The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths Read Online Free PDF

back to Norway. Ruth visited him last summer, in his log cabin by the lake - freezing morning swims followed by steaming saunas, Magda’s wonderful food, talking to Erik about Mayan civilisation as the stars came out at night. Madga, his wife, a voluptuous blonde goddess whose beauty manages to make you feel better, not worse, about your self, is another good friend. She never once mentioned Peter, even though she had been there that summer when Ruth and Peter first fell in love; had, in fact, by her tact and gentle benevolence, actually brought them together.
    But Erik is out. Ruth leaves a message and, feeling restless, gets the battered lump of metal out of her rucksack and examines it. Still in its freezer bag, carefully dated and labelled, it stares back at her. Phil wanted her to leave it in the Department safe but she refused. She had wanted to bring the torque home, to the Saltmarsh, at least for one night. Now she examines it under her desk light.
    Stained dark green from its long immersion in the marsh, the metal nonetheless has a burnished sheen that looks like it might be gold. A gold torque! How much would that be worth? She thinks of the so-called ‘marriage tore’ found near here, at Snettisham. That had been a wonderful, elaborate object, showing a human face with a ring through its mouth. This piece is more battered, perhaps it has been broken by ploughing or digging.
    However, squinting closely, she can just see a twisted pattern, almost like a plait. The piece in her hand is barely fifteen centimetres long but she can imagine it as a full half circle, imagine it round the neck of some savage beauty. Or round the neck of a child, a sacrificial victim?
    She remembers Nelson’s bitter disappointment when he learnt that the bones were not those of Lucy Downey.
    What must it feel like to have those deaths, those ghosts, forever on your mind? Ruth knows that for him the Iron Age bones are an annoyance, an irrelevancy, but for her they are as real as the five-year-old girl who went missing all those years ago. Why were the bones left on the edges of the marsh? Was she (from their size, Ruth thinks the bones are female but she cannot be sure) left for dead, sinking in the treacherous mud? Or was she killed somewhere else and buried at the start of the marshland, to mark the beginning of the sacred landscape?
    When her pasta is cooked Ruth eats it at the table by the window, Erik’s book The Shivering Sand propped up in front of her. The title is from The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and Ruth turns again to the first page where Erik quotes Collins’ description of the sands:
     
    The last of the evening light was fading away; and over all the desolate place there hung a still and awful calm.
    The heave of the main ocean on the great sandbank out in the bay, was a heave that made no sound. The inner sea lay lost and dim, without a breath of wind to stir it. Patches of nasty ooze floated, yellow-white on the dead surface of the water. Scum and slime shone faintly in certain places, where the last of the light still caught them on the two great spits of rock jutting out, north and south, into the sea. It was now the time of the turn of the tide: and even as I stood there waiting, the broad brown face of the quicksand began to dimple and quiver - the only moving thing in all the horrid place.
     
    Collins, surely, had understood about the ritual landscape of the sea and land and of the haunted, uncanny Places that lie between the two. Ruth remembers that at least one character in The Moonstone meets their death on sands. She remembers another phrase, ‘What the Sand gets, the Sand keeps forever.’ But the Saltmarsh had given up some of its secrets; first the henge and now this body, just waiting there for Ruth to discover them. Surely there must be a link.
    Reading again about the discovery of the henge (Erik wrote at least three books on the strength of the find), Ruth remembers how eerie it had looked in that