The Crossing Places

'It is,' says Ruth calmly. 'I assume that's why you're here?'

'Well, would you be able to tell if they are modern or not?' asks Nelson, again sounding rather belligerent.

'A recent discovery is usually obvious,' says Ruth, 'you can tell by appearance and surface. Older bones are more tricky. Sometimes it's almost impossible to tell fifty-year old bones from two-thousand-year-old. You need radiocarbon dating for that.'

'Professor Galloway is an expert on bone preservation.'

This is Phil again, anxious not to be left out. 'She's worked in Bosnia, on the war graves…'

'Will you come and look?' Nelson interrupts.

Ruth pretends to consider but, of course, she is utterly fascinated. Bones! On the Saltmarsh! Where she did that first unforgettable dig with Erik. It could be anything. It could be a find. It could be…

'You suspect it's a murder?' she asks.

Nelson looks uncomfortable for the first time. 'I'd rather not say,' he says heavily, 'not at the present time. Will you come and look?'

Ruth stands up. 'I've got a lecture at ten. I could come in my lunch break.'

'I'll send a car for you at twelve,' says Nelson.

Much to Ruth's secret disappointment, Nelson does not send a police car complete with flashing blue light.

Instead he appears himself, driving a muddy Mercedes.

She is waiting, as agreed, by the main gate, and he does not even get out of the car but merely leans over and opens the passenger door. Ruth climbs in, feeling fat, as she always does in cars. She has a morbid dread of the seatbelt not fitting around her or of some invisible weight sensor setting off a shrill alarm. 'Twelve and a half stone! Twelve and a half stone in car! Emergency!

Press ejector button.'

Nelson glances at Ruth's rucksack. 'Got everything you need?'

'Yes.' She has brought her instant excavation kit: pointing trowel, small hand shovel, plastic freezer bags for samples, tapes, notebook, pencils, paint brushes, compass, digital camera. She has also changed into trainers and is wearing a reflective jacket. She is annoyed to find herself thinking that she must look a complete mess.

'So you live out Saltmarsh way?' Nelson says, pulling out across the traffic with a squeal of tyres. He drives like a maniac.

'Yes,' says Ruth, feeling defensive though she doesn't know why. 'New Road.'

'New Road!' Nelson lets out a bark of laughter. 'I thought only twitchers lived out there.'

'Well, the warden of the bird sanctuary is one of my neighbours,' says Ruth, struggling to remain polite while keeping one foot clamped on an imaginary brake.

'I wouldn't fancy it,' says Nelson. 'Too isolated.'

'I like it,' says Ruth. 'I did a dig there and never left.'

'A dig? Archaeology?'

'Yes.' Ruth is remembering that summer, ten years ago.

Sitting around the campfire in the evenings, eating burnt sausages and singing corny songs. The sound of birdsong in the mornings and the marsh blooming purple with sea lavender. The time when sheep trampled their tents at night. The time when Peter got stranded out on the tidal marsh and Erik had to rescue him, crawling on his hands and knees across the mudflats. The unbelievable excitement when they found that first wooden post, proof that the henge actually existed. She remembers the exact sound of Erik's voice as he turned and shouted at them across the incoming tide, 'We've found it!'

She turns to Nelson. 'We were looking for a henge.'

'A henge? Like Stonehenge?'

'Yes. All it means is a circular bank with a ditch around it. Usually with posts inside the circle.'

'I read somewhere that Stonehenge is just a big sundial.

A way of telling the time.'

'Well, we don't know exactly what it was for,' says Ruth, 'but it's safe to say that it involves ritual of some kind.'

Nelson shoots a strange look at her.

'Ritual?'

'Yes, worship, offerings, sacrifices.'

'Sacrifices?' echoes Nelson. He seems genuinely interested now, the faintly condescending note has disappeared from his voice.

'Well, sometimes we find evidence of sacrifices. Pots, spears, animal bones.'

'What about human bones? Do you ever find human bones?'

'Yes, sometimes human bones.'

There is silence and then Nelson says, 'Funny place for one of those henge things, isn't it? Right out to sea.'

'This wasn't sea then. Landscape changes. Only ten thousand years ago this country was still linked to the continent. You could walk from here to Scandinavia.'

'You're joking!'

'No. King's Lynn was once a huge tidal lake. That's what Lynn means. It's the Celtic word for lake.'

Nelson turns to look sceptically at her, causing the car to swerve alarmingly. Ruth wonders if he suspects her of making the whole thing up.

'So if this area wasn't sea, what was it?'

'Flat marshland. We think the henge was on the edge of a marsh.'

'Still seems a funny place to build something like that.'

'Marshland is very important in prehistory,' explains Ruth, 'it's a kind of symbolic landscape. We think that it was important because it's a link between the land and the sea, or between life and death.'

Nelson snorts. 'Come again?'

'Well, marsh isn't dry land and it isn't sea. It's a sort of mixture of both. We know it was important to prehistoric man.'

'How do we know?'

'We've found objects left on the edge of marshes. Votive hoards.'

'Votive?'

'Offerings to the Gods, left at special or sacred places.

And sometimes bodies. Have you heard of bog bodies?

Lindow Man?'

'Might have,' says Nelson cautiously.

'Bodies buried in peat are almost perfectly preserved, but some people think the bodies were buried in the bogs for a purpose. To appease the Gods.'

Nelson shoots her another look but says nothing. They are approaching the Saltmarsh now, driving up from the lower road towards the visitor car park. Notices listing the various birds to be found on the marshes stand around forlornly, battered by the wind. A boarded-up kiosk advertises icecreams, their lurid colours faded now. It seems impossible to imagine people picnicking here, enjoying icecreams in the sun. The place seems made for the wind and the rain.

The car park is empty apart from a solitary police car.

The occupant gets out as they approach and stands there, looking cold and fed up.

'Doctor Ruth Galloway,' Nelson introduces briskly, 'Detective Sergeant Clough.'

DS Clough nods glumly. Ruth gets the impression that hanging about on a windy marshland is not his favourite way of passing the time. Nelson, though, looks positively eager, jogging slightly on the spot like a racehorse in sight of the gallops. He leads the way along a gravel path marked 'Visitor's Trail'. They pass a wooden hide, built on stilts over the marsh. It is empty, apart from some crisp wrappers and an empty can of coke lying on the surrounding platform.

Nelson, without stopping, points at the litter and barks, 'Bag it.' Ruth has to admire his thoroughness, if not his manners. It occurs to her that police work must be rather similar to archaeology. She, too, would bag anything found at a site, labelling it carefully to give it a context. She, too, would be prepared to search for days, weeks, in the hope of finding something significant. She, too, she realises with a sudden shiver, is primarily concerned with death.

Ruth is out of breath before they find the spot marked out with the blue and white police tape that reminds her of traffic accidents. Nelson is now some ten yards ahead, hands in pockets, head forward as if sniffing the air.

Clough plods behind him, holding a plastic bag containing the rubbish from the hide.

Beyond the tape is a shallow hole, half-filled by muddy water. Ruth ducks under the tape and kneels down to look.

Clearly visible in the rich mud are human bones.

'How did you find this?' she asks.

It is Clough who answers. 'Member of the public, walking her dog. Animal actually had one of the bones in its mouth.'