THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

sure of it.’
    That’s what Ruth’s afraid of.
    ‘We must invite his wife too,’ she says.
    ‘I’ve only met her once,’ says Cathbad, ‘but she seems a beautiful soul.’
    ‘She’s very pretty,’ says Ruth drily.
    ‘I meant spiritually beautiful,’ says Cathbad. Ruth isn’t convinced. For all his high-flown spirituality, Cathbad is susceptible to good-looking women.
    ‘All right,’ says Ruth. ‘We’ll have a party and a bonfire. Invite all the beautiful people.’
    Cathbad smiles and, long after he has left and Ruth is preparing for her tutorial, she still seems to see the smile lingering in the air, like the grin on the face of Lewis Carroll’s famous cat.

CHAPTER 8
     
    A week later Ruth gets the results of the isotope analysis. She rings Nelson immediately but is told, importantly, that he is out ‘on police business’. His mobile phone is switched off so she leaves a message and waits impatiently, looking down at the data in front of her, tapping her phone against her teeth. When it rings, she jumps a mile.
    ‘Ruth?’ It’s Ted.
    ‘Hi, Ted. What’s up?’
    ‘We’ve found something on the beach.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Some barrels.’
    ‘Barrels?’
    ‘Old oil barrels. They might be linked to the bodies we found. Do you want to come and have a look?’
    Ruth hesitates. Nelson could be hours and she doesn’t feel ready to settle down to any other work. She has no tutorials this afternoon and doesn’t have to collect Kate until five. And she’s intrigued; how could some old oil barrels be linked to the six skeletons?
    ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll come over.’
    Ted is waiting for her by the cliff path. It’s a beautiful afternoon; sunny but cold, with no wind. The tide is out and the shallow rock pools are a bright, unearthly blue. Ted is rubbing his hands together with what looks like glee but could just be an attempt to get the circulation back.
    ‘This way.’
    He leads the way past the jutting headland and onto the next beach. To get there they have to climb over the remains of the old sea wall and Ruth is soon out of breath. Ted rushes on ahead, bounding over the slippery rocks like a goat. Is there such a thing as a sea goat? Ruth pauses on the highest part of the wall, getting her breath back and enjoying the view. In front of her is a perfect picture-postcard bay – white sand, blue sky, seagulls calling – a desert island courtesy of Radio 4. Ted’s footprints in the wet sand are like Man Friday’s. Ruth could almost believe that no-one has ever been on this beach before. Although it is only a few miles from resorts like Cromer, this coastline is remote and hard to reach. The cliffs are high and there are no paths or steps. And there’s always the danger of being cut off by the tide. The cliffs are dangerous too, full of caves and fissures, overhanging precariously in places. The only creatures at home here are the birds – hundreds of them – nesting on the sheer rock face. Despite living near a bird sanctuary, Ruth is not fond of birds.
    A tiny figure on the deserted beach, Craig is clearing away sand with a shovel. He looks like an illustration of an impossible task, one of the labours of Hercules or a punishment in the Underworld.
    Another, less classical, allusion comes into Ruth’s head, inspired perhaps by Cathbad’s championing of Lewis Carroll:
    The Walrus and the Carpenter
    Were walking close at hand.
    They wept like anything to see
    Such quantities of sand.
    ‘If only this were cleared away,’
    They said, ‘it would be grand.’
     
    Ruth climbs down from the wall and walks carefully over the rock pools towards the beach. As she gets closer, she sees that, in fact, Craig is clearing the sand away from a large object – several large objects – that lie half-buried at the foot of the cliff. Closer still, she sees that they are oil barrels, orange with rust and studded with limpets.
    Craig is red in the face from his exertions. He greets Ruth and Ted with ‘Just the three of them, I think.’
    ‘What are they doing here?’ asks Ruth, bending close to examine the corroded metal. ‘It’s such an isolated place. Miles from anywhere.’
    ‘I used to come birds-nesting here as a child,’ says Craig. ‘We actually used to climb up without ropes or anything. Madness really. The cliffs are eighty foot high in places.’
    ‘I used to go in for extreme archaeology,’ says Ted. ‘Went into these caves once in the cliffs on the Firth of Clyde.