Ruth Galloway (12 page)

‘A little. There are some letters …'

Sure enough, Shona leans forward immediately, intrigued by the mention of the written word.

‘Letters?'

‘Yes, written after the first disappearance and now after Scarlet Henderson. This policeman, he thinks they might be linked.' Has she said too much?

‘What do the letters say?'

‘I don't think I can tell you,' says Ruth. She feels uncomfortable under the ultraviolet glare of Shona's interest.

Shona looks at her speculatively, as if wondering how much information she can extract. But then she seems to change her mind, tossing back her hair and looking out of the window where the sky is now a brooding purple colour.

‘This policeman, what's his name?'

‘Nelson. Harry Nelson.'

Shona swings round to look hard at Ruth. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes. Why?'

‘Oh nothing.' Shona goes back to the window. ‘It's just that I think I heard something about him once. Something about police brutality, I think. God, look at that sky! I'd better get home before it tips down.'

*

Ten minutes after Shona has left, the storm breaks. Rain and hail hurl themselves at the windows until Ruth feels as if she is under siege. The wind is roaring in from the sea
with a noise like thunder and she feels as if her whole cottage is shaking, tossed to and fro like a ship at sea. She is used to storms, of course, but she still finds them disconcerting. This house has stood for over a hundred years, she tells herself, it'll take more than a winter storm to blow it away. But the wind howls and wails as if it is trying to disprove her and the windows rattle under the onslaught. Ruth draws the curtains and turns on the lights. She'll do some work; that'll take her mind off the weather.

But instead of clicking onto Lectures 07, Ruth finds her finger hovering over the tempting, multicoloured Google logo. After a few seconds' inward struggle, she gives in and types in the words Harry Nelson.
ENTER
. A stream of Nelsons floods the screen, including a US chess champion and a professor of physics. Harry Nilsson is there too, the guy who sang ‘Without You'. Ruth hums it now, scrolling down the screen. There he is. DI Harry Nelson, decorated for bravery in 1990. And again, Harry Nelson (back row, second left) in a police rugby team. Ruth has another idea and clicks onto Friends Reunited, a rather guilty late-night fix of hers. Yes, here he is. Henry (Harry) Nelson at a Catholic grammar school in Blackpool. What does he say about himself? His contribution is brief in the extreme: ‘Married to Michelle, two daughters. Living in Norfolk (God help me).'

Ruth ponders this. No mention of the police. Does Nelson think his old friends in Blackpool will despise him for becoming a policeman? And it is interesting that he refers to his wife by name but not his daughters. Maybe he is scared of paedophiles on the internet. He would, surely, know more than most about the dark side of human nature.
Still, it must be significant that his marriage to Michelle is the first thing he mentions, as if it were the achievement of his life. Perhaps it is. Ruth thinks back to that sighting before Christmas. Michelle certainly looked attractive enough, a definite prize for a man who is letting himself go a bit, a man who doesn't look as if he has a gym membership or spends more than five pounds on a haircut. And Michelle looked, Ruth struggles to put her finger on it, like a woman who knows her own worth, as if she knows the value of her good looks and how to use them for her own purposes. She remembers seeing her laughing up at Nelson, her hand on his arm, soothing, cajoling. She looked, in short, like the sort of woman Ruth dislikes intensely.

What else? Well, he doesn't like Norfolk much. Ruth has already gathered as much from his references to ‘this Godforsaken county'. Godforsaken. And God gets a mention here too, even if the police force doesn't.
God help me
. It is meant light-heartedly, Ruth knows, but the fact remains that Nelson has one thing in common with the mysterious letter writer. He too likes to mention God.

Ruth scrolls back and clicks on the first mention, the decoration for bravery. She sees a much younger Nelson, less battered and wary-looking. He is holding a certificate and looking embarrassed. She reads:

James Agar. Ruth looks at the name, clicking through her internal search engine. Then it comes to her. Cathbad's poem, ‘In praise of James Agar'. No wonder Nelson's face had turned black when he read it. No wonder Cathbad had been so careful to choose this particular example of his handwriting. Manchester. That must have been when Cathbad was a student. Maybe he was involved in the riots. Lots of students were. She remembers similar riots when she was a student in London, watching from a window at University College, sympathising with the cause but too prudent to join in. Cathbad, typically, would have shown no such reserve. And James Agar was convicted. She wonders on whose evidence.

Sure enough, Ruth clicks on ‘James Agar' and finds page after page of tributes to James Agar – ‘framed by the police for the killing of PC Stephen Naylor'. There had been one key witness at Agar's trial: PC Harry Nelson.

Ruth clicks back onto her lecture notes. The wind continues to howl across the marshes. Flint, his fur soaked flat, dashes in through the cat flap and sits on the sofa looking martyred. Sparky is nowhere to be seen. She is probably hiding somewhere. She hates rain.

Ruth adds a few desultory notes about soil erosion and is just about to make herself a compensatory sandwich (compensating for what?) when the phone rings. She snatches it up like a lifeline.

‘Ruth! How are you?'

It is Peter.

After they split up Peter made a concerted attempt to stay in touch. He was living and working in London but he used to phone a lot, and once or twice came up to see her. On these occasions they invariably ended up in bed together and this felt so right that Ruth came to the conclusion that it must be wrong. If we're apart, we must stay apart, she had said, it's no good carrying on like this. Apart from anything else, it'll stop either of us finding someone new. Peter had been terribly hurt. But I want to be with you, he had said. Don't you see, if we can't stay away from each other, it must mean that we were meant to be together? But Ruth had been adamant and eventually Peter had stormed back to London in a fury, swearing undying love all the way. Six months later he had married someone else.

That had been five years ago. Ruth had heard very little from Peter in that time, a Christmas card, once a copy of an article he had written. She knew that he and his wife, Victoria, had had a baby, a boy called Daniel. He must be about four now. After Daniel's birth (she sent a teddy), Ruth had heard nothing until the text message on New Year's Eve.
Happy New Year love Peter
. Nothing more, but just for a second Ruth had felt her heart contract.

‘Peter. Hallo.'

‘Bit of blast from the past, eh?'

‘You could say that, yes.'

A brief silence. Ruth tries to imagine Peter at the other end of the phone. Is he calling from work? From home? She imagines Victoria, whom she has never met, sitting by
his side with Daniel on her lap. ‘What's Daddy doing?' ‘Shh darling, he's ringing his ex-girlfriend.'

‘So.' Very hearty. ‘How've you been, Ruth?'

‘I've been fine. How about you?'

‘Fine. Working hard.'

Peter teaches history at University College, London, where Ruth did her first degree. She imagines him there: the view of dusty plane trees, of bicycles chained against railings, of London buses, and tourists wandering lost around Gordon Square.

‘Still at UCL?'

‘Yes. What about you?'

‘Still at North Norfolk. Still digging up bones and fighting with Phil.'

Peter laughs. ‘I remember Phil. Is he still keen on his geophys gadgets?'

‘I think he's shortly going to mutate into a machine.'

Peter laughs again but this time the laugh ends rather abruptly. ‘Look Ruth. The thing is, I've got a sabbatical next term—'

‘You too?' The words are out before she can stop them.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Oh, it's just – Erik's got a sabbatical too. He's coming over next week.'

‘Erik! The old Viking himself! So you're still in touch?'

‘Yes.' Slightly defensively.

‘Well, the thing is … I'm writing a book on Nelson.'

‘
Who
?'

A confused pause. ‘Horatio Nelson. Admiral Nelson. You remember, I did my postgraduate research on the Napoleonic Wars.'

‘Oh … yes.' The other Nelson in her life has temporarily caused her to forget the most famous Nelson of all. Of course, he was from Norfolk too, there are hundreds of pubs named after him.

‘Well, I'm planning to visit Burnham Thorpe. You know, where he was born. I'm renting a cottage nearby and I thought I could pop over and see you.'

Several things cross Ruth's mind. You must have been to Burnham Thorpe before, without ‘popping over' to see me, why is this different? Will your wife be there? Is this only about research? Why ring me after all this time?

Aloud she says, ‘That would be great.'

‘Good.' Peter sounds relieved. ‘And I'd like to see the Saltmarsh again. God, I remember that summer. Finding the henge in the mud, those hippies who kept putting spells on us, old Erik telling ghost stories around the campfire. Do you remember when I nearly drowned?'

‘Yes.' Peter is suffering from an attack of nostalgia, she knows the symptoms. She mustn't join in otherwise she'll be swept away too, drowning in a quicksand of the past.

Peter sighs. ‘Well, I'll be in touch. It'll probably be next week or the week after. Will you be around?'

‘Yes, I'll be around.'

‘Great. Bye then.'

‘Bye.'

Ruth replaces the receiver thoughtfully. She doesn't know why Peter is coming to see her; she only knows that the past seems to be converging on her. First Erik, then Cathbad, now Peter. Before she knows it, she will have gone back in time ten years and will be walking along the beach, hand-in-hand with Peter, her hair six inches longer
and her waist four inches thinner. She shakes her head. The past is dead. She, as an archaeologist, knows that better than most. But she knows too that it can be seductive.

Rain is still drumming against the windows. Getting up, she strokes Flint, who is now stretched out on the sofa, eyes shut, pretending she isn't there. She'd better check that Sparky isn't outside meowing to be let in – although she has a cat flap, Sparky really prefers having the door opened for her. Ruth opens the door.

The rain flies in her face, blinding her. Spluttering, she wipes her eyes on her sleeve. And then she sees it. Sparky is on the doorstep but she isn't meowing or making any other sound. She is lying on her back and her throat has been cut.

Nelson is, for once, driving slowly. It is still raining hard, turning the narrow lanes into treacherous gullies, but Nelson isn't usually the sort of driver who worries about weather conditions. No, Nelson is dawdling because he has just been to see Scarlet's parents and feels he needs some time to recover before getting back to the station. He has had to tell the parents, Delilah and Alan, that not only has the investigation made no progress, but the police want to bring sniffer dogs to search the family garden.
Cases like this, it's usually the parents
. That's what he told Ruth and although maybe he had been trying to shock her, in his experience it has often proved true. One of his first cases involved a missing child in Lytham. Hundreds of police hours spent searching, a young mother very eloquent and moving at the press conference and then Nelson, a young PC, making a routine call at the house, had noticed a strange smell in the downstairs loo. He'd called for reinforcements but, before they arrived, had already found the tiny corpse, stuffed into the cistern. ‘She gets on my nerves,' said the mother, apparently unrepentant. ‘She's a little devil'. The present tense. It still gets to him. He'd been commended for his work on that case but he remembers weeks, months, of sleepless nights afterwards, retching as he remembered the smell, the sight of the water-bloated body.

He's ruling nothing out but he doesn't really suspect Scarlet's parents. Alan was away anyway and Delilah – Delilah is a fading flower child in bare feet and fringed skirts. She irritates the hell out of him but he can't really imagine her as a killer. Never assume, he tells himself. ‘Never assume', his first boss, Derek Fielding, used to say, laboriously. ‘It makes an ass out of you and me. Get it?' He'd got it, but he wasn't going to give Fielding the satisfaction of laughing; probably why it took so long for the old bastard to promote him, despite the commendation. But the point is a good one. Never make assumptions about people or circumstances. Delilah Henderson could have killed her daughter. She was in the right location and probably had the means to hand. It had taken her three hours to report Scarlet missing. ‘I thought they were just playing hide and seek,' she had sobbed. Nelson disapproves (what sort of mother would not notice, for three hours, that her four-year-old was missing?) but, on balance, he puts it down to the sort of lackadaisical parenting of people like the Hendersons. And she had been distraught, God knows, when she finally realised that Scarlet had gone. She was still distraught, weeping today and clutching an old photo of Scarlet, heart-breakingly happy astride a pink bike with stabilisers. Delilah had hardly taken in the news about the garden, had just clutched at Nelson, begging him to find her baby. Nelson slows down almost to walking pace as the windscreen wipers battle against the onslaught of water. Sometimes he hates his job. Christ, he could do with a cigarette but it's only January, a bit early to break his New Year resolution.