scene-of-crime boys could never get the edges that straight. Then he looks closer. The trench appears to be full of bones.

‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘How many in there?’

‘Just the six, I think,’ says Ruth. She leans over and Nelson looks anxiously at Kate, suspended in her baby sling. How safe were those things anyway…?

‘Any idea how old the bodies are?’ he asks.

‘I think they’re fairly recent,’ says Ruth. ‘Bones buried in sand usually disappear after a few hundred years.’

Not for the first time, Nelson marvels at what archaeologists consider recent. ‘So they could be a hundred years old?’

‘I think it’s likely they’re more modern than that,’ says Ruth cautiously. ‘We’ll do C14 dating. Also there’s hair and teeth. We can run a number of different tests.’

Nelson knows from previous cases that C14, or carbon fourteen dating, measures the amount of carbon left within a body. When we die we stop taking in carbon 14 and it starts to break down so, by measuring the amount of C14 left in a bone, archaeologists can estimate its age. He also knows that dates can vary by as much as a hundred years. This may not seem much to Ruth but it’s not very helpful when deciding whether or not you’re dealing with a recent homicide.

‘Anything else?’ asks Nelson, straightening up.

‘Bodies appear to be adult male, well-built…’ She pauses. ‘They’re bound, back to back. One has what looks like a bullet wound in the thoracic vertebrae, another looks as if he was shot in the back of the head.’

‘Natural causes then,’ says Clough, who is hovering in the background

Trace laughs but Nelson glares furiously at his sergeant. Murder is no laughing matter, whether it occurred twenty, seventy or two thousand years ago.

‘What will you do now?’

‘We’ll expose all the skeletons, then we’ll draw and photograph them in situ. Then we’ll excavate, skeleton by skeleton. They should all be done on the same day.’

‘You can’t dig with a baby round your neck.’

‘I can supervise.’

‘Give her to me.’

‘What?’

‘Give the baby to me. Just for a bit. I’ll sit in the car with her, it’s too cold out here.’

The wind has picked up in the last few minutes. They can hear the waves crashing on the beach and sand blows around them. Kate stirs fretfully.

‘She probably needs feeding,’ says Ruth.

‘Well feed her and then leave her with me. Just for a bit.’

‘Jesus, boss,’ says Clough. ‘Are you setting up as a nanny now?’

‘Just for ten minutes,’ says Nelson. ‘Then it’s your turn.’

Ruth’s first reaction is one of intense irritation, followed by an almost blissful sense of release. As Nelson carefully lifts Kate out of her sling, it is as if Ruth has her old body back, her old self back. She straightens up, feeling the gritty wind full on her face, her hair whipping back. She knows she is smiling.

Kate has had almost a full bottle of milk, her eyelids are drooping. Nelson sits with her in the front seat of the Mercedes, Clough watching open-mouthed from the passenger side.

‘She should go to sleep now,’ says Ruth.

‘If she doesn’t, Cloughie’ll sing her a lullaby,’ promises Nelson.

Kate’s head rests against Nelson’s blue waxed jacket. Her fine dark hair, with its one whorl that never goes in the same direction as the rest, suddenly looks unbearably fragile.

‘I’ll get back to the excavation,’ says Ruth, not moving.

‘Don’t hurry back on our account,’ says Nelson, who is still looking down at Kate.

Ruth finds herself almost running back along the cliff path. She can’t wait to get down to the beach and start work on the trench. She wants to assert her authority on the proceedings, to check that the skeleton sheets are properly filled in, that there is no mixing of bones, that everything is securely bagged and labelled. But, more than that, she wants to be involved. It is over six months since she did any practical archaeology. She knows that Trace thinks that she is using Kate as an excuse not to do her share of the hard work, to ‘supervise’ instead. Ruth is the expert here, she’s entitled to sit back and delegate, but Trace will never know how much Ruth wants to dig, to forget everything in pure physical hard work. She would not have admitted it, but by the time she looks down at the bodies stretched out back-to-back in their sandy grave she has almost forgotten that she has a baby.

The trench is still fairly narrow and Ruth squeezes in with difficulty. Ideally, she’d like more time to look at the context but she knows that the sea is advancing. High tide is at six, and with the stones cleared away the sea will probably come all the way into this inlet. Time to excavate the bodies. First she takes photographs, using a measuring rod for scale. Then she draws the skeletons in plan. Finally, bone by bone, she starts on the first body. As she lifts each bone, Trace records it on the skeleton sheet and marks it with a tiny number in indelible ink. All the bones are present and, as Ruth had thought, there are teeth too; each tooth also has to be numbered and charted. When she comes to the skull, she sees that there is some hair still attached, ashblond, almost the same colour as the sand.

There are fragments of rope around the wrists.

Ted whistles. ‘Their hands were bound.’

‘May be able to get DNA from the rope,’ says Ruth. ‘There could be blood or sweat on it.’

‘Will we get DNA from the bones?’ asks Ted.

‘Maybe,’ says Ruth. ‘But DNA can be contaminated by burial.’

Trace says nothing. She is working efficiently but silently, placing each marked bone in a paper bag.

Ruth looks at the skeleton sheet. She is sure that the bodies are adult males. She can see the brow ridges on the skulls, the pronounced nuchal crest at the back of the head, the large mastoid bones. This first skeleton also has a particularly square jaw. Ruth wonders whether they will be able to get a facial reconstruction done but, as she looks at this skull lying on the tarpaulin with sand blowing around it, she has an uneasy feeling that she knows exactly what its living form would be. A tall man (the long bones show that), blond haired with a jutting chin. A Viking, she thinks, though she knows this is historically unlikely. She thinks again of her first mentor – Erik Anderssen, Erik the Viking.

‘How are you doing?’ She recognises Clough’s voice but does not look up.

‘Okay. First body’s almost out.’

‘Baby’s asleep,’ says Clough, sounding amused. ‘Think the boss is about to drop off too.’

Ruth says nothing but Trace says, slightly bitchily, ‘Never knew Nelson was so soft about babies.’

‘Well, he’s got kids of his own, hasn’t he,’ says Ted, carefully lifting out the second skull.

‘They’re grown up now,’ says Clough. ‘Turning into right stunners.’

Ruth wonders whether Ted has children. She knows very little about him beyond the fact that he went to school in Bolton and is famous for his prodigious drinking. She also thinks it is inappropriate for Clough to refer to Nelson’s daughters, one still at school, as ‘stunners’. She wonders what Trace thinks.

The second body is slightly shorter and the few tufts of hair are dark. When they reach the hands they see that an index finger is missing.

‘Could be very useful, that,’ says Ted.

Ruth agrees. She is almost sure these men were killed within living memory. If that is the case, a distinguishing mark will be very useful.