Another pause.
‘Okay, love you too,’ she said before putting the phone back on the table.
They sat for a long time, Rebecca stroking her hair and rocking her gently, as she would rock one of the kids.
‘Jack will be back soon, then I’ll take you home in your car. You don’t want to be here.’
Laurel nodded, exhausted and eminently grateful that Rebecca knew her so well.
But did she want to be at home? She’d been sleeping in one of Nate’s t-shirts (a threadbare blue Time Team Archaeologist one), his papers were spread across her dining table, his running trainers by the door. Her bedroom smelled of him.
But she could sanitise it, get rid of him from her flat. Rebecca would help.
And then, maybe it would be better.
Nate
Nate did the only thing he could think of. He worked. He was first at the site, he was last to leave, and it didn’t stop there. Sleep was evading him, so he catalogued everything, described everything in minute detail. When he finally fell, utterly exhausted, into bed, he had three or four hours of fitful dozing before he repeated the whole groundhog day again. He was dying inside, and Laurel wouldn’t talk to him. She didn’t believe him.
He had to work to get the anger out. To fill his mind with something else. Anger at Alex, mainly, but also angry at Laurel. How could she not even give him the chance to explain himself? She obviously believed Alex’s bullshit story and he had done the worst thing an academic could do. Plagiarism was punishable by death. Well, not exactly, but you wouldn’t work again in a historical academic environment. Ever.
It was career ending, and Alex had put them both in this position. There was no saving Alex from himself this time, and Nate had to hope he had enough academic clout to distance himself from this entire debacle. It was going to come out sooner or later. Surely,surely, someone would have overheard, and academics were notorious gossips, especially about something as juicy as this. He had to get in front of it, had to minimise damage for himself and for the dig site. But how? Whatever he did, he had to do it soon. It had been nearly a week.
Ivor wasn’t going to be much help. He could go to the Chair of the University, but was that overkill? He could throw Alex under the bus, but quite frankly, he had already done that to himself.
And Laurel wouldn’t talk to him.
It was such a mess, and he couldn’t work it out by himself. He needed her arms around him, her reassuring smile, her sharp mind. She obviously didn’t need him because if she had done, she wouldn’t have had Sylvie reply to his emails (both personal and business). She would have replied to his text asking to let him explain, his voicemail saying it wasn’t true, that hedidn’tknow what Alex had done.
Nate’s throat tightened again as he checked his phone (just in case) for the fourteenth time in half an hour. He put it back in his pocket and dragged his hands over his face. Nothing.
‘Dr Daley! Nate! You need to see this!’
Nate turned to see Anwar, who was waving wildly at him from trench one.
‘It’s a bone, Dr Daley. I think it’s a jawbone, I can see teeth.’
‘Good, Anwar.’ Nate jumped down into the trench and bent to examine what Anwar had found. Nate’s heart beat steadily as he assessed it. ‘Yes, and see here? That’s the zygomatic bone.’ Nate brushed away soft dirt just above. ‘Which one is that?’
‘The bottom outside corner bone of the eye socket.’ Anwar was hopeful.
‘Good, and what should we find next to it?’ Nate murmured, soft strokes of his soft brush pushing at the earth.
‘The maxilla along the bottom and the frontal along the top.’
‘Male or female?’
‘Too early to tell. We’ll need to get to the supraorbital margin first.’
‘Gut?’
‘Male. I think it’s a warrior burial.’
Nate thought so too, the jaw was square and it feltbulky, much more so than a female skull. ‘Why?’
‘We found a shield boss, it’s at the top of a mound... I don’t know, I’ve just got a feeling.’ Anwar flicked his fingers against his thighs quickly.
‘Female warrior?’ Nate pushed.
