Dying Fall

expect. But Dan thought this was later. Mid to late 400s, he reckoned.’
    Ruth looks down at the ancient walls, exposed to the wind and the air. It is generally thought that the Romans left Britain between 383 and 410 AD, which would mean that this temple was built after the withdrawal, in the mysterious world of warring tribes, the battle for the soul of Britain, the beginning of the Dark Ages. It would also fit that, whoever lay in this tomb, he was buried rather than cremated. By the first century AD, cremation was already a thing of the past. Her heart beats faster. A temple, built in the Roman style, dedicated to an unknown god – even without King Arthur, this is a thrilling discovery.
    ‘The sarcophagus was here,’ says Henry, lifting a corner of the tarpaulin. ‘Buried about six feet down, under the central altar. The lid was broken, but the piece with the inscription remained almost intact.’
    ‘Where is it now?’ asks Ruth, peering into the trench. She can see the shape of a burial cut into the surrounding soil, a deep rectangular void, and some pieces of heavy stone. Nothing else.
    ‘At the university,’ says Henry. ‘We have a strong-room there. We would have used it for the bones but we felt they needed … well, special treatment.’ Ruth turns to look at him. She wonders why he is being so shifty about the excavation. Did something go wrong?
    ‘There were a few other significant finds,’ he says, rather hurriedly. ‘A carving of a raven with the words Bran and Corvus below it, and a great deal of skeletal matter.’
    ‘Human skeletal matter?’
    ‘No, avian. It looks as if a number of birds were sacrificed here.’
    Offerings to the Raven King, thinks Ruth. She looks around her, at the marshy plain with the wide sky high above. Seagulls are hanging in the air, black against the clouds. If you had to invent a spot for a temple dedicated to a strange pagan bird-deity, this would be the place for it.
    Clayton Henry is still looking slightly embarrassed. He stoops down to brush the mud off his cream trousers. Ruth wonders if he is going to change the subject, but even so she is surprised when what he actually says is,‘Would you like to come to a barbeque at my house on Saturday?’
    ‘Thanks,’ stammers Ruth. ‘But I’ve got my daughter with me and … and a friend.’
    ‘Bring her too,’ says Clayton breezily, leaving Ruth to ponder, once again, on his choice of pronoun.
    *
    Nelson rings just when Ruth is getting into her car. Clayton had driven her back to the university and she is keen to get back to Kate. In fact she almost doesn’t answer the phone.
    Nelson, typically, goes straight onto the attack.
    ‘Where have you been?’ he says. ‘I’ve been ringing your home number for days.’
    ‘I’m on holiday. Just for a week or so.’
    Thank God he doesn’t ask where, instead he says, ‘With Katie?’
    ‘Of course with Kate.’ What does he think she’s done, thinks Ruth, left Kate at home with a week’s supply of nappies? Asked Bob Woonunga to look after her as well as Flint, putting food for them both through the cat flap? And why can’t he ever bloody well get her name right? But she does feel slightly uncomfortable as she’s not sure why she hasn’t told Nelson that she’s in Lancashire. He has a right to know where Kate is, after all. Is it because she thinks it will seem as if she’s stalking him?
Is
she stalking him?
    ‘I talked to Sandy about your friend Dan Golding.’
    ‘What did he say?’
    ‘The fire was definitely arson. Someone pushed petrol-soaked rags through the letterbox.’
    ‘Oh my God. Why would anyone do that?’
    ‘Well, Sandy says there are some funny things going on at Pendle University.’
    ‘What sort of things?’
    ‘Racist groups. Neo-Nazis. White supremacists. They’ve had trouble on campus before.’
    ‘But why would white supremacists want to kill Dan?’
    ‘I don’t know. Sandy thought maybe because he was Jewish.’
    Ruth thinks of her easy-going friend Dan. Can he really have been killed for this most horrible of reasons? She’s not a stranger to racism, she was brought up in Eltham, a south London borough that has its share of such problems. She had already left home by 1993 when a black student called Stephen Lawrence was killed by a gang of white thugs, but she remembers many smaller incidents, taunts in the playground, graffiti on walls, a general sense of anger, bitterness and frustration. She’s seen racism in