'Yes. Thank you. Come in. I'll make us some coffee.'
'Coffee would be grand.'
He puts the box carefully on the floor by the sofa. They both avoid looking at it. Ruth busies herself with the coffee and Nelson stands in the sitting room, looking around with a slight frown. Ruth is reminded of the first time she saw him, in the corridor at the university, and the impression she had of him being too big for the room. That is certainly the case here. Nelson, looming in his heavy black jacket, makes the tiny cottage seem even smaller. Erik is tall but he had seemed able to fold himself up into the space.
Nelson looks as if he might, at any second, knock something over or bash his head against the ceiling.
'Lots of books,' he says, when Ruth comes in with coffee and biscuits on a tray.
'Yes, I love reading.'
Nelson grunts. 'The wife belongs to a book club. All they do is moan about their husbands. They never talk about the bloody books at all.'
'How do you know?'
'I've listened when they meet at our place.'
'Maybe they talk about the books when you're not listening.'
Nelson acknowledges this with a slight smile.
'Did you find anything?' asks Ruth, 'from… from Sparky?'
Nelson takes a gulp of coffee and shakes his head. 'We won't know until tomorrow at the earliest. I've had the letters tested again as well. We're checking the prints and DNA results against known offenders.'
Ruth wonders what has prompted this course of action.
Nelson sounds very much as if he has a 'known offender'
in mind. Before she can ask, Nelson puts down his coffee cup and looks at his watch.
'Have you got a spade?' he asks briskly.
Now the moment has come, Ruth feels curiously reluctant to go out into the garden and bury Sparky. She wants to stay inside drinking coffee and pretending that nothing bad has happened. But she knows it can't be put off and so she gets her coat and shows Nelson to the tool shed.
Ruth's garden is a tiny square of windblown grass.
When she first moved in she had tried to plant things but they were always the wrong things and nothing ever seemed to grow except thistles and wild lavender. Next door, the weekenders have a smart deck which, in summer, they adorn with terracotta pots. Today, though, it looks as forlorn and empty as Ruth's garden. David's garden is even more overgrown though it does contain an elaborate bird table complete with a device to repel cats (Ruth fears it doesn't work).
There is a dwarf apple tree at the end of the garden and it is here that Ruth asks Nelson to dig the grave. It is odd watching someone else dig. He does it all wrong, bending his back rather than his legs, but he does the job quickly enough. Ruth looks into the neat hole and automatically checks out the layers: topsoil, alluvial clay, chalk. Flint watches them from the apple tree, tail flicking. Nelson hands Ruth the box. It feels pathetically light. Ruth wants to look inside but she knows that this would not be a good idea. Instead, she drops a kiss on the cardboard lid, 'Goodbye Sparky,' and then she places the box in the grave.
Ruth gets another spade and helps Nelson fill in the hole and, for a few minutes, the only sound in the garden is their breathing as they shovel in the heavy earth. Nelson has taken off his jacket and hung it on the apple tree. Flint has disappeared.
When the hole is filled in, Nelson and Ruth look at each other. Ruth feels as if she understands now why burials are therapeutic. Earth to earth. She has buried Sparky but her cat will always be there, part of the garden, part of her life.
Then she remembers the Lucy letters. Lucy lies deep below the ground but she will rise again. She shakes her head, trying to rid herself of the words.
'What about the candle?' she asks Nelson.
'I'll do it on Sunday. A decade of the rosary too.'
'Only a decade?'
'Two decades and a Glory Be for luck.'
They look at each other over the newly dug grave and smile. Ruth feels that she ought to say something but, somehow, silence feels right just then. Geese call, high overhead, and a light rain starts to fall.
'I'd better be going,' says Nelson, but he doesn't move.
Ruth looks at him, the rain falling softly on her hair.
Nelson smiles, an oddly gentle smile. Ruth opens her mouth to speak but the silence is broken by a voice that seems to come from another world, another existence.
'Ruth! What are you doing out here?'
It is Peter.
When Nelson drives away, gruff and professional once more, Ruth makes more coffee and sits at the table with Peter.
He looks good, thinks Ruth. His gingery blond hair is shorter, he is about a stone lighter and he even has a tan, something so unusual (Peter has typical redhead's skin) that it makes him look almost shockingly different.
'You're looking well,' says Peter.
'I'm not,' says Ruth bluntly, aware that she is wearing no make-up and that her hair has gone crinkly from the rain.
There is a short silence.
'Who was that man again?' asks Peter.
'It's a long story,' says Ruth.
Peter is a good audience. He is satisfyingly shocked at the death of Sparky – he did love the cats, she remembers – and properly fascinated by the Iron Age bodies and the causeway. She tells him a little about the police investigations, but not about the letters, and he says that he has read about the Scarlet Henderson case.
'Poor little girl. Terrible for the parents. Do the police really think that the murderer might have killed Sparky as a sort of warning to you?'
'It's a possibility, they think.'
'God, Ruth. You do live, don't you?'
Ruth doesn't reply. She thinks she detects a tinge of envy in Peter's voice for her supposedly exciting life. She wants to tell him that, far from being excited, she actually feels lonely and rather scared. She looks at him, wondering how honest she wants to be.
It is odd to see Peter in the cottage again. He and Ruth had lived here together for a year. Ruth bought the cottage a few years after the henge dig, still drawn to the Saltmarsh and its eerie, desolate beauty. By that time she and Peter had been living together for two years and there was some talk of their buying the place together. Ruth had resisted, at the time she wasn't even sure why, and Peter had given in. The little cottage was hers alone, and she remembers that when Peter moved out, the house didn't even seem to notice. There were a few gaps on the walls and in her bookshelves but, on the whole, the house seemed to close in on her, satisfied. At last they were alone.
'I've missed this place,' says Peter, looking out of the window.
'Have you?'
'Yes, living in London you never get to see the sky.
There's so much sky here.'
Ruth looks out at the expanse of stormy, gunmetal sky where the lowering clouds are chasing each other over the marshes.
'Lots of sky,' she agrees. 'But not much else.'
'I like it,' says Peter, 'I like the loneliness.'
'So do I,' says Ruth.
Peter is looking sadly into his coffee cup. 'Poor little Sparky,' he says. 'I remember when we first brought her home. She was no bigger than that squeaky mouse toy we bought her.'
Ruth can't take much more of this. 'Come on,' she says.
'Let's go for a walk. I'll show you the causeway.'
The wind has grown stronger and, as they walk, they have to lower their heads to stop the sand blowing into their eyes. Ruth would be happy to stomp along in silence but Peter seems keen to chat. He tells her about his work, his recent skiing trip (hence the tan) and his views on the government, which had just been elected that heady summer ten years ago. He doesn't, once, mention Victoria or Daniel. Ruth tells him about her work, her family and the Iron Age bodies.
'What does Erik think?' asks Peter. He is walking fast, striding over the uneven ground. Ruth almost has to jog to keep up with him.
'He thinks they're all connected.'
'Oh yes.' Peter adopts a thick Norwegian accent. 'The sacred site, the power of the landscape, the gateway between life and death.'