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flashlight into the tomb. The sepulcher. Maggie craned over his
shoulder.
    “ An inscription?” repeated Tara. “Not
really, no. A few carvings Granny, Elaine, interpreted as horsemen.
Mags tried computer-enhancing a rubbing, but there’s not much of
anything to enhance.”
    Horsemen? Evidence for Maggie’s theory about
some Dark Age cavalry bloke? Jean remembered only too well another
grave inscription, one that had been enhanced by human imagination.
Alasdair had to be thinking of that, too.
    He said, “Professor Lauder, you’re telling us
this is a man’s body.”
    Okay, then, he wasn’t having flashbacks to
that particular inscription. He’d always been better at
single-tasking. Jean stepped closer and peered over his other
shoulder. Tara made no move to join them—if anything, she shrank
farther back. Was she helping with the excavation because of her
relationship with Maggie, not because she had any particular
interest in archaeology? So far as Jean knew, the girl could be
anything from a fashion model to a business administrator.
    “ Heavy brow ridges,” said Maggie.
“Narrow pelvis. A man—in my professional opinion, at the
least.”
    Maggie had a professional opinion. Jean
couldn’t tell what was bone, what was shadow, what was mud or decay
or some ghastly, slimy mixture of both. The moving light created
optical illusions and then dispelled them.
    “ Berwick’s on the way,” Crawford’s
voice said behind them.
    “ Very good,” Alasdair
replied.
    “ They’re sending a boat. Not worth a
helicopter, D.C.I. Webber reckons, but still, D.I. Grinsell’s
coming himself, not just sending a sergeant.”
    “ Detective Inspector Grinsell?”
Alasdair passed the flashlight off to Jean so quickly she had to
grab its weight with both hands before it thudded down onto the,
ah, evidence. He rose to his feet and turned around. “George
Grinsell? Was he with the Cumbria Constabulary some years
ago?”
    “ I’m thinking he was, aye.”
    Great. Alasdair’s tone wasn’t exactly filled with delight at meeting
an old colleague. It shouldn’t matter—he wouldn’t have jurisdiction
over an unexplained death back home, never mind here, but if he had
previous track with this particular detective . . . Jean peered up
into his shadowed face and saw nothing. As usual, he played his
cards so close to his chest they snagged on his buttons.
    A cold hand fell on hers and she jerked.
    “ Sorry.” Maggie directed the beam of
light away from the body, around the sides of the grave.
    Jean swallowed her heart back into her chest,
took a deep breath—and was sorry she had, the burial smelled like
the worst case of bad breath ever—and followed the track of the
little searchlight.
    The body sprawled atop a layer of mud and
rubble clods. Below them she glimpsed a more-or-less horizontal,
deep gray surface, decorated by small punch marks. “A lead coffin?
Wow, those are rare.”
    “ Meaning the original burial is that of
someone of high rank of the Romano-British period. The lid of the
coffin’s a bit crushed—it’s right thin lead, considering.” Maggie
knelt back down, Jean at her side. The stone beneath her shins
radiated damp and cold.
    The rectangular cavity of the tomb was lined
with flat stones turned on edge rather than by a mortared wall.
Jean was reminded of an ancient cist burial or the chamber in a
prehistoric passage tomb. “Which saint does the chapel
commemorate?”
    “ Saint Genevieve,” Maggie
replied.
    “ Saint Genevieve? She’s French. The
chapel must date only to the Norman rebuilding after
all.”
    “ Or earlier. Chantry chapels were quite
the thing in France in the ninth century, and King Athelstan
established more than a few in England in the tenth.”
    “ Considering the number of people who
died in his wars with the Celts and the Vikings, I’m not
surprised.”
    “ Perhaps this one was rededicated, then
or by the Normans,” suggested Maggie. “Given a new name as well as
a new