Dying Fall, A (11 page)

‘Thanks,’ stammers Ruth. ‘But I’ve got my daughter with me and . . . and a friend.’

‘Bring her too,’ says Clayton breezily, leaving Ruth to ponder, once again, on his choice of pronoun.

Nelson rings just when Ruth is getting into her car. Clayton had driven her back to the university and she is keen to get back to Kate. In fact she almost doesn’t answer the phone.

Nelson, typically, goes straight onto the attack.

‘Where have you been?’ he says. ‘I’ve been ringing your home number for days.’

‘I’m on holiday. Just for a week or so.’

Thank God he doesn’t ask where, instead he says, ‘With Katie?’

‘Of course with Kate.’ What does he think she’s done, thinks Ruth, left Kate at home with a week’s supply of nappies? Asked Bob Woonunga to look after her as well as Flint, putting food for them both through the cat flap? And why can’t he ever bloody well get her name right? But she does feel slightly uncomfortable as she’s not sure why she hasn’t told Nelson that she’s in Lancashire. He has a right to know where Kate is, after all. Is it because she thinks it will seem as if she’s stalking him?
Is
she stalking him?

‘I talked to Sandy about your friend Dan Golding.’

‘What did he say?’

‘The fire was definitely arson. Someone pushed petrol-soaked rags through the letterbox.’

‘Oh my God. Why would anyone do that?’

‘Well, Sandy says there are some funny things going on at Pendle University.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Racist groups. Neo-Nazis. White supremacists. They’ve had trouble on campus before.’

‘But why would white supremacists want to kill Dan?’

‘I don’t know. Sandy thought maybe because he was Jewish.’

Ruth thinks of her easy-going friend Dan. Can he really have been killed for this most horrible of reasons? She’s not a stranger to racism, she was brought up in Eltham, a south London borough that has its share of such problems. She had already left home by 1993 when a black student called Stephen Lawrence was killed by a gang of white thugs, but she remembers many smaller incidents, taunts in the playground, graffiti on walls, a general sense of anger, bitterness and frustration. She’s seen racism in Norfolk too, mainly directed towards Eastern European incomers, but somehow she never thought it would happen at Pendle and certainly never to Dan.

‘Anyway,’ Nelson is saying, ‘Sandy’s going to do some investigating. I’ll let you know how he gets on.’

‘Thanks,’ says Ruth. ‘How’s your holiday?’

Nelson grunts. ‘OK. My mum and sisters are driving me mad.’

‘Happy families.’

He gives a short laugh, then says. ‘Funny thing, Ruth. I was at Lytham today and I thought I saw Cathbad.’

‘Cathbad?’ echoes Ruth rather wildly.

‘Yeah. Cathbad pushing a pushchair. Crazy, eh?’

Clayton Henry turns out to live in a converted windmill just outside Kirkham, another picturesque town on the Roman road to Ribchester. Ruth, expecting a few charred sausages washed down with warm wine, is amazed to see a marquee, a bouncy castle and what looks like liveried staff carrying trays of champagne glasses.

‘Bloody hell,’ says Cathbad, as they park behind two Porsches and an Alfa Romeo. ‘Is it a wedding?’

‘He said barbeque,’ says Ruth, getting Kate out of her car seat. Kate looks up at the pink castle swelling out of the side of the windmill.

‘Balloon,’ she says, in wonder.

Ruth feels rather embarrassed, turning up with Kate and Cathbad in tow. She doesn’t know quite why she accepted Clayton’s invitation in the first place. For years, her instinct has been to start inventing excuses at the first mention of the word ‘party’. What on earth has made her become sociable in her old age? Partly it’s curiosity. She wants to meet Dan’s colleagues. Up until now she has been unable to imagine her glamorous friend in the grim surroundings of the cigarette factory or even digging outside the city walls in Ribchester. Maybe the party will shed some light on Dan’s decision to abandon the dreaming spires for a shabby ex-polytechnic. And Cathbad had been keen to come. Unlike Ruth, he enjoys a party and she feels that he deserves some fun. He has been sweet to her over the last few days, looking after Kate, cooking for them all, asking interested questions about the finds at Ribchester. But it makes her sad to see him so muted and domesticated. He has even stopped wearing his cloak. Maybe a party will awaken the old, eccentric, libation-loving Cathbad.

All the same, as they walk towards the windmill, she wishes they didn’t look so much like a
couple.
But Kate insists on holding one of Ruth’s hands and one of Cathbad’s so that they approach the house as a unit—man, woman and child. It’s like an advertisement for a company strong on family values but weak on style. And that’s another thing; she’s wearing the wrong clothes. Cotton trousers and loose top are OK for a family get-together but all wrong for a party with waiters. As they walk through a rose-strewn archway into the garden all Ruth can see are women in flowery dresses. Although it’s a cool summer’s day, there seems to be an abundance of flesh on show—spaghetti straps, Lycra minis, strapless midi dresses. She sees men in striped blazers, women in hats. No one else is wearing beige cotton trousers.

‘Ruth!’ Clayton Henry comes towards them, resplendent in a Hawaiian shirt and white trousers.

‘Hi.’ Ruth has brought a bottle, which seems wrong now. She pushes it into Henry’s hands nonetheless.

‘How kind.’ He looks around for somewhere to put it.

‘This is Cathbad,’ says Ruth, ‘my friend. And Kate, my daughter.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’ Cathbad and Henry exchange a hearty handshake though Ruth thinks there is something watchful about both men, as if they’re summing each other up.

‘Cathbad, did you say?’

‘Yes,’ says Cathbad modestly. ‘It’s a druidical name.’

‘How fascinating,’ says Henry and looks as if he’s going to say more, but at that moment a glamorous woman with long blonde hair floats out of the house.

‘Darling, have you seen the . . .’ She stops.

‘Pippa,’ says Henry, with apparent delight. ‘Do come and meet Ruth and Cathbad and their little girl. This is Pippa, my wife.’

If Clayton Henry is making assumptions about Ruth, Ruth realises that she has been guilty of the same crime. Without thinking much about it she had assumed that Henry, with his soft voice and pointed shoes, must be gay. She could just about imagine him married to some plump Bohemian type but not this willowy beauty with model-girl hair and the kind of shoes that make Ruth nervous. Apart from anything else, Pippa Henry is at least four inches taller than her husband.

She seems very friendly though, kissing Ruth on the cheek and bending down to talk to Kate.

‘Would you like to go on the bouncy castle, sweetheart?’

Kate, perhaps, like her mother, intimidated by glamour, hides behind Ruth. A white fluffy dog appears from nowhere and starts barking furiously. Pippa Henry scoops it into her arms.

‘What a lovely poodle,’ says Ruth, drawing Kate away.

‘Actually it’s a bichon frise.’

Of course it is.

In the end Ruth takes Kate onto the bouncy castle. This is the great thing about having a child, she thinks, grabbing a glass en route. You can escape to play with them and no one thinks you’re unsociable, they just think you’re a great mother. Ruth watches Kate bouncing on the Barbie castle, sips champagne and thinks that she wouldn’t mind if she spent the entire afternoon like this. Across the lawn, she can see Cathbad chatting animatedly with Pippa. He has always been susceptible to pretty women. She hopes Pippa will take his mind off Judy for a bit. Still, she’d better corner him before long and establish who’s driving home. God, they really are getting like a married couple.

‘Ruth?’ says a voice in her ear.

She swings round to see a pleasant-faced man of about her own age, with thinning sandy hair and a hesitant smile.

‘I hope you don’t mind me introducing myself but Professor Henry said that you were a friend of Dan’s.’

‘Yes, I was,’ says Ruth, thinking that the past tense is both sad and appropriate. She was a friend of Dan’s in the past, when they were both young.

‘I’m Sam,’ says the man, extending a hand. ‘Sam Elliot. I was a friend of his too. I just can’t believe that he’s gone.’

‘Nor can I,’ says Ruth. ‘I hadn’t seen him for ages but even so . . .’ Her voice dies away. Suddenly, surprisingly, she feels close to tears and has to cover up by checking on Kate, who is sitting on the very edge of the pink castle, rocking to and fro while the other children caper around her.

When she turns back, Sam Elliot is also looking sombre but he smiles when he sees her looking at him. His face isn’t made for sadness, all the lines go upwards. Ruth can easily imagine him being friends with Dan.

‘This is quite a party,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ says Sam. ‘It’s a yearly event, Clayton’s barbeque. He always has a big do at Christmas as well.’

Ruth tries to imagine Dan at one of Clayton Henry’s parties, playing the piano, drinking champagne, flirting with the prettiest women. She remembers him as something of a party animal and says as much to Sam.

‘Funny,’ he says. ‘I think of Dan as rather quiet. Always friendly but a bit aloof until you got to know him. Were you at university with him?’

‘Yes, at UCL.’

‘I was at Leeds,’ says Sam. ‘It seems a hundred years ago now. Mind you, a hundred years is nothing to an archaeologist, is it?’

‘Are you an archaeologist?’

Sam shakes his head. ‘I teach modern history. I was one of Dan’s colleagues. As Clayton may have told you, we cover everything from Boadicea to Adolf Hitler.’

‘I’m a teacher too,’ says Ruth. ‘I teach forensic archaeology at North Norfolk.’

‘I know,’ says Sam. ‘Clayton said you’d come to look at Dan’s discovery.’

‘Oh, do you know about that?’ asks Ruth, surprised. From Clayton’s manner, she had assumed that the whole thing was a deadly secret although, come to think of it, Dan could never have managed an excavation that size without some help.

Sam’s reply confirms this. ‘I was on the first dig with Dan,’ he says. ‘We were all volunteers then. Later he got a grant and was able to get the professionals in. It was really exciting though, when we first realised that there was something important buried there.’

Ruth knows this excitement well. She remembers when they had first discovered the wooden henge on the beach in Norfolk. The incredible feeling of something rising from the ground, something that had been hidden from sight for thousands of years, the sense of looking at the world through ancient eyes. All the same, she wonders exactly how much Sam knows.

‘Did he tell you about the bones?’ she asks.

‘Bones?’ says Sam. ‘Oh, they found a tomb, didn’t they? That was later. When I was digging Dan was just happy to have found the temple. The Temple of the Raven God. He was going to write a book about it.’

So Sam didn’t know about King Arthur. For reasons of his own, Dan had kept that quiet. But he had still been excited enough to think about writing a book. Did he start the book and, if so, where is it now? On the missing laptop, she supposes.

‘The Temple of the Raven God?’ says a mocking voice. ‘What nonsense are you talking now, Sammy?’

A man and a woman are walking towards them. They look like something out of
Brideshead Revisited,
the man in white trousers and shirt, the woman in a short, rose-patterned dress that makes Ruth feel about a hundred stone.

‘Hi, Elaine,’ says Sam without enthusiasm. ‘Hello, Guy.’

‘Aren’t you going to introduce us?’ says Elaine. Close up, she isn’t so gorgeous. Her hair is dyed blonde and her eyes are too close together.

‘This is Ruth Galloway from the University of North Norfolk.’

‘Oh,’ says Elaine, eyes widening. ‘The famous archaeology expert.’

Ruth registers the mockery but elects to take this at face value.

‘That’s right,’ she says.

‘You’ve come to look at the bones,’ says Guy. His voice is an elaborate upper-class drawl, with traces of Lancashire still clinging to the vowels. Ruth wonders if he was really christened Guy.

‘I didn’t know there were any bones,’ says Sam.

‘Sammy doesn’t know anything about real history,’ says Elaine to Ruth, ‘he only knows about the Second World War and the rise of communism in China. Stuff like that.’

Sam laughs but Ruth thinks he looks rather hurt.

‘It’s a really important discovery,’ says Guy. Something in his tone makes Clayton Henry, who is a few feet away, look over towards them. Ruth thinks that he is going to intervene, but at that moment Kate causes a distraction by falling off the bouncy castle and bursting into noisy tears.

Elaine and Guy are post-graduate students. Clayton explains this as they eat lunch in the marquee. There are tables inside too but Ruth elected for the outdoors in case Kate starts one of her food-throwing fits. At the moment, though, she is being angelic, eating potato salad and actually using her spoon. She looks like Little Miss Muffet.

‘We don’t get many graduate students these days, I’m afraid,’ says Clayton, throwing a piece of chicken skin to the drooling bichon frisé. ‘Young people just aren’t interested in history because there’s no money in it. But Guy is very able. He’s ex-Oxbridge actually. Could have had his pick of post-grad places but he chose us. Never really knew why.’ He laughs heartily.

‘What about Elaine?’

Clayton must have detected something in her tone because he looks up, the shrewdness of his expression not completely undermined by the blob of coronation chicken on his chin.

‘You mustn’t take Elaine the wrong way. She’s got an odd manner but she’s a dear girl underneath, a real sweetie.’

Ruth thinks she will reserve judgement on this but nothing in the prancing figure she can see laughing uproariously in the garden, surrounded by admiring men, makes her think ‘sweetie’ exactly.

‘They were talking about Dan’s dig,’ she says. ‘The Temple of the Raven God.’

‘Guy was very involved with the investigations. They both were.’

‘What about Sam?’