the comparison has actually been made. That way the delay will be minimized.” She looked around the table. “Don’t worry. No one else is going to find bones like this—Arnold here is more likely to find another wife.” She grinned and the others laughed. “You can afford to wait a few weeks—what Natalie suggests is a very simple piece of science craft, Richard. Very simple, but vital. And you know it in your heart.” She smiled at Natalie and then looked back to Richard. “Think how convincing a photograph of your bones would be alongside some modern bones.” She rested her elbows on the table. “You should thank our new arrival, Richard, not abuse her.”
She raised her glass. “Now, enjoy what’s left of your champagne. Who knows when We’ll taste the next bottle?”
• • •
Natalie sat in the canvas chair outside her tent and looked out at the night. Everyone had their own quarters on Eleanor Deacon’s digs, each tent big enough to stand up in, and Natalie was grateful for that. All tents, she had discovered, had their own bucket shower and latrine, too—another real luxury—and were spaced far enough apart from the other tents for true privacy. No doubt because she had been the last to arrive, Natalie’s was in fact at the end of the line. The tents were laid out in a large T shape and hers was at the foot of the central line, so she was doubly fortunate. This was the first excavation she had been on since she was a student, and the first where she had full responsibility for one particular aspect of affairs. She was already finding the experience very intense: everyone else was so much more experienced than she was, and all were extremely motivated, as the exchanges at dinner that night had shown, and they took their responsibilities so very seriously. She didn’t mind. That’s how she liked it, in fact, but she was grateful, for tonight at least, that people hadn’t lingered over the dinner table, so she could return to her tent, sit outside, wind down, smoke a cigarette, and, her guilty secret, sip a late whiskey. The flask was on the table in front of her now. She knew alcohol was banned but she wasn’t an alcoholic—far from it. She liked one whiskey a day, late at night, when the busyness was all over and she was by herself. She was ready for bed—more than ready—but one nip settled her; it did no harm.
She listened to the night. Barks from the baboons, shrieks from the chimpanzees. What did they find to shout about so much? There was also the odd roar from the lions, who always seemed so much closer than they actually were. Or so she hoped.
Sitting with her back to her tent, she could see across the camp to where three of the men were still sitting talking. They had moved from the refectory table to near the campfire: Richard, Russell, and Christopher. Eleanor had already turned in for the night, as had the others. The kitchen tent and storeroom were also dark and silent: Ndekei was in bed too.
Natalie smelled the whiskey she had poured into the small silver cap from her flask, and sipped the liquid. She had acquired the taste from her father, long before he had gone off into that private world he now inhabited alone, since Violette had died. Not surprisingly, being a choirmaster, Owen Nelson was a deeply religious man whose twin passions were the music of Bach—the greatest sacred composer in his view—and the single malts of the Scottish highlands, Scotland’s great gift to the world, as he liked to say. In Natalie’s early teens, immediately after the war, Owen had driven his wife and daughter, in his brand-new Hillman, on annual excursions to Scotland in search of distilleries he had never heard of. It was in the course of those holidays that Natalie had first encountered Loch Ness, and looked out of the car window in vain for the fabled, long-necked monster. The very next day, at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, she had stood underneath the never-ending skeleton of a diplodocus suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s main gallery, and to her young mind it had seemed all too obvious that the dinosaur and the mysterious creature in Loch Ness were pretty much the same beast. The museum had sold a jigsaw of the dinosaur, which Natalie’s mother hadn’t been able to resist, and