The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps Read Online Free PDF

remains of dead ones, peering at gradations in soil colour that could signal the vanished presence of a coffin or a pelvis, winkling pale fragments into the light which could, please God, be teeth.
    The skeletons exhumed so far had all been buried facing east, the direction of Jerusalem, to help Judgement Day run more smoothly. Four years from now, when the research would be completed and the bones re-buried with the aid of a JCB and vicar to bless them, they’d have to sort out their direction for themselves.
    Today, one of the girls was in a bad mood, her mouth clownishly downturned, her eyes avoiding contact with the young man working next to her. Yesterday, they’d been exchanging secret smiles, winks, sotto voce consultations. Today, they did their best to pretend they weren’t kneeling side by side; separated by mere inches, they cast expectant glances not at each other but at Nina, as if hoping she might assign them to different plots farther apart. A cautionary spectacle, thought Siân. A living parable (as Saint Hilda might call it) of the fickleness of human love.
    â€˜I think I may’ve found something,’ said someone several hours later, holding up an encrusted talon which might, once it was X-rayed, prove to be a coffin pin.
    At four-thirty, as Siân was walking past Saint Mary’s churchyard on her way down to the hundred and ninety-nine steps, she spotted Hadrian’s head poking up over the topmost one.
    â€˜Hush!’ he barked in greeting. ‘Hush, hush!’
    Siân hesitated, then waved. Magnus was nowhere to be seen.
    Hadrian ran towards her, pausing only to scale the church’s stone boundary and sniff the base of Caedmon’s Cross. Deciding not to piss on England’s premier Anglo-Saxon poet, he bounded back onto the path and had an exuberant reunion with Siân.
    By the time Magnus joined them, she was on one knee, her hands buried deep in the dog’s mane, and Hadrian was jumping up and down to lick her face.
    â€˜Excuse me, I’m just going overboard here,’ she said, too delighted with the dog’s affection to care what a fool she must look.
    Mack wasn’t wearing his running gear this afternoon; instead, his powerful frame was disguised in a button-down shirt, Chinos and some sort of expensive suede-y jacket. He was carrying a large plastic bag, but apart from that he looked like a young doctor who’d answered his beeper at a London brasserie and been persuaded to make a house call. Siân had trouble accepting he could look like this; she’d imagined him (she realised now) permanently dressed in shorts and T-shirt, running around Whitby in endless circles. She laughed at the thought, her inhibitions loosened by the excesses she was indulging with Hadrian. Casting her eyes down in an effort to reassure Mack that she wasn’t laughing at him, she caught sight of his black leather shoes, huge things too polished to be true. She giggled even more. Her own steel-capped boots were slathered in mud, and her long bedraggled skirt was filthy at the knees.
    â€˜You and Hadrian better not get too friendly,’ Mack remarked. ‘He might run off with one of your precious old bones.’
    It was such a feeble joke that Siân didn’t think anyone could possibly blame her for ignoring it. She heaved herself to her feet and, fancying she could feel his eyes on her dowdiness, she sobered up in a hurry.
    â€˜Have you read any of the books and pamphlets?’ she said.
    He snorted. ‘You sound like a Jehovah’s Witness, on a follow-up visit.’
    â€˜Never mind that. Have you read them?’ Be firm with him , she was thinking.
    â€˜Of course,’ he smiled.
    â€˜And?’
    â€˜Very interesting,’ he said, watching her straighten her shapeless cagoule. ‘More interesting than my research, anyway.’
    As they fell into step with each other towards the town, Siân rifled her memory for the