Nelson stands on the steps, looking about over the Norwich rooftops and wondering what his next move should be. Should he go back and question Edward Spens again? He is sure that the man is holding something back. Should he get back to the station and bully Tanya about the interment certificate? They need to get hold of the dental records too. He sighs. It’s a hot, muggy day and more than anything else he fancies diving into a pub for a cold beer. That’s what Clough would do, he’s sure of it.
‘Hi, Detective Chief Inspector.’
Nelson whirls round. A young woman with lurid purple hair is smiling cheekily up at him. Who is she? One of his daughters’ friends? A trendy acquaintance of Michelle’s?
‘I’m Trace,’ says the apparition. ‘From the dig.’
Oh yes. The skinny girl who was on the site the first day. The one they all think Cloughie fancies. Rather him than me, thinks Nelson, looking at the metalwork gleaming on Trace’s ears and lip. But she seems friendly enough.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asks.
‘Routine enquiries,’ he answers. ‘What about you?’
‘I work here, Mondays and Fridays. There’s not enough field archaeology to keep me busy all year round so I do some curatorial work, processing finds and that.’
Nelson has no idea what ‘processing finds’ means but he knows one thing: Trace could be an important contact within the museum. She might well know if anyone has been waltzing off with the exhibits. ‘Fancy a drink?’ he says.
Ruth tries to steer towards one of the picturesque cafés around Woolmarket Street but Father Patrick Hennessey heads like a bloodhound towards the shopping centre and Starbucks, a place Ruth loathes. ‘You can get a grand coffee in here,’ says Hennessey, rubbing his hands together. The air-conditioning is so strong that Ruth is shivering.
She notices some odd glances as they enter the café – the overweight woman with mud-stained trousers and a plaster over one eye, and the priest, red-faced in his black clothes. Ruth orders mineral water but Hennessey goes for the full skinny-latte-with-an-extra-shot-of-espresso palaver.
‘It’s impossible to get a decent coffee where I live,’ he explains.
‘Where do you live?’
‘In a godforsaken corner of the Sussex countryside.’ He says ‘godforsaken’ like he really means it.
‘Nelson, DCI Nelson, said it was very pretty.’
‘It’s pretty enough if you like trees. No, I’m a city boy. Born and brought up in Dublin. I’ve always lived in towns – Rome, London, Norwich.’
It sounds a bit like Del Boy’s van – New York, Paris, Peckham. Ruth suppresses a smile. ‘Norwich isn’t exactly cosmopolitan.’
‘Sure and it’s a fine town. I miss it. I miss my work, my parishioners, everything.’
‘You ran the children’s home, didn’t you?’
‘I started it and ran it, yes. I’d seen an orphanage in the East End of London, a place where the children lived together almost like a family. I tried to create something similar. Recruited all the staff myself. I chose young religious people, people who still had some ideals left.’
‘I met one of your ex… residents. He remembered the place with great affection.’
Hennessey looks interested. ‘Who did you meet?’
‘Davies, I think his name was.’
‘Oh, Kevin Davies. He was a nice boy. He’s an undertaker now I believe. He always had a serious way about him.’
Ruth thinks of the worried, crumpled-looking Davies. She can’t imagine him as a child. She is sure that he always looked forty.
Hennessey is looking at her. He has very blue eyes, with white smile-lines etched against his weather-beaten face.
‘Must be a difficult job,’ he says, ‘uncovering the past.’
Ruth is struck by this description. Most people see archaeology as ‘digging up bones’ but ‘uncovering the past’ is really what it is. She looks at the priest with new respect.
‘It is hard,’ she says carefully, ‘especially in cases like this where you’re dealing with the fairly recent past and especially when there’s a child involved.’ She stops, feeling that she has said too much.
But Hennessey is nodding. ‘As a priest I’ve often come across things that are best kept hidden. But the truth has a way of coming to the surface.’
Like the bones under the doorway, thinks Ruth. If Spens hadn’t been so keen to develop the site, if Ted and Trace hadn’t dug in that exact spot, would they have remained hidden for ever? Or would the long-forgotten crime have risen to the surface, crying out for vengeance?
‘Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t,’ she says.
‘Pontius Pilate would agree with you. “Truth” he said,
“what is that?” And he was a wise man, Pilate. A coward but a wise man.’
Ruth is slightly confused by the way he is talking about Pontius Pilate as if he might, at any moment, walk into Starbucks. ‘DCI Nelson will find the truth,’ she says, with more confidence than she feels, ‘if anyone can.’
‘Ah, DCI Nelson. He’s a fine man, I think. A man with morals.’ Ruth is furious to find herself blushing. ‘He’s a good detective,’ she says.
‘And a good man,’ says Hennessey softly, ‘which may prove more difficult for him.’
Rather reluctantly, Nelson settles for a coke but Trace asks for a pint of bitter.
‘I thought all archaeologists drank cider,’ says Nelson.
Trace pulls a face. ‘Cider’s for wimps.’
I could get to like this girl, thinks Nelson.
‘How long have you been an archaeologist?’ he asks.
‘I left uni five years ago. I did an MA in London and worked in Australia for a bit. I didn’t really want to come back to Norwich but my mum and dad live here and it’s cheaper to live with them. There’s lots of archaeology here too.’
‘Lots of prehistoric stuff,’ says Nelson. He knows this from Ruth.
Trace nods. ‘Bronze Age and Iron Age. And Roman. That’s my favourite period. The Romans.’
‘Did you see Gladiator? Great film.’
Trace snorts. ‘Films get everything wrong. All that decadent stuff, lying about eating grapes. The Romans brought law and order and infrastructure. We were nothing but a band of disparate warring tribes until they came along.’
Identifying ‘we’ as the British, Nelson says, slightly aggrieved, ‘They were invaders, occupiers, weren’t they?’
‘They were here for four hundred years. That’s more than fifteen generations. And, when they left, we forgot everything they taught us – all the stone building and engineering works, glass-making, pottery. We slipped into the Dark Ages.’
Nelson feels rather proud of this. They may have been here four hundred years, he thinks, but to us they were still foreigners, occupiers, with their fancy, glass-making ways. He does not say this to Trace though.
‘Have you been to the site in Swaffham?’ he asks. ‘Max Grey’s site?’
Trace’s face lights up. ‘Yes. I’ve done quite a bit of work there. He’s great, Max. He really knows his stuff. He did this great tour the other week for the Scouts. Made it all come alive.’
‘Do you get lots of visitors on the site?’
Trace shrugs. ‘A few. It’s become quite well-known since they mentioned it on Time Team. We’ve had some coach parties.’
‘Has Edward Spens paid a visit?’
Trace’s face, so open and animated when talking about the superiority of the Romans, becomes closed again. ‘I think he came once. I wasn’t there though.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘Everyone in Norwich knows him.’
*
‘The Spens family,’ Nelson tells his team, ‘have lived in Norwich for generations. Walter Spens built the house on Woolmarket Road. He was, by all accounts, rather an eccentric. Had a collection of stuffed animals and liked to dress as an African chieftain.’
Clough, scoffing peanuts at the back of the room,
coughs and almost chokes. Nelson glares at him.
‘His grandson, Christopher Spens, was headmaster of St Saviours, the public school that used to be on the Waterloo Road. According to his son, Roderick Spens, he was a bit of a tartar, made his children call him sir and forced them to speak in Latin at mealtimes.’
Nelson stops. Sir Roderick had not described his father as a tartar, in fact he had sounded almost admiring, but Nelson had the strong impression of a cold, controlling man. He wonders if he is betraying his own prejudice against public schools, Latin and posh people in general.
Nelson looks at his team. Clough is still spitting out peanut crumbs. Tanya Fuller has her notebook open. Judy Johnson has her eyes fixed on Nelson’s face, frowning slightly.
‘Sir Roderick Spens is in the first stages of senile dementia,’ continues Nelson, ‘so his impressions are rather confused. He remembers his father very clearly but it upsets him to talk about his sister. According to the death certificate Annabelle Spens died of scarlet fever aged six. She died at home and is buried in the churchyard at St Peter and St Paul.’
He looks at the team, wondering if they realise the implications of this. Judy does, obviously, but Clough can sometimes be a bit slow on the uptake. Sure enough, it is Tanya who speaks, ‘Could it be Annabelle who was buried under the door?’
‘I don’t know but I think we have to consider the possibility.’
‘But they buried her.’ This is Clough, sounding almost aggrieved.
‘Yes but it might have been fairly easy, if they had the coffin at home on the night before the funeral, to remove the body and then screw the lid on again.’
‘Why would anyone do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Nelson impatiently, ‘but I intend to find out.’
‘Dental records?’ asks Tanya.
‘Yes. You can get on to that, Tanya. The skull we found in the well had a filling in one of the teeth. That’s unusual in such a young child. Should be fairly easy to match. I’m also going to find out if there’s a DNA link between the dead child and Sir Roderick.’
‘What if there aren’t any dental records?’ asks Judy.
‘Then I’ll dig up the grave,’ says Nelson grimly.
CHAPTER 22
All in all, Nelson does not feel in the right frame of mind to attend an experimental production at the Little Theatre that evening. But, then again, when would he ever be in this particular frame of mind? However, he has promised Michelle and even the news that the play has been written by the ridiculous Leo from the medieval evening does not dent his determination to be a good husband.
‘What’s it about?’ he asks, as they edge through the streets looking for a parking space. The Little Theatre is in the new Arts Centre by the docks, a place so trendy that everything is in lower case, making it extremely difficult to read the signs.
Michelle is reading from a flyer which this Leo type has had the nerve to post to her.
‘The Two-Faced God. Narrated by Janus, the Roman God of beginnings and endings, this is a play about openings, about doorways and fissures and sexual orifices. The action stretches from Roman times, through the industrial and sexual revolutions and ends in a space station set in the distant future.’
‘Jesus wept,’ says Nelson. ‘Sexual orifices?’
‘Harry, you’re such a prude,’ says Michelle, examining her reflection in the passenger mirror. ‘All modern plays are about sex.’
Is he a prude? Nelson considers this accusation as he parks Michelle’s Golf in a space vacated by a moped. It’s true that he seldom finds Cloughie’s jokes funny and that he thinks that Sex and the City is borderline pornographic (and that’s just the shoes). But he’s a man of the world, sex is all very well in its place (he doesn’t allow himself to dwell very long on where that place is), it’s just that he doesn’t want to watch some weedy drama student going on and on about bodily functions. That’s not unreasonable, surely?
‘I’m not a prude,’ he says at last, ‘it’s just that there’s a time and a place.’
Michelle looks at him under her lashes. ‘You didn’t always think that way. Remember the ghost train on Blackpool pier?’
Nelson grunts. ‘We were young and stupid then.’ But he takes her arm as they walk towards the theatre.
A motley collection of individuals are gathered in the foyer, drinking overpriced cocktails and squinting at the lower case programme. Michelle’s employers Tony and Juan are there, surrounded by a group Nelson privately categorises as ‘exotic’. There are a few older couples, looking worriedly at the photographs posted around the walls showing actors in Greek masks and very little else. There are lots of young people too, probably from the university.
‘She’s attractive,’ says Michelle.
‘Who?’ Nelson is fighting his way back from the bar carrying a half of lager and a glass of white wine.
‘There. With the red hair.’
Nelson looks and sees a striking-looking woman in black who seems strangely familiar. With her is… Jesus Christ.
‘Come this way.’ He tries desperately to steer Michelle in the opposite direction. ‘There’s a seat.’
‘I don’t want a seat. Who’s that with her? It’s Ruth! Harry, look, it’s Ruth.’
Michelle is off through the crowd. Nelson watches as she taps Ruth on the shoulder and is introduced to the redhead, whom he now recognises as the nutcase Shona who was involved in the Saltmarsh case. Ruth greets Michelle with every appearance of pleasure. She looks pale, he thinks, but otherwise well, wearing a loose red top over black trousers. Thank God for loose clothing. With any luck Michelle will thinks it’s just fashion.
‘Harry!’ Michelle is beckoning imperiously.
Nelson stumps over and Ruth gives him a slightly mischievous smile.
‘I wouldn’t have thought this was your sort of thing, Nelson.’
‘It was Michelle’s idea.’
‘Ruth took a bit of persuading too.’ This is Shona, tossing back her hair and twinkling at Nelson. He stares impassively back.
‘We met Leo at Edwards Spens’ party,’ explains Michelle. ‘I thought he was very interesting.’
‘He’s taken some fascinating ideas from Greek and Roman theatre,’ says Shona, wearing an intense, twitchy look which makes Nelson fear that an intellectual conversation is on its way.
‘Are you looking forward to the play?’ Ruth asks him. She is drinking orange juice and looks happier than he has seen her for weeks. He feels his lips moving into a grudging smile.
‘No. You know how thick I am. I don’t even eat yoghurt because it’s got culture in it.’
Ruth laughs. ‘I can’t say I’m looking forward to it either but Shona thought a night out would do me good.’
Nelson lowers his voice. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Fine. No ill-effects at all. I was at the Woolmarket Street site today.’
Nelson bristles. ‘On your own?’
‘I met Father Hennessey.’
‘Hennessey? What was he doing snooping around?’
‘I think he just came to have a look round. Don’t you always say that people come back to the scene of a crime?’
‘Yes, but whose crime is it?’ answers Nelson soberly. ‘That’s what we need to find out.’
The play is as bad as Nelson fears. A man in a mask appears in front of a black curtain and drones on about January. Then he puts on another mask and drones on about the lottery and choices and whatnot. At least this reminds Nelson that he hasn’t bought his ticket for Wednesday’s draw yet. Then the curtain goes up and there are these people in togas having an orgy, only they can’t have much of one because the production obviously can’t stretch to more than four actors. Then the curtain comes down and the man in the mask drones on about women’s rights, puts on his other mask and starts on about rape. The curtain goes up and there are two people in Victorian dress having breakfast. Turns out the man is seeing a prostitute and the woman kills herself. Up pops Chummy in
the mask again and goes on about terminations and oral sex and the pill. Cue a blast of sixties music and the four actors at another orgy, only this time with LSD rather than grapes. Somebody dies of a drug overdose and the others sing ‘Yellow Submarine’ as a kind of funeral dirge. The man in the mask appears to say it’s all the fault of the planets and the jolly foursome appear in space suits to say that the Earth has finally disappeared into its own orifice. Cue applause and calls for ‘Author, Author’.
‘Jesus,’ says Nelson as they file out of the doors, ‘what a load of crap.’
‘Shh.’ Michelle looks round. ‘Leo’s just over there.’
Nelson looks and sees the bearded playwright surrounded by admiring friends. He thinks he sees Shona’s red hair in the crowd but there’s no sign of Ruth.
‘I’ll arrest him under the Public Decency Act,’ Nelson mutters.
‘Shh.’
In the car, Michelle admits that the play was dire and she even agrees to stop off for a Chinese. Cheered, Nelson hums under his breath as he negotiates the Norwich suburbs, the car flying merrily over the speed bumps.
‘So,’ says Michelle chattily, ‘what did you think of Ruth?’
Nelson stops humming. ‘What do you mean?’
Michelle laughs. ‘Oh Harry, you’re hopeless. Didn’t you notice?’
‘Notice what?’ Be careful, he tells himself.
But Michelle is still laughing. ‘She’s pregnant.’
Nelson counts to ten, keeping his eyes on the road.
‘Hadn’t you noticed?’
‘You know me,’ he says, ‘I never notice anything.’
‘A fine detective you make,’ teases Michelle.
‘You don’t know for sure that she’s pregnant,’ counters Nelson.
‘Yes, I do. I asked her when we went to the loo together.’
Nelson curses women’s inability to go to the loo on their own. And why do they have to chat? Catch men chatting in the bog. No wonder women always take so long in there.
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