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probably been sent on a fool’s errand, for one thing; to a place near Helpston, as well, which was not, strictly speaking, in his territory. For another, he had had one of his rare disagreements with Katrin – OK, he conceded, as he rewound the events of the previous evening in his mind, it was a row . Katrin had been behaving strangely of late – she was not her usual sunny, rational, forgiving self. There had been a heated exchange, during which she had said that it was he who had been behaving thoughtlessly. She would say that, of course. Nevertheless, her comments had prompted him to embark on some unaccustomed moments of introspection. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps they both needed a holiday. Perhaps he would be in a better mood if Superintendent Thornton hadn’t landed him with this bloody ‘incident’, or rather, non-incident. It would turn out to be a wild goose chase, he would put money on it. In the meantime, Detective Constables Juliet Armstrong and Andy Carstairs were investigating what appeared to be a contract killing that had taken place in Spalding the night before – a man had been found dead in Ayscoughfee Gardens, the cause of death apparently a single bullet through the forehead. Drugs, thought Tim. Drugs would be at the bottom of it; though it was odd that the man seemed to be a vagrant. He had been trying to persuade his superiors for months that there was evidence of an organised drugs gang at work in South Lincolnshire. Perhaps now they would believe him. Discovering the identity of the victim in the park could lead to the uncovering of a drugs network. If so, it would probably be the most important case that South Lincolnshire police had worked on for many years. And here he was, traipsing around the countryside looking for a vain old woman who had contrived to go missing.
    His assessment of Claudia McRae’s character was not entirely based on prejudice. As a history undergraduate, he had developed a passing interest in archaeology and, of course, he had heard of her. Dame Claudia McRae, as she was now. Most people had heard of her, even if they barely knew what archaeology was about. Her fame had been attributed to her having pushed back the boundaries of what the women of her generation were allowed to achieve; she had succeeded in gaining eminence in a science (art?) that had previously been a fiercely-guarded male preserve. Tim had read one of her books, however, and he suspected that vanity and a decided talent for self-promotion had also been major factors in her rise to stardom – not to mention her many friends in politics and other influential spheres. He did not deny the inventive virtuosity of the theories that she propounded; indeed, he found them fascinating, because they lent to archaeology the very quality which for him it had traditionally lacked: the power to recreate the voices of the past. But her prose style was thumping and arrogant and she allowed no room for doubt that she was right. Some of her hypotheses were based on extremely tenuous interpretations of tiny examples of barely-decipherable scraps of ancient writings whose languages could not be fully reconstructed. It was therefore difficult to say that she was wrong (particularly as she was the pre-eminent ‘expert’ in her field), but for a trained mind it was equally difficult to swallow that all of her theories were irrefutable. Remarkably, no-one of either her own generation or the one succeeding it had publicly challenged her writings, though conversely she had never received much acclaim from her peers. He wondered if a new young crop of would-be famous archaeologists was now busily casting a sceptical eye on the corpus of her work and coming up with alternative explanations for her ‘findings’. If so, he hoped that they would be diligent in researching the many accounts of recent discoveries that could no doubt be cited to provide a legitimate pretext for undertaking such a project and, also, that they