The Crossing Places

CHAPTER 12

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 sceneof-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 jumpsuited 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 sceneof-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.

She is not quite sure how she ended up here, in the Hendersons' chaotic kitchen, sitting on a rickety stool, balancing an earthenware mug in her hand. All she knows is that Nelson seemed very keen to accept the invitation on her behalf.

'We'd love to,' he had said. 'Thanks very much Mrs Henderson.'

'Delilah,' corrected Mrs Henderson wearily.

So now they are in the Henderson kitchen listening to Alan Henderson talking about dousing and to the Hendersons' youngest (Ocean) grizzling in her high chair.

'She misses Scarlet,' says Delilah with a resignation that Ruth finds hard to bear.

'I'm sure she does,' mumbles Ruth, 'How old is… er…

Ocean?'

'She's two, Scarlet's four, Euan and Tobias are seven, Maddie's sixteen.'

'You don't look old enough to have a sixteen-year-old child.'

Delilah smiles, briefly illuminating her pale face with its heavy fringe of hair. 'I was only sixteen when I had her.

She's not Alan's, of course.'

Ruth glances briefly at Alan who is now lecturing Nelson on ley lines. Nelson looks up and catches Ruth's eye.

'Do you have children?' Delilah asks Ruth.

'No.'

'What I'm afraid of,' says Delilah suddenly in a high, strained voice, 'is that one day someone asks me how many children I have and I say four, not five. Because then I'll know that it's over, that she's dead.' She is crying, but silently, the tears flowing down her cheeks.

Ruth doesn't know what to say. 'I'm sorry,' is all she manages.

Delilah ignores her. 'She's so little, so defenceless. Her wrist is so tiny she can still wear her christening bracelet.

Who would want to hurt her?'

Ruth thinks of Sparky, also little and defenceless and yet brutally murdered. She tries to imagine her own grief magnified by a thousand.

'I don't know, Delilah,' says Ruth hoarsely. 'But DCI Nelson is doing all he can, I promise you.'

'He's a good man,' says Delilah, brushing a hand over her eyes. 'He's got a strong aura. He must have a good spirit guide.'

'I'm sure he has.'

Ruth is conscious of Nelson's eyes upon her. Alan has briefly stopped talking. He rolls a cigarette, hands shaking.

Delilah gives a rice cake to Ocean who throws it on the floor.

Two dark-haired boys race into the room. To Ruth's surprise they head straight for Nelson.

'Harry! Did you bring your handcuffs?'

'Can I try them on?'

'It's my turn!'

Solemnly, Nelson pulls a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and fits them round one of the boy's hands. It makes Ruth feel slightly squeamish to see his bony wrists protruding from the restraining metal but there is no doubt that the boys are enjoying every minute.

'My turn! Let me!'

'I've only had a second. Less than a second.'

Ruth turns back to Delilah and sees, to her amazement, that she is now breast-feeding Ocean. Although Ruth has often signed petitions in favour of a woman's right to breast-feed in public, in practice she finds it deeply embarrassing.

Especially as Ocean seems big enough to run to the corner shop for a packet of crisps.

Trying to avert her eyes, her gaze falls on a cork board over the kitchen table. It is covered in multicoloured bits of paper: party invitations, torn-off special offers, children's drawings, photographs. She sees a picture of Scarlet holding baby Ocean and another of the twins holding a football trophy. Then she sees another photo. It is a faded snapshot of Delilah and Alan next to a standing stone, probably Stonehenge or possibly Avebury. But it is not the stone that catches Ruth's attention; it is the other person in the picture. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt and with normal length hair it is nonetheless definitely Cathbad.