5

“I will be able to help you,” said the dark woman with curly black hair. “You need an assistant, don’t you?”

“Very much,” Davis agreed.

The woman lifted herself onto her toes for a moment, as though his answer amused her. “And so now you have one.”

“Tell me a little about yourself.”

“I am also an archaeologist. My name is Irene Saarni. I am Indian. I have lived in America. In Hawaii. Where are you from?”

“California.”

“I have never been there. I am a friend of Jane’s. She said you are very famous.”

She wore a white lab coat, which looked out of place here in the midst of green grass and brick buildings. She seemed to struggle to repress nearly overpowering amusement. “I have my résumé here in this folder, if you want to see it, although there is no reason to believe everything written in a résumé.”

They wandered into the student crush, a pub-cum-coffee shop. They found a corner, far from anyone who could possibly overhear them. Davis was fascinated by this strange, small woman. He glanced at her résumé. She had worked on a dig in Turkey, in the ancient city of Aphrodite. On the island of Kauai she had helped unearth a lava-brick aqueduct. She had received medical training as a pathologist at the University of London. Davis guessed that she had considered, at one time, pursuing a medical career. She had worked on the exhumations of ancient graves in London, and had written an article on the skulls of the Roman cemetery here in York.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“In a flat belonging to the Foundation, on Saint Mary’s.”

“I live exactly next door to you. Do you know how to preserve our Skeldergate Man?”

“In a general way.”

“So you are knowledgeable on the subject of bog men?”

“I’m pretty well versed on the subject. I did work on the Tollund Man during my college years. I did a tour of Scandinavia. I’ve studied the Lindow Man, of course, although the fact that he was cut in two by a backhoe as they found him makes him seem—well—incomplete. He’s Britain’s favorite bog man. He’s lying there in the British Museum, for all to see. I was a part of the team that contour-mapped him.”

“And so your experience tells you how to proceed.”

Her barely suppressed glee challenged Davis, in a way he found stimulating. She seemed to be interviewing him, and to find him very amusing. He toyed with the thought of being annoyed by her, but her eyes were too bright. “I have a pretty good idea,” he said.

“Jane speaks very highly of you. She says I will learn a great deal working with you. I certainly hope so.”

“You sound as though you don’t believe it.”

“I am a natural skeptic.” She smiled. She had very white teeth, and as she mocked him, Davis found himself not knowing what, exactly, to say.

“I suppose you know all about the site,” she continued. “All the things that people say about it.”

“I have no idea what people say.”

She laughed. “Then you will be very surprised. And you will not believe it. I think I should have you speak with my friend Mr. Foote. With an e at the end. He is a great scholar of this city. You will find him very interesting.” She laughed again. “You have such a serious expression, Mr. Lowry. I think I will enjoy working with you very much.”

That night they began to work on the Skeldergate Man.

Davis wore a shaggy wool sweater under his lab coat, and Irene wore a jacket under hers.

Davis was curious to see if her cheerfulness would continue in the face of this ancient death. The black sheet was whisked to one side, and the body bag was unzipped. The ebony sleeper was exposed, glistening, under the fluorescent light.

“He is a handsome fellow,” said Irene.

“I want to do more C-fourteen dating. The reports of twelve hundred years give or take a few hundred are enough to satisfy the police.”

“But they don’t satisfy you.”

“I want to send some bone to some people I know at the British Museum. I know people at Oxford, and they tend to destroy less tissue in the process, but Dr. Higg practically owns the British Museum. They’ll give us the fastest results.”

“And there you stand, Mr. Lowry, with your scalpel in your hand, not wanting to cut our friend.”

It was true. Davis was stalling. He held the blade in his hand, and could not so much as touch it to the skin.

“I believe that five or six grams from the shin, and five or six from a hand, will be sufficient, Mr. Lowry. I will do it. The bone is so decalcified it is much like dried-out sponge. Here—this is enough femur. See how dry and porous it is. A Ziploc bag. Thank you.”

“You do this well.”

“You should not be surprised. I am cutting into the hand. I am sorry to do this, old friend. You are so handsome. But here—see how your metacarpals are like rotten wood. You have been dead a long time.”

“There’s a bag of some of the peat material found around the body,” said Davis. “They’ll want to test that, too.”

“This is a cold room.”

“Between four and six Celsius.”

“He will keep well here. But I think we should apply water to him. He begins to dry out. We have distilled water here. That will do nicely.”

“I took some tissue scrapes off his feet this morning. It’s the only work I’ve had time to do so far. This is only my first entire day here in York.” Why did he find himself wanting to apologize for not doing more? “I found two fungal organisms—penicillium and candida.”

“I thought candida would be called a yeast organism, but I may be wrong.”

“I can’t recall.”

She laughed. “And I can’t either. And I can’t recall if those organisms are a source of decay, or not. We don’t want our poor fellow to have athlete’s foot, do we?”

“They used to tan bog men,” said Davis, “like leather, as a way of preserving them. That’s the process nature began, anyway. They would tan them in a bark solution, rub them with oil—lanolin, or cod liver—and inject the saggy parts with collodion.”

“I hope you don’t suggest we do that to our friend. I know exactly what we should do with our ancient friend. We won’t keep him like an old boot.”

“I wasn’t suggesting—”

“We will have him freeze-dried, like coffee. Like food for mountain climbers. We will soak him in something kind to him—polyethylene glycol and water, at fifteen percent—and then when he is dried out we can keep him at a normal temperature, and not in a giant refrigerator like this.”

There was something mocking about her manner, insouciant, impenetrably happy. He was still slightly annoyed by her, but he was won over by her, too.

“But we are wasting time,” she said. “Use your tape recorder. We must continue. I am ready.” She set forth what Davis recognized as an endoscope, a metal tube for looking inside body cavities. She straightened a stainless steel tray on a side table. “Now, when you extract the gut, we will have somewhere to put it.”

“We don’t have to do everything in one night.”

“We will want to know what was his last meal. Hurry, Mr. Lowry. For a famous man, you are very slow.”

“I don’t like to be rushed.”

“You are standing like a statue. I cannot tell who is the bog man, the one standing up, or the one lying down. You are both too slow.”

Davis found the ON switch on the Panasonic. He cleared his throat. “We have a remarkably preserved male of as yet imperfectly determined age. In general appearance he is well built. His shoulders are fully muscled.” He bent closer to the head. “The pinna of the left ear shows some loss of inner cartilage. Otherwise, there is no sign of decay or, for that matter, damage, except for a wound to the throat.”

“Continue, Mr. Lowry.”

“The hair of his head is reddish-to-ginger in color. Probably a postmortem change in pigmentation. Much of the body has lost calcium to the extent that the limbs are spongy-to-hollow in feel. Pending the results of a computerized axial tomography workup there is no way to determine the presence of a foreign body as possible cause of death. A xeroradiograph will help determine skull fractures, if any, and other such details impossible to observe from the outside.”

He switched off the tape recorder.

“You are doing a magnificent job. Shall I insert the endoscope?”

He hesitated.

“I will make only a small hole. We want to look around the body cavity, Mr. Lowry.”

“There is something very strange about all of this. Forgive me, Irene. I have to stop for a moment.”

“It is too powerful, the presence of this ancient murder.”

She said this calmly, even happily, but she looked into Davis’s eyes, and seemed to understand him.

“Forgive me. I have trouble maintaining my professional detachment lately.”

“You need not apologize. I am pleased to see that you understand our friend. He wants our respect. He will not mind if we study him. If we are respectful of the dead, they will not harm us.”

Davis laughed, but she did not laugh in return.

The Skeldergate Man seemed to barely sleep. He seemed to twitch and toss, uneasily, in a dream.

As if he had made a sound.

Davis glanced up, to see if Irene had heard it.

She smiled back at him expectantly. “We can continue,” she said.

The hand of the Man moved. It was only unfolding, Davis saw, from an awkward position.

It continued to move.

Davis held his breath until it stopped.