In the Woods

His fists were clenched and he was halfway to a street fighter's crouch. The other archaeologists had stopped working and were watching, open-mouthed and unsure, tools suspended in midair. I wondered if it was going to turn into a brawl, but then Macker forced a laugh and stepped back, raising his hands mockingly. "Relax, man," he said. He held up the cigarette between thumb and finger and reinserted it into the packet with elaborate precision.

Mark kept staring until Macker, taking his time, had knelt down and picked up his trowel and started scraping again. Then he spun around and headed back towards the bank, his shoulders hunched and rigid. Macker scrambled stealthily to his feet and followed, mimicking Mark's springy lope, turning it into a chimpanzee's gallop. He got an edgy snicker from one or two of the others; pleased with himself, he held out his trowel in front of his crotch and thrust his pelvis at Mark's backside. His silhouette against the lowering sky was distorted, grotesque, a creature from some obscene and darkly symbolic Greek frieze. The air hummed with electricity like a power line and his clowning set my teeth on edge. I realized I was digging my nails into the wall. I wanted to handcuff him, smack him in the mouth, anything to make him stop.

The other archaeologists got bored and stopped paying attention, and Macker gave Mark's back the finger and swaggered back to his patch as if all eyes were still on him. I was suddenly, fiercely glad that I would never in my life have to be a teenager again. I ground out my cigarette on a stone and was buttoning my coat and turning to go back to my car when the realization slammed home in the pit of my stomach (sucker punch, wicked drop through black ice): the trowel.

I stood very still for a long time. I could feel my heartbeat, quick and shallow, at the base of my throat. At last I finished buttoning my coat, found Sean among the huddled army jackets and picked my way across the dig towards him. I felt curiously light-headed, as if my feet were paddling effortlessly a foot or two above the ground. The archaeologists threw small swift glances at me as I passed: not inimical, exactly, but perfectly, studiedly blank.

Sean was troweling earth away from a patch of stones. He had headphones on under his black woolly hat, and he was bobbing his head gently in time to the tinny bam bam bam of heavy metal. "Sean," I said. My voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere behind my ears.

He didn't hear me, but when I took a step closer my shadow fell across him, faint in the gray light, and he looked up. He fumbled in his pocket, switched off the Walkman and pulled the headphones down.

"Sean," I said, "I need to talk to you." Mark whipped round, stared, then shook his head furiously and attacked the bank again.

I brought Sean out to the road. He hauled himself onto the hood of the Land Rover and pulled a greasy doughnut wrapped in plastic out of his jacket. "What's the story?" he asked sociably.

"Do you remember, the day after Katharine Devlin's body was found, my partner and I brought Mark in for questioning?" I said. I was impressed with how calm my voice sounded, how easy and casual, as if this were only a small thing, after all. It becomes second nature, interrogation; it seeps into your blood until, no matter how stunned or exhausted or excited you are, this remains unchanged: the polite professional tone, the clean, relentless march as each answer unfolds into question after new question. "Not long after we brought him back to the site, you were complaining that you couldn't find your trowel."

"Yeah," he said, through a huge mouthful. "Hey, it's OK if I eat this, right? I'm starving, and Hitler will have a total cow if I eat during work."

"That's fine," I said. "Did you ever find your trowel?"

Sean shook his head. "I had to buy a new one. Bastards."

"OK, think carefully," I said. "When was the last time you saw it?"

"Finds shed," he said promptly. "When I found that coin. Are you going to, like, arrest someone for stealing it?"

"Not exactly. What's this about a coin?"

"I found this coin," he explained, helpfully. "Everyone was all excited and stuff, because it looked old and we've only found like ten coins on the whole dig. I took it to the finds shed to show Dr. Hunt-on my trowel, because if you touch old coins the oils in your hands could fuck them up or something-and he got all excited and started getting out all these books to try and ID it, and then it was half past five and we went home, and I forgot my trowel on the table in the finds shed. I went back to get it the next morning, but it wasn't there."

"And that was the Thursday," I said, my heart slowly sinking. "The day we came to talk to Mark." It had been a long shot, anyway, and I was surprised at how badly let down I was. I felt idiotic and very, very tired; I wanted to go home and go to sleep.