Dying Fall, A (4 page)

But today she is almost grateful for the time spent staring at red lights. Her mind is still struggling to comprehend Nelson’s words.
Sandy’s launching a murder enquiry.
Could Dan really have been murdered? It doesn’t seem possible. But then Ruth recalls the letter and its strange note of fear, almost of panic.
I’m afraid . . . and that’s just it. I’m afraid. Do ring me as soon as you get this letter.
Well, Ruth had rung Dan but who had received her call? Nelson said that Dan’s mobile was missing. Is it even now in the hands of his murderer? Who would want to kill an archaeologist working at an obscure university? Could it possibly be linked to Dan’s discovery? It could be big, Dan had said. It could change everything. And now Dan is dead and everything has changed.

Seeing Nelson always disturbs Ruth anyway. When she saw him today, dark-suited and sombre, walking through the chattering students, she was struck—as she was the first time they met—at how
grown-up
Nelson looked. It wasn’t just the clothes (he had been to an inquest in the morning, hence the black tie), there was something in his face, in his whole demeanour, that set him apart. Ruth’s students might be post-graduates but they still looked like teenagers, with long hair and keen expressions. Nelson, striding over the grass, frowning, not looking right or left, looked grim and uncompromising, even slightly dangerous. Ruth wishes, more than anything in the world, that she wasn’t still attracted to him.

As she turns into the King’s Lynn road she vows, as she has done many times before, to put Nelson behind her. They have a child together, they will always be linked, but Nelson is happily married and Ruth is in a relationship with Max. But what is that relationship? ‘I can’t really call him your boyfriend, can I?’ said her mother, archly, when she first found out about the affair (not through any fault of Ruth’s; her brother had snitched). Someone at work referred to him the other day as ‘your partner’, which seemed far too official.

Max lives in Brighton, Ruth sees him perhaps twice a month and they do coupleish things together; they take Kate to the park, they go to the cinema, they eat takeaways in front of
Doctor Who.
And they sleep together. If it wasn’t for the sex, Ruth would say they were just good friends. And they
are
friends. They get on really well, they’re both archaeologists, they share a similar sense of humour and have both been through rather a lot, one way or another. They never argue and are always considerate of each other’s feelings. And that’s just it. Nelson is hardly ever considerate and he and Ruth argue all the time, but the two nights they spent together are etched on Ruth’s soul and she can’t erase them, however hard she tries. Much as she disapproves of Nelson, fiercely as she sometimes hates him, there is something slightly wrong with any man who isn’t him.

Sandra greets her with a smile, cutting off Ruth’s apologies with a tolerant ‘Doesn’t matter, love’. And Kate doesn’t seem worried; she has been playing in the paddling pool with Sandra’s other two charges, but by the time Ruth arrives Kate is dry and dressed and eating an irreproachably healthy snack of raisins and apple chunks. Sandra is an excellent childminder; Ruth is lucky to have her. And if she sometimes wishes that Sandra wasn’t so bloody good at all the kid stuff, that just shows how unreasonable she has become. She needs a holiday.

Ruth sings all the way home. She needs to keep Kate awake so that she’ll go to sleep at bedtime. Ruth keeps looking in the mirror and, as soon as Kate’s head droops, she launches into another manic chorus of ‘The wheels on the bus’. Meanwhile her thoughts, like the bus’s wheels, go round and round. Was Dan murdered? Why? Is Cathbad the father of Judy’s baby? Is he still in love with her? Why did Nelson come to the dig when he could easily have telephoned? Who is the Raven King and how is he linked to Dan’s death?

At home she checks her answerphone and is relieved there are no messages. No one else is dead then. She switches on her laptop and finds the usual stream of mail from the department, and from Amazon hoping to interest her in any book with ‘stone’ in the title. She is in the middle of deleting when a new sender catches her eye. University Pals, it’s called. Thinking of Dan and of Caz, she clicks on the message. ‘Hi Ruth,’ runs the cheery salutation, ‘want to catch up with your old mates from uni? Join our website and hear about your old chums from University College London, Archaeology 89. One click and the years will roll away.’

Ruth has been thinking so much about UCL recently that she almost clicks on the link. Then she hesitates. More than most people, she knows the dangerous lure of the past. When, two years ago, her old boyfriend Peter had got back in touch, he had wanted to dive straight back into their relationship, regardless of the fact that ten years had passed and that he himself was now married with a child. And it had taken all Ruth’s strength to refuse him. She knows that you can’t go backwards, only forwards. Every archaeologist knows that. Time is a matter of layers, of strata, each firmly fixed in its own context. You can dig down through the layers but you can’t change the fact that time has passed and new strata have been laid on top. But, says a reproachful voice in her head, if she had joined a website like this earlier, she might have kept in touch with Dan. She would have known all about his work at Pendle University, they could have sent each other photos, updated each other on their lives. She wouldn’t now be left with this terrible feeling of waste.

As she is still deliberating, the landline rings. In the background, she hears Kate saying interrogatively, ‘Piss?’ Bloody Cathbad.

‘Hello?’ Ruth snatches the phone away.

‘Hello. Dr Ruth Galloway?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh super.’ The voice becomes expansive. ‘This is Clayton Henry from Pendle University.’

What an odd name, thinks Ruth irrelevantly, it sounds as if it’s the wrong way round. Then—
Pendle University.

‘I hope you don’t mind me ringing you at home. I got your number from Phil Trent.’

Ruth does mind and thinks that Phil should have more respect for her privacy. But, then again, she is dying to know why Clayton Henry is calling.

‘It’s OK,’ she says.

‘Well, Ruth, I’m in rather a fix.’ Clayton Henry’s voice is a strange mix of posh and Yorkshire. He sounds a bit like Alan Bennett. Ruth doesn’t like the confiding note that has crept in and she hates people she doesn’t know calling her by her first name.

‘Yes?’ she says, unhelpfully.

‘One of our archaeologists—delightful chap—died tragically last week. Dan Golding. Don’t know if you’d heard of him.’

‘We were at university together.’

‘Oh.’ Clayton Henry stretches out the syllable. ‘Then I’m so sorry to be the bearer of bad news.’

‘It’s OK. I already knew.’

‘Oh.’ A slightly different note this time. ‘Well, I don’t know if you knew that Dan had recently made what he considered to be a significant find.’

Ruth waits. A trick she has learnt from Nelson.

‘Bones,’ says Henry. ‘At a Roman site near Ribchester. The burial led Dan to think that the remains might be . . . important.’

‘Important?’

‘A significant figure historically.’

Ruth knows that burial can be an indicator of status. An elaborate tomb, grave goods, weapons and treasure—all signs that a rich or powerful person lies within.

‘I’ve asked around,’ Henry is saying, the unctuous note back in his voice. ‘And you are one of our foremost experts on bones.’

This description always makes Ruth think of a dog. Nevertheless, recognition is always welcome. She remembers how pleased she had been that Dan had followed her career.

‘I wondered if you might possibly consider coming up and having a look at our bones.’

Our bones.
Ruth feels a prickle of resentment. The bones belonged to Dan. But she would like to see Dan’s discovery very much indeed.

‘I know it’s a long way,’ comes the Alan Bennett voice, ‘but we could put you up. A colleague’s got a lovely holiday cottage out Lytham way. You could make a real break of it. Bring the family.’

For a moment Ruth wishes she had a real family—a husband, four children and a dog—all of them longing for a proper seaside holiday with buckets and spades and Blackpool rock. Still, Kate would like the donkeys.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she says.

‘Please do,’ says Clayton Henry. ‘I really think it might be worth the journey.’

Tonight, everything conspires against the peaceful bedtime routine. Flint is sick, regurgitating dead mouse on the kitchen floor, Kate doesn’t like her supper and cries bitterly into her scrambled egg, and Ruth’s phone rings constantly. First it’s her mother asking if she fancies going to a Christian camp in the summer. ‘There are special meetings for single parents. It’s all very friendly.’ As this invitation comes every year, Ruth has no difficulty in refusing. Thanks very much, she says breezily, but she has other plans. ‘With Max?’ asks her mother hopefully. She has never met Max and probably suspects that he and Ruth are living in sin, but with a daughter over forty you can’t afford to be choosy. ‘Not sure,’ says Ruth, truthfully. ‘Where are you going?’ asks her mother. ‘Blackpool,’ says Ruth, on impulse.
‘Blackpool?’
repeats her mother. ‘Why ever would you want to go there?’ ‘There’s some interesting archaeology in the area,’ says Ruth, knowing that this answer will silence her mother, at least temporarily. Neither of her parents shares her passion for the past and her mother is often heard loudly lamenting that Ruth (such a clever girl at school) couldn’t have studied something more useful, like nursing or accountancy or fulltime religious mania.

The next caller is Max. He is interested to know about the Swaffham dig. He was the first archaeologist to excavate the site and is full of theories and suggestions. He thinks that Ruth’s animal bones might point to the existence of a butcher’s shop or even a tannery. Ruth is happy to chat about bones and slaughter. She is aware of an odd reluctance to tell Max about Dan’s death. She wants to keep the conversation on a workaday note, a pleasant chat about cattle skulls and animal skins. But, eventually, she tells him that a college friend of hers has died. He says all the right things—how awful, he was so young, makes you think, doesn’t it, is Ruth OK? ‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Sad but fine.’ She doesn’t want to tell him about the invitation to Lancashire and she’s not sure why. Maybe it’s just because she doesn’t want Max, the Roman expert, offering advice on the possible find. At the moment that’s her secret. Hers and Dan’s. After a few more minutes’ chat they ring off, promising to see each other in a week’s time.

By now, Ruth is carrying a tired and irritable Kate up for her bath. She almost doesn’t answer her mobile when it rings again. She has left it downstairs on the sofa and can’t be bothered to retrace her steps. But it could be Nelson, or Sandra ringing to say that she can’t have Kate tomorrow. So Ruth comes slowly back downstairs, holding her sleepy daughter against her shoulder.

‘Hi, Ruth.’

‘Hi, Shona.’

Ruth supposes that Shona is her best friend in Norfolk. But it’s not like her relationship with Caz, which had been a friendship of equals, unmarked by jealousy or resentment. Ruth is both in awe of Shona’s beauty and slightly wary of her. A few years ago, she had found out something about Shona that had shaken their friendship to the core. Now the rift has healed but Ruth feels she will never be able to trust Shona again. It doesn’t help that Shona is living with Ruth’s boss Phil, whom she doesn’t trust either.

‘How are you?’ she says now. ‘How’s Louis?’

In February, Shona had given birth to a son, her first child and Phil’s third. Shona, with her willowy grace and Pre-Raphaelite hair, is so essentially feminine that Ruth had been sure her baby would be a girl. But Louis is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bruiser. A delightful boy with a shock of ginger hair and the build of a prizefighter. At birth he weighed over ten pounds and now, at five months old, is in clothes meant for one-year-olds. In fact, he’s not that much smaller than Kate, who is a slight child, causing Ruth to panic every time she looks at her growth chart at the doctor’s.

‘He’s great. Huge. Eating all the time.’

Shona has thrown herself into the role of earth mother, vowing to breastfeed Louis ‘until he goes to university’. Ruth, who found the whole business difficult and uncomfortable, tries not to feel envious.

‘What about Kate?’

‘She’s fine. A bit tired at the moment, I was just putting her to bed.’

‘Oh, I won’t keep you. I just wondered if you could pop in tomorrow. It seems like ages since I’ve seen another adult.’

‘What about Phil?’

‘He’s a man. He doesn’t count.’

‘It’s a bit difficult. We’re digging all week.’

‘I know,’ says Shona fretfully. ‘It’s all I hear about from Phil. Samian ware this, bath house walls that.’

Ruth can see that life with Phil as your only link to the outside world could feel rather stultifying. ‘I’ll try to pop in on my way home,’ she says.

Kate is almost asleep so Ruth skips the bath and puts her straight into bed. A few lines from Dora and Kate is fast asleep. As Ruth tiptoes out of the room, her mobile phone bleeps. Jesus. Who is it this time?

It’s a text message. Sender unknown.

Don’t come to Pendle if you know what’s good for you.

Shona lives in King’s Lynn, near Sandra the childminder, so Ruth drops in on her way home. Kate loves children younger than herself and has developed a convincingly patronising attitude towards them. ‘Baby,’ she says as soon as she sees Louis.
‘Little
baby.’

‘Yes,’ says Shona admiringly. ‘But you’re a big girl, aren’t you?’

Kate looks pleased at this description but Ruth, who is also sometimes called a ‘big girl’, is rather more ambivalent.

But Louis really isn’t that little. In fact, he seems to have grown since Ruth saw him a few days ago. He dominates Shona’s stylish sitting room, surveying the world from his bouncy chair like his namesake, the Sun King himself. Toys and baby clothes cover every surface, nursery rhymes play on a manic loop in the background. Ruth is reminded of the time when Shona looked after Kate, then only a few months old. Kate had screamed the entire time, and in minutes Shona’s beautiful sanded wood floors had become covered in toys, books, tapes, bottles of milk—evidence of abortive attempts to placate her—and when Ruth had arrived, all she had to do was take her baby in her arms and the crying had stopped immediately. Ruth remembers that day well. It was the first time she had really felt like a mother.