Elly Griffiths - The House At Sea’s End

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.

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. Trace walks 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 we can do about it.’ He grins happily as he says this.

Ruth walks towards the cliffs. She can see there has been a recent rock fall, rubble and stone have spilled out onto the beach and the cliff face is streaked black and grey.

‘Round here,’ says Ted.

In the furthest, most inaccessible corner of the beach, there is a gap in the cliff, a narrow cleft running from the coarse grass at the top to the beach below. This has been partly filled with rubble from the cliff fall but Ruth can see where some of the debris has been cleared away. She approaches carefully. ‘Look first,’ her mentor, Erik Anderssen, used to say. ‘Look, then plot, then dig. You will never get that first look again.’ She takes pictures of the cliffs and the rock fall and draws a map in her notebook. Then with Ted’s help she clears away some of the bigger stones. In the narrow space between the two cliff walls, the sand has been worn away, exposing something that looks at first like more stone, smooth and white.

Bones.

Ruth leans forward. She can see at once that there must be several bodies buried here. The bones are piled on top of each other but she can make out at least three thigh bones. Long, sturdy bones, which means the bodies may well be male. There is also a faint smell of rotten eggs. For a moment Ruth feels dizzy, remembering other mass graves, bones white in the sun. She takes a deep breath. She must plot this find, mark where the bodies are lying. ‘Sometimes,’ Erik used to say, ‘the most important thing is the direction.’

‘What do you think?’ comes Ted’s voice.

‘There are several bodies here,’ says Ruth. ‘We need to tell the coroner.’

‘Do you think they’re recent then?’ asks Ted.

‘There’s a good chance they’re recent.’

Ruth thinks that she has seen hair and teeth – signs that the bodies could be fairly modern but, then again, only the year before last she found a perfectly preserved body buried in a peat bog, that turned out to be over two thousand years old. But peat is alkaline, which preserves bone; sand is acidic. Digging on sandy sites, you are unlikely to find human remains because the bones have been eaten away. If these bones, buried in sandy soil, are still in relatively good condition, they may well be modern.

‘Dave said he’d tell the coroner on Monday,’ says Trace in an off-hand voice.

Ruth looks at her curiously. So it’s true that Trace is dating Dave Clough. Rather her than me, she thinks.

‘We should do it today,’ she argues.

‘Isn’t the boss man back on Monday?’ says Ted. ‘Maybe they’re waiting for him.’

‘He’ll be jet-lagged,’ says Trace. ‘Probably won’t be in until Tuesday.’

‘He’s only in Lanzarote,’ says Ruth.

There is a short silence.

Ruth steps over the wall of rubble. The gap between the cliffs is only about a metre wide, getting narrower as it goes back. It is much colder here and the air smells dank. Ruth shivers, and not entirely from the cold. Who would bury bodies here, in this inaccessible spot? She is willing to bet that it wasn’t for any good reason. She has her excavation kit with her but she doesn’t want to do any digging yet. Just look, says the voice in her head. If Trace is right about the tides, when they clear away the rocks this grave site will be destroyed altogether. All the more reason to make proper notes now. The bodies are lying north to south. She thinks that they are in correct anatomical position, stretched out, back-to-back. Taking her trowel, she scrapes away a little of the sand. There are definitely two bodies below, maybe more.

‘How many there?’ asks Ted, peering in.