The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths (10 page)

Do you remember when I nearly drowned?’

‘Yes.’ Peter is suffering from an attack of nostalgia, she knows the symptoms. She mustn’t join in otherwise she’ll be swept away too, drowning in a quicksand of the past.

Peter sighs. ‘Well, I’ll be in touch. It’ll probably be next week or the week after. Will you be around?’

‘Yes, I’ll be around.’

‘Great. Bye then.’

‘Bye.’

Ruth replaces the receiver thoughtfully. She doesn’t know why Peter is coming to see her; she only knows that the past seems to be converging on her. First Erik, then Cathbad, now Peter. Before she knows it, she will have gone back in time ten years and will be walking along the beach, hand-in-hand with Peter, her hair six inches longer and her waist four inches thinner. She shakes her head. The past is dead. She, as an archaeologist, knows that better than most. But she knows too that it can be seductive.

Rain is still drumming against the windows. Getting up, she strokes Flint, who is now stretched out on the sofa, eyes shut, pretending she isn’t there. She’d better check that Sparky isn’t outside meowing to be let in - although she has a cat flap, Sparky really prefers having the door opened for her. Ruth opens the door.

The rain flies in her face, blinding her. Spluttering, she wipes her eyes on her sleeve. And then she sees it. Sparky is on the doorstep but she isn’t meowing or making any other sound. She is lying on her back and her throat has been cut.

Nelson is, for once, driving slowly. It is still raining hard, turning the narrow lanes into treacherous gullies, but Nelson isn’t usually the sort of driver who worries about weather conditions. No, Nelson is dawdling because he has just been to see Scarlet’s parents and feels he needs some time to recover before getting back to the station. He has had to tell the parents, Delilah and Alan, that not only has the investigation made no progress, but the police want to bring sniffer dogs to search the family garden. Cases like this, it’s usually the parents. That’s what he told Ruth and although maybe he had been trying to shock her, in his experience it has often proved true. One of his first cases involved a missing child in Lytham. Hundreds of police hours spent searching, a young mother very eloquent and moving at the press conference and then Nelson, a young PC, making a routine call at the house, had noticed a strange smell in the downstairs loo. He’d called for reinforcements but, before they arrived, had already found the tiny corpse, stuffed into the cistern. ‘She gets on my nerves,’ said the mother, apparently unrepentant. ‘She’s a little devil’. The present tense. It still gets to him. He’d been commended for his work on that case but he remembers weeks, months, of sleepless nights afterwards, retching as he remembered the smell, the sight of the water-bloated body.

He’s ruling nothing out but he doesn’t really suspect Scarlet’s parents. Alan was away anyway and Delilah Delilah is a fading flower child in bare feet and fringed skirts. She irritates the hell out of him but he can’t really imagine her as a killer. Never assume, he tells himself.

‘Never assume’, his first boss, Derek Fielding, used to say, laboriously. ‘It makes an ass out of you and me. Get it?’

He’d got it, but he wasn’t going to give Fielding the satisfaction of laughing; probably why it took so long for the old bastard to promote him, despite the commendation.

But the point is a good one. Never make assumptions about people or circumstances. Delilah Henderson could have killed her daughter. She was in the right location and probably had the means to hand. It had taken her three hours to report Scarlet missing. ‘I thought they were just playing hide and seek,’ she had sobbed. Nelson disapproves (what sort of mother would not notice, for three hours, that her four-year-old was missing?) but, on balance, he puts it down to the sort of lackadaisical parenting of people like the Hendersons. And she had been distraught, God knows, when she finally realised that Scarlet had gone. She was still distraught, weeping today and clutching an old photo of Scarlet, heart-break ingly happy astride a pink bike with stabilisers. Delilah had hardly taken in the news about the garden, had just clutched at Nelson, begging him to find her baby. Nelson slows down almost to walking pace as the windscreen wipers battle against the onslaught of water. Sometimes he hates his job. Christ, he could do with a cigarette but it’s only January, a bit early to break his New Year resolution.

When his phone rings he almost doesn’t answer; not for safety reasons - Nelson thinks hands-free phones are for wimps - but because he just can’t be bothered with anything else today. When he does press RECEIVE an almost inhuman sound greets him, a sort of sobbing wail. Nelson squints at the caller identification. Ruth Galloway. Jesus.

‘Ruth? What is it?’

‘She’s dead,’ wails Ruth.

Now Nelson does stop the car, almost skidding into a waterlogged ditch.

‘Who’s dead?’

‘Sparky.’ Long, gulping pause. ‘My cat.’

Nelson counts to ten. ‘Are you ringing me up to tell me about a dead cat?’

‘Someone cut her throat.’

‘What!”

‘Someone cut her throat and left her on my doorstep.’

‘I’ll be right over.’

Nelson turns his car, with maximum tyre skidding, and heads back towards the Saltmarsh. Ruth’s dead cat could be a message from the abductor or the letter writer or both. It seems just the sort of warped thing the letter writer would do. Never assume, he tells himself, overtaking a lorry, half-blinded by spray. But cutting an animal’s throat, that is definitely sick. Might be able to get some DNA though. He will have to be sensitive (‘sensitive’ he repeats to himself - the word has a wet, Guardian-reader sound that he distrusts), Ruth seems very upset. Funny, he wouldn’t have thought her the sort of woman to have pets.

It is pitch black by the time he reaches the Saltmarsh, and though the rain has stopped it is still blowing a gale.

The car door is almost ripped out of his hand and, as he walks up the path, he can feel the full force of the wind in the small of his back, pushing him forwards. Jesus, what a place to live. Nelson’s home is a modern, fourbedroomed house outside King’s Lynn; it is all very

civilised, with speed bumps and security lights and double garages. You’d hardly know you were in Norfolk at all. Ruth’s cottage seems little better than a hovel and it’s so isolated, stuck out here on the edge of nowhere with only the twitchers for company. Why on earth does she live here? She must earn a fair wage at the university, surely?

Ruth opens the door immediately as if she were waiting for him.

‘Thanks for coming,’ she sniffs.

The door opens straight into a sitting room which, to Nelson’s eyes, looks a complete mess. There are books and papers everywhere, a half-drunk cup of coffee sits on the table, along with the remains of a meal, crumbs and olive stones. But then he stops noticing anything because, on the sofa, lies what must be the mutilated corpse of a small cat.

Ruth has covered the body with a pink, fluffy blanket which, for some reason, makes his throat close up for a second. He pulls back the blanket.

‘Have you touched it? The body?’

‘She. She’s a girl.’

‘Have you touched her?’ repeats Nelson patiently.

‘Only to put her on the sofa and I did … stroke her a bit.’ Ruth turns away.

Nelson reaches over as if to pat her shoulder but Ruth moves away, blowing her nose. When she turns back, her face is quite composed.

‘Do you think it was him?’ she asks. ‘The murderer?’

‘We haven’t got a murder yet,’ says Nelson cautiously.

Ruth shrugs this aside. ‘Who would do something like this?’

‘Someone pretty sick, that’s for sure,’ says Nelson, bending over Sparky’s body. Then he straightens up. ‘Does anyone know you’re involved in this investigation?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Phil, my boss, knows,’ says Ruth slowly, ‘and maybe some other people at the university. My next-door neighbour saw me leaving in a police car that time.’

Nelson turns away from Sparky then, almost as an afterthought, he stoops and covers the little body again with the pink blanket. Then he touches Ruth’s arm and says in a surprisingly gentle voice, ‘Let’s sit down.’

Ruth sits in a sagging armchair. She looks away from him, out towards the curtained window. The wind is still roaring outside, making the panes rattle. Nelson perches on the edge of the sofa.

‘Ruth,’ says Nelson, ‘we know there’s a dangerous man out there. He may well have murdered two girls and he may be the person who did this to your cat. In any event, you’ve got to be careful. Someone, for whatever reason, is trying to frighten you and I think it’s safe to assume that it has something to do with this case.’

Still looking past him, Ruth asks, ‘Do you need to take her, Sparky, away?’

‘Yes,’ says Nelson, trying to be honest and yet not too harsh, ‘we need to test for fingerprints and DNA.’

‘So really,’ says Ruth in a high, hard voice, ‘this is a bit of a breakthrough.’

‘Ruth,’ says Nelson, ‘look at me.’ She does so. Her face is swollen with crying.

‘I’m sorry about your cat. About Sparky. I had a German Shepherd once called Max. I thought the world of that dog. My wife used to say she felt quite jealous sometimes.

When he was run over, I was beside myself, wanted to charge the driver with dangerous driving though it wasn’t his fault really. But this is a possible murder investigation and I’m afraid your cat is a valuable clue. You want to find out what has happened to Scarlet, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth, ‘of course I do.’

‘I promise you, Ruth, that, when the lab has finished, I’ll bring Sparky back and help you bury her. I’ll even light a candle in church. Deal?’

Ruth manages a watery smile. ‘Deal.’

Nelson picks up Sparky’s body, covering it carefully with the blanket. As he moves towards the door, he turns. ‘And Ruth? Make sure you lock all your doors tonight.’

When he has gone, Ruth sits on the sofa, at the opposite end to the place where there is a faint bloodstain on the faded chintz. She looks at the remains of her meal with Shona and wonders, dully, how long ago it was that they sat at this table talking about men. It seems like days but it was in fact only a few hours ago. Since then, she has found out that Nelson has a secret in his past, spoken to her ex boyfriend and seen her beloved cat brutally murdered. She laughs, slightly hysterically. What else will the night bring?

Her mother coming out as a lesbian? David the bird warden proposing marriage? She heads for the kitchen, hell-bent on finding some wine. Flint, who has been watching from a distance, comes up and rubs against her legs. She picks him up, weeping into his dusty orange fur. ‘Oh Flint,’ she says, ‘what will we do without her?’ Flint purrs hopefully. Ruth has forgotten to feed him.

Splashing Pinot Grigio into a glass, Ruth looks across to the table by the window where her laptop is still open. She presses a key and her lecture notes appear. She clicks back through her history until she is back on the page of Nelsons: the US chess champion, the professor of physics, Harry Nilsson and Henry (Harry) Nelson of the Norfolk police. He had tried to be kind about Sparky, she recognises dimly. Part of him must have been excited about the possible clue but he had tried to acknowledge her feelings.

He probably despises her for getting so upset about a cat but she doesn’t care. Sparky was her pet, her companion, her friend - yes, her friend, she repeats defiantly to herself.

She thinks of the little black cat, so sweet, so self contained, and the tears run down her face. Who would want to kill Sparky?

And, for the first time, Nelson’s final words sink in. Make sure you lock all your doors tonight. The person who killed Sparky could have killed Scarlet and Lucy too.

The murderer could have been on Ruth’s doorstep. He could have been listening outside her window, knife sharpened.

He killed Sparky. Her entire body goes cold as she realises that the dead cat was a message addressed directly to her. Next time it could be you.

Then she hears it. A sound outside her window. A pause, a muffled cough and then, unmistakably, footsteps, coming closer and closer. She listens, her heart thumping with such huge, irregular beats that she wonders if she is going to have a coronary, right there on the spot. The knock on the door makes her cry out with fear. It has come. The creature from the night. The beast. The terror. She thinks of The Monkey’s Paw and the unnamed horror that waits at the door. She is shaking so much that she drops her wine glass.

The knock again. A terrible, doom-laden sound, echoing through the tiny house. What is she going to do? Should she ring Nelson? Her phone is across the room, by the sofa, and the idea of moving suddenly seems impossible. Is this it? Is she going to die, here in her cottage with the wind howling outside?

‘Ruth!’ shouts a voice. ‘Are you in there?’

Oh thanks be to the God she doesn’t believe in. It is Erik.

Half-laughing, half-crying, Ruth dives to open the door.

Erik Anderssen, dressed in a black raincoat and carrying a bottle of whisky, stands smiling in the doorway.

‘Hello Ruthie,’ he says, ‘fancy a nightcap?’

‘Drowned landscapes,’ says Erik, his singsong voice echoing across the wind-flattened grass, ‘have a peculiar magic of their own. Think of Dunwich, the city swallowed by the sea, the church bells ringing underwater. Think of the drowned forest on this very beach, the trees buried beneath our feet. There is something deep within us which fears what is buried, what we cannot see.’

Ruth and Erik are walking along the beach, their feet crunching on the hundreds of razor clam shells brought in by the tide. Yesterday’s rain has given way to a beautiful winter’s day, cold and bright. The horrors of last night seem far away. It seems impossible that Sparky is dead and that Ruth herself could be in danger. And yet, thinks Ruth, trudging along beside Erik, it is true and it did happen.

Last night she had flung herself into Erik’s arms, almost incoherent with crying. He had been very kind, she remembers, had sat her down and made her coffee with whisky in it. She had told him about Sparky and he had said that, when they got the body back, they should give her a Viking funeral, a burning pyre drifting out to sea.

Ruth, who wanted to bury Sparky in her garden, under the apple tree, had said nothing but had been aware that Erik was paying Sparky a huge compliment, considering her a soul worthy of such an honour. She remembers her mother telling her that animals don’t have souls. Another black mark against God.

Ruth hadn’t wanted to be alone last night and so Erik had slept on the sofa, folding up his long limbs under Ruth’s sleeping bag and not complaining when Flint woke him up at five, bringing in a dead mouse. He has been a true friend, thinks Ruth. Despite everything, it is wonderful to see him again, to be striding over the Saltmarsh with him once more.

After breakfast, Erik suggested going to look at the henge site and Ruth had agreed readily. She feels the need to be out of doors, away from the house and the dark corners where she expects, every second, to see Sparky’s little face appear. No, it is better to be in the open, to be walking along the wide expanse of beach, under the high, blue sky. Mind you, she had forgotten how far it was when the tide is out. The sand stretches for miles, glittering with secret inlets, the occasional piece of driftwood black against the horizon. It looks vast and

completely featureless but Erik seems to know exactly where he is going. He strides ahead, his eyes on the horizon. Ruth, wearing her trusty Wellingtons, plods along behind him.

Last night’s wind has blown the sand into odd shapes and ridges. Nearer the sea it is flatter, striped with empty oyster shells and dead crabs. Little streams run across the sand to join the sea and, occasionally, there are larger expanses of water, reflecting the blue of the sky. Ruth splashes her way through one of these pools, remembering the summer of the henge dig and the way the sand had felt under her bare feet. She can almost feel the sting of the water and the exquisite pain of walking on the clam shells. At the end of the day, her feet had been a mass of tiny cuts.

‘Do you still think we should have left the henge where it was?’ she asks.

Erik raises his face to the sun, shutting his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It belonged here. It marked a boundary. We should have respected that.’

‘Boundaries were important to prehistoric people, weren’t they?’

‘Yes indeed.’ Erik steps delicately over a fast-flowing stream; he isn’t wearing Wellingtons. ‘Which is why they marked them with burial mounds, religious shrines, offerings to the ancestors.’

‘Do you think that my Iron Age body marks a

boundary?’ Over breakfast, Ruth had told him more about her find, about the girl with her head shaved and branches twisted around her arms and legs, about the torques and the coins and the tantalising location of the body.

Erik hesitates. He uses his professional voice; measured, calm. ‘Yes, I do,’ he says, at last. ‘Boundaries in the ancient landscape were sometimes marked by isolated burials.

Think of the bodies at Jutland, for example.’

Ruth thinks of the Jutland discoveries: oak coffins found in water, containing Bronze Age bodies. One had been that of a young woman and what Ruth remembers chiefly were her clothes, a surprisingly trendy outfit of braided miniskirt and crop top.

‘What does gadget boy think?’ asks Erik.

‘Oh, he thinks it’s all chance. No link between the Iron Age body and the henge.’

Erik snorts. ‘How that boy ever became an archaeologist!

Doesn’t he understand that if the area was sacred to the Neolithic and Bronze Age people it was sacred to the Iron Age people? That the landscape itself is important.

This is a liminal zone, between land and water, of course it’s special.’

‘It isn’t that special to us though.’

‘Isn’t it? It’s National Trust land, a nature reserve. Isn’t that our way of saying that it is sacred?’

Ruth thinks of the National Trust, sensible women in quilted coats selling souvenirs at castle gates. It isn’t her idea of sacred. Then she thinks of David and the way he spoke about the migrating birds. He is someone, she realises, who does think that the place is special.

Erik stops abruptly. He is looking at the sand, which has suddenly become dark and silty. He traces a line with his smart shoe. Underneath, the sand is quite startlingly blue.

‘Burnt matter,’ he says, ‘the roots of ancient trees. We’re getting near.’

Looking back, Ruth sees a clump of trees to the left and the spire of a church away in the distance. She remembers the view perfectly; they are very near the henge circle. But the sand, grey in the winter sun, gives nothing away. What the Sand gets, the Sand keeps forever.

Ruth remembers how the henge had looked that

summer evening ten years ago, the ring of gnarled wooden posts sinister and otherworldly as if it had risen out of the sea. She remembers Erik kneeling before the posts in an attitude almost of prayer. She remembers, when she first entered the circle, a shiver running through her whole body.

‘It’s here,’ says Erik.

There is nothing to see, just a slightly raised circle, darker than the surrounding sand, but Erik acts as if he has entered a church. He stands completely still, his eyes closed and then touches the ground, as if for luck.

‘Sacred ground,’ he says.

‘That’s what Cathbad would say.’

‘Cathbad! Have you seen him?’

‘Yes … Erik?’

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you knew Cathbad quite well, that he’d been a student of yours?’

Erik is silent for a moment, looking at her. She can’t read his cool, blue stare. Guilt? Amusement? Anger?

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it matters!’ Ruth explodes. ‘He’s a suspect in a murder investigation.’

‘Is he?’

Ruth hesitates. She knows that Nelson suspects and distrusts Cathbad but is that enough to make him a suspect? Probably. Aloud she says, ‘I don’t know. The police think he’s hiding something.’

‘The police! What do they know? Hoi polloi. Barbarians.

Do you remember when they removed the protesters from the site? The unnecessary violence they used?’

‘Yes.’ The police had been heavy-handed when they removed the protesters. Erik and the other archaeologists had been distressed. They had lodged a complaint, which the police had ignored.

‘Did you put Cathbad up to it?’ asks Ruth. ‘The protest?’

Erik smiles. ‘No, the local pagans were up in arms already. There are a lot of pagans in Norfolk, you know.

Let’s just say that I encouraged him a bit.’

‘Did you get him the job at the university too?’

‘I gave him a reference.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me he was working there?’

‘You didn’t ask.’

Ruth turns away, stomping her way over the wet sand.

Erik catches her up, puts his arm round her.

‘Don’t be angry Ruth. Didn’t I always tell you, it’s the questions that matter, not the answers?’

Ruth looks at Erik’s familiar, weather-beaten face. He has grown older, his hair is whiter and there are more lines around his eyes, but he is still the same. He is smiling, his blue eyes sparkling. Reluctantly, Ruth smiles back.

‘Come on,’ says Erik, ‘let’s see if we can find that causeway of yours.’

They set off, walking inland across the dunes. A couple of waders are feeding on the mudflats. Ruth thinks of David’s description of the Saltmarsh as nature’s service station. The birds look up as they pass and then continue their frenzied digging. In the distance, a heron watches them, standing meditatively on one leg.

Ruth has David’s map, showing the buried posts.

Silently she unfurls it and hands it to Erik. He makes a hissing noise of satisfaction, ‘So … Now we have it.’ He examines the map for a long time in silence. Ruth watches him with admiration. No-one is better at reading a map or a landscape than Erik. For him, hills and streams and villages are signposts pointing directly to the past. She remembers him saying to her when she first started his postgraduate course, ‘If you wanted to make a map of your sitting room for archaeologists of the future, what would be the most important thing?’

‘Er … making sure I have a full inventory of objects.’

He had laughed. ‘No, no. Inventories are all very well in their place but they do not tell us how people lived, what was important to them, what they worshipped. No, the most important thing would be the direction. The way your chairs were facing. That would show archaeologists of the future that the most important object in the twenty first century home was the large grey rectangle in the corner.’

Now Erik looks up from the map, sniffs the air and smiles. ‘This way, I think.’ They set off at a brisk walk. The wind is behind them now, blowing the coarse grass flat against the ground. They pass the tidal reed beds, the shallow water dark and mysterious. Above them a bird calls, hoarse and angry.

‘Here.’ Erik stops and bends down. Ruth squats beside him. There, half-buried in the peaty ground between the reeds and the mudflats., is a post. It extends about ten centimetres above the soil.

‘Bog oak,’ says Erik. Ruth looks more closely. The wood is dark, almost black, its surface dotted with little holes, like woodworm.

‘Molluscs,’ says Erik laconically, ‘they eat away at the wood.’

‘How old is it?’ asks Ruth.

‘Don’t know for sure. But it looks old.’

‘As old as the henge?’

‘Possibly later.’

Ruth reaches out to touch the post. It feels soft, like black toffee. She has to resist the temptation to gouge in her fingernail.

‘Come on,’ says Erik. ‘Let’s find the next one.’

The next post is about two metres away. This one is harder to see, almost submerged by water. Erik paces between the posts.

‘Incredible. The land between the two is completely dry, although it’s marshland on either side. It must be a shingle spit, incredible that it hasn’t moved over the years.’

Ruth can sense his excitement. ‘So it could be a pathway through the marsh?’

‘Yes, a crossing place. It was as important as marking a boundary, marking a crossing place over sacred ground.

One step the wrong way and you’re dead, straight to hell.

Keep on the path and it will lead you to heaven.’

He is smiling but Ruth shivers, remembering the letters. Look to the sky, the stars, the crossing places. Look at what is silhouetted against the sky. You will find her where the earth meets the sky. Did the letter writer know about the pathway? He spoke about causeways and cursuses.

Had he brought Lucy here, to this desolate landscape?

They find a total of twelve posts, leading them back almost to the car park and the place where Ruth found the Iron Age body. Erik takes pictures and makes notes. He seems completely absorbed. Ruth finds herself feeling restless, abstracted. With Nelson, she had been the expert.

Now she feels relegated to the position of student.

‘How will you get the wood dated?’ she asks.

‘I’ll ask Bob Bullmore.’ Bob is a member of Ruth’s department, an experienced forensic anthropologist, an expert on the decomposition of flora and fauna. Ruth likes Bob; involving him is a good idea but, again, she has the sensation of being sidelined. This was my discovery, she wants to yell, you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.

Aloud she says, ‘Shall we tell Phil?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Bob might tell him.’

‘Not if I ask him not to.’

‘Do you think we have found a link between my Iron Age body and the henge?’

Erik looks at her quizzically. ‘Your Iron Age body?’

‘I found it,’ says Ruth defiantly.

‘We own nothing in this life,’ says Erik.

‘You sound like Cathbad.’

Erik looks at her for a minute, consideringly, like a lecturer assessing a new student. Then he says, ‘Come and meet him.’

‘Who?’

‘Cathbad. Come and meet him properly.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. I thought I’d look him up.’

Ruth hesitates. Part of her, the amateur detective part, wants to see Cathbad again, to assess him without Nelson’s sceptical presence clouding her judgement. But she is still slightly angry with Erik for not telling her that he had been Cathbad’s tutor. She considers, stuck in a liminal zone of her own between curiosity and resentment.

As she is thinking, watched quizzically by Erik, her phone rings, the noise sounding shockingly twenty-first century.

‘Excuse me.’ Ruth turns away.

‘Ruth. It’s Nelson.’

‘Oh … hello.’

‘Are you busy? Can you come to Spenwell? Now’

‘Why?’

‘I’m at Scarlet Henderson’s house. We’ve found some human bones in the garden.’