Ruth Galloway (14 page)

Erik stops abruptly. He is looking at the sand, which has suddenly become dark and silty. He traces a line with his smart shoe. Underneath, the sand is quite startlingly blue. ‘Burnt matter,' he says, ‘the roots of ancient trees. We're getting near.'

Looking back, Ruth sees a clump of trees to the left and the spire of a church away in the distance. She remembers the view perfectly; they are very near the henge circle. But the sand, grey in the winter sun, gives nothing away.
What the Sand gets, the Sand keeps forever
.

Ruth remembers how the henge had looked that summer evening ten years ago, the ring of gnarled wooden posts sinister and otherworldly as if it had risen out of the sea. She remembers Erik kneeling before the posts in an attitude almost of prayer. She remembers, when she first entered the circle, a shiver running through her whole body.

‘It's here,' says Erik.

There is nothing to see, just a slightly raised circle, darker than the surrounding sand, but Erik acts as if he has entered a church. He stands completely still, his eyes closed and then touches the ground, as if for luck.

‘Sacred ground,' he says.

‘That's what Cathbad would say.'

‘Cathbad! Have you seen him?'

‘Yes … Erik?'

‘What?'

‘Why didn't you tell me that you knew Cathbad quite well, that he'd been a student of yours?'

Erik is silent for a moment, looking at her. She can't read his cool, blue stare. Guilt? Amusement? Anger?

‘Does it matter?'

‘Of course it matters!' Ruth explodes. ‘He's a suspect in a murder investigation.'

‘Is he?'

Ruth hesitates. She knows that Nelson suspects and distrusts Cathbad but is that enough to make him a suspect? Probably. Aloud she says, ‘I don't know. The police think he's hiding something.'

‘The police! What do they know? Hoi polloi. Barbarians. Do you remember when they removed the protesters from the site? The unnecessary violence they used?'

‘Yes.' The police had been heavy-handed when they removed the protesters. Erik and the other archaeologists had been distressed. They had lodged a complaint, which the police had ignored.

‘Did you put Cathbad up to it?' asks Ruth. ‘The protest?'

Erik smiles. ‘No, the local pagans were up in arms already. There are a lot of pagans in Norfolk, you know. Let's just say that I encouraged him a bit.'

‘Did you get him the job at the university too?'

‘I gave him a reference.'

‘Why didn't you tell me he was working there?'

‘You didn't ask.'

Ruth turns away, stomping her way over the wet sand. Erik catches her up, puts his arm round her.

‘Don't be angry Ruth. Didn't I always tell you, it's the questions that matter, not the answers?'

Ruth looks at Erik's familiar, weather-beaten face. He has grown older, his hair is whiter and there are more lines around his eyes, but he is still the same. He is smiling, his blue eyes sparkling. Reluctantly, Ruth smiles back.

‘Come on,' says Erik, ‘let's see if we can find that causeway of yours.'

They set off, walking inland across the dunes. A couple of waders are feeding on the mudflats. Ruth thinks of David's description of the Saltmarsh as nature's service station. The birds look up as they pass and then continue their frenzied digging. In the distance, a heron watches them, standing meditatively on one leg.

Ruth has David's map, showing the buried posts. Silently she unfurls it and hands it to Erik. He makes a hissing noise of satisfaction, ‘So … Now we have it.' He examines the map for a long time in silence. Ruth watches him with admiration. No-one is better at reading a map or a landscape than Erik. For him, hills and streams and villages are signposts pointing directly to the past. She remembers him saying to her when she first started his
postgraduate course, ‘If you wanted to make a map of your sitting room for archaeologists of the future, what would be the most important thing?'

‘Er … making sure I have a full inventory of objects.'

He had laughed. ‘No, no. Inventories are all very well in their place but they do not tell us how people
lived
, what was important to them, what they worshipped. No, the most important thing would be the
direction
. The way your chairs were facing. That would show archaeologists of the future that the most important object in the twenty-first century home was the large grey rectangle in the corner.'

Now Erik looks up from the map, sniffs the air and smiles. ‘This way, I think.' They set off at a brisk walk. The wind is behind them now, blowing the coarse grass flat against the ground. They pass the tidal reed beds, the shallow water dark and mysterious. Above them a bird calls, hoarse and angry.

‘Here.' Erik stops and bends down. Ruth squats beside him. There, half-buried in the peaty ground between the reeds and the mudflats, is a post. It extends about ten centimetres above the soil.

‘Bog oak,' says Erik. Ruth looks more closely. The wood is dark, almost black, its surface dotted with little holes, like woodworm.

‘Molluscs,' says Erik laconically, ‘they eat away at the wood.'

‘How old is it?' asks Ruth.

‘Don't know for sure. But it looks old.'

‘As old as the henge?'

‘Possibly later.'

Ruth reaches out to touch the post. It feels soft, like black toffee. She has to resist the temptation to gouge in her fingernail.

‘Come on,' says Erik. ‘Let's find the next one.'

The next post is about two metres away. This one is harder to see, almost submerged by water. Erik paces between the posts.

‘Incredible. The land between the two is completely dry, although it's marshland on either side. It must be a shingle spit, incredible that it hasn't moved over the years.'

Ruth can sense his excitement. ‘So it could be a pathway through the marsh?'

‘Yes, a crossing place. It was as important as marking a boundary, marking a crossing place over sacred ground. One step the wrong way and you're dead, straight to hell. Keep on the path and it will lead you to heaven.'

He is smiling but Ruth shivers, remembering the letters.
Look to the sky, the stars, the crossing places. Look at what is silhouetted against the sky. You will find her where the earth meets the sky
. Did the letter writer know about the pathway? He spoke about causeways and cursuses. Had he brought Lucy here, to this desolate landscape?

They find a total of twelve posts, leading them back almost to the car park and the place where Ruth found the Iron Age body. Erik takes pictures and makes notes. He seems completely absorbed. Ruth finds herself feeling restless, abstracted. With Nelson, she had been the expert. Now she feels relegated to the position of student.

‘How will you get the wood dated?' she asks.

‘I'll ask Bob Bullmore.' Bob is a member of Ruth's department, an experienced forensic anthropologist, an
expert on the decomposition of flora and fauna. Ruth likes Bob; involving him is a good idea but, again, she has the sensation of being sidelined. This was my discovery, she wants to yell, you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me.

Aloud she says, ‘Shall we tell Phil?'

‘Not yet.'

‘Bob might tell him.'

‘Not if I ask him not to.'

‘Do you think we have found a link between my Iron Age body and the henge?'

Erik looks at her quizzically. ‘
Your
Iron Age body?'

‘I found it,' says Ruth defiantly.

‘We own nothing in this life,' says Erik.

‘You sound like Cathbad.'

Erik looks at her for a minute, consideringly, like a lecturer assessing a new student. Then he says, ‘Come and meet him.'

‘Who?'

‘Cathbad. Come and meet him properly.'

‘Now?'

‘Yes. I thought I'd look him up.'

Ruth hesitates. Part of her, the amateur detective part, wants to see Cathbad again, to assess him without Nelson's sceptical presence clouding her judgement. But she is still slightly angry with Erik for not telling her that he had been Cathbad's tutor. She considers, stuck in a liminal zone of her own between curiosity and resentment.

As she is thinking, watched quizzically by Erik, her phone rings, the noise sounding shockingly twenty-first century.

‘Excuse me.' Ruth turns away.

‘Ruth. It's Nelson.'

‘Oh … hello.'

‘Are you busy? Can you come to Spenwell? Now.'

‘Why?'

‘I'm at Scarlet Henderson's house. We've found some human bones in the garden.'

Spenwell is a tiny village, hardly worthy of the name. One street of houses, a phone box and a shop that is only open for two hours in the afternoon. Scarlet's family live in a big modern bungalow built of ugly brown brick slightly redeemed by ivy. Ruth parks behind Nelson's Mercedes and two police vans. The police presence has not gone unnoticed in the small community. A group of children watch, wide-eyed, from the other side of the road, and up and down the street faces appear in windows. Their expressions are hard to read: curious, frightened, gleeful.

As Ruth approaches, Nelson appears around the side of the house. The front garden has been reduced to mud by police boots. Someone has put down planks, presumably for a wheelbarrow.

‘Ruth,' Nelson greets her, ‘how are you this morning?'

Ruth feels slightly embarrassed. Today she is the professional, the expert once more, she doesn't want to be reminded that last night she was sobbing over a dead cat.

‘Better,' she says. ‘Erik … you know, my ex-tutor, he came round after you left.'

Nelson looks at her slightly quizzically. But all he says is, ‘Good.'

‘Where are the bones?' asks Ruth. She wants to bring the conversation back to business.

‘Round the back. The dogs found the place.'

The back garden is long and untidy, littered with old sofas, broken bicycles and a half-constructed climbing frame built, it appears, out of reclaimed timber. The scene-of-crime officers, clad in white jumpsuits, are clustered round a large hole. The sniffer dogs are straining at their leads, tails wagging madly. With a shock, Ruth realises that the Hendersons are here too. Scarlet's father and mother, standing silently by the back door. The mother is youngish, pale and pretty with long dark hair and a waifish look. She is wearing a purple velvet skirt and is barefoot, despite the cold. The father is older and has a slightly rat-like face, thin with watery eyes. In the garden three of their children are playing on the half-finished climbing frame, apparently unconcerned.

‘This is Doctor Ruth Galloway,' says Nelson to one of the jump-suited men. ‘She's an expert on buried bones.' Like a dog, thinks Ruth.

Ruth looks at the hole, which seems to run along the dividing line between the Hendersons' garden and the garden next door. Nearer the house, there is a timber fence but, here, at the end of the garden, there is only flint and rubble. A boundary, thinks Ruth. She hears Erik's voice in her head.
It marked a boundary. We should have respected that
.

‘Did there used to be a wall here?' she asks. She addressed the nearest white suit but Scarlet's father must have heard because he steps forward.

‘There used to be an old flint wall here. I took the flints about five years ago, to make a kiln.'

If there was a wall here, thinks Ruth, then the bones can
hardly be new. She knows that she does not want the bones to be Scarlet's. She does not want the parents to be the killers; she wants Scarlet to be alive.

The white suits step back and Ruth, carrying her excavation kit in her backpack, moves forward. She kneels on the edge of the hole, takes out her small trowel and gently scrapes away at the sides. The digging is clean, she can see the marks of the shovels, and the soil is arranged in neat layers, like a terrine. A thin layer of topsoil, then the characteristic peaty soil of the area, then a line of flint. At the bottom, about a metre down, Ruth sees the yellow-white of the bones.

‘Have you moved anything?' she asks.

The white-suited man answers. ‘No. DCI Nelson told us not to.'

‘Good.'

Wearing gloves, Ruth lifts a bone and holds it up to the light. She is aware of a collective intake of breath behind her.

Nelson leans forward and speaks into Ruth's ear. She smells cigarettes and aftershave.

‘Are they human?'

‘I think so, yes.

But …' ‘But what?'

‘They weren't buried.'

Nelson squats down beside her. ‘What do you mean?'

‘A burial is a disturbance. It disturbs the layers. Everything would be churned up. Look at this.' She gestures to the sides of the hole. ‘Here's the grave cut. Under all these layers. These bones were laid on the ground and, over the centuries, the earth has covered them.'

‘Over the centuries?'

‘I think they're Iron Age. Like the other ones.'

‘Why?'

‘There is some pottery there. It looks Iron Age.'

Nelson looks at her for a long moment before straightening up and calling out to the hovering scene-of-crime men.

‘Right, that's it, boys. Excitement over.'

‘What is it, boss?' asks one.
Boss!
Ruth can hardly believe her ears.

‘The good news is it's a dead body. The bad news is it's been dead about two thousand years. Come on. Let's get out of here.'

*

An hour later, Ruth has bagged up the bones and sent them to the university lab for dating. Even so, she is sure they are Iron Age, but what does that mean? Because it wasn't buried in peat, this body has not been preserved, only the bones remain. Could these bones be linked to that other body, found on the edge of the Saltmarsh? And is there another link between bones, body, causeway and henge? Her mind is buzzing but she tries to concentrate on drinking herbal tea and talking to Scarlet's parents, Delilah and Alan as she has been instructed to call them.