The Outcast Dead (17 page)

‘Ruth?’

Shona is looking at her, shielding her eyes from the sun.

‘Mmm.’

‘What’s going on with you and the American guy? The one that looks like George Clooney.’

‘He doesn’t look like George Clooney.’

‘He looks more like George Clooney than anyone else in Norfolk.’

Ruth has to acknowledge the truth of this. ‘Nothing’s going on,’ she says. ‘He’s working on the programme, that’s all.’

Last night Ruth had opened Frank’s present. It was a book of poems, leather-bound and old-looking. ‘Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson.’ Ruth had sat looking at it for some time. She hasn’t read poetry since A-Level English, many years ago. What was Frank trying to tell her with this gift? That she was a fellow intellectual? That they share an interest in the much-maligned Victorians? Or maybe it was just an old book that he had lying around.

‘Nothing’s going on,’ she says again.

‘You seemed to be having a very cosy chat last night.’

‘We were talking about Jemima Green.’

Shona pulls a face. ‘I don’t know how you can bear to think about that monster. Killing all those poor children. She must have been pure evil.’

‘Actually,’ says Ruth, ‘there was a good chance that she was innocent. She was only convicted of one murder and there was just circumstantial evidence against her.’

Shona stops Louis from upending the thermos. ‘You’re joking! What about that “Don’t cry little darling” stuff? What about the body snatchers and the devil worshipping?’

‘A myth grew up around her. She was a scary-looking woman with a hook for a hand. Who was going to believe that she was innocent?’

Ruth thinks of Mr G and of the The Book of Dead Babies. She read a few of the poems this morning (she couldn’t face it at night) and, while on the one hand they are rather touching expressions of quasi-maternal love, on the other hand they scare the hell out of her.

‘Well, it’ll make a good TV programme,’ says Shona. ‘Mother Hook was innocent, shock horror.’

‘I don’t know how the finished film will end up,’ says Ruth. ‘Dani says she wants to tell the truth about Jemima Green but Corinna keeps putting in all this stuff about evil and monstrous mother figures.’

‘Corinna was lovely,’ says Shona. ‘I had a long chat with her last night. She quite understood when I told her that all I really wanted to do was to stay home with Louis. I really hate leaving him at the nursery.’

Ruth knows that Shona hadn’t wanted to return to work after her maternity leave but Phil had insisted, saying that they needed the money. She can just imagine Corinna sympathising with this viewpoint, though calling her lovely seems to be stretching it a bit.

‘And she’s so gorgeous,’ Shona is saying. ‘I hope I look just as good at her age.’

Actually, by Ruth’s calculations Corinna isn’t much older than Shona, but Ruth has noticed before that her friend has a tendency to round figures downwards. Shona always describes herself as ‘mid-thirties’ but she is, in fact, almost exactly the same age as Ruth.

‘Corinna wears a wig,’ she says now. She learnt this interesting fact from Dex the cameraman.

Shona ignores this. ‘She was telling me how she took a career break to bring her children up. I wish I could do that.’

‘You’d miss work,’ says Ruth. When she went back to work after having Kate she had cried at the sight of her
office with its sign on the door, ‘Dr Ruth Galloway, Head of Forensic Archaeology’.

‘Children are the most important things in the world,’ says Shona passionately. ‘They’re so innocent and pure.’

As she says this, there is a loud cry from Kate. Louis has jumped on her sandcastle and is in the process of attacking her with his spade.

*

Google Earth is a wonderful thing, reflects Cathbad. He has never been to Judy’s house but now he knows it in detail. The square of garden, the red front door, the dwarf conifers separating it from its semi-detached neighbour. Judy’s jeep is parked outside. According to Ruth she has a new car now. Usually Ruth doesn’t mention Judy and he doesn’t ask, but this piece of information slipped out and was grasped greedily. The image was obviously taken in winter – the trees behind the house are bare – now the garden will probably be full of flowers. In the photo there’s a skip outside. Maybe Darren was doing some home decorating. He looks the type who’s handy with a socket set. Is Judy really happy with him? The last time they spoke, when Cathbad told her that he was staying in Lancashire, Judy had said, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll cope.’ Is that what she’s doing?
Coping?
He hopes not, he wants so much more for her than that. He wants her to be wildly, ecstatically happy. He knows that despite her reserve Judy is capable of such heights. Only a really passionate person could be so restrained. He stares at the house as if by the intensity of his longing he could conjure Judy and his son,
standing in the front garden and waving at him. But the little house is still, a tiny dot in the vast Google universe.

*

Tim is at the gym. He goes to the gym every day before work, but on Saturdays he has a proper session, ending with a sauna and a swim. He takes his time, pausing to stretch between machines, setting himself targets and limits. It’s not as if he has anything else to do, after all. Tim doesn’t regret the move to Norfolk, his career was stagnating in Blackpool and he wanted to be nearer his family, but he does miss his friends. In Lancashire he still used to see the old university crowd and there was always something to do on a Saturday night: cinema, pub, dinner dates. Increasingly, though, he found himself attending house-warming parties and even christenings as yet more friends succumbed to marriage and domesticity. At nearly thirty, Tim still thinks of himself as a young man, far too young to be thinking about duvet sets and the Ikea catalogue. He’s had affairs – short, intense periods of love and lust – but he’s never met anyone with whom he’d want to visit a DIY store. ‘Maybe, in Norfolk …’ his mother had said hopefully, but Tim thinks it’s unlikely, given that he’s hardly spoken to a woman outside of work.

In fact he doesn’t really do anything except work and go to the gym. Weekends stretch ahead of him: workout, then solitary lunch in the pub, then maybe a run before settling down to an evening of crap TV. Sundays are the worst; he even finds himself feeling nostalgic for the days when his mum used to force him to go to church. One
Saturday Clough did invite him to play five-a-side football. Tim enjoyed it immensely, the tough (frequently filthy) game, the drinks afterwards, the camaraderie and the banter. But Clough never asked him again. Now Tim wonders if he blew it by scoring a hat-trick. He knows that Clough regards him as a threat, but Tim is the new boy with everything to prove. Clough and Judy are formidable officers, he saw that immediately, and there’s a tight bond between them. Tanya did make overtures of friendship but Tim distrusts her. She’s too obviously on the make and, besides, he saw her in the gym once. Any woman who can do that many sit-ups is borderline unhinged. Nelson is a good boss – compared to Sandy MacLeod he’s the Angel Gabriel – but he’s never shown any tendency to favour Tim over his existing officers. Tim doesn’t want favours, all he wants is the chance to prove himself. He’s as ambitious as Tanya, it’s just that he’s learnt to hide it better. His childhood in Essex was fairly tough. His brothers were always getting into trouble but Tim kept his head down. He was a bright student, determined to go to university and escape the fate of most of his schoolfriends (dead-end job, dead-end relationship, living all your life in the suburb where you were born). But that doesn’t mean that he’s a wimp, as Sandy used to imply. Privately he thinks that he could take any of his new colleagues in a fight, except, perhaps, Tanya. In the gym, though, he can let his aggression show. He does so now, straining every muscle on the rowing machine in an effort to beat his previous best time, bringing
his chest forward to his knees, shaking the sweat from his eyes.

When he gets up, he thinks he might have overdone it, he is out of breath and his legs are buckling. Time to stop. He heads for the changing room, has a freezing shower and changes into swimming trunks. Fifty lengths and then he deserves a half-pint with his lunch. As he pushes open the doors to the pool area, he is hit by the smell of chlorine and the sound of screaming. That’s the worst thing about Saturdays, the pool is full of children, jumping in, having races or just bobbing up and down in arm-bands. The mothers, hair undisturbed by the breast-stroke, chat and gossip at the side of the pool, completely ignoring their offspring. His mother would never let him run wild like that but Tim can’t ever remember seeing his mother at a swimming pool. She would certainly never have been able to afford the prices at a place like this.

Tim makes his way to the fast lane, a segregated haven for real swimmers. As he does so, he sees a woman getting out at the other end. She’s got a great figure, he notices immediately, though he doesn’t think she’s young. The woman takes off her bathing cap and shakes out long blonde hair. She’s walking towards Tim and he delays his entry into the water so that he can get a proper look. She’s seriously good-looking, tall and statuesque like a young Jerry Hall. She’s wearing a simple black costume that leaves nothing to the imagination and, as she walks, she smoothes the material across her buttocks. Bloody hell. Good at guessing ages, Tim thinks that she’s in her
late thirties but she walks like a goddess. As she passes Tim she smiles. He dives into the deep end, puzzled yet pleased. Does he know the woman or is it possible that she was giving him a modest come-on? Then, as he reaches the other end, the awful realisation dawns. He knows where he has seen the goddess before. When he first joined the King’s Lynn force, Nelson invited him to his house for Sunday lunch. A proper roast with all the trimmings. Cooked, he now realises, by the blonde bombshell in the black swimming costume.

*

The rain starts just when Ruth is putting Kate in the car. She doesn’t mind too much. They’ve had a good day but Louis has punched Kate just one too many times and now they’ve both had enough. The lowering clouds give Ruth the excuse she needs to set off soon after lunch. Left to Shona they would have had to have a cream tea and then a fish and chip supper in Cromer. Ruth remembers this trait in Shona from their child-free days. She was always the last to leave a party, the one who suggested making a night of it, having breakfast on the beach, staying over until Monday. Now she’s the last to leave theme parks, and if she’s invited out to supper she’ll take Louis with her, feeding him pasta and letting him fall asleep on the seat beside her. But Ruth knows that she herself has become boring. She likes Kate to be in bed by seven, and she sitting on the sofa with Flint by eight. Even after a day in the sun, she’s longing to be home with a cup of tea. That’s what being forty-three does to you.

‘What a shame,’ says Shona, putting up a spotted umbrella. ‘We could have made a real day of it.’

‘We had fun though,’ says Ruth, feeling guilty. ‘We must do it again soon. Are you going home too?’

‘Oh I thought we might just walk in the rain for a while,’ says Shona. ‘What do you think, Lou Lou?’ Louis glares at her balefully from under his rain cover.

‘Home,’ chants Kate. ‘Home, home, home.’

Ruth raises her hand in farewell and they are free. She watches Shona shrinking in her mirror, a tiny flowery figure. If Ruth were a better friend, would she have stayed and walked in the rain too? But there’s only so much of Louis that Kate can take and, if she’s honest, only so much of Shona that Ruth can take. Take Shona’s admiration for Corinna, for example. Ruth can see that Corinna is glamorous and successful but how could Shona actually seem to enjoy her company? Maybe beautiful people are drawn to each other. Certainly Corinna has never shown the least interest in Ruth, even when they are filming together she wrinkles her nose at Ruth’s untidy hair and her laborious scientific explanations. Ruth knows that Corinna would be happier appearing with someone like Shona, they could discuss the evil of Mother Hook while the camera rested lovingly on their glossy hair and razor-sharp cheekbones. Well, bad luck. It’s Ruth who is the expert and Corinna is stuck with her – cagoule and all.

And Ruth had resented Corinna’s comments about working mothers. It’s all right for her, with unlimited funds and probably a supportive husband (Ruth is sure
there’s a husband in the background somewhere). She can afford to take a career break and spend quality time with her supremely gifted offspring. Ruth doesn’t have a husband and she has to work. Of course, she also wants to work, which complicates things. She’s ashamed to find herself thinking that Kate is probably brighter than Corinna’s children anyway.

It’s raining heavily by the time they reach home. An afternoon for cuddling down on the sofa and watching TV. And that’s just what they do. Ruth puts on a DVD of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
and soon they are lost in snowy Narnia. Mr Tumnus reminds Ruth strongly of Cathbad. She should give him a ring. She knows that he’s missing Judy. He never asks about her but there’s a longing in his voice when he mentions Norfolk or the police or anything from his old life. And Ruth misses Cathbad. It’s unfair, she knows, but she secretly blames Judy for Cathbad’s self-imposed exile. Why did she have to have an affair with him anyway? Why does everything have to be so complicated?

The phone rings and Ruth is convinced that it will be Mr Tumnus himself. Instead it is someone far more surprising.

‘Hi Ruth. It’s Simon.’

‘Simon!’

Simon. Her brother. The top hat from the Monopoly games. Why on earth is he ringing her?

She tries to keep this question out of her voice. ‘Good to hear from you.’

‘Yeah, well …’ She can hear Simon shuffling, as he always does when he’s embarrassed. ‘It’s been a long time. Did you get my birthday card?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ Simon always remembers Ruth’s birthday although she often forgets his.

‘Did you have a good day?’ he asks now.

‘Yes. I went out for a meal with some friends.’

‘Good,’ says Simon heartily. Then, after a slight pause, ‘I was wondering, were you planning to come down to see Mum and Dad this summer?’