Read Online Ruth Galloway by Elly Griffiths - Free Book Online Page B

regret.
Yet Lucy is in light. That I promise you.
In sadness.
    The last letter is dated January 2007:
    Dear Detective Inspector Nelson,
Had you forgotten me? But with each New Year I think of you. Are you any nearer to the right path? Or have your feet strayed into the way of despair and lamentation?
I saw your picture in the paper last week. What sadness and loneliness is etched in those lines! Even though you have betrayed me, still I ache with pity for you.
You have daughters. Do you watch them? Do you keep them close at all times?
I hope so for the night is full of voices and my ways arevery dark. Perhaps I will call to you again one day? In peace.
    What did Nelson think, wonders Ruth, when he read that open threat to his own children? Her own hair is standing on end and she is nervously checking the curtains for signs of lurking bodies. How did Nelson feel about receiving these letters, over months and years, with their implication that he and the writer are in some way bound together, accomplices, even friends?
    Ruth looks at the date on the last letter. Ten months later Scarlet Henderson vanishes. Is this man responsible? Is he even responsible for Lucy Downey? There is nothing concrete in these letters, only a web of allusion, quotation and superstition. She shakes her head, trying to clear it.
    She recognises the Bible and Shakespeare, of course, but she wishes she had Shona for some of the other references. She is sure there is some T.S. Eliot in there somewhere. What interests her more are the Norse allusions: Odin, the Tree of all Knowledge, the water spirits. And, even more than that, the signs of some archaeological knowledge. No layman, surely, would use the word ‘cursuses’. She lies in bed, rereading, wondering …
    It is a long time before she sleeps that night, and, when she does she dreams of drowned girls, of the water spirits and of the ghost lights leading to the bodies of the dead.

CHAPTER 6
    â€˜So what do you think? Is he a nutter?’
    Ruth is once again sitting in Nelson’s shabby office, drinking coffee. Only this time she brought the coffee herself, from Starbucks.
    â€˜Starbucks eh?’ Nelson had said suspiciously.
    â€˜Yes. It’s the closest. I don’t normally go to Starbucks but …’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Oh, you know,’ she shrugged, ‘too global, too American.’
    â€˜I’m all for America myself,’ said Nelson, still looking doubtfully at the froth on his cappuccino. ‘We went to Disneyland Florida a few years ago. It was champion.’
    Ruth, for whom the idea of Disney World is sheer unexpurgated hell, says nothing.
    Now Nelson puts down his Styrofoam cup and asks again, ‘Is he a nutter?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ says Ruth slowly. ‘I’m not a psychologist.’
    Nelson grunts. ‘We had one of those. Talked complete bollocks. Homoerotic this, suppressed that. Complete crap.’
    Ruth who had, in fact, thought she noticed a homoerotic subtext to the letters (assuming, of course, that the writer is male), again says nothing. Instead she gets the letters out of her bag.
    â€˜I’ve categorised the references in the letters,’ she says. ‘I thought it was the best way of starting.’
    â€˜A list,’ says Nelson approvingly. ‘I like lists.’
    â€˜So do I.’ She gets out a neatly typed sheet of paper and passes it to Nelson.
    Religious
Ecclesiastes
Isaac
Christmas
Christ dying on cross/Easter
St Lucy
St Lucy’s Day (21 December)
St John’s Day (24 June)
All Saints’ Day (1 November)
Jeremiah
    Literary
Shakespeare:
King Lear
: ‘A man may see how the world goes with no eyes.’
Henry V
: ‘A little touch of Harry …’
Julius Caesar
: ‘Graves have yawned and yielded up their dead.’
T.S. Eliot,
Ash Wednesday
: ‘There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again.’
The Waste Land
: