The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths (5 page)

‘Don’t worry.’

‘It’ll all come right in the end.’

‘Darkest before dawn.’

Words she can’t even remember hearing, though now they seem lodged in her brain. Who was it who told her once that it was darkest before dawn? She doesn’t know.

She only knows that the words give her a warm, ticklish feeling, like being wrapped in a blanket. She has an extra blanket when it’s cold but even then she shivers so much that in the morning her whole body aches. Sometimes it’s warmer and a little light shines through the edges of the trapdoor. Once he opened the window in the roof. Usually it’s only open at night when the sky is black, but this time it was bright and blue and it made her eyes hurt. The bars on the window turned into a little yellow ladder. Sometimes she dreams about climbing the ladder and escaping to …

where? She doesn’t know. She thinks of the sun on her face and being in a garden where there are voices and cooking smells and cool water falling. Sometimes she walks through the water and it’s like a curtain. A curtain. Where? A beaded curtain that you run through, laughing, and on the other side there’s the warm light again and the voices and someone holding you tight, so tight; so tight they will never let you go.

And, other times, she thinks there is nothing there at all, beyond these walls. Only more walls and iron bars and cold, concrete floors.

Ruth leaves her parents’ house as soon as she decently can after Christmas. Phil is having a New Year’s Eve party and, though in truth she would rather chew her own arm off than attend, she tells her parents that it is her duty to go.

‘It would be bad for my career. After all, he is head of department.’ They understand this alright. They understand that she might go to a party to further her career. It’s enjoying herself they wouldn’t understand.

So, on 29 December, Ruth is driving along the Mil to Norfolk. It is mid-morning and the frost has gone so she drives fast and happily, singing along to her new Bruce Springsteen CD, a Christmas present to herself. According to her brother Simon, Ruth has the musical taste of a sixteen-year-old boy. ‘A tasteless sixteen-year-old boy.’ But Ruth doesn’t mind. She loves Bruce and Rod and Bryan.

All those ageing rockers with croaky voices and faded jeans and age-defying hair. She loves the way they sing about love and loss and the dark, soulless heart of America, and it all sounds the same; crashing guitar chords against a wall of sound, the lyrics lost in a final, frenzied crescendo.

Singing loudly, she takes the All towards Newmarket.

It hadn’t been such a bad Christmas really. Her parents hadn’t nagged her too much about not going to church and not being married. Simon hadn’t been too irritating and her nephews were at quite interesting ages, eight and six, old enough to go to the park and play at being Neolithic hunters. The children adored Ruth because she told them stories about cavemen and dinosaurs and never noticed when their faces needed washing. ‘You’ve got quite a gift with kids,’ said her sister-in-law Cathy accusingly. ‘It seems a shame …’ ‘What’s a shame?’ Ruth had asked, although she knew only too well. ‘That you haven’t any of your own. Though, I suppose, by now …’

By now I have resigned myself to spinsterhood and godmotherhood and slowly going mad, knitting clothes for my cats out of my own hair, thinks Ruth, neatly overtaking an overburdened people carrier. She is nearly forty and although it is not impossible that she should still have a child she has noticed people mentioning it less and less.

This suits her fine; when she was with Peter the only thing more annoying than people hinting about possible ‘wedding bells’ was the suggestion that she might be ‘getting broody’. When she bought the cats her mother asked her straight out if they were ‘baby substitutes’. ‘No,’

Ruth had answered, straight-faced. ‘They’re kittens. If I had a baby it would be a cat substitute.’

She reaches the Saltmarsh by mid-afternoon and the winter sun is low over the reed beds. The tide is coming in and the seagulls are calling, high and excited. When Ruth gets out of her car she breathes in the wonderful sea smell, potent and mysterious, and feels glad that she is home.

Then she sees the weekenders’ monster car parked outside their cottage and feels a stab of irritation. Don’t say they have come here for New Year. Why can’t they stay in London like everyone else, flocking to Trafalgar Square or having bijou little parties at home? Why do they have to come here to ‘get away from it all’? They’ll probably let off fireworks and scare every bird for miles around. Imagining David’s reaction, she smiles grimly.

Inside her cottage, Flint leaps on her, mewing furiously.

Sparky, sitting on the sofa, steadfastly ignores her. Ruth’s friend Shona has been coming in to feed the cats and Ruth finds welcome home flowers on the table as well as milk and white wine in the fridge. God bless Shona, thinks Ruth, putting on the kettle.

Shona, who teaches English at the university, is Ruth’s best friend in Norfolk. Like Peter, she had been a volunteer on the henge dig ten years ago. Fey and Irish, with wild Pre-Raphaelite hair, Shona declared herself in sympathy with the druids and even joined them for an all-night vigil, sitting on the sand chanting until the tide forced them inland and Shona was lured away by the promise of a Guinness in the pub. That was the thing about Shona, she may have her New Age principles but you could nearly always overcome them with the promise of a drink. Shona is in a relationship with a married lecturer and sometimes she comes over to Ruth’s cottage, weeping and flailing her hair around, declaring that she hates men and wants to become a nun or a lesbian or both. Then she will have a glass of wine and brighten up completely, singing along to Bruce Springsteen and telling Ruth that she is a ‘dote’.

Shona is one of the best things about the university.

Her answer phone shows four messages. One is a wrong number, one is Phil reminding her about the party, one is her mother asking if she’s home yet and one … one is distinctly surprising.

‘Hello … er … Ruth. This is Harry Nelson speaking, from the Norfolk Police. Can you ring me? Thank you.’

Harry Nelson. She hasn’t spoken to him since the day they found the Iron Age bones. She sent him the results of the carbon 14 dating, confirming that the body was probably female, pre-pubescent, dating from about 650 bc. She heard nothing back and didn’t expect to. Once, before Christmas, when she was shopping dispiritedly in Norwich, she saw him striding along, looking discontented and weighed down with carrier bags. With him was a blonde woman, slim in a designer tracksuit, and two sulky-looking teenage daughters. Lurking in Borders, Ruth hid behind a display of novelty calendars and watched them. In this female environment of shopping bags and fairy lights, Nelson looked more inconveniently macho than ever. The woman (his wife surely?) turned to him with a flick of hair and a smile of practised persuasiveness.

Nelson said something, looking grumpy, and

both girls laughed. They must gang up on him at home, Ruth decided, excluding him from their all-girl chats about boyfriends and mascara. But then Nelson caught up with his wife, whispered something that brought forth a genuine laugh, ruffled his daughter’s careful hairstyle and sidestepped neatly away, grinning at her cry of rage. For a moment they looked united; a happy, teasing, slightly stressed family in the middle of their Christmas shopping.

Ruth turned back to the calendars. The Simpsons’ grinumg yellow faces smirked back at her. She hated

Christmas anyway.

Why was Harry Nelson ringing her now, at home? What was so important that he had to speak to her this minute?

And why is he so arrogant that he can’t even leave a phone number? Irritated but intensely curious, Ruth rifles through the phone book to find a number for the Norfolk police. Of course it is the wrong one. ‘You want CID,’ says the voice at the end of the phone, sounding slightly impressed. Eventually she gets through to a flunky who connects her, somewhat reluctantly, to DCI Nelson.

‘Nelson,’ barks an impatient voice, sounding more Northern and even less friendly than she remembers.

‘It’s Ruth Galloway from the university. You rang me.’

‘Oh yes. I rang you some days ago.’

‘I’ve been away,’ says Ruth. She’s damned if she’s going to apologise.

‘Something’s come up. Can you come into the station?’

Ruth is nonplussed. Of course, she wants to know what has come up but Nelson’s request sounds more like an order. Also there is something a bit frightening about coming ‘into the station’. It sounds uncomfortably like ‘helping the police with their enquiries’.

‘I’m very busy—’ she begins.

‘I’ll send a car,’ says Nelson. ‘Tomorrow morning alright?’

It is on the tip of Ruth’s tongue to say no, tomorrow is not alright. I’m off to a very important jet-set conference in Hawaii so I’m far too busy to drop everything just because you order me to. Instead she says, “I suppose I could spare you an hour or two.’

‘Right,’ says Nelson. Then he adds, ‘Thank you.’ It sounds as if he hasn’t had much practice in saying it.

The police car arrives at Ruth’s door promptly at nine.

Expecting this (Nelson seems like an early riser to her) she is dressed and ready. As she walks to the car, she sees one of the weekenders (Sara? Sylvie? Susanna?) looking furtively out of the window, so she waves and smiles cheerfully.

They probably think she is being arrested. Guilty of living alone and weighing over ten stone.

She is driven into the centre of King’s Lynn. The police station is in a detached Victorian house which still looks more like a family home than anything else. The reception desk is obviously in the middle of the sitting room and there should be framed family portraits on the walls rather than posters telling you to lock your car safely and not to exceed the speed limit. Her escort, a taciturn uniformed policeman, ushers her through a secret door beside the desk. She imagines the defeated-looking people waiting in reception wondering who she is and why she deserves this star treatment. They climb a rather beautiful swirling staircase, now marred with institutional carpeting, and enter a door marked CID.

Harry Nelson is sitting at a battered Formica desk surrounded by papers. This room was obviously once part of a bigger one; you can see where the plasterboard partition cuts into the elaborate coving around the ceiling. Now it is an awkward slice of a room, taller than it is wide, with a disproportionately large window, half-covered by a broken white blind. Nelson, though, does not seem a man who bothers much about his surroundings.

He stands up when she enters. ‘Ruth. Good of you to come.’

She can’t remember telling him to call her by her first name but now it seems too late to do anything about it. She can hardly ask him to go back to Doctor Galloway.

‘Coffee?’ asks Nelson.

‘Yes please. Black.’ She knows it will be horrible but somehow it feels rude to refuse. Besides it will give her something to do with her hands.

‘Two black coffees, Richards,’ Nelson barks at the hovering policemen. Presumably he has the same problem with ‘please’ as with ‘thank you’.

Ruth sits on a battered plastic chair opposite the desk.

Nelson sits down too and, for a few minutes, seems just to stare at her, frowning. Ruth begins to feel uncomfortable.

Surely he hasn’t just asked her here for coffee? Is this silent treatment something he does to intimidate suspects?

The policeman marches back in with the coffees. Ruth thanks him profusely, noticing with a sinking heart the thin liquid and the strange wax film floating on the surface.

Nelson waits until the door has shut again before saying, ‘You must be wondering why I asked you to come in.’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth simply, taking a sip of coffee. It tastes even worse than it looks.

Nelson pushes a file towards her. ‘There’s been another child gone missing,’ he says. ‘You’ll have read about it in the press.’

Ruth stays silent; she doesn’t read the papers.

Nelson gives her a sharp look before continuing. He looks tired, she realises. There are dark circles around his eyes and he obviously hasn’t shaved that morning. In fact, he looks more like a face on a ‘wanted’ poster than a policeman.

‘There’s been a letter,’ he says. ‘Remember I told you about the letters that were sent during the Lucy Downey case? Well, this looks to be from the same person. At the very least someone’s trying to make me think it’s from the same person, which may be stranger still.’

‘And you think this person may be the murderer?’

Nelson pauses for a long time before replying, frowning darkly into his coffee cup. ‘It’s dangerous to make assumptions,’

he says at last, ‘that’s what happened with the Ripper case, if you remember. The police were so sure the anonymous letters came from the killer that it skewed the whole investigation and they just turned out to be from some nutter. That may well be the case here. Nothing more likely, in fact.’ He pauses again. ‘It’s just … there is always the chance that they could be from the killer, in which case they could contain vital clues. And I remembered what you said, that day when we found the bones, about ritual and all that. There’s a lot of that sort of thing in the letters, so I wondered if you’d take a look. Tell me what you think.’

Whatever Ruth had been expecting, it wasn’t this.

Gingerly, she takes the file and opens it. A typewritten letter faces her. She picks it up. It seems to have been written on standard printer paper using a standard computer, but she assumes the police have ways of checking all that. It’s only the words that concern her:

Dear Detective Nelson,

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what has been planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.

She lies where the earth meets the sky. Where the roots of the great tree Yggdrasil reach down into the next life. All flesh is grass. Yet in death are we in life. She has become the perfect sacrifice. Blood on stone. Scarlet on white.

In peace.

There is no signature.

‘Well?’ Nelson is watching her closely.

‘Well, the first bit’s from the Bible. Ecclesiastes.’ Ruth shifts in her chair. She feels slightly queasy. The Bible always does this to her.

‘What’s all that about a tree?’

‘In Norse legend, there’s a tree called Yggdrasil. Its roots are supposed to stretch down to hell and up to heaven.

There are all sorts of legends attached to it.’ As she says this she remembers Erik, that great teller of Norse tales, sitting by the camp fire, his face radiant in the half light, telling them about Odin and Thor, about Asgard, the home of the Gods and Muspelheim, the land of fire.

‘The letter says its roots reach down into the next life.’

‘Yes.’ This was the first thing to strike Ruth. She is surprised to find Nelson so perceptive. ‘Some people think that prehistoric man may have believed that heaven was below the earth, not above. Have you heard of Seahenge?’

‘No.’

‘It was found on the coast, near the Saltmarsh, at Holme-Next-the-Sea. A wooden henge, like the one at Saltmarsh, except there was a tree buried in the centre of it. Buried upside down. Its roots upwards, its branches going down into the earth.’

‘Do you think this guy,’ - he picks up the letter - ‘may have heard of it?’

‘Possibly. There was a lot of publicity at the time. Have you thought that it might not be a man?’

‘What?’

‘The letter writer. It might be a woman.’

‘It might, I suppose. There were some handwritten letters the first time. The expert thought the handwriting was a man’s but you never know. The experts aren’t always right. One of the first rules of policing.’

Wondering where this leaves her, Ruth asks, ‘Can you tell me something about the child? The one who’s gone missing.’

He stares at her. ‘It was in the papers. Local and national. Bloody hell, it was even on Crimewatch. Where have you been?’

Ruth is abashed. She seldom reads the papers or watches TV, preferring novels and the radio. She relies on the latter for the news, but she’s been away. She realises she knows far more about happenings in the prehistoric world than in this one.

Nelson sighs and rubs his stubble. When he speaks, his voice is harsher than ever. ‘Scarlet Henderson. Four years old. Vanished while playing in her parents’ front garden in Spenwell.’

Spenwell is a tiny village about half a mile from Ruth’s house. It makes the whole thing seem uncomfortably close.

‘Scarlet?’

‘Yes. Scarlet on white. Blood on stone. Quite poetic isn’t it?’

Ruth is silent. She is thinking about Erik’s theories of ritual sacrifice. Wood represents life, stone death. Aloud she asks, ‘How long ago was this?’

‘November.’ Their eyes meet. ‘About a week after we found those old bones of yours. Almost ten years to the day since Lucy Downey vanished.’

‘And you think the cases are connected?’

He shrugs. ‘I’ve got to keep an open mind, but there are similarities, and then this letter arrives.’

‘When?’

‘Two weeks after Scarlet vanished. We’d done everything.

Searched the area, drained the river, questioned everyone. Drawn a complete blank. Then this letter came.

It got me thinking about the Lucy Downey case.’

‘Hadn’t you been thinking about it already?’ It is an innocent enough enquiry but Nelson looks at her sharply, as if scenting criticism.

“I thought about it, yes,’ he says, slightly defensively.

‘The similarities were there: similar age child, same time of year, but there were differences too. Lucy Downey was taken from inside her own home. Terrible thing. Actually snatched from her bed. This child was on her own, in the garden …’

There is a faint edge of censure in his voice that leads Ruth to ask, ‘What about the parents? You said … it’s sometimes the parents …’

‘Hippies,’ says Nelson contemptuously, ‘New Agers. Got five children and don’t look after any of ‘em properly.

Took them two hours to notice that Scarlet was missing.

But we don’t think they did it. No signs of abuse. Dad was away at the time and Mum was in a bloody trance or something, communing with the fairies.’

‘Can I see the other letters?’ asks Ruth. ‘The Lucy Downey letters. There might be something there, about Yggdrasil or Norse mythology or something.’

Nelson is obviously expecting this enquiry because he hands over another file which is lying on the desk. Ruth opens it. There are ten or more sheets inside.

‘Twelve,’ says Nelson, reading her mind. ‘The last one was sent only last year.’

‘So he hasn’t given up?’

‘No.’ Nelson shakes his head slowly. ‘He hasn’t given up.’

‘Can I take these home and read them tonight?’

‘You’ll have to sign for them, mind.’ As he roots around on the desk, looking for a form, he surprises her by asking.

‘What about the bones we found. What’s happened to them?’

‘Well, I sent you the report …’

Nelson grunts. ‘Couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’

‘Well, basically it said it was probably the body of a young girl, between six and ten, pre-pubescent. About two thousand, six hundred years old. We excavated and found three gold torques and some coins.’

‘They had coins in the Iron Age?’

‘Yes, it was the start of coinage actually. We’re going to do another dig in the spring when the weather’s better.’ She hopes Erik will be able to come over for it.

‘Do you think she was murdered?’

Ruth looks at the detective, who is leaning forward across his untidy desk. It seems strange to hear the word ‘murdered’ on his lips, as if her Iron Age body is suddenly going to form part of his ‘enquiries’, as if he is planning to bring the perpetrator to justice.

‘We don’t know,’ she admits. ‘One strange thing, half her hair was shaved off. We don’t know what that means but it may have been part of a ritual killing. There were branches twisted around her arms and legs, willow and hazel, as if she was tied down.’

Nelson smiles, rather grimly. ‘Sounds pretty conclusive to me,’ he says.

As Nelson escorts her out, he leads her through a room full of people, all working intently, crouched over phones or frowning at computer screens. On the wall is what looks like a roughly drawn mind map, full of arrows and scrawling writing. At the centre of it all is a photograph of a little girl with dark, curly hair and laughing eyes.

‘Is that her?’ Ruth finds herself whispering.

‘That’s Scarlet Henderson, yes.’

No-one in the room looks up as they pass through.

Perhaps they are pretending to work hard because the boss is there, but Ruth doesn’t think so somehow. At the door she turns and Scarlet Henderson’s smiling face looks back at her.

Once home, she pours herself a glass of Shona’s wine and puts the file with the letters in front of her. Before she looks at them though, she clicks on her computer and googles Scarlet Henderson. Reference after reference spews onto her screen. Nelson is right, how can she have missed this?

‘Heartache of Scarlet’s Parents’ screams an article from the Telegraph. ‘Police Baffled in Henderson Case’ says The Times, rather more soberly. Ruth scrolls down the article: ‘Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson of the Norfolk Police admitted yesterday that there are no new leads in the case of missing four-year-old Scarlet Henderson. Sightings in Great Yarmouth of a child answering Scarlet’s description are said by police to have been ruled out of the enquiry …’

Scarlet’s face, poignant in black and white, looks up from the edge of the page. Is she dead, this bright-eyed, smiling child? Ruth doesn’t like to think about it but she knows that, sooner or later, she will have to. Somehow she has become involved.

To stave off the moment when she will have to look at the letters, Ruth types ‘Lucy Downey’ into the search engine. Fewer references this time, Lucy disappeared before the ubiquity of the internet. She is listed, though, on a couple of websites.for missing children and there is an article from the Guardian headed ‘Ten Years On, the Never-ending Nightmare’. ‘Alice and Tom Downey,’ she reads, ‘meet me in their neat Norfolk home, full of pictures of the same, smiling five-year-old. Ten years ago, Lucy was sleeping in her bed in this same house when an intruder scaled the garage wall, opened the window and snatched the child while the parents were still sleeping …’

Jesus. Ruth stops reading. Imagine that. Imagine coming to wake your little girl in the morning and finding she wasn’t there. Imagine looking under the bed, searching, with increasing panic, downstairs, in the garden, back in the bedroom. Imagine seeing the open window, the curtains (she imagines them pink featuring Disney princesses) blowing in the breeze. Ruth can imagine all this, the hairs lifting on the back of her neck, but she can’t imagine what Alice Downey felt, is still feeling, ten years later. To lose your child, to have her spirited away like something from a fairy tale, surely that must be every mother’s nightmare.