impatiently, looking down at the data in front of her, tapping her phone against her teeth. When it rings, she jumps a mile.
‘Ruth?’ It’s Ted.
‘Hi, Ted. What’s up?’
‘We’ve found something on the beach.’
‘What?’
‘Some barrels.’
‘Barrels?’
‘Old oil barrels. They might be linked to the bodies we found. Do you want to come and have a look?’
Ruth hesitates. Nelson could be hours and she doesn’t feel ready to settle down to any other work. She has no tutorials this afternoon and doesn’t have to collect Kate until five. And she’s intrigued; how could some old oil barrels be linked to the six skeletons?
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll come over.’
Ted is waiting for her by the cliff path. It’s a beautiful afternoon; sunny but cold, with no wind. The tide is out and the shallow rock pools are a bright, unearthly blue. Ted is rubbing his hands together with what looks like glee but could just be an attempt to get the circulation back.
‘This way.’
He leads the way past the jutting headland and onto the next beach. To get there they have to climb over the remains of the old sea wall and Ruth is soon out of breath. Ted rushes on ahead, bounding over the slippery rocks like a goat. Is there such a thing as a sea goat? Ruth pauses on the highest part of the wall, getting her breath back and enjoying the view. In front of her is a perfect picture-postcard bay – white sand, blue sky, seagulls calling – a desert island courtesy of Radio 4. Ted’s footprints in the wet sand are like Man Friday’s. Ruth could almost believe that no-one has ever been on this beach before. Although it is only a few miles from resorts like Cromer, this coastline is remote and hard to reach. The cliffs are high and there are no paths or steps. And there’s always the danger of being cut off by the tide. The cliffs are dangerous too, full of caves and fissures, overhanging precariously in places. The only creatures at home here are the birds – hundreds of them – nesting on the sheer rock face. Despite living near a bird sanctuary, Ruth is not fond of birds.
A tiny figure on the deserted beach, Craig is clearing away sand with a shovel. He looks like an illustration of an impossible task, one of the labours of Hercules or a punishment in the Underworld.
Another, less classical, allusion comes into Ruth’s head, inspired perhaps by Cathbad’s championing of Lewis Carroll:
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand.
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand.
‘If only this were cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand.’
Ruth climbs down from the wall and walks carefully over the rock pools towards the beach. As she gets closer, she sees that, in fact, Craig is clearing the sand away from a large object – several large objects – that lie half- buried at the foot of the cliff. Closer still, she sees that they are oil barrels, orange with rust and studded with limpets.
Craig is red in the face from his exertions. He greets Ruth and Ted with ‘Just the three of them, I think.’
‘What are they doing here?’ asks Ruth, bending close to examine the corroded metal. ‘It’s such an isolated place. Miles from anywhere.’
‘I used to come birds-nesting here as a child,’ says Craig. ‘We actually used to climb up without ropes or anything. Madness really. The cliffs are eighty foot high in places.’
‘I used to go in for extreme archaeology,’ says Ted. ‘Went into these caves once in the cliffs on the Firth of Clyde. Thirty metres down and full of giant spiders.’
‘Fascinating,’ says Ruth. She has no time for extreme archaeology, which seems to her to abandon the most sacred precepts of the subject – time, patience and care – in favour of laddish thrill seeking. ‘Why do you think they could be linked to the bodies?
‘Take a look inside,’ says Ted.
The nearest barrel has a hole in its side, leaving a wickedly jagged edge. Peering gingerly inside, Ruth smells a heady mix of petrol and the sea. She gags. The barrel is half-full of stones which have either fallen from the cliffs or been swept in by the tide, but the smell is still all-pervasive. The second barrel is also open to the elements and inside, under the stones and beach debris, Ruth can see something whitish. The third barrel, as Ted says, is still sealed.
She puts on protective gloves and reaches inside the second barrel. The stones are tightly packed, a mixture of chalk and flint, with a stray crab leg or two thrown in for good measure (probably dropped there by seagulls). Ruth reaches down as far as she can and manages to get a hold of the something white. She pulls.
‘Let me help,’ says Ted.
Together, they drag out a wad of cotton fibres, once white but now stained grey and yellow, smelling strongly of rotten eggs.
Ruth almost chokes again. She takes a deep breath. ‘It looks like-’
‘The stuff we found buried with the bodies,’ says Ted. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘The barrel’s full of it,’ says Craig. ‘It stinks to high heaven.’
‘Could be something dead in the bottom of the barrel,’ says Ruth. ‘A fish maybe?’
‘Nah,’ says Ted sniffing knowledgeably. ‘That’s sulphur, that is.’
Sulphur. The word has an ominous sound. Sulphur and brimstone. The devil dancing in front of a yellow fire. Ruth shakes her head irritably. Her parents are big experts on the devil but she doesn’t expect him to come invading her thoughts like this. Especially as he is something else she doesn’t believe in.
The third barrel is still sealed. Ruth pushes at it experimentally; it doesn’t budge but there is a faint sloshing sound.
‘Think it’s full of petrol,’ says Ted.
‘Petrol?’
‘Yeah, the beach stinks of petrol.’
Ruth realises that this is true. Petrol must have leaked copiously from the first barrel so that the whole area smells like a garage forecourt. Looking down she sees that the sand is black with oil.
‘Well we’d better get the fire brigade to look at it,’ says Ruth. ‘Put some hazard signs up. All we need is some idiot with a cigarette…’
‘Goodnight Vienna,’ agrees Craig. He starts to pack up his equipment. Ruth likes him; he’s the only archaeologist who doesn’t argue with her.
‘What about the stuff we found in the barrel?’ asks Ted.
‘I’ll take a sample to the lab.’
‘Rather you than me,’ grins Ted.
Further inland, overlooking gently rolling hills and flat water meadows, Nelson and Judy are smelling a rather different smell. Antiseptic, lavender and cut flowers masking another, more elemental, odour.
‘Christ, I hate these places,’ says Nelson for the tenth time, shifting impatiently in his chintz armchair.
‘I can’t imagine anyone likes them much,’ says Judy. She is finding her boss rather trying. It’s not her favourite way to spend an afternoon – interviewing some gaga old bloke in an old people’s home – but it’s her job and she has to get on with it. She thinks that Nelson just resents the fact that Whitcliffe has insisted that he attend this rather routine interview. His attitude, as he shifts in the too-low chair, seems to suggest that, if it wasn’t for this intrusion, he would be out catching criminals and righting wrongs. As it is, he’d probably only be in another of Whitcliffe’s meetings.
As for her, she’d be catching up with paperwork and trying not to think about her hen night in two weeks’ time. There’s a notice on the staff room wall for people to sign on and she saw, to her horror, that there were at least thirty names on it. Surely there aren’t thirty women at the station? ‘Oh, people are bringing friends,’ said Tanya, a friend and fellow WPC. ‘The more the merrier.’
