THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

where is his body?’
    She had looked at Ruth in the dappled light from the trees.
    ‘I must find his body, Ruth. You know what Erik says about needing to find a grave. It’s true. You need to see the dead, to bury them, to mourn them. Otherwise …’ Her voice dropped away. ‘Otherwise you cannot continue to live.’
    ‘But how can …’ Ruth was miserably aware of how inadequate she sounded. What a poor confidante she was proving. She too lapsed into silence.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Tatjana briskly. ‘You know they are moving bodies all the time to try to hide their crimes.’ This was true and it made the archaeologists’ job much more difficult. On some sites it was clear that they were dealing with secondary, sometimes even tertiary, burials, bodies that had been moved several times to avoid detection. Sometimes they could use 3-D imaging to gauge the depth of a grave but often they had to rely on their knowledge of strata and earth movement to tell how many times and how recentlya body had been buried. At other times they just had to guess, to use their ‘archaeologist’s sense’ as Erik put it.
    ‘I need to make enquiries,’ Tatjana was saying. ‘I can ask everyone we meet about the village and what happened to the bodies. That’s where you can help me, Ruth.’
    ‘Of course I will.’
    ‘And,’ Tatjana had said, almost as an afterthought, ‘I know the name of the man who did this. That will be helpful.’
    Ruth did not know why but Tatjana told her anyway. ‘So I can kill him.’

CHAPTER 13
     
    The sheltered housing looks rather pleasant in the spring sunshine. The grounds are immaculate, the grass cut in neat deckchair stripes, the beds full of daffodils. The buildings too are attractive, low and red brick, doors and windows freshly painted. Not bad, thinks Nelson approvingly, one day he might have to fix his mum up with something like this. Not yet, though. Maureen Nelson goes mad if anyone mentions the words ‘pensioner’ or ‘sheltered’ or, especially, ‘warden’. Besides, when the time comes, Nelson has two older sisters who will manage the whole thing, complaining all the time about the extra work but scorning any offers of help, especially from him. It’s handy being the youngest sometimes.
    Now, Nelson presses the bell marked with the dreaded word ‘warden’, but surely even Maureen wouldn’t disapprove of the charming, soft-spoken man (possibly Irish, like Maureen herself) who ushers him through the double doors and into a ground floor flat.
    ‘Do you live on site?’ asks Nelson.
    ‘Yes,’ says the warden, whose name is Kevin Fitzherbert.
    ‘Lots of places, they say “warden” but it’s just a voice on the end of the phone, not someone living downstairs who’ll come and unblock your sink for you.’
    ‘Is that what you do? Unblock sinks?’
    ‘That, and find lost glasses, help people up if they take a tumble, change the channel on the TV – there’s hell to pay if they can’t get
Countdown
– undo jars, post their pools coupons.’
    Nelson looks round the room. It is comfortable and extremely neat with a single armchair pushed close to the TV, remote control and folded
Radio Times
on the arm.
    ‘Are you married, Mr Fitzherbert?’ he asks, accepting an invitation to sit down.
    Kevin Fitzherbert looks slightly discomforted. ‘Divorced. My wife and I … we had our problems … but I’m off the drink now, been off it for five years. I’m in AA. Made a completely new start.’
    Not for the first time Nelson wonders at the things people will disclose to the police without being asked. The fact that Kevin Fitzherbert used to have a drink problem might be relevant or it might not. Either way, Nelson stores the information away and smiles non-committally.
    ‘Tell me about Hugh Anselm,’ he says.
    ‘Ah …’ Fitzherbert looks genuinely sad now, the Irish lilt well to the fore. ‘That was a tragedy, so it was. A fine gentleman. A true gentle man, if you get my meaning. One of the old school.’
    Nelson wonders where else he heard this phrase recently. ‘How did he die?’ he asks.
    ‘Heart attack,’ says Fitzherbert. ‘He had a heart problem.
    Angina. It was very serious, the slightest exertion could trigger an episode. He knew he could go any time. I try to call on the older residents once a day, check they’re all right. Most people like a regular time. I used to see Hugh at nine o’clock, he was an early riser. We’d have a cup of tea,