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admitted it, but by the time she looks down at the bodies stretched out back-to-back in their sandy grave she has almost forgotten that she has a baby.
    The trench is still fairly narrow and Ruth squeezes in with difficulty. Ideally, she’d like more time to look at thecontext but she knows that the sea is advancing. High tide is at six, and with the stones cleared away the sea will probably come all the way into this inlet. Time to excavate the bodies. First she takes photographs, using a measuring rod for scale. Then she draws the skeletons in plan. Finally, bone by bone, she starts on the first body. As she lifts each bone, Trace records it on the skeleton sheet and marks it with a tiny number in indelible ink. All the bones are present and, as Ruth had thought, there are teeth too; each tooth also has to be numbered and charted. When she comes to the skull, she sees that there is some hair still attached, ashblond, almost the same colour as the sand.
    There are fragments of rope around the wrists.
    Ted whistles. ‘Their hands were bound.’
    ‘May be able to get DNA from the rope,’ says Ruth. ‘There could be blood or sweat on it.’
    ‘Will we get DNA from the bones?’ asks Ted.
    ‘Maybe,’ says Ruth. ‘But DNA can be contaminated by burial.’
    Trace says nothing. She is working efficiently but silently, placing each marked bone in a paper bag.
    Ruth looks at the skeleton sheet. She is sure that the bodies are adult males. She can see the brow ridges on the skulls, the pronounced nuchal crest at the back of the head, the large mastoid bones. This first skeleton also has a particularly square jaw. Ruth wonders whether they will be able to get a facial reconstruction done but, as she looks at this skull lying on the tarpaulin with sand blowing around it, she has an uneasy feeling that she knows exactly what its living form would be. A tall man (the long bones show that),blond haired with a jutting chin. A Viking, she thinks, though she knows this is historically unlikely. She thinks again of her first mentor – Erik Anderssen, Erik the Viking.
    ‘How are you doing?’ She recognises Clough’s voice but does not look up.
    ‘Okay. First body’s almost out.’
    ‘Baby’s asleep,’ says Clough, sounding amused. ‘Think the boss is about to drop off too.’
    Ruth says nothing but Trace says, slightly bitchily, ‘Never knew Nelson was so soft about babies.’
    ‘Well, he’s got kids of his own, hasn’t he,’ says Ted, carefully lifting out the second skull.
    ‘They’re grown up now,’ says Clough. ‘Turning into right stunners.’
    Ruth wonders whether Ted has children. She knows very little about him beyond the fact that he went to school in Bolton and is famous for his prodigious drinking. She also thinks it is inappropriate for Clough to refer to Nelson’s daughters, one still at school, as ‘stunners’. She wonders what Trace thinks.
    The second body is slightly shorter and the few tufts of hair are dark. When they reach the hands they see that an index finger is missing.
    ‘Could be very useful, that,’ says Ted.
    Ruth agrees. She is almost sure these men were killed within living memory. If that is the case, a distinguishing mark will be very useful.
    The next body is laid out in an identical position, hands behind the back. The only difference is that something is clasped in the right hand, its skeletal fingers still clenched.
    ‘What’s that?’ Ted leans in.
    Gently Ruth prises the fingers apart. Still they seem unwilling to give up the object they have grasped for so long. A flash of gold, white beads.
    ‘Is it a bracelet?’ asks Trace.
    ‘It’s a rosary,’ says Ruth.
    She has seen one before, of course. A picture comes into her mind of Father Hennessey, the Catholic priest she met while investigating another long-buried body. She has a vivid memory of a ruined house, a deserted garden, an archway silhouetted against the sky and Father Hennessey holding a rosary, passing it from