The Locked Room (Ruth Galloway #14)
Elly Griffiths
Prologue
At first, she thinks that he’ll be coming back. It’s all a mistake, she thinks. He can’t mean to leave her locked in the dark for ever. And it is dark. She doesn’t have her phone. Where did she leave it? There are blanks in her memory which scare her even more than the locked room.
She tries to pace it out. Eight paces forward, eight paces across. When she reaches a wall, it’s cold and clammy. There’s no window. The door is metal. She heard it clang behind him. She can’t remember entering the room. Did he drug her? She thinks, from the cold and damp, that she must be underground. She imagines earth above her head, fathoms of it. Is she in the basement of a house? Is anyone above her?
What did he say? That he’d be coming back later? Why can’t she remember any more than that?
Does he mean to leave her in the dark for ever?
Chapter 1
Saturday, 22 February 2020
It feels strange being in the house on her own. When she was growing up here, her mother always seemed to be in possession, even – mysteriously – when she wasn’t actually present. Ruth remembers coming home from school and feeling guiltily relieved when the double-locked front door meant that Jean Galloway was out at her part-time job. But, even as Ruth turned on the TV and raided the biscuit tin, there was always the sense that Jean was watching her, not just from the black-and-white wedding photo over the set – Jean in an uncomfortably short sixties dress, Arthur surprisingly dashing in a thin tie and Mod suit – but from every corner of the neat, terraced house. And now, even though Jean has been dead for nearly five years, there’s still the same sense that she’s hovering somewhere on the edge of Ruth’s consciousness.
Maybe Jean is hovering because Ruth is currently in her mother’s bedroom going through a shoebox of photographs marked ‘Private’. Ruth’s father has gone away for the weekend with Gloria, his new wife. When they return, Gloria wants to redecorate so Ruth has offered to go through her mother’s belongings. Gloria (however much she likes her, Ruth can’t think of her as her stepmother) has been very tactful about the whole thing. She hasn’t changed anything in the house since she moved in two years ago, living with Jean’s clothes in the spare room wardrobe and Jean’s pictures on the walls. It’s only natural that she would want to redecorate a little and, frankly, the house could do with it. Now that she doesn’t live there, Ruth notices the peeling paintwork, the faded wallpaper, the outdated furnishings. Once these were just part of what made up her home but, looking at the place with Gloria’s eyes, Ruth can understand the desire to freshen things up a bit. And, if Gloria has managed to persuade Arthur to get rid of his comb-over, there’s no limit to her powers.
Ruth is alone because her sister-in-law Cathy has taken her daughter Kate to the zoo, reluctantly accompanied by Kate’s seventeen-year-old cousin Jack. Kate loves animals and has been looking forward to the treat all week. Ruth hasn’t been to London Zoo for years but she has a sudden vision of the Penguin House, an art deco marvel of curves and blue water. But didn’t she read somewhere that penguins were no longer kept there because it turned out not to be suitable for them? She has the uncomfortable feeling that zoos, especially in the city, aren’t suitable for any animals. She braces herself for a debate with Kate on this subject when she returns. Kate is a great one for philosophical debate. Ruth can’t think where she gets it from. Kate’s father, DCI Harry Nelson, is allergic to the word philosophy. See also: art, archaeology, spirituality, yoga and vegan.
So far the photographs in the shoebox have not lived up to their intriguing label. There are a few pictures of Jean when she was young, as a schoolgirl in plaits and as a young bank clerk in a dark suit. Ruth peers at the faded prints, trying to detect any resemblance to herself, or to Kate. Ruth has often been described as looking like her mother, but she has always thought this was just because they both had a tendency to put on weight. Now, looking at the young Jean, she thinks she can see a faint likeness to Kate in her direct gaze and defiant stance, even in pigtails. It’s a real sadness to Ruth that Kate never really got to know the grandmother whom, she now realises, she rather resembles in character.
A picture of a fluffy dog is a mystery. Jean always refused to have a pet and thought that Ruth’s acquisition of two cats in her late thirties was a sign that she had, in her words, ‘given up’. Next there’s a picture of an older Jean in a long white dress, like a nightdress. What on earth? Then Ruth spots the grim-looking building in the background. Her parents’ church. This must have been Jean’s second baptism, when she was ‘born again’. Ruth doesn’t share her parents’ faith and, when she was growing up, she had bitterly resented the church’s influence on their lives. Finding God seemed to mean that her parents lost touch with everything else. For the truly righteous, religion is a full-time job. But the years have softened Ruth’s stance and she was particularly glad that her father had the church’s support after her mother died. In fact, the Christian Bereavement Group is where he met Gloria.
She shuffles through several adult baptisms until there’s only one photograph left in the box. It shows three cottages surrounded by flat marshland. Ruth looks again. It’s her cottage! Her beloved, inconvenient home, miles from everywhere, facing the Saltmarsh, inhabited only by migrating birds and the ghosts of lost children calling from the sea. Jean always disliked the house. ‘Why can’t you live somewhere more civilised?’ she used to say, a south London girl born and bred. ‘Somewhere with shops and a proper bus service?’ Why on earth would Jean have kept a photograph, a rather scenic one too, of the despised cottage?