The House At Sea’s End

Despite this, Ruth didn’t know very much about Tatjana. She came from Trebinje, near the Adriatic coast. It was rumoured that she’d lost her husband in the siege of Mostar but, then, almost every Bosnian had lost someone. You stopped asking after a while and just assumed tragedy. Certainly, in repose, Tatjana’s face sometimes looked unbearably sad but she had a reserve that prevented anyone from getting too close. Ruth didn’t mind this. She was a private person herself and disliked it when people asked probing questions in the name of friendship.

So, she was surprised, and rather pleased, when Tatjana suggested one evening that they go for a picnic. She remembers that she had laughed. The word picnic conjured up images of cucumber sandwiches and grassy meadows, not this nightmare land where the rolling fields usually turned out to be full of human bones rather than checked tablecloths and cupcakes. But Tatjana had ‘borrowed’ a jeep from one of the militia (she could always get round the soldiers) and she had a bottle of wine. What could be nicer? There was a pine forest on the edge of the town. Ruth had never been there, it was on the Serbian border and there were bandits in the hills, as well as the more picturesque dangers of bears and wolves.

‘It’ll be fine,’ Tatjana had said. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’

Where indeed? Ruth rather felt that she’d used up her quotient of adventure in volunteering for Bosnia in the first place. But the idea of being outdoors on a summer evening, of sitting on the grass and talking about Life, was too good to pass up. So Tatjana drove the jeep up to the forest and the two girls did indeed sit on the grass, drinking wine from the bottle, and talking about archaeology, Erik, careers, men, the state of the world. Ruth remembers that she was just feeling pleasantly sleepy and, for the first time that summer, almost relaxed, when Tatjana said, ‘Ruth. Will you do me a favour?’

Ruth will never forget the way that Tatjana’s face had become transformed, how it blazed with light. How she suddenly looked both incredibly beautiful and incredibly scary.

‘Of course,’ Ruth said nervously. ‘What?’

‘I want you to help me find my son.’

CHAPTER 6

The coroner, a horrendously cheerful man called Chris Stephenson, speculates that the bodies have been in the ground no longer than a hundred years. Ruth makes no comment on this. She has her own research to conduct on the bones. She will measure and analyse, looking for evidence of disease or trauma. She’ll send samples for Carbon 14 and DNA testing. She will do isotopic tests on the bones and teeth. Yet, even with all this technology, she still thinks identification is unlikely. If the bodies have lain in the earth all that time, why should anyone claim them now?

Stephenson agrees with Ruth that the bodies are male, aged between twenty-one and fifty (no signs of arthritis or typically ageing conditions, all adult teeth fully erupted) and that cause of death was probably gun shot. On four bodies there were entry and exit wounds which suggested that the men had been shot in the back of the neck, ‘execution style,’ Chris Stephenson explained jovially. The bullet found in the grave was from a.455 cartridge, the type used in a Webley Service revolver, a gun used by British soldiers in both the First and Second World Wars.

‘Are we looking at something that happened in one of the wars?’ asks Nelson as they leave the autopsy room, shaking off the smell of formaldehyde and the humour of Chris Stephenson.

‘It’s possible,’ says Ruth. ‘The dates could fit but… six bodies? How could six soldiers be killed and just buried under the cliff without anyone knowing about it? There’d be records, wouldn’t there?’

‘Maybe they weren’t soldiers.’

‘The bodies were military age.’

‘Well, we need to find out,’ says Nelson, heading across the car park to where his Mercedes is parked beside Ruth’s little Renault. ‘I’ll set Judy Johnson on to it. Get her talking to the locals. Most of them look as if they were alive in the war. The First World War at that.’

‘You should talk to Jack Hastings,’ says Ruth. ‘He says there’s nothing about the village that he doesn’t know.’

‘Good idea,’ says Nelson, to her surprise. ‘Why don’t you come with me? Seeing as you know him and all? Unless you’ve got to get back to the childminder?’

‘I don’t have to collect Kate until five,’ says Ruth with dignity.

It is only when she is in the car, hurtling through the Norwich suburbs, that she realises she has walked into a trap.