The Stone Circle: The Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries 11

by Elly Griffiths

  The Stone Circle

  Also By

  Also by Elly Griffiths

  the dr ruth galloway series The Crossing Places

  The Janus Stone

  The House at Sea’s End A Room Full of Bones

  Dying Fall

  The Outcast Dead

  The Ghost Fields

  The Woman in Blue

  The Chalk Pit

  The Dark Angel

  the stephens and mephisto series The Zig Zag Girl

  Smoke and Mirrors

  The Blood Card

  The Vanishing Box

  other works

  The Stranger Diaries

  As Domenica de Rosa

  One Summer in Tuscany

  (previously published as Summer School) The Eternal City

  Return to the Italian Quarter (previously published as The Italian Quarter) The Secret of Villa Serena (previously published as Villa Serena)

  Title

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2019 by Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2019 Elly Griffiths

  The moral right of Elly Griffiths to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78648 732 2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Ebook by CC Book Production

  Cover design © 2019 GHOST

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Dedication

  For Jane Wood

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgements

  Who’s Who

  Dr Ruth Galloway

  Harry Nelson

  Michelle Nelson

  Michael Malone (aka Cathbad)

  Shona Maclean

  David Clough

  Judy Johnson

  Phil Trent

  Chapter 1

  12 February 2016

  DCI Nelson, Well, here we are again. Truly our end is our beginning. That corpse you buried in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? You must have wondered whether I, too, was buried deep in the earth. Oh ye of little faith. You must have known that I would rise again.

  You have grown older, Harry. There is grey in your hair and you have known sadness. Joy too but that also can bring anguish. The dark nights of the soul. You could not save Scarlet but you could save the innocent who lies within the stone circle. Believe me, Harry, I want to help.

  The year is turning. The shoots rise from the grass. Imbolc is here and we dance under the stars.

  Go to the stone circle.

  In peace.

  DCI Harry Nelson pushes the letter away from him and lets out something that sounds like a groan. The other people in the briefing room – Superintendent Jo Archer, DS Dave Clough, DS Judy Johnson and DS Tanya Fuller – look at him with expressions ranging from concern to ill-concealed excitement.

  ‘He’s back,’ says Clough.

  ‘Bollocks,’ says Nelson. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ says Jo Archer, Super Jo to her admirers. ‘Would someone mind putting me in the picture?’ Jo Archer has only been at King’s Lynn for a year, taking over from smooth, perma-tanned Gerald Whitcliffe. At first she seemed the embodiment of all Nelson’s worst nightmares – holding meetings where everyone is supposed to talk about their feelings, instigating something unspeakable called a ‘group huddle’ – but recently he has come to view her with a grudging respect. But he doesn’t relish the prospect of explaining the significance of the letter to his boss. She’ll be far too interested, for one thing.

  But no one else seems prepared to speak so Nelson says, in his flattest and most unemotional voice, ‘It must have been twenty years ago now. A child went missing. Lucy Downey. And I started to get letters like this. Full of stuff about Gods and the seasons and mystical crap. Then, ten years on, we found a child’s bones on the Saltmarsh. I wasn’t sure how old they were so I asked Ruth – Dr Ruth Galloway – to examine them. Those bones were nothing to do with the case, they were Iron Age or something, but I got Ruth to look at the letters. She thought they might be from someone with archaeological knowledge. Anyway, as you know, we found Lucy but another child died. The killer was drowned on the marshes. The letter writer was a Norwegian professor called Erik Anderssen. He died that night too. And this,’ he points at the letter on the table, ‘reads like one of his.’

  ‘It sounds like someone who knows you,’ says Judy.

  ‘Because it goes on about me being grey and sad?’ says Nelson. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  No one says anything. The joys and sorrows of the last few years are imprinted on all of them, even Jo.

  After a few seconds, Jo says, ‘What’s this about a stone circle?’

  ‘God knows,’ says Nelson. ‘I’ve never heard of anything like that. There was that henge thing they found years ago but that was made of wood.’

  ‘Wasn’t the henge thing where you found the murdered child last time?’ says Jo, revealing slightly more knowledge than she has hitherto admitted to.

  ‘Yes,’ says Nelson. ‘It was on the beach near the Saltmarsh. Nothing’s left of it now. All the timbers and suchlike are in the museum.’

  ‘Cathbad says they should have been left where they were,’ says Judy.

  Judy’s partner, Cathbad, is a druid who first came to the attention of the police when he protested about the removal of the henge timbers. Everyone in the room knows Cathbad so no one thinks this is worth commenting on, although Clough mutters ‘of course he does’.

  ‘This is probably nothing,’ says Jo, gesturing at the letter which still lies, becalmed, in the centre of the table. ‘But we should check up the stone circle thing. Nelson, can you ask Ruth if she knows anything about it?’

  Once again everyone avoids Nelson’s eye as he takes the letter and puts in his pocket.

  ‘I’ll give her a ring later,’ he s
ays.

  *

  ‘How did you know about the stone circle?’ says Ruth.

  Nelson is taken aback. He has retreated into his office and shut the door for this phone call and now he stands up and starts to pace the room.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A team from UCL were digging at the original henge site just before Christmas. They think they’ve found a second circle.’

  ‘Is this one made of stone?’

  ‘No,’ says Ruth and he hears her switching into a cautious, academic tone. ‘This is wood too. Bog oak like the other one. But they’re calling it the stone circle because a stone cist was found in the centre.’

  ‘What’s a cist when it’s at home?’

  ‘A grave, a coffin.’

  Nelson stops pacing. ‘A coffin? What was inside?’

  ‘Human skeletal matter,’ says Ruth. ‘Bones. We’re waiting for carbon-14 results.’

  Nelson knows that carbon-14 results, which tests the level of carbon left in human remains, are useful for dating but are only accurate within a range of about a hundred years. He doesn’t want to give Ruth the chance to explain this again.

  ‘Why this sudden interest in the Bronze Age?’ says Ruth.

  ‘I’ve had a letter,’ says Nelson.

  There’s a silence. Then Ruth says, her voice changing again, ‘What sort of letter?’

  ‘A bit like the ones I had before. About Lucy and Scarlet. It had some of the same stuff in it.’

  ‘What do you mean “the same stuff”?’

  ‘About corpses sprouting, shoots rising from the earth. Imbolc. The sort of stuff that was in Erik’s letters.’

  ‘But . . .’ Nelson can hear the same reactions he witnessed in his colleagues earlier: disbelief, anger, fear. ‘Erik’s dead.’

  ‘He certainly looked dead to me when we hauled him out of the water.’

  ‘I went to his funeral. They burned his body on a Viking boat.’

  ‘So it can’t be him,’ says Nelson. ‘It’s some nutter. What worries me is that it’s a nutter who knows a bit about me. The letter mentions a stone circle. That’s why I rang.’

  ‘It can’t be this circle. I mean, no one knows about it.’

  ‘Except your archaeologist pals.’

  ‘Actually, they’ve got funding for a new dig,’ says Ruth. ‘It’s starting on Monday. I was planning to drop in for a few hours in the morning.’

  It’s Friday now. Nelson should be getting ready to go home for the weekend. He says, ‘I might drop by myself if I’m not too busy. And I’d like to show you the letter because, well, you saw the others.’

  There’s another tiny sliver of silence and Ruth says, ‘Isn’t the baby due any day now?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Nelson. ‘That might change my plans.’

  ‘Give Michelle my best,’ says Ruth.

  ‘I will,’ says Nelson. He wants to say more but Ruth has gone.

  Chapter 2

  Ruth reruns this conversation on a loop as she drives to collect her daughter from Sandra, her childminder. She has deliberately been keeping her interactions with Nelson to the minimum. She sees him every other Saturday when he takes Kate out for the morning but she manages to keep their conversation general and upbeat; they sound like two breakfast TV presenters handing over to the weather forecast. ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine. Getting sick of this weather.’ ‘Yes, when’s the sun going to come out?’ But this latest development takes her back to a time that still feels dangerous and disturbing: her first meeting with Nelson, the discovery of the bones on the marsh, the hunt for the missing children, her last encounter with Erik. Over the last ten years she has, by and large, dealt with these memories by ignoring them but the discovery of the new henge in December, and now Nelson’s mention of the letter, has brought everything back. She can still feel the wind on her face as she ran across the uncertain ground, half-land half-sea, knowing that a murderer was on her trail. She can hear Lucy’s voice calling from deep underground. She can see the police helicopter, like a great misshapen bird, stirring the waters of the tidal pool that had taken a man’s life.

  Corpses sprouting, shoots rising from the earth. That’s what Nelson had said, the words sounding strange in his careful policeman’s voice, the vowels still recognisably Lancastrian even after more than twenty years down south. It had to be a coincidence and yet Ruth does not trust coincidences. One of the few opinions that she shares with Nelson.

  Kate, her seven-year-old daughter, is drawing at Sandra’s kitchen table and acknowledges Ruth with a friendly, yet dismissive, wave.

  ‘I’m doing a Valentine’s card,’ she says.

  Ruth’s heart sinks. She has managed to forget that it is Valentine’s Day on Sunday (VD she calls it in her head). In her opinion, the whole thing is an abomination: the explosion of bleeding hearts in the shops, the sentimental songs on the radio, the suggestion that, if you are not in possession of a single red rose by midnight, you will die alone and be eaten by your pet cat. Ruth has had her share of Valentines in the past but this doesn’t lessen her distaste for the whole business. She’s never had a card from Nelson; their relationship is too complicated and clandestine. Roses are red, violets are blue. You’ve had my baby but I can’t be with you. She tries not to think about Nelson presenting his heavily pregnant wife with a vast bouquet (he will go for something obvious from a florist, red roses tied in ribbon and encased in cellophane). She wonders who is the intended recipient of Kate’s artwork.

  Ruth doesn’t ask though and Kate doesn’t tell her. She puts the card, which seems to show a large cat on a wall, in her school bag and goes to put her coat on. Ruth thanks Sandra and has the obligatory chat about ‘thank goodness it’s Friday, let’s hope the rain holds off’. Then she is driving off with her daughter, away from the suburbs towards the coast.

  It’s dark by the time that they get home. When they get out of the car they can hear the sea breaking against the sandbar and the air smells brackish which means that the tide is coming in. Ruth’s cottage is one of three at the very edge of the marshes. Her only neighbours are an itinerant Indigenous Australian poet and a London family who only visit for the occasional weekend. The road is often flooded in winter and, when it snows, you can be cut off for days. The Saltmarsh is a bird sanctuary and, in the autumn, you can see great flocks of geese coming in to hibernate, their wings pink in the sunlight as they wheel and turn. Now, in February, it’s a grey place even in daylight, grey-green marshes merging with grey sky and greyer sea. But there are signs that spring is coming, snowdrops growing along the footpaths and the occasional glimpse of bright yellow marsh marigolds. Ruth has lived here for twenty years and still loves it, despite the house’s increasing inconvenience for a single parent with a child whose social life now requires a separate diary.

  It was on the beach at the edge of the marshes that the henge was first discovered. Ruth remembers Erik’s cry of joy as he knelt on the sand before the first sunken post, the sign that they had found the sacred circle itself. She remembers the frenzied days of excavation, working desperately to remove the timbers before the sea reclaimed them. She remembers the druids protesting, the bonfires, the burning brands. It was during one of the protests that she first met Cathbad, now one of her dearest friends. And now they have found a second circle. Ruth worked on the dig in December and performed the first examination on the bones found in the stone cist. Now, during this second excavation, a lithics expert will look more closely at the stones and archaeologists will try to date the wooden posts. Ruth is looking forward to visiting the site again. It will never be the same as that first discovery though, that day, almost twenty years ago now, when the henge seemed to rise from the sea.

  ‘Hurry up, Mum,’ says Kate, becoming bored by her mother staring out to sea. ‘Flint will be waiting for us.’

  And, when Ruth opens the door, her large ginger cat is indeed waiting for them, managing to convey the impression that he has been doing this all day.

&n
bsp; ‘He’s hungry,’ says Kate, picking the cat up. There was a time when he seemed almost bigger than her; even now on his hind legs he reaches up to her waist.

  ‘There’s food in his bowl,’ says Ruth. But, nevertheless, she removes the perfectly edible cat food and replaces it with a fresh offering. Flint sniffs at it once and then walks away. He isn’t really hungry – he has just consumed a tasty vole – but he does like to keep his human minders on their toes.

  Kate switches on the television, a habit that never ceases to annoy Ruth but she doesn’t say anything. She starts to cook macaroni cheese for supper, one of her stock of boring but acceptable dishes. She tries to read the Guardian at the same time, propped up behind the pots which should contain tea and coffee but are actually full of mysterious objects like old raffle tickets and tiny toolkits from Christmas crackers.

  She has left her phone in her bag by the front door but Kate calls to tell her it is ringing. She manages to catch the call in time. Frank.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘OK. Phil is more megalomaniacal than ever. I’m expecting him to make his horse a senator at any minute.’ Phil is Ruth’s boss at the University of North Norfolk. He adores publicity and is very jealous of the fact that Ruth occasionally appears on television.

  ‘Same here.’ Frank is teaching at Cambridge. ‘Geoff now continually refers to himself in the third person. “Geoff is disappointed with student outcomes”, “Geoff has some important news about funding”.’

  Ruth laughs and takes the phone into the kitchen.

  ‘Frank was wondering if you wanted to go out for dinner tomorrow.’

  ‘Ruth doesn’t know if she can get a babysitter. Shall we stop this now?’