The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths (13 page)

‘I nearly drowned once on these mudflats,’ says Peter chattily. ‘Got cut off by the tide.’

‘Easy to do,’ says David. ‘The tide comes in faster than a galloping horse, they say.’

‘Let’s gallop off then,’ says Ruth. She is fed up with both of them.

As they trudge away, Peter says, ‘Funny chap. Do you know him well?’

‘Not really. I’ve only really spoken to him in the last few months. Which is why’ - she glares at Peter - ‘I don’t want him to know all my business.’

Peter laughs. ‘I was only being friendly. Remember that, Ruth? Friendly?’

Ruth is about to retort when her phone rings. For some reason she knows it will be Nelson.

It is a text, short and to the point. Have arrested Malone. His prints on letters. HN.

‘We’ve got to do something,’ says Erik. ‘The police haven’t got a suspect so they’re trying to frame Cathbad. We can’t let them get away with it.’

‘Apparently his fingerprints were on the letters,’ says Ruth cautiously.

‘Fingerprints, huh! You think they can’t fake evidence?

You think they aren’t capable of that?’

Ruth says nothing and Erik gets up to pace angrily around the tiny office. They are at the university. Term has started and Ruth has a student consultation in ten minutes.

However, Erik, who has been ranting against the police for the last half hour, shows no sign of leaving.

‘What have the letters got to do with anything, anyway?

Writing a letter doesn’t make him a murderer. There’s nothing that links him to that little girl. Nothing.’

Ruth thinks back to the photo in the Hendersons’

kitchen. She now knows that there is something that links Cathbad to the Hendersons, something definitely tangible.

Does this make him a murderer? His fingerprints were on the letters. Does this make him the author? Ruth thinks about the letters. Cathbad knows about mythology, he knows about archaeology, he is fanatically interested in the Saltmarsh. She has to admit he is a likely candidate. But why would he do it? Is he really capable of killing a little girl and taunting the police with clues? And Lucy Downey?

Could he have killed her too?

‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘I don’t know any more than you.’

This isn’t quite true. After receiving his text, Ruth rang Nelson. His phone was switched off but he rang her later that evening. Peter had finally gone home and she was once again trying to work.

Nelson sounded excited, almost jubilant. ‘Turned out we had his prints on file. He’d been arrested a few times before, demonstrations, that sort of thing. That’s why I tested again. We got a match an hour ago. And we’ve got a link to Scarlet.’

‘Does he admit anything?’

‘No.’ A harsh laugh. ‘Says it’s all a set-up, wicked police state and all that. But he can’t deny he knows the Hendersons: turns out he’s the father of the eldest girl.’

‘What?

‘Yes. He knew Delilah Henderson when she was still at school. He was a student at Manchester, she lived nearby.

They had an affair and the result was Madeleine.

Apparently they lived together for a bit but then she left him for another bloke.’

‘Alan Henderson?’

‘No, someone else. He came later. Anyway, she left Malone and he claims he hasn’t seen her to this day. Had no idea she was living nearby.’

‘He must have seen her on the TV. When Scarlet first went missing.’

‘Hasn’t got a TV. Harmful rays, apparently, polluting the atmosphere. Hasn’t got a mobile phone because of the radiation. Nutcase.’

‘Do you think he is mad?’

‘Don’t you believe it. Cunning as a nest of snakes.’

‘How long can you hold him?’

‘Twenty-four hours. But I’ll apply for an extension.’

‘Will you tell the press?’

‘Not if I can help it.’

But someone did tell them, because that night on the nine o’clock radio news Ruth heard that ‘a local man has been arrested in connection with the disappearance of four-year-old Scarlet Henderson.’ She had switched on the TV news and, immediately, Nelson’s face, dark and forbidding, had filled the screen. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson,’ intoned the newsreader, ‘who, up to now, has had to admit no progress in the case of little Scarlet Henderson, was tonight unavailable for comment.’ As if to prove this, Nelson swept past the hovering reporters and bounded up the steps to the police station. Ruth watched fascinated, feeling slightly smug despite herself that she knew what the inside of the station looked like, could imagine Nelson in his ungainly slice of room examining the evidence, shouting impatiently for coffee, looking again at the laughing face of Scarlet Henderson on the wall.

‘The man is believed to be forty-two-year-old Michael Malone, a lab technician at North Norfolk University.’

Jesus, thought Ruth, they know his name. Now all hell will break loose.

And it had. This morning, Ruth had been stopped at the university gates and asked to show her ID. Nodding her through, the policeman had told her to avoid the chemistry wing. Naturally this had aroused her curiosity and she had driven straight round to find the entrance to the chemistry department completely blocked by cars, trailers, even a portaloo. TV camera crews jostled to and fro, waving giant fluffy microphones. Anyone entering the building was greeted by a hysterical babble of questions, ‘Do you know Michael Malone? Who is he? What sort of …’ Ruth heard French, Italian, even, she thought, an American accent.

Hastily she backed away to the relative calm of the archaeology block.

Erik had arrived an hour later, eyes blazing, white hair flying.

‘Have you heard? Have you heard?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

“Me? What can I do?’

‘You’re friendly with this policeman, this Neanderthal, aren’t you?’

‘Not exactly friendly …’

Erik had looked at her narrowly. ‘That’s not what Cathbad said. He said you and this Nelson turned up together to interview him. Very cosy. He said there was a definite chemistry between you.’

‘Bollocks.’ Unthinkingly, Ruth employs Nelson’s favourite word.

Erik didn’t seem to have heard her. ‘It is obvious that this Nelson is using Cathbad as a scapegoat and you, Ruth, you delivered Cathbad to him. On a plate.’

The sheer unfairness of this made Ruth gasp. ‘I didn’t! I asked you if you remembered his name. You told me.’

‘And you told Nelson.’

‘He would have found him anyway.’

‘Would he? He seems a complete incompetent to me.

No, he used you to deliver Cathbad. He used you, Ruth.’

‘What if Cathbad did do it?’ Ruth countered angrily.

‘Don’t you want the murderer to be found?’

Erik smiled pityingly. ‘Ruth, Ruth. He really has got to you, hasn’t he? You’re even thinking like a policeman.’

That had been an hour ago and Ruth and Erik are still circling the topic furiously. Ruth is angry that Erik thinks her a patsy, a fool who has been used by the cynical Nelson in his attempt to pin the crime on Cathbad. But, secretly, she does feel slightly guilty. She suggested Cathbad to Nelson. She pointed him in the direction of the henge and the dig ten years ago. If Cathbad didn’t do it, his life could be ruined by this notoriety. He could even go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. But what if he did do it?

‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she says again.

Erik looks at her, his blue eyes cold. ‘Then find out, Ruthie.’

Then, just as Ruth thinks it can’t get any worse, Phil puts his head round the door.

‘I couldn’t help overhearing, it’s a teeny bit loud in here.

How are you Erik?’ He puts out his hand. After a second’s pause, Erik takes it.

‘Fine apart from an innocent man being under arrest.’

‘Oh that poor soul from the chemistry department. Do you know him?’

‘Yes. A former student of mine.’

‘No!’ Phil’s eyes are round with interest. ‘Is he an archaeologist then?’

‘He did a postgraduate degree at Manchester.’

‘How did he end up here?’

Erik gestures towards Ruth, who is sitting behind her desk, as if for protection. ‘Ask Ruth, she knows.’

‘Ruth, are you involved in all this?’

‘You knew I was helping with the case.’

‘Just with the bones, I thought.’

This, Ruth realises, is how Phil sees her. Only concerned with bones, a dull specialisation, useful but ultimately marginal. She is not a heroine type like Shona, she does not belong centre stage.

‘Ruth gave Cathbad’s name to the police,’ says Erik spitefully.

‘Cathbad?’ Phil looks confused.

‘Erik knows Michael Malone as Cathbad,’ Ruth shoots back. ‘They’re old friends.’

Phil glances from Ruth to Erik, enthralled. ‘Are you?’ he asks. ‘Old friends?’

‘Yes,’ hisses Erik, ‘and I’m going to clear my old friend’s name.’

And he sweeps out, colliding in the doorway with Ruth’s student, a polite Chinese man called Mr Tan, who is most surprised to find himself at the receiving end of a stream of Norwegian invective.

‘I’ll leave you to it, Ruth,’ says Phil. ‘Let’s catch up later.’

Not if I can help it, thinks Ruth. She turns to Mr Tan.

‘I’m so sorry. We were going to talk about your dissertation.

What was it about again?’

‘Decomposition,’ says Mr Tan.

Ruth has to battle past the reporters again on her way home. The news reports gave no further developments in the case. ‘Police have been granted another twenty-four hours to question the suspect, believed to be forty-two year-old Michael Malone from Blakeney.’

Ruth switches off the radio. She still feels uneasy about Cathbad’s arrest. Although she doesn’t, like Erik, think that Cathbad is simply a scapegoat, equally it is hard to think of him as a murderer. Yet he could conceivably be the author of those letters. Erik hasn’t read them. He can’t hear the erudite, sinister, taunting voice. She lies where the earth meets the sky. Where the roots of the great tree Yggdrasil reach down into the next life … She has become the perfect sacrifice. Blood on stone. Scarlet on white. Thinking of Cathbad in his wizard’s chair, the dream catchers glittering around him, Ruth can imagine him writing these lines. But abducting and killing a little girl?

He is the father of Scarlet’s half-sister, how could he possibly have done this to Scarlet? To Delilah, whom presumably he had once loved?

And what about Lucy Downey, all those years ago? Ruth thinks of Cathbad in his prime, purple cloak fluttering, exhorting his followers to stand firm against the police and the archaeologists. She has a vision of him standing within the timber circle, arms aloft, as the seawater swirls around his feet and the other druids clamber to safety. She had thought at the time that if conviction could stop the tide the sea would surely turn in its tracks. But of course it hadn’t, and ten minutes later Cathbad too was scrambling for the higher ground, holding his sodden robe above his knees.

Could this man - ridiculous, impressive, passionate - really be a killer? Is it possible that a few months after that stand at the henge Cathbad had kidnapped Lucy Downey and killed her?

When she reaches the Saltmarsh, the tide is out and the birds are coming in to feed, their white feathers catching the last of the setting sun. Watching them, Ruth thinks of David, his face transformed as he talked about the migrating birds; and of Peter, saying sadly that he just wanted to come back.

Going back. When Ruth met Peter she was not yet thirty.

She had been newly appointed to the job at North Norfolk University and was full of energy and enthusiasm. Peter, a history research fellow at the University of East Anglia, had heard on the academic grapevine about the dig. He had simply turned up one morning with his backpack and bedroll and asked if they wanted help. They had teased him for being a city boy - though he was actually from Wiltshire and had spent five years in the Australian outback. They laughed at the straw hat that he wore to keep the sun off his pale skin, at his lack of knowledge of archaeological terms. He had always referred to the Pleistocene as the plastocine and could never remember which came first, Bronze Age or Iron Age. Yet he was obsessed with the henge and listened enthralled to Erik’s tales of ritual and sacrifice. It was he who had found the first oak stump, exposed when a summer storm had blown the sand away from its base. Peter had been frantically digging around the stump when he had been caught by the tide and eventually rescued by Erik.

It was that evening that she realised she loved him, Ruth remembers. They had always got on well together, learning up on the dig, laughing at the same things. Erik’s wife, Magda, had noticed, and often seemed to contrive to leave the two of them together. Once she had read Ruth’s palm and told her that a tall red-haired stranger was about to come into her life. Once Ruth had cut herself and Peter had helped her put on the plaster; the touch of his hand had made her tremble. And as they sat by the campfire on the evening of his near-drowning, Ruth had looked at Peter and thought: now, it has to be now. He could have drowned today, we mustn’t waste any more time. And she remembers smiling to herself because it seemed such a momentous, and yet such a joyful, thought. Peter had looked up and met her eyes. He had got up and suggested a walk to collect samphire. Magda had discouraged anyone else from accompanying them. They had walked to the water’s edge, the sound of the sea rustling in the dark and, smiling, had walked into each other’s arms.

And now, as Ruth lets herself into her cottage, she wonders if she really wants Peter back in her life. After the walk on Sunday, he has called twice but she hasn’t seen him again. He is staying nearby, she could call him tonight, suggest going out for a drink, but she knows she won’t. She is not sure what Peter means by ‘coming back’. Does he mean coming back to her} And, if so, is that what she wants? Having ended the relationship, with so much heart searching, does she really want them to get together again?

And why does the new slightly bitter Peter seem more attractive than the adoring Peter of five years ago?

Inside the cottage a clock ticks lugubriously and the seabirds are calling from the marshes. Otherwise, all is silent. Flint, who is obviously nervous without Sparky, leaps down from the sofa back, making Ruth jump. There is something ominous in the silence, she realises, as if the house is waiting for something. Her footsteps, as she goes to the kitchen to feed Flint, echo on the floorboards. The radio is no help - the reception is so bad that all she can hear are muffled crackles, as if the announcer has been gagged and is struggling for freedom. This is so disconcerting that she switches it off and the silence returns, heavier than ever.

Ruth makes herself some tea and sits at her computer, meaning to do some work. But the silence is still at her back, making the hairs on her neck rise. She swings round.