The Way, the Truth and the Dead

by Francis Pryor

  ‘Alan, you’re being ridiculous and you know it. Yes, I could probably dig three bodies in a week, providing there weren’t any complications, but you’ve proudly announced to the world that you’ve almost certainly discovered a cemetery. And as you’re no doubt aware, most cemeteries contain more than three graves.’

  ‘I know, but think about it this way: the graves we’ve got are sealed beneath alluvium. Metalwork is superbly preserved—’

  ‘But that won’t matter if they’re Christian, will it? There’ll be no finds.’

  Alan was getting desperate; he tried another approach.

  ‘That’s as may be. If this cemetery is as early as I think—’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Judging by the stratigraphy it has to be very early post-­Roman indeed, maybe even sixth, but more probably seventh century.’

  ‘Hmm, so earlier than Guthlic’s?’

  Had that been a mistake? He didn’t want to remind her of their last time together.

  ‘Yes, by quite a lot.’

  ‘I must admit that does sound very intriguing …’ There was a short pause. When she resumed, her tone, Alan thought, seemed brighter. ‘You may not know it, but I’ve just been given a Moorhouse Fellowship to collate all the known sub-Roman and early Christian burials in Britain. It’s a five-year project.’

  Moorhouse Fellowships were very highly regarded indeed and Alan felt slightly deflated that he hadn’t been told.

  ‘It sounds right up your street, then.’

  This was more hopeful. If all else had failed, he knew he could appeal to her enthusiasm for her specialism. Had it worked?

  ‘Look, I’m nearly at the station, so I can’t come over today. I’ll watch the programme when I’m back from London tonight—’

  ‘But we may not come down on the bones. They could be quite deep.’

  ‘Yes, I’m well aware of that, Alan. So I’ll be with you bright and early tomorrow morning. I’ll see you at Fursey at nine.’

  And with that, she rang off.

  He put the phone down and leant back in his seat. That could have gone worse. A lot worse. Suddenly he started to feel elated, but then he got a grip of himself. No, that wasn’t the way forward. This time everything about their relationship was going to be professional. Strictly professional.

  * * *

  If the live shoot could have been said to have had a quiet day, it was Day 5, Friday evening. The discovery of the Roman helmet cheek-piece had moved the programme from the centre to the front pages of all national newspapers and visitor numbers to Fursey had continued their relentless rise.

  It was approaching 8am when Alan turned the Fourtrak into the staff car park at Fursey Abbey. He drew up alongside a familiar Land Rover. As he got out, Sebastian did the same. Both doors slammed in unison. Sebastian glanced across at the peaty mud, still wet on the Fourtrak.

  ‘Been out surveying?’ Sebastian asked cheerfully. He was in a good mood.

  Alan was desperate for a coffee and couldn’t face a long explanation.

  ‘Yes, sort of. All this filming gets in the way of my normal work. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘Yes, I do. For me it’s the council; for you it’s the camera.’ Sebastian was plainly very pleased with this.

  ‘Yes, but they both have their pressures, don’t they?’

  ‘Could be worse. Could be worse.’

  Sebastian reached into the Land Rover and rapidly pulled out a briefcase. ‘Can’t hang around,’ he said as he locked the door. ‘Got an FHD board meeting. All your fault, Alan. John says the place’s crowded. Too many visitors to deal with properly. But I thought that’s what we wanted, wasn’t it?’

  And with a cheery shrug he turned and headed rapidly towards the abbey office.

  Despite the rain, Alan paused for a moment. Why would John want to call a full Fursey Heritage Developments board meeting so urgently? Surely it was just a simple management decision? Clearly Sebastian wasn’t about to give anything away, but something was happening, and presumably it was quite important. But what? And more importantly: why? Try as he would, Alan couldn’t get his head around it.

  * * *

  As he left the catering trailer holding a mug of coffee, Alan met Frank who was poring over a clipboard of papers. He looked up. For a brief moment Alan feared he was going to propose another strange idea, but he was wrong. Frank merely smiled and asked what he was planning to do today. Alan explained that as soon as they’d lifted the helmet cheek-piece, they must crack on with the three graves, if they were to have any hope of revealing bones on Day 5, let alone on Day 6. To his surprise, Frank agreed – he was very aware that what with the Lidar results, the developing building in Trench 2, not to mention all the military finds, the final day would be hectic verging on the impossible. Whereas today looked relatively quiet. So he promised to do everything possible to ensure they were not interrupted in Trench 1. Alan thanked him, but wasn’t even slightly optimistic: someone, or something, was bound to turn up.

  But he was wrong, and they got a good day’s work done. The graves’ fillings were quite soft and the ancient grave­diggers had back-filled them with the clean soil dug out of the grave. Unlike graves in later churchyards, the filling of these very early burials was not mixed with material disturbed from much older, completely decayed graves. They did find a few small and weathered pieces of Roman pottery in the top of the filling, but that was to be expected. But to Alan’s great relief, the main graves’ back-fill was sterile. He even contemplated being naughty and using a mattock, but decided against it, given the visitors and ubiquitous reporters. He could see the tabloid headline: WHOOPS! Shock Horror! Clumsy Archaeologist Smashes Ancient Skull!!

  By the time Frank called everyone together for the final rehearsal, the graves were now looking like graves: each one a foot to 18 inches deep and with nice steep, clean sides. Alan was clearing up pieces of loose earth from around ‘his’ grave, as he now unselfconsciously thought of it, when Charles ­Carnwath, T2’s commissioning editor, arrived.

  ‘I’ve only just got here, Alan. Just thought I’d let you know how well you’ve been doing.’

  ‘Thanks, Charles, we’ve got a great team here—’

  ‘No, Alan.’ He crouched down by the edge of the trench, his tone more confidential. ‘I’m not getting through, am I?’

  Alan looked at him, his mind still largely on the live session that would start in five minutes. Carnwath continued more urgently, ‘It’s not just me, Alan, it’s everyone at T2 from the controller of television downwards we all think you personally are doing a fantastic job.’

  Alan still didn’t know quite what to say. ‘That’s, er, very nice to—’

  ‘All the feedback we’re getting is about what everyone is calling the real reality of this show. And they all say it’s down to you.’ Alan tried to interrupt, but Carnwath wouldn’t let him. ‘Yes, Craig and Tricia are great, but they’re not unusual. There are Craigs and Tricias right across television. But you’re different. You’re real. You’re fresh and you’re not seen as bland. We’re wiping the floor with the opposition. On Day 2 our audience share topped twenty per cent, while that Road Rage spoiler slumped to eight per cent. Tonight with luck we might make twenty-five per cent. So keep it up – and stay yourself. Don’t forget: Lew and I will back you, whatever you decide. And I mean that.’

  He tried to take in what had been said as he watched ­Carnwath leave the shelter. Then he smiled. He wasn’t even slightly sad that the Road Rage special – Chelsea Tractors from Hell – had flopped. But ‘stay yourself’ – what did that mean? Right now he wasn’t entirely sure who he was. The old Alan Cadbury, Stan’s close friend, had long gone. The straightforward man-of-the-trenches field archaeologist was being stifled by the ‘Itsagrave’ media star. The amateur sleuth couldn’t decide who to follow: Thorey? John? Candice? Sebastian? – even Sarah? And then of course there was Harriet: what would she make of this character stew?

  Carnwath’s encoura
ging words had had the opposite effect.

  * * *

  Alan was back in Trench 1 trowelling away. Over the day he’d managed to catch up with Graves 2 and 3, not of course that they were being at all competitive – although they had agreed that the other two would buy the first one who hit bones all their drinks in the pub for one evening.

  The monitor on the side of the trench had been turned on, but the three archaeologists all had their heads down and were scraping vigorously. Rather unusually, Weinstein had decided to start Day 5 with the studio panel discussing the significance of the helmet cheek-piece. They began with the more complete and better preserved example from ­Witcham, currently on display at the British Museum – and of course there were lingering shots of light glinting off its ­silvery surfaces. And yes, Alan had to concede, glancing up, it was very fine. Very fine indeed – if, that is, you liked that sort of thing. But was our – as he now thought of the Fursey cheek-piece – fragment precisely the same? Were they by the same maker, even? The only way they’d ever know would be to visit the hallowed display cases in the BM and do a close comparison. Ever since his student days, when he’d first heard the nation’s premier museum referred to as the Bloomsbury Lubyanka, after the Soviet Union’s most notor­ious prison, Alan had found it very daunting. He much preferred Portakabins.

  Then the panel moved on to discuss why the Roman Army would have needed horses in an environment where the ground was so soft. Alan could hear the monitor jabbering away in the background. But the Fens aren’t a quaking bog, you bloody halfwits! He sighed heavily and trowelled even harder to suppress his anger at such rubbish. As if reading his mind, Weinstein came over the earpiece and explained that this had been the main worry of the thousands of people who contacted T2 via Twitter and social media. Alan paused while Weinstein spoke and felt slightly mollified when he’d ­finished. Then he resumed trowelling. Hard. Even after years of such work, his wrist was beginning to feel the strain.

  He stood up: he had to straighten his back. Instinctively he looked at the visitors over by the barrier and checked their faces. Was Harriet among them? But she wasn’t there. Briefly he felt irrational disappointment. Then he pulled himself up short. Time to get a grip: the filming wasn’t going to be easy and he needed his brain to be focused. He got back to his trowelling.

  Weinstein’s original plan had been to finish the studio piece, then Craig would kick off the live section in Trench 2 where viewers would see how the find spot of the cheek-piece related to the emerging timber wall. Towards the end of the middle of the programme they’d make just one visit to Trench 1, before returning to Trench 2 for a discussion of the day’s finds, including some fine and quite large pieces of Samian ware with clear makers’ marks on their bases, which had got Tricia very excited in the afternoon. One highly ­decorated bowl had been imported around AD140–175 from a particular maker, Cinnamus, who was based in Lezoux, in southern France. Alan could anticipate her holding forth at some length about that. And as he’d told Weinstein, they needed time to work their way through the graves’ fillings or they wouldn’t have a chance of reaching bones on the all-­important Day 6. So just one visit to Trench 1 would be fine by them.

  That, at least, was the plan.

  The panel discussion was starting to wind down, but for some reason the sound-feed on the monitor had become rather crackly and Grump was approaching the trench to fix it when he was frozen in his tracks by a squeal from Kaylee. Alan immediately straightened up and looked into Grave 2. Kaylee was no longer kneeling forward. She was smiling hugely. But instead of anything memorable or broadcastable she announced to everyone in the shelter, ‘You two boys owe me an evening’s Bacardi and Coke!’

  Her squeal had caused near-panic behind the scenes. Mercifully for Kaylee, nobody at home heard the Bacardi and Coke remark. Somehow, and in a very few seconds, Weinstein engineered a crash-cut from the studio to Trench 1. Luckily Speed was on stand-by and his camera was turning over in time to catch Alan’s response, which was picked up on the camera mike alone at first, so was rather indistinct.

  ‘Skull?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kaylee replied, her voice still faint. ‘Lying prone, I think.’

  By now Grump had twiddled his knobs and switches. Suddenly the sound improved as their mikes cut in.

  ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Alan moved from Grave 1. As he did so, Weinstein came through the earpiece.

  ‘Play for time, Alan. Craig’ll be with you very soon.’

  Alan knelt at the edge of Grave 2 and suddenly felt the silt beneath his knees start to shift. Immediately he knew the graveside was about to collapse. Very, very carefully he pulled back, then rapidly collected two short kneeling-boards from a heap behind the now dead monitor. Meanwhile Kaylee was continuing to clear soil away from the skull. Weinstein had told Speed to go in close, and people at home were able to see her expose the skull’s left eye socket. It was a wonderful moment of live television.

  Hundreds of thousands of children right across Britain shuddered in unison. Alan looked down at what Kaylee was revealing. The orbit, or eye socket, was sharp and well-­defined which meant that the bone was well preserved. He knew that would please Harriet. And for some reason he found it pleased him too.

  * * *

  By the end of Day 5’s filming, Kaylee had exposed the upper part of the skull and John had come across a toe bone in Grave 3. The skull was at the west end of its grave, the toe bone at the east: final confirmation of their Christian status.

  It had been an interesting ‘live’, with much less chat and discussion and more focus on the actual archaeology. Alan preferred it that way and knew that Weinstein could see it provided contrast and further evidence, not that this was needed, that this was indeed real reality television.

  Alan was aware that bone preservation was the main concern of the special human osteologist he wanted to join them.

  ‘Alan,’ Craig asked in the scene before the end credits. ‘You seem more than usually excited by the bones.’

  ‘You’re right, Craig, I am. You see, I’d been a bit worried. There’s a lot of peat around Ely and peat can be very acid. Bones, of course, are made from calcium which is easily attacked by acid soils. But when I examined the skull closely’ – he didn’t tell the world the truth: that he’d tapped it with the tip of his trowel – ‘I could see it was hard and in exceptionally good condition. All the surfaces seem smooth and intact.’

  ‘And is that important?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Bone surfaces preserve muscle scars, so we can tell a lot about a person’s build and even their lifestyle.’

  ‘And disease?’

  Clearly Craig knew that TV audiences relished anything about disease, the nastier the better.

  ‘Absolutely. It’s been said that there was a wave of plague at the end of the Roman period and these bones might also reveal traces left by boils, scurvy, mouth ulcers and a host of dental problems too painful to think about.’

  ‘So something grisly to look forward to tomorrow?’

  Alan frowned, but he didn’t reply. He knew he’d already said more than enough.

  Then the credits rolled.

  Twelve

  Alan had a restless few hours’ sleep, which ended in a nightmare in which the graveside collapsed and he crashed onto the skull, smashing it to pieces, while Harriet looked on in stern disapproval. Then, quite out of the blue, a fire engine, all bells and sirens at full blast, was hurtling towards them. At that his brain woke up. It was the phone. The bloody phone. Last night he’d been too tired to turn it off. He reached out and picked it up. His sleepy eyes wouldn’t focus on the screen.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Alan,’ the voice was half-familiar. ‘It’s Alan, here.’

  Alan? For an instant his woolly brain thought he was going mad. Then sanity returned: it must be Dr Alan Scott, the soil micromorphologist in Cambridge.

  ‘I finished with the soil samples last night, but thought you wouldn’t
welcome a call so late, as I know you’ve been quite busy these evenings.’

  ‘Yes, it’s been a bit frantic.’

  ‘And last night’s was good. We had it on in the lab. The students cheered when the skull appeared. And that Tricia has won over the blokes, big time. You’d better watch it, Alan, or she’ll up-stage you, unless you’re careful.’

  ‘I hope she does. I think she wants a career in TV, which is more than I do. But the samples?’

  Small talk. He hated it.

  ‘Oh, yes, the samples. Well, for once I think we took them from the right place and the sequence doesn’t seem to have been disturbed too much by post-depositional effects.’

  ‘Ah, that’s good. So not a lot of drying out?’

  ‘No. So I think we’re deep enough down to be able to say some useful things.’

  ‘Like?’

  Alan’s sleepy mind had now fully woken up. He wanted Dr Scott to get to the point.

  ‘There’s a clear cut-line in the lower part of the alluvium.’

  For Alan, that was the big story. It confirmed what he had seen, but couldn’t prove in the trench.

  ‘Yes, we could see something very faintly, which lined up well with the edge of Grave 2. Is that what you spotted in thin-section?’

  ‘It is, I’m certain of that. And the other thing that’s very clear are the separate episodes of flooding, which form a series of quite distinct varves, about half a millimetre thick.’

  This was more music to Alan’s ears. He’d learnt about varves when studying the history of archaeology at Leicester. They were first identified in Scandinavian glacial lake-beds in the 19th century.

  ‘I couldn’t spot any obvious standstill or weathering horizons,’ Dr Scott continued. ‘So I must assume the flooding was a regular annual event. And you say the pottery dates the start of alluviation to the later third century?’

  ‘That’s right. Sometime shortly before AD300.’