Chapter 3: Resistance Is Useless

It was towards the end of the next day that Freddie decided to take up Bethany's invitation. He made his way down from the villa into the valley. The land rover was parked by the track. Sitting on the tail gate, Bethany was staring glumly at the screen of a laptop computer. "Bloody geo-phys," she muttered, "useless."

"Afternoon," he called jovially. "I wondered how things were going."

Bethany looked up from her PC screen. "Pretty much how I thought it would at this stage," she said, closing the screen and getting up. "Maybe something, maybe nothing. Come on, I'll show you." She led the way down the track, Freddie followed enjoying the site of her backside, as it fought against the constraints of her shorts, and her legs; nut brown from months spent outdoors excavating in the Aegean and the Anatolian peninsula.

It was odd, Freddie thought, the way that she combined the bookish air of a university don with the healthy outdoors-girl look. On the other hand he wasn't complaining.

The track led down to where the valley widened as it reached the beach. The girls had cleared a lot of scrub and vegetation. Norah was dragging a tangle of brushwood across to a pile on one side of the site. She was built more heavily than the others. She looked like she was finding it hard work. On the other hand, thought Freddie, she looks like she could do with the exercise.

Bethany strode forward into the middle of the cleared area. "This is the site we're going to be digging," she said.

"Doesn't look much to me," said Freddie.

"No," said Bethany with a worried look. "And to be honest I'm not sure it does to me right now. The resistivity survey hasn't been much use. Looking for rocks in a rocky soil on a subsoil of rock doesn't give very good results. Plus there's what is obviously a sewer pipe or something similar running right down the middle of the valley," she gestured to a line following the track that they'd come down, "and that is completely foxing things."

"Disappointing," said Freddie. He wasn't sure whether he should be pleased or not. On one hand, it made things more difficult, perhaps they'd go and find somewhere else to dig. On the other hand, he didn't imagine that they would be put off so easily and it meant that it would all take longer.

"Well maybe. There is something though. And when we get the results from the GPR," she pointed to Danni who, wearing a bikini that looked designed for lounging rather than working, was dragging a heavy looking, sledge like, box across the clearing, "we should get a better picture."

"GPR?" Freddie was never good with acronyms.

"Ground Penetrating Radar. It's another way of looking under the ground. Where the resistivity survey looks at how electrical current passes through the soil, GPR works with sound waves. You can get better results in this sort of terrain."

"Good," said Freddie. He looked around. "You've not started digging yet, then?"

"No. Not until we've finished this. It's too big an area for us to try to attack without some pin-point targets."

"You said you thought that there was something."

"Well, yes. It's on the edge of the resistivity survey away from the area where the sewer is distorting the readings." She waved her arm in an arc. "We'd come to the conclusion from the field walking that there is some sort of semi-circular enclosure or structure with its edge running along that line. It's there on the resistivity as well; just. It could be a boundary wall or the edge of a building. If you follow the arc around it dives under the edge of the headland. Obviously there's been land slippage back towards your villa that's buried one edge of it."