The Crossing Places

CHAPTER 6

'So what do you think? Is he a nutter?'

Ruth is once again sitting in Nelson's shabby office, drinking coffee. Only this time she brought the coffee herself, from Starbucks.

'Starbucks eh?' Nelson had said suspiciously.

'Yes. It's the closest. I don't normally go to Starbucks but…'

'Why not?'

'Oh, you know,' she shrugged, 'too global, too American.'

'I'm all for America myself,' said Nelson, still looking doubtfully at the froth on his cappuccino. 'We went to Disneyland Florida a few years ago. It was champion.'

Ruth, for whom the idea of Disney World is sheer unexpurgated hell, says nothing.

Now Nelson puts down his Styrofoam cup and asks again, 'Is he a nutter?'

'I don't know,' says Ruth slowly. 'I'm not a psychologist.'

Nelson grunts. 'We had one of those. Talked complete bollocks. Homoerotic this, suppressed that. Complete crap.'

Ruth who had, in fact, thought she noticed a homoerotic subtext to the letters (assuming, of course, that the writer is male), again says nothing. Instead she gets the letters out of her bag.

'I've categorised the references in the letters,' she says. "I thought it was the best way of starting.'

'A list,' says Nelson approvingly. "I like lists.'

'So do I.' She gets out a neatly typed sheet of paper and passes it to Nelson.

Religious

Ecclesiastes

Isaac

Christmas

Christ dying on cross/Easter

St Lucy

St Lucy's Day (21 December) St John's Day (24 June)

All Saints' Day (1 November) Jeremiah

Literary

Shakespeare:

King Lear: 'A man may see how the world goes with no eyes.'

Henry V: 'A little touch of Harry…'

Julius Caesar: 'Graves have yawned and yielded up their dead.'

T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday: 'There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again.'

The Waste Land: 'We, who were living are now dying.'

Norse legend

Odin

The Tree of All Knowledge (the World Tree, Yggdrasil) Pagan

Summer solstice

Winter solstice

Litha (Anglo-Saxon word for the solstice) Wicker Man

Sun God

Shamanism

Will o'the wisps

Mistletoe

Greek legend Argus

Archaeological

Cursuses

Causeways

Nelson reads intently, his brows knitted together. 'It's good, seeing it all spread out like this,' he says at last, 'otherwise you can't tell which is a quote and which is just mumbo jumbo. "We who were living are now dying," for example. I thought that was just more spooky stuff. I never realised it was an actual quote.'

Ruth, who has spent hours trawling through Eliot's Collected Poems, feels gratified.

Nelson turns back to the list. 'Lots of biblical stuff,' he says, 'we spotted that straight off. Psychologist thought he might even be a lay preacher or an ex-priest.'

'Or maybe he just had a religious upbringing,' says Ruth. 'My parents are Born Again Christians. They're always reading the Bible aloud, just for kicks.'

Nelson grunts. 'I was brought up a Catholic,' he says, 'but my parents weren't really into the Bible. It was more the saints, praying to this one or that one, saying Hail Marys. Jesus – a decade of the rosary every bloody day! It seemed to take hours.'

'Are you still a Catholic?' asks Ruth.

"I had the girls baptised Catholic, more to please my mum than anything else, but Michelle's not a Catholic and we never go to church. Don't know if I'd say I was a Catholic or not. A lapsed one maybe.'

'They never let you get away, do they? Even if you don't believe in God, you're still "lapsed". As if you might go back one day.'

'Maybe I will. On my death bed.'

"I won't,' says Ruth fiercely, 'I'm an atheist. After you die, there's nothing.'

'Shame,' says Nelson with a grin, 'you never get to say I told you so.'

Ruth laughs, rather surprised. Perhaps Nelson regrets this foray into levity because he turns back, frowning, to the list.

'This guy,' he says, 'what does he believe?'

'Well,' says Ruth, 'there's a strong theme of death and rebirth, the seasons, the cycle of nature. I would say his beliefs were more pagan, though. There's the mention of mistletoe, for instance. The druids considered that mistletoe was sacred. That's where the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe comes from.' She pauses.

'Actually, our Iron Age girl. She had traces of mistletoe in her stomach.'

'In her stomach?'

'Yes, maybe she was forced to eat it before they killed her. As I said, ritual sacrifice was quite common in the Iron Age. You find bodies that have been stabbed, strangled, clubbed to death. One body found in Ireland had its nipples sliced through.'

Nelson winces. 'So does our guy know about all this Iron Age stuff?'

'It's possible. Take this stuff about sacrifice, the wicker man. Some people think that Iron Age man made human sacrifices every autumn to ensure that spring came again the next year. They put the victim in a wicker cage and burnt it.'

"I saw the film,' says Nelson, 'Christopher Lee. Great stuff.'

'Well, yes. It was sensationalised, of course, but there's a theme of sacrifice that runs through all religions. Odin was hung on the World Tree to gain all the knowledge of the world. Christ was hung on the cross. Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac'

'What did that mean, "Like Isaac, like Jesus, she carries the wood for her own crucifixion."'

'Well, Isaac carried the wood on which he was to be burnt. There's a clear echo of Christ carrying his cross.'

'Jesus.' There is a silence. Ruth suspects that Nelson is thinking of Lucy Downey, condemned, perhaps to carry the instruments of her own death. She thinks of her Iron Age body. Was she really staked down and left to die?

'Actually,' says Ruth, 'there's one very interesting Bible reference. This one from Jeremiah. "A curse on the man who puts his trust in man."'

"I didn't even realise that was from the Bible.'

'Well, it is. One of the prophets. Anyway, I looked it up and guess how the next bit goes…' She recites it for him: A curse on the man who puts his trust in man, who relies on the things of flesh, whose heart turns from the Lord.

He is like dry scrub in the wastelands, if good comes, he has no eyes for it, he settles in the parched places of the wilderness, a salt land, uninhabited.

Nelson looks up. 'A salt land?'

'Yes.'

'The Saltmarsh,' says Nelson, almost to himself, 'I always wondered about that place…'

'Actually, I think there are a few things that might point to the Saltmarsh,' says Ruth. She reads from one of 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. Erik – an archaeologist I know – he says that prehistoric man may have built structures on flat landscapes like the fens or the marshes because they would stand out so much, be silhouetted against the sky. He thinks that's one reason why the henge was built on the Saltmarsh.'

'But other places are flat. Specially in this Godforsaken county.'

'Yes, but…' How can she explain that she thinks the letter writer shares Erik's views about a ritual landscape, about marshland being the link between life and death.

'Remember what I said about marshland?' she says at last.

'We quite often find votive offerings or occasionally bodies buried there. Maybe this man' – she gestures to the letters – 'maybe he knows that too.'

'You think he's an archaeologist?'

Ruth hesitates. 'Not necessarily but there's this word, cursuses.'

'Never heard of it.'

'Exactly! It's a very technical word. It means a parallel ditch with banks on the inner sides. They're often found within early ritual landscape but we don't know what they were used for. At the Maxley Cursus, for example, they found shamans' batons.'

'Shamans' what?'

'Pieces of decorated deer antler. They would have been used by the shaman, the holy man.'

'What for?'

'We don't know, maybe as part of some ritual ceremony.

Maybe they were like magic wands.'

'This guy' – Nelson points to the letters – 'he talks about a shaman.'

'Yes, it's quite a popular idea amongst modern New Age thinkers. A holy man who works with natural magic'

Nelson looks back at the list. 'What about causeways?

Now I've heard that word.'

'Causeways are early pathways, often leading across marsh or water.' She pauses. 'Actually, I think I've found one at the Saltmarsh, leading to the henge. It's a sort of hidden path marked out by sunken posts. It's very exciting.'

Nelson looks as if he will take her word for that. 'So our man may be a pagan, he may be a New Ager, he may be a religious nutter, he may be an archaeologist.'

'He may be all four, or maybe he just knows a bit about all of them. He strikes me as someone who hoards nuggets of knowledge. The bit about the will o'the wisps, for example.'

'Yes, what was all that about?'

'Will o'the wisps are lights, often seen on marshland and often on the night of the summer solstice. They lead travellers onto dangerous ground and so to their deaths.' As she says this, Ruth thinks of the weird phosphorous glow over the marsh on the night that she was lost. Without David, would she have died?

'There are lots of legends about will o'the wisps. In some stories they're named after a wicked blacksmith who sold his soul to the devil in return for a flame from the fires of hell. He roams below the earth trying to find his way to the surface, lighting his way by the flame. Other stories say that they're the souls of murdered children.'

'Murdered children,' says Nelson grimly. 'That's what this is all about.'

Ruth arrives home to find the phone ringing. She snatches it up and is rewarded by the voice of her favourite Viking.

'Ruthie! What news on the causeway?'

She tells him that no-one else knows of her discovery.

However, when she visited David to give him a bottle of whisky as a thank-you present, he gave her a map of the Saltmarsh with the posts clearly marked in his own hand.

'Excellent,' purrs Erik. 'Don't let Techno Boy see anything until I get there.' Techno Boy is his nickname for THE CROSSING PLACES

Phil, who is addicted to all kinds of archaeological technology.

'When

will that be?'

'That's why I'm ringing. Very good news. I've managed to get a sabbatical for next term.'

'That's wonderful!'

'Yes, I know. Magda's very jealous. It's the long nights, you know, a real killer in the winter. Anyway, I hope to be with you in a week or so.'

'Wonderful!' says Ruth again. 'Where will you stay?'

Erik laughs. 'Don't worry; I won't be after your sofa. I don't fancy sharing it with the cats. I'm sure they would put the evil eye on me. I remember a nice B and B quite near you. I'll book there.'

'I'll book it for you, if you want,' offers Ruth, wondering why she doesn't mind Erik making jokes about her cats.

'No problem, baby. I've got the internet for that. Techno Boy would be proud of me.'

"I doubt it. Erik?'

'What?'

'There's just a chance you might get a call from someone called Detective Inspector Harry Nelson…'

Nelson had asked her if there was anyone she remembered hanging around the dig ten years ago, anyone fascinated by archaeology and mythology. Ruth could, in fact, remember one name. A man who called himself Cathbad and who was the leader of the group of druids who wanted to save the henge. After a moment's hesitation, she had offered Nelson this name, which was met with a snort of contempt. Did Ruth have any idea what his real name was? No. Did she know anyone who might know? So Ruth had given him Erik's name. She remembers, many times, seeing Erik deep in conversation with Cathbad, the latter's purple cloak flying out behind him as they stood on the mudflats looking out to sea. Cathbad had been fairly young, she remembers. He would only be in his late thirties or early forties now.

She explains the situation to Erik, telling him about the disappearance of Scarlet Henderson and the earlier case of Lucy Downey.

Erik whistles softly. 'So. You are helping the police with this case?'

'Well, only slightly. There are some letters, you see. They were sent when Lucy Downey vanished and Nelson thinks… Well, he'll explain if he speaks to you.'

'You sound as if you've got quite friendly with him.'

There is an odd note in Erik's voice. Ruth remembers that he doesn't much like the police.

'I'm not friendly with him,' she hurries to defend herself.

'I don't know him very well.' Erik is silent so she goes on, 'He's odd, complicated. He seems very Northern and brash. Thinks archaeology is rubbish and mythology is nonsense and all New Agers should be shot but, I don't know, there's something else too. He's bright, brighter than you think at first. And he's interesting, I suppose.'

"I look forward to speaking to him,' says Erik politely.

'Am I to understand that I am a suspect?'

Ruth laughs. 'Of course not! It's just… he was asking whether I remembered anyone from the henge dig, anyone who was interested in druids. And I thought of Cathbad.'

'Cathbad.' Erik takes a deep breath, she can hear it all the way across the North Sea. 'Cathbad. I haven't thought of him for years. I wonder what he's doing now.'

'What was his real name?'

'Something Irish, I think. He was into the Celtic stuff too. Malone. Michael Malone.'

'Could he have been involved?'

'Cathbad? God, no. He was a real innocent. A simple soul. I think he really had magic powers, you know.'

After they have said goodbye and Ruth is bustling around, feeding herself and the cats, she reflects that Erik has a way of bringing you up short with something like that.

Mentioning magic in the same quiet authoritative way that he talks about carbon dating or geophysics. Can Erik really believe that Cathbad, alias Michael Malone, has magical powers?

She doesn't know but, before she goes to bed that night, she looks up Malone in the local phone book.