Free The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths by Elly Griffiths

Styrofoam cup and asks again, ‘Is he a nutter?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ says Ruth slowly. ‘I’m not a psychologist.’
    Nelson grunts. ‘We had one of those. Talked complete bollocks. Homoerotic this, suppressed that. Complete crap.’
    Ruth who had, in fact, thought she noticed a homoerotic subtext to the letters (assuming, of course, that the writer is male), again says nothing. Instead she gets the letters out of her bag.
    ‘I’ve categorised the references in the letters,’ she says. “I thought it was the best way of starting.’
    ‘A list,’ says Nelson approvingly. “I like lists.’
    ‘So do I.’ She gets out a neatly typed sheet of paper and passes it to Nelson.
     
    Religious
    Ecclesiastes
    Isaac
    Christmas
    Christ dying on cross/Easter
    St Lucy
    St Lucy’s Day (21 December)
    St John’s Day (24 June)
    All Saints’ Day (1 November)
    Jeremiah
     
    Literary
    Shakespeare:
    King Lear: ‘A man may see how the world goes with no eyes.’
    Henry V: ‘A little touch of Harry …’
     
    Julius Caesar: ‘Graves have yawned and yielded up their dead.’
    T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday: ‘There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again.’
    The Waste Land: ‘We, who were living are now dying.’
     
    Norse legend
    Odin
     
    The Tree of All Knowledge (the World Tree, Yggdrasil) Pagan
    Summer solstice
    Winter solstice
    Litha (Anglo-Saxon word for the solstice)
     
    Wicker Man
    Sun God
    Shamanism
    Will o’the wisps
    Mistletoe
     
    Greek legend Argus
     
    Archaeological
    Cursuses
    Causeways
     
    Nelson reads intently, his brows knitted together. ‘It’s good, seeing it all spread out like this,’ he says at last, ‘otherwise you can’t tell which is a quote and which is just mumbo jumbo. “We who were living are now dying,” for example. I thought that was just more spooky stuff. I never realised it was an actual quote.’
    Ruth, who has spent hours trawling through Eliot’s Collected Poems, feels gratified.
    Nelson turns back to the list. ‘Lots of biblical stuff,’ he says, ‘we spotted that straight off. Psychologist thought he might even be a lay preacher or an ex-priest.’
    ‘Or maybe he just had a religious upbringing,’ says Ruth. ‘My parents are Born Again Christians. They’re always reading the Bible aloud, just for kicks.’
    Nelson grunts. ‘I was brought up a Catholic,’ he says, ‘but my parents weren’t really into the Bible. It was more the saints, praying to this one or that one, saying Hail Marys. Jesus - a decade of the rosary every bloody day! It seemed to take hours.’
    ‘Are you still a Catholic?’ asks Ruth.
    “I had the girls baptised Catholic, more to please my mum than anything else, but Michelle’s not a Catholic and we never go to church. Don’t know if I’d say I was a Catholic or not. A lapsed one maybe.’
    ‘They never let you get away, do they? Even if you don’t believe in God, you’re still “lapsed”. As if you might go back one day.’
    ‘Maybe I will. On my death bed.’
    “I won’t,’ says Ruth fiercely, ‘I’m an atheist. After you die, there’s nothing.’
    ‘Shame,’ says Nelson with a grin, ‘you never get to say I told you so.’
    Ruth laughs, rather surprised. Perhaps Nelson regrets this foray into levity because he turns back, frowning, to the list.
    ‘This guy,’ he says, ‘what does he believe?’
    ‘Well,’ says Ruth, ‘there’s a strong theme of death and rebirth, the seasons, the cycle of nature. I would say his beliefs were more pagan, though. There’s the mention of mistletoe, for instance. The druids considered that mistletoe was sacred. That’s where the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe comes from.’ She pauses.
    ‘Actually, our Iron Age girl. She had traces of mistletoe in her stomach.’
    ‘In her stomach?’
    ‘Yes, maybe she was forced to eat it before they killed her. As I said, ritual sacrifice was quite common in the Iron Age. You find bodies that have been stabbed,