A Room Full Of Bones

CHAPTER 21

At first Judy doesn’t recognise the voice on the phone.

‘DS Johnson? It’s Superintendent Whitcliffe here.’

Judy sits up in bed, feeling the utter wrongness of being caught talking to the Superintendent while wearing a baby doll nightdress. Next to her, Darren stirs in his sleep.

‘Morning, sir.’ Judy looks around the room for something to make her feel more professional. She puts on her watch.

‘Johnson. DCI Nelson has been taken ill in the night. He’s in the university hospital. It looks bad. I’m making you SIO on the drugs case and the museum case.’

Senior Investigating Officer. At first that is all Judy can hear, then the rest of the sentence filters through.

‘Nelson’s in hospital? What happened?’

‘I’m not quite sure. I’ve just come off the phone to his wife. It might be something viral, maybe meningitis. He’s unconscious.’

‘What?’

‘That’s all I know but it sounds serious. He’s in intensive care. I’m going to need you to rally the team. They’ll be in shock.’

Clough will also be madder than a snake, thinks Judy, getting out of bed. He’ll think he should have been put in charge. He’ll be devastated about the boss too; he worships Nelson.

I’ll call a meeting,’ says Whitcliffe.

Judy looks at her watch. It’s Sunday and they’re meant to be having lunch with Darren’s parents.

‘I’m on my way,’ she says.

‘Good girl. I’ll see you there.’

Ruth, too, is in bed. Weak sunlight is filtering through the blinds, she stretches and is instantly aware of two, no three, things. There are no blinds in her bedroom, she must be in the spare room. It’s morning and Kate isn’t awake yet and she’s in bed with Max.

The last thing will have to wait for a moment. She pads across the landing and looks into Kate’s cot, standing beside the pristine double bed. Kate is awake too, looking at the light reflected on the ceiling. Her dark eyes are wide open and she’s smiling.

‘Good morning darling,’ whispers Ruth.

Kate’s smile turns into a full-on beam. ‘Mum,’ she says.

Ruth picks up Kate and carries her downstairs. In the sitting room she is startled by a large furry shape hurtling towards her. Christ, she’d forgotten the dog. Claudia is friendly but she is anxious to tell Ruth that she’s hungry. Ruth heats up a bottle for Kate and pours milk into instant porridge. Then she puts on the kettle and gives Claudia a piece of bread. It disappears in a second and Claudia looks at her expectantly. Feeling treacherous, she puts some cat food in a bowl and pushes it towards Claudia. There’s no sign of Flint.

It’s eight o’clock. Still early for normal people but afternoon as far as Kate is concerned. Ruth switches on the radio and is surprised to hear organ music blasting out. Of course, it’s Sunday. She turns off the radio and puts bread in the toaster. Claudia is sitting hopefully under Kate’s high chair. Kate drops porridge onto her head.

It takes two cups of tea before Ruth can think about last night. After Kate had fallen asleep in Max’s arms, he had put her into her cot and opened his arms to Ruth. As simple as that. In the end, she hadn’t thought about it at all. Like sleepwalkers they had moved into the spare room and made love on the narrow bed. Not one word was spoken. The whole thing had seemed natural and right, as if they really had been the married couple who had entered the house with their baby only hours before. Very different from Ruth’s last sexual encounter with Nelson, when they had come together through fear and a mutual, desperate longing. In fact, the intensity of emotion had been almost unbearable. But some time during last night Ruth had vowed never to think about Nelson again.

She takes her tea and toast to the table by the window. Flint comes in and sits in a patch of sunlight, washing himself with his leg in the air. Kate plays with one of her birthday presents, a miniature garden complete with plastic flowers and vegetables that must be slotted into the correctly shaped holes. Kate is quite good at this game though she sometimes loses patience altogether and throws the plastic flowers around the room. Where does she get this temper from? Ruth is a simmerer, slow to anger and slow to forget. She bets that Nelson had tantrums as a child. In fact he probably has them now, yelling at his team, driving off in a cloud of exhaust smoke. ‘Just fucking do it,’ she heard him say once to Clough. Not the most tactful management style in the world. But then Ruth has never had to manage anyone but herself. And she’s thinking about Nelson again.

It’s a beautiful crisp winter morning. The sky is a clear pale blue, the sea, glimpsed over the miles of white grass, is a darker blue, almost grey. Occasionally a cloud of birds will rise up out of the reeds, wheeling and turning in the vast sky. Some birds will spend the winter on the mud flats, others are preparing for the long journey south. A few days ago Ruth saw a peregrine, swooping down on some unsuspecting prey in the long grass. Is that like Max, she wonders now, swooping down on her when she is alone and vulnerable? It hadn’t felt like that but what does she know? She doesn’t exactly have a good track record in romance.

‘Morning.’ Max stands in the doorway, looking less like a bird of prey than a large dog, a wolfhound maybe, hair dishevelled, rangy body at ease with itself. Claudia goes mad with delight, rushing round the room for something to bring him and coming up with one of Ruth’s bras, tugged out of the laundry basket. Max looks at Ruth and they both laugh. Kate, carefully fitting vegetables into holes, laughs too.

‘Tea?’ says Ruth.

It isn’t going to be so difficult after all.

Whitcliffe calls the team together and they sit in the briefing room, sleepy and resentful at being summoned on a Sunday morning. Whitcliffe tells them about Nelson; he pitches it just right, sympathetic yet businesslike. Judy stands behind him, feeling horribly self-conscious. She can see the faces of her colleagues as they take in the news. Clough looks stunned; he opens his mouth to speak and then shuts it again, a half-eaten chocolate bar falls to the floor. Tanya looks concerned, ‘Can we send flowers or something?’ Tom Henty is stolid, unmoveable, though Judy notices that, when he gathers his papers together, his hands are not altogether steady. Rocky doesn’t seem to have understood a word.

Clough is in such a state of shock that he doesn’t seem to take in Whitcliffe’s breezy statement that Judy ‘is going to take over for the time being’. It is only when she gets up and walks to the whiteboard that his head jerks up and he stares at her with something approaching hatred. Judy herself is shaking slightly as she writes the date on the board. Her writing seems schoolgirlish and unformed after Nelson’s passionate scrawl. She sees Tanya watching her, her body language sliding almost comically between concern (head on one side) and resentment (narrowed eyes, tapping foot).

‘Operation Octopus,’ Judy writes on the board. That is the name they are giving to the drugs case, chosen by Clough to reflect the fact that the drugs are thought to be coming by sea and that the smugglers seem to have tentacles everywhere. ‘It’s like the mafia,’ says Clough, who loves the Godfather films and frequently intones ‘I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse’ when alone with a mirror. ‘Possible sources,’ writes Judy. ‘The docks, the airport, freight.’ Forensics has identified traces of straw on some of the drugs seized in the city. This may indicate that they were transported in freight packing cases. Judy says this now, making neat lines on her chart.

‘But we know all this,’ drawls Tanya. ‘Are there any new leads?’

‘Just recapping,’ says Judy briskly. ‘I’m going to talk to Jimmy Olson.’

‘But he’s the boss’s source,’ protests Clough. ‘Only the boss talks to Jimmy. You’ll blow his cover.’

‘I want to talk to all the local haulage companies,’ says Judy, ignoring him.

‘We’ve done that,’ says Clough.

‘Well, we’ll do it again,’ says Judy. ‘I’m sure we’re missing something.’

Clough opens his mouth to speak, but before Judy’s leadership skills can be tested the door opens and the duty sergeant comes in. He looks embarrassed. ‘I’ve got a message. Someone asking for the boss.’ He looks doubtfully at Judy, who bites back a temptation to say that she is the boss now.

The message is from Randolph, now Lord, Smith. He wants to talk to someone about his father’s death. He has some new evidence, he says.

‘I’ll go and see him,’ says Judy. She looks at the uncooperative faces of her fellow police officers. ‘You can come with me, Dave.’