English Rose for the Sicilian Doc

‘Yes, hoping.’ She smiled, leaning towards him, obviously catching his mood. ‘Careful. We’ll have you hooked if you don’t watch out.’

‘You might have warned me sooner. I’m already hooked.’ In more ways than one, when he thought about it.

‘Ah. Well, since the damage is already done, it can’t do any harm to show you a bit more.’ Rose gave him a bright smile, her obvious enthusiasm for her work bubbling deliciously. Putting the bullet away and picking up the sheets of paper, she led him away from the finds to a large computer screen in the corner of the room.

‘I thought this might be of interest to you. Where your skills and mine meet.’

The thought of her off-duty skills meeting his, and testing them to their limit, sent a cool shiver down his spine. Matteo reminded himself that he needed to get a grip. That clearly wasn’t what she was talking about.

She opened directories, finding the file she wanted, and an image came up on the screen. ‘This is the geophysical survey.’

Matteo sat down next to her, leaning forward to study it carefully. ‘This is ground-penetrating radar?’

‘Yes, that’s right. We’re using a combination of GPR and electromagnetic survey techniques.’ She leaned back in her seat. ‘This is a pretty easy one. What do you reckon?’

‘I’d say...well, that line looks like an external wall of some sort, and those are internal walls?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Most people don’t see it straight away.’

‘And this is...what, two doorways?’ Matteo indicated the breaks in the pattern.

‘Maybe. I’m inclined to think a doorway and a window. We’ll see when we excavate.’ She pulled up the directory and opened another file. ‘We interpret the survey data and map out the site using computer aided design software. These green lines here...’ Her hand flew to her mouth.

Matteo grinned at her. ‘It’s okay. You can mention green in my presence. I can take it.’

She laughed, changed the settings on the image, and it reformed on the screen, different hatching styles replacing the difficult-to-read colour coding.

‘That’s better. So these single lines are...?’

‘It’s what we’ve gleaned so far from the surveys. The cross-hatching is what we’ve extrapolated from that.’

‘Guessed, you mean?’ he teased.

She gave him a look of mock horror. ‘It’s in keeping with what we know about this type of building. Call it an educated guess.’

‘Right. And this is the atrium?’ When he leaned in, he caught her scent. She smelled gorgeous, like the scent of silk against skin.

‘Yes, that’s right. It has a mosaic floor and usually an indoor pool right at the centre, below the open part of the roof.’

‘Is that another guess?’

‘No! We’ve dug a few test pits there, and there is evidence of a mosaic floor. We’re hoping that it’s in good condition and the bits we’ve seen aren’t just fragments. Would you like to come and see?’

When they walked out into the evening sunshine, Rose tipped her head up slightly, as if welcoming the cool caress of the breeze on her face. ‘It’s beautiful up here. I’m very lucky...’

‘You like Sicily?’ Suddenly that mattered more than it should.

‘I haven’t actually seen a great deal of it yet. I’ve been pretty involved up here, and the rest of my time is William’s. But what I have seen is wonderful.’

Such a bright, sparkling spirit, contained in such strictly drawn boundaries. Matteo felt himself wanting to break those boundaries down, and wondered if Rose ever felt constrained by them.

‘You do this kind of thing back in England?’

‘These days, I usually teach during term time and dig during the summer holidays. William’s grown up messing around in the mud.’ She grinned. ‘But this was such an opportunity I couldn’t say no to it, and I’ve taken a six-month sabbatical.’

‘But you don’t do forensics any more?’

‘No, never.’ She quirked her mouth down a little. ‘I got involved with that when I was at university—one of the professors did work for the police. Finding remains, modelling faces, that kind of thing. It seemed like a good thing to do at the time and I went on to work on a number of cases with him and then some alone’