The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [52]
‘This wasn’t my idea,’ I say, before he can get a word in. ‘Understand? This is the one and only time I’m ever going to mention what happened between us. I’d rather not be showing you round, but it seems nobody else has time to do it.’
He starts laughing. Bastard. Then he peers over the sunglasses and sees I’m serious.
‘Sorry. Sorry, Indy’ He takes the glasses off, folds them, tucks them into his shirt pocket and strides round to the other side of the vehicle. ‘Get in. By the way, I’ve the change from your twenty.’
‘My what?’
‘The twenty-pound note you gave me on the train. Remember? Before you did a runner at Reading.’
Ha, ha. I throw my rain jacket into the footwell, feeling stupid. But I had to say something to make the position clear.
‘Why did you give the job to him?’ I asked Michael, without thinking, when I heard last week. I’d strolled into his office hoping to persuade him to give me more work with the wardens, and it came as a shock to have my fears confirmed.
‘D’you know him, then?’ Michael straightened the photograph of his children, which I’d knocked off its precise axis on the desk.
I’d well and truly stitched myself up. ‘I met him once. He struck me as a bit of a loudmouth.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t have said that.’ Michael gave me a particularly beady stare, and I discovered I was kicking the leg of my chair like a petulant schoolgirl.
‘And he’s a helicopter pilot, not an archaeologist.’
‘Which is an excellent skill to bring to the job. He’s studying aerial survey, among other things, and it’s about time we looked again at Avebury from the air, especially with these new Lidar techniques that can even penetrate woodland. You do realize this placement is part of his MA? We’ve an arrangement with the university.’
‘Oh.’
‘Works out perfectly to give us cover while Morag’s away. He won’t be here full time. There might still be a day here and there for you. But you’ll be pretty busy, anyway, with those television people.’
Will I? Not a word from Daniel Porteus since I emailed him a list of the stills I’d found, and no dates fixed for filming.
‘Tell you what,’ Michael adds, with the gleeful expression of a man handing out sweeties. ‘Why don’t you do a day for us next Monday? You can show Ed round.’
‘Hope the anti-freeze is topped up in this vehicle,’ says Ed, as I climb into the Land Rover: his, not the National Trust’s, and in only marginally better condition. ‘Your expression could ice a small lake. Pardon me for asking, but what was so awful about what we did? You seemed to appreciate it at the time.’
‘I wouldn’t have, if I’d known you were married. You waited to break that snippet of news until afterwards.’
‘Ah.’ He clips on his seatbelt. ‘Only…there didn’t seem to be an appropriate moment to mention it.’
‘You’re doing it again.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Being flip about it.’
‘I’m never flip about my marriage.’ He starts the engine before I’ve closed the passenger door, and we’re spraying gravel on the Manor driveway while I try to get the seatbelt fastened. It’s become twisted somehow inside the reel, and I haven’t managed to straighten it out when we come to a sudden halt.
I turn round to see him looking at me. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Which way? Left, right? You’re supposed to be giving me the guided tour, remember?’
‘Oh. Right.’ Right takes us between the henge banks, past the massive diamond-shaped Swindon Stone, and into the circle. ‘Follow the road round by the Red Lion, then we’ll go down the Avenue to where the equipment’s kept at West Kennet Farm. Graham asked us to pick up a chainsaw.’
He guns the engine and we move out between the Manor gates onto the main road. It’s a sunny, blustery day, cloud shadows scudding over the high Downs, a bit chilly but what do you expect in March? At least it isn’t raining. But those cowboy boots will take some punishment when we go up to the Long Barrow. There’s a lake of mud at the bottom end of the track.
Anchors on again. Dead halt.
‘What the fuck’re they doing?’
‘Oh, no. Druid procession.