The Crossing Places

CHAPTER 22

For what seems like hours, she just stands there, unable to move. Almost unable to breathe. An icy paralysis seems to have taken over her whole body. Think, Ruth, think.

Breathe. Can Erik really have written these letters? Is it possible that Erik, as well as being a hypocrite and a serial seducer, is also a murderer?

The worst thing is that she can almost believe it. Erik knows about archaeology. He knows about Norse legends and Neolithic ritual and the power of the landscape. She can hear his voice, that beloved singsong voice, telling campfire stories of water spirits and shape-changers and the creatures of the dark. With a sudden, fresh chill she remembers his words that very morning: The poor girl is dead. She is buried, she is at peace. Almost an exact echo of one of the letters.

Can it possibly be true? Erik was still living in England when Lucy Downey vanished. It was just after the henge dig. He could have sent those early letters. He didn't go back to Norway until eight years later. But could he have sent the recent letters about Scarlet Henderson? He has only been back in England since January. Nelson showed her a letter dated last November. 'He hasn't forgotten,' said Nelson. Could Erik have sent that letter? – or arranged to have someone else send it?

It's crazy, Ruth tells herself, moving stiffly to stroke Flint who is purring round her ankles. Erik would not be capable of writing those evil, taunting, warped letters. He is a humanitarian, the first to support striking miners or victims of natural disasters. He is kind and thoughtful; comforting Ruth in the shock of Peter's marriage, grieving with Shona when her father died. But he is also, thinks Ruth, the man who speaks approvingly of human sacrifice ('isn't the same thing happening in Christian Holy Communion?'), who advised Ruth to forget Peter with another lover ('it's the easiest way') and who, presumably, was sleeping with Shona and encouraging her to abort their child whilst weeping with her about her father. Erik is amoral, he is somehow outside normal human rules; that is one of the most attractive things about him. But is it also something that makes him capable of unimaginable evil?

If he wrote the letters, did he kill the two little girls?

Mechanically feeding Flint, Ruth realises that she has poured the cat food right over the sides of the bowl. Flint pushes furrily past her to get at the food. She remembers a conversation she had with him about her Iron Age body. 'How could anyone do that?' she had asked. 'Kill a child for some religious ritual?' 'Look at it this way,' Erik had said calmly.

'Maybe it's a good way to go. Saves the child the disillusionment of growing up.' He had smiled as he said it but Ruth remembers feeling chilled. Could Erik have killed the two girls to save them the disillusionment of growing up?

She can't bear it any more. Grabbing her coat and bag, she rushes out into the rain. She is going to speak to Shona.

Shona is still out when she arrives. Ruth slumps down on the doorstep, too exhausted to remember that she has a key. She just sits there, looking at the people going in and out of the Tesco Express and wondering what it must be like to have no more to worry about than whether to have chops or sausages for supper and whether you've got enough potatoes for chips. Her own life seems to have become dark and grim, like the sort of film she would avoid watching late at night. When did this happen? When they dug down into the peat and found the body of Scarlet Henderson? When she first saw Nelson, standing in the university corridor? When she first looked down at her student introductory pack and saw the words, Personal Tutor: Erik Anderssen?

When Shona eventually appears, swinging down the road carrying a Thresher's bag and a rented DVD, she looks so blameless, so innocent, with her long legs and silver jacket, that Ruth thinks that she must be mistaken.

No way can Shona be mixed up in any of this. She is Ruth's dear friend, her crazy, lovable, scatty friend. But, then, Shona sees Ruth, and a curious trapped look comes over her face, like a fox cornered in a suburban garden. Almost instantly though, charm breaks out again and she smiles, proffering the bag and the DVD.

'Girls' night in,' she says. 'Want to join me?'

'I've got to talk to you.'

Now Shona looks positively terrified. 'OK,' she says, opening the door. 'You'd better come in.'

Ruth doesn't even give Shona time to take off her coat.

'Did Erik write those letters?'

'What letters?' asks Shona nervously.

Ruth looks around the room, at the sanded floor and the trendy rugs, at the photos in decorated frames – almost all of Shona herself, she notices now – at the patchwork throw over the sofa, at the new novels stacked on the table, at the bookshelves with their battered copies of the classics, from T.S. Eliot to Shakespeare. Then she looks back at Shona.

'Jesus,' she says, 'you helped him, didn't you?'

Shona seems to look around for a means of escape, the trapped fox again, but then, as if finally surrendering, she collapses onto the sofa and covers her face.

Ruth comes nearer. 'You helped him, didn't you?' she says. 'Of course, he'd never have thought of all that T.S.

Eliot stuff by himself, would he? You're the literature expert. Your Catholic background probably helped too.

He supplied the archaeology and the mythology, you did the rest. Quite the perfect little team.'

'It wasn't like that,' says Shona dully.

'No? What was it like?'

Shona looks up. Her hair has come down and her eyes are wet, yet Ruth is beyond being moved by her appearance.

So Shona is beautiful and she's upset. So what? She's played that trick too many times before.

'It was him. Nelson,' says Shona. 'What?'

'Erik hates him,' says Shona, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. 'That's why he wrote the letters, to get at Nelson. To distract him. To stop him solving the case. To punish him.'

'What for?' whispers Ruth.

'James Agar,' says Shona. 'He was Erik's student. At Manchester. It was during the poll tax riots. Apparently a group of students attacked a policeman and he was killed.

James Agar was only on the outskirts of the group. He didn't do anything but Nelson framed him.'

'Who told you this? Erik?'

'It was common knowledge. Everyone knew it. Even the police. Nelson wanted a scapegoat so he picked on James.'

'He wouldn't do that,' says Ruth. Wouldn't he? She thinks.

'Oh, I know you like him. Erik says you've been totally taken in by him.'

'Does he?' Despite everything, the bitchiness of this still stings. 'And you weren't taken in by Erik, I suppose?'

'Oh, I was,' says Shona wearily. 'I was obsessed with him. I would have done anything for him.'

'Even helped to write those letters?'

Shona looks up, her face defiant. 'Yes,' she says. 'Even that.'

'But why, Shona? This was a murder investigation. You were probably helping the murderer get away.'

'Nelson's a murderer,' snaps Shona. 'James Agar died in prison, a year after Nelson framed him. He killed himself.'

Ruth thinks of Cathbad's poem 'In praise of James Agar'. She thinks of Nelson's face as he looked down at the scrawled lines. She thinks of the locked cabinet in Cathbad's caravan.

'Cathbad,' she says at last. 'Where does he come into this?'

Shona laughs, slightly hysterically. 'Didn't you know?'

she says. 'He was the postman.'