The Locked Room (Ruth Galloway #14)(65)

‘We don’t want you putting on weight,’ comes the voice.

‘Can I have some water?’ she asks.

He doesn’t reply but, a few minutes later, a bottle of water is pushed through the slot. She drinks greedily then forces herself to stop. She doesn’t know how long it will have to last.

‘Please,’ she says. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘It’s for the best,’ he says. ‘You’re not happy. You’ve never been happy.’

‘Let me out,’ she says. Trying to make her voice sound authoritative and not pathetic.

‘There’s no way out. The only escape is to make your own exit. Take the narrow gate.’

She’s silent then and, just when she thinks he’s gone, something else comes through the grille. A pack of pills. She can’t see what type they are but, when she fingers them in their foil packet, the shape is oddly comforting, like peas in a pod.

The only escape is to make your own exit.



Ruth looks around her sitting room, so comforting, so familiar. The tatty sofa where Kate is now stretched out eating an apple. The bookshelves, two-deep now, with genres and authors jumbled together. The wooden staircase leading to the upstairs rooms. The broken lightshade. The chewed suffragette cushions. Is it possible that, some time in 1963, Ruth’s mother once visited this house with a baby in her arms? That she handed the baby over to kind foster mother, Dot, and departed, taking one last photograph to remind herself of her daughter? Dawn 1963. And is it possible that Zoe, with whom Ruth did feel an immediate bond, is actually her sister?

Ruth has always wanted a sister. It was something she used to say to Simon when they argued. ‘I wish I had a sister instead of a stupid brother!’ Had Ruth’s mother overheard? What had she thought? What had she thought when Ruth announced that she was going to have a baby without a husband in the picture? Ruth remembers when she told her parents, walking in the grounds of Severndroog Castle on Shooter’s Hill. ‘What do you mean, you’re pregnant,’ Jean had said, ‘you’re not even married.’ ‘You don’t need to be married to have a baby,’ Ruth had replied. But Jean had obviously felt that you did. Or maybe others had thought it for her. She’d once told Ruth that her father had been strict but Ruth, remembering a mild elderly man, had dismissed this. But what if her grandfather had been a domestic tyrant, ordering his daughter to give up her illegitimate child? He wouldn’t have been the first to do so.

‘Oh, Mum,’ says Ruth, aloud.

‘What?’ says Kate from the sofa.

‘Nothing.’

Not for the first time, Ruth wishes that her mother was still alive. She wishes that she could ask her if this was where it all started: her disapproval of Ruth’s life, her rigid Christianity, her hatred of Norfolk and this cottage in particular. Ruth remembers visiting her mother in hospital after her first stroke and having the distinct impression that Jean wanted to tell her something. But they had ended up talking about Kate, as usual. And Jean had adored the child whom Arthur, now a doting granddad, had once described as ‘a bastard grandchild’. Ruth supposes that this represents closure of some kind.

Does Ruth’s father know? She thinks not, remembering his genuine confusion over the Dawn photograph. Arthur and Jean met and married in 1964, Simon was born in 1966, Ruth in 1968. Ruth imagines that her mother simply left her past behind her. Something that her daughter, as an archaeologist, could have told her is almost impossible to achieve.

This explains, of course, why Zoe Hilton, née Dawn Stainton, came to rent the house next door. She must have known that this was where she spent the first year of her life. Did she also know that Ruth was her half-sister? You’re allowed to trace your birth parents, aren’t you, when you reach eighteen? Zoe had acquired a photograph of Jean from somewhere. It wouldn’t have been hard to trace the line from Jean to Ruth. Ruth tries to remember what Zoe told her about her early life. Only that she’d married her teenage boyfriend, now white-haired but still cool, and that she thought they’d still be together if they’d had children. Her parents were both dead and her mother had been a keen gardener. Nothing about being adopted or the reasons for her child-free state. Jean would have been proud of Zoe, thinks Ruth. Nurse was top of her list of respectable professions. Archaeologist was near the bottom.

But where is her respectable nurse neighbour now? And does her disappearance have anything to do with the fact that her history is now known to Norfolk police? Ruth has not enjoyed the few instances when she has appeared on screen, as an expert witness in various archaeology programmes. She can only imagine how it would feel to have your face emblazoned across the papers, charged with the very worst of crimes. That Zoe was completely innocent doesn’t seem to have affected the prurient tone that still accompanies her original name. Even Nelson called her a murderer.

Ruth goes to the window, hoping that Zoe will materialise in front of her. But all she sees are the marshes, the long grasses moving endlessly in the wind.



‘We need to find Joe McMahon,’ Nelson tells Tanya. ‘His dad lives in London. Says he hasn’t seen Joe for a year but maybe he’ll turn up there. People do normally drift home in the end. Here’s the number.’

‘Do you think he’s the bearded man the neighbour mentioned?’

‘I don’t know but he’s got a bloody big beard and he’s been acting suspiciously. That’s enough for me. Try to find this neighbour of Samantha’s too. Oh, and now Ruth’s neighbour’s gone missing.’ He tells Tanya briefly about Zoe Hilton.