On the first anniversary of Graham’s death, he’d gone to see Samantha with a couple of bottles of wine, in case she’d needed a shoulder to cry on. She had. The comfort hug they’d shared had ended in a kiss. He’d barely slept that night, so excited had he been to go see her again the next morning. But she’d texted him first thing to make it clear – sympathetically yet firmly – that the kiss had been a mistake. He’d been gutted, of course, but he’d accepted it too, retreating back behind his line and never trying for a repeat – for, rather to his surprise, her friendship had become as important to him as her love. Even her occasional flings with other men hadn’t tormented him as they might have done, partly because of how she mocked those men behind their backs, making fun of their various shortcomings; but also because he’d come to accept that, while she might not have been the person he’d have chosen to fall in love with, she was the one he had.

  In all their years of friendship, he’d only once seriously defied her. That, of course, had been by accepting Aston Farms’ invitation to help them survey and excavate this place. But how could he have refused? It would have been a repudiation of everything he’d always stood for. Yet her disapproval had still tormented him. The fear that she’d cut him off for good. So it was little wonder, then, that he fairly bounced back into the processing room, enough for Melissa to eye him curiously.

  ‘Have you had good news?’ she asked.

  ‘I have, rather,’ he confessed. But he didn’t elaborate, beckoning instead for her and Anna to follow him through to the next room along, which had also been taken over by the excavation, with more shelving against its walls and another pair of worktables in the centre, though these were side-by-side rather than end-to-end, and covered by an array of cork-boards to which a huge surveyor’s map had been pinned, on which he himself had outlined Grove Farm in thick red felt-tip, before festooning it with colour-coded pins.

  ‘Are these all your survey hits?’ asked Anna, leaning over it.

  ‘Not all of them,’ he told her. ‘If we’d done it that way, it would be nothing but pins. These are just the most promising ones. I had great hopes when I started, that it would give us an idea of how the fighting went. But it’s chaos, as you can see. That’s the trouble with battlefield archaeology, of course. It’s overwhelming.’

  ‘Battlefield archaeology?’ asked Melissa. ‘Is it its own discipline?’

  ‘It is, rather,’ he said. ‘If you think about it, most field archaeology involves a settlement of some kind. A house, a village, a community. Our job as excavators is to find out how the people there lived, and how that changed over time. The ways they sheltered, what kind of pottery they used, which foods they ate. Their communal buildings, who they traded with, their burial customs. It’s a kind of saga, if you like, unfolding over generations. Battlefields aren’t like that. They were often chosen precisely because they were wide open spaces with nothing in the way. You’d have one furious explosion of activity that left debris everywhere. Broken swords and snapped off spearheads. Helmets and horseshoes and bits of armour. Medallions and brooches and lucky charms that hadn’t exactly proved their worth. Teeth and bones and the rest, all swallowed by the mud. Then, just as quickly, it would have gone quiet again. “The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.”’ He turned to Anna. ‘You know that line, of course? And who wrote it? Or translated it, should I say?’

  ‘The Rubáiyát?’ frowned Anna, surprised to be put to the test. ‘And Edward Fitzgerald. But why do you ask?’

  ‘He was an archaeologist too, did you know?’ he told her. ‘An amateur one, to be sure – they all were back then, of course – but a fine one nonetheless. His family owned huge tracts of land around Naseby, where the Civil War battle was fought. He excavated it himself, and he did such a fine job that he came to be known as the father of battlefield archaeology.’

  ‘Now that I didn’t know,’ admitted Anna.

  ‘Me neither, if I’m honest. Not until this project got underway, and I looked around for guidance. Precious few battlefields have ever been excavated, you see. Almost none from as early as this. Their locations have typically been lost, for a start. And what remains is a nightmare to decipher. But we’re lucky here. If this really was Mount Badon, it was a siege first and foremost, and so went on for at least a few days. More likely weeks and possibly even months, because we’ve found traces of a well on the hill, suggesting they had their own water supply. Then you had the battle on top of that. Plus of course there’s the clayey nature of the soil, which has preserved it all remarkably well.’

  ‘But it’s such a mess,’ said Melissa. ‘How can you even hope to make sense of it?’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ he admitted. ‘We have so little to go on. We don’t even know for sure who the two sides were, or who was besieging whom. Not yet, at least. But that’s precisely the sort of thing we’re hoping to discover.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, it’s likely that the side nearest the hill was the one defending it. Sometimes you can find writing or symbols on their weapons. We haven’t found anything like that yet, but you never know.’ He went over to the shelves, checked several of the smallest of the acid-free boxes until he found the one he was after, brought it back over to show them. A small grey pellet shaped like a tiny lemon was lying on a bed of tissue paper. ‘A lead slingshot bullet,’ he told them. ‘They used stones too, but the lead ones were best. Too small for the other side to see coming, yet still heavy enough to inflict real damage. They used to drill holes through some of them, so that they’d make a whistling noise as they flew. Must have been terrifying.’

  ‘And how does that help?’ asked Melissa.

  He turned it over with his fingertip to show them the crude picture of a bird on its underside. ‘Maybe this is just a bird, to represent how it flies through the air. But doves were also important early Christian symbols, which would make it Brittonic rather than Saxon. We can’t be sure one way or the other with this, but people sometimes scratched short messages on them too, like gun-loaders with their munitions. You know the kind of thing: “Take this, Adolf.” “Up yours.”’

  ‘Embrace each day as if it is your last?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ smiled Quentin. ‘That’s probably a little wordy for something this small. But you get the general idea. And the two sides used different scripts, you see, so anything like that would tell us for sure who the battle was between, and maybe even who was besieging whom.’

  ‘Assuming it really is Mount Badon,’ said Anna.

  ‘Yes,’ acknowledged Quentin. ‘Assuming that.’

  SEVEN

  Elias drove down to the end of Grove Farm’s drive then pulled in to the lay-by opposite. Wynn Grant gazed coolly at him as he parked and got out then came across to where he was still sitting on his camping chair, beanie on his head and his hands stuffed into the pockets of his winter jacket, zipped up to his throat against the increasingly chilly wind. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he asked.

  ‘Public land, isn’t it?’ said Wynn, gazing Elias up and down. ‘Police?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Why not? They catch you framing some poor bastard?’

  ‘They don’t fire us for that. They promote us instead.’

  Wynn gave a snort. ‘Fine. Please yourself.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He squatted down alongside him, the pair of them facing towards Grove Farm’s drive. ‘So I was talking with your mate Quentin just now,’ he said. ‘He tells me you used to be an addict.’

  ‘Still am,’ said Wynn, with mock piety. ‘Just not using right now. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?’

  ‘You go to meetings?’

  ‘God, no. They bore my tits off, those do. You need a bottle of whisky just to get through them. Anyway, what’s the point? I’m off the junk, thank Christ. It messed me up. But I still need pills for the pain, and they’ll only ever take the bottle out of my cold dead hands.’

  ‘So was it you who pissed through Ms Ward’s letterbox the other night?’

  ‘Hah. You don’t mess about, do you? No, to answer your question. That wasn’t me. Why would I? Woman’s only doing her job. It’s that arsehole Ravi Pandey I’d go after, if I was to go after anyone. He deserves all the shit he gets. But I couldn’t have managed it, even had I wanted to. I mean, come on. That time of the morning, it’s a miracle if I can hit my own bowl, which is a good foot around. If you think I’m going to hold my bladder while trekking five miles through the darkness to piss on some bird’s doormat… Come on. Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘What about the other stuff?’

  ‘What other stuff?’

  Elias nodded across the way at Grove Farm. ‘Painting graffiti on the walls. Supergluing equipment. Smearing shit on Quentin’s windscreen.’

  This last one made him scowl. ‘No,’ he said angrily. ‘I’d never mess with Quentin like that. He’s the only one of these bastards who ever stood up for me, or came to visit. Anyway, why would I make it that easy for them?’

  ‘Make what easy? For whom?’

  He waved a hand. ‘For them, for them. To yank me back inside. Sitting here’s one thing. It’s public land. They’ll never revoke my parole for that, not with the prisons so full. But the kind of shit you’re talking about…? I mean life outside isn’t all sunbeams and rose petals, but it’s the Seychelles compared to being inside.’

  Elias nodded. ‘That’s what Quentin said. He said you never killed your brother either. That you were railroaded.’

  Grant’s eyes filled with moisture. He wiped it irritably away. ‘And so I was,’ he said. ‘I was bombed out of my mind when they told me about Caleb. I felt sick and confused, guilty and devastated all at once. I was on the junk back then too. Aching for my next fix. They came at me in teams, painting this picture of how it had happened, repeating it and repeating it until it felt like a proper memory. Then they told me I could go if I signed their piece of paper, at least for the moment. And that’s the thing about junk. It becomes all you ever think about. So I signed their bloody piece of paper, and they promptly arrested me and locked me up. Bastards. But at least it cleared my head, enough for my memory to come back. And I never touched Caleb. I never pushed him down those sodding steps. I wasn’t even in his house when they said. I know it for a fact.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I used to lie on my sofa with the TV on. Not watching it exactly. For the company of voices. So I thought to check the listings for the time I was supposedly seen coming out of Caleb’s house, and they had one of those Channel 5 movies on. You know the ones – awful yet somehow impossible to turn off. And I’d watched it all the way through. I even remembered how it ended. So it couldn’t have been me, could it? But it was too late by then. No one believed me, not even my own bloody mouthpiece, useless streak of piss that he was. Getting them to play that bloody phone call! How were the jury supposed to believe me after that? Then letting them steal my farm from me too.’

  ‘No one stole it. Aston Farms bought it fair and square.’

  ‘From people who had no right to it. Caleb left it to me, not some arsehole cousins we’d never even met.’ His eyes went distant; his jaw set hard. ‘So it’s still mine, isn’t it? By rights it’s still mine. As is all that shit they’re digging up. I’ll get it back too. I swear to god I will. I’m going to clear my name and make the bastards pay.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘That’d be telling, wouldn’t it? But just you watch. Just you watch.’ He drained his cup then unscrewed his thermos to pour himself a refill. Gin from the smell of it, though so little left that he tossed it straight back in disgust. He laboured to his feet, made his way over to the gate behind them with an oddly rhythmic walk, rising up onto his tiptoes to protect his bad right knee. There was a bike tucked away on the other side of the hedge that Elias hadn’t noticed. An e-bike at that, fitted with a front hamper and a rear basket, enough to carry a decent sized shop, and likely his only transport, on the fairly safe assumption that he’d have lost his licence somewhere along the line. He took a fresh bottle of cheap gin from the hamper, held it up. ‘Keeps it out of the sun,’ he said.

  ‘What sun?’ asked Elias.

  ‘It was there when I left home.’ He made his way back across with the same peculiar limp. ‘Tastes like dog’s piss when it’s warm. Pretty much tastes like it straight out of the freezer too, if I’m honest, only you don’t notice it so much.’

  ‘Then why not vodka?’

  ‘Costs more.’ He unscrewed the cap and poured himself a generous slug before tucking the bottle away beneath his chair. ‘I’d offer you a nip too, if only you weren’t driving. Wouldn’t want to cause an accident, would I?’

  ‘How very public spirited of you.’

  ‘Yeah. What can I say?’ He raised his cup in farewell. ‘Always thinking of other people, that’s me.’

  EIGHT

  Melissa might look dressed for a garden party, but she’d also come prepared for a spot of fieldwork too – not least because she hadn’t yet seen the villa, or its famous mosaic. She replaced her Verona jacket with a far more practical hooded green Barbour from the boot of her Audi, then sat sideways on the passenger seat to trade her high heeled black leather boots for a pair of tall green Hunter wellies. Anna, meanwhile, shared an anxious glance with Quentin, for the sky had turned an ominous battleship grey, while the wind was growing both colder and fiercer, coming down from the north in biting hard gusts.

  They crossed the courtyard to a dirt track that – just a month or two ago – would have passed between a pair of large outbuildings; but both of these had since been torn down and their foundations ripped up, great slabs of brick and concrete half buried in the roiled earth. Quentin pointed out to her the site of the body-pit as they passed it, not that it was necessary, for shreds of blue and white police tape still fluttered from a cordon of metal stakes. Then they passed through the line of firs into the nearest of the fields. ‘You should have seen all this before they got the mowers in,’ he told Anna. ‘It hadn’t been farmed in years, what with all the legal wrangling going on, and then the planning disputes. It was a jungle. Wild grasses everywhere. Nettles and brambles up to your chin. We even had a few saplings and some patches of bamboo. Honestly, you needed a machete even to take the dog for a walk. Wonderful for the wildlife, of course. We had all sorts. Hares and muntjacs and badgers. And rabbits too, of course. They bred like… well, I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blank. And so colourful too, particularly at this time of year. Like a great big Monet canvas, dotted with dabs of bright spring flowers. Huge daisies and wild garlic; bluebells and cowslips; primroses and lady’s smocks and those prickly mauve thistles. And the butterflies! My god, the butterflies! But it all needed to go, sadly. I thought it would take them weeks, but they brought in a pair of huge industrial mowers and got it all done in a day. Necessary, of course, but still terribly sad, particularly for all those animals. I hate it, being the cause of suffering like that.’

  Anna stopped a moment, to scrape off some of the mud that had already clumped to her boots. ‘And your ground penetrating radar worked okay?’ she asked.

  ‘It was brilliant,’ nodded Quentin. ‘But it’s a huge area, as you can see, so we had a ton of data to go through. And while the GPS it’s fitted with is far better than the one you’ll likely have on your phone, even that is only really accurate to about a yard or so. Then you have to remember that each rainstorm over the past fifteen hundred years has brought a little more mud down from off the hillside to lay upon these fields, burying all our artefacts that fraction deeper, meaning that everything is at least four feet underground, usually a fair bit more. Thankfully, we already had a mechanical digger on site, which Ravi has very generously kept on, and which makes amazingly light work of it. I can work it myself, if push comes to shove, but he’s also very generously paid for our operator Nigel to come in on any days when he’s not needed elsewhere. And we’ve got him so hooked that he’s volunteered this weekend for free.’

  ‘Ha!’ laughed Anna. ‘We get them all in the end.’

  ‘Quite. Though frankly his job is much more exciting than mine. I’m mostly stuck indoors, trying to identify promising sites for him to work. What he does is, he skims off six inches of earth at a time until my two metal detectors can pick up whatever it was that our survey flagged for us. Then it’s over to our volunteers to get busy with their trowels and brushes. All a bit crude, I know, but we have a crazy amount of ground to cover, and so little time. I promised Ravi we’d be out within a month, you see, one way or the other. And he’s been so helpful that I mean to stick to that. Besides, our volunteers won’t keep coming forever.’

  They trekked diagonally across the field along a footpath helpfully trampled for them by a multitude of previous feet, eventually reaching the tarpaulin tent she’d watched being put up earlier, its sides already being pressed taut by the wind. Quentin untethered a rope then pulled back a flap to let them see inside, proud as a smallholder showing off his prize pumpkin. Anna ducked her head to go within. The tent was only a little longer and wider than the trench it was there to cover, so that the struts and frames holding it up were awkwardly set, making her worry for it if the night’s storm proved as fierce as predicted.

  A little daylight filtered through the open mouth, but it was still gloomy enough that she took out her phone for its torch and shone it down at the foot of the trench some four feet beneath her. The base of an ancient wall ran alongside a line of flagstones and then part of a pebble mosaic showing the lower halves of a man and woman seated side by side on a pair of thrones, wearing matching sandals and white togas with a coloured band near the hem.

  Anna had excavated a Roman villa herself once, and so was somewhat familiar with their mosaic styles. This one had a geometric border of a kind that had become fashionable in London at the turn of the fourth century CE, though it had likely taken longer to make it all the way out here. Mid fourth century, then, give or take thirty or forty years, and in a wonderful state of preservation, the tesserae gleaming and glistening in her torchlight.