The Night Hawks Read online

  ‘What is it?’ says Ruth.

  ‘It seems like a lot of old metal,’ says Nelson. ‘I thought you might like to have a look.’

  Ruth feels her heart beating faster. This part of the coast is famous for buried treasure. There was the so-called jeweller’s hoard at Snettisham, as if the contents of a Romano-British jewellery shop were just lying underground waiting to be discovered. Then there was the Sedgeford torc and the Iceni silver coins at Scole. Old metal, Nelson said, but he wouldn’t know an Iron Age hoard from the contents of the slot machines on the Golden Mile in his beloved Blackpool.

  ‘These metal detectorists,’ Nelson is saying. ‘They were here last night with their machines and lights and what have you. They found this and got all excited, then one of them, a young lad called Troy Evans, found the body. They called the police and two local PCs attended the scene. They called me first thing this morning.’

  ‘We’ll have to secure this site,’ says Ruth. ‘Stop anyone else trampling over it. Can you make it part of the crime scene, Nelson?’

  She’s half-joking but Nelson says, ‘I suppose so as it was found at the same time as the body. Funny place to bury something, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really,’ says Ruth. ‘Two thousand years ago it would have been well above the tide line.’

  ‘But why bury something on the beach?’

  ‘They could have been a votive offering,’ says Ruth. ‘An offering to the sea gods.’ She looks at Nelson and knows that they are both thinking the same thing: bodies buried in the sand near here, murdered to placate nameless, vengeful gods. They have reached the hole – it can hardly be called a trench – and Ruth can see the dull gleam of greenish metal.

  ‘Or sometimes you find escape hoards,’ David cuts in. ‘Warlords on the run, perhaps escaping back to Scandinavia. They buried their treasure, hoping they would come back for it.’ He squats down to look. Ruth is rather pleased to see that his shoes and trousers are wet and spattered with sand. He leans closer and, when he speaks, his voice is different. Thick with excitement.

  ‘Ruth! I think this is Bronze Age.’

  Ruth comes forward to look. A Bronze Age hoard would be a find indeed. Rarer and older. Leaning in – uncomfortably close to David – she can see what looks like a fragment of a spear, shaped a bit like the club in a suit of cards.

  ‘Broken spears,’ says David. ‘This could be Beaker.’ Ruth knows that the Bronze Age, and the Beaker People specifically, is David’s speciality.

  Ruth has brought her excavation kit, a backpack containing trowel, brush and zip-lock bags. She brushes the sandy soil away from the metal and sees something else in the earth below, something smooth and off-white.

  Nelson comes forward now.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I think it’s a part of a skull,’ says Ruth.

  ‘There’s a body there?’ Ruth can sense Nelson’s excitement, even without looking at him.

  ‘I think so. We’ll need to do a proper excavation.’

  David has taken the trowel and widened the area around the bone. ‘I think there’s more here. Looks like we’ve got our dig.’ He grins at her. It’s the first time that Ruth has seen him smile and the effect is actually to make his face look even grimmer than before. She doesn’t smile back. Someone is dead, after all. Two people, if you count the body lying amongst the Bronze Age spears. Which she does.

  ‘Glad someone’s happy,’ says Nelson. ‘It’s an ill wind.’ This too, suddenly sounds rather sinister, especially as the wind has been getting stronger in the last few minutes. Sand is rising from the beach in clouds, getting into Ruth’s hair and her eyes. Ruth suspects that Nelson got this particular adage from his mother and it’s never a good sign when he starts quoting Maureen.

  When Ruth and her follower have trudged back to the car park, Nelson returns to the crime scene. The Forensics team are having to work quickly because of the incoming tide. Last night, the Night Hawks moved the body to higher ground. Normally Nelson would be cursing them for interfering but, in this case, it was the only thing to do. The tide was rising fast and, by the time that the police appeared, the body would have been lost to the water. It does mean that they can’t gain any clues from the surrounding area, ‘the context’, Ruth would call it. And they need to move the dead man before the tide comes in again, at midday.

  After exchanging a few words with the Forensics officers, Nelson heads back inland. There’s nothing more for him to do here. He’s not a fan of the north Norfolk coast, miles of sand and rocks and mangy looking vegetation. It whiffs to high heaven too, a horrible, rank, briny smell, not like the aroma of vinegar and chips which hovers over proper seaside resorts. As he treads carefully over the wet seaweed, he sees a woman coming towards him, dressed in a yellow raincoat. DI Judy Johnson always has the right gear for the climatic conditions. Cathbad, her partner, says it’s because she is in tune with the weather gods.

  ‘Hi, boss,’ says Judy, when she gets closer. ‘I saw Ruth leaving. Who was that with her?’

  ‘Some dickhead from the university. And guess what? We’ve found another body.’

  ‘Another body’s been washed up?’

  ‘No. Ruth thinks there’s a skeleton buried with a pile of old metal higher up on the beach. That’s what they were looking for, this Night Hawk gang. They call it a hoard. Of course, they didn’t know there was a body there too.’

  ‘Is that why you called Ruth?’

  ‘No,’ says Nelson, not looking at her. ‘I didn’t know about the skeleton. I just thought she’d be interested because some of her lot were involved. Though Ruth says that metal detectorists aren’t proper archaeologists.’

  ‘Cathbad goes out with the Night Hawks sometimes,’ says Judy. ‘He says that they’re genuine questing souls.’

  That figures, thinks Nelson. Cathbad is a druid. He also teaches meditation and once trained as an archaeologist. Nelson doubts that there’s a single group of local eccentrics that Cathbad doesn’t know about. And, if they go out at night and break a few laws along the way, that’s right up his street. Questing souls indeed. He never knows quite what Judy, his best and most rational officer, makes of her partner’s beliefs. She certainly manages to say this sort of thing with a straight face.

  ‘We need to secure the archaeological site,’ says Nelson. ‘And inform the coroner. Even though the body will turn out to be thousands of years old.’

  ‘It might not,’ says Judy. ‘Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘They certainly have,’ says Nelson. ‘And mostly to us.’

  ‘Do we know anything about the body washed up on the beach last night?’ says Judy. ‘Any identification on him?’

  ‘No,’ says Nelson. ‘I think he must have come from a migrant boat. Have the coastguard reported anything?’

  ‘No. I rang round all the stations this morning. Of course, they could have come ashore somewhere where there are no checks. Who attended the scene first?’

  ‘PC Nathan Matthews and PC Mark Hammond. Local boys. Good coppers. I came across them in Cley last year.’

  ‘I’ll read their reports, but shall I get them to come in for the briefing later? Might be good to hear about it in their own words. Especially as we won’t have forensics from the scene.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘The tide’s coming in,’ says Judy as, on cue, a wave sneaks over the shingle and breaks just in front of them. ‘We need to move the body. I’ve got a private ambulance standing by.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ says Nelson. ‘Briefing at three. See you later.’

  ‘Super Jo was looking for you,’ says Judy, over her shoulder. ‘I told her you were out.’

  ‘Good work,’ says Nelson. His boss, Superintendent Jo Archer, is always trying to make him have meetings with her. Avoiding her is his main form of exercise.

  Chapter 3
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  As soon as Ruth gets back to her office, she rings the coroner’s office. She needs a licence before she can excavate the bones. In order to get the licence, she has to prove that excavating the remains will further historical and scientific understanding. She doesn’t think that this will be difficult. If the weapons look to be Bronze Age, then it’s reasonable to suppose that the skeleton must be too. Of course, there might not be a complete articulated skeleton – an animal could have deposited the bones there – but the presence of the swords makes Ruth think that this is a significant site of some kind and, in that case, it’s quite likely that it’s also a burial site. Bronze Age bodies are often found in burial mounds, typically surrounded by pottery and other grave goods. She remembers reading about a burial in Wiltshire – near Stonehenge, she thinks – where the body was surrounded by gold, like some Inca deity. What if they unearth something like that on Blakeney Point?

  The encounter with Nelson had gone well, she thinks, perhaps helped by David’s presence. Since she has returned to Norfolk, her relationship with Nelson has been cordial but slightly distant. She’s aware that her feelings for him played a big part in the decision to return but she doesn’t necessarily want him to know this. Nelson is the father of Ruth’s child but he’s still married and, whilst Ruth once might have overridden her conscience and ignored this fact, the arrival of baby George has made this impossible. She couldn’t forgive herself if she took Nelson away from his three-year-old son, even assuming that he wanted to come. Nelson is a family man, first and foremost, and his family is his wife Michelle and their three children. Ruth thinks that there was a time when Nelson did consider leaving Michelle for her, but that time is firmly in the past. The trouble is that Ruth, as an archaeologist, feels more comfortable in the past. But, in the present, Ruth has her life with her daughter and her cat – and her work. She has to be content with that.

  Her reverie is interrupted by David. If he knocked, she didn’t hear him.

  ‘You know, this is potentially a very exciting discovery,’ he says.

  ‘Come in,’ says Ruth pointedly. She doesn’t want David taking ownership of the find, something she suspects he is quite likely to do. He was only with her on Blakeney beach because she was too polite to tell him to get out of her car. Or was she just too feeble?

  David looks around him, as if surprised to find himself in the room.

  ‘I think it’s a Beaker burial,’ he says. ‘You know I did my PhD research on the Beaker folk.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ruth. She has read his CV, after all. The Beaker people are thought to have migrated to Central Europe from the Eurasian Steppe, continuing west until they eventually arrived in Britain around 4,400 years ago.

  ‘As you know,’ says David, ‘just a few hundred years after the arrival of the Beakers, only ten per cent of the native population remained. Neolithic Britons were wiped out. It’s my theory that it was a plague. A new virus brought by the Beakers from Central Europe. The native population had no immunity. Ninety per cent of them died. Their DNA just disappears.’

  ‘A plague or genocide,’ says Ruth.

  ‘The Beakers were a peaceful people,’ says David. ‘They were interested in culture and pottery.’ Ruth knows that the Beakers take their name from their distinctive bell-shaped pots, but she thinks that David is making some sweeping assumptions here.

  ‘I was thinking,’ says David. ‘Once we’ve excavated our skeleton, we should get a facial reconstruction done. Beaker people were more likely to be blue-eyed and fair-skinned whereas the native Neolithic population were dark-skinned with brown eyes. It would make an interesting social point.’

  Interesting, thinks Ruth, and potentially controversial. She doesn’t want to feed into the idea that immigrants bring diseases which wipe out native populations. And she dreads to think of the sort of people who will crawl out of the woodwork complaining if they portray Neolithic Britons as people of colour. All the more reason to do it, of course. The real stumbling block is that facial reconstruction is very expensive. It’s depressingly Phil-like to have to think in this way.

  ‘We don’t even know if there’s a complete skeleton there yet,’ she says.

  ‘There is,’ says David. ‘I’m sure of it. I sense it.’

  Ruth gives him a sharp look. Archaeology is divided between people like Phil, who love geophysics and technology, and those, like Ruth’s old lecturer Erik, who reply on instinct and inspired guesswork. Before today, Ruth would have put David in the former camp. She likes to think that she is a mixture of the two.

  ‘I’ve been talking to the coroner’s office,’ she says. ‘We’ll have to do a controlled excavation following IFA guidelines.’ She can hear herself sounding more corporate by the second.

  David sounds slightly chastened. Maybe it’s the mention of the Institute for Archaeologists. Or the coroner.

  ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘When we’ve excavated the body then maybe we can do a dig for the students. I’ve been talking to an old school friend of mine. He was actually one of the metal detectorists who found the body last night . . .’

  ‘An old school friend?’ says Ruth. ‘Are you from Norfolk then?’

  She remembers the Beakers from David’s interview but she doesn’t recall him ever saying that he was local. They had talked about UCL and David’s years in Scandinavia but schooldays hadn’t come up. Surely David should have mentioned that he knew the area well?

  ‘It was a private prep school in West Runton,’ he says now. ‘Closed years ago, thank God. I was only there a short time. Alan was a few years above me but he was kind to me, we were friends. I lost contact with him but we came across each other on a history forum a few years ago.’

  No wonder David had been so quick to defend the Night Hawks.

  ‘Anyway, Alan saw that there have been lots of discoveries along this part of the coast. Iron Age hoards but also Bronze Age burials. And there’s the henge, of course. You were involved in excavating that, weren’t you?’

  A series of images flash across Ruth’s brain: the timbers rising out of the sea, Erik falling to his knees in the henge circle, her then boyfriend Peter trapped on the quicksand with the tide rolling in, a little hand wearing a christening bracelet . . .

  ‘Yes, I was involved,’ she says. ‘But it was a long time ago. I’ll let you know when I’ve got the dig organised. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of work to do before the Meet and Greet.’

  The briefing room is full. The body on the beach isn’t necessarily a case for the Serious Crimes Unit but any unexplained death has to be investigated. Nelson runs through the details: ‘Deceased male, probably late teens or early twenties, found on Blakeney beach in the early hours of the morning. Death looks to be from drowning but we’ll wait for the autopsy results to be sure. By the look of the body, the deceased had only been in the water for a few hours. The deceased . . .’ He misses his former DS David Clough, now a DI, who would have given the dead man a name, probably taken from one of the Godfather films. The rest of his team are watching him intently. Judy, inscrutable, notebook in hand. Tanya, ever eager, hand hovering to be the first to ask a question. Tony, the new DS, trying to look mature with a newly grown beard and an expression of carefully cultivated nonchalance. Nathan and Mark, the PCs who first attended the 999 call, sitting awkwardly to one side. Nathan, in particular, looks nervous at finding himself in the CID lair. He is sweating profusely and has to keep wiping his forehead.

  Mark Hammond takes the lead in reporting their part of the story. ‘We got the call at one forty-five a.m.,’ he says. ‘We proceeded to Blakeney beach where we found four individuals beside the body of a deceased male. They stated that they had found the deceased while searching for buried treasure on the beach. They had moved the deceased to higher ground because the tide was coming in. We secured the site and took statements, then we allowed the witnesses to return home. Their names
. . .’ he consults his notebook, ‘are Troy Evans, aged twenty-one, Alan White, aged fifty-eight, Neil Topham, aged fifty-six, and Paul Noakes, aged thirty-one.’

  ‘Do we know anything about these men?’ asks Nelson.

  ‘Alan White runs the Night Hawks,’ says Judy, ‘a local group of metal detectorists. They’re a proper registered group. Alan is very respectable. Cathbad knows him. He’s an ex-history teacher.’

  Nelson nods but doesn’t say anything. The words ‘Cathbad’ and ‘respectable’ don’t exactly go together. And he’d like to know why Alan White left teaching. Once again, he misses Clough, who would certainly have been rolling his eyes.

  ‘Did you get a look at the dead man?’ Nelson asks the two PCs.

  ‘We checked that he was dead,’ says Nathan. His voice is hoarse and his hands are shaking slightly. Nelson wonders if he has the right temperament for a police officer. ‘We also looked for any identifying documents but there was nothing in any of his pockets. He was wearing jeans and a check shirt. No shoes. They had probably come off in the water.’

  ‘Anything that struck you as strange?’ asks Nelson.

  ‘He had a tattoo,’ says Mark.

  ‘Nothing so odd about that,’ says Nelson. He has one himself. It says ‘Seasiders’, a reference to Blackpool FC, his beloved football club.

  ‘This was a bit strange though,’ says Mark. ‘It was on his neck and it was a snake with sort of spikes on its back. Looked as if it was about to bite his ear off.’

  Tony laughs and turns it into a cough. Tanya, who has a discreet dolphin tattoo on the inside of her wrist, says, ‘Maybe it was some sort of gang insignia?’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ says Mark.

  ‘An unusual tattoo might help with identification,’ says Nelson. ‘Thanks, boys. Looks like this poor lad was just unlucky. Maybe he took his own life or maybe he was in a ship that got into trouble. Anything from the coastguard, Judy?’