The Ghost Fields (Ruth Galloway) (12 page)

He walks round the table and stops by Ruth’s chair. ‘Good to see you again, Ruth,’ he says softly.

Ruth doesn’t know what she replies. Inside she is screaming, ‘Where are you going?’ She had been so sure that, after the formal meeting was over, she and Frank could go somewhere and . . . well, take up where they left off two years ago.

Earl too is looking after Frank with a slightly disgruntled expression.

‘Where’s he off to in such a hurry?’ he says.

‘Who knows with Frank?’ They are almost the first words Ruth has heard Paul say. He has an accent that she recognises from films as old-school New York.

‘Of course,’ says Earl. ‘You know him pretty well.’

‘Should do,’ says Paul. ‘Seeing as he’s dating my kid sister.’

CHAPTER 9

Ruth drives away feeling angry with Frank, Earl, Paul, Paul’s kid sister and, most of all, herself. How could she have assumed that he was still interested in her? After all, she hasn’t heard from him in more than a year. Surely that should have told her something. What’s the usual reason for a man not being in contact? Because they’ve met someone else, of course. Paul’s ‘kid sister’. Just how young is this woman anyway? Twenty-five? Twenty? Eighteen? Frank is over fifty and has three grown-up children. If he’s going out with an eighteen-year-old, then Ruth really is better off without him.

She’d wanted to ask more (Gloria her name is. Gloria!) but she’d also wanted to get away from the Le Strange Arms as fast as humanly possible. So she’d thanked Earl for a very interesting meeting, promised to stay in touch and headed off to the car park, where the sea had almost reached the sand dunes. Frank was nowhere in sight. Where did he have to go in such a hurry? To meet Gloria and go for a romantic walk on the beach? To head back to their hotel and enjoy the crisp white sheets and room-service lunch? It’s not as if Ruth was planning to go to bed with Frank herself but – grinding gears – it would have been nice to have the option.

With this in mind, Ruth has cleared the whole day. Sandra, Ruth’s childminder, will collect Kate from school and Ruth has arranged to pick her up at Sandra’s at five. She could go back to the university and catch up on some marking but, instead, she takes the turning for the Saltmarsh. The thought of a rare few hours alone in her house is enough to make her momentarily forget Frank, Gloria, room service, everything.

She’s angry because this is unlike her. It’s not in Ruth’s nature to imagine that men are interested in her. She’s more likely to make the opposite mistake, and there are a few missed opportunities that still torment her (Dan on the number 68 bus, Erik during the henge dig). But Frank really did seem to like her, especially in the beginning. She remembers the way he had looked at her, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners, smiling in that special way that seemed to imply that he, alone of all the company, really understood her. Well, maybe he smiles that way at all the girls. More gear grinding as Ruth turns onto the raised road that leads to her cottage.

The tide is in and Ruth never ceases to be surprised at the way that land suddenly becomes sea, dry patches of sand and grass becoming cool blue lagoons, the desert transformed into the ocean. In fact tides are particularly high this autumn and Ruth is sure that the water is nearer her front door than ever. Perhaps she ought to get some sandbags in, just in case.

There is something else at her front door, a man leaning on the fence looking out over the sand dunes and the incoming tide. For one crazy moment Ruth thinks it’s Frank (so
that’s
why he left early), but then she sees that the man is darker than Frank and slimmer. When he turns, a characteristic sweeping motion even without his cloak, she recognises him as Cathbad.

Ruth parks her car and gets out. She’s pleased to see Cathbad, even if this means that she’ll miss her precious hours of solitude. Hang on, though. Does this visit mean . . .

‘Judy . . . ?’ she asks.

‘It’s OK.’ Cathbad grins. ‘She hasn’t had the baby yet. I just came round for a chat. I haven’t seen you since the dig.’

Ruth doesn’t ask how he knew she’d be home early. Cathbad just knows these things. She gets her bag out of the car and fumbles for her key. ‘When’s the due date again?’ she asks.

‘Early December but I think she’s going to be late.’

‘She?’

‘I’m pretty sure this one’s a girl. Anyway, I don’t like the impersonal pronoun.’

‘Did the scan show anything?’ Ruth has never forgotten the moment when she learnt that she was expecting a girl. That sudden rush of recognition. The feeling of carrying a real person inside you.

‘No,’ says Cathbad. ‘But if you combine Judy’s age with the number of the month when the baby was conceived, the resulting number is even.’

Ruth knows better than to challenge the absolute scientific veracity of this. She opens the door, thinking that a cup of tea with Cathbad is always good value – even if it isn’t an intimate rendezvous with Frank.

Flint, Ruth’s cat, is standing at the top of the stairs looking accusing. He wasn’t expecting her back until six (Ruth always tells him the exact time) but he manages to convey the impression that she is late and he is starving.

‘Hallo, Flint,’ says Cathbad, who believes that he has a psychic connection with the cat. ‘How are you?’

‘What would you do if he answered you?’ says Ruth.

‘He is answering me,’ says Cathbad. Flint is certainly communicating something, rubbing himself around Cathbad’s legs and purring loudly. Ruth tries not to think that they’re talking about her.

‘Where’s Thing?’ she asks. Cathbad is the owner of a mad but extremely friendly bull terrier. Not that he would put it like that, of course. ‘We can’t own our fellow creatures,’ he once said as Thing dragged him along the beach, ‘we’re just permitted to share their space.’

‘With Judy. She’s off work today.’

‘How’s she feeling? You get so tired in the last few months. And she’s got Michael to look after.’ Michael, Judy’s son, is three. He has two fathers: Cathbad, his biological father, and Darren, Judy’s ex-husband.

‘She is tired, of course,’ says Cathbad. ‘I make her infusions every night and I burn ginger roots to prevent sickness. Michael’s no trouble. He’s an old soul.’

Ruth smiles. She is very fond of Michael. ‘Is he excited about the new baby? I’m envious. Kate would love a brother or sister.’

‘She can share this baby,’ says Cathbad. ‘Families are just modern constructs, after all. We’re all children of the Great Creator.’

Ruth, who knows just how far Cathbad has gone to secure his own bourgeois family unit, says thank you very much. Then she goes into the kitchen to make the tea. Flint follows anxiously.

When Ruth comes back into the sitting room, Cathbad is standing by the bookcase examining a paperback copy of Ruth’s book,
The Tomb of the Raven King
.

‘I enjoyed this,’ he says. ‘Is there going to be a sequel?’

‘I’ve got a contract for another one,’ says Ruth, ‘but I haven’t started it yet.’ This is one of her favourite worries when she wakes in the middle of the night. Her editor, Javier, has requested a synopsis by the end of October. The problem is that Ruth can’t think what to write about.
The Tomb of the Raven King
had a real story and – rare for archaeology – a proper ending. Where can she find another buried king? If only she’d been one of the team who discovered Richard III’s body under a car park in Leicester.

‘Why not write about the dead pilot?’ says Cathbad, when she confides this dilemma.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ruth, thinking of Blackstock Hall and the family graves, the mist floating in from the sea. ‘It’s all a bit complicated.’

‘Hazel says that the land is cursed,’ says Cathbad as if he is relaying the weather forecast. ‘Devil’s Hollow and the land around Blackstock Hall.’

‘Did he say why?’ asks Ruth, offering Cathbad a biscuit and taking one herself.

‘Legend has it that the Devil was building a dam at Old Hunstanton,’ says Cathbad. ‘He took the soil from Devil’s Hollow, hence the name.’

‘Why does the Devil always do that?’ says Ruth. ‘He’s a shockingly bad digger. I wouldn’t have him on one of my excavations.’

Cathbad smiles. ‘There’s a bad history about the place. Bloodshed, evil deeds. There was a massacre there in the Civil War. You said yourself that there may be a Bronze Age burial ground.’

‘Burial grounds aren’t necessarily bad places,’ says Ruth. ‘I would have thought that a druid would like them – life and death, portals to the afterlife and all that.’

Cathbad acknowledges this with another smile. ‘All the same,’ he says, ‘Devil’s Hollow didn’t bring your pilot much luck, did it?’

‘It’s stranger than you think,’ says Ruth. She tells him about the body, how she doesn’t believe it can have lain in the chalky ground all that time, how she suspects that Frederick Blackstock was buried somewhere else, maybe in the grounds of his ancestral home. She doesn’t stop to question why she is willing to confide in Cathbad when she withheld this information from the TV people. After all, even Nelson confides in Cathbad. One way or another, he has been part of several police investigations. Nelson always says that Cathbad would have made a good detective.

His eyes gleam at the story. Cathbad loves a good conspiracy. ‘Hazel was right,’ he says. ‘He always says that the Blackstock family are bad news.’

‘How does he know them?’

‘He used to have his yurt on their land.’

‘Well, I suppose it was quite nice of them to let him stay there,’ says Ruth. ‘I rather liked Sally Blackstock.’

‘Oh, the younger generation are all right,’ says Cathbad. ‘It was the older lot that were the problem.’

‘Old George?’ says Ruth. ‘Nelson mentioned him. He was Fred’s brother.’

‘Further back than that,’ says Cathbad. ‘Old George’s parents. You know his mother killed herself? Drowned herself on the beach by Devil’s Hollow.’

‘Nelson mentioned something about her,’ says Ruth slowly. ‘She thought that the land was cursed because it ought to be at the bottom of the sea.’

‘There’s something in that,’ says Cathbad. ‘The boundaries between land and sea are blurred in Norfolk. That’s what makes it such a special place, of course. And look at places where the sea has taken the land back. Dunwich, for example.’

‘Dunwich is in Suffolk,’ says Ruth, but she takes the point. Dunwich, an important town in Anglo Saxon times, is now really just a small village. Most of the old town, including – it is said – eight churches, is underwater. Coastal erosion and a series of disastrous floods have eaten away at the landscape. During one particularly violent storm in the fourteenth century, the entire village of Newton, a few miles up the coast, was swept away. Legend has it that you can still hear the church bells ringing under the sea.

‘Anyway,’ says Cathbad, ‘Hazel says that the mother – Leonie her name was – put a curse on the whole family. They can never escape the Blackstock lands.’

This was certainly true of Fred, thinks Ruth. He probably thought he had escaped when he emigrated to America but the war came and there he was, soon to be dead and buried under that same Norfolk soil.

‘How does Hazel know all this?’ she says. ‘Old George’s parents must have died long before he was born.’

‘Oh, he’s heard stories,’ says Cathbad vaguely. ‘All druids love a good story.’

Devil’s Hollow is a churning pit. The digger moves to and fro, its movements seemingly random and jerky. Yet in the far corner of the field a line of bricks shows that progress is being made and Edward Spens’s beachfront apartments are one step closer to being completed.

Chaz Blackstock and his father stand glumly at the gate, watching.

‘I used to come here as a boy,’ says George. ‘Wonderful place for rabbits.’

‘Why did you sell it then?’ says Chaz. He says it without any real heat though. This argument has been rehearsed so many times over the last year that both of them know how it goes.

‘We needed the money,’ says George. ‘The Hall costs a bomb to keep up and you don’t honestly think we’ll ever turn it into a profitable B & B, do you?’

‘Mum thinks we will.’

George watches as the digger piles earth into a crater. Despite everything, there’s something hypotonic about it, the uneven space becoming transformed into a smooth square, a blank canvas for the developers.