She supposes that she must really have been in love with Erik all these years. She remembers when she first met him, as a graduate student in Southampton, the way that he seemed to take her mind apart, shuffle it and put it back together a different shape. He changed her view of everything: archaeology, landscape, nature, art, relationships.
She remembers him saying, 'The human desire is to live, to cheat death, to live forever. It is the same over all the ages.
It is why we build monuments to death so that they live on after we die.' Did Erik's desire to live simply mean that he could do whatever he wanted?
And when she met Magda she had been so pleased. She had thought nobody could be good enough for Erik but Magda was. She had loved their relationship, that affectionate companionship, so different from her parents'
stilted formality. She could never imagine Erik and Magda calling each other Mummy and Daddy or driving to a garden centre on a Sunday afternoon. They lived the perfect life, climbing mountains, sailing, spending the winters writing and researching and the summers digging.
She remembers the log cabin by the lake in Norway, the meals eaten on the deck, the hot tub, the evenings eating, drinking and talking. Talking. That's what she remembers most about Erik and Magda. They had always talked, argued sometimes, but always they had listened to each other's views. Ruth remembers many times listening to Erik and Magda as, glasses of wine in their hands and the Northern lights shining above them, they had fitted their differing theories together so that they came up with something new, better, more complete. Not for them the moment described by Peter: 'We just ran out of things to say to each other.'
Ruth is not stupid. She knows that she created idealised parents in Magda and Erik and that is why she feels so let down now. And if she was also secretly in love with Erik, well that just makes a perfect Freudian hole-in-one. What upsets her most, she thinks, looking out over the rain sodden marshland, is that she had thought she was special.
Even if Erik had not fancied her, he had thought her an especially talented student. On the henge dig he had continually deferred to her. 'Ruth will understand this even if the rest of you don't' implied that he and she shared a special understanding. Ruth, he had said, had 'an archaeologist's sense', a quality which, apparently, cannot be taught. Erik's approval has carried Ruth through many difficult years, insulated her against Phil's patronising indifference, comforted her when she never quite seemed able to get that book proposal down on paper.
She knows it is childish, but Ruth feels that she needs to be reminded of Erik's good opinion, so she takes down her copy of his book The Shivering Sand. She opens it at the title page. There it is, in black and white. To Ruth, my favourite pupil.
Ruth looks at the words for a long moment. It is as if she has suddenly seen a gross misshapen shadow on the wall the horns and the tail and the cloven hoofs. Blindly, almost staggering, she gets up and goes to the desk where she keeps her copies of the Lucy Downey letters. Hands shaking, she leafs through the letters until she gets to the two that are handwritten.
She lays them on the table next to Erik's dedication. The handwriting is the same.
CHAPTER 22
For what seems like hours, she just stands there, unable to move. Almost unable to breathe. An icy paralysis seems to have taken over her whole body. Think, Ruth, think.
Breathe. Can Erik really have written these letters? Is it possible that Erik, as well as being a hypocrite and a serial seducer, is also a murderer?
The worst thing is that she can almost believe it. Erik knows about archaeology. He knows about Norse legends and Neolithic ritual and the power of the landscape. She can hear his voice, that beloved singsong voice, telling campfire stories of water spirits and shape-changers and the creatures of the dark. With a sudden, fresh chill she remembers his words that very morning: The poor girl is dead. She is buried, she is at peace. Almost an exact echo of one of the letters.
Can it possibly be true? Erik was still living in England when Lucy Downey vanished. It was just after the henge dig. He could have sent those early letters. He didn't go back to Norway until eight years later. But could he have sent the recent letters about Scarlet Henderson? He has only been back in England since January. Nelson showed her a letter dated last November. 'He hasn't forgotten,' said Nelson. Could Erik have sent that letter? – or arranged to have someone else send it?
It's crazy, Ruth tells herself, moving stiffly to stroke Flint who is purring round her ankles. Erik would not be capable of writing those evil, taunting, warped letters. He is a humanitarian, the first to support striking miners or victims of natural disasters. He is kind and thoughtful; comforting Ruth in the shock of Peter's marriage, grieving with Shona when her father died. But he is also, thinks Ruth, the man who speaks approvingly of human sacrifice ('isn't the same thing happening in Christian Holy Communion?'), who advised Ruth to forget Peter with another lover ('it's the easiest way') and who, presumably, was sleeping with Shona and encouraging her to abort their child whilst weeping with her about her father. Erik is amoral, he is somehow outside normal human rules; that is one of the most attractive things about him. But is it also something that makes him capable of unimaginable evil?
If he wrote the letters, did he kill the two little girls?
Mechanically feeding Flint, Ruth realises that she has poured the cat food right over the sides of the bowl. Flint pushes furrily past her to get at the food. She remembers a conversation she had with him about her Iron Age body. 'How could anyone do that?' she had asked. 'Kill a child for some religious ritual?' 'Look at it this way,' Erik had said calmly.
'Maybe it's a good way to go. Saves the child the disillusionment of growing up.' He had smiled as he said it but Ruth remembers feeling chilled. Could Erik have killed the two girls to save them the disillusionment of growing up?
She can't bear it any more. Grabbing her coat and bag, she rushes out into the rain. She is going to speak to Shona.
Shona is still out when she arrives. Ruth slumps down on the doorstep, too exhausted to remember that she has a key. She just sits there, looking at the people going in and out of the Tesco Express and wondering what it must be like to have no more to worry about than whether to have chops or sausages for supper and whether you've got enough potatoes for chips. Her own life seems to have become dark and grim, like the sort of film she would avoid watching late at night. When did this happen? When they dug down into the peat and found the body of Scarlet Henderson? When she first saw Nelson, standing in the university corridor? When she first looked down at her student introductory pack and saw the words, Personal Tutor: Erik Anderssen?
When Shona eventually appears, swinging down the road carrying a Thresher's bag and a rented DVD, she looks so blameless, so innocent, with her long legs and silver jacket, that Ruth thinks that she must be mistaken.
No way can Shona be mixed up in any of this. She is Ruth's dear friend, her crazy, lovable, scatty friend. But, then, Shona sees Ruth, and a curious trapped look comes over her face, like a fox cornered in a suburban garden. Almost instantly though, charm breaks out again and she smiles, proffering the bag and the DVD.
'Girls' night in,' she says. 'Want to join me?'
'I've got to talk to you.'
Now Shona looks positively terrified. 'OK,' she says, opening the door. 'You'd better come in.'
Ruth doesn't even give Shona time to take off her coat.
'Did Erik write those letters?'
'What letters?' asks Shona nervously.
Ruth looks around the room, at the sanded floor and the trendy rugs, at the photos in decorated frames – almost all of Shona herself, she notices now – at the patchwork throw over the sofa, at the new novels stacked on the table, at the bookshelves with their battered copies of the classics, from T.S. Eliot to Shakespeare. Then she looks back at Shona.