There were too many people milling around for comfort, however, especially as they were still close enough to home that he might be recognised. ‘You don’t know me,’ he told her, in a low voice. ‘But it’s possible that you might know of me. My name’s Quentin Parkes. I gave a pair of guest lectures at Nottingham University some years ago, though I think probably before your time there. I also once wrote a book you might have—’

  ‘Material Culture in Sub-Roman Britain?’ she said eagerly. ‘That was you?’

  ‘You know it?’ he said, unable to hide his gratification, not just at her words but at her look of admiration.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonderful piece of work. Though…’

  ‘Yes,’ he said ruefully, finishing the thought she’d been too polite to. ‘It has been rather overtaken.’

  She touched his arm. ‘I didn’t mean it as a criticism. It’s just that so much has been discovered in the last, what? Fifteen years?’

  ‘Twenty, now,’ he said, with a shake of his head. It was hard for him to believe how much time had passed. He’d intended – he’d expected – to achieve so much. ‘Of course the world has moved on. It’s a good thing.’ Then he added, with a smile: ‘Though I admit it can sting a little.’

  ‘It’s great to meet you,’ said Anna, shaking his hand warmly in both hers. ‘Though I have to ask: what has your book to do with me? With all this?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘At least… I mostly said that by way of introduction. To reassure you that we’re not about to abduct you or hurt you or anything crazy like that. We’re here for a good reason. A historical reason. An archaeological reason. Only it’s one that we can’t afford to get out, at least not yet.’ He nodded at the car behind her. ‘So would you please trust us enough to join us inside there, so that we can be as sure as possible that we won’t be overheard?’

  She gazed at him a moment or two, then at Melissa, and finally at Ravindra, his arms folded impatiently, not bothering to hide his irritation with all this dancing around the point. Then she looked at the various people collecting belongings from their boots or packing up after their picnic lunches, and at the pair of burly stewards in bright yellow bibs who were standing by the exit. Yet clearly she still wasn’t satisfied, for she took out her phone and snapped their faces in turn, then went around to the back of the Rolls to add its licence plate before letting them know that she was uploading the photographs to the cloud.

  ‘Good lass,’ said Ravindra approvingly. ‘I only hope my own granddaughters grow up as sensible.’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ said Anna. ‘Then I need to get back.’

  They climbed inside, with Anna and Melissa in the rear, Ravindra at the wheel and Quentin in the passenger seat, so that he had to turn uncomfortably around to let Anna look him in the eye. ‘So,’ he said. ‘I’m Quentin Parkes, as you already know. That’s Melissa beside you. Melissa Ward. And this is Ravindra Pandey up here with me.’

  ‘And you’re all archaeologists?’

  Ravindra gave a scornful laugh. ‘You think I could afford a ride like this by digging up old pots? No, love. I own a company called Aston Farms. Melissa here is one of my oldest employees.’

  ‘One of his longest serving employees,’ corrected Melissa, with a reproving look. ‘Not oldest.’

  ‘Sorry, yes,’ said Ravindra, unabashed. ‘Longest serving and most trusted. We have a bunch of different interests, but our main business is poultry. We’re the second largest producers in the country. On our way to becoming the largest.’

  ‘Poultry?’ said Anna, baffled.

  ‘Chickens, mostly,’ said Ravindra. ‘But turkeys and ducks too. Even a few geese and guinea-fowl. We supply all the main supermarkets and restaurant chains. If you like the odd plate of buffalo wings, or you’ve ever had a Christmas dinner, or you’re partial to a Sunday roast, then like as not you’ll have eaten one of ours.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Anna.

  ‘We’re not just a big company,’ said Melissa, taking over. ‘We’re a growing company. Ravindra is too modest to say it, but he’s turned the handful of free range chickens he started out with into the largest privately-owned poultry supplier in the country. And we’re not done yet. Supermarkets know they can trust us. They keep pushing us for more. So we’re always on the lookout for new locations for our farms. They’re not easy to find. At least, the farms are easy enough. It’s the planning permission that’s the curse. People have the wrong idea about what we do. They fear our barns are going to be noisy and smelly and cruel, and that they’ll be a magnet for the animal rights brigade, even though we take the welfare of our birds very seriously. Not that those people really care about…’ She paused and smiled and gave herself a moment, lest she head off on a tangent. ‘Anyway, we’re always looking for new sites, like I say. We acquired another one a few years back. It looked ideal. Zoned for agriculture, yet the soil not great for arable or livestock, so available at a reasonable price, despite people like Quentin here trying to outbid us.’

  ‘I put a kind of consortium together,’ admitted Quentin. ‘But it was hopeless. If we could have done something with the land, then maybe. But, like Melissa says, the soil simply isn’t good enough. Ravindra’s opening bid was already twice our upper limit.’

  ‘We don’t care about soil quality,’ said Ravindra bluntly. ‘What we want is space. Enough that we can site our barns a fair distance from the nearest neighbours, to get past the planning committee, yet close enough to the motorway and our main processing plant. Permission was still a slog. It always is. The locals fight us tooth and nail, despite the jobs we’ll bring, which the area is crying out for. They claimed that the local infrastructure couldn’t support us, that we’d destroy a site of outstanding natural beauty and ruin a popular walk. All the usual stuff. It’s touching how people who’d shriek and run a mile if they ever saw a bat suddenly develop such concern for their roosts. But we’re patient, we have good lawyers and architects, and we cleared each of these hurdles in turn. And finally we prevailed.’

  ‘Are we getting any closer to the point?’ asked Anna.

  ‘I’m overseeing the redevelopment myself,’ said Melissa. ‘We knocked down the existing outbuildings about two months ago now, then we dug up the ground to lay new foundations for our own first barn. We’d barely started before we made a rather gruesome discovery. A human skull.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Anna.

  ‘Quite. Obviously we stopped work at once. We called in the police. They found more human remains beneath. Long bones, teeth, hips, ankles. You name it. And more skulls, of course. It turned out that at least a dozen people had been buried there. Thankfully, it also turned out that we hadn’t bought the place from a serial killer. The bodies had been there a long, long time. The soil is very clayey, you see, and its right next door to a hill, too, meaning that all the rain – of which there is a lot, believe me – drains into it. You’ll know better than me, I suppose, but apparently wet clay is good at preserving organic remains.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna.

  ‘Anyway, the coroner told us we needed to contact the county’s Finds Liaison Officer, a woman called Ursula Platt. She was away, but she put us in touch with an archaeologist called David Connelly from the local museum. She also suggested that I invite Quentin here to come take a look, because he lived nearby, and they’d worked together before, and he knew the local history better than anyone. I wasn’t exactly delighted by this, as you can imagine. He’d fought us pretty hard over the farm. But, to be fair, he’d fought us precisely because he believed it to be an important heritage site, and so deserving of preservation. Anyway, I called him and he came straight over.’

  ‘We found at least a dozen bodies, as Melissa says,’ said Quentin, taking the baton. ‘Likely a great many more. It can be hard to tell, as I’m sure you know. Several of the skulls and long bones had violent fractures that showed no sign of healing, suggesting they’d died very quickly from their injuries. We also found scraps of rusted chain-mail, the hilts and blades of some broken swords, a few fighting knives and a dozen or so spear points.’

  ‘A body pit,’ said Anna. ‘Have you managed to date it?’

  ‘Very broadly, yes. We were lucky enough to find a silver coin in there. A Honorius siliqua, in case you’re curious, giving us a terminus ante quem of—’

  ‘In English,’ said Ravindra irritably.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Quentin. ‘An earliest possible date of around four hundred CE, which was when the coin was minted. But it was pierced in the middle, so it seems likely to have been worn as a medallion, which was very much a post-Roman fashion. And the weaponry looks post-Roman too. Though, honestly, we know so little of the era, who can truly say?’

  ‘So you’re thinking, what?’ asked Anna, intrigued. ‘First half of the fifth century?’

  ‘Fifth century, yes. But we’re not so sure about the first half. Not yet.’ Quentin hesitated, then added: ‘The body pit obviously suggests a very serious skirmish or even a battle of some kind. The location would indicate that it was most likely between the Britons and the Saxons. So it probably wasn’t that early, because, as far as we know, the Saxons took a fair few decades to get that far west.’

  ‘How far west are we talking?’

  ‘Forgive us,’ said Melissa, before Quentin could answer. ‘We need to keep that confidential for the moment. Though of course if you agree to help…’

  ‘Help how? You still haven’t told me.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ravindra dryly. ‘Another day or two, I’m sure they’ll get there.’

  ‘You want to take over, do you?’ asked Melissa.

  ‘I want you to get to the point. As Ms Warne clearly does too.’

  ‘Fine.’ She turned back to Anna. ‘But first you should know that Ravi is a stickler for social responsibility. In spirit as well as in letter. It’s one of the reasons I’m proud to work for him.’

  ‘We’re unpopular enough as it is,’ said Ravindra, looking mollified. ‘No need to make it worse.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Melissa. ‘So of course we’d already done a thorough archaeological survey as part of the planning process. Quentin here made sure of that. We took high resolution aerial photographs of the farm and the surrounding area, and we had a team survey the fields in question with metal detectors.’

  ‘VHF metal detectors,’ grumbled Quentin. ‘Not even pulse induction. I offered them my own. Thanks but no thanks. And they wonder why they didn’t find anything.’

  ‘Do we really need to go over all that again?’ sighed Melissa. She turned back to Anna. ‘Anyway, after we found the body-pit, Quentin suggested we bring in a completely different machine. I forget what it was called, but it looked a bit like a large lawnmower.’

  ‘A ground penetrating radar,’ said Quentin. ‘There’s a company nearby that mostly runs surveys for industrial companies and utilities. But they do some archaeology on the side, at a substantial discount. Kind of pro bono. Mr Pandey hired them to survey the farm for us. The whole of it, to be fair, not just where he wants his barns.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘GPR data is a nightmare to interpret, as I’m sure you know. Mapping out pipes and sumps is one thing. Even tracing old ruins or roads. But making sense of an ancient battlefield…’ He shook his head. ‘Their analysts are good, but it was taking up far too much of their time, so they sent us the raw data instead, and we’ve been plotting it out ourselves, one field at a time. And we’ve been finding all sorts. In places where we think the fiercest fighting was, there are bits and pieces scattered everywhere, but mostly a good metre deep, which is how come the detectors came up so dry.’

  ‘Have you dug test trenches?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Of course. We’ve already made some fascinating finds. Enough scraps of weaponry and armour to rewrite our notions of post-Roman warfare. Though it’s still far too early to say exactly how. We’ve also found what appears to be a Roman villa. Or at least, the foundations of a large building with columns, walls, and part of a mosaic that’ll blow your socks off when you see it, I promise. If you agree to help us, that is.’

  ‘The villa is well away from where we want to site our barns, thankfully,’ said Melissa. ‘But not all the finds are. And obviously word is already getting out. Our local objectors, who’d just about made peace with us, have been given new hope. They’re demanding that the whole property be taken from us and given to the National Trust or whoever.’

  ‘I don’t mind Quentin here riding that particular horse,’ said Ravindra. ‘He’s been on it from the start. But none of those others care two pins for heritage. All they care about is stopping us. Screw them. We were granted permission for our barns fair and square, and we intend to build them. But the situation has turned increasingly ugly. They spray-painted disgusting slogans all over the front of the farmhouse. They vandalised our construction equipment and dug pits to disrupt our excavations. They sent threatening messages to us at Aston Farms, and to our contractors too. They’ve yelled at and spat at Quentin and our other archaeologists.’

  ‘They smeared shit all over my windscreen,’ said Quentin, with a shudder of memory. It had been an icy cold morning too, so that it had frosted to the glass, making it a nightmare to scrape off.

  ‘Some mornings, they’ll get a crowd together at the end of the drive,’ added Melissa. ‘They’ll yell at everyone who turns up, including our volunteers, even though some of them are still just kids. They wave placards with horrible pictures of battery hens on them, which aren’t from our farms and have nothing to do with how we operate. They’ve scared half of our crew off, though thankfully we still have enough, like Quentin here, who are prepared to brave it.’

  ‘It’s our nation’s history,’ said Quentin simply. ‘It’s too important to play games with. That means working with Aston Farms, rather than against them. But that’s too much for some of my old friends and neighbours. They call me traitor. They accuse me of animal cruelty. They shun me on the street and in the shops. Honestly, it’s such a mess. I’d give it up if I could. Except I can’t.’ He gave a helpless shrug. ‘I’m an archaeologist.’

  ‘Have you notified the police?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Melissa. ‘They send along a car for each new incident. They shake their heads and take notes and file reports. But they don’t do anything. They tell us that reasonable protest is allowed. They tell us that it’s too late to catch the people who did these horrible things. So there’s been no real investigation at all, as far as I can tell. No-one’s even been interviewed. And it’s not that they’re overstretched, though they are, and which I understand; it’s that their sympathies are with the locals. A couple of them even live nearby.’

  ‘Okay, fine,’ said Anna. ‘I still don’t get what you need me for.’

  Melissa nodded. ‘Three nights ago now, I was at home with my two young girls. I was lying awake in the small hours, as I mostly do these days, worrying about what new horrors the morning would bring, when I heard this strange metallic slapping noise from downstairs. It carried on long enough that I went down to investigate. It turned out to be my letterbox opening and closing so that a foul-smelling liquid could be poured in, soaking the doormat and a lovely old rug I’d brought in Marrakesh, and forming a puddle on the tiles. And the moment I turned on the light and shouted, they struck a match and dropped it in.’

  ‘Christ!’ said Anna.

  ‘Quite. The liquid turned out not to be flammable.’ Her lips tightened at the memory; her throat and cheeks flushed a violent pink. ‘It turned out to be piss. But they’d still waited for me to come downstairs and turn on the lights before dropping in their match, presumably to give me the scare of my life. It worked, I can tell you. I ran to the door to stamp it out. I got my feet soaked. I was half naked, and petrified, so I didn’t dare look out. But I heard them scampering off. I called the police in again. They said all the right things, but I could see in their eyes that they thought it was just a nasty teenage prank. A horrible one, yes, but not a threat to life. I don’t see it that way, though. The way I see it, someone was telling me that they know where I live, and no doubt where my two girls go to school. The way I see it, it was a threat against their lives. It’s doing my head in. Every time my phone goes, I think it’ll be their headmistress or the police.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s awful. I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She took a breath to calm herself. ‘What we do isn’t popular. I get that. Farming can be an ugly business, even when you do it right. We’ve had to deal with these sort of issues before, and we will again, and that’s fine. I’m happy to take a certain amount, not least because I know Ravindra is a good man.’ She threw him a glance of such warmth that he flushed a little, making Quentin wonder – not for the first time – just how strictly professional their relationship was. ‘He doesn’t allow our standards to drop. He doesn’t stand for threats against his staff either. When I told him what had happened, he promised to sort it, whatever it took.’

  ‘Mel’s been with me almost from the start,’ he said. ‘She’s like a daughter to me. Anyone coming after her and her kids might as well be coming after me and my own. I won’t put up with it. I just won’t. Whatever it takes, like she says. Which is why we’re here today.’

  Anna shook her head, more bemused than ever. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been through this. Truly I am. But what can I do?’

  ‘I’ve had my letterbox sealed up, and I’ve had better locks put on my windows, and all of that. I’ve given my girls panic alarms. We’ve beefed up security at the farm as well, though it’s too big to make completely safe. We’ve put up some more fencing and a couple of cameras, and we’ve brought in an old friend of Quentin’s as nightwatchman. But if people want to get at you badly enough, they will. So it’s time to turn proactive. It’s time for us to find out who’s doing this. Find them and stop them before they can do us any real harm. Obviously we’re not investigators ourselves, so Ravindra suggested bringing in a London firm he’d used before. This isn’t exactly their thing, though I’m sure they’re competent enough. But, as Quentin pointed out, it’s unlikely to get us anywhere.’