Ruth Galloway by Elly Griffiths Read Free Book Online Page B

Victorian house which still looks more like a family home than anything else. The reception desk is obviously in the middle of the sitting room and there should be framed family portraits on the walls rather than posters telling you to lock your car safely and not to exceed the speed limit. Her escort, a taciturn uniformed policeman, ushers her through a secret door beside the desk. She imagines the defeated-looking people waiting in reception wondering who she is and why she deserves this star treatment. They climb a rather beautiful swirling staircase, now marred with institutional carpeting, and enter a door marked CID.
    Harry Nelson is sitting at a battered Formica desk surrounded by papers. This room was obviously once part of a bigger one; you can see where the plasterboard partition cuts into the elaborate coving around the ceiling. Nowit is an awkward slice of a room, taller than it is wide, with a disproportionately large window, half-covered by a broken white blind. Nelson, though, does not seem a man who bothers much about his surroundings.
    He stands up when she enters. ‘Ruth. Good of you to come.’
    She can’t remember telling him to call her by her first name but now it seems too late to do anything about it. She can hardly ask him to go back to Doctor Galloway.
    â€˜Coffee?’ asks Nelson.
    â€˜Yes please. Black.’ She knows it will be horrible but somehow it feels rude to refuse. Besides it will give her something to do with her hands.
    â€˜Two black coffees, Richards,’ Nelson barks at the hovering policemen. Presumably he has the same problem with ‘please’ as with ‘thank you’.
    Ruth sits on a battered plastic chair opposite the desk. Nelson sits down too and, for a few minutes, seems just to stare at her, frowning. Ruth begins to feel uncomfortable. Surely he hasn’t just asked her here for coffee? Is this silent treatment something he does to intimidate suspects?
    The policeman marches back in with the coffees. Ruth thanks him profusely, noticing with a sinking heart the thin liquid and the strange wax film floating on the surface. Nelson waits until the door has shut again before saying, ‘You must be wondering why I asked you to come in.’
    â€˜Yes,’ says Ruth simply, taking a sip of coffee. It tastes even worse than it looks.
    Nelson pushes a file towards her. ‘There’s been another child gone missing,’ he says. ‘You’ll have read about it in the press.’
    Ruth stays silent; she doesn’t read the papers.
    Nelson gives her a sharp look before continuing. He looks tired, she realises. There are dark circles around his eyes and he obviously hasn’t shaved that morning. In fact, he looks more like a face on a ‘wanted’ poster than a policeman.
    â€˜There’s been a letter,’ he says. ‘Remember I told you about the letters that were sent during the Lucy Downey case? Well, this looks to be from the same person. At the very least someone’s trying to make me think it’s from the same person, which may be stranger still.’
    â€˜And you think this person may be the murderer?’
    Nelson pauses for a long time before replying, frowning darkly into his coffee cup. ‘It’s dangerous to make assumptions,’ he says at last, ‘that’s what happened with the Ripper case, if you remember. The police were so sure the anonymous letters came from the killer that it skewed the whole investigation and they just turned out to be from some nutter. That may well be the case here. Nothing more likely, in fact.’ He pauses again. ‘It’s just … there is always the chance that they
could
be from the killer, in which case they could contain vital clues. And I remembered what you said, that day when we found the bones, about ritual and all that. There’s a lot of that sort of thing in the letters, so I wondered if you’d take a look. Tell me what you