A Room Full Of Bones

CHAPTER 30

Ruth wakes up to Radio 4 telling her about fallen trees and blocked roads and villages without power. It is still dark outside. Six o’clock. In the garden, she can just see the faint outline of the bonfire. Kate is still asleep; though Ruth doesn’t realise it yet, it is the first time since early babyhood that she has slept through the night. But right now Ruth has other priorities. Pulling on a dressing gown, she crosses the landing to the spare room. Cathbad too is asleep, lying on his side with his arm stretched out, touching the floor.

Ruth shakes him roughly. ‘Cathbad! Cathbad!’

Cathbad opens his eyes. ‘Hallo Ruth. Is it morning?’

Ruth doesn’t bother to answer. Cathbad is alive. That’s enough for her. She runs back into her room where Kate is just starting to squawk. She changes Kate’s nappy and dresses her in warm clothes. Kate is so surprised by this turn of events that she is quiet, watching Ruth out of her great, dark eyes. Then Ruth gets herself dressed, throwing on clothes at random. She goes downstairs, feeds Flint (who is also surprised, though not displeased, at the early start) and makes some porridge for Kate and a black coffee for herself. Then, just as dawn is breaking over the Saltmarsh, she carries Kate out to the car. She doesn’t know when visiting starts but she’s determined to be at the hospital as early as possible.

In the car she switches on the local radio and learns that last night’s storm caused devastation around Norfolk. A tree fell on a car outside Swaffham, caravans in Cromer were destroyed and trains in and out of Norwich are delayed. But there seems to be nothing in the way of Ruth reaching the university hospital. She drives carefully, avoiding fallen branches and waterlogged gutters. As she reaches the King’s Lynn road she drives through water that is several inches deep; she skids slightly but the little car holds the road well. As she reaches the suburbs she sees rubbish bins strewn across the road and fallen hoardings extolling the beauties of Norfolk. Ruth drives on, unheeding. After a while she switches from the local channel back to Radio 4 and is, as ever, soothed by the familiar voices telling her about war, disaster and financial collapse. It is nearly seven o’clock.

She pays an extortionate amount to park in the hospital car park and carries Kate to the main entrance. It is some minutes before she finds the way to Intensive Care. She doesn’t want to ask for directions in case they tell her that babies aren’t allowed. But Kate is going to see her father, no matter what. Kate enjoys the adventure, trotting along beside Ruth through endless swing doors, up and down stairs, into lifts, across a glass walkway. This last transfixes her. Sky is all around them and pigeons are actually flying under their feet. ‘Bird!’ she shouts joyously. ‘Bird!’ ‘Come on, Kate.’ Ruth picks her up. They must, they must get there in time.

But the entrance to the Intensive Care ward is barred by an avenging angel. A nurse is actually standing in her path, arms akimbo.

‘You can’t bring a baby in here.’

‘But we’ve got to see Harry Nelson,’ pants Ruth. ‘It’s urgent.’

‘He’s not here.’

Ruth feels her legs giving way underneath her. She’s too late. Nelson is dead and she will always know that she failed him. As she struggles to frame the fateful question, a voice behind her says, ‘Ruth?’

Michelle is standing by the sign telling visitors to wash their hands. She is putting away her phone. Is she ringing her daughters to tell them… what? There’s no clue in Michelle’s pale, closed face. Ruth runs towards her, bouncing Kate against her hip.

‘So you’ve come, have you?’ says Michelle.

‘Is he…’ Ruth stops. She is a coward, even at the last.

Michelle stares at her for a long moment then she says, with the faintest trace of a smile, ‘He’s regained consciousness. They’ve moved him onto a ward.’

‘What? Oh my God.’ Suddenly Ruth’s feet can’t hold her any longer and she and Kate collapse onto a nearby chair.

‘Yes. At about three o’clock this morning,’ says Michelle, almost as if she’s talking to herself. ‘He’s very weak but they think he’s going to make a full recovery.’

‘Oh God.’ Ruth leans forward, tears spilling from her eyes. Kate touches them experimentally. ‘Mum?’

‘I’m going home to get some sleep,’ says Michelle. ‘I’ve just rung the girls. Neither of them slept a wink either.’

But I did, thinks Ruth, and so did Kate. She feels as if they have failed some important test. She stands up. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you for telling me.’ And she turns to follow Michelle back out of the swing doors.

Michelle stops her with an imperious hand. ‘Don’t you want to see him?’

‘Yes… I… I didn’t think…’

Michelle gestures towards a door on their left. ‘He’s in there. They’ll probably let you in. Go on. Take Kate to see him.’

Judy is mopping up. She has just finished an exhaustive debrief with Whitcliffe and feels as if she has been awake for several years. Len Harris was apprehended at King’s Lynn airport, where he kept a private plane. He must have come back to the yard, seen the police cars and made a run for it. He is in the process of singing to the rooftops. Tamsin, on the other hand, drove calmly back to London, where she attempted to resume her life as a blameless solicitor and mother of two. ‘You should have seen the house,’ one of the London PCs tells Judy over the phone. ‘It was like something out of a magazine, everything perfect, a Range Rover and a BMW in the garage, two kids at private school. Poor little sods. I felt for them, setting off for school in their boaters while their mum was on her way to prison.’

Was this why Tamsin had masterminded the drugs smuggling operation, just so that she could send her children to private schools wearing boaters? It doesn’t seem enough to Judy. Tamsin was born into a wealthy family; she had obviously worked hard and established herself in her career. Her husband is a successful banker. (Does he know about it, Judy wonders, or does he think that the Range Rover and the BMW came from the Top Gear fairy?) Surely Tamsin had enough of everything without turning to crime? Maybe the more you have, the more you want. Maybe it was the adventure that appealed to her, the idea of carrying on a complicated illegal operation under the noses of her father and sister. Or maybe she just resented all the time spent on the horses. Because Tamsin, according to Caroline, was the one who really couldn’t stand horses. Randolph had been an amateur jockey, Caroline toiled away in the yard for little reward or appreciation but Tamsin really hated the animals.

Tamsin had got as far as possible from the world of mucking out, dawn rides and endless backbreaking work, only to be drawn back in at the suggestion of Len Harris, a man with vast experience, both of horseflesh and drugs. But Harris says that it was all Tamsin, right down to the idea of using the horses themselves to smuggle the drugs. ‘She got a real kick out of that.’ Harris claims that Tamsin forced him to comply, he was only obeying orders. Judy, when she has heard more about the actual process involved, feels absolutely no sympathy for Harris. Sometimes the drugs were fed into the horses’ stomachs through a tube (hence the condom in the manure) but more often they were inserted vaginally into mares and sutured to keep them in place. Apparently stud mares routinely have vulval sutures so, even if the procedure had been discovered, it wouldn’t have seemed unduly suspicious. The whole thing makes Judy feel sick. Tamsin is currently denying everything.

Romilly Smith, who arrived home on Tuesday morning to find her driveway full of police cars, was even more interesting. She didn’t seem in the least surprised to find out that her eldest daughter had been drug smuggling or that she and her accomplice had tried to murder two members of the police.

‘Poor Tammy,’ she had said, sinking into a chair. ‘I never gave her enough attention.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Randolph, who was still charging around like Ben Hur. ‘She was just greedy. And she wanted to pull a fast one over us. Show how stupid we are.’

What Judy thought strangest of all was that no one enquired where Romilly had been all night. She was wearing jeans and a black jumper and looked, to Judy’s critical eye, rather dishevelled. Where had she been all night? With a boyfriend? Caroline had apparently been in the Newmarket Arms. When Tamsin hadn’t turned up she’d been unexpectedly joined by Trace, probably still seething at Clough’s desertion. Judy thought of the shabby little pub, lights blazing, music blaring, a beacon in the dark woods. She couldn’t quite imagine Caroline and Trace at the microphone, belting out I Will Survive. Well, maybe she could. Randolph had been at a ‘private’ club in King’s Lynn. Witnesses? Plenty, apparently.

When Judy got back to the station, she found, to her slight annoyance, that Operation Octopus had not been the only excitement of the night. Head office received a call at one o’clock in the morning, informing them that a suspicious device had been sent to the University of North Norfolk. A special squad had been dispatched and had discovered not a bomb but a poisonous snake in a jiffy bag. Who would send a snake to a university (apparently it was addressed to someone in the science department)? Animal rights nutters, says a laconic Tom Henty, this sort of thing has happened before. Judy feels that she would give a lot to know what Romilly Smith had been doing at one a.m.

Judy makes her report, skating over certain aspects such as her lack of judgment in going to the yard on her own in the first place. She does, though, give Clough full credit for rescuing her. Whitcliffe keeps trying to send Clough home to rest but he insists on hanging around, limping like Long John Silver and eating a vast McDonald’s breakfast. ‘Could be a commendation in this,’ Whitcliffe tells him. Clough grins at Judy, wiping ketchup from his chin. Typical. She cracks the case and Clough gets all the glory.

Forensics teams are currently swarming all over Slaughter Hill Stables and have unearthed enough drugs ‘to float the QE2’, though why an ocean liner would want to float on pure Colombian cocaine is a mystery to Judy. The Drugs Squad thinks that the cocaine came via Dubai. Presumably, whenever a batch of horses was flown over from the Middle East, one or two were carrying the drugs inside them. She wonders how many of the stable lads were involved. She remembers Billy’s anxious squint, the studied nonchalance of the jockeys. Quite a few of them would have had to be in on it, given the regularity with which the ‘mules’ were collapsing. Judy believes, though, that Randolph and Caroline were completely in the dark. Randolph might have a recreational drugs habit but Tamsin was the professional. Nelson told her about the mysterious ‘lady’ that the Vicar was meeting at the museum. Was that Tamsin? The museum, deserted and almost invisible in its colourless back street, might have been the scene for many such meetings. Neil Topham, another man with an expensive habit, was probably in on it too. And Danforth Smith, the man who apparently loved and understood his horses. Had he known?

Tanya Fuller has interviewed Randolph and has texted Judy to say ‘phwoar’. Very well put, thinks Judy, remembering Randolph in his white shirt, riding off into the night. The Highwayman. He’d a French cocked hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin. She would fancy him herself if she had the energy.

At half-past nine, Judy has finally finished writing reports and is just tidying Nelson’s office when Clough puts his head round the door. He’s still chewing, she notices.

‘I’ve just heard from Michelle. The boss is on the mend.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. He regained consciousness at about three this morning, apparently. The docs think he’s going to be OK.’

Three in the morning, thinks Judy. Half an hour after Randolph agreed to return the skulls to their ancestors. Not that she believes in any of that rubbish.

‘Are you going home now?’ she asks.

‘Think so. I need my beauty sleep.’

Judy does not make the obvious retort. Nor does she mention that Clough is now limping with the wrong leg. She owes Clough; she’s going to have to be nice to him for about a year. It’ll be tough, though.

She is just putting the Operation Octopus files in the Case Closed cupboard when her phone rings. Cathbad. She has been expecting this call, she realises, all night. She suddenly feels desperately tired, as if she could lie down on the dirty carpet tiles and sleep for a week.

‘Hallo Cathbad.’

‘Hallo Judy.’

‘Have you heard about Nelson?’

‘No. What?’

‘He’s regained consciousness. They think he’s going to be all right.’

‘I’m glad.’ Cathbad doesn’t sound surprised, she notices. But then he doesn’t really do surprise.

‘Where are you?’ she asks.

Cathbad laughs. ‘I’m at Ruth’s. It’s a long story.’

Isn’t everything, thinks Judy, straightening the pens on Nelson’s blotter.

‘Can I see you later?’ asks Cathbad. ‘I’ve got a lot to tell you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Judy. ‘There isn’t going to be any later.’

Ruth approaches the bed. Nelson lies with his eyes shut, his chin dark with stubble. He has surprisingly long eyelashes, thinks Ruth, as she has thought before. A wire extends from a clip on his finger and a nurse is fiddling with a blood pressure cuff. She looks up.

‘I’m afraid you can’t bring the baby in here.’

‘Just for a minute,’ pleads Ruth. ‘She’s his daughter.’

The nurse looks at her sceptically, obviously remembering Michelle, and Nelson’s other, older, daughters. At that moment, Nelson opens his eyes.

‘Hi Ruth.’

‘Hi Nelson.’

‘Is that Katie?’

Ruth holds the baby up so he can see her. Kate claps her hands and, right on cue, announces, ‘Dada.’

‘Just for a few minutes then,’ says the nurse. Nelson’s eyes are full of tears. ‘She called me Dad.’

Ruth doesn’t tell him that Kate has said it to every male within a twenty-mile radius. She is perilously close to tears herself.

‘How are you?’

Nelson frowns. ‘I don’t know. Last thing I remember we were driving home from Brighton.’

‘You’ve been in a coma. Everyone’s been worried sick.’

‘Michelle told me.’

‘She’s been incredible,’ says Ruth softly. ‘She’s hardly left your side.’

‘I know,’ says Nelson. ‘The nurses say she willed me back to life.’

‘Do they know what was wrong with you?’

‘No. I’m a medical miracle.’ He closes his eyes.

‘Are you still feeling bad?’ Ruth looks around nervously for a nurse but they are all standing by the door talking about The X Factor.

‘A bit odd. I had all these weird dreams. Cathbad was in them.’

‘Cathbad?’

Ruth must have spoken sharply because Kate, fretful after her early start, begins to cry. Ruth tries to distract her with her black cat key-ring. The nurses are looking over now.

Nelson is gazing at Kate. ‘She’s got so big.’

‘She can say sixteen words.’

‘That’s more than me.’

They smile at each other and suddenly the atmosphere becomes charged with something more than goodwill. Ruth looks at Nelson’s hair, now quite grey around the temples. She has an insane desire to stroke it.

Suddenly, though, sexual attraction is blown away as if by a whirlwind. A large woman wearing a purple coat erupts into the ward.

‘Harry! How’s my boy?’

Nelson winces. ‘Hallo Mum.’

Maureen Nelson advances on her son, her black eyes taking in every detail of his appearance and that of the ward. ‘You should have water by your bed,’ she says. ‘It’s a basic human right.’

‘I’m OK, Mum.’

‘OK? Michelle says you nearly died. She’s been out of her mind with worry. How could you do this to her?’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ says Nelson, rather sulkily.

Maureen’s laser-beam gaze now takes in Ruth and Kate, who is chewing furiously at the key-ring.

‘Who’s this?’

‘This is Ruth. A… a friend.’

‘What a lovely baby,’ says Maureen. She pronounces it ‘babby’. She has a distinct Irish accent, something Ruth did not expect.

‘Better take the baby home,’ says Maureen, settling herself at Nelson’s bedside. ‘These places are full of germs, you know.’