THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END (6 page)

‘Better hurry, Ruth,’ shouts Trace, looking at the path where the waters are now swirling and foaming. ‘We’ve got to wade across the beach before it gets too deep.’

‘Okay.’ Ruth takes a last photograph. ‘A grave is a footprint of disturbance,’ she tells her pupils; the natural layers destroyed, soil and stones churned up together, vegetation growing differently. Someone dug this hole deliberately and, judging from its position, they hoped that it would never be found. If she had more time she might be able to tell exactly which digging implement was used, but now all she can do is note the way that the strata have been sliced through: the ‘grave cut’ it’s called. She bags some soil and a few fragments of wood and glass, worn smooth by sand and sea. She has already removed what may prove to be their most significant find – a single bullet. Then she climbs, rather awkwardly, out of the trench.

The last box is being hauled up the cliff, swaying wildly in the wind as the two men pull on the ropes. Ruth squints up at the dark shape, strangely reluctant to leave until the last skeleton has left its resting place. ‘Come on!’ yells Trace. There is only a thin line of pebbles left, and in places the waves are already pounding against the rocks. Trace and Ruth run along the narrow strip of land, hugging the cliff, trying to dodge the waves. As they reach Sea’s End House, they have to wade out to the stone jetty. Trace surges ahead,
creating a wake in the churning water. ‘Jesus,’ she shouts, above the noise of the sea. ‘It’s deeper than it looks.’

They have an anxious few minutes, struggling against the surprisingly strong undertow. The wind sounds loud and angry and it is nearly dark. Twice Ruth almost loses her footing. She can feel water seeping unpleasantly over the tops of her wellingtons. She should have worn waterproof trousers. She tries not to think that the reason she didn’t was because they make her look like a Michelin man and she knew that she would be seeing Nelson.

At three o’clock Ruth had rung Shona who had finished teaching for the day. Shona drove over and collected Kate, taking her back to her house in King’s Lynn. Ruth trusts Shona (up to a point) but she also knows that the nearest her glamorous friend ever comes to motherhood is weekend visits from her married lover’s children. She hopes she won’t take Kate for a McDonald’s.

Wiping the wet hair from her eyes, Ruth sees that Trace has reached the path. Without checking to see if Ruth is all right, she runs up the slope towards Sea’s End House, slapping her pockets for her iPhone. Ruth climbs slowly out of the icy water, her trousers now drenched almost to her thighs. She looks back. Across the bay, in the car park, she can just make out Ted and Craig loading the boxes into a van. Clough is there too. She can see his reflective jacket. Nelson has not come back. On the beach, the sea has reached the inlet and waves rush joyfully into the narrow cleft between the rocks. The grave of the six men has been destroyed. Water covers the beach, the biggest waves breaking against the cliffs with a sound like smashed glass.

Ruth walks slowly up the slope. She is desperate to get back to Kate but she has to check that all the finds are accounted for. In the car park her Renault is beside the plain white police van. Ted and Craig are shutting the double doors. Clough is watching. A little way apart Trace is talking into her phone. Clough catches Ruth’s eye. ‘She loves that thing more than me.’

Ruth hasn’t usually got much time for Clough, whom she regards as the worst sort of sexist, racist Neanderthal policeman, but something in his expression touches her. She is also surprised to hear him use the word ‘love’, even facetiously. Can the famously commitment-phobic Clough really have fallen at last?

Ruth smiles. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t.’

Clough shrugs, looking rather rueful. ‘Bone boxes are in the van. Post-mortem’s set for tomorrow, nine o’clock.’

‘Does Nelson know?’

‘He said to say he’d see you there.’

‘Thanks.’ Ruth has a last few words with Ted before heading back to her car. Clough calls after her. ‘Look after that baby of yours. She’s a little star.’

Wonders will never cease, thinks Ruth as she drives off into the night. Kate has turned her into a nervous wreck and Clough into a human being. Whatever will she accomplish in the next four months of her life?

The first thing that Ruth hears as she approaches Shona’s house is the sound of crying. More than crying; this is screaming, wailing, the sound of a banshee in full-throated howl. The neat terraced house seems almost to be pulsating
with the noise. Ruth runs up the path but Shona has opened the door before she reaches it. A scarlet-faced monster squirms in her arms.

‘I’m sorry, Ruth. I’ve tried everything. Lullabies, classical music, ride-a-cock-horse. The lot. She’s been at it for nearly an hour. I think she must be ill or something.’

Ruth reaches out her arms for Kate who takes a deep breath, leans into her mother’s neck and instantly falls asleep. The silence feels immense, far more than mere absence of sound.

‘My God.’ Shona sounds both awed and rather resentful. ‘All she wanted was her mum.’

‘She’s probably just cried herself to sleep,’ says Ruth, speaking gruffly to hide how she feels. This has never happened before. Secretly she has never felt before that she is any better than anyone else with Kate. It is her mother, comfortably upholstered and full of maternal authority, or Sandra, who have seemed like the real experts. Ruth may feel that she knows Kate but she has never been sure that the compliment is returned. Until now.

Juggling Kate with what now seems to be practised ease, she follows Shona into the sitting room. The normally stylish room bears the signs of Shona’s struggle to placate the baby. A half-full bottle of milk rolls on the polished wood floor and CDs of suitably soothing classics lie scattered over the sofas. The TV is showing some primary coloured children’s programme and an open bottle of wine sits on the coffee table.

Shona follows Ruth’s glance. ‘Didn’t even have time to get myself a glass.’

Ruth doesn’t comment on the fact that Shona has been drinking while in charge of her baby. It’s her fault, her lack of contingency planning, that has led to Shona having to cope with a screaming baby all afternoon and she’s grateful – if slightly worried at the urgency with which Shona now grabs a glass and fills it to the brim.

‘Do you want some?’ asks Shona as an afterthought.

‘No thanks. I’ve got to drive.’

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ says Shona, not moving.

‘It’s okay,’ says Ruth. ‘I ought to be going.’ She starts to arrange Kate in her car seat, an unnecessarily complicated device bought for her by Cathbad.

‘How was the dig? Things looked pretty busy when I left you. What did you find?’

Ruth looks over her shoulder at Shona, who is sitting cross-legged in an armchair, her bright red hair falling over her eyes. In the past she has had reason to distrust Shona’s interest in her work but she feels that she, or Kate, owes her something, information at the very least.

‘Six skeletons,’ she says. ‘They look comparatively recent.’

‘Good God, Ruth,’ says Shona, sounding almost amused. ‘Are you going to be mixed up in another murder?’

‘I wasn’t exactly mixed up in the last one,’ says Ruth with asperity. ‘Unless you count a madman trying to kill me.’

‘I would definitely count that.’

‘Well, in this case, I’ve simply been called in to examine the bones. Look at how they’ve been buried and so on.’

‘Mmm.’ Shona looks unconvinced. ‘I saw the mad Irishman there,’ she says. ‘And that purple-haired bitch. Anyone else from the university?’

Ruth looks curiously at Shona as she struggles with the last strap. Shona also works at the university, teaching English, but for the last year she has been having an affair with Ruth’s boss, Phil. Just before Christmas, much to everyone’s surprise, Phil left his wife for Shona. Ruth isn’t sure if Shona herself wasn’t rather shocked by this development. Certainly she hasn’t rushed to move Phil into her house. He is renting a flat nearby ‘while the kids get used to the situation’. Presumably Shona knows a good deal about the workings of the archaeology department. Ruth wonders why she dislikes Trace so much.

‘Steve and Craig from the field team,’ she says. ‘I thought Phil might look in.’

‘Oh, he had a meeting with some sponsors,’ says Shona vaguely.

‘How are things?’ asks Ruth, not sure that she really wants to know. She gets on all right with Phil, he’s a decent enough boss, but that’s as far as it goes. He’s very much the new style of archaeologist, obsessed with technology and appearing on television. Ruth has always got the impression that Phil regards her as a throwback, an expert in her own field but a grafter, a plodder, not someone suited to the centre stage. Which suits her fine. Their working relationship works. She just doesn’t particularly want to get to know Phil in his new guise as her best friend’s partner.

‘Oh, all right,’ says Shona, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers. ‘His wife’s being a cow.’

‘Well, it must be difficult for her,’ offers Ruth. ‘They were married for … how long?’

‘Fifteen years. But it hadn’t been working for the last five.’

Not for the first time, Ruth wonders how Shona, who is, after all, an astute literary critic, can be so gullible when it comes to men. Who says the marriage hadn’t been working for the past five years? Phil, presumably. Ruth has met Phil’s wife, Sue, at various department functions over the years and the couple always seemed perfectly comfortable together. They have two children, boys, who must be teenagers by now.

‘Fourteen and twelve,’ says Shona, in answer to Ruth’s question. ‘I get on brilliantly with them.’

Ruth can believe that this is true. She imagines Shona, with her beauty and vivacity, utterly charming the two boys. Whether the infatuation, on either side, will last, is another matter.

Ruth picks up Kate’s bottle, blanket and the various stuffed toys that have become strewn around the room. Shona makes no move to help her, just stays curled up in her chair, sipping her wine. She obviously feels that her work is done and, really, Ruth agrees with her.

Ruth stuffs the last toy in the nappy bag and says, ‘Thank you, Shona. I’m sorry you had such an awful time of it.’

‘That’s okay,’ says Shona, not denying that it was awful. ‘Any time.’

‘I’m praying Sandra will be better tomorrow,’ says Ruth.

Driving home across the Saltmarsh, she thinks about her friendship with Shona. They met when Ruth first started working at the University of North Norfolk, but they only
really got to know each other on the henge dig. When Ruth looks back to that time – Erik’s ghost stories around the camp fire, the smell of peat smoke in the morning, the wind whistling through the rushes at night, the unforgettable first sight of the henge, black against the blue-grey sand – she thinks of Shona, her red hair flying out behind her as she ran over the sand dunes like a sea sprite shouting ‘It’s here! The henge is here!’ Shona had been Ruth’s first real friend in Norfolk and Ruth values her friends highly. Ever since adolescence, when her parents retreated into the church, putting their relationship with God, it seemed, above their relationship with her, Ruth has relied on her friends for support. She has never been one for the gang. She is bemused by her students, with their hundreds of friends on Facebook or Bebo. Are these real friends, people who would look after your cat or drive you home from hospital, or are they just an amorphous mass, happy enough to leave cute messages (lol!) on your wall but completely removed from your everyday life? How can you have three hundred close friends?

Ruth has always preferred just two or three. Alison and Fatima at school, Caz, Roly and Val at university, Josephine Dumbili from that holiday in Crete. And now Shona. As, over the years, Fatima, Caz and Val acquired husbands and children (Roly is gay and Alison determinedly single in New York) they seemed to move, inexorably, further away from Ruth and she relied more and more on Shona, who sometimes seemed her only ally in a world of motherhood, family holidays and smug Round Robins at Christmas (‘This year Ellie joined Sophie and Laura at the grammar school’). When
she found out that Shona had been lying to her for years, ever since the henge dig in fact, the betrayal hit Ruth hard. But her need for Shona was too strong and their friendship mended itself, not quite as strong as before but pretty resilient all the same. Ruth hopes it can withstand Kate, who seems a force more powerful than ten hurricanes, and that scary two-headed beast called Shona-and-Phil.

She is nearly home. The road is raised up over the flat marshland; at night it seems as if you are driving into nothingness, isolated, vulnerable, a prey to the winds that thunder in from the sea, ‘direct from Siberia,’ as the locals always say with pride. Ruth turns on the radio and Mark Lawson’s fruity voice fills the car, telling her about an experimental play that she has never heard of and will never see. Thank God for Radio 4. Ruth prays that Kate will stay asleep and maybe (wonderful thought) sleep all the way through the night. Surely she must be exhausted after all that screaming?

When she gets to her cottage, she carries Kate in, opening and shutting the door soundlessly. She knows from experience that, though Kate can sleep through any amount of radio programmes about experimental drama, the smallest unexpected sound will wake her up. She once cried for half an hour after Ruth sneezed. She lifts Kate out of the car seat and carries her carefully up the steep staircase. ‘You can’t have a baby in that house,’ her mother had said, ‘the stairs are a death trap.’ But Ruth successfully negotiates the hazard and lays Kate down, still fast asleep, in her cot. There is a spare room but it is tiny and full of junk so, at present, she and Kate are roommates, a situation which she can see lasting until Kate is about eighteen.

The phone rings as Ruth is switching on the baby monitor. She races downstairs to stop the dreadful clamour. Her ears strain to hear if Kate has woken up but there is silence from the bedroom.

‘Yes?’ whispers Ruth into receiver.

‘Ruth. It is I. Tatjana.’

Of all Ruth’s friends, the very last one she expected.