The Shadowy Horses

"The finds room," Fabia identified it, looking round. "Not that we're likely to find much. I'd have had this for my darkroom only Peter thought it better if I had the cellar at the house. More space, he said, and not so dusty.''

I felt a spark of interest. "Your darkroom? Are you the site photographer, then?"

"Peter had to find some use for me, didn't he?" Turning, she led me toward the dark end of the stable building, away from the refinished stalls. "And this is the common room," she told me, flipping up a switch to flood the space with light.

I stared. "The common room?"

"For the students."

All the stalls here had been removed, and the walls painted bright creamy white above green pub-style carpeting. In one comer, a large television and video faced two angled sofas. A narrow bookcase held an assortment of paperbacks, board games, and jigsaw puzzles, and the wall beside sported a professional-looking dartboard. And at the center of the room a massive snooker table rested, rather smugly, as though it judged itself the most important furnishing.

Fabia folded her arms. "Showers and toilets are out back."

"Showers?" I echoed, incredulous.

"Oh yes. Nothing's too good for the students, you know." Her mouth quirked. “Not that we have any students working here. Peter's little fantasy, that. He thinks he can convince the university to support his excavation."

Her tone implied that he might as well tilt at a windmill. I looked at her, curious. "But you said David Fortune's from the university."

"Well, yes. But Davy's known Peter for years; he's hardly impartial. Having him associated with our dig might make us more respectable, but it still doesn't solve Peter's problem. To hire students for the summer," she explained, "he needs the approval of the head of the department. And I'm told the head and Peter have a history."

"Oh, I see. Still, it's not such an obstacle, surely? If your grandfather's very determined, he could always hire regular workers to help with the dig. They don't have to come from the university."

"Ah, but that," she said, in a patronizing tone, "would mean he wouldn't get the recognition he deserved. It's his golden scenario, getting those students."

She'd lost interest in the common room.

"Your office," she said, "is down here, with the others."

I followed her back toward the renovated stalls at the other end of the stables, past the finds room, past the shelves and microscopes and packing boxes, to the last stall but one. It put me in mind of a monk's cell, clean and efficiently organized down to the tiniest detail.

The gray filing cabinet and metal-topped desk were gleamingly new, as was the state-of-the-art computer in the corner, and the orthopedic office chair, upholstered in soft green fabric that cleverly matched the desk accessories and litter basket. A calendar above the desk displayed a glossy yellow field of April daffodils,

"It's lovely." I delivered my verdict honestly. "Really lovely. All of it."

"You're right across from Adrian," she pointed out. "And Davy's office is in the corner, there, but he's only here a few days a week."

David Fortune's office looked abandoned, actually, and gave no clue as to the personality of the man who worked there. Adrian's workspace, on the other hand, was easy to identify. He was not the most tidy of men.

I shifted a coffee-stained cup from a stack of his papers, and peered with interest at the computer-generated image that topped the pile. It looked like something a child might produce by rubbing a stick of charcoal over a bumpy block of granite, only I knew it was nothing so amateurish. It was, in fact, a plotted section of a ground-penetrating radar survey.

Adrian had already been here a few weeks, I knew. He'd have completed his initial topographic survey of the site, using the measurements to create a detailed contour map of the field where Quinnell wanted to dig. But digging, by its nature, was destructive, and archaeologists didn't do it blindly. There were other ways to see beneath the ground.

Geophysical surveying, Adrian's speciality, relied on highly sensitive instruments to measure minuscule changes in the underlying soil. A resistivity survey passed a current through the ground to measure its resistance—walls and roads, much drier than the earth around them, showed up clearly. Where the soil was not well drained, as I suspected might be the case here at Rosehill, Adrian usually opted for a magnetic survey.

But ground-penetrating radar was his favorite. It often proved prohibitively expensive, but then Adrian loved spending other people's money. And he loved the high technology, the physical precision. I'd seen him spend days in a field, On his own, dragging the little wheeled radar device behind him like a child dragging a wagon, moving back and forth across the same bit of ground with a thoroughness that would bore most men rigid.

The results were usually worth the effort. His readings could reveal fascinating things beneath the most uncooperative of surfaces. And when the results were plotted on a computer, they produced a stratified landscape of black, gray, and white, like the one I was looking at now.

Incomplete, the image showed a definite anomaly, a sharp dip spearing down through the black and gray bands. It certainly might be a ditch, I conceded. And those smaller blips off to the right could be buried features, as well. I picked the paper up and brought it closer for a better look. Funny, I thought, how these things all started to look alike, after a while. This one put me in mind of an image I'd seen only last year... they were very similar... very ... and then I saw the tiny black smudge of a fingerprint to one side of the "ditch," and I frowned.