The House At Sea’s End

Another, less classical, allusion comes into Ruth’s head, inspired perhaps by Cathbad’s championing of Lewis Carroll:

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Were walking close at hand.

They wept like anything to see

Such quantities of sand.

‘If only this were cleared away,’

They said, ‘it would be grand.’

Ruth climbs down from the wall and walks carefully over the rock pools towards the beach. As she gets closer, she sees that, in fact, Craig is clearing the sand away from a large object – several large objects – that lie half-buried at the foot of the cliff. Closer still, she sees that they are oil barrels, orange with rust and studded with limpets.

Craig is red in the face from his exertions. He greets Ruth and Ted with ‘Just the three of them, I think.’

‘What are they doing here?’ asks Ruth, bending close to examine the corroded metal. ‘It’s such an isolated place. Miles from anywhere.’

‘I used to come birds-nesting here as a child,’ says Craig. ‘We actually used to climb up without ropes or anything. Madness really. The cliffs are eighty foot high in places.’

‘I used to go in for extreme archaeology,’ says Ted. ‘Went into these caves once in the cliffs on the Firth of Clyde. Thirty metres down and full of giant spiders.’

‘Fascinating,’ says Ruth. She has no time for extreme archaeology, which seems to her to abandon the most sacred precepts of the subject – time, patience and care – in favour of laddish thrill seeking. ‘Why do you think they could be linked to the bodies?

‘Take a look inside,’ says Ted.

The nearest barrel has a hole in its side, leaving a wickedly jagged edge. Peering gingerly inside, Ruth smells a heady mix of petrol and the sea. She gags. The barrel is half-full of stones which have either fallen from the cliffs or been swept in by the tide, but the smell is still all-pervasive. The second barrel is also open to the elements and inside, under the stones and beach debris, Ruth can see something whitish. The third barrel, as Ted says, is still sealed.

She puts on protective gloves and reaches inside the second barrel. The stones are tightly packed, a mixture of chalk and flint, with a stray crab leg or two thrown in for good measure (probably dropped there by seagulls). Ruth reaches down as far as she can and manages to get a hold of the something white. She pulls.

‘Let me help,’ says Ted.

Together, they drag out a wad of cotton fibres, once white but now stained grey and yellow, smelling strongly of rotten eggs.

Ruth almost chokes again. She takes a deep breath. ‘It looks like-’

‘The stuff we found buried with the bodies,’ says Ted. ‘That’s what I thought.’

‘The barrel’s full of it,’ says Craig. ‘It stinks to high heaven.’

‘Could be something dead in the bottom of the barrel,’ says Ruth. ‘A fish maybe?’

‘Nah,’ says Ted sniffing knowledgeably. ‘That’s sulphur, that is.’

Sulphur. The word has an ominous sound. Sulphur and brimstone. The devil dancing in front of a yellow fire. Ruth shakes her head irritably. Her parents are big experts on the devil but she doesn’t expect him to come invading her thoughts like this. Especially as he is something else she doesn’t believe in.

The third barrel is still sealed. Ruth pushes at it experimentally; it doesn’t budge but there is a faint sloshing sound.

‘Think it’s full of petrol,’ says Ted.

‘Petrol?’

‘Yeah, the beach stinks of petrol.’

Ruth realises that this is true. Petrol must have leaked copiously from the first barrel so that the whole area smells like a garage forecourt. Looking down she sees that the sand is black with oil.

‘Well we’d better get the fire brigade to look at it,’ says Ruth. ‘Put some hazard signs up. All we need is some idiot with a cigarette…’

‘Goodnight Vienna,’ agrees Craig. He starts to pack up his equipment. Ruth likes him; he’s the only archaeologist who doesn’t argue with her.

‘What about the stuff we found in the barrel?’ asks Ted.

‘I’ll take a sample to the lab.’

‘Rather you than me,’ grins Ted.

Further inland, overlooking gently rolling hills and flat water meadows, Nelson and Judy are smelling a rather different smell. Antiseptic, lavender and cut flowers masking another, more elemental, odour.

‘Christ, I hate these places,’ says Nelson for the tenth time, shifting impatiently in his chintz armchair.

‘I can’t imagine anyone likes them much,’ says Judy. She is finding her boss rather trying. It’s not her favourite way to spend an afternoon – interviewing some gaga old bloke in an old people’s home – but it’s her job and she has to get on with it. She thinks that Nelson just resents the fact that Whitcliffe has insisted that he attend this rather routine interview. His attitude, as he shifts in the too-low chair, seems to suggest that, if it wasn’t for this intrusion, he would be out catching criminals and righting wrongs. As it is, he’d probably only be in another of Whitcliffe’s meetings.