The Locked Room (Ruth Galloway #14)(29)
Ruth tries to breathe mindfully, the way Cathbad taught her. In for four, out for eight. Don’t have a panic attack, she tells herself. You’re quite safe as long as you never leave the house. But Ruth must go to the shops today to buy Flint’s gourmet cat food. Strangely, the thought of doing something actually calms her. She gets up and puts on her dressing gown. She’ll go downstairs and have a cup of tea. Then she’ll start planning her day’s teaching. She’s getting to grips with the dreaded Zoom. At first, she treated it like a recorded lecture but now she’s able to be more interactive and is even able to send the students into breakout rooms. Preferably for ever.
Ruth treads carefully across the landing. She doesn’t want to wake Kate. She has a feeling that it’s going to be very hard to occupy Kate all day, especially when Ruth has her own work to do. The worksheets the school has sent seem very dull and, besides, Kate will dash through them in minutes. Thank goodness for the Saltmarsh, miles of blessedly empty marshland full of educational possibilities. They can collect grasses and shells. They can search for Neolithic flint flakes. When the weather gets better, they can paddle or even swim. Surely this nightmare will be over by the summer? But, even as Ruth dreams of shell and grass collages, she imagines Kate refusing to go outside and rolling her eyes at the thought of Neolithic flakes. She must ask Cathbad for some advice. She’s sure that he will have an imaginative curriculum worked out.
Flint is waiting for her in the kitchen, staring pointedly at his empty bowl. Ruth feeds him while she waits for the kettle to boil. Then she takes her tea into the sitting room. The sun is rising over the marshes, turning the distant sea to gold. The Saltmarsh is coming to life, like a photograph developing, the grasses turning from grey to brown to green, the birds ascending from the reedbeds to wheel across the rosy sky. Dawn. Ruth thinks of the picture she found in her parents’ house, ‘Dawn 1963’. Out on this very eastern edge of England, the sunrises are spectacular. Is that why Ruth’s mother took that photo, all those years ago? The shoebox is still by the front door, where Ruth left it when she came back from London. So much has happened in the weeks since then. Ruth clears a space on her desk, which is overflowing with files and books from her office, and rifles through the school photos and adult baptisms until she finds the picture of the cottage. Flint jumps lightly onto the table and starts sniffing the box. Maybe he can just smell Eltham mice, but Ruth takes his interest to be a sign that this is a mystery worth pursuing.
The picture shows all three cottages. To take it the photographer must have been standing on the other side of the road, in the rough grass that segues into the marshes. Was it taken at sunrise? It’s hard to tell because the colours have faded so much. There are no people present, just the three houses and a car. Ruth has no idea of the make. She could ask Nelson or Judy but she thinks they have enough on their plates on the moment. The houses are painted pink and there’s a hedge in front of them. A tree in the garden of the right-hand house seems to be in blossom, which means the picture was taken in spring. The tree’s not there now. The weekenders cut it down when they paved over the front garden.
Ruth moved into her house, 2 New Road, twenty-two years ago. She had been part of a dig that had discovered a Bronze Age henge buried in the nearby sands. The excavation turned out to have long-lasting and devastating consequences, one of which, for Ruth, was a passionate love of Norfolk. Ruth applied for a lecturing job at the University of North Norfolk and bought the cottage, which was then uninhabited. Who had owned it? She has the title deeds somewhere, but she remembers that the previous resident had been an elderly man who had died on the premises, probably in Ruth’s bedroom with its view of the ever-changing marshes. She tries not to think of this fact too often. The house was then passed to his children who had been anxious to sell it as quickly as possible. Ruth got the place very cheaply and had loved it from the first. Even though she had first co-habited with her then-boyfriend, Peter, the cottage had seemed always and only hers, although nowadays Kate and Flint would probably claim joint ownership.
‘What are you doing, Mum?’
Ruth jumps. Even Flint looks up guiltily. Kate is at the foot of the stairs in her Peppa Pig pyjamas, which are slightly too small for her. Her dark hair is standing up around her head. She looks very grumpy and very young.
‘Looking at this picture,’ says Ruth, showing Kate. She’s interested in her reaction.
‘That’s our house,’ says Kate. ‘Why’s it pink?’
‘I think it was taken a long time ago,’ says Ruth. ‘Can you tell why?’ It’s never too early to start home-schooling.
‘Because of the car,’ says Kate, as if it’s a stupid question. Which perhaps it is. ‘And there’s no satellite dish on Sammy and Ed’s house.’
Ruth hadn’t even noticed this. Kate likes the weekenders who sometimes invite her in to watch their superior home entertainment.
‘Let’s have breakfast,’ says Ruth, in her new jolly lockdown tones (lightly tinged with hysteria). ‘Then maybe we can go for an early morning walk.’
‘I hate walks,’ says Kate. She and Flint look at Ruth with identically mutinous expressions.
At nine o’clock Ruth sets out for the supermarket. She leaves Kate watching a Harry Potter DVD. So much for the ‘no screens before lunchtime’ rule Ruth devised last night. But Kate finds the wizarding world very comforting and Ruth hopes it will make her forget that this is the first time she has ever been left alone in the house. At least Kate has Flint, sitting on the sofa watching Dumbledore narrowly, and Zoe next door. Ruth has texted Zoe and put her number in Kate’s phone. ‘NP,’ Zoe texts back. ‘Here if you or Kate need anything’. Ruth is halfway to Lynn before she realises that NP means ‘no problem’.