The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths (18 page)

Ruth is awoken from confused dreams by a furious knocking at the door. She staggers downstairs, groggy with sleep, to find Erik, dressed in army surplus and a bright yellow sou’wester, standing on the doorstep.

‘Good morning, good morning,’ he says brightly, like some crazed holiday rep. ‘Any chance of a cup of coffee?’

Ruth leans against the door frame. Is he mad or is she?

‘Erik,’ she says weakly, ‘what are you doing here?’

Erik looks at her incredulously. ‘The dig,’ he says. ‘It starts today.’

Of course. Erik’s dig. The one approved by Nelson. The dig that aims to answer the riddle of the Iron Age body and the buried causeway. To find out whether the Saltmarsh has any more secrets.

“I didn’t know it was today,’ says Ruth, backing into the house. Erik follows, rubbing his hands together. He has probably been up for hours. Ruth remembers that one of his traditions on a dig was to see the sun rise on the first day and set on the last.

‘Yes,’ Erik is saying casually. ‘Nelson said it had to be after the funeral and that was yesterday, I believe.’

‘It was. I was there.’

‘Were you?’ Erik looks at her in surprise. ‘Why ever did you go

‘I don’t know,’ says Ruth, putting on the kettle. ‘I felt involved somehow.’

‘Well, you aren’t involved,’ says Erik shortly, removing his sou’wester. ‘High time you stopped all this detective nonsense and concentrated on archaeology. That’s what you’re good at. Very good. One of my very best students, in fact.’

Ruth, who bridles with indignation at the start of this speech, softens somewhat by the end. Even so, she isn’t about to let Erik get away with this.

‘Archaeologists are detectives,’ she says. ‘That’s what you’ve always said.’

Erik dismisses this with a shrug. ‘This is different, Ruthie. You must see that. You’ve given the police the benefit of your professional advice. Now leave it at that.

There’s no need to become obsessed.’

‘I’m not obsessed.’

‘No?’ Erik smiles in an irritating, knowing way that reminds Ruth of Cathbad. Have they been discussing her?

‘No,’ says Ruth shortly, turning away to pour the coffee.

She also puts some bread in the toaster. No way is she going to dig on an empty stomach.

‘The poor girl is dead,’ says Erik gently, his accent like a lullaby. ‘She is buried, she is at peace. Leave it at that.’

Ruth looks at him. Erik is sitting by the window, smiling at her. The sun gleams on his snowy hair. He looks utterly benign.

‘I’m going to get dressed,’ says Ruth. ‘Help yourself to coffee.’

The dig is already well underway by the time Ruth arrives.

Three trenches have been marked out with string and pegs, one by the original Iron Age body, the other two along the path of the causeway. Archaeologists and volunteers are very gently lifting off the turf in one-inch squares; they will aim to put the grass and soil back at the end of the dig.

Ruth remembers from the henge excavation that digging on this marshy land is a tricky business. The furthest trench, which is beyond the tide mark, will fill with water every night. This means it will, in effect, have to be dug afresh every day. And the tide can take you by surprise.

Ruth remembers that Erik always used to have one person on ‘tide watch’; sometimes the tide comes in slowly, creeping silently over the flat landscape. At other times the earth becomes water before you have time to catch your breath. These fast tides, called rip tides, could cut you off from land in the blink of an eye.

Even the trenches near to dry land have their problems.

Although Erik has already mapped the area, the land can shift overnight, nothing remains certain. Archaeologists tend to become twitchy if they can’t rely on their coordinates.

Ruth

finds Erik leaning over the furthest trench. Because of the shifting ground, the trench is narrow and reinforced with sandbags. Two men are standing in the trench, looking nervously at Erik. Ruth recognises one of them as Bob Bullmore, the forensic anthropologist.

Ruth kneels beside Erik, who is examining one of the posts.

‘Are you going to take it out?’ asks Ruth.

Erik shakes his head. ‘No, I want to keep it in place but I’m worried the waves will loosen it if we dig too far down.’

‘Don’t you need to see the base?’

‘Yes, if possible. Look at this wood though. It looks as if it has been sawn in half.’

Ruth looks at the post. The other, softer wood has been worn away by the constant movement of the tides. What’s left is the hard centre of the wood, ragged and somehow menacing-looking.

‘It looks like the same wood that was used for the henge posts,’ says Ruth.

Erik looks at her. ‘Yes, it does. We’ll have to see what the dendrochronology says.’

Tree-dating, or dendrochronology, can be amazingly exact. A tree lays down a growth ring each year, more in wet years, fewer in dry years. By looking at a graph showing growth patterns, archaeologists can chart the growth fluctuations. This process is called ‘wiggle watching’ (Peter always used to find this hilarious). Wiggle watching, combined with radiocarbon dating, can tell you the actual year and the actual season when a tree was felled.

Ruth goes to help with the trench where the Iron Age body was discovered. She still has a fellow feeling with this girl who was fed mistletoe and tied down to die. She sees her as somehow linked to Lucy and Scarlet. She can’t help thinking that if she solves the riddle of the Iron Age girl she might just throw some light on the deaths of the other two girls.

More than anything though it is wonderful to be digging again. Like the day when she helped Nelson fill in Sparky’s grave, it is a relief to forget the heartache and terror and excitement in uncomplicated, physical labour. Ruth settles down to trowelling, getting into a rhythm, ignoring the twinges in her back and concentrating on moving the soil in neat cross-sections. After yesterday’s rain the ground is sticky and sodden.

Cathbad eventually left last night after Ruth promised to help clear his name. She would have promised almost anything to get him out of the house, he was giving her the creeps sitting there in his wizard’s cloak with his knowing grin. But, despite herself, as she digs, she can’t stop his words running on a continuous loop in her head.

I felt sorry for you because you didn’t get a look-in, what with his wife and girlfriend both on the dig …

Did Erik and Shona have an affair on the henge dig?

Shona is very gorgeous and Ruth knows that no man is impervious to beauty (look at Nelson with Michelle). But Erik has a beautiful wife of his own, and one, moreover, who seemed to share his interests and enthusiasms. Ruth thinks of Magda, whom she has always liked and admired.

Magda has almost been a surrogate mother, one who won’t say threateningly that she is praying for her or buy her an Oxfam goat for Christmas. Magda, with her sea-blue eyes and ash-blonde hair, her voluptuous figure in fisherman’s jumpers and faded jeans, her gleam of Nordic jewellery at the neck and wrists. Ruth remembers once reading about the goddess Freya, the patroness of hunters and musicians, with her sacred necklace and persuasive powers and thinking - that’s Magda. Easy to imagine Magda, both youthful and ageless, holding the sacred distaff of life, the power of life and death. How could Erik have risked all this for an affair with Shona?

Is she jealous, Ruth asks herself as she trowels and sifts?

Not sexually jealous. She has always known that Erik could never be interested in her, but she had thought that she was special to him. Hadn’t he written on the title page of The Shivering Sand, ‘To Ruth, my favourite pupil’? But it turns out that she hadn’t been his favourite after all.

Ruth digs her trowel into the soil with unnecessary venom, causing a mini landslide and earning her a shocked look from the dreadlocked girl next to her.

‘Ruth!’

Eager to be distracted from her buzzing, unpleasant thoughts, Ruth looks up. Standing in the trench, she sees the newcomer from the bottom up: walking boots, waterproof trousers, mud-coloured jacket. David.

David kneels down on the edge of the trench.

‘What’s going on?’ he asks.

Ruth pushes a lock of sweaty hair out of her eyes. ‘It’s an archaeological dig,’ she says. ‘We’re excavating the Iron Age grave and the causeway.’

‘Causeway?’

‘Those buried posts you showed me. We think it’s a Bronze Age causeway. A kind of pathway possibly leading to the henge.’ Ruth looks down, hoping David won’t realise that it was she who told the archaeologists about the posts.

But David has other things on his mind. ‘Well, mind you don’t go near the hide. The furthest one. There’s a rare Long Eared Owl nesting there.’

The Long Eared Owl sounds like he made him up but Ruth can see that David is genuinely worried. ‘I’m sure we won’t go near the hide,’ she says soothingly. ‘The trenches are all over to the south.’

David stands up, still looking anxious. ‘By the way,’

Ruth calls after him, ‘thanks for looking after Flint. My cat.’ She had meant to get him a box of chocolates or something.

His face is transformed by a sudden smile. ‘That’s OK,’

he says. ‘Any time.’

David is looking over towards the car park. Following his gaze, Ruth sees a familiar dirty Mercedes coming to a halt by the bird sanctuary notice board. Nelson, wearing jeans and a battered Barbour, gets out and strides towards the trench. Unconsciously, Ruth rubs her muddy hands on her trousers and tries to smooth her hair.

‘Hello Ruth.’ Ruth is fed up with looking up at people.

She heaves herself out of the trench.

‘Hello.’

‘Bit of a circus, isn’t it?’ says Nelson, looking round disapprovingly at the archaeologists swarming over the site. The dreadlocked girl chooses this moment to start singing a high-pitched folk song. Nelson winces.

‘It’s all very organised,’ says Ruth. ‘Anyway, you gave permission for the dig.’ .

‘Yes, well, I need all the help I can get.’

‘Did you find anything at the henge circle?’

‘Not a thing.’ Nelson is silent, looking out, past the pegged-out trenches and the neat mounds of soil, towards the sea. He is thinking, she is sure, of the morning when they found Scarlet’s body.

“I saw you yesterday,’ says Nelson, ‘at the funeral.’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth.

‘Good of you to go.’

“I wanted to.’

Nelson looks as if he is going to say something else, but at that moment a familiar lilting voice cuts in. ‘Ah, Chief Inspector …’ It is Erik.

As far as Ruth knows, this is a promotion for Nelson, but he doesn’t offer a correction. He greets Erik fairly cordially, and after a few words with Ruth the two men walk away talking intently. Ruth feels unaccountably irritated.

By

lunchtime she is tired and fed up. She is considering sneaking off back to her cottage for a cup of tea and a hot bath when two slim hands wrap themselves over her eyes.

‘Guess who?’

Ruth breaks free. She has recognised the perfume anyhow. Shona.

Shona flops down on the grass next to Ruth. ‘Well?’ she asks, smiling, ‘found anything interesting?’

As usual Shona looks stunning despite (because of?) looking as if she hasn’t tried. Her long hair is caught up in a messy bun and she is wearing jeans that make her legs look like pipe-cleaners and a puffy silver jacket which only emphasises her slimness. I’d look like a walking duvet wearing that, thinks Ruth.

‘Just some more coins,’ she says. ‘Nothing much.’

‘Where’s Erik?’ asks Shona, slightly too casually Ruth thinks.

‘Talking to Nelson.’

‘Really?’ Shona raises her eyebrows at Ruth. ‘I thought they couldn’t stand each other.’

‘So did I but they seem matey enough now.’

Then,’ says Shona lightly, pulling her jacket more tightly round her. ‘It’s bloody freezing. How long are you going to stay?’

‘I was just thinking of going back to the house for a cup of tea.’

‘What are we waiting for then?’

On the way back to the house, Ruth wrestles with her conscience. Shona has really been very kind to her, letting her stay with her at a moment’s notice. Ruth hasn’t even thanked her properly, just disappeared yesterday leaving a brief answerphone message. She needs to go back and pick up her things. Shona has been a good friend to her over the years. When Ruth split up with Peter, she provided a shoulder to cry on plus several vats of white wine. They have spent countless evenings together, laughing, talking, crying. They even went on holiday together, to Italy, Greece and Turkey. Is Ruth really going to let Cathbad’s spiteful rumours get in the way of this friendship?

‘I’m sorry about taking off like that,’ she says at last.

‘For some reason after the funeral I just wanted to be at home.’

They have reached that home now. Ruth opens the door for Shona.

‘That’s OK,’ says Shona. “I completely understand. Was it awful, the funeral?’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth, putting on the kettle. ‘It was terrible.

The parents were just shattered. And the little coffin … it was all too heart-breaking.’

‘I can imagine,’ says Shona, sitting down and taking off the silver jacket. ‘There can’t be anything worse than losing a child.’

Everyone says that, thinks Ruth, maybe because it’s true.

It’s difficult to imagine anything worse than burying your child, a complete inversion of the natural order of things.

Briefly, she thinks of Lucy Downey’s parents walking away from the funeral, arm-in-arm. Was that worse? To lose your daughter and not be able to say goodbye?

She makes tea and sandwiches and they sit there companionably in silence. Outside it has started to rain, which strengthens Ruth’s resolve not to go back to the dig.

Eventually Ruth says, “I saw Cathbad yesterday.’

‘Who?’

‘Michael Malone. You know, the one they questioned about Scarlet’s murder.’

‘Jesus! Where did you see him?’

‘Here. He came to talk to me.’

‘Bloody hell, Ruth.’ Shona shivers. ‘I’d have been terrified.’

‘Why?’

asks Ruth, even though she had been so scared that she had slept last night with a kitchen knife by her bed. ‘He wasn’t charged with the murder, you know.’

“I know, but even so. What did he want?’

‘Said he wanted me to clear his name.’

‘What a cheek.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ says Ruth, who has been obscurely flattered.

‘What’s he like, this Cathbad?’

Ruth looks at her. ‘Don’t you remember him? He remembers you.’

What?’ Shona has taken out her combs and shaken out her hair. She stares at Ruth, apparently bewildered.

‘Don’t you remember him from the henge dig? He was the leader of the druids. Always wore this big, purple cloak.

He remembers you were sympathetic to them, joined in the protests.’

Shona smiles. ‘Cathbad … Now I remember. Well, he was quite a gentle soul as I recall.’

‘Erik says he has magic powers.’

Now Shona laughs aloud. ‘Dear old Erik.’

‘Cathbad says you had an affair with Erik.’

‘What?’

‘Cathbad. He says you and Erik had an affair on the henge dig, ten years ago.’

‘Cathbad! What does he know?’

‘Did you?’

Instead of answering, Shona twists her hair into a tight knot and puts the combs back in, their little teeth digging viciously into her skull. She doesn’t look at Ruth, but Ruth knows the answer now.

‘How could you do it, Shona?’ she asks. ‘What about Magda?’

She is shocked at the virulence with which Shona turns on her.

‘What do you care about Magda, all of a sudden? You don’t know anything about it, sitting there, judging me. What about you and Peter? He’s married now, didn’t you know?’

‘Peter and I aren’t …’ stammers Ruth. ‘We’re just friends,’ she finishes lamely. Inside, though, she knows that Shona is right. She is a hypocrite. What did she care about Michelle when she invited Nelson into her bed?

‘Oh yeah?’ sneers Shona. ‘You think you’re so perfect, Ruth, so above all those human feelings like love and hate and loneliness. Well, it’s not as simple as that. I was in love with Erik,’ she adds, in a slightly different tone.

‘Were you?’

Shona flares up again. ‘Yes, I bloody well was! You remember what he was like. I’d never met anyone like him.

I thought he was so wise, so charismatic, I would have done anything for him. When he told me that he was in love with me, it was the most wonderful moment of my life.’

‘He told you that he was in love with you?’

‘Yes! Does that surprise you? Did you think he had the perfect marriage with Magda? Jesus, Ruth, they both have affairs all the time. Did you know about Magda’s toyboy, back home in Sweden?’

“I don’t believe you.’

‘Ruth, you’re such an innocent! Magda has a twentyyear-old lover called Lars. He fixes her sauna and then hops into bed with her. And he’s one of many. In return, Erik does what he likes.’

To rid her mind of the image of Magda with her twentyyear-old handyman lover, Ruth turns to the window. The Saltmarsh has almost disappeared beneath the slanting, grey rain.

‘Did you think I was the first?’ asks Shona bitterly.

‘There are graduate students all over England who can say they went to bed with the great Erik Anderssen. It’s almost an essential part of your education.’

But not of my education, thinks Ruth. Erik treated me as a friend, a colleague, a promising student. He never once said a single word that could be construed as a sexual invitation.

‘If

you knew he was like that,’ she asks at last, ‘why did you go to bed with him?’

Shona sighs. All the anger seems to seep out of her, leaving her limp, like her silver jacket lying collapsed on the floor.

“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.