In the Woods

Still, I regretted having to get rid of my twin. I'd found it comforting, the knowledge that Peter was alive and riding horseback, somewhere in a couple of dozen minds. If Jamie had been in the photo, I would probably have made us triplets and had a much harder time working my way out of that one.

* * *

By the time we got back to the site, the reporters had arrived. I gave them the standard preliminary spiel (I do this part, on the basis that I look more like a responsible adult than Cassie does): body of a young girl, name not being released till all the relatives are informed, treating it as a suspicious death, anyone who may have any information please contact us, no comment no comment no comment.

"Was this the work of a satanic cult?" asked a large woman in unflattering ski pants, whom we'd met before. She was from one of those tabloids with a penchant for punny headlines using alternative spellings.

"There's absolutely no evidence to indicate that," I said snottily. There never is. Homicidal satanic cults are the detective's version of yetis: no one has ever seen one and there is no proof that they exist, but one big blurry footprint and the media turn into a gibbering, foaming pack, so we have to act as though we take the idea at least semi-seriously.

"But she was found on an altar that the Druids used for human sacrifice, wasn't she?" the woman demanded.

"No comment," I said automatically. I had just realized what the stone table reminded me of, that deep groove round the edge: the autopsy tables in the morgue, grooved to drain away blood. I had been so busy wondering whether I recognized it from 1984, it hadn't even occurred to me that I recognized it from a few months ago. Jesus.

Eventually the reporters gave up and started drifting off. Cassie had been sitting on the steps of the finds shed, blending into the scenery and keeping an eye on things. When she saw the large journalist homing in on Mark, who had come out of the canteen heading for the Portaloo, she got up and wandered towards them, making sure Mark could see her. I saw him catch her eye, over the reporter's shoulder; after a minute Cassie shook her head, amused, and left them to it.

"What was that all about?" I asked, fishing out the key to the finds shed.

"He's giving her a lecture about the site," said Cassie, dusting off the seat of her jeans and grinning. "Every time she tries to ask anything about the body, he says, 'Hang on,' and goes into a rant about how the government is about to destroy the most important discovery since Stonehenge, or starts explaining Viking settlements. I'd love to stay and watch; I think she may finally have met her match."

* * *

The rest of the archaeologists had very little to add, except that Sculptor Boy, whose name was Sean, felt we should consider the possibility of vampire involvement. He sobered up a lot when we showed him the ID shot, but although he, like the others, had seen Katy or possibly Jessica around the site a few times-sometimes with other kids her age, sometimes with an older girl matching Rosalind's description-none of them had seen anyone odd watching her or anything like that. None of them had seen anything sinister at all, in fact, although Mark added, "Except for the politicians who show up to have their photos taken in front of their heritage before they pimp it out. Do you want descriptions?" Nobody remembered the Tracksuit Shadow, either, which reinforced my suspicion that he had been either some perfectly normal guy from the estate out for a walk, or else Damien's imaginary friend. You get people like this in every investigation, people who end up wasting huge amounts of your time with their compulsion to say whatever they think you want to hear.

The archaeologists from Dublin-Damien, Sean and a handful of others-had all been at home on Monday and Tuesday nights; the rest had been in their rented house, a couple of miles from the dig. Hunt, who of course turned out to be pretty lucid on anything archaeological, had been home in Lucan with his wife. He confirmed the large reporter's theory that the stone where Katy had been dumped was a Bronze Age sacrificial altar. "We can't be sure whether the sacrifices were human or animal, naturally, although the…um…the shape certainly suggests they may have been human. The right dimensions, you know. Very rare artifact. It implies that this hill was a site of immense religious importance in the Bronze Age, yes? Such a terrible shame…this road."

"Have you found anything else to suggest this?" I asked. If he had, it would be months before we could disentangle our case from the media-versus-New-Age frenzy.

Hunt gave me a wounded look. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," he told me reproachfully.