A Room Full of Bones: A Ruth Galloway Investigation

landscape, but Max was looking at a bustling garrison town with Italianate villas, a market place and a road leading directly to the sea. Ruth, arriving breathlessly at the top of the hill, saw it too. She also saw children’s bodies buried under walls, a skull in a well, the Goddess Hecate with her two spectral hounds. The Goddess of the crossroads. Luckily Claudia, distinctly unghostlike, provided a distraction by chasing a rabbit.
    ‘Claudia!’ shouted Max.
    ‘Perfectly trained,’ observed Ruth as Claudia, taking absolutely no notice of her master, disappeared over the horizon.
    ‘I’ve been taking her to obedience classes,’ said Max ruefully. ‘We got a medal for trying hard.’
    Kate laughed, tugging Max’s hair.
    Claudia arrived back in time for the descent to thePhoenix. Ruth and Max ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and even Kate managed three roast potatoes. After lunch, in the late afternoon, they stood outside the pub, Ruth holding Kate, Max with a struggling Claudia on the lead.
    ‘When will I see you again?’ asked Max. ‘What about next weekend?’
    Ruth had been delighted that Max wanted to see her again, that he was making all the running, but, all the same, next weekend seemed a little too soon. ‘I think my parents are coming,’ she extemporised. ‘Maybe the weekend after?’
    ‘Sounds good,’ Max had said, leaning forward to kiss her cheek. ‘Keep in touch.’
    And now, driving back through the twilight, Ruth feels free to enjoy the thought that she actually seems to be in a relationship with Max. A proper grown-up relationship with a proper grown-up man who isn’t married to someone else. A weekend relationship suits her perfectly. She likes having her house to herself all week, not having to cook for another person or wear her chillier, more glamorous, nightwear. But it would be lovely to have someone to see at weekends, to go to plays or to the cinema, to walk with on the beach, to sit and watch
Antiques Roadshow
with on a Sunday evening. And to have sex with, of course.
    It’s nearly dark when she reaches the Saltmarsh. The clocks went back last week and now, at four-thirty, it’s almost night. She has been chatting to Kate all through the journey, trying to keep her awake, and her effortshave been rewarded. Kate, though definitely sleepy, is still bright-eyed, exclaiming happily whenever Ruth starts a new verse of
The Wheels on the Bus
. What a sexist song, thinks Ruth, why do the mothers do nothing but chatter and the fathers nothing but nod? Kate won’t be able to accuse her mother of chattering – sleeping with strange men perhaps but not chattering. Ruth stops outside the cottage. Bob’s car isn’t there. It’s strange how quickly she has got used to having neighbours. Now she feels slightly nervous at being here on her own, on the edge of the world. Ridiculous, she tells herself, you were alone for nearly two years and nothing happened to you. But the wind is howling in from the sea and Ruth clutches Kate tightly as she gets her out of the car. You’re getting soft, she tells herself.
    Kate screams, a cry of real terror. Ruth reels round and sees a monster lurching towards her through the darkness. A hideous misshapen figure, ink black, with a giant head, like a goblin or a minotaur. Ruth shields Kate with her body, unable to move further. The creature looms nearer and nearer. Where’s her phone? She has to ring Nelson. Oh God, it’s still in the car. She and Kate are going to be murdered and no one will hear them scream. Nelson will investigate and then, perhaps, he’ll be sorry for abandoning them. Her parents will pray for her soul. Cathbad will light a bonfire in her honour. The figure is getting nearer, making hideous squelching sounds. It has come from the sea, it’s one of Erik’s malevolent water spirits, come to put its slimy fingers round her throat and drag her back into the depths.
    Suddenly they are flooded with light. The security light has come on and the monster has resolved itself into a young man wearing a wet suit and carrying a surfboard on his shoulders.
    ‘Hallo,’ he says. ‘I hope I didn’t startle you. I’m Cameron. Sammy and Ed’s son.’
    Sammy and Ed? Who the hell are they? Then Ruth remembers. The weekenders. Her other next-door neigh-bours. And this massive creature must be the little boy she remembers trekking over the marshes with his inflatable boat. Well, he obviously still likes the sea.
    ‘Just come down for a