The Stone Circle: The Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries 11

by Elly Griffiths

  ‘Yes,’ says Judy. ‘I’ll go and see her.’

  ‘And talk to Marj Maccallum,’ says Nelson. ‘She was a good officer. I’d like to have her take on the case.’

  ‘What did DS Burnett say?’ asks Clough, who, as usual, is chomping his way through a McDonald’s breakfast. ‘I remember him. Hard as nails.’

  ‘Freddie thinks it’s all down to Mostyn. Well, he may be right.’

  ‘Mostyn’s coming in at nine thirty to give a DNA sample,’ says Clough.

  ‘Good,’ says Nelson. ‘Let me know when he’s here. I’d like to take a look at him.’

  ‘He’s an unsavoury specimen,’ says Clough. ‘Lives in a house full of cardboard boxes and rats.’

  ‘They were hamsters,’ says Judy.

  ‘He took a liking to Johnson,’ says Clough. ‘Gave her one of those stones with holes in.’

  ‘Did he?’ says Nelson. He notes that the team who, according to Jo, have been working together in perfect harmony during his absence, are back to vying for position. ‘Well, Mostyn was the original prime suspect but there was nothing at the time to tie him to the crime. He was seen talking to Margaret during the street party but he had an alibi for the whole afternoon and evening. Admittedly it was from his mother and, as Freddie reminded me, she might well have been prepared to lie for him.’

  ‘I think that it was Mostyn who wrote you that letter and left the stone outside your house,’ says Clough. ‘He’s interested in history and literature and all that. There were all sorts of books around the house. And he talked about finding Roman coins on the beach.’

  ‘And he’s from east Norfolk,’ says Judy. ‘So he’d know the Jack Valentine legend. And there was a witch stone found with the remains.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Clough. ‘Ruth thought that it had been placed there deliberately because you don’t find chalk on that beach. She also thought that the bones hadn’t been there long. She reckoned they’d been buried somewhere else first, in anaer-whatsit conditions. It’s in her report.’

  ‘I’ve been reading it,’ says Nelson. ‘She thought the bones had previously been buried in peaty soil that was rich in nitrogen.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ says Clough.

  ‘Horse manure,’ says Nelson, ‘or some sort of silage.’

  ‘So we’re looking for horse shit,’ says Clough.

  ‘Again,’ says Judy.

  ‘The stone and the rope are both promising leads,’ says Nelson. ‘Also the material found near the mouth. The killer’s DNA could be on them. You’ve taken samples from the mother and sister?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Judy. ‘They were the first people we went to.’

  ‘We need to get the brother too,’ says Nelson. ‘He’s a bit of a shadowy figure in all this. He was fifteen when Margaret disappeared. That’s old enough.’

  ‘Do you think he could have killed his own sister?’ says Clough, always one for saying the unsayable.

  ‘I’m just saying we ought to talk to him,’ says Nelson, ‘and get a DNA sample. Fuller, can you get on to it?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ says Tanya. ‘Is the case officially open again?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Nelson. ‘It may be thirty-five years too late but we’re going to get justice for Margaret. Let me know when Mostyn comes in, Cloughie.’

  *

  Ruth is also looking at a report. She is reading the results of the isotope analysis on Margaret’s teeth. There is nothing too surprising as it confirms that the teeth belonged to someone who was brought up in Norfolk, specifically the coastal north-east region. This would fit Margaret, who was born and bred in King’s Lynn. The carbon-14 report confirms that the bones are fairly recent but has nothing much to add to the investigation. The best hope of a lead lies with the bones themselves. If Ruth could find out where they had originally been buried, then it might point the police in the right direction. Ruth has a lecture in half an hour but she opens her desk drawer and gets out a map entitled ‘Geology of Norfolk’. Ruth loves old maps, the pinks and greens, the lines showing contours, the crosses for churches and the picks and shovels for mines. Reading maps is an essential skill for an archaeologist. But now she is looking at soil. The area around King’s Lynn is marked as ‘tidal flat deposits’ and she knows that this will be clay and silt, built up during the millennia north Norfolk was covered by the sea (Lynn is the Celtic word for lake), so the soil is shallow and lime-rich over chalk or limestone. But Margaret’s bones were buried in richer earth and there were definite traces of nitrogen which could come from manure. This might mean farmland. Ruth searches further inland, where you would expect to find loamy clay soil with a peat surface. This would fit with the preservation of the bones, typical of waterlogged anaerobic conditions. Taking a pencil Ruth traces a circle around King’s Lynn, taking in agricultural land near the River Great Ouse.

  She is so deeply engrossed that she doesn’t hear the knock on the door. Debbie, the department secretary, has to put her head round the door. ‘Ruth?’

  Ruth jumps. ‘Sorry. I was miles away.’

  ‘A letter’s been delivered for you.’

  ‘A letter?’ In these days of email, actual post is rare. Her publishers send royalty statements where the earnings are so tiny, both in monetary and typeface terms, that they are almost impossible to find. But they write to her home address. If the post has come to the university, it must be a sales catalogue of some kind. But Debbie’s face seems to indicate that this delivery is rather more intriguing.

  Debbie hands over a white envelope. ‘Hand delivered,’ she says impressively.

  Ruth waits until Debbie has gone and then slits open the envelope with her special Victorian paperknife – a present from Frank. Inside is a brief typed note:

  You found Margaret. She called from the depths and you answered. Her soul is now at peace. May the Gods of earth, sky and sea bless you, Ruth.

  Ruth stares at the words for a long time. She doesn’t move until her Fitbit buzzes and exhorts her, bossily, to ‘get up and stretch for ten’.

  *

  Kim Jennings’ shop, called Little Rocks, is on the quayside at Wells, only a few hundred metres from Judy’s cottage. She texts Cathbad and suggests meeting for fish and chips after her interview. It’s a lovely spring day, the sea sparkling and the boats clinking in the harbour. Although it’s only March there are a few tourists wandering around and taking photos of the beach huts. Little Rocks, with its window display of crystals and fridge magnets in the shape of crabs, is empty though. There are trays outside displaying stones and pebbles, some rough-edged, some polished to shine like jewels. Judy recognises a couple of the shepherd’s crowns mentioned by John Mostyn. These are really fossilised sea urchins, grey stones with a darker pattern of rays protruding from the centre, like a star or the spikes of a crown. She looked up sea lilies and brittle stars too, though she can’t see any of them in the shop. These fossils are usually found in sandstone and can look rather sinister preserved in the stone, like scaly claws or alien faces. The most attractive stones outside Little Rocks are chunks of amber, clear yellow or red-gold, some flecked with what might be the remains of tiny prehistoric insects. But still no one is buying anything.

  Kim Jennings, a short woman with Cleopatra hair, says that business is bad. ‘People browse but they don’t buy. I think that’s rude.’ Judy sympathises but she can’t see anything in the shop that anyone would actually want to buy, unless you fancy bracelets made from pebbles and books entitled Crystal Healing: How to Attract Wealth and Reduce Stress.

  On second thoughts, maybe that would be worth a read.

  Kim switches the driftwood sign on the door to ‘Gone fishing’ and leads Judy into a back room. They sit amongst cardboard boxes which reminds Judy of John Mostyn’s house but Kim offers to make coffee, which certainly wasn’t on offer at the Mostyn residence, and the parts of the floor which can be seen are, thankfully, free of rodents.

  ‘You’ve heard that we’ve found Margaret’s remains,’ says
Judy, accepting a cup of instant coffee in a mug proclaiming, probably erroneously, that ‘Mermaids Exist’.

  ‘Yes,’ says Kim. ‘I heard it on the news. Poor Margaret. You know, for a long time I really thought that she was still alive. I kept expecting her to turn up at my house as if nothing had happened. “Hi, Kimbo,” she’d say, “what’s the gossip?” No one calls me Kimbo now.’

  ‘It must have been very hard for you,’ says Judy.

  ‘It was awful,’ says Kim, winding a large onyx ring round her finger. ‘For years I was just “Margaret’s Friend”, “The Last Person To See her Alive”. Newspapers hassled me, people stopped me in the street.’

  ‘But you didn’t move away?’

  Kim shrugs. ‘Norfolk’s my home. My family have lived here for ever. Why should I move away? And things died down after a while. But now you’ve found her, I suppose it’ll all start up again.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Judy. ‘But it does give us a chance to bring Margaret’s killer to justice. There have been so many advances in forensic science since 1981. We’re really hopeful that new evidence will come to light.’

  ‘I hope so too. For Karen’s sake mostly. It’s been hell for her.’

  ‘Did you know Margaret’s family well?’

  ‘Yes, we were in and out of each other’s houses all the time. Karen was lovely. The sort of mum who didn’t care if you came in with muddy shoes. She was so pretty, really slim with feathery blonde hair, like someone from Pan’s People. I used to wish my mum looked like that.’ She laughs. ‘My mum looked like a mum, that was all.’

  ‘Did you know Margaret’s brother and sister too?’

  ‘Annie was a bit of a cow. She was always jealous of Margaret. I had a bit of a crush on Luke. All the girls did. He was blond too, and an ace footballer. He had loads of girlfriends though. He never noticed me. I was a dumpy little thing in those days.’

  ‘What about Margaret’s dad, Bob?’

  ‘Bob was all right. He had a short temper though so we kept out of his way. Bob was a mate of my dad’s and Dad said that he was devastated when Margaret went missing. He searched for her for years. I think that’s what killed him in the end, not the cancer.’

  ‘I know it’s a long time ago,’ said Judy, ‘but could you bear to tell me again what happened that day, the Royal Wedding day, the last day you saw Margaret?’

  Kim laughs hollowly but answers readily enough. ‘I could recite this in my sleep. I even did a reconstruction for the TV with Annie being Margaret, even though she didn’t look anything like her.’

  ‘Just tell me in your own words,’ says Judy. ‘Try to cast your mind back.’

  Kim looks up and to the right. A good sign, according to a neural linguistic programming course that Judy once attended, because it means that Kim is remembering past experiences.

  ‘We were at the street party,’ she says. ‘It was a really sunny day, I remember that. The party was lots of fun at first, food and games and everyone having a good time. Then the grown-ups starting singing these old songs and it got a bit embarrassing. Margaret and I slipped away. It was after lunch, about three-ish. We went for a walk to the quay because we liked seeing the swans. There was a Punch and Judy show in the Tuesday Market Place and Margaret wanted to go but I hate that sort of thing. I went back to the street party and I sat with my mum and sisters. They were all singing Beatles songs. “All You Need Is Love”. I still can’t hear that song without wanting to cry. The last time I saw Margaret she was walking up by the Custom House, across the little bridge, her head up and her hair blowing in the breeze. She looked so beautiful, she really did.’

  There’s no envy here from Kim, the woman who remembers her twelve-year-old self as ‘a dumpy little thing’, just sadness. Judy sympathises with her over the Punch and Judy show, she hates that form of entertainment herself and not just because of the name; it glorifies wife beating, in her opinion.

  ‘Did you argue with Margaret?’ she asks. ‘Some onlookers thought you looked as if you were quarrelling.’

  ‘The police asked me this at the time,’ says Kim, with a trace of impatience. ‘We often used to argue, about silly things really. Margaret said I was posh because I had a pony, even though he was just a shaggy little thing left behind by some gypsies. I used to say that Margaret was big-headed, she thought she was so pretty, just because she had blonde hair and had her ears pierced.’

  Some of the papers had even mentioned Margaret’s earrings, Judy remembers, as if they were a sign of sexual precocity that would surely end in abduction and death.

  ‘Was Margaret angry when you wouldn’t go to the Punch and Judy show?’ she asks.

  ‘She was a bit annoyed,’ says Kim, ‘but nothing serious. She waved goodbye and blew me a kiss. I’ll always remember that.’

  She is silent for a moment, twisting her ring.

  ‘Did you see John Mostyn on your walk?’ asks Judy.

  ‘That was earlier,’ says Kim. ‘He came up to me and Margaret and some other girls and asked if we wanted to see some pebbles that he’d found on the beach. He was always doing that but the stones were lovely sometimes. I think that’s where I got my interest in crystals from.’

  ‘I know you’ve told this story lots of times before,’ says Judy, ‘but is there anything that you’ve remembered over the years, something that came into your head, maybe something that doesn’t seem to fit with the rest?’

  ‘There is something,’ says Kim, unexpectedly. ‘Seahorse.’

  ‘Seahorse?’

  ‘It came to me about five years ago that Margaret had said something about a seahorse or seahorses. That’s when I started collecting them in the shop. It was a sort of tribute to her.’

  Judy dimly remembers the seahorses; keyrings and charms, a few cuddly versions with iridescent tails. It strikes her as oddly fitting that these tiny, beautiful, almost otherworldly, creatures remind Kim of her dead friend.

  ‘But you can’t remember the context of the seahorse comment?’ she says.

  ‘No,’ says Kim. ‘Memory’s a funny thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ says Judy. As an expert in the art of forensic interviewing, memory is her job but she often feels as if she doesn’t understand it at all. She thanks Kim for her time and asks if her parents still live in the area.

  ‘Mum and Dad are still in Norfolk,’ says Kim. ‘They still live in the house I grew up in. It’s not far from here. And, of course, Uncle Pete lives in Lynn.’

  ‘Uncle Pete?’

  ‘Mum’s brother. He married Karen. Didn’t you know?’

  Chapter 13

  Clough informs Nelson when John Mostyn is in the building. He gives it about twenty minutes and then goes down to the interview room where a young PC called Jane Campion is guiding Mostyn through the DNA procedure.

  Nelson watches through the two-way mirror for a few minutes. Mostyn looks nervous, but that could be just because he’s in a police station. He also looks so much like a stereotypical sex offender – scruffy clothes, unwashed look, shifty gaze – that Nelson is almost predisposed to think that he is innocent. It’s no wonder that the police focused on him at the time, weird loner living with his mother, wandering round showing young girls his pebble collection. It’s only a surprise that Roy Brown, who’d been the superintendent in 1981, hadn’t locked him up as soon as look at him. Nelson remembers Superintendent Brown, known to the station as ‘Chubby’, and he wasn’t a man to let lack of evidence stand in the way of an arrest. Freddie Burnett has already been on the phone demanding to know if Mostyn is going to ‘get away with it again’. Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn’t a murder investigation the first time round but now it is and Nelson is determined to do things by the book.

  Nelson pushes open the door. Campion jumps and looks flustered, although she is a highly competent constable and is handling the procedure perfectly.

  ‘Good morning.’ Nelson addresses Mostyn directly. ‘I’m DCI Nelson. I’m in charge of the inquiry i
nto the abduction and murder of Margaret Lacey.’

  He means to intimidate Mostyn with his rank and with the reminder that this is now, officially, a murder case but the man just blinks at him mildly.

  ‘I know who you are,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you for voluntarily providing a DNA sample,’ says Nelson. ‘We’re hopeful that we’ve been able to retrieve DNA from the scene. It means we’ll be able to bring the killer to justice.’

  ‘That would be good,’ agrees Mostyn.

  ‘And we’d like a handwriting sample from you too,’ he says.

  For a second a flicker of alarm seems to cross Mostyn’s face.

  ‘Handwriting?’

  ‘Yes. Just a few words will do. PC Campion will show you what to do.’ The words ‘Greetings from Jack Valentine’ were in capitals and there’s probably not enough writing to get a match but Nelson wants Mostyn, if he is the sender, to know that they’re on to him.

  ‘Happy to help,’ says Mostyn, recovering his poise.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Nelson. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ he adds, managing to make this sound more like a threat than a promise. He goes to leave the room and is surprised when Mostyn calls him back, ‘DCI Nelson?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is DS Burnett still on the force?’

  ‘No,’ says Nelson. ‘He retired some years ago.’ And is currently sunning himself in Tenerife.

  ‘Well, give him my regards,’ says Mostyn. ‘If you see him, that is.’

  *

  Cathbad and Judy are eating fish and chips in a tiny café overlooking the quay. It’s lunchtime so the place is full and they’re sharing the table with two pensioners and a greyhound in a tartan coat. For this reason, Judy doesn’t mention the morning’s interview. They talk about the children, how Miranda is enjoying nursery and how well Michael is doing with his reading.

  ‘I think we should get him piano lessons,’ says Judy. ‘I’m sure he’s musical.’

  ‘Lessons are so prescriptive,’ says Cathbad. ‘Let him find out about music for himself. Maybe we should buy him a ukulele.’