The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths by Elly Griffiths Read Free Book Online

long talks, sometimes, whispering in the dark.
    ‘Don’t worry.’
    ‘It’ll all come right in the end.’
    ‘Darkest before dawn.’
    Words she can’t even remember hearing, though now they seem lodged in her brain. Who was it who told her once that it was darkest before dawn? She doesn’t know.
    She only knows that the words give her a warm, ticklish feeling, like being wrapped in a blanket. She has an extra blanket when it’s cold but even then she shivers so much that in the morning her whole body aches. Sometimes it’s warmer and a little light shines through the edges of the trapdoor. Once he opened the window in the roof. Usually it’s only open at night when the sky is black, but this time it was bright and blue and it made her eyes hurt. The bars on the window turned into a little yellow ladder. Sometimes she dreams about climbing the ladder and escaping to …
    where? She doesn’t know. She thinks of the sun on her face and being in a garden where there are voices and cooking smells and cool water falling. Sometimes she walks through the water and it’s like a curtain. A curtain. Where? A beaded curtain that you run through, laughing, and on the other side there’s the warm light again and the voices and someone holding you tight, so tight; so tight they will never let you go.
    And, other times, she thinks there is nothing there at all, beyond these walls. Only more walls and iron bars and cold, concrete floors.

CHAPTER 4
    Ruth leaves her parents’ house as soon as she decently can after Christmas. Phil is having a New Year’s Eve party and, though in truth she would rather chew her own arm off than attend, she tells her parents that it is her duty to go.
    ‘It would be bad for my career. After all, he is head of department.’ They understand this alright. They understand that she might go to a party to further her career. It’s enjoying herself they wouldn’t understand.
    So, on 29 December, Ruth is driving along the Mil to Norfolk. It is mid-morning and the frost has gone so she drives fast and happily, singing along to her new Bruce Springsteen CD, a Christmas present to herself. According to her brother Simon, Ruth has the musical taste of a sixteen-year-old boy. ‘A tasteless sixteen-year-old boy.’ But Ruth doesn’t mind. She 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 All 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 and her 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