In the Woods

"Ah," she said. "I wondered. Is that in the file, do you know, or do you just remember it?"

"What difference does that make?" It came out sounding snottier than I'd intended.

"Well, if there's a link, we can't exactly keep it to ourselves," Cassie said reasonably. "Just for example, we're going to have to get Sophie to check that blood against the '84 samples, and we're going to have to tell her why. It would make things a whole lot simpler to explain if the link was right there in the file."

"I'm pretty sure it is," I said. The desk rocked; Cassie found a blank sheet of paper and folded it to wedge under the leg. "I'll double-check tonight. Hold off on talking to Sophie till then, OK?"

"Sure," said Cassie. "If it's not there, we'll find a way round it." She tested the desk again: better. "Rob, are you OK with this case?"

I didn't answer. Through the window I could see the morgue guys wrapping the body in plastic, Sophie pointing and gesturing. They barely had to brace themselves to lift the stretcher; it looked almost weightless as they carried it away towards the waiting van. The wind rattled the glass sharply in my face and I spun round. I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to shout, "Shut the hell up" or "Fuck this case, I quit" or something, something reckless and unreasonable and dramatic. But Cassie was just leaning against the desk and waiting, looking at me with steady brown eyes, and I have always had an excellent brake system, a gift for choosing the anticlimactic over the irrevocable every time.

"I'm fine with it," I said. "Just kick me if I get too moody."

"With pleasure," Cassie said, and grinned at me. "God, though, look at all this stuff… I hope we do get a chance to have a proper look. I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was little, did I ever tell you?"

"Only about a million times," I said.

"Lucky you've got a goldfish memory, then, isn't it? I used to dig up the back garden, but all I ever found was a little china duck with the beak broken off."

"It looks like I should have been the one digging out the back," I said. Normally I would have made some remark about law enforcement's loss being archaeology's gain, but I was still feeling too nervy and dislocated for any decent level of back and forth; it would only have come out wrong. "I could have had the world's biggest private collection of pottery bits."

"Now there's a pick-up line," said Cassie, and dug out her notebook.

* * *

Damien came in awkwardly, with a plastic chair bumping along from one hand and his mug of tea still clutched in the other. "I brought this…" he said, using the mug to gesture uncertainly at his chair and the two we were sitting on. "Dr. Hunt said you wanted to see me?"

"Yep," said Cassie. "I would say, 'Have a seat,' but you already do."

It took him a moment; then he laughed a little, checking our faces to see if that was OK. He sat down, started to put his mug on the table, changed his mind and kept it in his lap, looked up at us with big obedient blue eyes. This was definitely Cassie's baby. He looked like the type who was accustomed to being taken care of by women; he was shaky already, and being interrogated by a guy would probably send him into a state where we would never get anything useful out of him. I got out a pen, unobtrusively.

"Listen," Cassie said soothingly, "I know you've had a bad shock. Just take your time and walk us through it, OK? Start with what you were doing this morning, before you went up to the stone."

Damien took a deep breath, licked his lips. "We were, um, we were working on the medieval drainage ditch. Mark wanted to see if we could follow the line a little further down the site. See, we're, we're sort of cleaning up loose ends now, 'cause it's coming up to the end of the dig-"

"How long's the dig been going on?" Cassie asked.

"Like two years, but I've only been on it since June. I'm in college."

"I used to want to be an archaeologist," Cassie told him. I nudged her foot, under the table; she stood on mine. "How's the dig going?"

Damien's face lit up; he looked almost dazzled with delight, unless dazzled was just his normal expression. "It's been amazing. I'm so glad I did it."

"I'm so jealous," Cassie said. "Do they let people volunteer for just, like, a week?"

"Maddox," I said stuffily, "can you discuss your career change later?"

"Sor-ry," said Cassie, rolling her eyes and grinning at Damien. He grinned back, bonding away. I was taking a vague, unjustifiable dislike to Damien. I could see exactly why Hunt had assigned him to give the site tours-he was a PR dream, all blue eyes and diffidence-but I have never liked adorable, helpless men. I suppose it's the same reaction Cassie has to those baby-voiced, easily impressed girls whom men always want to protect: a mixture of distaste, cynicism and envy. "OK," she said, "so then you went up to the stone…?"