THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END (3 page)

Cathbad, wearing white robes to honour the good spirits, had accompanied Ruth to hospital. ‘First babies take ages,’ he had assured her. ‘How do you know?’ Ruth had shouted, rent by pain which seemed both unbearable and continuous. ‘I have had a daughter,’ said Cathbad with dignity. ‘You didn’t have her,’ Ruth yelled, ‘your girlfriend did.’ Cathbad had ignored Ruth’s yelling, swearing, and assertions that she hated all men and him in particular. He had scattered herbs on her, walked around the bed muttering incantations, and finally had just held her hand.

‘She’ll be hours yet,’ said the midwives cheerfully. But Kate had been born at ten minutes past midnight, thus avoiding Halloween and arriving in time for All Saints’ Day.

‘I don’t hold with all that Catholic nonsense,’ said her mother, when Ruth informed her of this fact. Ruth’s parents were both Born Again Christians and considered that they alone of all denominations knew The Truth – a delusion which, as Ruth could have told them, they probably shared with every religious cult since the Assyrians first started burying bits of pottery alongside their ancestors, just to be on the safe side.

When Ruth had looked down at her daughter’s furious little face, she had been surprised by a rush of recognition. Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t this. The books had talked about Mother Love, about euphoria and joyfulness and feeding on demand. Ruth was too exhausted to feel euphoric. She wasn’t even sure if, at that moment, what she felt was love. All she felt was that she knew her baby: she wasn’t a stranger, she was Ruth’s daughter. That feeling carried her through the agonies of breast-feeding (nothing like the bucolic descriptions in the book), through the loneliness that engulfed her as soon as her parents had left, through the sleepless nights and zombie-like days that followed. She knew her baby. They were in this thing together.

Her mother had been pleased with the choice of name. ‘Short for Catherine, just like your Auntie Catherine in Thornton Heath’. ‘It’s not short for anything,’ Ruth had retorted, but she found that, increasingly, when she spoke, people tended not to hear. This was a shock for Ruth, who has been a university lecturer for all her working life. People
used to pay to listen to her. Now, unless she was talking specifically about the baby, her mouth simply opened and shut like one of those nodding dogs in cars.

Cathbad had also liked the name. ‘After Hecate, the witch goddess. Very powerful magic.’ Her friend Max, an expert in Roman History, had made the same point. ‘Hecate was sometimes called the child nurse, you know.’ Ruth did know, but Kate was not named after Hecate or Auntie Catherine or Santa Caterina of Siena (suggested by a Catholic priest of Ruth’s acquaintance). She was simply Kate because Ruth liked the name. It was attractive without being twee, strong without being hard. You could hear it prefaced by Doctor or followed by MP. At the same time it was cute enough for a baby.

The future Dr Kate Galloway continues to yell in the back seat as Ruth makes for home. She lives outside King’s Lynn, on the North Norfolk coast, not in one of the many picturesque seaside resorts but in an isolated cottage facing a desolate but beautiful stretch of land known as the Saltmarsh. ‘You won’t be staying in that awful house after you have the baby, will you?’ her mother had asked. ‘Why not?’ Ruth had answered.

She loves the house, loves the view that stretches over the marshes into nothingness, loves the expanse of sky and the sound of the sea, loves the birds that darken the evening sky, their wings turned to pink by the setting sun. But she has to admit that the winter was hard. She spent Christmas with her parents in south London and was only too glad to leave, having had enough of praying before meals and listening to her sister-in-law talk about calories. But when
she and Kate were finally home, alone in the little house with the wind roaring in from the sea, she had felt a slight but none the less real stab of fear. They were on their own; they truly were in this thing together. Ruth’s cottage is one of three but one house is empty and the other is owned by weekenders who visit less and less often now that their children have grown up. Her nearest neighbours are in the village, a mile away along a dark, exposed road raised up over the flat marshland, and the houses were mostly boarded up for the winter.

Throughout the whole of that January, Ruth and Kate scarcely left the house. Ruth was sustained by Radio 4 (the two episodes of
The Archers
were oases of delight in her day) and by watching Kate. She hadn’t realised that a baby would change day by day. One day Kate could smile – she mostly smiled at Ruth’s cat, Flint – the next gurgle, and on one joyous occasion she slept through the night. Soon she was greeting her mother with a whole-body wriggle and delighted waving of the legs. This probably saved Ruth’s sanity.

When, in February, Cathbad arrived to celebrate Imbolc, the coming of Spring (slightly premature as there was still snow on the ground), he astounded Ruth by asking her when she was going to return to work. Her hermit-like existence had become her only reality; her world had shrunk to four walls and a computer screen. But when Cathbad mentioned work she realised how much she missed it. She missed her students and her colleagues but most of all she missed the archaeology, the painstaking sifting of evidence, the age-old puzzles of bones and soil, the delight in discovery.
Leaving Kate with her friend Shona, who seemed to have bought the whole of Toys R Us for the occasion, she went to see Phil. Then she came home, ordered some work clothes on-line (her pre-baby clothes had become mysteriously tight) and set about weaning Kate onto a bottle. This last task proved so difficult and emotional that it severely tested Ruth’s new-found resolve. But she persevered, and by early March she was back at work.

For years Ruth has been a fan of
Woman’s Hour
but it is only now that she begins to see the point of all those features about ‘juggling’ and the impossibility of ‘having it all’. With a little application, it was perfectly possible to put adequate childcare provisions in place. What she hadn’t bargained for were the emotions. She felt terrible about leaving Kate, yet when she entered her office for the first time, her own office with her name on the door, she felt a relief so strong that she almost cried (and Ruth doesn’t, on the whole, do tears). If she is late to pick up Kate, she feels guilty of almost every crime against humanity. She longs to be with her baby, but when she is she’s assailed by a feeling almost of panic. Will she ever escape or will she be trapped in the mother world forever?

Now, she parks her rusty car outside her cottage. The security light comes on, illuminating the overgrown garden and the scrub bushes blown flat by the wind. Kate has fallen asleep and, though this means she probably now won’t sleep again before midnight, Ruth is grateful. She carries the car seat into the house and places it in the middle of the sitting room. Flint comes up and sniffs Kate’s face. Ruth carries
him away. Her mother is full of stories about cats sitting on babies and suffocating them but Flint’s attitude so far has been one of detached friendliness and Ruth relies too much on his companionship to suspect him of sinister motives. She feeds him, makes tea and toast for herself and prepares to enjoy an hour’s peace.

The phone rings as soon as she has sat down. It is Nelson.

‘Hallo. How are you doing?’

‘I’m fine. Where are you ringing from? Are you back?’

A hollow laugh. ‘No, I’m still here in bloody Lanzarote listening to the most boring man in the world talk about hard drives.’

‘Sounds like fun.’

‘You’ve no idea.’

There is an expensive international pause.

‘How’s Katie?’

‘Kate.’

Impatient grunt. ‘Is she okay?’

‘She’s fine. She’s sleeping.’ From where she is sitting Ruth can see Kate’s little chest rising and falling. Though she no longer checks every ten minutes to see if her daughter is breathing, she still does it every hour.

‘How’s the childminder? Working out all right?’

‘Jesus. You ran a police check on her. Twice.’

‘Things can get past those checks.’

‘She’s fine. Not a murderer or a child molester. Fine.’

There is another silence while they both think of people who turned out to be not quite what they seemed. Ruth has assisted the police on two murder cases, both involving children.

‘I’ll be home tomorrow.’

But Ruth knows that home does not mean home to her.

‘It’s very cold in Norfolk,’ she says, dampeningly.

‘Christ Almighty. It’s always cold in bloody Norfolk.’

He rings off and Ruth sits on the sofa thinking complicated and uncomfortable thoughts. When Trace rings and tell her that they have discovered a mass grave at Broughton Sea’s End, it’s a relief as much as anything.

The next day is Saturday, and at low tide Ruth, Ted and Trace walk along the beach to Broughton Sea’s End. Kate has been left with Sandra for the morning. ‘It’s no trouble,’ said Sandra but Ruth feels that it is. Weekdays are all right because that is the arrangement but weekends are an imposition. Ruth also has an absolute dread of asking for favours. She hates ringing up and saying, in that special wheedling voice, ‘Can I ask … would you mind … you’ve saved my life … you’re a star.’ She’d rather cut the crap and do the thing herself but, as she’s finding out, being a working mother means asking for favours. She stumps across the sand in a bad mood.

It is a grey morning. The mist still lingers inland, but at the edge of the sea the air is cold and clear. It’s hard going, walking over pebbles and rocks encrusted with tiny, sharp mussel shells. Ted is almost unforgivably breezy for a man who hasn’t had a drink yet. He exclaims at unusual rock formations, finds a piece of fool’s gold and a coin, worn completely smooth by the sea. He throws floundering crabs back into the water and writes his name in the sand. Trace
walks in silence, occasionally taking notes. Ruth finds this rather irritating but she is grateful not to have to make small talk.

As they round the headland, Sea’s End House towers above them, grey against the grey sky. With the rest of the coastline hidden by fog, it seems to float out into the sea like a doomed ocean liner, lights blazing as it heads towards the ice-floe.

‘Welcome to the end of the line,’ says Ted, with undiminished good humour.

Ruth looks up at the cliffs. The stone is sandy, soft and crumbly at the edges where it has been eaten away in bitesized chunks. ‘Sandstone,’ she says.

‘Yeah,’ Ted agrees. ‘Sandstone all along this stretch. That’s why erosion’s so bad.’

‘There was a sea wall,’ says Trace, ‘but it disappeared years ago. There are the remains, over there.’

They all look out to sea where, about a hundred yards away, two or three large boulders are sticking out of the water like giant stepping stones.

‘Trouble is,’ says Ted, ‘most of the defences were built in Victorian times. The cliffs behind them were too steep. When the walls went, there were no banks or anything to slow the tide down.’

‘Should have been fixed,’ says Trace. ‘Even fifty years ago there would still have been time.’

Ted shrugs. ‘It’s global warning, innit? Seas are rising and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ He grins happily as he says this.

Ruth walks towards the cliffs. She can see there has been
a recent rock fall, rubble and stone have spilled out onto the beach and the cliff face is streaked black and grey.

‘Round here,’ says Ted.

In the furthest, most inaccessible corner of the beach, there is a gap in the cliff, a narrow cleft running from the coarse grass at the top to the beach below. This has been partly filled with rubble from the cliff fall but Ruth can see where some of the debris has been cleared away. She approaches carefully. ‘Look first,’ her mentor, Erik Anderssen, used to say. ‘Look, then plot, then dig. You will never get that first look again.’ She takes pictures of the cliffs and the rock fall and draws a map in her notebook. Then with Ted’s help she clears away some of the bigger stones. In the narrow space between the two cliff walls, the sand has been worn away, exposing something that looks at first like more stone, smooth and white.

Bones.

Ruth leans forward. She can see at once that there must be several bodies buried here. The bones are piled on top of each other but she can make out at least three thigh bones. Long, sturdy bones, which means the bodies may well be male. There is also a faint smell of rotten eggs. For a moment Ruth feels dizzy, remembering other mass graves, bones white in the sun. She takes a deep breath. She must plot this find, mark where the bodies are lying. ‘Sometimes,’ Erik used to say, ‘the most important thing is the direction.’

‘What do you think?’ comes Ted’s voice.

‘There are several bodies here,’ says Ruth. ‘We need to tell the coroner.’

‘Do you think they’re recent then?’ asks Ted.

‘There’s a good chance they’re recent.’

Ruth thinks that she has seen hair and teeth – signs that the bodies could be fairly modern but, then again, only the year before last she found a perfectly preserved body buried in a peat bog, that turned out to be over two thousand years old. But peat is alkaline, which preserves bone; sand is acidic. Digging on sandy sites, you are unlikely to find human remains because the bones have been eaten away. If these bones, buried in sandy soil, are still in relatively good condition, they may well be modern.

‘Dave said he’d tell the coroner on Monday,’ says Trace in an off-hand voice.

Ruth looks at her curiously. So it’s true that Trace is dating Dave Clough. Rather her than me, she thinks.

‘We should do it today,’ she argues.

‘Isn’t the boss man back on Monday?’ says Ted. ‘Maybe they’re waiting for him.’

‘He’ll be jet-lagged,’ says Trace. ‘Probably won’t be in until Tuesday.’

‘He’s only in Lanzarote,’ says Ruth.

There is a short silence.

Ruth steps over the wall of rubble. The gap between the cliffs is only about a metre wide, getting narrower as it goes back. It is much colder here and the air smells dank. Ruth shivers, and not entirely from the cold. Who would bury bodies here, in this inaccessible spot? She is willing to bet that it wasn’t for any good reason. She has her excavation kit with her but she doesn’t want to do any digging yet. Just look, says the voice in her head. If Trace is right about
the tides, when they clear away the rocks this grave site will be destroyed altogether. All the more reason to make proper notes now. The bodies are lying north to south. She thinks that they are in correct anatomical position, stretched out, back-to-back. Taking her trowel, she scrapes away a little of the sand. There are definitely two bodies below, maybe more.