‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Visiting a friend in the history department apparently.’
They have to stop talking because Leif and his tray have arrived. Michael sits reading on his Kindle. Judy feels conflicted (reading: good; technology: bad) but doesn’t say anything. Besides, Miranda is making up for it by watching delightedly as Leif turns his paper napkin into a swan.
‘Again!’ she says.
‘Do you want one, Michael?’ asks Leif.
‘No thank you,’ says Michael politely.
‘How long are you in England for?’ Judy asks Leif as she sips her cappuccino. Ruth told her recently that, in Italy, it’s considered shocking, almost rude, to drink cappuccino after midday. Judy is rather pleased to think that she’s being a rebel for once.
‘For as long as the dig lasts,’ says Leif. ‘Probably about two weeks.’
‘What about the modern bones that you’ve discovered? Won’t that delay things?’
‘Ruth thinks that the excavation will only take a day. She seemed pretty confident.’
‘She’s very good at her job,’ says Judy. ‘She’ll be very thorough.’
‘She seems an altogether admirable person,’ says Leif. Something in the way he says this makes Judy look at him sharply but Leif is smiling pleasantly while his hands are busy with another piece of origami. This time it’s a frog for Michael. Despite his earlier refusal, Judy can tell that Michael is pleased with the gift.
‘It’s sacred land,’ says Cathbad. ‘That’s what your dad would say. That’s why you’ve found a second circle.’
‘The second circle might have been a burial mound,’ says Leif, ‘with the cist at the centre. Or a sky burial.’
‘What’s a sky burial?’ asks Judy.
‘Bodies left in the open to be consumed by animals and carrion birds,’ says Leif, taking a bite of chocolate brownie. ‘They could be offerings to the sky gods or simply part of the natural cycle. Animals and plants feed on the remains, death and rebirth. We’ll know more when we have the results back on the bones.’
‘What about the modern bones?’ says Judy.
‘A policewoman’s question,’ says Leif, smiling.
‘I prefer police officer,’ says Judy. ‘When do you think the modern bones were buried there?’
‘Ruth thought they might have been interred fairly recently,’ says Leif. ‘She mentioned the grave cut. I suppose you are looking into your . . . what do you call them? Cold cases?’
‘Yes, we are,’ says Judy.
‘I’d love to see the site,’ says Cathbad. ‘I have very happy memories of the first excavation. Despite what happened later.’
Leif seems quite moved. He puts his hand on Cathbad’s. ‘Come to the site,’ he says. ‘Come early one morning and we will salute the dawn together.’
‘I’ll have to do the school run first,’ says Cathbad.
*
Nelson stares at the beauty spot on his wife’s cheek. They are in the zone now. Michelle seems oblivious of him; she concentrates on breathing, occasionally waving her hands as if trying to conjure something out of mid-air. Just once, she stares at him, really stares, as if she’s seeing him for the first time.
‘If anything happens to me,’ she says, ‘look after the baby.’
‘I will.’
‘Promise!’
‘I promise.’
But then, suddenly, she’s pushing and it’s all screaming, grunting and panting and horrible silences and then, just like in the films, a slithery rush and the first angry cries.
‘A beautiful boy,’ says the midwife.
She puts the baby on Michelle’s chest, still with the umbilical cord attached. The room smells of blood.
‘Does Dad want to cut the cord?’
But Nelson can’t tear his eyes away from the baby. This miracle child. His son.
‘Hallo, George,’ he says.
Chapter 8
Ruth doesn’t hear until halfway through the next morning when Clough turns up at the excavation. She has exposed the margins of the visible bones and has taken pictures next to a scaling rod for measurements. Now she is in the process of lifting out a femur. She’s not sure if there’s a complete skeleton; the bones aren’t articulated, and don’t seem to have been buried with any particular care. By contrast, the remains in the cist had clearly been arranged with reverence, almost in foetal position, with the grave goods, the urn and seeds, at their side. Ruth is more certain than ever that the modern bones were buried in a rush and fairly recently.
Ted, from the field archaeology team, stands by to number and label each bone. It’s a sunny day, though bitterly cold, and Ruth plans to let the bones dry out in the sun for a while, which should harden them. She is concentrating on the job so doesn’t see Clough until he appears at the edge of the trench. She sees his feet first, tough-looking boots that also manage to look as if they’re at the cutting edge of fashion. That’s how she knows it’s not Nelson.
‘Have you heard the news?’
‘What news?’ says Ruth, pushing the hair out of her eyes. She is simultaneously hot and cold and her back aches. She is desperate for coffee but Leif tells her that the site is a caffeine-free zone: ‘No poisons, only good energy here.’
‘Michelle’s had the baby.’
‘That’s great.’ Ruth wonders how she can voice the question that crowds all others out of her mind. Is there some subtle way she can ask, without offending or shocking Clough?
‘Oh, and it’s not black,’ says Clough, climbing into the trench. ‘So we know it’s the boss’s. I brought you some coffee.’
So even Clough knows! Does everyone at the station know? Were they having bets on whether Michelle’s baby was Nelson’s or Tim’s? Clough’s face gives nothing away. He hands over a Starbucks cup, which probably completely violates the karma of the dig, and looks around the trench with apparent interest. Ruth drinks the coffee gratefully. The baby is Nelson’s. This means it will cement Nelson and Michelle’s marriage for ever. She can’t see Nelson walking out on a baby and, anyhow, does she still want him to walk in her direction? She doesn’t know. At that precise moment she is conscious only of the caffeine making its way into her system and of the relief of standing upright, easing her back. The other emotions will come later.
‘Born last night,’ Clough is saying. ‘Seven pounds, six ounces. Not as big as Spencer was.’ Since becoming a father, Clough has directed some of his relentless competitiveness into boasting about his offspring. He hands Ruth his phone to show the photograph sent by Nelson last night. Ruth looks at the baby wrapped in a blue shawl, eyes closed, fists clenched. Nelson’s son. Kate’s brother.
‘Mother and baby both doing well,’ says Clough. ‘They should be home later today.’
‘That’s great,’ says Ruth again. ‘I’ll send some flowers.’ She takes another swig of coffee.
‘How are your bones?’ says Clough, peering at the half-exposed femur, which Ted is clearing with a pointing trowel.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ says Ted. ‘I know what the police are like. And why didn’t I get coffee?’
‘I’ve never seen you drink anything that isn’t beer,’ says Clough. ‘How old do you think the bones are?’
‘We won’t know until we have the carbon-14 results,’ says Ruth, rather wearily, ‘and even then we won’t have an exact date. The burial looks fairly new but the bones are older. We’ll do isotope tests on the teeth. That will tell us where this person grew up.’
‘The boss said you thought it was a child.’
‘Yes, from the look of the bones I’d say it’s an early adolescent. The bones still have epiphyses on them and we’ve got teeth, which is a great help with ageing. The eruption of permanent teeth happens within fairly set timescales. I’ll know more when we excavate the skull.’
‘Girl or boy?’
‘We can’t be sure unless we get some DNA. Girls have shallower pelvises and less pronounced brow-ridges but this is
n’t always easy to discern in adolescents. These changes occur gradually during the pubescent years.’
‘You know we’ve got a possible name? Margaret Lacey, a twelve-year-old who went missing in 1981. That’s strictly confidential, by the way.’
Ruth is pretty sure that Clough shouldn’t have told them at all but he’s always been a terrible gossip. Having a name makes all the difference though. She looks at the skull, which is still embedded in the earth and thinks: Margaret.
‘I remember Margaret Lacey,’ says Ted. ‘Disappeared during a street party, didn’t she?’
‘Were you living in Lynn then?’ asks Clough. ‘You’d be about the right age.’
‘No, I was still in Bolton in 1981,’ says Ted. ‘That was before I had to leave.’
Ted always makes it sound as though he was chased out of his home town by a pitchfork-waving mob but, as far as Ruth can make out, he simply left to attend Liverpool University.
‘Are Margaret’s family still living in the area?’ asks Ruth.
‘The mother and sister are,’ says Clough. ‘Father’s dead, brother’s in London. From what you’ve said, I think we’d better warn Margaret’s mum that this might be her.’
‘Who’s in charge now the boss is on paternity leave?’ asks Ted, with a wink at Ruth.
Clough puffs out his chest. ‘Who do you think?’
‘Judy,’ says Ruth.
*
Michelle and George are home by lunchtime. Nelson drives them back as if he’s advertising a safer roads initiative. Rebecca has come up from Brighton and she and Laura have attached blue balloons to the front door. Both sets of neighbours come out to welcome them.
‘I feel like royalty,’ says Michelle, getting carefully out of the car. She’s still wearing maternity clothes but she has dry shampooed her hair and it glows in the sunshine. Both girls come out to hug her but they turn immediately to the occupant of the baby seat that is being proudly displayed by Nelson.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ says Rebecca. ‘He looks just like me.’ And it’s true that George, like Rebecca (and Kate) has inherited Nelson’s dark hair.
‘He’s a bonny baby,’ says Brenda next door, who likes to emphasise her Scottish ancestry.
‘Can I hold him?’ says Laura, who is trying to stop Bruno jumping up at his master.
‘When we get inside,’ says Nelson. ‘It’s a bit cold out here.’
After a few more pleasantries, the family go indoors; Nelson holding the baby seat with Bruno at his heels, Rebecca and Laura either side of their mother. Brenda turns to Alan, the other next-door neighbour. The cul-de-sac is not normally a very chatty place but the events of the last few months have brought them all a bit closer together.
‘It’s nice to see some happiness after everything that happened in the summer,’ says Brenda.
‘Yes,’ says Alan. ‘Michelle looked radiant, didn’t she?’ He has always had a soft spot for Mrs Nelson.
‘I still think about that day,’ says Brenda. ‘That poor young man being shot like that. Tim Heathfield, his name was. Derek and I went to his funeral. The church was packed out.’
‘Well that’s all in the past now,’ says Alan, trying to edge back inside.
‘Poor Tim,’ says Brenda, looking at the Nelsons’ house, the balloons dancing in the breeze. ‘I’ll never forget him.’
*
It’s late afternoon by the time that Ruth has finished her excavation. The scene-of-crime officers have left. Ted has numbered each bone and Ruth has filled in her bone chart. It seems as if they have a complete skeleton and, from the look of the skull and the pelvic bones, Ruth thinks it is that of a young female. The bones lie in paper bags, ready to go into the pathology crates. They are well-preserved, a factor that makes Ruth think that they were originally buried elsewhere, in a more anaerobic environment, with little oxygen to cause decay. There’s nothing obvious to point to the cause of death. A healed fracture is evident on one humerus but this injury probably occurred in early childhood. The other bones show no abnormal signs of stress. The most precious clue is the presence of some blue household rope, strands that may have once bound Margaret’s arms and legs. Traces of material were also found near the jawbone, possible evidence of a gag or even a means of asphyxiation. These fragments have been carefully bagged and documented. If DNA is found on them then the police might have a suspect at last. Ruth is just about to ring Clough when Ted says, ‘What’s this?’
Ted is taking soil samples and is kneeling looking into the crater left by the skull. Ruth comes to join him and, as she does so, she is aware that Leif is now standing behind them. Ted points at something white, half-embedded in the soil. At first Ruth thinks it’s another bone but then she sees the pitted surface and realises that she is looking at a round piece of chalk. Ted picks it up carefully with gloved hands. The stone is the size of a small apple and there are two holes going through it. The positioning of the holes makes them look disconcertingly like eyes.
‘A witch stone,’ says Leif. ‘Was it buried with the body?’
‘I think so,’ says Ruth, looking closer. ‘This is a sandy beach, there’s not much chalk around.’
‘It looks like a skull,’ says Ted. ‘Maybe that’s why it was buried there.’
‘Maybe,’ says Ruth. ‘Let’s bag it up and send it for tests. There could be DNA on it. Or fingerprints.’
‘You think like a policeman, Ruth,’ says Leif. ‘It’s clear that this is an offering of some kind.’
‘Nothing’s clear at the moment,’ says Ruth, rather annoyed at this comment. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to box up the bones.’
*
It rains later that evening. Michelle feeds George and goes to bed early. Nelson stays downstairs watching a Swedish crime drama with his daughters. He keeps falling asleep but he knows that the presence of the baby’s cot in his room will mean that he wakes every hour in the night to check that George is still breathing. The trouble is, every time Nelson’s eyes close he thinks of Ruth. Will she have heard about George by now? He sent texts and pictures to Judy and Clough. A massive bunch of flowers has already been delivered, ‘From everyone at King’s Lynn CID’. What did Judy say about news leaking from the police station? Presumably the whole town will know by now. He needs to tell Ruth. For one thing he wants Katie to meet her half-brother, though that will be tricky with Laura and Rebecca here. His head nods.
‘Why don’t you go to bed, Dad?’ says Laura. ‘We’ll take Bruno out.’
His girls have been wonderful all evening, so excited about the baby, so kind to their parents. There’s not a trace or resentment or jealousy in either of them. Maybe they would welcome Katie in the same wholehearted way.
‘No, you’re all right,’ he says. ‘I want to see if that Sven bloke killed the man dressed up as a moose.’
*
Ruth sits at her computer as the rain lashes against the windows. Kate is in bed, still oblivious to the fact that she is no longer an only child. Ruth has been expecting Nelson to ring all day but now it’s nearly midnight and she knows that she won’t hear from him. She should go to sleep – she has a nine o’clock lecture tomorrow – but she googled Margaret Lacey a few hours ago and now can’t stop reading about the case.
‘Family’s anguish as Street Party Girl still missing.’
Margaret became ‘Street Party Girl’ very quickly in the days after her disappearance. Ruth was thirteen in 1981, almost the same age as Margaret is, was, would have been. As Douglas Adams said, the problem of the past is largely one of grammar. A confirmed republican, Ruth is rather embarrassed to remember that she too had attended a street party, just off Eltham High Street. She remembers the bunting and a ribald song about ‘Lady Di’ but little else. Now Lady, later Princess, Diana is dead too and the whole thing seems like it happened in a different life.
To some papers Margaret was also ‘Maggie’ although there was no evidence that her family ever called her by this diminutive.
&nb
sp; ‘Did Maggie have a London boyfriend?’
The answer was almost certainly no but some of Margaret’s schoolfriends mentioned ‘a boy in London’, a ‘penfriend’ according to some. Ruth had almost forgotten penfriends. She’d exchanged letters with Beatrix in Germany for almost a year before the correspondence petered and died. Where was Beatrix now? she wondered. All Ruth could remember was that she’d been keen on ‘prog rock’ and Starsky and Hutch. At any rate, Margaret’s penfriend never materialised. There was only one London train from King’s Lynn that afternoon and none of the passengers remembered seeing a twelve-year-old girl wearing jeans and a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt. No CCTV in those days, of course.
There was TV though and Ruth manages to track down a documentary from 1988 called The Missing about unsolved cases. Margaret pops up on screen, first in her school uniform – purple blazer, fat tie, blonde hair in plaits – then in a bridesmaid’s dress, her hair loose and curly. She was a pretty girl with a heart-shaped face and big blue eyes. In 1981, the days when Jimmy Savile was considered a lovably eccentric entertainer, many of the papers commented on Margaret’s looks or speculated that she might have had ‘admirers’, despite being only twelve. ‘She looked older,’ said one report, lascivious even in print.
Margaret’s mother, Karen, features strongly in the documentary. The father, Bob, doesn’t speak much apart from, once, saying he’d like to kill the person who took his little girl. Ruth can see why Karen was chosen as spokesperson. She was attractive, like her daughter, with short blonde hair and an impressively straight gaze.
‘Margaret wouldn’t have run away,’ she said, more than once. ‘She was happy at home. Her brother and sister doted on her. She was the apple of our eye. We all adored her.’
Margaret certainly looked like the adored youngest child, the golden girl. Ruth is a youngest child too although it’s hardly the same with two and, besides, she always felt that both parents preferred her brother, Simon, who got married, produced children and kept his atheism decently hidden behind dutiful churchgoing. Annie and Luke Lacey both appear on the documentary. Annie would have been twenty-one at the time but looked older, a solid-looking girl with an impassive stare. ‘Someone knows what happened to my little sister,’ she said, ‘and we won’t rest until we find them.’ Luke, a year older, was more nervous, ducking his head so that his eighties fringe covered his eyes. ‘It’s not knowing that’s quite hard,’ he said, with rather touching understatement. ‘It would be better really if we knew she was dead. Then we could grieve.’
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