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the right. By the pillar box.’
    â€˜And will you?’ She turned and slowed, looking for his house.
    â€˜Just drop me here. This is fine.’
    Though she could have sworn there was a good hundred yards to go. Still, if he preferred a soaking to a door-to-door delivery, who was she to argue? Particularly as they both knew who would be waiting behind the door.
    She pulled into the kerb, and cut her lights and the ignition.
    â€˜Thanks.’ He reached for the door handle.
    â€˜Just one thing, Gaffer, before you go.’
    â€˜I’m very late, Kate,’ he said, suddenly severe. ‘I promised my wife I wouldn’t keep supper waiting.’
    â€˜Won’t take a second. Yes or no to the rumours?’ He couldn’t get out anyway – she always kept the doors on central locking when she was driving through town.
    It was too dark to see the look he gave her, but his voice mixed exasperation with something else. It didn’t seem to be amusement.
    â€˜As it happens, the rumours are wrong. Now, I must go. Thanks for the lift.’
    She released the lock before he touched the handle – perhaps he wouldn’t realise he’d been locked in.
    â€˜That’s OK, Gaffer – no problem. All you have to do is ask. Just one thing!’ she added, as he got out and turned to slam the door. ‘Your case – it’s on the back seat.’

Chapter Five
    Easter Saturday afternoon saw Kate not sitting in the rain in an enormous traffic jam but squatting in the sun in her back garden.
    â€˜Button-making was a home industry, you see, like nail-making or chain-making in the Black Country. I’d say this brickwork –’ Stephen Abbott, the man from the museum, brushed away earth from a section which had lain under her shed – ‘was the foundations of a late eighteenth-early nineteenth-century workshop.’
    She pounced, excited. ‘What if
Worksop
Road were a corruption of “workshop”?’
    â€˜Hmm. Could well be.’ He sounded doubtful. But surely an archaeologist would know that sort of thing. ‘Monday, I’ll nip into the Reference Library and check on documentation there – old maps, trade directories, that sort of thing. What I’d guess is that when they built your row of houses, they just flattened this. Now I’d say this could be an important site – of its type. Which is, I’m afraid, not in itself as important as – say – a Bronze Age kiln we found in someone’s garden a few years back. So I can’t see you getting a huge grant to preserve it. On the other hand, I’d quite like to spend a little time looking at it, and recording it, before it disappears under your garden pond, or whatever. Look,’ he said, holding a button between finger and thumb, ‘at this one – you can see the pressing marks. Excellent. And aren’t they in good condition? Why they should make bone buttons too I’ve no idea. I’d need to check the archival material for that, too.’ He stood up. Stereotypical grey-haired, stoop-shouldered archaeologist Stephen Abbott was not. Nothing dry-as-dust about him. Apart from his job title, of course. He was probably no older than Kate, and not a lot taller. He had exactly the right sort of bum for jeans. Broad shoulders. Under his sweat-shirt there seemed to be muscles to die for. The whole lot was topped off by a nicely-shaped head, under a mop of blond curls, now glinting in the sun. And the face – well, Kate had always considered herself proof against a pretty face, but now she found that she might not be.
    â€˜I suppose the spring isn’t the worst time to be working outdoors,’ she said tentatively. Despite the sun, there was a cold wind, and she wished that vanity hadn’t meant she’d left her fleece indoors.
    â€˜Not bad at all. The days are getting longer, for one thing. And I may have to make this a private project,