The Locked Room (Ruth Galloway #14)(6)

‘Danny was mad about you. He was so upset when you finished with him.’

As Ruth remembers it, she and Daniel had drifted apart when she went to university. Although she had only crossed London to go to UCL, she had moved into halls and consciously started a new life.

‘Well, he seems OK now,’ says Ruth lightly.

‘We’re all OK now,’ says Kelly. ‘Have you seen Alison? She must have lost five stone.’





Chapter 4


Ruth is keen to leave after breakfast on Sunday. Arthur and Gloria aren’t due back until the evening but Ruth has explained that she needs to be back in Norfolk by midday in order to prepare for the next day’s teaching. Although, now she’s head of department she finds that she spends as much time juggling timetables and listening to complaints from students – and lecturers – as she does teaching. Besides, she wants to see her cat, Flint. Both her neighbours are away so she’s had to rely on Cathbad coming round to feed him. She knows that Cathbad will have discharged his duties faithfully. He gets on well with Flint and claims that they have a psychic bond. It’s just that she doesn’t like to think of her cat alone in the cottage with no humans in sight. Ridiculous, she knows; this is probably Flint’s idea of heaven. She remembers her mother saying, ‘It’s not natural, living in the middle of nowhere.’ But why had Jean kept a picture of the unnatural dwelling place amongst her private papers?

‘What would Granddad do on Sundays?’ asks Kate, who is sitting at the kitchen table eating toast and Marmite. Ruth is sure that this room will be high on Gloria’s redecorating list, the blue Formica cabinets haven’t changed since she was a child and the lino is threadbare in places. Nevertheless, it’s the cosiest room in the house. After Jean and pre-Gloria, Arthur used to spend most of his time in here, watching a black-and-white television set balanced on top of the microwave.

‘I suppose he’d go to church,’ says Ruth, making herself a second cup of instant coffee. She bought her father a cafetière once, but he had clearly been baffled by the gift and there’s no sign of it in the cupboards. Gloria thinks caffeine is a poison.

‘Shall we do that?’ asks Kate brightly.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Can we visit Grandma’s grave then?’

Kate obviously wants some sort of Sunday activity, something wholesome and slightly boring. Well, maybe she’s right. If Ruth packs up the car, they can leave as soon as they have paid their graveside respects.

Ruth and Kate walk to Eltham cemetery and buy flowers from the opportunistic stall at the gate. It’s a bright, cold morning. Last week high winds, given the inappropriately cosy name of Storm Dennis, ravaged the country but today the trees that line the paths are almost completely still. Jean’s grave looks very white amongst the older models. Ruth wonders whether her father, or maybe even Gloria, comes to clean it.



Jean Galloway Beloved wife and mother At rest with the angels 1938–2015



There’s a rose in a pot at the foot of the stone. Ruth places their carnations next to it.

‘Shall we say a prayer?’ says Kate. Ruth gives her daughter a look, wondering where she’s getting this religious stuff from. Kate’s school is secular in a ‘let’s all be nice to each other’ way. Nelson’s a lapsed Catholic but Ruth can’t imagine him ever talking about prayer. Cathbad? His inclination is always to light a ceremonial fire rather than say an Our Father.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘Let say a prayer quietly in our heads.’

She thinks Kate looks disappointed.

‘Hi, Mum,’ says Ruth silently, ‘I miss you. I never thought I’d miss you this much. There’s so much we didn’t talk about. Daniel Breakspeare’s a successful businessman now. You were right about him. Kelly Sutherland has been married three times and I haven’t even married once. I did give you a granddaughter though. I wish you could see her. And, Mum, why did you have a picture of my cottage dated 1963?’

‘Mum?’ Kate is tugging at her arm. ‘Have you finished? Can we go and see the tiny pilot?’

In the older, more overgrown, part of the graveyard there’s a half-sized statue of an airman killed in 1938. The little figure is dressed in overalls that look oddly like a post-apocalyptic radioactivity suit. The inscription says that Ernest Francis Bennett was killed in a flying accident at Auchengilloch Hill, Scotland. He has a sweet, childlike face and Ruth had once imagined herself going back in time and falling in love with him. She remembers shedding sentimental tears at the vision of herself receiving a telegram containing the tragic news of her boyfriend’s death. When she and Alison were sixteen they had drunk a bottle of Blue Nun in front of Ernest’s grave and tried to talk to his spirit. Ruth wonders if Ali remembers it.

Kate picks daisies and puts them at Ernest’s booted feet. Richmal Crompton, the author of the Just William books, also rests in Eltham Cemetery, although she doesn’t have a gravestone because her ashes were scattered in the crematorium rose garden. Ruth wonders what Ms Crompton would have made of Kate and the children of the twenty-first century. She has a feeling that, excluding things like TikTok and Instagram, nothing much has really changed.



They reach Norfolk at two, having stopped on the way for a service station lunch. It’s a beautiful afternoon, the yellow grasses brushing the bright blue sky, the seagulls calling from the shore. Flint is waiting by the gate, looking disapproving, but what catches Ruth’s eye is a van by her next-door neighbour’s house. She knew that Bob was renting out the place while he spent a year in his native Australia but she hadn’t realised that the new tenant would be moving in so soon.