you be?’
He tried for bemusement. ‘What are you on about, love?’
‘Don’t call me love. You slept with Ruth, she’s had your baby, and now you’re trying to deny it. I never knew you were such a coward, Harry.’
And he is a coward. He knows that now. They had been forced to go into the pub, to drink Kate’s health and laugh at Cathbad’s jokes. Michelle, brittle and beautiful with self-righteous fury, had even held the baby in her arms, thoughtfully stroking the telltale swirl of dark hair. When they got home Michelle had given him an ultimatum. He must never see Ruth or Kate again. ‘But I work with her,’ he had protested. ‘You know what I mean. You can speak to her as a colleague but never, never as anything more than that.’ And he had agreed.
He had known all along that he could never break up his family, turn Laura and Rebecca into resentful strangers and Michelle into that age-old stock character ‘the ex-wife.’ Although his daughters are both at university now, they still need him. They need both their parents, they need a home. And Michelle. He has loved her for almost all his adult life. She’s still one of the most beautiful women he’s ever seen and she’s the mother of his beloved daughters. How could he ever leave her? Once he fantasised that he could have both women, all three children, but that’s not the way the world works. But in honouring his wedding vows Nelson has betrayed Ruth. He can hear himself now, blustering, gabbling away, denying that there was ever anything between them. A phrase from the Good Friday gospel comes back to him. Before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.
Nelson sighs as he turns into the grounds of the hospital. ‘Car Park full. Current waiting time: 30 minutes.’ He has sinned and the wages of sin are death. Death has come uncomfortably close in the last few years. He can’t afford to make the Gods angrier than they already are. And, in the meantime, he has a dead body and Ruth Galloway is the only witness.
The whole case bothers him. Neil Topham could have died from natural causes but the idea of the body lying beside the other, long-dead, corpse disturbs him. And those letters. Once before Nelson had had to deal with a case involving anonymous letters and there were enough echoes in the missives found in Topham’s desk to make the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
Nelson screeches to a halt in a bay reserved for emergency vehicles. Detective Sergeant Judy Johnson comes out to meet him. She’s one of Nelson’s best officers: bright, hard-working, excellent at the touchy-feely stuff. She got married earlier in the year and Nelson lives in dread of her announcing that she’s off on maternity leave. ‘That’s the trouble with promoting women,’ he grumbled to his boss. Whitcliffe had been shocked. ‘Harry! You just can’t say things like that these days.’ The list of things that Nelson can’t say seems to be getting longer by the minute. Still, he’s sure that Whitcliffe knows what he means. All that trouble training up an officer only to have her quit the moment she starts getting really useful. Or she’ll try and juggle work and babies and be constantly tired and stressed. Judy hasn’t said anything about starting a family though; come to think of it, she’s been rather quiet these last few weeks.
‘Hi boss.’
They are standing in the entrance to A and E. A steady stream of injured revellers, some still in Halloween masks, trail past them. The walking wounded. And it’s not six o’clock yet.
‘Dead on arrival?’ Nelson greets Judy.
She nods. ‘He’s in the morgue. I’ve contacted his parents. They’re on their way.’
‘Chris Stephenson had a look?’
‘Yes. He says he’ll do a post-mortem tomorrow.’
‘Say anything else useful?’
‘Signs of drug use.’
Nelson thinks of the white powder found in the desk drawer. Was it for Topham’s private use only? What was going on at the Smith Museum?
‘Cause of death?’ he asks, stepping aside to let a reeling man dressed as a mummy go past.
‘Not sure. Could have been heart attack.’
‘I’d better have a look.’
Judy follows Nelson across the car park, towards a discreet sign saying ‘Hospital Morgue’. On their way they pass a couple of nurses wearing witches’ hats and a disturbingly realistic vampire, swigging Bull’s Blood from the bottle.
CHAPTER 4
It seems impossible that six children can make this much noise. Ruth’s little house seems to be swelling with sound, its sides straining under the pressure of chocolate fingers, party games and an exuberant rendering of ‘Happy Birthday Dear Katie’. This last reminds Ruth uncomfortably of Nelson, who persists in calling her Katie. Why can’t people just accept that Ruth knows her own daughter’s name, even if it does scan better with an ‘ie’ on the end?
Kate’s little friends include two toddlers, both clients of Sandra’s, who ignore each other and run round bursting balloons, and two older children belonging to a colleague of Ruth’s. The older kids, who are called Daisy and Ben, try to organise the babies but end up playing pass-the-parcel solemnly by themselves. Ben wins a rag doll and hands it silently to his mother.
Shona, radiant in a pink velvet tunic, sits on the floor with Kate so that people who don’t know her say ‘she’ll make a lovely mother.’ Ruth smiles noncommittally. She has known Shona a long time. They first met on a dig, twelve years ago. It was on this dig that Erik had his finest hour, the discovery of the Bronze Age henge. Cathbad too had been centre stage, organising protests against the removal of the henge to a museum. Shona had sympathised with the protesters, as had Ruth and Erik too, up to a point. But the henge had been removed, and though there is no trace of it now on the shifting sands of the Saltmarsh the repercussions of that summer are still being felt in many people’s lives. Ruth had once felt betrayed by Shona, beautiful Shona who could have any man she wanted, but her need for a friend had been too strong and they managed to repair their relationship. Now Shona is living with Ruth’s boss, Phil, and expecting his baby. She is blissfully happy and so Ruth, who wonders just how her glamorous friend will cope with broken nights, mother-and-toddler groups and endless reruns of
As an entertainer, though, Shona is quite outclassed by Cathbad, who arrives late and promptly leads the children in a wild game of follow-my-leader: over the sofa, up and down the stairs, rampaging through Ruth’s tiny, overgrown garden.
‘Does he have children of his own?’ asks one of the toddlers’ mothers, picking her offspring out of a bramble bush.
‘One daughter. She must be almost grown up now.’
‘He seems very… energetic.’
‘He is.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘He works at the university.’ Ruth doesn’t feel up to going into her whole history with Cathbad. How she first met him on the henge dig, how he reappeared when a child disappeared on the Saltmarsh. How he keeps appearing whenever her life is in danger. How he has appointed himself as unofficial guardian angel, not just to Ruth and Kate, but also to a markedly ungrateful DCI Harry Nelson.
‘He’s Kate’s godfather,’ she offers.
‘Oh.’ The mother looks relieved, as if Cathbad’s presence has at last been satisfactorily explained. Ruth doesn’t think it’s worth mentioning that Cathbad is also a druid. Thank God he’s not wearing his cloak.
