But now she is cooking spaghetti bolognese to placate Frank. He’s in the mood to be placated, that much is immediately clear. He says that the food is delicious and insists on clearing up afterwards. He chats to Kate about school and tells Ruth about an interesting manuscript that has just been discovered. It’s only when Kate has gone upstairs to have her bath that Ruth mentions Ivor March.
‘So he actually told you where the bodies were buried?’
‘He told me where to dig. We’re going to do an excavation tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘We have to move quickly.’
Frank doesn’t query the ‘we’. ‘Do you think Ivor March was telling the truth?’ he asks.
Ruth considers. ‘I don’t know. He kept smiling in this awful way. I wouldn’t put it past him to play a trick on us. But that would make him look stupid too. I think he enjoyed having this information to taunt the police with. It would lower his status if it turns out to be a hoax. I’m pretty sure we will find something there.’
‘In the back garden of a pub?’
‘March said he used to know the landlord. He said it as if this explained everything.’
‘Well, be careful, Ruth,’ says Frank. ‘I seem to keep saying that these days.’
‘I’m just supervising,’ says Ruth. ‘I won’t even get my hands dirty.’
‘I bet you will.’
He smiles at her and Ruth remembers why she’s here, in this Cambridge town house, trying to make this new life work. It’s because Frank is a nice person and an extremely attractive man. He reaches out to take her hand. ‘Ruth?’
‘Yes?’ Ruth smiles back at him. The moment hangs in the air, heavy with promise, but then Kate calls down that she can’t find her pyjamas. Ruth gets up to help her and Frank opens History Today.
*
Nelson is also thinking about food. Michelle has made a mixed grill and, for once, he’s having trouble finishing it. He keeps thinking about the roast meal in the pub with Ruth. It was delicious but it has left him less enthusiastic about his supper than usual. However, for many reasons, he is not going to mention the pub lunch to Michelle. She knows that he was seeing Ruth but he was careful to tell her the circumstances and to stress that the meeting was work-related. A pub lunch comes under a different category altogether. Not that there was anything in his behaviour towards Ruth that couldn’t have been witnessed by his wife. They had both been careful to discuss neutral matters only and had not kissed hallo or goodbye, or even touched. But, even so, there had been something about eating in the pub garden, about the long, scented summer afternoon as they dawdled over the coffee, almost the only customers in the place, that felt illicit somehow. Nelson told himself that they had needed a respite after the horrors of the prison but that did not stop the thought that kept recurring during the lunch: if he was married to Ruth they could spend every day like this. Well, not exactly, because they’d both have to work, but even that is an intoxicating thought. Working together, talking about their cases over supper, arguing over the exact age of long-buried bones. Stop it, he tells himself.
‘Are you feeling all right, Harry? You usually love kidneys.’
‘I’m fine, love. I had some chips on the way home.’
‘Oh, Harry. You promised you’d start eating more healthily. It’s important when you’re over fifty.’
‘I’m not over fifty,’ says Nelson. ‘I’m fifty.’
‘Fifty-one in November,’ says Michelle. But she seems to accept the chips excuse. She clears his plate away – ignoring Bruno’s hopeful glance – and tells Nelson that she doesn’t suppose he wants any pudding. Nelson feels like he has to agree.
‘Shall I make coffee?’ he says.
‘Not in the evening,’ says Michelle. ‘Or I won’t sleep.’ She’s fanatical about getting a proper night’s sleep. George is a good sleeper too, better than either of the girls. It’s only Nelson who finds himself awake in the early hours, grinding his teeth and worrying.
Before he can slot in the coffee capsule that, according to Laura, is helping to destroy the planet, his phone buzzes. Judy.
‘Sorry, love,’ he says to Michelle, ‘I have to get this.’ But she too is looking at something on her phone and doesn’t hear.
‘Sorry to disturb you, boss,’ says Judy, ‘but I thought you’d want to hear this. Phil Trent has been attacked.’
‘What?’
‘Cathbad was on his way to the soup run in Lynn. You know, that volunteer work he does with the homeless? He heard an altercation and went to help. He found Phil on the ground with a man leaning over him. It looked like he had a knife. Cathbad shouted and the attacker ran away.’
Cathbad to the rescue again, thinks Nelson.
‘Is Phil badly hurt?’ he asks.
‘He’s had a heart attack,’ says Judy.
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Doctors think it was the shock of the assault. Phil was knocked off his bike but he doesn’t have any serious injuries from that. Cathbad said that he was lying in a pool of red liquid but that turned out to be a broken bottle of wine. Cathbad called the ambulance and waited with Phil until it came. Luckily he knows first aid.’
Of course he does, thinks Nelson. Cathbad knows everything. He’s not at all surprised that Phil was on a bike and carrying a bottle of red wine. It fits all his prejudices about Ruth’s ex-head of department.
‘Is Phil going to be all right?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know. He’s in an induced coma at the moment. Shona’s with him.’
‘Poor bugger.’
‘Yes,’ says Judy. ‘The thing is, the attacker ran off with Phil’s backpack, which apparently had his laptop in it. And I was thinking, given the postcard that was sent to Ruth, could this be linked to the Ivor March case?’
‘It’s a coincidence,’ says Nelson, ‘and you know how I feel about coincidences.’
‘Yes,’ says Judy quickly, obviously not wanting him to tell her again. ‘And I feel the same. Someone close to March clearly has it in for Phil Trent.’
Chapter 11
The Jolly Boatman is on the very edge of the marshes. The pub, a squat, white-walled building with boarded-up windows, still has a few wooden tables in its overgrown garden. There’s also a piece of children’s play equipment that now looks somehow ominous, like a half-built gallows, ropes swinging and wood rotting. Beyond this is a low wall and, beyond that, miles of undulating grass, green and yellow, with the wide, blue sky above. Ruth parks her car in the car park, deserted now apart from several police vehicles and the van belonging to Ted from the field archaeology team. For a second Ruth just sits and looks. The flat landscape is almost featureless but, in the distance, she can see the sails of a windmill. She can’t see the sea but she knows it’s out there. Seagulls fly high above them, white against the blue.
Ted, a bald giant in a high-vis vest, appears in her wing mirror. Ruth winds down her window.
‘Hi, Ted.’
‘Hi, Ruth. Admiring the scenery?’
‘Yes,’ says Ruth. It’s very like the view from her beloved Saltmarsh cottage and she feels her heart twist with longing. Don’t look back, she tells herself, you’ve got a new life now. But the location in its lonely beauty, and the fact that she is about to dig for buried bones, reminds her of the first time that she and Nelson searched for human remains on the marshes.
‘Marshland is very important in prehistory,’ she had told him, as they followed the path across the uneven, treacherous ground, ‘because it’s a link between the land and the sea and between life and death.’
Nelson had been sceptical, she remembers, but that was before they had found a child’s body buried there, an offering to faceless and vengeful gods. Had Ivor March chosen this spot for the same reason? He had certainly painted this landscape many times. Yesterday, when Nelson had dropped her back
at home, she had googled ‘Ivor March Art’ and had spent almost an hour looking at watercolours and prints of grassland and waterways, boats on the shore, lighthouses and masts rising out of the mist.
Ruth gets out of the car. The pub is already cordoned off with police tape. Ruth expects to see Nelson but, when she nears the police cars, she finds Judy directing operations.
‘Where’s Nelson?’ asks Ruth.
Judy steers her away from the others. ‘He’ll be along later. Did you hear about Phil?’
‘No?’
‘He was attacked on his way home last night. He’s had a heart attack.’
‘Oh my God. Is he all right?’
‘He’s in an induced coma. I’m going to ring the hospital later.’
‘I must ring Shona,’ says Ruth. ‘Do you know what happened?’
‘Well, Cathbad actually found him. He heard a noise and went to help. He saw the attacker bending over Phil. It was a man, he thinks. He ran off with Phil’s backpack.’
‘Was he a mugger then?’
‘I don’t think it was a straightforward mugging,’ says Judy. ‘Cathbad thinks the man had a knife, for one thing.’
‘It’s amazing that Cathbad was there,’ says Ruth.
‘He’s here too,’ says a voice behind her.
Ruth turns and sees Cathbad, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and carrying a trowel. ‘I thought you might need some help with the digging,’ he says.
Ruth gives him a quick hug. Apart from being pleased to see Cathbad for his own sake, it will be useful to have another expert digger. Cathbad trained as an archaeologist before becoming a druid, shaman, house husband and all-round superhero.
‘I was just saying how amazing it was that you were there when Phil was attacked,’ she says.
‘It’s not amazing,’ says Cathbad. ‘It’s all part of the great web.’
‘The great web comes in handy sometimes.’
‘It certainly does. Everything happens for a reason.’
‘It’s a bit tough on Phil though. Being attacked because of some cosmic plan.’
‘Phil will survive,’ says Cathbad, ‘but this will have repercussions. We are all threads in the tapestry of life.’
Ruth can almost hear Nelson’s voice saying ‘bollocks’. Judy seems unmoved. She probably gets enough of this sort of thing at home.
‘Where did it happen?’ she asks.
‘Near Tuesday Market Place in Lynn,’ says Cathbad. ‘Did you know that a witch’s heart is buried in the wall there? She was burned at the stake and her heart flew out and into the side of a house.’
‘It sounds pretty unlikely to me,’ says Ruth. She thinks that Cathbad is looking at her a little too intently. He won’t have forgotten the panic attack in the swimming pool. But Ruth doesn’t want to talk about that now. Today she is Dr Ruth Galloway, calm, professional and detached.
‘Shall we get started?’ she says.
Ivor March said that the bodies were buried in the garden of the pub. It’s gone wild now, the grass waist high in places. Ted has brought a lawnmower and a scythe as well as a hand-held magnetometer. If March buried Nicola and Jenny soon after they disappeared, they will have been lying in the soil for almost a year, enough time for the grass and weeds to have grown over them, but the magnetometer will sense magnetic disturbances in the earth, such as a burial. But, looking at the green space in front of her, Ruth thinks she hardly needs geophysics.
‘Nettles,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ says Ted.
There is a dense patch of nettles in the very centre of the garden. Nettles thrive on nutrients from human waste and so their existence on a site usually means that people have lived there – or that there’s a dead body buried in the vicinity. Ted passes the magnetometer over the area. There’s an immediate reaction.
‘Right,’ says Ruth. ‘Let’s start here.’
Ted takes the scythe and, looking like the personification of Old Father Time or some more sinister folkloric figure, hacks back the vegetation. Then he, Cathbad and the police volunteers start to dig. Ruth stands back at this stage. She wants to get a sense of the land and to look at soil samples. Besides, digging gives her backache these days.
She knows. She knows as she watches the men dig, their shovels moving in unison, cutting through the chalky soil. She knows as she listens to a skylark singing high above and hears the distant roar of the tide. She knows what they will find.
They are hardly through the topsoil when Ted shouts, ‘Stop!’ He beckons Ruth over and she kneels to examine something embedded in the ground, as white as the chalk around it.
‘It’s a skull,’ says Ruth. She kneels down and, with her pointing trowel, pushes away the earth. Ted helps her and, in a few minutes, they see a shred of cloth and a bone, still with leathery skin attached. Judy squats down beside them. Ruth knows that Judy is tough but she still wants to warn her about what she might see.
‘It’s OK,’ says Judy, looking closer. ‘But this looks very decomposed. Nicola and Jenny have only been dead two years.’
‘Marshy soil can hasten putrefaction,’ says Ruth, deliberately maintaining a detached, scientific tone. ‘Sand or lime can retard the process.’
‘Can you tell if the body is male or female?’ says Judy.
‘Not yet,’ says Ruth, ‘but when we excavate properly we should be able to tell. Male and female skulls look different. Male skulls have a more developed nuchal crest and larger mastoid bones. The female frontal bone is straighter and steeper. The long bones are different too because women are usually shorter. The pelvic bones are most definitive though. The female pelvis is much shallower and broader.’
‘This skull is female,’ says Cathbad. ‘I can sense it.’
Ruth gives him a look, pushing sweaty strands of hair out of her eyes. She could do without Cathbad’s sixth sense today. But, actually, she thinks that he is right. The chin, which she has just cleared, is pointed and delicate. Male chins are usually squarer. She thinks of the pictures she has seen of Nicola and Jenny, both attractive women with heart-shaped faces.
‘Let’s keep digging,’ she says, ‘but carefully. I think the other body must be nearby.’
By midday they have exposed the second body. A black van with the words ‘Private ambulance’ on the side now waits discreetly in the car park. A small group of reporters have gathered by the police lines, some with cameras trained on the archaeologists. Ruth spots Maddie’s blonde head and wonders whether it was Cathbad who told her about the excavation.
‘Did you see who’s turned up?’ says Judy, sounding exasperated. ‘That’s all I need.’
‘Maddie?’
‘Not Maddie. She’s only doing her job, after all. No, Chantal Simmonds. The small, dark woman in the red dress.’
‘Ivor March’s girlfriend?’ Ruth looks over and sees a figure in an incongruously smart outfit, like someone lost on their way to a wedding. She’s standing a little apart from the press pack but there’s also something separate about her, perhaps in the way she is holding herself, head up, arms crossed. She looks as if she is waiting for something.
‘I suppose March told her we would be here,’ says Ruth.
‘I’m sure he did,’ says Judy. ‘Chantal will find some way of saying that the police have planted the bodies. She hates us.’ And Ruth, looking at the small, tense figure, thinks that she can feel the hatred radiating from it.
They stop briefly for sandwiches and much-needed cold drinks. Then they start work again. Ruth is just brushing soil from the second skull when she hears the roar of a car’s engine that can only mean Nelson’s arrival. She keeps working though. She doesn’t want Nelson to think that she was on tenterhooks waiting for him to turn up. In a few minutes she hears a familiar voice saying, ‘You’ve found them then?’
Ruth looks up, conscious of her shiny face and
untidy hair. She’s wearing gloves but her bare arms are scratched and dirty and covered in nettle stings. She tries – and fails – to imagine Michelle ever letting herself be seen in such a state.
‘We’ve found two bodies,’ she says cautiously, ‘and they look like they’re female. We’ll know more when we excavate them.’
‘Any idea how long they’ve been there?’
‘Again, I’d need to do some tests,’ says Ruth, ‘but it could be quite a recent burial. You can see the grave cuts in the soil.’
‘If these . . .’ Nelson gestures, obviously trying to think of a respectful word. ‘If these remains are Nicola and Jenny, would you expect them to look like this? I mean, they’ve been dead less than two years.’
‘It all depends on the soil,’ says Ruth. ‘This is marshland, so it’s fairly alkaline, which preserves bones, but the soft tissue would decay pretty rapidly.’
‘How long before you can excavate?’ asks Nelson, one foot pawing the ground in a typically impatient way.
‘We should get it done by the end of the day,’ says Ruth, ‘but it’ll take some time. We’ll need to clean the bones in the lab and then number and chart them.’
Cathbad is kneeling in a trench a few yards away. He has been working away assiduously, ignoring Nelson and Ruth. Now he says, ‘Ruth!’
‘Well, look who it is,’ says Nelson. ‘The hero of the hour.’
‘Hallo, Nelson,’ says Cathbad. ‘Any word on Phil?’
‘He’s stable, apparently.’
‘He’ll pull through,’ says Cathbad. ‘It’s not his time.’
‘And you’d know, I suppose?’ says Nelson.
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