Dying Fall, A (32 page)

‘I’d better stay here,’ he says. ‘Sandy might call.’

‘Honestly, Harry.’ Michelle tosses her blonde pony tail. ‘This isn’t your case, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve been so funny this holiday. Even mum has noticed it.’

‘I’m useless at holidays. You know that.’

‘You might try, Harry.’ Michelle gives him a significant look, eyelashes lowered. ‘For my sake.’

‘All right,’ says Nelson. ‘I’ll get my hiking boots.’

Ruth parks outside the cigarette factory. As it is now August, there will be no one at reception and Clayton has told her to come straight up to his office. Standing outside the building, looking up at its grim grey industrial walls, she feels an odd disinclination to go inside. Come on, Ruth, she tells herself, best foot forward. Jesus, even the voice in her head is sounding like her mother now. She squares her shoulders and climbs the steps to the main entrance.

As she passes through the atrium full of pictures of scientists, Ruth thinks about Dan, who must have walked past these dusty display cases every day. She feels that she hasn’t really justified Dan’s faith in her. True, she spotted the trick with the switched skeletons but she hasn’t managed to track down the original bones and now fears that they have been burnt on some pseudo-Arthurian funeral pyre. She hasn’t made any archaeological breakthroughs herself though she now understands the nature of Dan’s great discovery. The trouble is, without evidence, she might well be the only person who ever knows the truth about the Raven King. Still, it will be interesting to see the artefacts today, and the tomb itself may be worth a paper or two. She dismisses this ignoble thought as she starts to climb the metal stairs.

She doesn’t really feel any closer to Dan, even though she is in his university, working with his colleagues. In some ways he seems further away than ever. He was sleeping with several women but didn’t love any of them. He had friends but didn’t seem to take any of them into his confidence. He felt an outsider, as indeed he was. The only emotions with which Ruth can completely empathise are the professional feelings—the sense that his career has stalled and then the incredible excitement of a new discovery. She can imagine the febrile, intense atmosphere of the days surrounding the excavation. It must have been something like the henge dig all those years ago when she was falling in love with Peter. Although she hadn’t known it at the time, Erik, Cathbad and Shona had also all been conducting clandestine business of their own. Strange how a dry academic exercise like an archaeological dig can arouse such violent human emotions. Both excavations, in their way, led to murder.

She is out of breath by the time she reaches the fourth floor. She should have started going to the gym again after Kate was born. Oh well, plenty of time for that when the new term starts. She takes a deep breath and heads for the door marked Prof. C. Henry.

Clayton Henry is sitting at his desk. It is some moments before Ruth notices the silver paper knife protruding from his chest.

Ruth stands in the doorway, frozen with shock. She thinks of the occasion, last year, when she went into a deserted museum and discovered a dead body. For some reason, she is reminded, not of the corpse, but of a waxwork figure in one of the galleries, a man seated at his desk, quill raised, dusty eyes unseeing. Perhaps it’s the absence of blood, perhaps it’s the almost comical expression of shock on Clayton Henry’s face, but the scene does not seem quite real somehow. It’s like a tableau: posed, unconvincing. She steps closer. The knife’s hilt is embedded in Clayton’s smart pink shirt. A darker pink stain is slowly spreading but that is all the blood she can see. She touches Clayton’s hand, still—like the waxwork—holding a pen. It’s warm. She feels for a pulse but can’t detect anything. She reaches for her phone.

Nelson is sitting outside The Swan With Two Necks when he gets the call. At first he can’t take in what Ruth is saying. It seems so at odds with the idyllic village scene, the perfect country pub, the stream running the length of the street, the tables and umbrellas, the two pretty women in front of him.

‘Clayton Henry? Murdered?’

Michelle looks up, almost crossly, as if it’s bad taste to mention
that
word in this setting. Two elderly women at the next table lean forward avidly.

‘Are you sure he’s dead? Have you called an ambulance? OK, love. Listen. Don’t stay there. Get into your car and lock the door. Don’t get out until the police get there. I’ll ring Sandy and the local boys. Yes, I’m on my way.’

He looks up at his spellbound audience and spreads his hands apologetically.

It is not until Nelson tells her to get into her car that Ruth realises she might be in danger. Clayton Henry’s killer might still be in the building. In fact, probably is, given the warm body and the still spreading blood. She stands still, listening, thinking of all the hundreds of rooms in this huge old industrial building. The killer could be anywhere, in an office, in one of the labs, hiding in the students’ Common Room, lurking behind one of the scientific displays in the atrium. She listens. Silence except for the traffic outside and the dim mechanical whirr of computers and plumbing and alarm systems. Then she hears something. A very faint tap like the hooves of a tiny horse. Someone is running about on the floor above. Someone in high heels.

She turns and runs, down the stairs, skidding on each landing, through the atrium, bumping off the display cases. She flings herself through the double doors and doesn’t stop running until she reaches her car. Then she locks all the doors and sits slumped in her seat until the ambulance and police cars arrive.

‘For Christ’s sake, put your bloody foot down!’

Tim, who is already driving at ninety miles an hour with sirens blaring, grits his teeth and presses the accelerator even harder. They got the call about Clayton Henry when they were already on their way back from Lancaster, but now all thoughts of a leisurely pub lunch have vanished and Sandy is in full Sweeney mode. He knows that the local boys will be on their way and there is nothing that Sandy hates more than letting uniforms in on a murder case.

‘Who’s your money on?’ he asks as they take the turn for Preston.

Tim hates being asked this sort of question, especially when he is cutting across three lanes of traffic.

‘The Arch Wizard,’ he says, half-joking.

But Sandy replies seriously, ‘My thoughts exactly. And we know who the Arch Wizard is, don’t we?’

Tim, who doesn’t, says nothing.

Nelson is pulling into the university car-park when he gets the call from Clough. He listens as he takes the steps at a run.

‘Elaine Morgan, boss. There’s something on her, all right. Conviction as a minor for grievous bodily harm.’

‘What did she do?’

‘Stabbed her mother.’

Nelson finds Ruth in the atrium, sitting below a poster of chemical engineering in Chile. She looks pale but manages a rather shaky smile.

‘Are you OK, love?’

‘Yes. I took them up to the room. The police are in there now. They’re sealing it off.’

Sandy will go mad if the forensics boys get there before him, thinks Nelson.

‘He’s definitely dead then?’ he says.

‘Yes. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene. It was weird, Nelson.’ She shivers. ‘He looked just like a statue or a waxwork, sitting propped up at his desk with a knife sticking into him.’

Nelson reaches out a hand to her but doesn’t quite make contact.

‘Sandy here yet?’

Ruth shakes her head. ‘Someone called Peter Greengrass seems to be in charge.’

‘Have you seen anyone else? Anyone leaving the building?’

‘No.’ She tells him about the footsteps.

‘You say they sounded like a woman’s steps?’

‘Yes. Someone wearing high heels.’

Nelson looks around the deserted atrium. He wants to go up to the crime scene but he knows that he’ll be given short shrift by the forensics team and by Sandy’s nemesis Peter Greengrass. Also, he doesn’t want to leave Ruth on her own. But he hates doing nothing. Comforting witnesses is not one of his strengths; that’s Judy’s job. Not for the first time, he wishes she and Clough were there.

As he hesitates, the doors crash open and Sandy and Tim erupt onto the scene.

‘Where is he?’ barks Sandy.

‘Fourth floor,’ says Nelson. ‘The forensics boys are up there.’

With a furious expletive Sandy charges for the stairs. Tim stays to confer with Ruth.

‘Are you all right? Shall I get someone to drive you home?’

‘It’s OK. Nelson’s looking after me.’

Tim gives Nelson a rather doubtful look.

‘Has anyone taken a statement?’

‘Yes. A policewoman. She was very nice.’

‘Can I have a word?’ says Nelson.

He tells Tim what he has learnt about Elaine Morgan. He can’t help adding, ‘I’d get her and that Guy chap in for questioning.’

Tim doesn’t betray any annoyance at being told how to do his job. ‘I’ll tell the boss,’ he says. Then he turns and takes the stairs at a run. He must be very fit, thinks Nelson enviously.

‘I’ll run you home,’ says Nelson.

‘I’m meeting Cathbad in Blackpool,’ says Ruth. Her phone rings. ‘That’ll be him now. He’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

The caller ID says Cathbad but Ruth hardly recognises his voice. ‘Ruth, I’m so sorry. I’ve lost Kate.’

The world spins. Nelson and the engineering posters blur into one dizzying, whirring kaleidoscope of shape and colour. It’s Kansas, and Dorothy’s house is disappearing into the vortex of the tornado. But Ruth herself sits quite still in the centre of it all.

‘What do you mean, you’ve lost her?’

Cathbad’s voice is high and strained. She thinks dumbly that she hardly knows this person. ‘It was just for a second. We were in Nickelodeon Land and I’d just bought her an ice cream. I turned round for a second to put my wallet back in the backpack and she was gone.’

The backpack. Ruth had made him take the backpack. ‘There’s more to taking a child out than you know,’ she’d told him bossily. ‘You need drinks, snacks, wet-wipes, spare clothes in case she goes on the log flume.’ If she had let Cathbad look after Kate in his own way—conjuring drinks and snacks from the air—maybe she would still be at his side.

‘I’m sure she’s just wandered away,’ Cathbad is saying. ‘I’ve told the Pleasure Beach people. They’re being very good. Apparently kids get lost all the time.’

But Kate isn’t a ‘kid’. She’s Ruth’s baby and now she’s . . . nowhere. Lost. In Limbo. In the liminal zone between life and death so beloved of Erik. The floor tilts and she has to grip onto the sides of her chair to stop herself from falling. She looks up, trying to remember where she is, and, as she does she so, she becomes dimly aware that one of the spinning shapes has materialised into Nelson.

‘Give me the phone.’

She can hear Nelson barking into her mobile, telling Cathbad to stay where he is, to contact the police, to retrace his steps. At the same time Nelson is pulling her to her feet and propelling her across the atrium and through the double doors. All this happens without her once being aware of her feet moving. She has left her body and is hovering somewhere among the cast-iron rafters and industrial lifting devices.

She is in Nelson’s car and hurtling towards Blackpool at the speed of light before she manages to take a proper breath. Her ribs ache and she feels as if she’s about to pass out.

‘It’ll be OK,’ Nelson is saying. ‘I’ve seen this hundreds of times. Kids wander away, parents panic, ten minutes later they’re back together again. Lots of tears and wasted police time. No harm done.’

Ruth glances at his set profile and wonders why she isn’t more reassured. Because there’s a muscle going in Nelson’s cheek and his knuckles are white on the steering wheel? Because Cathbad hasn’t rung back to say it’s all a terrible mistake and he and Kate are enjoying complimentary Krabby Patties in Sponge Bob’s Snack Shop? Because deep down she has always known that they will get her—the shadowy figures who killed Dan and goaded Pendragon to his death. And how better to get her than to attack the most precious thing in her life?
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home.
Oh why hadn’t she flown back home as soon as she received those texts? Why is she still here, in this nightmare world where people are thrown into the air for pleasure and cartoon animals guard a land where children can disappear forever? She starts to cry.

‘It’ll be OK,’ says Nelson again. ‘We’ll find her. She’ll have just wandered off to see Dora.’

‘She loves Dora.’

‘I know. I saw the book by your bed.’

Will she ever read to Kate again? She would give everything—
everything
—to be lying beside her sleepy child, ploughing through Dora’s interminable adventures. Please God, she prays fiercely, I’ve never believed in you but, please, prove me wrong. Please find my darling daughter.

Nelson screeches to a halt on double yellow lines outside the Pleasure Beach. They run through a hall full of people queuing for tickets, and out again to more queues and a row of turnstiles.

‘Have you got day passes sir?’ asks a polite doorman. Nelson waves his police badge and pushes Ruth past the outraged pleasure seekers. Ruth rings Cathbad as she runs. He says he’s waiting for them outside Nickelodeon Land.

‘Have you found Kate?’ asks Ruth though she knows that, if he had, it would have been the first thing he’d said.

‘No.’

They run past ghost trains and carousels and people hanging upside down in the air. A vast skull in a Viking helmet guards the entrance to something called Valhalla. The giant raven of the Raven Falls spreads his baleful wings, as black as night. For Ruth, the place could not seem more hellish if there were actual devils manning the rides. The visitors to the Pleasure Beach resemble not happy families in search of an innocent thrill, but sinister misshapen creatures, their features smeared with face paints, ghastly smiles enhanced by comedy hats and T-shirts saying ‘I’m with Stupid’. Some of these monsters are clutching the furry corpses of stuffed animals won in arcades, others are swilling lurid drinks from oversized plastic glasses. Many of them are wearing the Simon Cowell masks Ruth first saw on the pier. The effect is of hundreds of dark-haired, icy-toothed showbiz supremos on the rampage. It’s as if Cowell has been cloned by some evil pharmaceutical lab intent on taking over the world. Ruth rushes past these abominations, head down, phone clasped to her heart. She hates everyone for not being Kate.