Dying Fall, A (2 page)

Bob will be back in July but Ruth knows that this June is probably as good as it will get. By August the sky will be grey and the streets of King’s Lynn full of bored schoolchildren looking for distraction. But now, in term-time with exams in full swing, the unfeeling sun shines for day after unbelievable day. Ruth feels sorry for the children but the good weather has come at the perfect time for her. June is the month of their annual university dig which, this year, is taking place at a Roman site near Swaffham. Ruth teaches forensic archaeology, her students are mainly postgraduates from overseas, and it seems unfair to expose them to Norfolk in the winter or even the spring. So the June dig will be their first practical assignment. For Ruth, too, it’s her first dig for a while and one which is close to her heart. The Roman remains, which promise to be part of a sizeable settlement, were first discovered by Max Grey, an archaeologist at Sussex University and Ruth’s . . . But, as ever, at the thought of defining her relationship with Max, Ruth’s mind skitters away in a panic.

Kate has finished throwing her pasta around and she totters off to look for Flint. Ruth follows, glancing at her watch. Seven o’clock. If she can keep Kate busy for another half hour, she’ll sleep well tonight. Ruth feels pretty tired herself. It’s been a long time since she’s spent the whole day in the open air. She enjoys teaching archaeology but her real love is digging. She loves the mixture of painstaking order and backbreaking work, hauling earth about like a navvy one minute and dusting the sand away from a shard of bone the next. She loves the sight of a neat trench, its sides perfectly straight, the soil below exposed in clear layers. She remembers the moment, here on the Saltmarsh, when she found the body of an Iron Age girl, a bracelet of grass still around one wrist. That was the day when she first met DCI Harry Nelson.

Kate discovers Flint in the back garden and chases him through the blackberry bushes. Ruth sits on the grass and watches them. She thinks of Max and Nelson and Dan. She was never in love with Dan but, right now, their friendship seems sharper and sweeter than any love affair. She can picture Dan’s face perfectly whereas she would have difficulty recalling the features of Peter, the man she lived with for almost ten years. Similarly, her university years suddenly seemed bathed in a light much brighter than the dusky twilight glow in the garden. She thinks of Gordon Square, the University of London Union, beer at a pound a pint, the night bus, Bilal’s kebab shop, the sound of a radio playing on a still afternoon, Sonia singing ‘You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You’. Why hadn’t she kept in better touch with Dan? She knows that as a working-class girl from South London she had always felt slightly in awe of him, the son of wealthy Islington intellectuals. She remembers that Dan had played the piano to almost concert standard, had been able to tell off-colour jokes in several languages, had spent a year teaching English in Japan. They had been friends and classmates, but in other respects they were worlds apart. When did she last see Dan? She thinks it was at Caz’s wedding. She recalls Dan jamming on a piano with a glamorous girl draped around him like a stole. ‘Keep in touch’, he’d said, scribbling his number on a page ripped from a cheque book. She’d kept the page for years (cheque book! who writes cheques now?) but had never dialled the number.

Kate starts to cry because she has been scratched by a bramble and Ruth takes her upstairs for her bath. Flint follows. Ruth has noticed before that, though the cat spends most of his time running away from Kate, he seems keen to stay in her vicinity. He always comes upstairs for the bath and the story and usually sleeps on the landing outside Kate’s bedroom. The strict night-time regime is a fairly recent innovation and Ruth is determined to stick to it. By insisting on bed at half-seven and lights out at eight she has eventually managed to claw some of the evenings back for herself. All day she has been looking forward to sitting downstairs with a glass of wine, limbs pleasantly heavy, watching crap TV and thinking about the dig. Except that now she knows that she will think about Dan—about the time that he dressed up as Margaret Thatcher to heckle a visiting dignitary, about the time he allegedly kidnapped a penguin from the zoo, about his amazing knowledge of Bowie lyrics, about the time when—drunk on cheap Pernod—he had kissed Ruth on the Number 68 bus to Camberwell Green.

Tonight the routine works smoothly. Kate is asleep before Ruth has finished her deliberately boring recital of Dora the Explorer’s antics. Ruth tiptoes downstairs. As she is pouring the wine she thinks that she wasted her friendship with Dan, her acquaintance with a truly unusual and anarchic mind. She should have kept in touch with him; they would have had something in common after all. Class differences fade with the years and, besides, she is middle-class now; she listens to Radio 4 and reads the
Guardian
. It has been decades since she has said the word ‘pardon’. They could have talked about archaeology, visited each other’s universities. Maybe, in some bizarre way, if Ruth had kept in touch with Dan, he wouldn’t have died in a house fire, far away from everyone who knew and loved him. She should have been a better friend to Dan but now it’s too late. She will never hear from him again.

The next day she receives a letter from him.

The letter has been forwarded from the university:

Hi Ruth. Dan here. Dan Golding. I hope you remember me as otherwise this is going to get embarrassing. How is life treating you? I’m in the inhospitable and frozen north, teaching archaeology at Pendle University. I know you’re at North Norfolk. In fact, I’ve been following your career with interest and admiration. I know that you are one of the country’s leading experts on bone preservation.

So that’s why I'm writing. (Although, of course, it would be great to catch up. Do you see anything of Caz these days? Or Roly? Or Val?). I’ve made a discovery, Ruth, and it could be big. It could be huge. But I need your help. I need a second opinion on the bones. Things are a little sensitive here, which is why I'm writing not emailing. Can you ring me on the number below? I think you’ll be interested. Have you heard of the Raven King? Well, I think I’ve found him. Jesus, Ruth, it seems a long time since UCL, doesn’t it? We’re all older and sadder, if not wiser. This discovery, though,
could change everything. But I’m afraid . . . and that’s just it. I’m afraid. Do ring me as soon as you get this letter.

With love from your old friend

Dan

Ruth reads this letter standing by her front door, which is still open. It has been another exhausting day on the dig and her bones ache to be immersed in warm water. But there’s Kate and her night-time routine to be got through first. Kate is searching for Flint in the kitchen. Ruth can hear her calling through his cat flap. On a sudden, ridiculous impulse she dials the mobile-phone number at the foot of the letter. Dan’s voice, deep, amused, slightly sleepy, comes clearly across the years and the miles, from the land of death itself.

‘Hi. This is Dan Golding. I’m not here right now but if you leave your name and number I’ll get back to you. Promise.’

That, muses Ruth, as she puts her rucksack on the floor and goes into the kitchen to rescue Flint, is one promise that Dan won’t be able to keep. Hearing his voice—in the letter and over the phone—has shaken her badly. The jaunty Dan of the first paragraph she had recognised instantly. Of course, he knew that she would have remembered him. Dan wasn’t the sort of man that people forgot. And, despite everything, Ruth had felt a glow at the thought that he had remembered her and even followed her career ‘with admiration’. But the Dan of the last paragraph, the Dan who is older and sadder and afraid . . . she doesn’t recognise that person at all. What can have happened in the frozen and inhospitable north to have made Dan—
Dan
—so scared that he dared not write an email, so desperate that he needed help from her—Ruth Galloway from Eltham, the girl who was eighteen before she drank champagne and nineteen before she lost her virginity?

She extricates Flint from Kate and feeds them both. It has been another lovely day and from the open front door comes the scent of grass and the sea. Ruth makes herself a cup of tea and tells herself that this is all she fancies but before too long she’s tucking into cold pasta. She really must get a grip and stop eating Kate’s food. If someone asked her if she’d like a gourmet meal of sucked toast soldiers, congealed egg and soggy carrot sticks, she’d say no, thanks very much, but that’s what she eats every time she clears the table. Ruth has never been thin but she has an uneasy feeling that now she’s less thin than ever. Still, all that digging will have used up a few calories. Ruth takes another piece of fusilli.

‘Mine,’ says Kate.

What was Dan’s great discovery? It obviously included bones, by the sound of it. What sort of archaeology is there up there anyway? When Kate has finished eating, Ruth forces herself to throw away the remaining pasta then adjourns to the sitting room in search of an atlas. The cottage is tiny, just two rooms plus loo downstairs, with the front door opening straight into the sitting room. This room is full of books, overflowing on the shelves that reach up to the low ceiling and piled in heaps on the wooden floor, the sofa and the table. Ruth loves reading and is eclectic in her tastes: scholarly archaeological tomes jostle for space next to romances, thrillers and even children’s pony books. She’s sure there’s an atlas in there somewhere. She starts pulling books from the shelves and, enthralled, Kate joins her. ‘Me too.’ Here it is.
The Reader’s Digest Atlas of Great Britain.
Ruth takes the book to the table by the window. Where was Dan living? Fleetwood, Caz said. Near Lytham. Bloody hell—Ruth smoothes down the page—it’s right next door to Blackpool, the much-loved and much-missed home town of DCI Harry Nelson. She had no idea that Dan had strayed into Nelson’s territory. Fleetwood is right on the coast—there could be Viking remains, maybe even a Roman garrison town. But what could be so earth-shattering that Dan was scared to write about it in an email?

The Raven King, he had said. Abandoning the printed word, Ruth switches on her laptop. Kate is sitting on the floor, apparently absorbed in Ruth’s tattered edition of
The Women’s Room.
Excellent choice, Kate.

Ruth googles ‘raven king’ and, seconds later, her screen is full of heavy metal lyrics, on-line gaming tips and images of swarthy men in feathered cloaks. The Raven King is obviously a potent symbol but, trawling through the sites, Ruth can only find a few solid references. One is to a Celtic God and hero called Bran, or Raven. The other is to a fifteenth-century Hungarian king famous for his library. Neither of these seems to fit Dan’s great discovery.

Interestingly, though, the Raven King myth is often especially linked to the north of England. Ruth thinks of Erik’s descriptions of the Norse God Odin, who sits with his ravens, Huginn and Muginn, on each shoulder. Huginn and Muginn; thought and memory. Odin, Erik used to say, saw all and knew all. Rather like Erik himself, or so Ruth thought once.

Ruth is reading about the ravens in the Tower of London when the phone rings. For a second, she has the ridiculous idea that Dan is ringing back, calling from the realms of the lost. Her hands are shaking when she picks up the phone.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Ruth, it’s Caz.’

‘Oh, hi, Caz.’ Ruth watches as Kate abandons Marilyn French for the TV remote. Oh well, perhaps eighteen months old is too young to be a fully fledged feminist. Soon the soothing strains of
Emmerdale
fill the room. Kate snuggles on to the sofa and Flint sits beside her, though not too close.

‘I said I’d ring to tell you about the funeral.’

‘Oh, yes, it was today, wasn’t it?’

So Dan was buried on the day that she received his letter. Ruth shivers.

‘It was grim, Ruth. Only a few people. His parents, Miriam, his ex-wife.’

‘Ex-wife?’

‘Yes, apparently they were divorced a few years ago. She seemed very upset though, cried all the way through the service.’

‘Did they have children?’

‘No. Miriam said that was partly why they split up, she wanted children, he didn’t.’

‘Is Miriam married?’

‘No. She’s as stunning as ever, though.’

Ruth thinks of her friend Shona, who is also often called ‘stunning’. To stun someone—it’s quite a violent image. What must it be like to be so beautiful that looking at you is like a blow on the head? Ruth can’t imagine.

‘It was so sad, Ruth,’ Caz is saying. ‘All that promise, all that brilliance, ending in a bleak little synagogue in Blackpool. Only a handful of people to mourn him.’

‘Was anyone else from UCL there?’

‘No. I don’t know if he was in touch with anyone.’

Thinking about the letter, with its enquiries after Caz, Roly and Val, Ruth doesn’t think so. The north, it seems, was inhospitable in more ways than one.

‘I got a letter from him,’ she says. ‘Weird, isn’t it?’

‘What do you mean, you got a letter from him?’

‘Just that. It was forwarded from the university. He’d made a discovery and he wanted my opinion.’ Ruth can’t quite keep a note of pride from creeping into her voice. ‘Jesus. What an awful coincidence.’

‘Yes. It really shook me up. It sounded just like him, the letter I mean.’ She doesn’t tell Caz about the voicemail.

‘What was it, the discovery?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Maybe you’ll have to come up to Pendle, do some research?’

‘Maybe,’ says Ruth, without much conviction.

Things are a little sensitive here, Dan had said. Ruth somehow doesn’t think that she’ll be getting an invitation from Pendle to look at Dan’s discovery, whatever it is. But Dan was afraid. And Dan is dead.

Ruth knows that when Kate has gone to bed she will ring Nelson.

Detective Inspector Harry Nelson is having a bad day. It’s not the pressure of fighting crime in King’s Lynn (though that’s tougher than you’d think). Work is fine, though his best sergeant, Judy Johnson, is away on maternity leave and his other sergeant, Dave Clough, seems to be enjoying a second childhood. The team broke a drug-smuggling ring last year and are still dealing with the clean-up. Clough, who played rather a heroic role in the operation, has compensated by acting ever since as though he’s auditioning for a role in
Starsky and Hutch.
He has even taken to wearing woolly jumpers. He has just split up with his girlfriend Trace and is currently, if the rumours are to be believed, dating every nubile girl in the Norfolk region. ‘I’m young, free and single, boss,’ he keeps telling Nelson, who knows better than to reply. He thinks the break-up with Trace has hit Clough hard.