Ruth Galloway by Elly Griffiths Read Free Book Online

loves Bruce and Rod and Bryan. All those ageing rockers with croaky voices and faded jeans and age-defying hair. She loves the way they sing about love and loss and the dark, soulless heart of America, and it all sounds the same; crashing guitar chords against a wall of sound, the lyrics lost in a final, frenzied crescendo.
    Singing loudly, she takes the A11 towards Newmarket. It hadn’t been such a bad Christmas really. Her parents hadn’t nagged her too much about not going to church and not being married. Simon hadn’t been too irritating andher nephews were at quite interesting ages, eight and six, old enough to go to the park and play at being Neolithic hunters. The children adored Ruth because she told them stories about cavemen and dinosaurs and never noticed when their faces needed washing. ‘You’ve got quite a gift with kids,’ said her sister-in-law Cathy accusingly. ‘It seems a shame …’ ‘What’s a shame?’ Ruth had asked, although she knew only too well. ‘That you haven’t any of your own. Though, I suppose, by now …’
    By now I have resigned myself to spinsterhood and godmotherhood and slowly going mad, knitting clothes for my cats out of my own hair, thinks Ruth, neatly overtaking an overburdened people carrier. She is nearly forty and although it is not impossible that she should still have a child she has noticed people mentioning it less and less. This suits her fine; when she was with Peter the only thing more annoying than people hinting about possible ‘wedding bells’ was the suggestion that she might be ‘getting broody’. When she bought the cats her mother asked her straight out if they were ‘baby substitutes’. ‘No,’ Ruth had answered, straight-faced. ‘They’re kittens. If I had a baby it would be a cat substitute.’
    She reaches the Saltmarsh by mid-afternoon and the winter sun is low over the reed beds. The tide is coming in and the seagulls are calling, high and excited. When Ruth gets out of her car she breathes in the wonderful sea smell, potent and mysterious, and feels glad that she is home. Then she sees the weekenders’ monster car parked outside their cottage and feels a stab of irritation. Don’t say they have come here for New Year. Why can’t they stay in London like everyone else, flocking to Trafalgar Square orhaving bijou little parties at home? Why do they have to come here to ‘get away from it all’? They’ll probably let off fireworks and scare every bird for miles around. Imagining David’s reaction, she smiles grimly.
    Inside her cottage, Flint leaps on her, mewing furiously. Sparky, sitting on the sofa, steadfastly ignores her. Ruth’s friend Shona has been coming in to feed the cats and Ruth finds welcome home flowers on the table as well as milk and white wine in the fridge. God bless Shona, thinks Ruth, putting on the kettle.
    Shona, who teaches English at the university, is Ruth’s best friend in Norfolk. Like Peter, she had been a volunteer on the henge dig ten years ago. Fey and Irish, with wild Pre-Raphaelite hair, Shona declared herself in sympathy with the druids and even joined them for an all-night vigil, sitting on the sand chanting until the tide forced them inland and Shona was lured away by the promise of a Guinness in the pub. That was the thing about Shona, she may have her New Age principles but you could nearly always overcome them with the promise of a drink. Shona is in a relationship with a married lecturer and sometimes she comes over to Ruth’s cottage, weeping and flailing her hair around, declaring that she hates men and wants to become a nun or a lesbian or both. Then she will have a glass of wine and brighten up completely, singing along to Bruce Springsteen and telling Ruth that she is a ‘dote’. Shona is one of the best things about the university.
    Her answer phone shows four messages.