'Harry! Did you bring your handcuffs?'
'Can I try them on?'
'It's my turn!'
Solemnly, Nelson pulls a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and fits them round one of the boy's hands. It makes Ruth feel slightly squeamish to see his bony wrists protruding from the restraining metal but there is no doubt that the boys are enjoying every minute.
'My turn! Let me!'
'I've only had a second. Less than a second.'
Ruth turns back to Delilah and sees, to her amazement, that she is now breast-feeding Ocean. Although Ruth has often signed petitions in favour of a woman's right to breast-feed in public, in practice she finds it deeply embarrassing.
Especially as Ocean seems big enough to run to the corner shop for a packet of crisps.
Trying to avert her eyes, her gaze falls on a cork board over the kitchen table. It is covered in multicoloured bits of paper: party invitations, torn-off special offers, children's drawings, photographs. She sees a picture of Scarlet holding baby Ocean and another of the twins holding a football trophy. Then she sees another photo. It is a faded snapshot of Delilah and Alan next to a standing stone, probably Stonehenge or possibly Avebury. But it is not the stone that catches Ruth's attention; it is the other person in the picture. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt and with normal length hair it is nonetheless definitely Cathbad.
CHAPTER 13
'Are you sure it was him?'
'Certain. He had short hair and ordinary clothes but it was him without a doubt.'
'Bastard! I knew he was hiding something.'
'It could be quite innocent.'
'Then why didn't he mention it when I interviewed him?
He acted as if he'd hardly heard the name Henderson.'
Ruth and Nelson are in a pub near the harbour having a late lunch. Ruth had been surprised when Nelson suggested lunch, not least because it was three o'clock when they finally left the Hendersons' house. But it seems that no landlord will refuse to serve a policeman complete with warrant card and now they are sitting in an almost empty bar looking out onto the quayside. The tide is high and swans glide silently past their window, oddly sinister in the fading light.
Ruth, slightly ashamed of being so hungry, tucks into a ploughman's lunch. Nelson eats sausages and mash like someone refuelling, not noticing what he puts into his mouth. He has insisted on paying. Ruth drinks diet coke she doesn't want to be caught drink-driving after all – and Nelson chooses the full-fat variety.
'My wife keeps nagging me to drink diet drinks,' he says.
'She says I'm overweight.'
'Really,' says Ruth drily. She has noticed before that you never see a thin person drinking a diet coke.
Nelson chews meditatively for a few minutes and then asks, 'How long ago do you think the picture was taken?'
'Hard to tell. Cathbad's hair was dark and it's quite grey now.'
'More than ten years ago? Before you first met him?'
'Maybe. His hair was long ten years ago but he could always have cut it in the meantime. Delilah looked young.'
'She dresses like a teenager now.'
'She's very beautiful.'
Nelson grunts but says nothing.
'She thinks you have a strong aura,' says Ruth mischievously.
Nelson's
lips form the word 'bollocks' but he doesn't say it aloud. Instead he says, 'What did you think of Alan? Bit of an unlikely partner for her, wouldn't you say? With her being so beautiful and all.'
Ruth thinks of Alan Henderson, with his sharp, rodent's face and darting eyes. He does seem an unlikely husband for Delilah who, even_ in her distress, seemed somehow exotic. But then they have four children together so presumably the marriage works. 'The eldest child, Maddie, isn't his,' she says. 'Maybe she married him on the rebound.'
'How the hell do you know that?'
'She told me.'
Nelson smiles. 'I thought she'd talk to you.'
'Is that why you made us have tea with them?'
'I didn't. They offered.'
'And you accepted. For both of us.'
Nelson grins. 'I'm sorry. I just thought we might need to build bridges with them. After all, we'd been there all morning digging their garden up, all the neighbours watching. They must have felt like suspects. I thought they might appreciate a nice friendly chat. And I thought Delilah might open up to you.'
'Open up? About what?'
'Oh, I don't know,' says Nelson with what sounds like studied nonchalance. 'You'd be surprised what turns out to be useful.'
Ruth wonders whether Delilah did tell her anything 'useful'. Mostly it had just seemed unbearably sad.
'It was just horrible,' she says at last, 'to see them suffering so much and not to be able to do anything about it.'
Nelson nods soberly. 'It is horrible,' he says. 'That's when I hate my job the most.'
'It was so sad, the way Delilah kept referring to Scarlet in the present tense but we don't know if she's alive or dead.'
Nelson nods again. 'It's every parent's worst nightmare.
The worst, the very worst. When you have children, suddenly the world seems such a terrifying place. Every stick and stone, every car, every animal, Christ, every person, is suddenly a terrible threat. You realise you'd do anything, anything, to keep them safe: steal, lie, kill, you name it. But sometimes there just isn't anything you can do. And that's the hardest thing.'
He stops and takes a swig of coke, maybe embarrassed at saying so much. Ruth watches him with something like wonder. She thought she could understand what Delilah Henderson felt, losing a beautiful child like Scarlet, but the thought that Nelson should feel like that about the two stroppy adolescents she had seen him with at the shopping centre seems almost unbelievable. Yet looking at his face as he stares into his glass, she does believe it.
Back home, trying half-heartedly to prepare her first lecture for next week, Ruth thinks about children. 'Do you have children?' Delilah had asked her. The implication was, if you don't, you won't understand. Nelson had understood. He might be an unreconstructed Northern policeman but he had children and that had given him access into the inner sanctum. He understood the terrible power of a parent's love.
Ruth doesn't have children and she has never been pregnant. Now that she is nearly forty and thinking that she might never have a child, it all seems such a waste. All that machinery chugging away inside her, making her bleed each month, making her moody and bloated and desperate for chocolate. All that internal plumbing, all those pipes gurgling away, all for nothing. At least Shona has been pregnant twice – and had two tearful abortions – at least she knows it all works. Ruth has no evidence at all that she can get pregnant. Maybe she can't and all those years of agonising over contraception were in vain.
She remembers once with Peter when their condom broke and, in the sweaty heat of the moment, they had decided to carry on. She remembers how, the morning after, she had woken up thinking, perhaps this is it. Perhaps I'm pregnant, and the sheer power of that thought, its ability to throw everything else into acute relief. To know that you are carrying something secretly inside you. How can anything stay the same after that? But, of course, it
