CHAPTER 1
ANNA
“Anna, can you hand me my other trowel, please? I just dropped mine down that crevice.”
Beside Professor Doyle, Ruth – the senior graduate assistant – sniggered as she shot in a deer skull with the theodolite. Two years ago it would’ve been Ruth doing all the fetching on site, but now she was senior to me, and I was the one scampering around after our scatterbrained professor like a faithful dog.
Sighing loudly – for my sigh would never be heard over the driving rain outside the cave – I picked myself out from underneath the rock shelf I was using as shelter and splashed over to the mouth. This was the third trowel Frances had lost down that bloody crack in as many days, and every time I’d braved the elements to replace it, the weather was worse.
We kept all the site tools in a lockable chest just outside the cave mouth, which meant I had to lie on my stomach and slither through a tiny hole while muddy water trickled down my bra, and then stand up in the howling wind and driving rain, all so my dopey lecturer could lose her tools again.
This was not what I had imagined archaeology would be like.
When I’d started my degree at Loamshire University, I had visions of swanning around exotic locations in a white tank top and Bermuda shorts, getting a glorious tan while I uncovered glittering jewels and treasures of long-lost civilisations. I’d wanted so badly to get away from Crookshollow my entire life. As a teen, I’d worked my arse off for top marks and had got accepted to Cambridge University, but after my father died, I had to give up my place to stay close to look after my mother. Giving up my spot at one of the best universities in the world to live at home had been one of the hardest things I’d ever done, but I’d consoled myself by remembering that at least I’d get to travel to far-flung locales as part of my degree to dig up the remains of the past. My dreams absolutely did not include spending four of the coldest weeks of my life stuck in the middle of Crookshollow forest with Frances Doyle, the mad professor of neolithic cave art.
And the worst thing was, I only had myself to blame. All the third-year archaeology students were required to undertake a four-week field trip on a site of their choice throughout the world. The university had relationships with several ongoing excavations, so we had our choice of locales … Greece, Italy, Egypt, Ecuador, Australia … It was the highlight of my entire degree.
I put in my application for a classical villa site in Sicily, and was informed I’d got the spot. But that was before Becky Masters – the stupidest girl in our entire class, the girl with the perfect blonde hair and perfect nose and perfect tinkling laugh whose passing grades came solely from the fact she was shagging the classical pottery professor – got hit by a bus.
She didn’t die, but her perfect little nose had to be reconstructed, and her arm had been broken in three places. Poor Becky, everyone said. Stuck in hospital with a broken arm and a mushed-up nose. Poor Becky, who missed the cut-off date for applications and was stuck at a dig in Crookshollow forest. Poor Becky who really, really wanted more than anything in the world to go to Sicily with Professor Hicks to study classical pottery in situ … wasn’t there a student who would consider swapping her place with Becky so she could continue the work that inspired her?
That was the spiel Professor Hicks gave me when he called me into his office and suggested I be the one to swap places with Becky. “You’re such a good student, Anna.” he said, “I’m sure you will excel wherever you are placed. You would be doing a great kindness to a fellow student, and I would definitely look upon this kindly when it comes to making your recommendation for postgraduate study.”
Because I was such a pushover, and I liked Professor Hicks and wanted to please him, and I didn’t want to be the cruel person who said “fuck off” to a girl who’d just been hit by a bus, I agreed. So Becky took my spot on the Sicily dig, and instead of relaxing in the sun beside a Minoan palace with my friend Katie, or excavating pharaonic treasures in the Valley of the Kings with Sinead, I got stuck in a soggy English cave twenty miles from home during the coldest month of the year.
Fuming silently at my miserable situation, I lifted the lid on our toolbox. My hand closed around one of the many trowels we had on hand. One of the first lessons I learned on the site was that an archaeologist would never get far without a spare trowel or ten. I stuffed a second one in my back pocket, knowing Professor Doyle would inevitably need it before the day was out. The biting wind whipped across my face, the cold stinging my filthy skin.
I knelt down at the cave entrance and slid inside, feet first, pulling my body through the gap. Rain pounded against my face, dripping down the collar of my jacket, wet droplets crawling over my skin.
“Thanks,” Frances said, barely even glancing at me as she grabbed the trowel and continued to scrape away at the dirt layers in her quadrant. In the quadrant opposite hers, Ruth and Max – the other graduate student – were laughing as they shot in the edges of an area of blackened dirt that signified the position of a hearth. I seethed inwardly as I noticed Ruth’s clothes were mostly dry and free of mud.
We were working in a raised area near the rear of the main cave complex, above the natural water level – so even through the entrance was like climbing through a waterfall, the actual site itself was mostly dry. The site was clearly a living floor for the neolithic inhabitants of the cave – functioning as a kitchen, judging by the cutting tools and piles of animal bones we’d uncovered. Foxes and birds and even bones of wolves from when wolves were still common in England had all been dragged back to the cave and eaten. The dietary habits of the neolithic cave dwellers were of particular interest to Max, who was completing his thesis on the subject. And Ruth was pleased with the charcoal samples and dried seeds we’d found inside the hearth, which she would be analysing for her doctoral thesis once we returned to the university. But so far, we hadn’t uncovered any treasure. Glittering jewels, Greek vases and gold funerary masks were not abundant in neolithic caves, and that meant I couldn’t find much to interest myself on the site.
I bent down to help Frances scrape off the remaining layer of soil on her quadrant. As I rolled the edge of my trowel over the surface, the corner of a small bone became visible. It was probably the rib bone from a fox, judging by the size and shape of it, but animal bones weren’t exactly my area of expertise. I placed it in a small bag, wrote a number on it, and left it in place to be shot in with the theodolite – a surveying instrument used to create a three-dimensional plotted map of all artefacts and features – once the other two had finished with it in their quadrant.
While I worked, I watched Frances, her messy brown hair falling out of her ponytail and spilling over her shoulders, her face streaked with smudges of dirt where she had itched her nose or pushed her glasses back up over her eyes. She didn’t even wear gloves when she dug, and her hands seemed to be permanently stained from the dark soil of the cave floor.
“What’s the time?” she asked absentmindedly as she scraped down the edges of the quadrant, her wrinkled hands making expert work of the corners of the square.
“Three-thirty,” I answered, pulling my phone out of my pocket and squinting at the screen. There wasn’t any reception in this remote corner of the forest, so my expensive smartphone had become nothing but a heavy portable timepiece. Smears of mud ran across the screen from where I’d been checking it frantically throughout the day, looking forward to knock-off time so I could get back to the camp and out of my mud-soaked clothes.
“Oh! So late already! That new ranger was supposed to be here around three. He might already be outside.”
“What happened to Daniel?” The county required a forest ranger to accompany us throughout the excavation, ostensibly to ensure our safety but really to make sure we didn’t damage any fragile forest ecosystems. Ranger Daniel Davies had been living at camp with us for the last two weeks, although he didn’t hang out much on site, preferring to spend his days inspecting the hiking trails and bridges in this area of the forest. He was a cheerful guy, and a lot of fun to have around. He was also the ranger who’d found Ben’s body, so I felt a special connection to him.
“He got a call the other day saying his flat had been broken into, so he’s had to go back to Liverpool.” Frances replied. “Can you go and meet the new ranger? He’s probably wandering around, wondering where the cave entrance is.”
“Either that or giving us red crosses for health-and-safety violations,” Ruth piped up. I stiffened at the words. Most archaeologists had a blasé attitude towards health and safety on site, believing their “common sense” would prevent an accident. I was the opposite. I was the only one on the team wearing my hard hat in the caves. I wanted more safety procedures, more lectures, more equipment. But I had my reasons.
A flicker of panic crossed Frances’s face. If a ranger deemed a site unsafe, they could shut it down. Daniel had been pretty chilled out, but who knew what this new ranger was like? “Find him and take him back to camp and show him the run of the place. Don’t let him come down here until we’ve had a chance to … to clean things up. Tell him I’ll be back around six to brief him. I want to finish shooting in these features.”
Why couldn’t she have told me all that before I’d crawled back down the hole again, saving me a trip? I sighed again. She wouldn’t be Mad Frances if she had.
I crawled out of the cave again, just as a large four-wheel-drive truck pulled up along the narrow dirt road near the site. The truck parked up, and I jogged towards it, my feet slipping against the muddy ground. I knew I must look like a golem rising out of the mud, but forest rangers tended to be pretty grubby themselves, and it wasn’t as if I were showing up for a date. I had my hard hat on, which was the only important thing.
“Hello,” I began, as the door swung open. “I’m—”
My words died in my throat as the new ranger stepped out of the car. His tall, muscular body towered over mine, biceps bulging from the rolled up sleeves of his work shirt. He wore dark jeans and workboots with the laces loose, and looked like he’d just stepped off the set of a “Hottest Rangers” calendar shoot. On the edge of his sleeve, I caught the outline of a black and grey tattoo encircling his upper arm.
But most of all, it was his eyes that had me frozen. Deep, pools of dancing green flicked over my body, appraising me. He gave a curt nod, a stray dark brown curl falling over his eye. Another curled around his ears, the rest pulled back in a tight ponytail, like a Viking warrior preparing for battle. A line of stubble ran along his broad jaw, giving him a wild, untamed look.
He was beautiful, and here I was, wearing baggy dungarees, a shirt that had belonged to my father, and with mud caked over every inch of my body.
“H-h-hello,” I plastered a smile on my face and extended my hand to him. A strange electrical energy sizzled along my veins. The air around us suddenly became thick and heavy. My stomach flipped, and not from anything I ate. What was happening to me? The ranger was hot, but he wasn’t Tom Hiddleston or anything. Why did I feel as nervous as a PhD candidate about to defend their thesis? “Welcome to the Crookshollow Caves. I’m Anna Sinclair, from the University of Loamshire. I’d be happy to show you around—”
He stared at my hand extended in front of him, an expression of cruel disdain crossing his handsome features. “No thanks,” he said, looking me up and down, his scowl deepening. “I don’t deal with students.”
My face flushed with heat. I stared down at my boots, hoping he wouldn’t notice. It figures someone that hot was a complete prick. “Dr Doyle is down in the cave.” I pointed to the cave entrance. “She won’t leave until this evening, and it’s pretty cramped quarters down there anyway. If you want to talk to her, you’ll have to wait until—”
“I have a job to do, and that job includes spot inspections of the work area.” The ranger shot me a defiant look, then stalked over to the cave entrance. I longed to just walk away and leave him to sort himself out, but I was curious to see how his meeting with Frances would go. He was definitely going to make her put on a hard hat.
So I followed him back to the cave entrance, rubbing my arms through my shirt in an attempt to drive out the strange heat tingling through them. The ranger knelt down in front of the tiny hole, sticking one leg in first, than the other. I was hoping he’d get his enormous, sculpted, arrogant shoulders stuck, but he managed to slide through easily, the rain hardly touching him. Sighing, I crouched down and slid in after him.
By the time I’d wriggled through the entrance, he was already stomping through the water towards the site, his face set in a firm line. Frances stood up, and dusted off her hands. “You must be the new ranger. You don’t have to come down here, you know. I understand it’s a tight fit.”
She didn’t say it, but her resentment at his presence was written all over her face, unobscured by the brim of her nonexistent hard hat. Frances hated the county intrusion on her work. They were required by law to oversee the excavation, but Frances saw Crookshollow caves as her site. She’d literally written the textbook on neolithic caves in England. She didn’t want some ranger who didn’t know a flint tool from an arrowhead telling her what to do, especially if he was as prickly as this character appeared to be.
He didn’t shake her offered hand, either. “I’m Luke Lowe. I’m replacing Daniel. Can you tell me what procedures you have in place for preserving the ecosystem within the cave? I notice a stalagmite broken off by the entrance.”
I cringed. I’d done that accidentally on the first day. A stalagmite formed over tens of thousands of years, through water dripping through cracks in the rocks. One misplaced swing of the theodolite tripod, and I’d knocked it off. And judging by Luke’s expression, I could be glad he didn’t know it was me.
“I have a full environmental report waiting for you back at camp, Mr Lowe. Anna will show you. I have a lot of delicate work to do here, and I’m sure you’d rather get out of the rain.”
“The rain doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is your lack of personal protective equipment—”
“Nonsense.” Frances practically pushed him towards the cave entrance. “I wouldn’t want you to catch a cold. I’ll give you a full tour of the site in the morning, I promise. The weather is supposed to clear a little by then. Anna, take our guest back to the camp and get a pot of tea boiling. You might as well finish up for the day, and we’ll be along presently.”
“I’ll take Mr Lowe, if Anna would rather stay behind. It doesn’t look as though she’s finished her quadrant yet.” Ruth piped up. I snapped my head around, watching her smile broadly at Luke and tuck her chin-length blonde hair behind her ears. For some reason, this turned my stomach more than it should have.
“That’s fine,” I snapped. “I can do it.” I didn’t want to be alone with the new ranger, but I wasn’t giving Ruth the satisfaction of flirting with him for the rest of the afternoon. “Finish my square for me, would you? You must be dying to pick up a trowel again after a whole day carrying around that heavy tripod.”
Ruth gave me a filthy look. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought I saw a flicker of amusement pass over Luke’s face. But when I glanced at him again, it was gone, replaced by his now-familiar sour expression.
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