The Lantern Men

by Elly Griffiths

  ‘I know you’re right,’ says Judy. ‘It’s just that she was blonde, like the others, and riding a bike, like Jenny.’

  ‘That shook me too,’ says Nelson. ‘This story,’ he points towards the computer, ‘it’s about a girl on a bike seeing weird lights out on the marshes. It’s called “The Lantern Men”. Cathbad was telling me all about the legends, ghost lights and what have you. He’s better than Wikipedia.’

  Cathbad knows all about mythology, thinks Judy. It’s just everyday life that seems to confuse him. Aloud she says, ‘The Lantern Men? That’s what Ivor, Bob and Leonard called themselves.’

  ‘Yes, it makes me wonder what they really got up to in that van. In the story the girl has an affair with a man called The Artist and he eventually kills her.’ He says, in what sounds like a deliberately casual voice, ‘I sent the story to Ruth.’

  ‘Did you?’ says Judy, trying not to sound too surprised.

  ‘Yes,’ says Nelson. Now he seems to be avoiding her eyes. ‘I thought she might be interested in it, being a university lecturer and a writer and everything.’

  ‘If you want literary criticism, you should send it to Shona,’ says Judy. ‘She’s the one who teaches English.’

  ‘Shona’s got enough on her plate,’ says Nelson. ‘Have you heard how Phil’s doing?’

  ‘He’s out of the coma,’ says Judy. ‘I rang the hospital this morning. They wouldn’t tell me anything else. We should go and talk to him when he’s strong enough.’

  ‘I still think there’s something suspicious about Phil being attacked,’ says Nelson.

  Phil was attacked, thinks Judy, then they found the three bodies, then Heidi was killed. The boss might say not to look for patterns but something is going on. You don’t have to be an expert on mythology to think that dark forces are at work. She recalls a favourite quotation of Cathbad’s. She can’t remember where it’s from but she always finds it both ominous and depressing.

  The things we fear in secret always happen.

  Chapter 17

  Liz calls Judy just as she is getting ready to go home.

  ‘I think I’ve found her,’ she says.

  ‘Sofia Novak?’

  ‘Yes. Sofia Maria Novak, born 1989 in Debrecen, Hungary. She left school in 2007, after which nothing. No university records, no marriage certificate, no death certificate. It’s as if she disappeared. Her parents are dead but her mother was English so it’s probable that Sofia spoke perfect English which could be why she was backpacking here rather than mainland Europe. There’s a brother and a sister but I haven’t been able to trace them. I’ve got a photograph from her identity card and, this is the best bit, I’ve managed to find her old dentist so we can get hold of her records.’

  ‘We’ve got the skull,’ says Judy. ‘That should be enough for an identification. Great work, Liz. Can you email me the picture?’

  It comes through a few minutes later but the passport-sized photo gives little away. Like students the world over, Sofia is staring truculently into the camera. Black shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, one of those Arabic-looking scarves. There’s nothing that gives you any sense of the person who vanished eleven years ago, but Judy is sure that she is looking at the girl who was buried in the garden of the Jolly Boatman.

  She thinks about Sofia Novak all the way home. She can only have been eighteen or nineteen when she met the Lantern Men. What was she thinking when she got into their van? Was she relieved when they took her back to Grey Walls and she met Crissy and Ailsa? At what point did she start to become afraid? Judy thinks of her daughter Miranda, who is only five. Will Miranda want to go backpacking when she’s eighteen? Cathbad will probably want to let her. He’s all for children being free spirits and studying at the university of life. Whereas Judy realises that she has a far more pessimistic view of the world, which probably comes from being in the police. She’d like to keep Michael and Miranda at home for ever, except that’s what she did. She didn’t go to university, she married her childhood boyfriend and now lives in the same place where she grew up. OK, along the way she swapped the boring, dependable husband for a druid but, even so, it’s not the most inspiring of CVs. Shouldn’t she want better – more – for her children?

  When she opens her front door, Michael is playing the piano and she can smell vegetable curry cooking. Her senses are instantly calmed. Michael only started lessons last year but he is now finding his way through Walter Carroll with something like brio. He never needs to be reminded to practise and even seems to enjoy scales. Judy likes them too, up and down, up and down, every note in its place. It’s very soothing. She thinks she’ll get Miranda lessons when she’s older, though she has a suspicion that her daughter will favour a louder and more raucous instrument.

  She listens at the sitting room door for a moment and then goes into the kitchen where Cathbad is cooking and Miranda is at the table colouring in a dinosaur picture. Thing, the bull terrier, is sitting watching Cathbad, hoping something edible falls on the floor. He wags his tail when Judy comes in but doesn’t get up.

  Judy kisses her daughter on her curly dark head.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she says.

  ‘I saw a dinosaur today,’ says Miranda.

  ‘Did you?’ Ridiculously, Judy looks towards the window as if she might see a stegosaurus munching the leaves of the cherry tree.

  ‘We went to the dinosaur park at Lenwade,’ says Cathbad, adding coriander to the sauce. ‘The dinosaurs are rather anthropomorphised but there’s a nice walled garden with goats and donkeys.’

  ‘I saw Dippy,’ says Miranda, ‘and I got wet.’

  ‘Dippy Diplodocus’s splash zone,’ explains Cathbad.

  ‘Did you bring her a change of clothes?’ asks Judy.

  ‘Yes,’ says Cathbad patiently. ‘Plus a towel and some healthy snacks.’

  Judy thinks of her day: trying to identify one dead woman, talking to the relatives of another. She imagines herself splashing happily in the shadow of a giant plastic dinosaur and, for a second, feels so jealous that it actually hurts.

  ‘Why don’t you go and watch TV?’ she says to Miranda. ‘I want to talk to Daddy.’

  ‘I don’t like the noise Michael’s making.’ Perhaps she won’t get piano lessons for Miranda after all.

  ‘He’s just stopped,’ says Judy, as ‘The Little Brook’ trickles to an end. ‘You can watch Britain’s Got Talent.’

  Miranda heads off eagerly (another indication of poor musical taste?) and Judy sits down at the kitchen table. Cathbad puts a glass of wine in front of her.

  ‘Tough day?’

  ‘You could say that.’ Judy takes a deep swig of Winbirri white. ‘Though I might have a lead on the third body.’

  ‘Really?’ says Cathbad. She knows that he takes a proprietorial interest in the remains that he discovered.

  ‘I think she might be a Hungarian girl called Sofia Novak. March befriended her about ten years ago, after which she disappeared.’

  She shouldn’t really give Cathbad the name but she finds herself wanting to discuss the case with him. If only to make him see that March really is guilty.

  But Cathbad just says, stirring busily, ‘That doesn’t mean he killed her though.’

  ‘Cathbad!’ Judy stands up to face her partner. ‘You can’t really think that he’s innocent. He told us where to find those bodies. His DNA was all over the first two.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Judy,’ says Cathbad. ‘I know it’s not what you want to hear but, when we excavated those bones, those women, I had a strong presentiment that March hadn’t killed them.’

  ‘I suppose you didn’t have a presentiment about who did?’

  ‘No,’ says Cathbad, sounding genuinely regretful. ‘But I will tell you if I do.’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Judy.

  If Cathbad gets the irony, he doesn’t remark on it. Thing�
�s tail starts wagging again and Judy hears the front door open.

  ‘Maddie,’ she says. Though there’s no one else it can be.

  Cathbad’s oldest daughter comes into the room. She has been covering a local agricultural show and is, Judy notices, still wearing her muddy wellingtons.

  ‘What a day,’ she says. ‘I’ll be happy if I never see another cow or pig again.’

  ‘Well you won’t find any in this kitchen,’ says Cathbad. Judy pours Maddie a glass of wine. She used to resent her quasi-stepdaughter’s presence but now they have a friendship that almost amounts to love, helped by the fact that Maddie saved Judy’s life a few years back.

  ‘And bloody Nelson woke me up at the crack of dawn,’ says Maddie, sitting at the table and draining half her glass. It always irritates Judy that Maddie drinks wine like lemonade. Her tipple of choice is vodka and lime.

  ‘He was going on about some short story,’ says Maddie. ‘You’d think he’d have other things on his mind, what with this new murder and everything.’ She looks at Judy speculatively, her green eyes bright and mischievous.

  ‘It’s no good, Maddie,’ says Judy. ‘I don’t know anything about it. I’m still on the Ivor March case.’

  ‘Is Tanya in charge then?’ says Maddie. ‘Good. She always talks to the press.’

  ‘I bet she does,’ says Judy. Tanya’s craving for publicity is almost unhealthy.

  ‘It’s a funny thing, though, isn’t it,’ says Maddie. ‘The murder seems so much like one of March’s but he’s in prison.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it funny,’ says Cathbad.

  ‘Nor would I,’ says Judy. She swallows the rest of her wine and pours herself another glass.

  *

  Ruth is also working, alone in her office at St Jude’s. She has papers to mark and she can’t really do it at home with Saturday night TV blaring and Kate wanting her to listen to her rendition of the latest song from drama group. She has a study in the attic, that was one of the things that first attracted Frank to the house. ‘We’ll be a two-study family, honey.’ She hadn’t liked Frank calling them a family though she knows that’s what they look like from the outside. But she had liked the study, with its sloping roof and its view over the Cambridge rooftops. She had imagined herself working there but, somehow, that has never really happened. Frank can work quite happily in his next-door room, headphones on, reading accounts of Victorian housing and sanitation. But Ruth gets too easily distracted, especially when Kate is in the house. Even if Kate is watching TV downstairs or playing with friends, Ruth feels herself on Mother Alert. Will her daughter fall and hurt herself? Will she argue with her playmate? Will something unsuitable appear on TV, like a Conservative party broadcast? Ruth can never really relax in her study eyrie. Hence the writing retreat at Grey Walls.

  She used to be able to work when Kate was in bed but these days, and especially at weekends, Kate seems to stay up as late as they do. Ruth has a sneaking suspicion that she would be stricter about bedtimes, and about everything really, if it was still just her and Kate. It’s almost as if she has to put on a good show in front of Frank: look how well Kate and I get on, no need for pesky rules, we’re as carefree as characters in an American sitcom.

  Besides, she loves being in the college at night. There’s a palpable sense of industry and purpose, the ancient building heavy with centuries of study and learning. From her open window she can smell the trees and the newly mown grass outside. There’s just one other light, on the other side of the court, and Ruth likes to think of her fellow night-worker, a white-haired scholar poring over some obscure text or adding a footnote to the definitive book on Byzantine Art. Actually, it’s more likely to be a student studying for finals. Only third years have rooms in the old block. Exams end next week and then it’s more marking and more meetings, until graduation in July. The college is hosting a conference in August so Ruth will take that month off. Maybe she, Frank and Kate will go away somewhere. A family holiday.

  She goes back to the paper that she is marking. When she started at St Jude’s she had been rather surprised that her students didn’t, at first, seem any cleverer than her postgraduates at UNN but they do have a spurious confidence that will, no doubt, take them a long way in life. ‘We know that Stonehenge marked a shift in the Neolithic psyche from solar to lunar allegiance . . .’ What does this mean? No one has any idea what Neolithic people thought of the sun or the moon. We can theorise that monuments like Stonehenge had some sort of astronomical significance but we can’t know. Ruth resists the temptation to put a red line through the sentence. Instead she just writes in the margin, ‘Really?’

  She thinks of her visit to the stone circle at Stanton Drew two years ago. When she and Cathbad arrived, the stones had loomed out of the mist, like sentinels or something altogether more sinister. It had been a strange, sullen place, not welcoming to outsiders, or maybe that’s just Ruth’s memory playing tricks on her, because of what happened afterwards.

  She looks up from the candidate’s almost insultingly neat handwriting. Is it her imagination or did the door to her staircase just open? Ruth sits completely still, listening. Then, unmistakably, she hears footsteps on the stone stairs. A Classics professor has the room below hers but she knows that he’s gone to Rome for the weekend because he has promised to bring back some limoncello – he’s rather a good neighbour. The footsteps seem to have stopped. Was she mistaken? But the door is made of oak, it wouldn’t open by accident. And she was sure that she heard something. Someone.

  Ruth goes to the window and looks out. The court is empty, the one lighted window casting a golden rectangle on the dark grass. The paths are gravel. Surely she would have heard the person approach? She walks to her door but doesn’t open it. Suddenly she is really afraid. She imagines her mysterious visitor standing waiting on the other side of her door. She even starts to believe that she can hear them breathing. For one crazy moment she thinks of Ivor March, his shadowed eyes and half-smile. I’ve been following your career. You’re a very impressive woman, Dr Galloway.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she says, her voice sounding high and, despite her best efforts, scared.

  There, there, there. Her voice echoes around the panelled room. The two old Judeans look down on her. Interloper, their painted faces say. You’re not welcome here. It’s no concern of ours if you’re murdered at your desk.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ says Ruth, aloud. She opens the door. The landing is empty. Ruth runs down the stairs. The door at the bottom is firmly shut. She opens it. Larry, the porter, is passing on his rounds, keys jingling at his waist.

  ‘Did anyone come in just now?’ asks Ruth.

  ‘No,’ says Larry. ‘They’d have had to come past the porter’s lodge and I didn’t see a soul.’

  A soul. The word sounds strange and rather spooky. Body and soul. The Holy Spirit. The Holy Ghost. Ruth thinks of her parents, evangelical Christians who enjoyed talking about their souls. Her mother is dead now and her father, in his eighties, has taken up with a woman at his church, a spritely sixty-year-old called Bella Parkinson. Has Ruth’s mother decided to pay her a visit from beyond the grave? But Ruth is an atheist who doesn’t believe in life after death.

  ‘Everything all right, Ruth?’ says Larry.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ says Ruth. ‘I just thought I heard something.’

  ‘Probably just the building creaking,’ says Larry. ‘That happens at night sometimes when the wooden beams cool down and contract.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ says Ruth. She goes back to her office and finds that an email has appeared on her computer screen. It’s from Crissy Martin.

  ‘Ruth,’ says the message, ‘I need your help.’

  Chapter 18

  Ruth ends up taking Kate with her to Grey Walls. It isn’t ideal but, for some reason, she doesn’t want to tell Frank about the email from Crissy. Besides, she tells herself, Frank ha
s done enough babysitting – despite Kate’s protests that she’s not a baby – over the last few days. Kate has her swimming gala in the morning so Ruth spends a few chlorine-heavy hours trying to follow Kate’s red cap as it ploughs up and down the lanes. Kate is a good, if splashy, swimmer. Ruth remembers how keen she used to be on swimming. When did it stop? When she became embarrassed to be seen in a swimming costume? Well, that won’t happen to Kate, she tells herself. Her daughter is as slim as a reed now but, even if she fills out later, Ruth will fill her with self-confidence and body positivity and all those things that sound so easy on paper. Ruth has a sudden flashback to a beach in Italy and the look Nelson had given her when she emerged from the changing room in a black one-piece. It had, unmistakably, been a look of approval.

  The smell of chlorine and the shouts and splashes of the swimmers reminds Ruth of her swim on Tuesday. Why had she suddenly been unable to breathe? Was it a panic attack or something more serious? What if it had been an actual heart attack? She remembers reading somewhere that heart attacks are harder to spot in women and that many people have them without knowing it. After all, Phil had one and he’s a million times fitter than Ruth. She tries to practise her breathing, sitting on the wooden bench with Kate’s hoodie in her lap. In for four, out for eight. The woman next to her gives her a suspicious look and moves away slightly.

  Kate comes second in her race and St Benedict’s comes third overall, so honour is satisfied. Ruth gives Kate a drink and a KitKat (you get so hungry swimming, Ruth has had to eat a KitKat herself just from the stress of watching) and tells her that they are going for a drive.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asks Kate, getting into the passenger seat and dumping her wet towel in the back.