'More than ten years ago? Before you first met him?'
'Maybe. His hair was long ten years ago but he could always have cut it in the meantime. Delilah looked young.'
'She dresses like a teenager now.'
'She's very beautiful.'
Nelson grunts but says nothing.
'She thinks you have a strong aura,' says Ruth mischievously.
Nelson's
lips form the word 'bollocks' but he doesn't say it aloud. Instead he says, 'What did you think of Alan? Bit of an unlikely partner for her, wouldn't you say? With her being so beautiful and all.'
Ruth thinks of Alan Henderson, with his sharp, rodent's face and darting eyes. He does seem an unlikely husband for Delilah who, even_ in her distress, seemed somehow exotic. But then they have four children together so presumably the marriage works. 'The eldest child, Maddie, isn't his,' she says. 'Maybe she married him on the rebound.'
'How the hell do you know that?'
'She told me.'
Nelson smiles. 'I thought she'd talk to you.'
'Is that why you made us have tea with them?'
'I didn't. They offered.'
'And you accepted. For both of us.'
Nelson grins. 'I'm sorry. I just thought we might need to build bridges with them. After all, we'd been there all morning digging their garden up, all the neighbours watching. They must have felt like suspects. I thought they might appreciate a nice friendly chat. And I thought Delilah might open up to you.'
'Open up? About what?'
'Oh, I don't know,' says Nelson with what sounds like studied nonchalance. 'You'd be surprised what turns out to be useful.'
Ruth wonders whether Delilah did tell her anything 'useful'. Mostly it had just seemed unbearably sad.
'It was just horrible,' she says at last, 'to see them suffering so much and not to be able to do anything about it.'
Nelson nods soberly. 'It is horrible,' he says. 'That's when I hate my job the most.'
'It was so sad, the way Delilah kept referring to Scarlet in the present tense but we don't know if she's alive or dead.'
Nelson nods again. 'It's every parent's worst nightmare.
The worst, the very worst. When you have children, suddenly the world seems such a terrifying place. Every stick and stone, every car, every animal, Christ, every person, is suddenly a terrible threat. You realise you'd do anything, anything, to keep them safe: steal, lie, kill, you name it. But sometimes there just isn't anything you can do. And that's the hardest thing.'
He stops and takes a swig of coke, maybe embarrassed at saying so much. Ruth watches him with something like wonder. She thought she could understand what Delilah Henderson felt, losing a beautiful child like Scarlet, but the thought that Nelson should feel like that about the two stroppy adolescents she had seen him with at the shopping centre seems almost unbelievable. Yet looking at his face as he stares into his glass, she does believe it.
Back home, trying half-heartedly to prepare her first lecture for next week, Ruth thinks about children. 'Do you have children?' Delilah had asked her. The implication was, if you don't, you won't understand. Nelson had understood. He might be an unreconstructed Northern policeman but he had children and that had given him access into the inner sanctum. He understood the terrible power of a parent's love.
Ruth doesn't have children and she has never been pregnant. Now that she is nearly forty and thinking that she might never have a child, it all seems such a waste. All that machinery chugging away inside her, making her bleed each month, making her moody and bloated and desperate for chocolate. All that internal plumbing, all those pipes gurgling away, all for nothing. At least Shona has been pregnant twice – and had two tearful abortions – at least she knows it all works. Ruth has no evidence at all that she can get pregnant. Maybe she can't and all those years of agonising over contraception were in vain.
She remembers once with Peter when their condom broke and, in the sweaty heat of the moment, they had decided to carry on. She remembers how, the morning after, she had woken up thinking, perhaps this is it. Perhaps I'm pregnant, and the sheer power of that thought, its ability to throw everything else into acute relief. To know that you are carrying something secretly inside you. How can anything stay the same after that? But, of course, it hadn't been it. She wasn't pregnant and now she probably never will be.
Peter has a child. He will know the feelings described by Nelson. Would Peter kill for his son? Erik has three children, all now grown up. Ruth remembers him once saying that the greatest gift you can give a child is to set them free.
Erik's children, scattered in London, New York and Tokyo, are certainly free, but are Erik and Magda free of them?
Once you have had a child, can you ever go back to being the person you were?
Ruth gets up to make herself tea. She feels twitchy and ill-at-ease. She told Erik she would be fine in the house on her own but she can't help thinking about Sparky and her brutal, horrible death. Iron Age man left dead bodies as messages to the Gods. Did Sparky's killer leave her body as a message to Ruth? Did the cat's body also mark a boundary? Come no further or I'll kill you, as I've killed Scarlet and Lucy. She shivers.
Flint squeezes in through the cat flap and Ruth picks him up and cuddles him. Flint endures her embrace whilst all the time looking hopefully at the floor. Child substitute, she thinks. Well, at least she has one.
Abandoning her work, she settles in front of the TV. Have I Got News For You is on but she can't lose herself in Ian Hislop's wit or Paul Merton's surreal brilliance.
She keeps thinking about Scarlet Henderson's parents, waiting for her in that messy family house. Delilah aching to hold her daughter one more time, perhaps wishing she could have her back inside her body, where at least she had been safe.
When she puts her hand to her face, she realises that she is crying.
The new sound is very close sometimes. It happens when the night is very dark and very cold. It wakes her up and she shivers, wrapping her blanket around her. It comes once, twice, three times. She doesn't know why but she thinks it might be calling to her. Once she calls back, "I'm here! Let me out!' and the sound of her own voice is the scariest thing of all.
Now there is a new noise at night. It comes again and again. Three cries, one after the other, very low and echoey.
The third cry always lasts the longest and is the most frightening.
She's used to the other sounds at night, the snufflings and rustlings, the wind that has a voice of its own, a roaring angry shout. Sometimes it feels as if the wind is going to roar in through the trapdoor and snatch her up with its cold, angry breath. She imagines herself caught up, thrown high into the air, sailing through the clouds, looking down on all the houses and the people. Funny, she knows exactly what she will see. There's a little white house, very square, with a swing in the back garden. Sometimes there's a girl on the swing, going to and fro, laughing as she flies into the air.
If she closes her eyes, she can still see the house and it's hard to believe that she hasn't actually floated there on top of the clouds, looking down on the girl and the swing and the neat rows of bright flowers.
Once she saw a face at the window. A monster's face.
Grey-white with black stripes on either side. She kept very still, waiting for the monster to see her and gobble her up.
But it hadn't. It had sort of sniffed at the bars with its wet black nose like those shoes that she had once had for best.
Then it had gone away, clattering horribly over the glass.
She has never seen it again.
CHAPTER 14
In the morning, Nelson brings Sparky's body back. He stands on the doorstep, holding the ominous-looking cardboard box, looking like a salesman who is uncertain of his welcome.
Ruth, still bleary-eyed before her first coffee, squints at him.
'I did promise.' Nelson indicates the box.