It’s a text message. Sender unknown.

Don’t come to Pendle if you know what’s good for you.

CHAPTER 5

Shona lives in King’s Lynn, near Sandra the childminder, so Ruth drops in on her way home. Kate loves children younger than herself and has developed a convincingly patronising attitude towards them. ‘Baby,’ she says as soon as she sees Louis. ‘Little baby.’

‘Yes,’ says Shona admiringly. ‘But you’re a big girl, aren’t you?’

Kate looks pleased at this description but Ruth, who is also sometimes called a ‘big girl’, is rather more ambivalent.

But Louis really isn’t that little. In fact, he seems to have grown since Ruth saw him a few days ago. He dominates Shona’s stylish sitting room, surveying the world from his bouncy chair like his namesake, the Sun King himself. Toys and baby clothes cover every surface, nursery rhymes play on a manic loop in the background. Ruth is reminded of the time when Shona looked after Kate, then only a few months old. Kate had screamed the entire time, and in minutes Shona’s beautiful sanded wood floors had become covered in toys, books, tapes, bottles of milk – evidence of abortive attempts to placate her – and when Ruth had arrived, all she had to do was take her baby in her arms and the crying had stopped immediately. Ruth remembers that day well. It was the first time she had really felt like a mother.

Shona still doesn’t look like a mother. She is too slim for one thing, having miraculously regained her pre-pregnancy figure. ‘It’s the breast-feeding,’ she says smugly, floating away to put the kettle on. She is also too well dressed. Ruth spent her entire maternity leave in tracksuit bottoms; Shona is wearing a short flowery dress, and high-heeled sandals tied with ribbon. She has even done her hair, though, as usual, it looks artfully dishevelled. It is only when Ruth sees her close up that she notices the shadows under the mascara’d eyes.

‘How are you?’ asks Ruth, when Shona reappears with tea, and juice for Kate.

‘OK. Knackered.’

‘They are tiring, the first months,’ says Ruth. ‘I remember it well.’

Louis starts to bang his rattle on the table in front of him.

‘Noisy baby,’ says Kate, primly sipping her juice.

‘When are you going back to work?’ asks Ruth. Shona teaches English at the university, which is how they first met.

Shona pulls a face as she reaches down to pick up Louis’ dropped rattle.

‘I’m not sure I want to go back.’

Ruth stares at her friend. She remembers the emotional intensity of those months alone with your baby. She remembers the feeling that work was another world, one that you are no longer equipped to enter. But not to go back at all?

‘I remember feeling like that,’ she says. ‘But, when I went back, it felt great. I felt like I was a person again.’

She had almost cried with happiness when she saw her office again, but she’s not going to tell Shona that.

‘I don’t know,’ says Shona. ‘I just love being with Louis. I’m so enjoying him.’

Maybe it’s different if you have another adult at home, thinks Ruth. Mind you, that other adult is Phil.

‘What does Phil think?’ she says.

‘Oh,’ says Shona dismissively. ‘He thinks I should go back. He says we need the money. He says we should get a childminder. He’s always going on about how well you cope.’

‘He is?’

Part of Ruth is gratified to hear this. She has tried hard not to let her motherhood intrude on her work or to burden her colleagues with excuses about illness or child-minding problems. But on the other hand – cope? How many men are complimented on how well they ‘cope’ with fatherhood?

‘Well, you’ve got a while to decide,’ says Ruth. ‘You can take a year now if you want.’

‘But you only get paid maternity leave for six months,’ says Shona. ‘Honestly, I never knew Phil was such an old woman about money.’

But Shona didn’t know Phil that well at all, thinks Ruth, until she moved in with him. They had been lovers for some time but, as we all know, lovers are more attractive than husbands or boyfriends. Phil probably made efforts to disguise his chronic stinginess (a standing joke in the department) when he was only seeing Shona twice a week, stolen hours in a country pub or in the office after dark. Even so, Ruth bets that he kept the receipts.

‘Louis is gorgeous, though,’ says Ruth, retreating to a safer topic. ‘I can see why you don’t want to leave him.’

Shona puts her son on a rug on the floor, propped up by cushions. Kate sits next to him and solemnly shows him how to work his shape sorter. Louis doesn’t seem that interested in shape-sorting himself. He just sits and smiles goofily at Kate.

‘Isn’t it sweet?’ says Shona. ‘Maybe they’ll get married.’

‘Maybe,’ says Ruth drily. ‘Maybe they’ll achieve something neither of their mothers managed.’

Shona looks sideways at Ruth. She knows about Nelson but is usually very good about ignoring Kate’s parentage. Like most of Ruth’s friends, she acts as if Kate sprang fully formed from the maternal egg.

‘How’s Max?’ she asks.

‘OK,’ says Ruth. ‘He’s down next weekend.’

‘We should get babysitters and go out, the four of us,’ says Shona.

‘We should,’ says Ruth. She has no desire to see more of Phil than she has to but maybe it would be good for them to socialise with another couple. It might make her relationship with Max seem more like a relationship.

‘We might be going on holiday,’ says Ruth.

‘You and Max?’

‘No.’ Ruth realises that this isn’t what she meant. ‘Me and Kate.’

‘Oh.’ The sideways glance again. ‘Where?’

‘Blackpool. Well, Lytham.’

She tells Shona about Dan and about the invitation from Pendle University. She doesn’t tell her about the text message or about the possibility that the fire might not have been an accident. Shona listens, entranced. She always loves a story. Her subject is English literature, after all.

‘Oh you must go,’ she says. ‘Kate would love Blackpool. She could ride on the donkeys, go on the rides at the Pleasure Beach.’

‘Most of the Pleasure Beach rides look terrifying.’ Ruth had looked on the website last night.

‘Well, there must be a carousel or something,’ says Shona. ‘You ought to go. Dan might have discovered something big after all. It would be good for your career.’

Her career. In recent years Ruth has wondered whether her career hasn’t, in fact, become a job. She still loves archaeology but she has never written a book or made her name in any way. She did discover the Iron Age girl and has certainly helped the police a few times, but students in years to come are hardly going to talk about the Ruth Galloway Theory or the Ruth Galloway Method. She is a jobbing forensic archaeologist, that’s all.

‘I might go,’ says Ruth. ‘Funny, I’ve travelled all over Europe but I’ve hardly ever been further north than the Midlands.’

‘Oh, it’s all different up north,’ says Shona. ‘I’ve got an aunt in Hartlepool, so I know.’

*

Nelson, too, is on mother and baby duty. He had been surprised when Leah informed him that Judy was already back at home. ‘They only keep them in one night these days.’ Then, as he and Clough had driven back from investigating a reported shooting near Castle Rising (turned out to be an airgun being fired at pigeons), Clough remarked casually, ‘Judy lives near here, boss. Shall we pop in?’ So they had stopped at a petrol station and bought flowers and chocolates and were now, rather self-consciously, examining the tiny object wrapped tightly in a yellow blanket.

‘Can I hold him?’ asks Clough. Nelson looks at him curiously. He’d heard rumours that Clough and Trace had been talking about starting a family, but now the relationship is over and Clough has custody of the couple’s dog, a rather demented labradoodle. Certainly Clough seems better with babies than is usual for an unmarried (straight) man.