THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

seat into the house and places it in the middle of the sitting room. Flint comes up and sniffs Kate’s face. Ruth carrieshim away. Her mother is full of stories about cats sitting on babies and suffocating them but Flint’s attitude so far has been one of detached friendliness and Ruth relies too much on his companionship to suspect him of sinister motives. She feeds him, makes tea and toast for herself and prepares to enjoy an hour’s peace.
    The phone rings as soon as she has sat down. It is Nelson.
    ‘Hallo. How are you doing?’
    ‘I’m fine. Where are you ringing from? Are you back?’
    A hollow laugh. ‘No, I’m still here in bloody Lanzarote listening to the most boring man in the world talk about hard drives.’
    ‘Sounds like fun.’
    ‘You’ve no idea.’
    There is an expensive international pause.
    ‘How’s Katie?’
    ‘Kate.’
    Impatient grunt. ‘Is she okay?’
    ‘She’s fine. She’s sleeping.’ From where she is sitting Ruth can see Kate’s little chest rising and falling. Though she no longer checks every ten minutes to see if her daughter is breathing, she still does it every hour.
    ‘How’s the childminder? Working out all right?’
    ‘Jesus. You ran a police check on her. Twice.’
    ‘Things can get past those checks.’
    ‘She’s fine. Not a murderer or a child molester. Fine.’
    There is another silence while they both think of people who turned out to be not quite what they seemed. Ruth has assisted the police on two murder cases, both involving children.
    ‘I’ll be home tomorrow.’
    But Ruth knows that home does not mean home to her.
    ‘It’s very cold in Norfolk,’ she says, dampeningly.
    ‘Christ Almighty. It’s always cold in bloody Norfolk.’
    He rings off and Ruth sits on the sofa thinking complicated and uncomfortable thoughts. When Trace rings and tell her that they have discovered a mass grave at Broughton Sea’s End, it’s a relief as much as anything.

CHAPTER 3
     
    The next day is Saturday, and at low tide Ruth, Ted and Trace walk along the beach to Broughton Sea’s End. Kate has been left with Sandra for the morning. ‘It’s no trouble,’ said Sandra but Ruth feels that it is. Weekdays are all right because that is the arrangement but weekends are an imposition. Ruth also has an absolute dread of asking for favours. She hates ringing up and saying, in that special wheedling voice, ‘Can I ask … would you mind … you’ve saved my life … you’re a star.’ She’d rather cut the crap and do the thing herself but, as she’s finding out, being a working mother means asking for favours. She stumps across the sand in a bad mood.
    It is a grey morning. The mist still lingers inland, but at the edge of the sea the air is cold and clear. It’s hard going, walking over pebbles and rocks encrusted with tiny, sharp mussel shells. Ted is almost unforgivably breezy for a man who hasn’t had a drink yet. He exclaims at unusual rock formations, finds a piece of fool’s gold and a coin, worn completely smooth by the sea. He throws floundering crabs back into the water and writes his name in the sand. Tracewalks in silence, occasionally taking notes. Ruth finds this rather irritating but she is grateful not to have to make small talk.
    As they round the headland, Sea’s End House towers above them, grey against the grey sky. With the rest of the coastline hidden by fog, it seems to float out into the sea like a doomed ocean liner, lights blazing as it heads towards the ice-floe.
    ‘Welcome to the end of the line,’ says Ted, with undiminished good humour.
    Ruth looks up at the cliffs. The stone is sandy, soft and crumbly at the edges where it has been eaten away in bitesized chunks. ‘Sandstone,’ she says.
    ‘Yeah,’ Ted agrees. ‘Sandstone all along this stretch. That’s why erosion’s so bad.’
    ‘There was a sea wall,’ says Trace, ‘but it disappeared years ago. There are the remains, over there.’
    They all look out to sea where, about a hundred yards away, two or three large boulders are sticking out of the water like giant stepping stones.
    ‘Trouble is,’ says Ted, ‘most of the defences were built in Victorian times. The cliffs behind them were too steep. When the walls went, there were no banks or anything to slow the tide down.’
    ‘Should have been fixed,’ says Trace. ‘Even fifty years ago there would still have been time.’
    Ted shrugs. ‘It’s global warning, innit? Seas are rising and there’s nothing