A Room Full Of Bones

CHAPTER 3

Ruth drives straight to the childminder’s house to collect Kate. Sandra looks after Kate while she is at work, but this is a Saturday and Ruth feels it is an imposition. Sandra doesn’t seem to mind though, and Kate, up to her elbows in flour making cakes, seems to be having a whale of a time. As usual, Sandra has several other children there, all organised in benign labour – making cakes, sticking things on paper, playing a giant (wipe clean) snakes and ladders in the sitting room. Sandra’s own kids are grown up so these must also be the offspring of mothers too disorganised to arrange weekend childcare. Ruth can’t be the only one, surely? At least she is paying Sandra, which means it’s a clean commercial transaction, unlike those murky arrangements with friends. Could you do me a favour? Are you sure you don’t mind? I’ll do the same for you one day. Much better like this, cash in hand.

Ruth likes Sandra but never knows what to say to her, so she thanks her, picks up Kate – floury hands on her best jacket – and backs out of the small terraced house. Sandra waves her goodbye, a child on each hip.

‘She hasn’t slept, kept going all afternoon, so you might be lucky tonight,’ she says.

There was a time when Ruth wouldn’t have understood this sentence. She is wiser now. Kate hasn’t slept. This means that if Ruth keeps her awake all the way home, she may fall asleep at six and not wake until the morning. Kate and Ruth still haven’t really got the sleeping thing sorted. Get her into a routine, the books say, but the only bedtime routine that suits her daughter is Ruth staying with her for hours, reading stories, singing lullabies, or just lying there holding her hand. If Ruth tiptoes out of the room, Kate starts to wail. Let her cry, say the books, but Ruth can’t bear to. Maybe it would be better if there was another parent, someone to pour her a glass of wine and tell her to be strong, but on her own Ruth weakens. Before she has got downstairs, she’s back in attendance, singing, story-telling, hand-holding. She usually falls asleep too, lying beside Kate’s cot, and wakes up stiff and dry-mouthed at midnight. When morning comes, horrifyingly early, one of them is bright-eyed and raring to go and it isn’t Ruth.

‘Mum,’ says Kate now. ‘Mum mum mum mum.’

This is a new development, one which never fails to bring a lump to Ruth’s throat. She likes the way that Kate says ‘Mum’ and not ‘Mummy’, as if she’s a tiny teenager. Ruth’s more comfortable with mum anyway. Mummy sounds twee and home counties. She’s sure that Shula and David Archer call their mother ‘Mummy’.

Slightly more disturbingly, Kate has also started saying ‘Dada.’ As there’s no male person currently standing in this relation to her, she employs a scatter-gun approach and has so far bestowed the title on Ruth’s cat, Flint, her grandfather, Cathbad, and the postman. Ruth’s father and Cathbad were delighted; Flint and the postman under-whelmed.

As she drives through the King’s Lynn streets, past the quay and the customs house and the market square, Ruth keeps up a merry flow of prattle designed to keep her daughter awake. ‘Look Kate, look at that dog! He’s spotty isn’t he? Just like the hundred-and-one Dalmatians. Mum will read you that one day. It’s brilliant. Much better than the film. Look, children dressed as witches! And some more of them! And here are some children dressed as mass-murderers. How cute!’ As afternoon turns to evening, more and more of these mini-devils swarm onto the streets. When did trick-and-treating become so ubiquitous? She’s never going to let Kate do it. But then, there are no neighbours where they live, only the sea and the miles of whispering marshland. Perhaps she should move. Ruth winds down the windows, hoping that the cold will keep Kate awake. She ejects Bruce Springsteen and puts in a tape of children’s songs. ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea.’ All in vain. Kate’s head droops.

Ruth’s not too disappointed. She knows she’ll pay for it later but right now she could do with the quiet. Maybe Kate will stay asleep when they get home and Ruth can carry her up to her cot. Mum needs to think, Ruth tells Kate silently. She’s a bit churned up because she saw your dad today. Dad. Kate has never called Nelson ‘Dada’ but then she hasn’t seen him for six months. In the first few months of Kate’s life, Nelson was a frequent visitor, torn with guilt over Michelle but also fascinated by this new, unexpected daughter. Kate was born after Ruth and Nelson spent one night together, a few hours stolen out of a horrendous sequence of events which had begun with a murdered child. Ruth had always known that Nelson would never leave his wife and his other daughters, and she had prided herself on asking him for nothing. But Nelson hadn’t been able to leave the situation alone, had wanted to give Ruth money, had wanted to be part of Kate’s life. He had even insisted that Ruth have the baby christened and that he and Michelle should be godparents. But at the christening, Michelle had found out.

Ruth still doesn’t know how it happened, but two days after the short ceremony at a Catholic church, Nelson had turned up on her doorstop, so ashen-faced that for a second she had barely recognised him. Michelle knew that he was Kate’s father. ‘She asked me a straight question and I couldn’t very well lie, could I?’ Ruth had her own opinion on that but she had wisely kept silent. Nelson had admitted everything and he and Michelle had ‘had it out’. They had argued furiously (‘It was terrible, Ruth, we argued for two days. We never argue.’ ‘Really?’) and the upshot was that Nelson had agreed not to see Ruth or Kate again. Ever. ‘It was the only way I could save our marriage. I’m sorry.’ What if they met in the course of work, Ruth had asked, stony-faced. ‘She accepts that that might happen, of course.’ Nelson had wanted to make a ‘financial provision’, to give her money every month, but Ruth had refused. She hadn’t realised how far Nelson would go to save his marriage. Or how much it would hurt.

Seeing Nelson at the museum had been worse, far worse, than seeing poor Neil Topham’s body curled up beside the bishop’s coffin. Her feelings for Nelson are so complicated that she has long since stopped trying to make sense of them. As soon as she sees him she always feels, in quick succession: irritation (he’s the bossiest person she knows), respect (he’s very good at his job), pleasure (he makes her laugh), and undeniable attraction. Does she love him? She has stopped asking herself this question too. She knows that she never wants to live with a man again. Ten years ago, when Peter moved out, she remembers the way the house itself seemed to sigh with relief. It was just Ruth and the cats and the wild skyline, alone at last. And now it’s just Ruth and Kate and Flint. But it had been nice having Nelson around. He may be a male chauvinist pig but he’s quite useful in a crisis.

Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonnie to me…

She has reached the Saltmarsh. It is dark now but she can hear the sea sighing in the distance. The road is raised up over the flat marshland, and at times like this it feels as if you are arriving at the end of the world. She may have left the plastic ghouls and miniature witches behind but this is the real thing. The dark, the unknown. Ruth has known real terror on the Saltmarsh but still she loves it. Her cottage is one of three but one is empty and the other is a holiday home, seldom occupied. It’s a lonely place but, on the whole, Ruth enjoys the solitude. So, when she parks outside her house and the security light (installed two years ago by Nelson) illuminates the Sold sign on the house next door, she feels a familiar irritation, almost anger. The house has been bought for rental, she knows, and any day now she’ll have some trendy couple leaning over the fence and inviting her round for sushi, or some bearded loner who wants to show her his dried seaweed collection. Or some-. Stop, she tells herself, unlocking the door and carrying Kate inside. It may well be a new soul mate, or someone with children the right age to play with Kate, but the truth is that Ruth doesn’t really want any new friends. She has enough trouble with the ones she’s got.

Nelson drives to the hospital in a similarly uncomfortable state of mind. Seeing Ruth again had been as bad as he had imagined it would be. And when she mentioned Katie! Nelson’s feelings for Ruth are so tied up with guilt and fear that he finds them impossible to untangle. His feelings for Katie, on the other hand, are crystal clear. He loves her, the baby he has only held three times in his life, and he wants to be her father. But that’s impossible.

The events at the christening six months ago are still so painful that Nelson finds his thoughts veering away whenever he tries to approach the recollection. Now he forces himself to remember. Michelle had been fine at first. She had been keen to be a godmother; in fact she had always taken a special interest in Ruth and Kate, something which, when he thought about it, had had the power to make him feel almost ill with guilt and foreboding. But like an idiot, he had ignored his misgivings. He had insisted on a Catholic christening because he’d been brought up a Catholic, and Cathbad’s naming day ceremony held a few months earlier had made him acutely uncomfortable. Worse, he felt that they were ill-wishing Kate in some way, invoking those faceless, bloodthirsty Gods that Cathbad admires so much. He’d wanted some protection from the angels and saints of his own childhood. So he had persuaded Ruth to have Kate baptised and had asked Father Hennessey, a Catholic priest whom he had met on a previous case, to perform the service. Ruth had agreed, partly because she too had been impressed by Patrick Hennessey and, he suspects, partly because Ruth herself had come close to death just a few weeks earlier.

And, at first, it had been a happy occasion. A beautiful May day, he remembers, with blossom on the trees and the promise of summer in the air. He had held Kate (the third time) and Michelle, who loves babies, had been in her element. Cathbad and Shona, the other godparents, had been no madder than they could help. Afterwards they had driven to a country pub with Ruth and Kate in the back of the car. Michelle had chatted happily to Ruth on the journey but as Ruth got out of the car, Michelle had detained Nelson with an imperious hand. Despite trying not to, he can see her face now, an expression so glacial with anger that he can only describe it as terrifying.

‘She’s yours, isn’t she?’

‘What?’

‘Kate. She’s yours. I was looking at her just now and she’s got this little whorl of hair that goes a different way from the rest. You’ve got one just like it. So has Rebecca.’

At first he denied it outright. They had stood there, in the car park of The Phoenix, hissing at each other as the happy families walked past them, heading for a pub lunch in the sun.

‘You must be mad,’ he had said. ‘What are you talking about, a whorl of hair?’

Michelle had looked at him disdainfully. ‘Don’t bother lying about it. Everything fits. I wondered why you were always so concerned about Ruth. I thought you might be becoming a nicer person in your old age. How wrong can you be?’

He tried for bemusement. ‘What are you on about, love?’

‘Don’t call me love. You slept with Ruth, she’s had your baby, and now you’re trying to deny it. I never knew you were such a coward, Harry.’

And he is a coward. He knows that now. They had been forced to go into the pub, to drink Kate’s health and laugh at Cathbad’s jokes. Michelle, brittle and beautiful with self-righteous fury, had even held the baby in her arms, thoughtfully stroking the telltale swirl of dark hair. When they got home Michelle had given him an ultimatum. He must never see Ruth or Kate again. ‘But I work with her,’ he had protested. ‘You know what I mean. You can speak to her as a colleague but never, never as anything more than that.’ And he had agreed.

He had known all along that he could never break up his family, turn Laura and Rebecca into resentful strangers and Michelle into that age-old stock character ‘the ex-wife.’ Although his daughters are both at university now, they still need him. They need both their parents, they need a home. And Michelle. He has loved her for almost all his adult life. She’s still one of the most beautiful women he’s ever seen and she’s the mother of his beloved daughters. How could he ever leave her? Once he fantasised that he could have both women, all three children, but that’s not the way the world works. But in honouring his wedding vows Nelson has betrayed Ruth. He can hear himself now, blustering, gabbling away, denying that there was ever anything between them. A phrase from the Good Friday gospel comes back to him. Before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.

Nelson sighs as he turns into the grounds of the hospital. ‘Car Park full. Current waiting time: 30 minutes.’ He has sinned and the wages of sin are death. Death has come uncomfortably close in the last few years. He can’t afford to make the Gods angrier than they already are. And, in the meantime, he has a dead body and Ruth Galloway is the only witness.

The whole case bothers him. Neil Topham could have died from natural causes but the idea of the body lying beside the other, long-dead, corpse disturbs him. And those letters. Once before Nelson had had to deal with a case involving anonymous letters and there were enough echoes in the missives found in Topham’s desk to make the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

You have ignored our requests.

Now you will suffer the consequences.

You have violated our dead.

Now the dead will be revenged on you.

We will come for you.

We will come for you in the Dreaming.

Nelson screeches to a halt in a bay reserved for emergency vehicles. Detective Sergeant Judy Johnson comes out to meet him. She’s one of Nelson’s best officers: bright, hard-working, excellent at the touchy-feely stuff. She got married earlier in the year and Nelson lives in dread of her announcing that she’s off on maternity leave. ‘That’s the trouble with promoting women,’ he grumbled to his boss. Whitcliffe had been shocked. ‘Harry! You just can’t say things like that these days.’ The list of things that Nelson can’t say seems to be getting longer by the minute. Still, he’s sure that Whitcliffe knows what he means. All that trouble training up an officer only to have her quit the moment she starts getting really useful. Or she’ll try and juggle work and babies and be constantly tired and stressed. Judy hasn’t said anything about starting a family though; come to think of it, she’s been rather quiet these last few weeks.

‘Hi boss.’

They are standing in the entrance to A and E. A steady stream of injured revellers, some still in Halloween masks, trail past them. The walking wounded. And it’s not six o’clock yet.

‘Dead on arrival?’ Nelson greets Judy.

She nods. ‘He’s in the morgue. I’ve contacted his parents. They’re on their way.’

‘Chris Stephenson had a look?’

‘Yes. He says he’ll do a post-mortem tomorrow.’

‘Say anything else useful?’

‘Signs of drug use.’

Nelson thinks of the white powder found in the desk drawer. Was it for Topham’s private use only? What was going on at the Smith Museum?

‘Cause of death?’ he asks, stepping aside to let a reeling man dressed as a mummy go past.

‘Not sure. Could have been heart attack.’

‘I’d better have a look.’

Judy follows Nelson across the car park, towards a discreet sign saying ‘Hospital Morgue’. On their way they pass a couple of nurses wearing witches’ hats and a disturbingly realistic vampire, swigging Bull’s Blood from the bottle.