Damien came in awkwardly, with a plastic chair bumping along from one hand and his mug of tea still clutched in the other. “I brought this…” he said, using the mug to gesture uncertainly at his chair and the two we were sitting on. “Dr. Hunt said you wanted to see me?”
“Yep,” said Cassie. “I would say, ‘Have a seat,’ but you already do.”
It took him a moment; then he laughed a little, checking our faces to see if that was OK. He sat down, started to put his mug on the table, changed his mind and kept it in his lap, looked up at us with big obedient blue eyes. This was definitely Cassie’s baby. He looked like the type who was accustomed to being taken care of by women; he was shaky already, and being interrogated by a guy would probably send him into a state where we would never get anything useful out of him. I got out a pen, unobtrusively.
“Listen,” Cassie said soothingly, “I know you’ve had a bad shock. Just take your time and walk us through it, OK? Start with what you were doing this morning, before you went up to the stone.”
Damien took a deep breath, licked his lips. “We were, um, we were working on the medieval drainage ditch. Mark wanted to see if we could follow the line a little further down the site. See, we’re, we’re sort of cleaning up loose ends now, ’cause it’s coming up to the end of the dig—”
“How long’s the dig been going on?” Cassie asked.
“Like two years, but I’ve only been on it since June. I’m in college.”
“I used to want to be an archaeologist,” Cassie told him. I nudged her foot, under the table; she stood on mine. “How’s the dig going?”
Damien’s face lit up; he looked almost dazzled with delight, unless dazzled was just his normal expression. “It’s been amazing. I’m so glad I did it.”
“I’m so jealous,” Cassie said. “Do they let people volunteer for just, like, a week?”
“Maddox,” I said stuffily, “can you discuss your career change later?”
“Sor-ry,” said Cassie, rolling her eyes and grinning at Damien. He grinned back, bonding away. I was taking a vague, unjustifiable dislike to Damien. I could see exactly why Hunt had assigned him to give the site tours—he was a PR dream, all blue eyes and diffidence—but I have never liked adorable, helpless men. I suppose it’s the same reaction Cassie has to those baby-voiced, easily impressed girls whom men always want to protect: a mixture of distaste, cynicism and envy. “OK,” she said, “so then you went up to the stone…?”
“We needed to take back all the grass and soil around it,” Damien said. “The rest of that bit got bulldozed last week, but they left a patch round the stone, because we didn’t want to risk the bulldozer hitting it. So after the tea break Mark told me and Mel to go up there and mattock it back while the others did the drainage ditch.”
“What time was that?”
“Tea break ends at quarter past eleven.”
“And then…?”
He swallowed, took a sip from his mug. Cassie leaned forward encouragingly and waited.
“We, um…There was something on the stone. I thought it was a jacket or something, like somebody had forgotten their jacket there? I said, um, I said, ‘What’s that?’ so we went closer and…” He looked down into his mug. His hands were shaking again. “It was a person. I thought she might be, you know, unconscious or something, so I shook her, her arm, and um…she felt weird. Cold and, and stiff. And I put my head down to see if she was breathing, but she wasn’t. There was blood on her, I saw blood. On her face. So I knew she was dead.” He swallowed again.
“You’re doing great,” Cassie said gently. “What did you do then?”
“Mel said, ‘Oh, my God,’ or something, and we ran back and told Dr. Hunt. He told us all to go into the canteen.”
“OK, Damien, I need you to think carefully,” Cassie said. “Did you see anything that seemed weird today, or over the last few days? Anyone unusual hanging around, anything out of place?”
He gazed into space, lips slightly parted; took another sip of his tea. “This probably isn’t the kind of thing you mean….”
“Anything could help us,” Cassie told him. “Even the tiniest thing.”
“OK.” Damien nodded earnestly. “OK, on Monday I was waiting for the bus home, out by the gate? And I saw this guy come down the road and go into the estate. I don’t know why I even noticed him, I just—He sort of looked around before he went into the estate, like he was checking if anyone was watching him or something.”
“What time was this?” Cassie asked.
“We finish at half past five, so maybe twenty to six? That was the other weird thing. I mean, there’s nothing round here that you can get to without a car, except the shop and the pub, and the shop closes at five. So I wondered where he was coming from.”
“What did he look like?”
“Sort of tall, like six foot. In his thirties, I guess? Heavy. I think he was bald. He had on a dark blue tracksuit.”
“Would you be able to work with a sketch artist to come up with a drawing of him?”
Damien blinked fast, looking alarmed. “Um…I didn’t see him all that well. I mean, he was coming from up the road, on the other side of the estate entrance. I wasn’t really looking—I don’t think I’d remember…”
“That’s all right,” Cassie said. “Don’t worry about it, Damien. If you feel like you might be able to give us some more details, let me know, OK? Meanwhile, just take care of yourself.”
We got Damien’s address and phone number, gave him a card (I wanted to give him a lollipop, too, for being such a brave boy, but they’re not standard department issue) and shooed him back to the others, with orders to send in Melanie Jackson.
“Sweet kid,” I said noncommittally, testing.
“Yeah,” said Cassie dryly. “If I ever want a pet, I’ll keep him in mind.”