The Outcast Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

postman. Ruth doesn’t like to think what this means.
    But today the sky is clear. It’s another beautiful June day and Kate is shouting with delight as she is led around the paddock. Last summer’s trip to Blackpool may have dark memories for Ruth, but for Kate its abiding legacy is a love of donkeys. And a fear of roller coasters. Michelle has gone to get coffee (she often leaves them alone for tactful, but rationed, spaces of time) and Ruth has seized her moment. Nelson, though, is glowering.
    ‘Did Cathbad put you up to this?’
    Of course he did, Ruth wants to shout. Bloody Cathbad. How can he still be pulling the strings from two hundred miles away? But all she says is, ‘He says he knows Liz Donaldson very well.’
    ‘I’m sure he does. I’m sure he knows all sorts of nutcases.’
    ‘Is that what she is, a nutcase?’
    Ruth looked up the case last night. There are any number of internet experts prepared to bet on the odds of three children from the same family dying from cot death. Articles range from ‘The horror of mums who kill’ to ‘A mother’s worst nightmare’. Other cases aretrawled out: mothers jailed for killing their children, only to be released when new medical evidence comes to light, mothers who poison their babies and then act the heartbroken parent for the cameras. She can see them all, the mothers and their babies, in endlessly repeating patterns, like wallpaper. She sees Mother Hook too, in the one surviving photograph of Norfolk’s worst murderess. A square, heavy-browed face, scowling out of the gentle sepia. There was a gruesome lullaby written at the time:
Don’t cry little darling. Don’t cry little dear. Don’t cry little darling. Or Mother Hook will hear
.
    Kate waves. Ruth and Nelson wave back.
    ‘Look Ruth,’ says Nelson, in the voice that he uses when he’s trying to be reasonable. ‘I’m sympathetic to any parent who loses a child, but three children are dead and I’ve got to keep an open mind. That’s all I’m doing. Keeping an open mind.’
    ‘She’s a friend of Delilah’s,’ says Ruth.
    Nelson doesn’t respond to the name. He stares straight ahead but Ruth knows that he’s not seeing Kate wobble past on her donkey. He’s seeing the Saltmarsh at first light, the seagulls calling overhead, the sudden silence as the sand revealed its secrets. Nelson’s hand is clenched on the gatepost. Ruth has a crazy desire to touch it.
    ‘Delilah was an irresponsible hippie,’ says Nelson, his voice harsh. ‘It’s no recommendation being a friend of hers.’
    ‘Liz used to babysit for the children,’ says Ruth. She doesn’t say ‘she may have known Scarlet’. She doesn’thave to. She knows that Nelson is thinking about Scarlet, about the family. There were three other children too.
    ‘If she’s innocent she’s got nothing to worry about.’
    ‘Do you think she’s innocent?’
    ‘Like I say, I’ve got an open mind.’
    ‘What do Judy and Clough think?’
    ‘Judy thinks she’s the bloody Virgin Mary. Clough believes everything he reads in the
Sun
.’
    ‘What about Tim?’ Ruth, too, is a little wary of Tim. They met in rather inauspicious circumstances and Ruth feels that Tim – like his old boss Sandy – slightly disapproves of her.
    ‘Tim’s just doing his job. He’s a good copper.’
    He looks as if he’s about to say more, but at that moment Kate’s ride comes to an end. Excited children rush to the fence to claim the next go. ‘Dada!’ shouts Kate as she is lifted out of the saddle. ‘Look at me, Dada.’ Michelle arrives just in time to see Nelson’s fleeting expression of pure delight.
    *
    Nelson and Michelle leave soon afterwards. Ruth thinks that Michelle may have had enough for one day, especially after a carthorse slobbered on her pink cardigan. But before Ruth can go, Kate demands that they visit Ranger. In a weak moment last year Ruth agreed to sponsor Ranger, a bad-tempered Shetland, and many pictures of his cross, hairy