Dying Fall

fitted in here? Perhaps Fleetwood, where he lived, is a bijou artists’quarter, full of antique shops and espresso bars. But he must still have driven in to Preston every day, past these depressed estates and cheerless parades. Dan, whose parents lived in an elegant town house, each floor crammed with books (Ruth went to a party there once when Dan’s parents were away). Dan, who sometimes wore a dinner jacket over jeans and knew the right way to eat asparagus. How had he coped with a place where the only cafe offers chips with prawn cocktail sauce? Well, maybe his colleagues were brilliant, witty sophisticates. And of course it was here, in the ‘frozen and inhospitable north’ that Dan had made his great find. That would have made up for anything.
    The directions seem clear enough but Ruth gets lost several times, driving into deserted industrial estates and dead-end streets. She stops once to ask the way but she picks a man who doesn’t understand her and clearly thinks she’s rather frightening. At any rate, he backs away before she can finish her sentence. Ruth turns the map upside down, performs a thirty-point turn and retraces her steps. Surely a university would be hard to miss? She drives down another side road and sees a grim industrial building with the words ‘Sickers Tobacco’ painted in vast white letters on one of the walls. This can’t be it, can it? It is. A small sign welcomes visitors to ‘Pendle University: A new way of learning’. Ruth learns later that the students’ nickname for the place is ‘The Fag Factory’.
    Inside, the reception desk sits uncomfortably in a cavernous space, three storeys high. It looks like a prison,thinks Ruth; it even has those inner balconies running round the central atrium, linked by flights of wroughtiron stairs. All it needs is a suicide net. Ruth asks for Clayton Henry, thinking again how odd the name sounds. The receptionist, too, seems to find it strange.
    ‘Who?’ she asks, manoeuvring her chewing gum to the other side of her mouth.
    ‘Clayton Henry.’
    ‘What department?’
    ‘Archaeology.’
    ‘We haven’t got an archaeology department.’
    Ruth stares at her. For one moment she thinks she has imagined the whole thing – Dan dying, Clayton’s invitation, the Raven King, the lot. But Andrea Vickers had seemed to know Clayton Henry quite well (‘He’s quite a character’) and Ruth has an email from him, with directions, printed out in her pocket.
    This last provides the clue. At the bottom of the email are the words ‘History Department’. The receptionist reluctantly concedes that such a department exists and puts through a call. ‘Mr Henry? Visitor for you.’ She then puts down the phone and goes back to her gum, ignoring Ruth altogether.
    There is nothing Ruth can do but wait, hoping the message got through to someone. She walks around the atrium which is decorated – if that is the word – by posters advertising the work of the engineering and chemistry departments. Underground piping, laboratories, men in hard hats, women in white coats. There is no sign thatanything as effete as history – much less archaeology – is even taught here.
    ‘Ruth!’ A figure is scurrying down one of the iron staircases. Ruth looks up to see a smallish, plumpish man coming towards her, both hands outstretched.
    ‘Mr Henry?’ she says.
    ‘Clayton. Please.’ He takes her hand in both of his. For one horrible moment she thinks he might be about to kiss her. ‘So good of you to come.’
    ‘That’s OK.’ Ruth extricates her hand.
    ‘How do you like Andrea’s cottage?’
    ‘It’s lovely,’ says Ruth. ‘Lytham’s very pretty.’
    ‘Lytham? I’ve seen Stone Age burial mounds that are livelier than Lytham.’ He laughs heartily. Ruth smiles. She is surprised to hear him use the term ‘Stone Age’. An archaeologist would usually distinguish between Palaeolithic (old Stone Age), Mesolithic (middle) and Neolithic (new). She begins to suspect that Clayton Henry is not an archaeologist.
    And once they are sitting in his cramped fourth-floor office she finds that her suspicions are correct. Clayton Henry is a historian, and head of a department that includes archaeology and anthropology as well as sociology and classical studies. Dan Golding, described by Henry as ‘one of our archaeologists’, was, in fact, their only archaeologist. ‘It’s only a module, you see,’ said Clayton Henry apologetically. ‘Not many people opt