smell, potent and mysterious, and feels glad that she is home.
Then she sees the weekenders' monster car parked outside their cottage and feels a stab of irritation. Don't say they have come here for New Year. Why can't they stay in London like everyone else, flocking to Trafalgar Square or having bijou little parties at home? Why do they have to come here to 'get away from it all'? They'll probably let off fireworks and scare every bird for miles around. Imagining David's reaction, she smiles grimly.
Inside her cottage, Flint leaps on her, mewing furiously.
Sparky, sitting on the sofa, steadfastly ignores her. Ruth's friend Shona has been coming in to feed the cats and Ruth finds welcome home flowers on the table as well as milk and white wine in the fridge. God bless Shona, thinks Ruth, putting on the kettle.
Shona, who teaches English at the university, is Ruth's best friend in Norfolk. Like Peter, she had been a volunteer on the henge dig ten years ago. Fey and Irish, with wild Pre-Raphaelite hair, Shona declared herself in sympathy with the druids and even joined them for an all-night vigil, sitting on the sand chanting until the tide forced them inland and Shona was lured away by the promise of a Guinness in the pub. That was the thing about Shona, she may have her New Age principles but you could nearly always overcome them with the promise of a drink. Shona is in a relationship with a married lecturer and sometimes she comes over to Ruth's cottage, weeping and flailing her hair around, declaring that she hates men and wants to become a nun or a lesbian or both. Then she will have a glass of wine and brighten up completely, singing along to Bruce Springsteen and telling Ruth that she is a 'dote'.
Shona is one of the best things about the university.
Her answer phone shows four messages. One is a wrong number, one is Phil reminding her about the party, one is her mother asking if she's home yet and one… one is distinctly surprising.
'Hello… er… Ruth. This is Harry Nelson speaking, from the Norfolk Police. Can you ring me? Thank you.'
Harry Nelson. She hasn't spoken to him since the day they found the Iron Age bones. She sent him the results of the carbon 14 dating, confirming that the body was probably female, pre-pubescent, dating from about 650 bc. She heard nothing back and didn't expect to. Once, before Christmas, when she was shopping dispiritedly in Norwich, she saw him striding along, looking discontented and weighed down with carrier bags. With him was a blonde woman, slim in a designer tracksuit, and two sulky-looking teenage daughters. Lurking in Borders, Ruth hid behind a display of novelty calendars and watched them. In this female environment of shopping bags and fairy lights, Nelson looked more inconveniently macho than ever. The woman (his wife surely?) turned to him with a flick of hair and a smile of practised persuasiveness.
Nelson said something, looking grumpy, and both girls laughed. They must gang up on him at home, Ruth decided, excluding him from their all-girl chats about boyfriends and mascara. But then Nelson caught up with his wife, whispered something that brought forth a genuine laugh, ruffled his daughter's careful hairstyle and sidestepped neatly away, grinning at her cry of rage. For a moment they looked united; a happy, teasing, slightly stressed family in the middle of their Christmas shopping.
Ruth turned back to the calendars. The Simpsons' grinumg yellow faces smirked back at her. She hated Christmas anyway.
Why was Harry Nelson ringing her now, at home? What was so important that he had to speak to her this minute?
And why is he so arrogant that he can't even leave a phone number? Irritated but intensely curious, Ruth rifles through the phone book to find a number for the Norfolk police. Of course it is the wrong one. 'You want CID,' says the voice at the end of the phone, sounding slightly impressed. Eventually she gets through to a flunky who connects her, somewhat reluctantly, to DCI Nelson.
'Nelson,' barks an impatient voice, sounding more Northern and even less friendly than she remembers.
'It's Ruth Galloway from the university. You rang me.'
'Oh yes. I rang you some days ago.'
'I've been away,' says Ruth. She's damned if she's going to apologise.
'Something's come up. Can you come into the station?'
Ruth is nonplussed. Of course, she wants to know what has come up but Nelson's request sounds more like an order. Also there is something a bit frightening about coming 'into the station'. It sounds uncomfortably like 'helping the police with their enquiries'.
'I'm very busy-' she begins.
'I'll send a car,' says Nelson. 'Tomorrow morning alright?'
It is on the tip of Ruth's tongue to say no, tomorrow is not alright. I'm off to a very important jet-set conference in Hawaii so I'm far too busy to drop everything just because you order me to. Instead she says, 'I suppose I could spare you an hour or two.'
'Right,' says Nelson. Then he adds, 'Thank you.' It sounds as if he hasn't had much practice in saying it.
CHAPTER 5
The police car arrives at Ruth's door promptly at nine.
Expecting this (Nelson seems like an early riser to her) she is dressed and ready. As she walks to the car, she sees one of the weekenders (Sara? Sylvie? Susanna?) looking furtively out of the window, so she waves and smiles cheerfully.
They probably think she is being arrested. Guilty of living alone and weighing over ten stone.
She is driven into the centre of King's Lynn. The police station is in a detached Victorian house which still looks more like a family home than anything else. The reception desk is obviously in the middle of the sitting room and there should be framed family portraits on the walls rather than posters telling you to lock your car safely and not to exceed the speed limit. Her escort, a taciturn uniformed policeman, ushers her through a secret door beside the desk. She imagines the defeated-looking people waiting in reception wondering who she is and why she deserves this star treatment. They climb a rather beautiful swirling staircase, now marred with institutional carpeting, and enter a door marked CID.
Harry Nelson is sitting at a battered Formica desk surrounded by papers. This room was obviously once part of a bigger one; you can see where the plasterboard partition cuts into the elaborate coving around the ceiling. Now it is an awkward slice of a room, taller than it is wide, with a disproportionately large window, half-covered by a broken white blind. Nelson, though, does not seem a man who bothers much about his surroundings.
He stands up when she enters. 'Ruth. Good of you to come.'
She can't remember telling him to call her by her first name but now it seems too late to do anything about it. She can hardly ask him to go back to Doctor Galloway.
'Coffee?' asks Nelson.
'Yes please. Black.' She knows it will be horrible but somehow it feels rude to refuse. Besides it will give her something to do with her hands.
'Two black coffees, Richards,' Nelson barks at the hovering policemen. Presumably he has the same problem with 'please' as with 'thank you'.
Ruth sits on a battered plastic chair opposite the desk.
Nelson sits down too and, for a few minutes, seems just to stare at her, frowning. Ruth begins to feel uncomfortable.
Surely he hasn't just asked her here for coffee? Is this silent treatment something he does to intimidate suspects?
The policeman marches back in with the coffees. Ruth thanks him profusely, noticing with a sinking heart the thin liquid and the strange wax film floating on the surface.
Nelson waits until the door has shut again before saying, 'You must be wondering why I asked you to come in.'
'Yes,' says Ruth simply, taking a sip of coffee. It tastes even worse than it looks.
Nelson pushes a file towards her. 'There's been another child gone missing,' he says. 'You'll have read about it in the press.'
Ruth stays silent; she doesn't read the papers.
