hadn't been it. She wasn't pregnant and now she probably never will be.
Peter has a child. He will know the feelings described by Nelson. Would Peter kill for his son? Erik has three children, all now grown up. Ruth remembers him once saying that the greatest gift you can give a child is to set them free.
Erik's children, scattered in London, New York and Tokyo, are certainly free, but are Erik and Magda free of them?
Once you have had a child, can you ever go back to being the person you were?
Ruth gets up to make herself tea. She feels twitchy and ill-at-ease. She told Erik she would be fine in the house on her own but she can't help thinking about Sparky and her brutal, horrible death. Iron Age man left dead bodies as messages to the Gods. Did Sparky's killer leave her body as a message to Ruth? Did the cat's body also mark a boundary? Come no further or I'll kill you, as I've killed Scarlet and Lucy. She shivers.
Flint squeezes in through the cat flap and Ruth picks him up and cuddles him. Flint endures her embrace whilst all the time looking hopefully at the floor. Child substitute, she thinks. Well, at least she has one.
Abandoning her work, she settles in front of the TV. Have I Got News For You is on but she can't lose herself in Ian Hislop's wit or Paul Merton's surreal brilliance.
She keeps thinking about Scarlet Henderson's parents, waiting for her in that messy family house. Delilah aching to hold her daughter one more time, perhaps wishing she could have her back inside her body, where at least she had been safe.
When she puts her hand to her face, she realises that she is crying.
The new sound is very close sometimes. It happens when the night is very dark and very cold. It wakes her up and she shivers, wrapping her blanket around her. It comes once, twice, three times. She doesn't know why but she thinks it might be calling to her. Once she calls back, 'I'm here! Let me out!' and the sound of her own voice is the scariest thing of all.
Now there is a new noise at night. It comes again and again. Three cries, one after the other, very low and echoey.
The third cry always lasts the longest and is the most frightening.
She's used to the other sounds at night, the snufflings and rustlings, the wind that has a voice of its own, a roaring angry shout. Sometimes it feels as if the wind is going to roar in through the trapdoor and snatch her up with its cold, angry breath. She imagines herself caught up, thrown high into the air, sailing through the clouds, looking down on all the houses and the people. Funny, she knows exactly what she will see. There's a little white house, very square, with a swing in the back garden. Sometimes there's a girl on the swing, going to and fro, laughing as she flies into the air.
If she closes her eyes, she can still see the house and it's hard to believe that she hasn't actually floated there on top of the clouds, looking down on the girl and the swing and the neat rows of bright flowers.
Once she saw a face at the window. A monster's face.
Grey-white with black stripes on either side. She kept very still, waiting for the monster to see her and gobble her up.
But it hadn't. It had sort of sniffed at the bars with its wet black nose like those shoes that she had once had for best.
Then it had gone away, clattering horribly over the glass.
She has never seen it again.
CHAPTER 14
In the morning, Nelson brings Sparky's body back. He stands on the doorstep, holding the ominous-looking cardboard box, looking like a salesman who is uncertain of his welcome.
Ruth, still bleary-eyed before her first coffee, squints at him.
'I did promise.' Nelson indicates the box.
'Yes. Thank you. Come in. I'll make us some coffee.'
'Coffee would be grand.'
He puts the box carefully on the floor by the sofa. They both avoid looking at it. Ruth busies herself with the coffee and Nelson stands in the sitting room, looking around with a slight frown. Ruth is reminded of the first time she saw him, in the corridor at the university, and the impression she had of him being too big for the room. That is certainly the case here. Nelson, looming in his heavy black jacket, makes the tiny cottage seem even smaller. Erik is tall but he had seemed able to fold himself up into the space.
Nelson looks as if he might, at any second, knock something over or bash his head against the ceiling.
'Lots of books,' he says, when Ruth comes in with coffee and biscuits on a tray.
'Yes, I love reading.'
Nelson grunts. 'The wife belongs to a book club. All they do is moan about their husbands. They never talk about the bloody books at all.'
'How do you know?'
'I've listened when they meet at our place.'
'Maybe they talk about the books when you're not listening.'
Nelson acknowledges this with a slight smile.
'Did you find anything?' asks Ruth, 'from… from Sparky?'
Nelson takes a gulp of coffee and shakes his head. 'We won't know until tomorrow at the earliest. I've had the letters tested again as well. We're checking the prints and DNA results against known offenders.'
Ruth wonders what has prompted this course of action.
Nelson sounds very much as if he has a 'known offender'
in mind. Before she can ask, Nelson puts down his coffee cup and looks at his watch.
'Have you got a spade?' he asks briskly.
Now the moment has come, Ruth feels curiously reluctant to go out into the garden and bury Sparky. She wants to stay inside drinking coffee and pretending that nothing bad has happened. But she knows it can't be put off and so she gets her coat and shows Nelson to the tool shed.
Ruth's garden is a tiny square of windblown grass.
When she first moved in she had tried to plant things but they were always the wrong things and nothing ever seemed to grow except thistles and wild lavender. Next door, the weekenders have a smart deck which, in summer, they adorn with terracotta pots. Today, though, it looks as forlorn and empty as Ruth's garden. David's garden is even more overgrown though it does contain an elaborate bird table complete with a device to repel cats (Ruth fears it doesn't work).
There is a dwarf apple tree at the end of the garden and it is here that Ruth asks Nelson to dig the grave. It is odd watching someone else dig. He does it all wrong, bending his back rather than his legs, but he does the job quickly enough. Ruth looks into the neat hole and automatically checks out the layers: topsoil, alluvial clay, chalk. Flint watches them from the apple tree, tail flicking. Nelson hands Ruth the box. It feels pathetically light. Ruth wants to look inside but she knows that this would not be a good idea. Instead, she drops a kiss on the cardboard lid, 'Goodbye Sparky,' and then she places the box in the grave.
Ruth gets another spade and helps Nelson fill in the hole and, for a few minutes, the only sound in the garden is their breathing as they shovel in the heavy earth. Nelson has taken off his jacket and hung it on the apple tree. Flint has disappeared.
When the hole is filled in, Nelson and Ruth look at each other. Ruth feels as if she understands now why burials are therapeutic. Earth to earth. She has buried Sparky but her cat will always be there, part of the garden, part of her life.
Then she remembers the Lucy letters. Lucy lies deep below the ground but she will rise again. She shakes her head, trying to rid herself of the words.
'What about the candle?' she asks Nelson.
'I'll do it on Sunday. A decade of the rosary too.'
'Only a decade?'
