A Room Full Of Bones

CHAPTER 17

Nelson is in a sauna. It’s not his preferred way of spending the time. Michelle loves all the gym stuff – exercise classes, Jacuzzi, aquarobics, the lot – but he finds it all rather embarrassing. He likes a swim (as a teenager he had a holiday job as a lifeguard) but that’s about it. He hates the recycled air, the recycled music, the little bottles of shampoo that smell like a Thai meal, the fluffy towels, the frothy coffee. He hates the women in their designer sportswear; they make him feel both lustful and disapproving, an uneasy combination. Why haven’t they got jobs to go to, for God’s sake? And the water’s too hot too. At the Derby Baths you used to be blue when you got out of the water, despite being indoors. That was proper swimming in a proper Olympic-sized pool with diving boards that seemed to reach up to the sky. It was salt water, he remembers, made your eyes sting and your skin turn crusty. He’d once challenged a fellow lifeguard to a race over fifty lengths. When they’d got out, their legs had buckled. Like he said, proper swimming.

But today’s visit is business not pleasure. Nelson has a meeting with Jimmy Olson, his informant. Nelson suspects Jimmy of choosing increasingly bizarre meeting places. Last time it was a cinema, the time before in a seedy arcade. It’s like going on a series of terrible dates. At least today’s venue, in a health club attached to a hotel in Cromer, is relatively upmarket. How had Jimmy, for whom the words low life might have been invented, come up with a place like this?

‘Mate of mine’s a member,’ he says, in answer to Nelson’s question.

Does Olson have mates? Nelson looks at the skinny figure opposite, physique miserably exposed in a pair of skimpy Speedos, and concedes that it must be possible, though it seems unlikely. Olson looks back at him out of eyes so pale blue that they look almost white. He sniffs noisily. Nelson hopes that he doesn’t catch Olson’s cold, these places must be a breeding ground for germs.

‘Have you got anything for me?’ he asks.

‘I told you,’ says Jimmy. ‘There hasn’t been a dicky bird on the ground.’

‘There must be something.’

A woman looks in through the glass door but decides against entering the sauna. Nelson doesn’t blame her. They must look an odd couple, the thin, red-eyed twenty-something and the tall, greying man in slightly too tight swimming trunks (they only had one size for sale in the lobby; cost a bomb too). They must look strange but they probably do look like a couple. Jesus wept, what a way to spend his birthday.

‘There’s a lot of charlie around. It’s good stuff, clean, but no one knows where it’s coming from.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Honest to God.’ Jimmy found God while serving time for dealing. He credits the Almighty for keeping him out of prison for the past three years but he would do better to thank Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, who has got him off a number of smaller charges in return for information. And now Nelson is impatient; he is sure Olson must know something. He is close to a number of dealers, including a deeply unpleasant character known as the Vicar. Yet here’s the market being flooded by cheap foreign cocaine and no one knows anything about it. Call themselves businessmen.

Jimmy gets up to put water on the hot coals. The room is filled with steam and Nelson catches a whiff of Jimmy’s body odour over the smell of pine and lemongrass. He starts to feel slightly sick.

‘Do you know a character called Neil Topham?’ asks Nelson.

He can’t see Jimmy very well but he’s sure that he’s looking shifty.

‘Why?’

‘I ask the questions.’

‘I think I may have heard the name. He’s a customer.’

‘Of yours?’

‘No! I swear to God, Inspector Nelson, I haven’t dealt for years. No, a customer of a friend of mine.’

‘Good customer?’

‘I think so. Why? What’s he done?’

‘He’s dead.’

Jimmy’s mouth opens in a silent O.

‘Would your dealer friend have anything to do with that? Has he been hanging round the Smith Museum?’

Jimmy starts violently then tries to conceal the fact by jumping to his feet.

‘Getting a bit hot in here,’ he says.

Nelson pushes Jimmy back down into his seat. He looms over the cringing younger man. The woman, who has reappeared in the window, beats a hasty retreat.

‘What do you know about the Smith Museum?’

‘Me? Nothing. What would a bloke like me know about a museum?’ Olson reminds Nelson of a character in a classic TV serial, years ago. Uriah something. Always banging on about being humble, but evil through and through.

‘Why did you jump like a cat on hot bricks when I mentioned it?’ The simile is all too apt. Nelson feels the sweat running down his back. He feels more nauseous than ever.

Jimmy slumps forward on the slatted bench. Nelson sits opposite, breathing hard.

‘It’s just something the Vicar said.’

‘What?’

‘Well I met him one day down at the docks and I said how are you Vicar, friendly like, and he said he’d been to the Smith Museum. I thought he was joking because museums are for kids, aren’t they? So I says what were you doing at a museum Vicar, and he says I went to see a lady.’

‘A lady?’

‘Yeah. So I says, still thinking he was joking, was she in a glass case, like she was a mummy or something, and he says no she was flesh and blood alright.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No. On my mother’s life.’

‘Your mother’s dead.’

‘On her grave then.’

Nelson can’t stand it anymore. He pushes open the wooden door and heads for the showers. He stands under the blissfully cold water until he is sure that Olson has gone. Then he dives into the tepid pool and swims non-stop for twenty minutes.

Nelson is drinking overpriced cappuccino in the hotel lounge when he gets the call from Clough.

‘Hi boss. You home yet?’

Nelson has told the team that he’s going home early so that he can have a meal out with Michelle. He knows they are taking bets on whether he’ll come back to the office.

‘Almost. Have you got anything for me?’

‘Well, you know you said to check up on the Smith family, see if there were any convictions, anything like that?’

‘Yes?’

‘Well I’ve got one. A conviction for criminal damage. Part of an animal rights demonstration.’

Nelson thinks of a pale intense face fringed by dark hair. ‘Was it the daughter? Caroline?’

‘No.’ Clough is savouring the moment. ‘Romilly Maud Smith, aged fifty-five. Lady Smith to you.’

‘The wife?’

‘That’s right. Looks like Lady Smith was part of a group that broke into a pharmaceutical company to protest about animal testing.’

‘Jesus! Wonder what Danforth Smith thought about that.’

‘He must have known. It was in the papers. The Evening News described her as a “mother figure” to the group. Her code name was Big Mama.’

‘What did she get?’

‘Two hundred pound fine.’

‘Any other convictions?’

‘No, but according to the papers the group had been involved in lots of other demos. They’re organised, these animal rights nutters.’

Are they nutters thinks Nelson, as he drives home at only a few miles over the speed limit. In his experience, animal rights activists are highly principled people, which makes them dangerous. Even so, he can’t quite equate the elegant woman that he saw this morning with a camouflage-wearing extremist going by the name of Big Mama. What did Danforth Smith think about his wife’s activities? And what was an animal rights campaigner doing married to a racehorse trainer in the first place? Danforth obviously loved his horses, but in Nelson’s mind racehorses are linked to hunting and shooting and other bloodthirsty pursuits. He remembers his shock when Judy told him that she used to go hunting. ‘It was a pony club thing,’ she’d said. Pony club! Just when you thought you knew someone, they come out with something like that. Judy had done good work though, coming up with Cathbad on the CCTV. According to Judy, though, Cathbad had an alibi, which doesn’t surprise Nelson at all. Cathbad had been visiting Caroline Smith. Are they having an affair? Caroline is rather attractive in a slightly nutty way. Nelson imagines that she would be just Cathbad’s type.

So Caroline is having an affair with a druid and Romilly is a secret activist. How many other skeletons are going to tumble out of the Smith closet? Thinking of skeletons reminds him of Bishop Augustine and Ruth’s amazing revelation. How coolly she had put it. ‘Anything interesting?’ that slimy Phil had asked. ‘Rather interesting, yes,’ Ruth had replied. Nelson never admires Ruth more than when he sees her doing her professional stuff. She is so sure of herself, there is none of that ‘oh I don’t know’ nonsense that you get with some women, no trying to ingratiate herself with men by playing on their vanity. Ruth knows that she is as good as any man and she says so. It’s refreshing. Nelson does not want to admit, even to himself, that he finds it sexy.

Which ‘lady’ had the Vicar been meeting at the museum? Caroline? Romilly, Lady Smith? It could even be Bishop Augustine, the amazing transvestite bishop, herself. But ‘flesh and blood’ Jimmy had said. What is the link between the museum and the stables, apart from the Smith family? And the fact that two men, in perfect health a few days ago, are now dead.

Nelson reaches the King’s Lynn roundabout. After a moment’s hesitation, he takes the turn for the station. He’ll just pop in for a few minutes, talk to Judy and Clough about the case. He’ll still be back in plenty of time to take Michelle out for a meal.