Authors: Elly Griffiths
Dying Fall, A
Sample Chapter from THE OUTCAST DEAD
First U.S. edition
Copyright © 2013 by Elly Griffiths
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Quercus
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
ISBN 978-0-547-79816-5
eISBN 978-0-547-79369-6
v4.0114
For John Maxted and for Sarah and Michael Whitehead
‘That strain again! It had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets
Stealing and giving odour! Enough, no more;
Tis not so sweet now as it was before . . .’
Prologue—Shakespeare,
Twelfth Night
At first he isn’t even scared. Even though his room is full of smoke, and when he reaches the top of the stairs the heat makes him stagger backwards, eyes stinging. It’s only a fire and he knows what to do in a fire, he learnt it at Cubs some thirty years ago. Besides, he’s in a tiny two-storey house, not the Towering Inferno (a film that he must have watched at about the same time, come to think of it). He knows the bedroom window doesn’t open and the bathroom window’s too small but the front door is only a few steps away, just down those stairs. How hard can it be? Still calm, he goes back into the bathroom and soaks a towel, just like Akela told him. He wraps the towel round his face and starts to descend the stairs. It
is
hard, far harder than he thought possible. In the past he has read about people in fires being ‘beaten back by the heat’ and, deep down, he had always thought, ‘Wimps. It’s just hot air. Push through it.’ But this doesn’t seem like air any more, it’s solid, and he has to batter against it with his whole body. After three steps he is exhausted and the heat is just getting stronger. He can’t see much because of the towel, but he can
hear
the fire—a sort of dull rushing sound filling the whole of the downstairs. He can smell it too; it smells industrial and serious.
But he can hear something else. Sirens. Someone must have called the fire brigade. Hallelujah. He’s saved. He falls the last few steps, right onto the front door. The handle is so hot that it sticks to his hand but he holds on and turns with all his might, pushing against the door with his shoulders. The towel slips and suddenly he’s choking. The hall is full of dense black smoke and he’s gasping for breath. With his last atom of strength he hurls himself against the door. Only then does he realise that it’s locked. From the outside.
And now he’s scared.
The phone is ringing when Ruth opens the front door. She pauses on the threshold, wondering whether she should just let it ring. Her friends all have her mobile number. The landline can only mean her mother or someone trying to sell her double glazing, and even though the windows of her cottage rattle in the wind she likes it that way, thank you very much. Her mother will only be ringing to torment her (‘I saw Janice’s daughter the other day, she’s a GP, ever so slim and attractive, and she’s got three children and they all play the violin. How’s the diet going?’). She decides to ignore it but Kate, her eighteen-month-old daughter, runs past her yelling ‘Ring! Ring!’ Kate picks up the phone and says clearly, ‘Piss.’ Cursing Cathbad, Kate’s Druid godfather, who has taught her the all-purpose salutation, ‘Peace’, Ruth snatches the phone away.
‘Hello?’
‘Ruth?’ It’s a woman and she’s laughing. ‘Did someone just say “piss”?’
‘That was Kate.’ Ruth is rifling through her mental list of acquaintances. Who can this be? Someone from the university? A chatty window saleswoman? But she sounds familiar . . .
‘Ruth,’ says the voice, ‘it’s Caz. Carol.’
Carol. One of Ruth’s best friends from her university days. A fellow archaeology student, ex-flatmate, loyal drinking companion and repository of secrets. With a rush of guilt, Ruth realises that when she transferred her contacts onto her new phone last year she must have forgotten Caz. They haven’t spoken for almost three years.
‘I tried you on your mobile,’ Caz is saying, ‘but there was no answer.’
As Ruth’s old mobile is currently reposing at the bottom of the sea, or washed up like flotsam on some North Norfolk beach, this is hardly surprising.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Ruth. ‘I’ve got a new one. I’ve been a bit crap about updating it.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Caz. ‘It’s great to hear your voice.’
‘Great to hear you too.’ Ruth feels a rush of affection for Caz, cool spiky-haired Caz, expert exponent of drinking games, fan of explosive cocktails and dry-stone walls, anarchist and fearless beret-wearer. She’s an accountant now.
‘I’m really sorry, Ruth,’ Caz is saying, and all the laughter has gone from her voice. ‘But I’m ringing with bad news.’
‘Oh God.’ Again Ruth rifles through her list of friends. Is anyone dead, sick? She has just reached the age when her friends start to seem mortal. She watches as Kate staggers into the room carrying Ruth’s cat, Flint. ‘Ahh! My Flinty.’
‘Put him down, Kate.’ Flint is giving her martyred looks over Kate’s shoulder.
‘What?’ says Caz.
‘Sorry. Just talking to Kate.’
‘Oh, I forgot you had a child. How old is she now?’
‘Nearly two.’ She feels stupid saying eighteen months and thinks that Caz, who has three children of her own, doesn’t sound particularly interested.
‘Cute,’ says Caz briefly. ‘The news. It’s Dan. Dan Golding.’
‘Dan? Dan the Man?’
Dan Golding. Dan the man. The coolest archaeologist ever. The Indiana Jones of UCL. Ruth hasn’t heard from him for years but she has always imagined that he’s doing impossibly exciting things, finding the Lost Ark of the Covenant, starring in a Hollywood film, marrying Angelina Jolie.
‘What’s happened to him?’ she asks.
‘He’s dead,’ says Caz. ‘I read it in the paper. He was working at Pendle University and he died in a fire.’
‘Jesus.’ In all her imaginings, Ruth never thought of anything like this. Dan Golding the victim of something as simple and devastating as a fire. And Pendle University? It’s one of the new ones, like North Norfolk, the university where Ruth works. Nothing wrong with that, just that she’d always imagined Dan working at Cambridge or Harvard. Or diving for pearls off some South Sea Island.
‘I didn’t know he was working at Pendle,’ she says stupidly.
‘Nor did I. It’s just round the corner from me.’ Of course, Caz lives up north.
‘It was awful,’ Caz is saying, ‘I just read it in the local paper. Archaeologist Daniel Golding found dead in his Fleetwood cottage. I didn’t even twig at first because I’ve never thought of him as Daniel.’
‘How did the . . . what happened?’
‘The article just said that he’d died in a house fire. The place was completely gutted apparently. They think it was caused by faulty electric wiring.’
Faulty electric wiring. Could Dan the Man really be destroyed by a bit of flex, a badly earthed plug, a few pluses and minuses going the wrong way? It just doesn’t seem possible.
‘Are you sure it was him?’ asks Ruth with sudden hope.
‘Our
Dan?’
‘Yes,’ says Caz sadly. ‘I rang his sister. You remember his sister Miriam, two years above us?’
Ruth dimly remembers a darkly glamorous presence at some of their parties. Miriam Golding. She had heard rumours that she became a model.
‘How did you track her down?’
‘It was easy enough. She’s on Facebook.’
Ruth has never got to grips with Facebook. It’s another aspect of the modern world that seems beyond her. She can’t understand why you’d want to update your friends every time you make a cup of tea. In any case, her friends are a small select group. Smaller now.
‘The funeral’s tomorrow,’ Caz is saying.
‘So soon?’
‘It’s the Jewish tradition, Miriam says.’
Ruth had never even realised that Dan was Jewish. They didn’t talk much about religion when they were students—the meaning of life, yes, everyday beliefs, no. In any case, Ruth had been in full-scale flight from her parents’ evangelism. The G-word would have sent her running for cover.
‘I wish I could be there,’ she says, meaning it.
‘I know. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to send flowers or not, but if I do I’ll send them from both of us.’
‘Thanks, Caz.’
‘Good to speak to you, Ruth. It’s been too long.’
‘Yes, it has.’
‘Maybe you’ll come up to Lytham some time?’
Ruth laughs. ‘Maybe.’ Secretly she’s thinking that, after the events of the past few years, she needs to take Kwells if she goes further afield than the Chinese takeaway.
‘Maybe you’ll come to Norfolk,’ she says.
Now it’s Caz’s turn to laugh. ‘You never know. Take care, Ruth.’
As Ruth makes supper she thinks about the fact that Caz, in the north of England, seems further away than her neighbour, Bob, who’s currently in his native Australia. It’s more than distance, surely. The truth is that when Caz got married (to Pete, another university friend) and had her children, she began to move away from the single, childless Ruth—just as, some eight thousand years ago, the sea levels rose and Britain was separated from the European landmass, the channel river widening into a sea—so that, now Ruth feels herself almost a different species from her erstwhile friend. True, Ruth now has a child of her own (interesting that Caz had forgotten, but then Ruth herself sometimes still finds it hard to believe) but she still doesn’t feel that she is a Mother (capital letters) and certainly she’s never been a Wife. She has her work but Caz, along with most of Ruth’s other classmates, long ago abandoned archaeology for a more lucrative career.
There is something quixotic, almost eccentric, about carrying on digging and sifting and lecturing on flint hand-axes. Come to think of it, Dan was probably the only other member of the class of ’89 still involved in archaeology. Ruth and Dan were the only two students in their year to get firsts but Ruth feels now that she wasn’t really passionate about archaeology until she did a post-graduate degree and met the brilliant and charismatic Professor Erik Anderssen, Erik the Viking. Well, Erik is dead now, and though he still haunts her dreams he does so less and less. But Ruth is still plugging away at archaeology. It is just a surprise that Dan was doing similar badly paid, unglamorous work. And now he, too, is dead.
Ruth makes pasta and they eat at a plastic table in the front garden, a sensible precaution given Kate’s predilection for smearing food over all surrounding surfaces, but also a real joy on evenings like this. It is still light but there is a soft, diluted feel to the air. Beyond Ruth’s fence the long grass is tawny and gold, with the occasional flash of dark blue water as the marsh leads out to the sea. In the distance the sand glimmers like a mirage, and further still the sea comes whispering in to shore, heralded by the seagulls flying high above the waves. Ruth has lived here for thirteen years now and she has never tired of the view, the lonely beauty of the marshland, the high-arching wonder of the sky. The situation is isolated in the extreme; just three cottages perched on a road to nowhere. One neighbour, Bob Woonunga, is an Indigenous Australian poet who spends much of the year on the other side of the world. The other cottage is a holiday home owned by a couple who seem to have forgotten its existence, although their son and his university friends sometimes come down for noisy weekends of surfing and partying. Ruth finds herself quite looking forward to these weekends, although Flint hates the smell of dope and Kate is kept awake all night by N-Dubz remixes.