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 56
Tana French
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 mediaversus-New-Age frenzy. Hunt gave me a wounded look. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he told me reproachfully.
He was the last interview. As we were putting our stuff away, the boy tech knocked on the door of the Portakabin and stuck his head in. “Um,”
he said. “Hi. Sophie says to tell you we’re finishing up for today and there’s one more thing you might want to see.”
They’d packed up the markers and left the altar stone alone in its field again, and at first the whole site looked deserted; the reporters had long since moved on, and all the archaeologists had gone home except Hunt, who was clambering into a muddy red Ford Fiesta. Then we came out from among the Portakabins, and I saw a flash of white between the trees. The familiar, uneventful routine of the interviews had settled my mood considerably (Cassie calls these preliminary background interviews the nuthin’ stage of a case: nobody saw nuthin’, nobody heard nuthin’, nobody In the Woods 57
did nuthin’), but still I felt something zip down my spine as we stepped into the wood. Not fear: more like the sudden shot of alertness when someone wakes you by calling your name, or when a bat shrills past just too high to be heard. The undergrowth was thick and soft, years of fallen leaves sinking under my feet, and the trees grew heavily enough to filter the light into a restless green glow.
Sophie and Helen were
“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 56
Tana French
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 mediaversus-New-Age frenzy. Hunt gave me a wounded look. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he told me reproachfully.
He was the last interview. As we were putting our stuff away, the boy tech knocked on the door of the Portakabin and stuck his head in. “Um,”
he said. “Hi. Sophie says to tell you we’re finishing up for today and there’s one more thing you might want to see.”
They’d packed up the markers and left the altar stone alone in its field again, and at first the whole site looked deserted; the reporters had long since moved on, and all the archaeologists had gone home except Hunt, who was clambering into a muddy red Ford Fiesta. Then we came out from among the Portakabins, and I saw a flash of white between the trees. The familiar, uneventful routine of the interviews had settled my mood considerably (Cassie calls these preliminary background interviews the nuthin’ stage of a case: nobody saw nuthin’, nobody heard nuthin’, nobody In the Woods 57
did nuthin’), but still I felt something zip down my spine as we stepped into the wood. Not fear: more like the sudden shot of alertness when someone wakes you by calling your name, or when a bat shrills past just too high to be heard. The undergrowth was thick and soft, years of fallen leaves sinking under my feet, and the trees grew heavily enough to filter the light into a restless green glow.
Sophie and Helen were
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