It is Sunday, thinks Ruth as the taxi shoots through the deserted streets. In a few hours, people will be getting up, going to church, buying the papers. For the first time in a while, she thinks of her parents. Sunday is the most important day of the week for them; church, elders’ meetings, Bible classes, a roast meal with all the trimmings. She pictures her mother and father walking down Avery Hill Road, dressed in their best clothes, thinking of Salvation. She really must take Kate down to see them soon.
In a remarkably short time they are on New Road, crossing the marshes, blackness around them, the sea somewhere close, whispering in the dark.
‘Bloody hell,’ says the driver. ‘What do you want to live here for? Gives me the creeps.’
‘I like it,’ says Ruth. Stop talking, she adds silently, and just get me home.
‘Isn’t this the place where they found that little girl? About a year ago?’
‘I think so.’
‘Rather you than me, love. I’d be scared of the ghoulies and ghosties, living out here.’
But Ruth isn’t scared of ghosts. She pays the driver his Sunday rates and lets herself into the cottage. Creeping upstairs, she looks at the sleeping Kate. Her little face looks stern and thoughtful through the bars of the cot. Beside her Shona sleeps peacefully, her long hair spread out on Ruth’s pillow. Ruth takes a pile of bedding and heads down to the sitting room. She isn’t scared of ghosts. She is scared of nightclubs, of having to enjoy herself, of something happening to Kate, of waking up one morning and realising that she is in love with Nelson.
Sighing, she curls up on the sofa, listening to the sea.
At Sea’s End House, a single light shines from the turret. Like the beam from the deserted lighthouse, it illuminates the black waves as they thunder in towards land. They break against the walls of the house as if demanding entrance, turning the narrow inlet into a torrent, rising and falling as the moon waxes and wanes. Then, as the tide starts to turn, they retreat, sucking the stones from the beach where the six Germans soldiers lay buried, leaving the cliff path wet and gleaming. And leaving a body floating gently in the shallows, its blond hair streaming out in the dark water.
CHAPTER 18
Ruth’s first thought is that Kate is crying. Then she realises that the insistent noise is in fact her phone, ringing on the table next to her ear. Typical. The one morning that Kate doesn’t wake at the crack of dawn someone decides to make an early morning phone call. Who the hell can it be?
‘It’s me,’ says a brusque voice, though the screen is already flashing ‘Nelson’.
‘What is it?’ asks Ruth blurrily. She has just realised that she is on the sofa, that her neck aches and that she has a splitting headache.
‘Dieter Eckhart’s dead. Fisherman found his body this morning. Washed up by Sea’s End House.’
‘
‘Eckhart’s dead. Cloughie and I are at Broughton now.’
‘What’s the time?
‘Nine o’clock. I didn’t think it was much use trying to get Johnson out of bed. Have a good time last night, did you?’
Nine o’clock! Why hasn’t Kate woken up yet? Ruth is just about to rush upstairs in a panic when she sees Shona descending the stairs, carrying Kate in her arms. Kate looks smug; Shona triumphant.
Ruth wrenches her attention back to Nelson.
‘Was it an accident?’ she asks. ‘Did he drown?’
Nelson gives a humourless laugh. ‘Pathologist’s here now. Cause of death – a knife wound to the heart. It wasn’t an accident.’
‘Does Clara know?’
‘Yes. She identified the body.’
So many thoughts are swirling around in Ruth’s head that she feels sick. Clara, Dieter, a knife wound to the heart, Tatjana, Judy, fisherman found his body this morning. Then Kate holds out her arms and everything else is forgotten.
Kate coos loudly into the phone.
‘Is that Katie?’ Nelson’s voice softens. ‘I’ll call you later.’
The phone clicks off. Ruth looks at Shona, who is still holding Kate and looking pleased with herself.
‘We’ve been up for ages,’ she says. ‘I got Kate dressed and gave her a bottle. We’ve been playing.’
Of the two, Kate looks the best for the experience. She is bright-eyed and bursting with energy. Shona has, in fact, dressed her in pyjamas and a jumper that is two sizes too big but she is overcoming these sartorial disadvantages with aplomb. She takes Ruth’s phone and bites it, experimentally. Shona, on the other hand, looks pale and bleary-eyed, her hair is unbrushed and her shirt is on inside-out. But she is obviously so pleased with herself for having survived the night and the morning that Ruth feels a rush of affection for her.
‘You’ve done brilliantly,’ she says, taking Kate and putting her on the floor where she immediately rolls over on the rug – her favourite trick. ‘Did you hear me come in last night?’
‘No. Was it late? Did you have a good time?’
‘So-so. I think I’m too old for clubs.’
‘Rubbish. You just need the right company. Where’s Tatjana?’
Shona has a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards Tatjana. Before she arrived, she was full of curiosity. ‘I remember you talking about your time in Bosnia. I can’t wait to meet her.’ But when the two finally met at the naming day party, Shona had been decidedly cool. Maybe she hadn’t expected Tatjana to be so attractive, maybe she resented the way that she had annexed Phil, maybe she was just jealous of Tatjana’s relationship with Ruth but Shona, after exchanging a few cool pleasantries, announced to Ruth that she thought Tatjana was ‘shallow’. ‘What does your Bosnian friend think of me?’ she asked, a few days later. ‘She hasn’t mentioned you,’ Ruth had replied truthfully.
‘I’m not sure where she is,’ she says now. ‘I suppose she went home with Judy or one of the others.’
‘Maybe she met a man.’
Ruth thinks of the man Tatjana was dancing with. He was certainly gorgeous but would Tatjana really cheat on Rick?
‘She’s married,’ she says.
Shona shrugs. ‘When has that ever stopped any one? Who was that on the phone?’
‘Nelson.’
‘What did he want?’
‘A new development in the case.’
‘Jesus, Ruth. You’ve even starting to talk like a policeman. I’ll get us a coffee, shall I?’
Nelson walks slowly back along the cliff path. The scene-of-crime boys are loading Dieter Eckhart’s body into the white mortuary van. Clara and Jack Hastings stand watching. She had screamed when she first saw the body but now she is silent, her head on her father’s shoulder. Although he is smaller than her, there is something infinitely protective about the way he is stroking her hair. Nelson, thinking of his own daughters, feels moved.
Clough is still talking to the fisherman, who gave his statement with the stolid air of one who regularly finds dead bodies tangled up in his nets. A duty policeman had answered the first 999 call but, as soon as it was clear that a body was involved, Nelson was on his way. Jack Hastings was already there when he arrived, his dogs barking excitedly as the fisherman and the PC hauled the corpse above the tide line. Nelson was wondering whether to summon Clara when she appeared, wearing a coat over her pyjamas. Clough had attempted CPR but soon gave up. As he turned the body onto its side, water spouted from the mouth and the head flopped backwards, eyes rolling. It was then that Clara screamed.
The deputy pathologist, whom Nelson much prefers to Chris Stephenson, estimated that the body had only been in the water for a couple of hours, but that was time enough for Eckhart’s handsome face to become bloated and obscene. He is dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers and the knife wound, bloodless after immersion in the
