The Night Hawks

by Griffiths, Elly

  ‘Did any of your teachers suspect that your father was ill-treating you?’ says Judy. ‘Did you ever try to tell anyone?’

  ‘No,’ says Chloe. ‘Dad presented this ultra respectable front to the outside world, renowned scientist, all that crap. And he was always polite to our teachers. Except that one time.’

  ‘The body buried in the garden,’ says Nelson. ‘Do you know if that has any basis in truth? Did your father ever say who was buried there?’

  ‘I assumed he made it up,’ says Chloe. ‘He had a dark imagination but even I never suspected Dad of murder.’

  ‘He murdered Mum, didn’t he?’ says Paul, his voice rising.

  ‘Yes,’ says Chloe, ‘he did.’

  ‘Have you any idea why he would have done such a thing?’ asks Judy.

  ‘No,’ says Chloe. ‘Dad was such a narcissist, he’s the last person I would have thought would commit suicide.’

  ‘When did you last see your parents?’ says Judy.

  ‘A few months ago,’ says Chloe. ‘I dropped in because I needed them to sign some papers.’

  ‘I saw them last week,’ says Paul. ‘I called in to see Mum on Monday night. I tried to come at times when Dad was out. I thought he’d be at bridge club, but he came home early. He was his usual charming self, talking about how I’d wasted my life in my dead-end job.’

  Paul Noakes is a teacher at a sixth form college, Nelson remembers. Most parents would consider this a success.

  ‘How did your mum seem?’ asks Judy.

  ‘The usual. Scared, placatory, not standing up to him,’ says Paul. ‘But not standing up for me either.’

  He sounds like a hurt child, thinks Nelson. There’s a silence and then Chloe says, ‘You know what really surprises me about the note? It’s the fact that he said sorry.’

  It’s past five by the time that Ruth arrives at Black Dog Farm. Nelson is standing waiting for her at a sign saying, ‘To the farm’. To Kate’s delight, he gets into the back seat for the drive along the rough track to the building itself.

  ‘You’re late,’ he says.

  ‘There was lots of traffic,’ says Ruth. And then curses herself for offering an excuse.

  ‘Have you ever sat in the back of a car before, Dad?’ says Kate.

  ‘Very rarely,’ says Nelson, wincing – unnecessarily, in Ruth’s opinion – as the car judders forwards.

  There are dense hedges on either side of the track so that, when the house appears, it does so with surprising suddenness. It’s a square, flint-lined building, surrounded by outhouses bordering a concrete yard. Nelson’s white Mercedes is parked there beside another car, a red Toyota Yaris. As soon as Ruth stops, Nelson gets out and strides over to this vehicle and speaks to the two people inside. After a few words from him, the driver performs a three-point turn and departs.

  ‘Reporters,’ says Nelson. ‘Vultures circling.’

  ‘I suppose people are always fascinated by this sort of story,’ says Ruth.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Nelson. ‘Spooky house. Dysfunctional family. It’s got it all. I’ve got Maddie Henderson – Cathbad’s daughter – nagging me for an exclusive. She’s not the worst but I can just imagine the sort of thing she’ll write.’

  Ruth looks up at the house. It has a dour, closed face, curtains drawn, door firmly shut, boarded up, police tape across it. A rook caws loudly from the roof.

  ‘Is this where . . .?’ Ruth looks at Kate, who is watching the rabbits in the next-door field.

  ‘Yes,’ says Nelson. ‘This is where the bodies where found. I want to show you the back garden, though.’

  Calling Kate, Ruth follows Nelson round the house to a fenced-off garden. It’s very overgrown but there are signs that someone must have tended it once: the remains of a rockery, the ropes of a swing hanging from a tree. They sit at a wooden bench and Ruth offers Kate a carton of juice that she has brought with her. Kate sips it unenthusiastically.

  ‘How was Sunday?’ says Nelson. ‘Did you see your dad?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ruth. ‘And, over lunch, he announced that he wants to marry his girlfriend.’

  ‘I’m going to be a bridesmaid,’ says Kate.

  ‘You’ll be a beautiful bridesmaid,’ says Nelson. Kate seems satisfied with this response and, a few minutes later, wanders off to explore the garden.

  ‘How do you feel about it?’ Nelson asks Ruth.

  ‘OK, I suppose. I mean I want Dad to be happy and Gloria seems really nice. Simon – my brother – is finding it a bit hard to deal with.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ says Nelson. ‘I can’t imagine what I would have felt if my mother had married again after my dad died.’

  ‘Did your mother ever think of marrying again?’

  ‘God, no!’ Nelson sounds so shocked that Ruth lets it drop. Honestly, what is it about men and their mothers? Time to change the subject.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Why did you want me to come here?’

  ‘You know that there was a shooting here last week. We think that one of the inhabitants of the house, Douglas Noakes, killed his wife and then killed himself.’

  ‘How awful.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Nelson. ‘These sorts of crime scenes are always very distressing. We’ve had the SOCO team in the house since Friday and today they’ve found what looked to be a suicide note from Dr Noakes. In it he mentions “the body buried in the garden”.’

  Ruth looks over towards Kate but, thankfully, she is at the very end of the garden. Even so, Ruth suddenly wants to shout out to her to be careful. Two more rooks are watching them from the branches of an elm.

  ‘“The body buried in the garden”? My God, do you think there’s someone buried here?’

  ‘I don’t know but I think we have to dig it up. That’s why I called you.’

  ‘We’ll need diggers,’ says Ruth. ‘And geophysics equipment. A resistivity metre, maybe a magnetometer.’

  ‘You can arrange that, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but it might take several days.’

  ‘I was thinking about something you once said,’ says Nelson, ‘about nettles.’

  ‘Nice to know that you listen,’ says Ruth.

  ‘I always listen,’ says Nelson. ‘You said once that, if there were nettles, it meant that there might be a body.’

  ‘It means there’s been human activity,’ says Ruth. ‘That could just mean that someone once had a pee in the garden.’

  ‘Or a body could be buried here.’

  ‘It could, I suppose.’

  ‘Well,’ Nelson stands up. ‘Let’s get a dig organised. Get Irish Ted on the job.’

  ‘He’ll be delighted.’

  ‘What about that man who was with you when we first found the body?’ says Nelson. ‘Will he be involved?’

  ‘David?’ says Ruth, feeling defensive, though she couldn’t have said why. ‘He’s a new lecturer. I hired him in the summer. He wouldn’t be involved with this.’

  ‘He struck me as the kind of bloke who wants to be involved with everything. He was there on Saturday, wasn’t he?’

  What is Nelson getting at? ‘He’ll do what I tell him,’ says Ruth.

  ‘Ha.’ Nelson gives a bark of laughter. ‘That’s my girl.’

  Ruth wants to tell him not to call her a girl, to tell him that she’s not his girl, not in any sense. Instead she says, ‘What do you know about the people who lived here?’

  ‘Douglas Noakes, Dr Douglas Noakes, was an eminent scientist, involved with some sort of research in Cambridge. And, by his children’s account, he was a nasty piece of work. His wife Linda was a retired primary school teacher. Sounds as if she was completely dominated by her husband.’

  ‘And he killed her and then killed himself?’

  ‘It looks that way, yes.’

  Ruth looks up at the house
. The back is as stark as the front. Four sash windows, all the same size and shape. Two sloping attic windows. Curtains drawn, eyes closed.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to live here,’ she says.

  ‘Why? You live in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘There’s a difference,’ says Ruth. ‘I live near the sea. You can see the edges. Here you feel completely hemmed in.’

  ‘I think the Noakes children, Paul and Chloe, felt the same,’ says Nelson. While they have been speaking, the light has just begun to fade. The rooks fly into the air, calling spectrally. Ruth thinks of Nelson’s comment. Vultures circling.

  ‘Come on, Katie,’ says Nelson. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Yes, come on, Kate,’ says Ruth. She will never stop trying to educate him about their daughter’s name.

  As Ruth bumps along the track that leads to the gate, Kate tells her about rehearsals for Scrooge.

  ‘And then I have to be really angry and throw a book at Bob Cratchit. Miss Walker says that I’m really good at being angry.’

  This too must be something she has inherited from Nelson.

  ‘And then I tell him that he can’t have Christmas Eve off and then . . . Mum!’

  But Ruth has seen it too. She slams on the brakes. Behind them, Nelson hoots impatiently.

  ‘What was that?’ says Kate, slightly breathless.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe a deer.’

  The animal had appeared from the hedgerow and had seemed to look at them before disappearing back into the darkness.

  ‘It looked like a dog,’ says Kate, ‘a dog with red eyes.’

  ‘It was too big for a dog,’ says Ruth. She starts the car again, ignoring Nelson’s pantomime of frustration in the car behind.

  Chapter 12

  Ruth can’t get the image of the strange animal out of her mind. Back home, after Kate has gone to bed, she does what she always does when faced with the mystical and fantastical. She rings Cathbad.

  ‘Hallo, Ruth.’

  ‘Hi. Is it too late to ring?’

  She has just realised that it’s past ten. Kate seems to go to sleep later and later these days. Even if Ruth starts the process in good time, her daughter now lies in bed reading or listening to music for hours. Is she in training for being a teenager? Ruth remembers reading in bed – Georgette Heyer and Jilly Cooper as well as school books – in her little room in Eltham. What will happen to that bedroom when Gloria and Arthur get married? Maybe Gloria will turn it into her sewing room.

  ‘It’s not too late,’ says Cathbad. ‘Judy and I were just sitting in the garden. It’s beautiful at night.’

  Just for a second, this image makes Ruth feel so jealous that she can hardly breathe. Cathbad and Judy, their children in bed, sitting in their night-scented garden, chatting and drinking tea. She stamps on this emotion as hard as she can. Living with a man is not all it’s cracked up to be. If she was sharing a house with Nelson, they would probably argue all the time. In the evenings they would certainly not be admiring the beauties of nature. Nelson would almost definitely be watching the football.

  ‘I was at Black Dog Farm today,’ says Ruth.

  ‘Judy’s been telling me about the place. It has a very bad energy.’

  ‘It’s certainly a bit creepy,’ says Ruth, thinking of the shuttered house, the rooks in the garden. ‘But I was thinking about the name. Do you think it’s linked to the Black Shuck?’ She has lived in Norfolk long enough to know about the spectral dog.

  ‘I think it must be,’ says Cathbad. ‘The legend is very strong around Sheringham way. Funnily enough, though, there have been quite a few sightings near Black Dog Farm. Recent sightings, I mean.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘A friend of mine does a lot of field walking around there. He’s a bit of an amateur archaeologist.’

  Cogs turn in Ruth’s mind. Surely this is a sign of the great web at its knottiest?

  ‘This friend,’ she says. ‘Is it Alan White?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Alan White who just turned up at the dig on Saturday?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s interested in archaeology. And he’s a nice man. You saw how good he was with Hecate.’

  ‘Her name’s Kate. I just think it’s a bit sinister the way this Alan keeps popping up everywhere.’

  ‘He’s a questing soul,’ says Cathbad. It sounds as if he’s said this before. There’s more to this than meets the eye but it’s not Ruth’s job to investigate links between the two deaths. It’s Nelson’s, and she’s fairly sure that he won’t have missed the connection.

  ‘The thing is,’ she says. ‘When I was driving away from the farm today, I saw something that looked like a big black dog.’

  Cathbad draws in his breath. ‘Ruth, you’ve seen the Black Shuck.’

  ‘That’s bad, right? Aren’t I about to drop dead?’ She can’t stop herself touching the wood of her desk as she says this. Nelson, a lapsed Catholic, would have crossed himself.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ says Cathbad. ‘As I said to Judy, the Black Shuck can just be a travelling companion. I’ve seen him twice. Once when I was walking near Beeston Bump. I saw the shadow of a large dog walking beside me. It was comforting.’

  ‘When was the other time?’

  ‘Just before Tim died.’

  ‘That’s less comforting.’ Tim, a police officer on Nelson’s team, died in tragic circumstances four years ago.

  ‘The Shuck can warn of a death,’ says Cathbad. ‘Not necessarily the death of the person who sees him.’

  ‘Well, he arrived at Black Dog Farm a bit late,’ says Ruth. ‘There have already been two deaths.’

  ‘Two deaths so far,’ says Cathbad.

  He sounds remarkably upbeat about it.

  The next morning, Ruth is reading about the Black Shuck in her office when David gives a perfunctory knock and barges in.

  ‘Any news on our skeleton?’ he says.

  ‘The lab only got the samples late on Saturday,’ says Ruth. ‘They won’t have any results for us yet.’

  ‘This could be big, Ruth,’ says David. ‘We could have a display at the museum with a reconstruction and everything. We could tell the story about how the deadly virus came to England.’

  ‘The deadly virus is just a theory,’ says Ruth. Your theory, she adds silently. ‘I don’t think our skeleton will help prove or disprove it.’

  ‘Scientists have found the hepatitis virus in fossilised bird bones,’ says David. ‘It’s not impossible.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ says Ruth, sounding Phil-ish again. ‘In the meantime, I’ve got another excavation to do for the police. At Black Dog Farm.’ She doesn’t know why she tells him this. Perhaps to show that she’s got better things to do than speculate on prehistoric viruses. Perhaps she is just showing off – a rather lowering thought.

  ‘Black Dog Farm?’ echoes David. His face changes but Ruth is not quite sure how.

  ‘Yes. The police are conducting an excavation there.’

  ‘Two people were found dead there last week,’ says David. ‘Alan told me. He says it was a murder-suicide.’

  ‘Alan seems to know more than the police,’ says Ruth. ‘I don’t think they’re sure what happened.’

  ‘If they’re not sure, they’ll make it up,’ says David, with a return to his arrogant manner. ‘But Black Dog Farm is a bad place.’

  Ruth sees the square house in the middle of the fields, watching her out of the drooping eyelids of its curtained windows. She sees the overgrown garden, the nettles, the hanging swing. Then she sees the dog running across their path, the flash of its red eyes. The Shuck can warn of a death, not necessarily the death of the person who sees him.

  ‘What do you mean, a bad place?’

  ‘Bad things have happened there,’ says David. ‘Places don’t
forget.’

  Now he sounds like Ruth’s old lecturer, Erik, who believed that landscape held memories and could, in itself, be cursed or sacred.

  ‘Are you talking about the Black Shuck?’ she says, trying for a lighter tone.

  ‘The Black Shuck,’ David laughs, a harsh, humourless noise. ‘The devil dog. That’s just a story. The Matron at West Runton used to be full of Norfolk ghost stories. The Black Shuck, the ghostly coach and horses at Hedenham, the bride of White Woman Lane, the green children of Woolpit. I liked the Sheringham mermaid best – I liked the way she came up from the sea to listen to the service in the church. Though if the vicar was anything like Reverend Peters in my day, she would have been better off staying in the water.’

  David seems to have drifted off down a memory lane full of ghosts. Ruth doesn’t like to ask any more about West Runton. She doesn’t know who sounds more sinister, Matron or Reverend Peters. Instead she says, ‘Norfolk is full of stories. I think it’s because people seem to live here for a long time. Generations staying in the same area. These legends get passed down.’

  ‘Norfolk’s been occupied for a long time,’ says David. ‘That’s why this Bronze Age reconstruction could be so exciting. We could even get some DNA from the skeleton. Imagine if there was a match with some local people.’

  ‘I am imagining it,’ says Ruth. She took part in a similar study once, with dramatic results.

  ‘Just be careful at Black Dog Farm,’ says David. ‘I’d hate anything to happen to you.’

  Is this solicitude or a threat? thinks Ruth. With David Brown it’s hard to tell.

  Chapter 13

  Two interesting pieces of information greet Nelson when he arrives at his desk. One, the body on the beach has been identified as being that of twenty-five-year-old Jem Taylor. Far from being an illegal immigrant, Taylor was born in Cromer and was recently released from prison in ­Norwich. The second email is a preliminary forensics report from Black Dog Farm. It confirms that Douglas Noakes’s prints were on the gun. This, together with the note, makes the murder-suicide theory more likely. Nelson thinks of the house, its sullen, shuttered air, the birds calling from the elm tree, and he looks at the report again. Dad used to say that there was a dead body in the garden. He said that, if we didn’t behave, it would rise up out of the ground and kill us.