THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

mittens. She is sound asleep.
    ‘I hadn’t got time to make other arrangements,’ says Ruth.
    ‘What about Shona?’
    ‘She’s teaching.’
    Nelson knows he can’t say any more. Not here. He glares at Ruth and crunches away across the shingle. He doesn’t like this beach; it feels claustrophobic somehow, with the cliffs looming on one side and that monstrosity of a house on the other. He looks across at the turrets of Sea’s End House. Presumably that’s where Whitcliffe’s mate lives. Never trust a man who flies the Union Jack. Everything is so bloody grey – grey stone, grey sea, grey sky. Nelson has a very clear idea of what the seaside should look like, a vision that stays remarkably true to his native Blackpool – sand, big dippers and donkeys. Not this God-forsaken pile of rubble in the middle of nowhere. There’s not even a slot machine, for heaven’s sake.
    At the far side of the bay there is an opening in the cliff, a sort of cleft about a metre wide. The mad Irishman Ted is there, clearing stones away with a shovel. Trace is there too, talking into her phone. Nelson sees Clough give her a little wave. Pathetic.
    ‘Top of the morning to you,’ Ted greets him.
    ‘Is this where the skeletons were found?’
    ‘Yes, in this recess. The opening was blocked off by a rock fall. I’ve cleared most of it away now.’
    ‘We’ve started on the trench.’ Ruth appears next to him. ‘It’s difficult because there’s not much space to dig.’
    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