THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

straightens up, feeling the gritty wind full on her face, her hair whipping back. She knows she is smiling.
    Kate has had almost a full bottle of milk, her eyelids are drooping. Nelson sits with her in the front seat of theMercedes, Clough watching open-mouthed from the passenger side.
    ‘She should go to sleep now,’ says Ruth.
    ‘If she doesn’t, Cloughie’ll sing her a lullaby,’ promises Nelson.
    Kate’s head rests against Nelson’s blue waxed jacket. Her fine dark hair, with its one whorl that never goes in the same direction as the rest, suddenly looks unbearably fragile.
    ‘I’ll get back to the excavation,’ says Ruth, not moving.
    ‘Don’t hurry back on our account,’ says Nelson, who is still looking down at Kate.
    Ruth finds herself almost running back along the cliff path. She can’t wait to get down to the beach and start work on the trench. She wants to assert her authority on the proceedings, to check that the skeleton sheets are properly filled in, that there is no mixing of bones, that everything is securely bagged and labelled. But, more than that, she wants to be involved. It is over six months since she did any practical archaeology. She knows that Trace thinks that she is using Kate as an excuse not to do her share of the hard work, to ‘supervise’ instead. Ruth is the expert here, she’s entitled to sit back and delegate, but Trace will never know how much Ruth wants to dig, to forget everything in pure physical hard work. She would not have admitted it, but by the time she looks down at the bodies stretched out back-to-back in their sandy grave she has almost forgotten that she has a baby.
    The trench is still fairly narrow and Ruth squeezes in with difficulty. Ideally, she’d like more time to look at thecontext but she knows that the sea is advancing. High tide is at six, and with the stones cleared away the sea will probably come all the way into this inlet. Time to excavate the bodies. First she takes photographs, using a measuring rod for scale. Then she draws the skeletons in plan. Finally, bone by bone, she starts on the first body. As she lifts each bone, Trace records it on the skeleton sheet and marks it with a tiny number in indelible ink. All the bones are present and, as Ruth had thought, there are teeth too; each tooth also has to be numbered and charted. When she comes to the skull, she sees that there is some hair still attached, ashblond, almost the same colour as the sand.
    There are fragments of rope around the wrists.
    Ted whistles. ‘Their hands were bound.’
    ‘May be able to get DNA from the rope,’ says Ruth. ‘There could be blood or sweat on it.’
    ‘Will we get DNA from the bones?’ asks Ted.
    ‘Maybe,’ says Ruth. ‘But DNA can be contaminated by burial.’
    Trace says nothing. She is working efficiently but silently, placing each marked bone in a paper bag.
    Ruth looks at the skeleton sheet. She is sure that the bodies are adult males. She can see the brow ridges on the skulls, the pronounced nuchal crest at the back of the head, the large mastoid bones. This first skeleton also has a particularly square jaw. Ruth wonders whether they will be able to get a facial reconstruction done but, as she looks at this skull lying on the tarpaulin with sand blowing around it, she has an uneasy feeling that she knows exactly what its living form would be. A tall man (the long bones show that),blond haired with a jutting chin. A Viking, she thinks, though she knows this is historically unlikely. She thinks again of her first mentor – Erik Anderssen, Erik the Viking.
    ‘How are you doing?’ She recognises Clough’s voice but does not look up.
    ‘Okay. First body’s almost out.’
    ‘Baby’s asleep,’ says Clough, sounding amused. ‘Think the boss is about to drop off too.’
    Ruth says nothing but Trace says, slightly bitchily, ‘Never knew Nelson was so soft about babies.’
    ‘Well, he’s got kids of his own, hasn’t he,’ says Ted, carefully lifting out the second skull.
    ‘They’re grown up now,’ says Clough. ‘Turning into right stunners.’
    Ruth wonders whether Ted has children. She knows very little about him beyond the fact that he went to school in Bolton and is famous for his prodigious drinking. She also thinks it is inappropriate for Clough to refer to Nelson’s daughters, one still at school, as ‘stunners’. She wonders what Trace thinks.
    The second body is slightly shorter and the few tufts of hair are dark.