Free The Ghost Fields (Ruth Galloway) by Elly Griffiths Page B

that family keeps going. They’re all living on a different planet.’
    ‘What about Sally’s children?’ asks Ruth, stepping sideways to avoid a sheep. ‘What are they like?’
    ‘Son’s a pig farmer. His farm’s on the site of the old airfield. He seems OK. Bit of an upper-class boy playing at working, but OK.’
    ‘Like Marie Antoinette.’
    ‘If you say so. I haven’t met the daughter. Apparently she’s an actress.’
    ‘Do you really think someone from the family dug up Fred’s body? What was it doing in the pets’ burial ground in the first place?’
    ‘We’ve got to find out if it was Fred’s body that was buried there. Will your excavation do that?’
    ‘Maybe,’ says Ruth cautiously. ‘We can take soil samples. Find out if there’s any human matter there. And there may well be something in the context. Scraps of uniform, hair, that sort of thing.’
    ‘You really think there’ll be something left behind?’
    ‘There’s always something left behind,’ says Ruth.
    They have reached the cars. The rain has started again, a thin drizzle that you don’t notice until your hair is completely wet. Ruth looks at Nelson and sees that he has raindrops on his eyelashes. She looks away again.
    ‘Sally didn’t seem to mind the idea of an excavation on her land, did she?’ says Nelson.
    ‘No, she seemed quite excited about it.’
    ‘That’s because she thought your American friend might turn up.’
    ‘He’s not . . .’ begins Ruth. But Nelson has already got into his car and is backing out with a squeal of tyres and a fine spray of mud. He winds down his window.
    ‘I’ll wait until you’ve got your car out.’
    ‘I’ll be OK,’ says Ruth. ‘Don’t worry.’
    She half expects him to argue or to make some comment about the car’s decrepitude. But instead he raises his hand in mock salute and he’s gone, driving far too fast in the middle of the road. He has always been terrible at saying goodbye.
     
    Nelson’s car is nowhere in sight by the time that Ruth reaches the roundabout and the turn-off to the university. He is probably halfway back to the station, getting ready to hassle the team about drug dealers from the Far East and teenage hooligans in the marketplace. She is aware that the case of long-dead Frederick Blackstock is not exactly top of his agenda. But something happened on the lonely marshland where the sea comes whispering in over the flat fields. Someone has been digging there fairly recently and someone undoubtedly placed Frederick’s skeleton in the cockpit of the abandoned plane, ready to grin up at Ruth as she brushed the soil away.
    Nelson obviously thinks that the Blackstocks are hiding something. He once told Ruth that he could smell murder and, though she had laughed at the time, she thinks that she knows what he means. Even when she is excavating the remains of people who died thousands of years ago, she thinks that she can tell when death had been from unnatural causes. A grave is a footprint of disturbance, that’s what she told Nelson, and she thinks that the disturbance stays in the air – and in the land – for a very long time.
    Why did Nelson drive off so suddenly? Was it the mention of Frank Barker? She doesn’t flatter herself that Nelson is jealous of Frank. Why should he be jealous when he’s married to the beautiful Michelle? Any jealousy in their relationship, she thinks wryly, is all one-way. It’s probably more that Frank represents everything Nelson despises. He’s an academic who’s on television. A good-looking American academic who presents history programmes on television. Ruth can’t think of anybody more likely to ignite Nelson’s famous short fuse.
    Well, Nelson needn’t worry. She hasn’t heard from Frank since the email ten days ago. As she parks in her slot outside the Natural Sciences building, she thinks that she will bury herself in her work and forget about dead pilots, American TV – and Frank. It’s a busy term and