‘Well, Harry, this is all very mysterious.’
‘Not at all, Mr Spens. Just following a line of enquiry. Your family lived at the house in Woolmarket Street from…’
‘From 1850. It was built by my great-great-grandfather Walter Spens.’
‘I’m interested in the years between 1949 and 1955. Who would have been living in the house at that time?’
‘My grandfather, Christopher Spens, his wife Rosemary and their children Roderick and Annabelle.’
‘And Roderick is your father?’
‘Sir Roderick. Yes.’
‘I’d like to talk to him. Does he live locally?’
Edward pauses, fiddling with an executive toy on the desk. ‘Well, actually he lives with us.’
‘He does?’ Wondering why on earth Spens didn’t mention this before, Nelson asks, ‘Is he in?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Could I speak to him?’
‘Of course.’ But Spens doesn’t move. Finally he says, ‘My father is in the first stages of senile dementia. He can seem lucid, very lucid, but he gets confused very easily. And when he gets confused he gets… upset.’
‘I understand,’ says Nelson, though he doesn’t really. He has never met anyone with dementia and can’t imagine what it would be like living with someone who is slowly losing their sense of themselves. It makes him see Edward and Marion in a rather different light. ‘Must be hard,’ he offers.
‘Yes,’ Spens agrees. ‘Hardest on Marion because she’s at home more. Sometimes, what with my father and the children… though we have an au pair, Croatian girl, very good. And Dad keeps himself busy, has the Conservative Association, the Historical Society, still plays bowls. He’s a silver surfer too. Better with new technology than I am. He’s not an invalid yet.’
The ‘yet’ hangs on the air because the one thing Nelson does know about dementia is that it is irreversible.
‘I’ll get him for you,’ says Edward. He smiles slightly. ‘He’ll probably be pleased. He loves talking about the old days.’
This is certainly true though Edward Spens hadn’t mentioned that the old days included Ancient Rome, the Counter Reformation and the Crimean War. When he can get a word in, Nelson asks, ‘Sir Roderick, do you remember your years at Woolmarket Street?’
‘Remember them?’ Roderick looks at him sharply from under bushy white eyebrows. ‘Of course I do. I remember everything, don’t I, Edward?’ Edward agrees that he does.
‘You would have been, how old?’
‘I was born in 1938. I lived at the house until I left for Cambridge, when I was eighteen.’
That makes him seventy, Nelson calculates. No great age these days. His own mother has recently taken up line-dancing at seventy-three. Roderick Spens could be a decade older.
‘You lived with your parents?’
‘Yes, my father was the Headmaster of St Saviours on Waterloo Road. He taught classics as well.’
‘The school’s not there any more, is it?’
‘No, it closed sometime in the sixties. Great shame. It was an excellent school.’
‘Did you go there?’
‘Yes, it was my father’s school, y’see.’ He looks beadily at Nelson as if suspecting a trap. ‘My mother wanted me to go to Eton but m’father insisted. His word was law in our house.’
Nelson tries, and fails, to imagine one of his daughters saying the same about him. ‘And your sister… Annabelle. Did she go there too?’
Roderick looks confused. ‘Annabelle?’
Edward Spens cuts in. ‘It’s all right, Dad.’ He turns to Nelson. ‘My father still gets upset when he talks about her. She died young, you see.’
‘How young?’ asks Nelson, his antenna up.
‘Five or six, I believe.’
CHAPTER 21
Ruth is at Woolmarket Street. The builders are starting work again tomorrow and she wants to collect the rest of the finds. Not that the other trenches have turned up anything very exciting – some more pottery, some glass, a few coins. But there might be something interesting there and she needs to check that the site is tidy. That’s her job as lead archaeologist. It’s another warm day and it’s surprising how innocuous the site looks in the sunlight. Nevertheless, Ruth finds herself looking over her shoulder every few minutes and jumping when a squirrel runs across the wall in front of her.
Although she still has a plaster stuck rather rakishly over one eye, Ruth feels remarkably well after Saturday’s trauma. The boy doctor had told her not to be alone in the night, ‘in case you fall into a coma’ he explained cheerfully, but Ruth had been so exhausted that she went to bed at nine and slept beautifully with only Flint for company. She’s sure that it was the conversation with Nelson that caused her to sleep so peacefully. He knows. He may be agonised and conflicted and all the rest of it, he may now drive her mad by interfering at every stage in the pregnancy, but at least he knows. She is no longer entirely on her own. And this morning she had a civil, if stilted, conversation with her mother. Ruth didn’t mention any of the events of the last few weeks but assured her mother that she was no longer feeling sick, had more energy, was not doing so much awful digging. ‘I sailed through both my pregnancies,’ said her mother smugly and Ruth is only too happy to allow her this victory.
The site is still deserted. Ruth had half expected to see Irish Ted and Trace. There is still some work to do back-filling trenches, though maybe they have decided not to bother in view of the fact that the house is shortly to be razed to the ground. Ruth collects the finds from the foreman’s hut. No sign of him either, thank goodness. She looks across at the arch silhouetted against the blue sky.
She should have another look at the trench where the cat was found but something makes her wary about going into the grounds, so far away from the main road. There is something heavy, something watchful, about the silence. Don’t be silly, she tells herself, it’s broad daylight. What can possibly hurt you? She shoulders her backpack and picks her way through the rubble, past the outhouses and into what was once the back garden. Was this ever the happy place that Kevin Davies remembers? Ruth tries to imagine children running laughing through the garden, swinging on the tree, throwing pennies in the wishing well. No, the well was covered up by then. She approaches the well now and looks inside. A dank, unpleasant smell meets her and she straightens up hastily. When was the well covered? That’s another question for Nelson. The skulls must have been put in the well before the concrete cap was put in place. Skulls in a well. The words have a crazy, topsy-turvy sound, like a nightmare nursery rhyme. She thinks of the children on the beach. Ding Dong Dell.
The cat’s trench is by the outer wall, bulging now with age. This is the boundary. Terminus, the God of boundaries. ‘I pray to him whenever I go to Heathrow,’ Nelson had said when he heard the name. She can’t imagine Nelson on holiday somehow. She is sure that Michelle insists on somewhere sun-kissed and glamorous whereas Nelson is more suited to wilder, colder places – the Yorkshire moors, perhaps, or the Scottish Highlands. She can just picture him up to his waist in some freezing loch.
Ruth stands up, easing her back. It is really hot now and the air is still. She climbs out of the trench and walks
