Red Bones (Shetland Quartet 3)

Perez to check that he was following. He nodded. Her voice was very precise, almost as if she was presenting to an academic audience. Perhaps she didn’t know how to speak to anyone else.
    ‘The remains of the building at Setter are bigger than you’d expect for a croft, but there could be reasons for that. Perhaps there were extensive outbuildings, a workshop. The foundation stone we’ve found is even, dressed, it’s not the rough boulders you’d expect to make up the wall of a croft, but that hasn’t provided the proof I was looking for. Today though we made a find that would suggest the inhabitants were much wealthier than they’d have been as crofters. This is a big deal. For me at least. I mean it kind of proves my theory. It makes the whole project worthwhile.’ She gave a sudden wide smile that lit up her whole face. ‘It means I can get funding to extend the project. We should be able to do a full-scale dig over a number of years.’
    ‘So what did you find?’ Sandy managed to drag his attention from Sophie’s body.
    ‘Silver coins. Half a dozen of them. Beautiful and quite intact. I came across one by chance and the others soon after. It’s likely that the floor would have been made of wood, rather than beaten soil, though of course there’s no trace of that now. We can’t tell how the coins got left there. Maybe they slipped through the cracks in the floor and into the hole in the foundation. Maybe they were hidden there. We might find more.’ Hattie took another breath. ‘Two silver coins of the same age were found during a dig at Wilsness, Dunrossness, in Shetland mainland. In the dunes close to the airport. Those coins confirmed the interpretation of that building as a merchant’s house. I’m hoping that this find will do the same for me.’
    ‘Where are the coins now?’
    ‘We’ve taken them to Evelyn. She’s locked them up in a drawer in her desk. Val Turner, the Shetland archaeologist, will come in later and Paul Berglund will be in too.’
    The little Glaswegian came out with food for Hattie and Sophie. Perez watched Sophie slice her steak with complete focus. He thought she was like a man. She didn’t like to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. But now she’d started Hattie was happy to continue talking. ‘We’ll get an expert to look at them of course. I mean they could be more modern, but they look like right to me and Sophie thought so too as soon as she saw them. We ’re both familiar with the Wilsness coins. But we do need Paul’s advice about what we should do next.’ She stopped abruptly and forked a tiny piece of lasagne into her mouth, frowned as she chewed.
    ‘When’s Mr Berglund coming in?’
    ‘Professor Bergland,’ Hattie corrected him. ‘Tomorrow or perhaps the next day. He’d hardly got home when he got our call. He needs a bit of time to sort things out at home. He’s got a young family.’ Perez thought she seemed subdued. Did she resent her supervisor coming in and taking over her project? Or the fact that he hadn’t left immediately to return to Whalsay?
    ‘Are these coins worth anything?’ Sandy asked.
    ‘They’re invaluable.’
    ‘But if I was to try and sell them on the open market?’
    ‘You mean money?’ Hattie seemed startled by the question.
    ‘Aye, money.’ Sandy looked at her as if he was tempted to add, What else would I mean?
    ‘I don’t know. If they were sold at auction to a collector perhaps they would.’
    She seemed uncertain; the whole concept of private collection and trading in artefacts was strange to her. Perez felt a rush of sympathy. She seemed too frail and innocent to be living alone here in Whalsay. Sophie the Sloane Ranger was no sort of guardian. How would Hattie survive in the big world outside? He wanted to ask if she kept in touch with her parents. He imagined a protective mother who’d had to find the courage to let her daughter go, but who had sleepless nights about her, who held her breath every time the phone went in case there’d been a disaster. Because somewhere in Hattie’s history there must be illness or tragedy, he thought. No one got that haunted look if they’d had a happy childhood.
    Curiosity led him to form a question about her family in his head. Your parents must be very proud of you. Will they get a chance to visit the islands?
    Then he heard Fran’s voice, had a very clear picture of her tipping her head to one side, a half-smile, her nose slightly wrinkled as it