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the saw himself. “Cutting branches that are in my way when I’m trying to ring birds. It’s all right, I’ll show you what to do.”
    It was hot work, hacking away at the gorse and scrubby trees that George wanted trimmed. Stopping to mop her brow, Callie noticed a sooty mark on her left wrist. She rubbed at it, but it wouldn’t come off.
    Witch-girl
…
    She whirled round to see who had spoken, but there was no one there. She could hear George and Josh on the other side of a huge gorse bush, laughing, but the voice had come from the opposite direction. She swallowed, holding tightly to the hatchet, looking about as if she expected someone to leap out of the undergrowth.
    “Callie!”
    She jumped at the sound of Josh’s voice.
    “What?”
    “You must be slacking. We can’t hear you chopping.”
    “Just having a quick rest.” She shook her head at her overactive imagination, and started hacking away at branches again.
    Half an hour later, the trimming was finished to George’s satisfaction and he was settling down in the shade with his binoculars to see which birds were around.
    Josh and Callie wandered off along the shore. Unlike Pitmillie beach, it was almost deserted.
    “Wind’s going round,” Callie observed. “Should be good for body boarding tomorrow if you still fancy it?”
    “Definitely.”
    After half an hour or so they made their way back to George’s birdwatching patch and found him finishing a mug of tea.
    “Nothing around. Too hot, I expect. They’ll all be lying low in the shade,” he said with regret. “We may as well go, but we’ll go back by Dane’s Dyke just in case there are any birds around there.”
    “George, tell Josh the story. The one you used to tell me when I was small.”
    “The one I regretted telling you, you mean.”
    “What story?” asked Josh.
    “It’s not a story really, Callie, it’s local history,” George corrected her. As they walked on, he began to talk.
    “Long ago, the Danes came raiding in Fife over and over, and there’s supposed to have been a great battle here in eight hundred and eighty something. I forget the exact date. It’s not very clear what happened: either they won and killed King Constantine of Scotland, or they didn’t win and they didn’t kill him. Nobody seems to know either way.” He led them up onto a grassy bank about a metre high. “Anyway, you’re standing on what’s been known as Dane’s Dyke ever since.”
    From the name, Josh would have expected something impressive: a wall maybe, or a defensive earthwork at least a couple of metres high. The bank they stood on was covered in grass and scrubby weeds. It stretched off in a gentle curve, getting lower and lower until it merged with the ground around it.
    It really wasn’t that interesting. However, he didn’t want to seem rude, so…
    “What is it? Was it some sort of defence?”
    George beamed. “Everyone assumed so, but it turns out it’s more than that. There was some excavation done a few years ago, and it turned up human bones.”
    “It’s a grave?”
That
was more interesting.
    “It seems to be – or part of it is, anyway.”
    “He hasn’t told you the best bit,” Callie said. “Go on George. Josh won’t think you’re nuts. He already knows there’s more to this part of Fife than meets the eye.”
    Now Josh was
really
intrigued.
    George hesitated for a few seconds, then started to speak again.
    “When I was a couple of years older than you I used to come birdwatching down here with an old chap called John Fordyce who’d lived in Crail all his life. One day he took me along Dane’s Dyke, right to the far end.” George pointed towards the sea. “Up at the top of the bank he showed me a big stone slab. He levered it up and there was a human skeleton underneath.
    “Well, you can imagine what went through my mind; I thought I was being shown the scene of a murder at first. Then I looked at the bones properly and realised they must be pretty old.