Tonight, she was struggling to keep that goal in mind. The warmth of the day had given way to a cold breeze as the sun dipped in the sky and she was exhausted after nine hours on her feet. Her skin felt sweaty from the hot air in the kitchen, her dark hair was greasy and her muscles protested with every step she took.
Missing the bus wasn’t a disaster, she told herself, but it wasn’t ideal. The metro closed early on a Sunday evening and she couldn’t justify the expense of a taxi when the walk home would only take fifteen minutes, so she might as well suck it up and carry on. Maybe she should have accepted a lift, but … well, she didn’t want to face the inevitable attention from her boss.
So, she had two choices: either take a circuitous route home, along well-lit roads, or take a short-cut skirting around the edge of the Town Moor, the large area of common parkland which lay in the centre of the city.
She warred with herself and wished that she had remembered to bring flat shoes.
She was so tired.
The moor beckoned.
CHAPTER 6
Monday, June 22nd 2015
“I don’t believe this.”
Ryan stood with his feet planted slightly apart and his arms folded while he stared ferociously at the television screen.
“Problem?” Anna listened while she collected her house keys and scooped up her leather satchel, a half-bitten slice of toast clamped between her lips as she hurried around the house.
“Look,” he continued to stare at the television, which cheerfully blared out the local morning news. Anna stopped beside him and watched a journalist interview an attractive blonde woman standing outside the visitors’ centre at Housesteads Fort. It didn’t take much to figure out what had happened.
Anna studied the woman on the screen. “That’s Jane Freeman.”
“You know her?”
“The world of academic history is a small one.”
“What do you think of her?”
It was a big mental leap for him, Anna knew, to seek help from another person. For, in Ryan’s mind at least, to ask for help would be to make himself vulnerable.
She cocked her head while she watched Freeman schmooze with the journalist.
“I knew Jane when she was finishing her doctorate in Durham. She was older than the average – and I don’t say that to be snide – simply that, I think she did her first degree in something fairly scientific elsewhere, then followed it up with archaeology at Durham. I only knew her for a couple of terms, while she was tutoring.”
“What did she teach?”
“Let me see,” Anna thought back, to nearly ten years ago. “I would have been eighteen or nineteen, in the first year of my degree. Methodologies!” she remembered suddenly. “She taught a class called ‘Methods’, which gave you an overview of several approaches to looking at historical texts. She taught the class to first year undergraduates while she studied towards her doctorate.”
She glanced across and saw that a fixed, glazed expression was beginning to form on Ryan’s strong face.
“Anyway,” she gestured with the toast. “I remember her being competent, but I have to say that physically, she looked very different ten years ago.”
“Oh yeah?”
“She was very … well, I guess you would say she was quite mousy back then. Not really somebody that you would pick out of a crowd.”
One dark eyebrow flicked up as Ryan digested that snippet of information. Professor Freeman had definitely undergone some sort of overhaul in the intervening years, if her current image was anything to go by. Now, the world would see a polished, sleek woman with an expert dye job and good bones.
“I wonder what prompted the makeover,” he murmured.
Anna shrugged and finished the last of her toast.
“Could be nothing more than the simple fact that she fancied a change. On the other hand, she was always submitting papers, constantly researching and looking for the next opportunity to progress in her field. She was a competent teacher, but I don’t think her heart was ever really in it. She struck me as quietly determined and very ambitious.”
“Had her goals in mind and went for them in her own quiet way until she decided to go for the ‘big reveal’?”
Anna laughed.
“Yes, something like that. She’s done well for herself, to rise so high in a relatively short timescale.” Anna reflected briefly on her own career path and found herself content with exactly where she was.
“Have you had any other dealings with her?”
“No, not really. She crossed over to archaeology quickly, so I had very little interaction with her after that. I know that to the layman ‘history’ is ‘history’, but there are different fields of study.” She struggled to think back, with half an eye on the time. She was now running very late. “Look, why don’t you leave it with me? I’ll have a think and see if I can remember anything else about her.”