of wispy ginger hair going white. He wore stiff canvas trousers with long patches from knee to thigh and a collarless blue shirt, both of which seemed impregnated with fine, gray dust.
“Coffee!” he said by way of greeting.
Casehill—Case—jerked his head to the left. “Bakery's open. Few doors down from the village shop.”
“Excellent,” the man responded, and promptly took his leave. “One more coming,” he said over his shoulder. “Gel, thank the good Lord.”
Burt lumbered after the instructor, big and slow as a draft horse.
Andrew mumbled, “Gel?”
“A woman,” Newsome explained. “And, like all women, late.”
As if to prove him instantaneously wrong, a dark-green Land Rover with NATIONAL TRUST stenciled on its doors roared into the car park and whipped smartly into a space. The driver's door snapped open and a young woman who looked to be in her midtwenties fairly exploded from the car and strode toward them. She was stocky, had broad shoulders, and sported a deep tan set off dramatically by a helmet of close-cropped platinum-blonde hair. She was wearing olive-drab hiking shorts, and her calves looked carved from stone.
“This it? Just the three of you?” she said without introduction.
“Lovely to meet you, too,” Newsome answered with a broad grin. Andrew gathered this was not the sort of “gel” he'd anticipated.
Her manners caught up with her and she thrust out her hand. “Sorry. Becky Coombs. Got stuck behind a bloody charabanc full of tourists.” She shook hands all around. “Where's Jamie?”
“You know him, then?” Andrew asked.
“Oh, yes. Jamie's by way of being a god around here. Figured it was time I took one of his classes, especially since the project's on my patch. Volunteers will join us next week.”
“You're at the National Trust office downstream from the first bridge?” Andrew ventured.
“That's the place. In the old forge. When I'm not out in the field, that is.”
“Must be great to have a job that takes you out into countryside this beautiful,” Andrew said.
“It is that … except maybe in the winter. Rains constantly and the wind never lets up. Storms take a toll, especially along the coast path; we've a lot of stonework needs doing.”
Andrew liked Becky Coombs, her energy, her straight-ahead attitude.
Case had been quiet. Now he gave the girl a sly look and said, “Reckon you can hoist all the stone we'll be shiftin'?”
Becky smiled at Case.
“No, not all of it; just my share.”
Andrew glanced at the sturdily built “gel” and then the wiry little man and figured Becky Coombs could take the ferret out in maybe twenty seconds, no contest. He chuckled.
Jamie Boden was back, big Burt close behind, both of them clutching Styrofoam coffee cups. They gathered in a circle, and Boden looked each of them over like they were rocks he was sizing up before lifting them.
“Right then, what're you chaps driving?”
“Thought we was workin' right here, by the car park,” Case said.
“Will be,” Boden said. “That's our remit: Build a barrier between the verge and the river. But not this morning. This is a course, not a work party—not yet, anyways—so today we learn things. And to do that we go to my place, up on the moor. But it's rough going. Becky's got her Land Rover, so that's good. The rest of you?”
Burt rumbled that he had a Toyota pickup. Case was driving a beat-up Ford Fiesta. Newsome had a BMW 3 Series.
“Well, that's out,” Boden said. “Fiesta, too, most likely.”
“You?” he said to Andrew.
“I walked here.”
“You'll be the American then. You ride with me in the van. Becky, you take Mr. BMW here. Burt, can you take Mr. Casehill? Right, then, stick close or you'll never find it.”
A little after eight-thirty, Randi dragged Nicola out for his morning walk. She didn't mind; it was a splendid day, and she wasn't scheduled to work at the Museum of Witchcraft until ten. She smiled at the thought of her “job.” She'd been volunteering at the museum—“the world's largest collection of witchcraft-related artifacts”—for more than two years now. She often wondered what her very Catholic mother, dead not long before her divorce from Jeremy, would have thought. But it was really all Randi's fault. He'd belonged to an elderly woman in a nearby village—a practicing witch known only as Joan—and Colin Grant, the museum's owner, had taken the dog in after she died. Nicola met Colin while out walking along the cliffs just after sunrise one morning. He was sitting atop a ledge on Penally Point, meditating so quietly that Nicola hadn't noticed him. When