Ruth Galloway (36 page)

From: Michael Malone

Date: 19 May 2008 17.30

To: Ruth Galloway

Subject: Imbolc

Michael Malone, also known as Cathbad, sometime Druid, also employed as a lab assistant in the chemistry department.
Strange that she had been thinking about Cathbad only that evening, sitting in the pub with Max. But, on second thoughts, maybe not that strange. Cathbad has a habit of appearing just when he is needed. Cathbad would say that this is his sixth sense, his extraordinary sensitivity to the world around him. Ruth prefers to think of it as coincidence. As far as she is concerned, the jury is out on Cathbad's sixth sense.

Light a fire to celebrate Imbolc
[reads the email],
the Gaelic festival of the coming of spring. Join us on Saltmarsh beach on Friday 23
^rd
May at six o'clock. Light a fire for Brigid, the goddess of holy wells, sacred flames and healing.

Below, in rather less high-flown language, Cathbad has written:

Imbolc is traditionally celebrated on 2
^nd
Feb but the weather's been so bad I thought we'd wait. I don't expect Brigid will mind! Do come, Ruth.

He finishes with a Gaelic verse to which he has kindly added a translation.

Thig an nathair as an toll

La donn Bride,

Ged robh tri traighean dh' an t-sneachd

Air leachd an lair.

The serpent will come from the hole

On the brown Day of Bride,

Though there should be three feet of snow On the flat surface of the ground.

Ruth looks at this email for a long time. On one hand it is Cathbad doing what he does best, combining Celtic mysticism with an opportunity for binge drinking and dancing round a fire. On the other hand … She points her cursor at the words ‘goddess of holy wells'. It seems strange, even sinister, that this email should come just after her discussion with Max. Ruth wonders about the term ‘holy wells'. Brigid seems distinctly pagan – in what sense were her wells holy? And what's this about ‘sacred flames'? Is Brigid another fire goddess? Sacred, holy – it is the language of the Church but she knows that there will be nothing Christian about the celebration on Saltmarsh beach.

On impulse, she types ‘St Bridget' into her search engine. Immediately, she comes up with a Wikipedia entry for St Bridget, or Brigid. St Bridget, she reads, is considered one of Ireland's patron saints, along with Patrick and Columba. Her feast day is the first of February.

Imbolc, according to Cathbad, is usually held on the second of February. Does the holy Bridget (a nun, she discovers) have anything to do with the earlier, pagan feast day? She reads on. Bridget founded Kildare monastery, which is sometimes called ‘the church of the oak' after the large oak tree which grew outside Bridget's cell. The oak, Ruth knows, is highly important in Norse and Celtic mythology. The word Druid even comes from the Celtic word for oak ‘derw'.

Another story concerns ‘St Bridget's cross'. Apparently, Bridget made a cross out of reeds and placed it beside a dying man in order to convert him (might have been more useful to have called a doctor, Ruth thinks). Anyway, traditionally, a new cross is made every St Bridget's day and the old one
burnt to keep the maker's house safe from fire. Clearly there is a thin line between the pagan Brigid's fire and the saintly Bridget's burning cross.

Max would be interested in this, thinks Ruth. Should she invite him to Cathbad's Imbolc celebration? Max did say that he wanted to see the Saltmarsh. And it is interesting, too, from an archaeological perspective. Ten years ago, Ruth's extutor, Erik, discovered a Bronze-Age wooden henge on Saltmarsh beach. That was where Ruth first met Cathbad. He was one of the Druids fighting to stop the henge's timbers being removed to a museum. The Druids had lost, even though Erik had sympathised with them, and now all that is left of the henge is a slightly blackened circle of sand.

Ruth has Max's email address. She'll send a casual invitation to the Imbolc thing. Cathbad won't mind, she's sure. Druids aren't exactly hung up on numbers and table settings. And he would like the chance of converting another academic to the ‘old ways'. Thinking of Max's face as he described St Hugh and St Fremund, Ruth thinks that he may well be a closet Christian. Well, that won't deter Cathbad. He is open to any form of ritual, though he does tend to alienate the more devout by referring to Jesus as ‘the great shaman'.

Ruth starts to type when suddenly a light comes on, making her momentarily shield her eyes. After a second she realises that it is the security light. She goes to the window and looks out. The garden is flooded with the glare, each blade of grass sharply defined, white against black. But there is no living creature to be seen.

The proper thing to do is to sacrifice nine black puppies to Hecate. I worried about this because, owing to my asthma, I don't have even one puppy. And I do like to do the right thing. In the end, I killed a cat. I didn't like doing it because I'm fond of animals. But it was old. A scrawny black cat who used to sleep in the sun outside my window. I think it belongs to some old lady in the alms cottages. Anyway, yesterday when the
domus
was deserted I crept out and cut its throat. It screamed and scratched and I realised that I should have hit it on the head first. Oh well,
tamdiu discendum est, quamdiu vivas.
We live and learn. I chased it into the bushes, caught it by its tail and finished the job. Then I hacked off the head. It was hard work but I found an axe in the outhouse which did the job admirably. The axe will be useful later so I hid it in the usual place. There was a hell of a lot of blood. Too much really. I got a bucket of water and cleaned the pathway and I buried the cat beneath the laurel bush. I was exhausted after all that and had to lie down. I just hope Hecate is satisfied.

Nelson is in his car, one of his favourite places, doing one of his favourite things, driving to interrogate a suspect. Of course, Whitcliffe would say that he is ‘merely popping down to have a chat' with Father Patrick Hennessey, ex-principal of the Sacred Heart Children's Home. There is, as yet, no crime. Ruth's skeleton has, as yet, no age and no sex. But Nelson has been a policeman long enough to smell wrongdoing. As soon as he looked into that trench (‘grave' is how he thinks of it), as soon as he saw the bones, so small and oddly vulnerable curled up in the foetal position, he knew. He knew that he was looking at a murder victim. And, if the bones do turn out to be medieval, or even bloody Iron Age again, he knows that he will still be right. That body, that child, was murdered.

When Nelson is asked what's the worst thing about being a policeman, he sometimes answers ‘the smell'. It is partly meant as a rather grim joke but, in fact, it conceals an even grimmer truth. Villains, the feral, rat-like kind, do smell. As a young policeman, Nelson once had to accompany a convicted
paedophile from court to prison. Being locked in the back of a van with this scum for a sixty-mile journey was one of the worst experiences of his life. Nelson remembers the man had actually tried to talk to him. Had even, incredible as it seems, wanted to be friendly. ‘Don't. fucking. talk. to. me.' Nelson had spat, before they had even reached the outskirts of Manchester. But it is the smell that he remembers most. This man would obviously have had a shower in prison but he absolutely
stank
: a fetid, rotten smell that reeked of unwashed clothes, windowless rooms, of fear and unspeakable obsession. When he got home that night, Nelson had washed and showered three times but sometimes, even today, he can still smell it. The stench of evil.

Places smell too. The downstairs loo where he once found the body of a little girl, murdered by her mother; the garbagestrewn backstreet where he saw a colleague stabbed to death; the desolate beach where he and Ruth unearthed the body of another dead girl. There may not have been an actual smell but there was something in the air, heaviness, a sense of secrecy and of things left to fester and rot.

And Nelson had smelt it on that building site. No matter how many years had passed since that little body was buried beneath the floorboards, the smell was still there. It's a murder scene; Nelson is sure of it.

The children's home had closed in 1981; afterwards the building had been used as some sort of council offices. Now Edward Spens is planning to build seventy-five luxury apartments on the site.

‘Seventy-five!' Nelson had echoed, when Edward Spens had told him. ‘Seventy-five luxury rabbit hutches more like.'

Edward Spens had, of course, been on the phone as soon as Nelson and Clough had got back to the station. He'd been very cordial and full of phrases like ‘my duty as a citizen' but had, nevertheless, managed to drop in a few mentions of his very good friend Gerry Whitcliffe and the city's need for new housing, job creation, urban redevelopment la di da di da.

‘I appreciate your frustration, sir,' Nelson had said, ‘but you must understand that we have a suspected murder enquiry.'

‘Murder?' Spens had sounded shocked as Nelson had meant him to be. ‘But those bones could be hundreds of years old. That archaeologist chap Ted was telling me that there used to be a medieval churchyard on the site.'

‘That's as maybe, sir. I've got Dr Ruth Galloway from the university examining the bones now. I'm hoping that in a few days she'll be able to give me an approximate date.'

‘This Ruth Galloway, is she the best person? I know Phil Trent up at the university. He might be able to get us someone more … senior.'

‘Dr Galloway is head of forensic archaeology,' Nelson replied stiffly, ‘and an acknowledged expert on bones.' Ruth always claims that this makes her sound like a sniffer dog but, for the present, Spens seemed satisfied.

Spens is losing money, Nelson reflects, not without satisfaction, as he turns off the M25 towards Gatwick. Everyone is talking about the property market caving in. Nelson loathes TV programmes about smug yuppies buying and selling houses but even he has gathered that much. All those smug yuppies will soon be saddled with negative equity and serve
them right. His own house is mortgaged up to the hilt, of course, but that doesn't bother him. Nelson was brought up in a council house. For him, a mortgage is a sign of respectability.

But, even so, Spens had better start building quickly or there will be no one left to buy his luxury apartments. Luxury! Nelson snorts as he overtakes a coach loaded with German tourists. Where there was once one, admittedly large, house, now there will be seventy-five soulless shoe-boxes. It's not his definition of luxury. Actually, he's not sure he possesses one.

Father Patrick Hennessey lives in a church-run ‘retreat' in West Sussex. He explains on the phone that this is a sort of retirement placing for priests. ‘People come here for a week or even just for a few days, to recharge their spiritual batteries. I wander around asking them if they want to talk to a priest and, when they say no, I wander off again.' Nice work if you can get it, thinks Nelson. It is a beautiful May morning, the fields lush and green, the trees heavy with blossom. As he drives past yet another rose-strewn cottage, Nelson reflects how much he prefers this countryside to Norfolk. Everything is contained: a single oak stands in a gated field, flint cottages surround a pond, gentle hills form perfect framing devices for picturesque villages. There is no threatening expanse of sky, none of the windswept desolation that he so dislikes about his adopted county. Even so, you'd need a ton of money to live here. The villages are heavy on antique shops and low on fast-food outlets. He has to weave his way through a slalom of BMWs, Porsches and shiny Land Rovers. Definitely a cushy retirement billet.

‘Can't stand the place,' says Father Patrick Hennessey cheerfully, stomping out over the smooth green lawn to shake Nelson heartily by the hand.

The strength of the handshake does not surprise Nelson. He has met priests like this before; burly, red-faced Irishmen who look more like ex-boxers than clerics. Hennessey is elderly, seventies Nelson reckons, and walks with a stick, but he has a definite physical presence, with shoulders as broad as Nelson's own, a white crew cut and a nose that has clearly been broken several times.

‘Why not?' asks Nelson as they walk towards a shady seat overlooking the rose garden. ‘Seems a beautiful spot to me.'

‘Beautiful,' says Hennessey gloomily, ‘yes, I suppose so. But it bores the hell out of me. People talk about seeing God's hand in nature but, in my opinion, when you've seen one tree you've seen them all. Now, when I see a beautiful building and I think of how God has given man the wits to build it, that's worth celebrating. Have you seen the Gherkin in London? Pure poetry.'

‘I'm a city boy myself,' says Nelson cautiously, ‘but buildings don't make me think about God exactly.'

Hennessey gives him a rather sharp look. His eyes are very light blue in a weather-beaten face. Intelligent eyes, watchful eyes. And, like his handshake, not particularly gentle.

He lowers himself onto the bench and stretches one leg stiffly in front of him. ‘So, Detective Chief Inspector Nelson, you said you wanted to talk to me about SHCH.'

Sacred Heart Children's Home, Nelson works out silently. He hates acronyms. Whitcliffe, of course, loves them.

‘Yes,' he says brusquely, ‘as you may know, the site is being developed. The plan is to build a number of luxury apartments.'

‘Dear God.'

‘And in the course of the building work a discovery has been made. A body. Skeleton to be precise, buried under the main doorway. It looks to be that of a child.'