Ruth Galloway (24 page)

‘I thought I was different, of course. Like all the other silly little cows, I thought I was the one he really loved. He said he'd never felt like that before, he said he'd leave Magda, that we'd get married, have children …' She stops, biting her lip.

And then Ruth remembers Shona's first abortion, just a few months after the henge dig.

‘The baby …' she begins.

‘Was Erik's,' says Shona wearily. ‘Yes. I think it was then that I realised he didn't mean any of it. When I told him I was pregnant, he just went mad, started pressuring me to have an abortion. Do you know, I actually thought he'd be pleased.'

Ruth says nothing. She thinks of Erik talking about his grown-up children: ‘You have to set them free.' Well, he hadn't wanted this one set free. As a fervent believer in a woman's right to choose, Ruth doesn't condemn Shona for having an abortion. But she does condemn Erik for his deceit, his hypocrisy, his …

‘Poor Ruth,' says Shona, looking at her with a strange, dispassionate smile. ‘All this is worse for you. You always admired him so much.'

‘Yes,' says Ruth hoarsely. ‘Yes I did.'

‘He's still a great archaeologist,' says Shona. ‘I'm still
friends with him. And with Magda,' she adds with a slight laugh. ‘I guess it's just the way he is.'

‘I guess so,' says Ruth tightly.

Shona rises, picking up her silver jacket. At the door she turns. ‘Don't blame either of us too much, Ruth,' she says.

*

When Shona has gone, Ruth sits down at the table. She is amazed to find that she is shaking. What is so surprising about finding out that two grown-up people have had an affair? Alright, Erik was married, but these things happen as she knows all too well. Why does she feel let down, angry,
betrayed
?

She supposes that she must really have been in love with Erik all these years. She remembers when she first met him, as a graduate student in Southampton, the way that he seemed to take her mind apart, shuffle it and put it back together a different shape. He changed her view of everything: archaeology, landscape, nature, art, relationships. She remembers him saying, ‘The human desire is to live, to cheat death, to live forever. It is the same over all the ages. It is why we build monuments to death so that they live on after we die.' Did Erik's desire to live simply mean that he could do whatever he wanted?

And when she met Magda she had been so pleased. She had thought nobody could be good enough for Erik but Magda was. She had loved their relationship, that affectionate companionship, so different from her parents' stilted formality. She could never imagine Erik and Magda calling each other Mummy and Daddy or driving to a garden centre on a Sunday afternoon. They lived the perfect life, climbing mountains, sailing, spending the
winters writing and researching and the summers digging. She remembers the log cabin by the lake in Norway, the meals eaten on the deck, the hot tub, the evenings eating, drinking and talking. Talking. That's what she remembers most about Erik and Magda. They had always talked, argued sometimes, but always they had listened to each other's views. Ruth remembers many times listening to Erik and Magda as, glasses of wine in their hands and the Northern lights shining above them, they had fitted their differing theories together so that they came up with something new, better, more complete. Not for them the moment described by Peter: ‘We just ran out of things to say to each other.'

Ruth is not stupid. She knows that she created idealised parents in Magda and Erik and that is why she feels so let down now. And if she was also secretly in love with Erik, well that just makes a perfect Freudian hole-in-one. What upsets her most, she thinks, looking out over the rain-sodden marshland, is that she had thought she was special. Even if Erik had not fancied her, he had thought her an especially talented student. On the henge dig he had continually deferred to her. ‘Ruth will understand this even if the rest of you don't' implied that he and she shared a special understanding. Ruth, he had said, had ‘an archaeologist's sense', a quality which, apparently, cannot be taught. Erik's approval has carried Ruth through many difficult years, insulated her against Phil's patronising indifference, comforted her when she never quite seemed able to get that book proposal down on paper.

She knows it is childish, but Ruth feels that she needs to be reminded of Erik's good opinion, so she takes down her
copy of his book
The Shivering Sand
. She opens it at the title page. There it is, in black and white.
To Ruth, my favourite pupil
.

Ruth looks at the words for a long moment. It is as if she has suddenly seen a gross misshapen shadow on the wall – the horns and the tail and the cloven hoofs. Blindly, almost staggering, she gets up and goes to the desk where she keeps her copies of the Lucy Downey letters. Hands shaking, she leafs through the letters until she gets to the two that are handwritten.

She lays them on the table next to Erik's dedication. The handwriting is the same.

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.'

Nelson has had a tough day. But then again, he almost can't remember a time when his life didn't consist of defending himself against people who wanted him sacked, trying to motivate an increasingly depressed team and ignoring Michelle's demands to come home while at the same time trying to catch a murderer. He had thought that Scarlet's funeral yesterday must be the lowest point. Jesus, that little white coffin, Scarlet's brothers and sisters looking so shocked and vulnerable in their new black clothes, seeing Lucy Downey's parents again and feeling how he had let them down. And then having to stand up and spout all that stuff about the resurrection and the life. He had caught sight of Ruth in the congregation and wondered if she was thinking what he was thinking: the letter writer would love this.

And then there is Ruth. He knows he shouldn't have gone to bed with her. It was totally unprofessional as well as wrong. He has betrayed Michelle, whom he loves. He has, in fact, been unfaithful on two other occasions but he comforts himself that these were brief flings which didn't mean anything. Did Ruth mean something then? She's not really his type. But, that night, he has to admit, was something else. At that moment, Ruth seemed to understand him totally, in a way that Michelle has never done. She
seemed to understand, to forgive him and offer herself to him in a way that even now threatens to bring tears to his eyes. Why had she done it? What does she see in him? He's not intellectual enough for her. She likes poncy professors with theories about Iron Age pottery, not uneducated Northern policemen.