The Woman In Blue: The Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries 8 (15 page)

Chapter 21

Ruth wakes up knowing that she’s worried about something. Is it Kate? Always her first thought. She runs through her list of Kate worries: illness, developmental delay, friendship problems at school. But no. Kate had seemed in rude health yesterday, her teacher says she’s the best reader in the class, and she seems extremely popular, her book bag always full of invitations to parties and play dates. Ruth had friends at school, but she was never one of those children who is effortlessly top dog, the arbiter of playground fashions, the one everyone fights to sit next to at lunchtime. It seems amazing to her that she has given birth to one of those alpha pupils. So it isn’t Kate. Is it work, her parents, the state of the world? No – as she rises from sleep it all becomes clear. It’s Nelson.

What actually happened last night? Ruth ponders this, and other Nelson-related matters, as she showers and dresses, wakes Kate and supervises her washing and dressing. ‘I need white socks with frills today,’ says Kate informatively. ‘It’s too cold,’ says Ruth, ‘you should wear your woolly tights.’ ‘It’s white socks with frills day,’ counters Kate. ‘Who says so? Mrs Mannion?’ asks Ruth. Kate narrows her eyes, wondering how far she can go with this – ‘I expect Mrs Mannion thinks it’s a good idea.’ Ruth lays out the tights.

Making breakfast, Ruth wonders whether she should ring Nelson, just to clear the air. She dismisses this at once. What is there to say anyway? Nelson came over to tell her that his wife was having an affair, Ruth had suggested that he talk to Michelle about it and Nelson had stormed out in a temper. But that’s without the subtext, without the moment when Nelson had touched her cheek, had leant towards her, the moment when she knew that he was going to kiss her. Why had she pulled away? Why had she wanted to make sure that this – this thing that she had wanted for so long – wasn’t just a reaction to Michelle and Tim, but something that Nelson actually wanted too? She had spoken up, like an idiot, and in doing so had given herself away.

She makes breakfast for herself, Kate and Flint. Flint is the only one who eats heartily. Kate is a picky eater in the morning, and Ruth doesn’t feel hungry. Hooray. At this rate she’ll be thin, albeit with a broken heart. Is her heart broken? She thinks about it as she cuts Kate’s lunchtime sandwiches into triangles (squares are unacceptable). Her heart isn’t broken but only because she has immunised herself against this eventuality, building herself up with little doses of heartbreak every now and again. Every time that Nelson goes home to his wife, every time he says ‘we’ and means him and Michelle, every time he talks about their shared past, every Mother’s Day, every birthday, every Christmas. So she isn’t in pieces. She just feels numb and rather scared, terrified that the fragile relationship she and Nelson have built since Kate’s birth might be shattered. That can’t happen. She owes it to Kate to keep on civil terms with her father. She adds an apple to Kate’s lunchbox, hoping that she won’t notice that it’s green instead of the more socially acceptable red.

As she drives over the marshes (silver-grey with frost this morning) Ruth makes a decision of sorts. She has a morning without lectures; she’ll go to King’s Lynn Museum and look up the Walsingham digs from 1961 and 2011. There might be something there that links to Hilary’s letters. And, if she finds anything, then she’ll have to steel herself to ring Nelson and tell him about her discovery. After all, the letter-writer might be the person who killed Chloe and Paula. She thinks of Paula’s family. Hilary said that she had a husband and son. What must they be feeling this morning? How Paula would love the chance to be arguing about woolly tights (or the male school uniform equivalent). Ruth really must count her blessings.

Hilary is going home today. She has asked Ruth to meet her at the Anglican shrine at five to say goodbye. Ruth wanted to find an excuse (she never wants to go to Walsingham again), but knows that’s only cowardice. She owes it to Hilary to meet. After all, they might never see each other again. All the same, the thought of the encounter makes a morning in the museum seem even more appealing.

At the school she zips into a parking space made available by some monster people carrier. As she walks Kate to the gate she sees several little girls wearing white frilly socks, their legs blue with cold.

*

Tim gets caught in a hold-up on the M25 and so only just makes it to the crematorium on time. It’s a plain room, aggressively tasteful, with bleached wood and lavender-painted walls. Tim finds himself feeling nostalgic for St Simeon’s with its stained glass and high altar, even for the clashing primary colours of his mother’s church. But, unlike St Simeon’s, this place is full to bursting. Tim has to stand at the back, next to a group of mourners who could have stepped from the
Vogue
fashion pages (‘Funeral Chic Special’). Tim has attended a few funerals, both as a policeman and his mother’s son, and remembers the congregations consisting mainly of old people, some clearly just looking forward to the food afterwards. But today the crowd is overwhelmingly young and beautiful. He can’t see Chloe’s family, but assumes that they are at the front of the room. A burst of recorded music, and people start to stand up. The girl next to Tim is crying so hard that she looks about to collapse. ‘Are you all right?’ he whispers. A singularly stupid question.

The coffin is carried in, a wreath of white roses on top. And following behind are Chloe’s family. Julie, in a smart black dress, leaning heavily on Alan. And, behind them, a beautiful blonde woman who can only be Lauren, Chloe’s sister. She is accompanied by a handsome young man with a designer goatee. Is this Thom Novak or another male relative, a cousin perhaps? An elderly couple complete the family party. Chloe’s grandparents, Tim assumes. What a terrible thing it must be to outlive your granddaughter.

The service is brief, ecumenical and – to Tim – heartbreaking in its lack of certainty. Chloe was a beautiful young woman, taken too soon, who is now in some hazy location ‘with the angels’. Lauren takes the pulpit to say that Chloe was the best little sister anyone could have had. A schoolfriend (Kelly or Kylie, Tim doesn’t quite catch the name) remembers the fun they used to have. ‘Chloe was the best friend ever. She’d do anything for anyone.’ Isn’t that what Alan had said, with rather more sinister overtones?
Chloe always found it hard to say no
. But Chloe wasn’t killed by drink or drugs, she was murdered. The manner of her death is never mentioned, and Tim doesn’t blame the family for that. This is a time for remembering Chloe in life. By the end, when Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’ fills the room, there’s not a dry eye in the place.

As the music swells and the sobs abound, the curtains open and Chloe’s coffin is borne smoothly away. What a horrific moment this is, thinks Tim, and nothing Robbie Williams can say about loving angels instead is going to change that. Chloe was alive and now she’s dead. Soon, all her parents will have of their daughter is an urn full of ashes.

Robbie has finished and something classical is playing as the congregation files out, by a back door this time. Tim is one of the last to leave and he finds Alan, Julie and Lauren standing in a sea of flowers still shaking hands and managing to smile.

They don’t recognise him at first.

‘Detective Sergeant Tim Heathfield from King’s Lynn CID,’ says Tim. ‘The whole team send their condolences. We’re all thinking of you today.’ This isn’t perhaps strictly true but the team will be doing the next best thing; trying to find Chloe’s killer.

‘It’s so good of you to come, Sergeant Heathfield,’ says Julie.

‘Tim, please. I wanted to pay my respects.’

‘That other girl who was killed yesterday,’ says Alan. ‘Do you think it’s the same person?’

‘We’re not jumping to any conclusions,’ says Tim, ‘but there are similarities, yes.’

‘She even looked a bit like Chloe, we thought,’ says Julie. ‘Poor woman. We feel for her family, we really do.’

‘I know you do,’ says Tim, thinking that the Jenkins family are really the only people who know what today will be like for the Moncrieffs. Today, tomorrow and all the days afterwards.

‘There are some refreshments at the golf club,’ says Julie. ‘We hope you’ll join us.’

‘I ought to get back to work.’

‘Just for a cup of tea. Before you have to drive back. It’s a long way.’

‘That would be very kind.’

But Tim isn’t the only person making the drive back to Norfolk. In the car park he sees Fiona McAllister getting into a smart Range Rover. Stanley and Jean are in the back seat.

*

King’s Lynn Museum is a modern state-of-the-art establishment, brimming with the best of old and new. The timbers from the henge are there, and Ruth often visits them for old time’s sake, wondering what Cathbad and the other druids who complained about their removal would think about this new chapter in the life of these ancient oaks. But today Ruth is far from the glass cabinets and interactive displays. She is in the basement, going through the archaeological finds from Walsingham. It always gives her a strange feeling to be in these subterranean rooms, surrounded by hundreds of labelled boxes. How many treasures are here, identified and catalogued, but hidden from sight? She knows that there’s not room to display everything but, even so, she sometimes wonders if it wouldn’t be better to leave these objects in the ground – part of the natural world, as Cathbad would say – instead of bagging them up in acid-free paper, putting them in a box and forgetting all about them.

The Walsingham finds are conveniently marked WS. As Phil said, the bronze Mercury and some of the more interesting pieces are on display in the museum, but there’s plenty here: some flint tools and axe-heads, a Bronze Age knife, pieces of quern-stones, fragments of pottery, a few Late Saxon coins and a rather interesting Viking buckle. But it’s the more recent finds that she’s interested in, the ones relating to the medieval shrine. She finds the ampullae and the copper alloy reliquary thought to be meant for a fragment of the True Cross, plus a medieval leather boot (preserved because it was apparently found in a sewer). Most of these finds come from the 1961 dig which excavated the remains of the original holy house. But there are some objects from the dig Ruth attended a few years ago which concentrated on land just outside Walsingham, on the way to the Slipper Chapel, in fact. At the time, she remembers that the team had been disappointed, a week’s digging, and all they had found were a few pieces of pottery, impossibly broken up by ploughing. There had been some flints too and a few coins, nothing that justified further excavation. She looks down the list now:

WS1025 Fragment of Roman pot

WS1026 Fragment of Roman pot

WS1027 Flint implement

WS1028 Coin, Roman: 43–409
AD

WS1029 Coin, Roman: 43–409
AD

WS1030 Lead ampulla with scallop shell design

WS1031 Medieval gilt, possibly from horse harness

WS1032 Fragment from neck of hand-blown glass phial

The scallop shell design is quite interesting. The scallop shell is the symbol of pilgrimage; Ruth seems to remember that it comes from Santiago or Saint James. She went to Santiago de Compostela with Shona once, and there had been scallop shells everywhere, including (Ruth had been pleased to see) on their dinner plates. Coquilles St Jacques, one of the great pleasures of earthly life. She and Shona had travelled by bus, but Ruth remembers seeing pilgrims, dusty and sunburnt, staggering along by the side of the road with their backpacks and staffs. At each stage you had to have the scallop shell stamped in your passport, and then you got a free meal at the end of the pilgrimage. Ruth wonders whether the same system applied in medieval times.

She looks at the last item on the list.
WS1031 Fragment from neck of hand-blown glass phial.
There’s no picture, but the notes describe it as ‘Early Medieval, possibly mid-to-late 12th century’. With some difficulty, she locates the correct box. She finds the pieces of Roman pottery and the lead ampulla and the horse harness, but, although she looks several times, there’s no sign of the piece of hand-blown glass. It’s not unknown for objects to go missing – perhaps taken for display elsewhere – but why would anyone want to show a broken piece of old glass? Ruth stares at the sheet of grid-references, troubled by a memory that’s buried in some forgotten storeroom of her brain.

*

The golf club has put on quite a spread. Tim accepts a cup of tea and a biscuit. He looks around at the room, which is now making the kind of upper-class roar more suited to a cocktail party. Still, people have to unwind somehow after the stress of the funeral. The whole thing has made him want to write a will specifying that he wants to be buried at sea with no mourners present. Planning her own funeral is one of Tim’s mother’s favourite pastimes. Recurring themes include a horse-drawn hearse (with plumes), a gospel choir and internment in a proper grave with a proper headstone. ‘A cross or an angel. Or one of those books like the Bible. White marble.’ ‘Where are we going to get the money for all this?’ Rick, Tim’s eldest brother, had asked after the last such conversation. ‘Save it,’ their mother had said darkly. ‘Go without.’

Who would attend
his
funeral? thinks Tim, standing on the outskirts of the room, drinking his tea. He hopes for her sake that he will outlive his mother. His brothers, presuming they are both out of prison at the time? His sisters? His nephews and nieces? Michelle won’t be there because, when this case is over, he will have to go away and never see her again. To his horror, he feels tears pricking behind his eyes.

‘Detective Heathfield?’ Tim puts the cup down and blinks rapidly. It’s Lauren and the goatee man. He knows from their faces that they saw the tears and were touched by them. He feels oddly guilty about this.