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Breathe in for four, out for eight. He remembers telling Ruth this when she began to suffer from panic attacks. But it’s easier to advise other people. Ruth seems calmer now but not as happy as Cathbad hoped she’d be. There’s a stubborn force binding Ruth and Nelson. The question is, should Cathbad help them to break it?
Cathbad picks up a piece of driftwood and throws it for Thing. He’s not an efficient retriever– like Nelson’s Bruno– and often gets distracted. Now he’s discovered a jellyfish marooned in the sand. It’s a disconcertingly bright blue, like something from a science fiction film. Cathbad thinks of the green children again. In for four, out for eight.
‘Leave it, boy.’ The tide is coming in so Cathbad decides to leave the creature where it is. Soon it will be returned to its element, as we all will in the end. He thinks of the henge, the wooden timbers rising from the sea. ‘They belong here,’ he’d said to Erik, ‘part of the cycle of nature, part of the sea and the tide.’ But Erik had taken them away, talking of scientific research and the pursuit of knowledge. It was the first betrayal. And now Erik is dead and the henge is reconstructed in Lynn Museum. Cathbad should go to see them. Before it’s too late.
That’s the thing. It’s easy to talk about time and tide and the cycle of nature. It’s more difficult when you’re the one facing the long journey into the unknown. Cathbad has visited the portals of the underworld before and has been able to come back. This time it will be different. That morning, when Judy forced him to have a lie-in, Cathbad had found a quotation in one of his poetry books. Tennyson. FromUlysses.
Death closes all: but something ere the end
Some work of noble note, may yet be done.
Cathbad walks on, his dog beside him.
‘OK,’ says Tanya. ‘Let’s get to work.’
Her only audience is DC Tony Zhang, who is already at work, but Tanya never misses a chance to sound like DCI Jane Tennison.
‘Nelson says Ruth’s pretty sure the remains are female,’ says Tanya, ‘and relatively young. We should be looking for any woman, aged between eighteen and, say, thirty-five, who went missing in the last twenty years.’
‘Ruth said something similar yesterday,’ says Tony. ‘I’ve been looking at all the misper files since 2000 but I haven’t found anyone that fits. I’ve contacted the neighbouring forces too.’
‘Dave Clough will probably come charging in saying he’s solved the case,’ says Tanya. Clough, once on Nelson’s team, is now a DI in Cambridgeshire. Tanya likes him– they all do– but that’s no reason to let a former colleague steal a march on you.
‘What about the metal pin in her ankle?’ says Tony. ‘Shall I ring round the hospitals?’
‘I was just going to suggest that,’ says Tanya. ‘The pin itself might help us age the body. I don’t know if these things go in and out of fashion.’
‘My brother’s a doctor,’ says Tony. ‘I could ask him.’
Tony often talks about his family, so Tanya knows about Mike,the clever one. ‘Good idea,’ she says, going back to her laptop. Tony’s a good cop but she doesn’t want to get caught up in the outer branches of the Zhang family tree.
Ruth is finished with the bones by midday. They are then sent to the lab to be cleaned and will eventually go to the coroner’s office. Nelson would have liked to have had lunch with her in King’s Lynn but Irish Ted is still hanging around, so they all end up going to the pub. Then Ruth says she has to get back because Kate wants to go to the cinema with a schoolfriend. There are many things Nelson wants to say but he can’t say them in front of Ted, so he mutters something about Covid and social distancing.
When Nelson gets back to the station he is met by Tanya and Tony, radiating smugness and excitement according to temperament. Apparently, Tony has been in touch with his brother, a junior doctor on an orthopaedic ward, and he says that metal pins– like the one on their skeleton’s ankle– are rarely used now.
‘It’s all absorbable implants now,’ he tells Nelson. ‘There’s less chance of post-operative infection and—’
‘Spare me theHolby Citystuff,’ says Nelson, ‘and give me the basics.’
‘Stainless steel pins, like the one on our skeleton,’ says Tanya, ‘were only used between 2000 and 2005. Mike, Tony’s brother, sent us an article about it.’
‘That’s great,’ says Nelson. ‘Narrows it down a lot. Ruth thinks the surgery was done when the deceased was an adult. We need to ring round hospitals and private clinics.’
‘I’m on it,’ says Tony.
‘Have you checked the mispers?’
‘Yes,’ says Tony, ‘but there’s no one that really fits. I’ve sent a message about the surgery to neighbouring forces. I mean, Lynn’s a busy place. Lots of people pass through.’
‘If they’ve got any sense, they keep going,’ says Nelson, although he has lived twenty, mostly happy, years in King’s Lynn. ‘We need to look at the building where the bones were discovered too. Have you checked the land registry?’
‘Intel are on it now,’ says Tony. ‘It’s one of the oldest buildings in King’s Lynn. I looked on a history site and they said it was a bakery in the 1600s or thereabouts. But the building is older than that, probably about the same age as the Exorcist’s House. You know, by St Nicholas’s Church.’
Nelson remembers having this building pointed out to him, early in his acquaintance with the town. It’s a strange little building attached to the wall of the graveyard, where abandoned tombstones form a grisly picket fence. From the outside, it looks like a picturesque cottage until you note the crucifix on the roof. And the fact that it’s as creepy as hell.
‘We’re not looking for some bloody sixteenth-century ghost,’ he says, ‘we’re looking for a woman who was alive in the year 2000.’
‘It was an antique shop until 2020,’ says Tony. ‘I think I remember going there once, looking for a present for my mum. She’s very difficult to buy for because. . .’ He stops, probably because he’s seen Nelson’s face.
