A Room Full of Bones (14 page)

Cathbad bends to light a fuse. Nothing happens. He goes back to try again. Ruth opens the back door.

‘You shouldn’t return to a lighted firework.’ She learnt that from
Blue Peter
.

‘It’s OK, Ruth.’ Cathbad brandishes his taper. ‘Fire always obeys me.’

Famous last words, thinks Ruth. But she shuts the door again. The wind is getting up, making the whole lighting business more hazardous than ever. Maybe they’ll give up soon. She wonders if they’d notice if she sneaked off to watch
Newsnight
.

But suddenly there is a slight hiss and a little gold tree springs up in front of her. The tree spins, shedding gold and silver leaves. Bob laughs aloud and Cathbad performs a rudimentary, capering dance. Ruth smiles, despite herself. This sort of firework seems harmless enough, rather beautiful, in fact. A few more like that and she can put the kettle on.

In fact, there are many many more. How can Bob’s little box hold so much? Fountains, stars, spinning wheels, shrieking rockets – Ruth watches them all from the back door. What is it, this desire to fill the night with noise and light? It goes back hundreds of years before poor old Guy Fawkes. Probably another attempt to stave off the horrors of the night and of winter, like cockerels crowing at dawn. And like the cockerel, there seems to be a certain element of macho posturing involved. Bob and Cathbad are determined not to come back indoors before every last touch paper has been lit. Ruth doesn’t know a single woman who really likes fireworks.

But, finally, they do come back in, smelling of gunpowder and the sea.

‘How about that?’ says Cathbad triumphantly.

‘Amazing,’ says Ruth. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘I’d like something stronger.’

‘I might have some brandy left over from last Christmas.’

‘Perfect.’

So they sit in front of the fire and drink brandy and talk about bonfires, paganism and Aboriginal smoke ceremonies. Ruth feels her eyelids drooping but she enjoys sitting there, listening to the ebb and flow of conversation. If only she didn’t keep thinking that Kate would wake up any minute. Surreptitiously, she looks at her watch. Eleven-thirty. Even at the most optimistic assessment Kate will be awake in six hours. Ruth stifles a yawn, feeling her jaw lengthening.

‘We should go,’ says Bob. ‘Ruth has to be up in the morning.’

‘Oh, Ruth’s a night owl,’ says Cathbad, pouring more brandy.

‘I used to be,’ says Ruth. ‘Now I’m a lark. A reluctant one, I grant you.’

‘Come on Cathbad.’ Bob stands up, turns to Ruth. ‘Thank you for a lovely evening.’

‘Thank you for the fireworks.’

Bob grins. ‘Well, the sun god needs his sacrifice. Isn’t that right, Cathbad?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Can I give you a lift?’ It hadn’t occurred to Ruth that Cathbad didn’t bring his car. He rarely drives. He has a car but it is the oldest vehicle that Ruth has ever seen. Erik used to speculate that it dated from the Bronze Age.

‘No, I’m fine. I like walking at night.’

‘I’ll give you a lift as far as Snettisham.’

‘OK.’

Ruth watches them go. The Saltmarsh is dark and silent, the Gods of night still reigning. As Bob’s tail lights disappear into the blackness, Ruth goes back inside and bolts her door.

The Necromancer is cantering along the all-weather track. He is going uphill, neck arched against the bit, powerful quarters pushing him onwards in a series of huge, bounding leaps. When he takes the turn at the top of the hill, his great round hooves strike sparks from the churned earth. He rises in the air, eyes red, mane and tail ablaze. He flies over the house. The Milky Way is his race track, the stars his hurdles. The asteroid belt writhes and twists beneath his feet. It is a snake that falls, hissing, to earth. It is a snake that is bigger than the sky, bigger than the earth. It is a snake that is small enough to whisper in his ear: ‘You are going to die.’

Danforth Smith wakes with a sudden lurch of the heart. He can hear his breathing reverberating around the empty room. His duvet is drenched with sweat. He reaches out for his water but touches a dead hand. He is lying beside the bishop’s corpse, the ghastly skeletal face turned to his. He tries to scream but his voice has been stolen. With horror, he watches as a snake emerges from the skeleton’s rib cage. The creature, green as death, weaves itself in
and out of the protruding bones. Smith knows that it has come for him, but with equal certainty he knows that he will not be able to move, not even to stretch out a hand as the dryly slithering body presses itself against his.

Will it come for him, the black coach with its six horses, the headless coachman? He hears Niamh’s voice, her sweet Irish voice, clear as a bell. ‘When it stops at your door, there’s no escape. Your time has come.’ The sky is alight with gold and silver stars, the black horse gallops across the heavens. Romilly appears briefly, hand-in-hand with a shadowy figure that he doesn’t recognise. Then Randolph, laughing and laughing. Then Tamsin, but her face is turned away. Then Caroline. She’s trying to tell him something but he can’t hear. Now Lester the cat appears, swollen to the size of a lion. Lester opens his mouth and a man’s voice says, ‘The great snake will have its revenge’.

The snake has reached his face. He can see its yellow eyes. In the background, Randolph laughs harder than ever. He wants to say that he’s sorry but he knows it’s too late.
The great snake will have its revenge
. He prays that it won’t hurt, that he’ll be able to see his horses galloping one last time.

The yellow eyes are level with his. The black horse waits for him outside.

Nelson is not normally much of a one for breakfast. He likes to leave early and grab a bacon butty on the way to work. Sometimes he even accompanies Clough for a traditional McDonald’s breakfast. What he doesn’t do is sit at his breakfast bar consuming the Full English and trying to make conversation with his wife. But today, 6 November, is his birthday and Michelle announced that she was going to ‘cook him a proper breakfast for once’. The trouble is that it’s only seven-thirty and neither of them feels much like eating. All Michelle has on her plate is a single piece of toast.

‘Have some of this bacon, love.’

Michelle shudders. ‘I couldn’t.’

‘It’s too much for me. You know I’m trying to lose weight.’

Michelle’s face falls. ‘I thought you’d like a proper breakfast. You always used to when we lived in Blackpool.’

Nelson and Michelle are both from Blackpool. They lived there when they were first married and Nelson has noticed that, in the last few months, Michelle has increasingly
been harking back to those days. It’s as if she wants to remember a time before Norfolk, before the children grew up, before Ruth.

‘I was young then. I didn’t have to watch my weight.’

‘You should come to the gym with me. You said you were going to.’

In the euphoria of reconciliation, Nelson and Michelle had agreed to do more things together. Nelson would go to the gym, Michelle would watch football matches, they would go out for meals, book mini breaks. So far Nelson has been to the gym once, they have had two unsatisfactory meals out and Michelle has leafed through a brochure full of details of spas and golf links but coy about prices. Nelson did try to get tickets when Blackpool played Norwich but neither of them had been too disappointed when he was unsuccessful. Michelle hates watching Blackpool; orange isn’t her colour.

‘I haven’t got time,’ he says now, gulping his tea. ‘Work’s a nightmare. We’re getting nowhere on the drugs case.’

‘I thought we’d have more time together now the girls have left,’ says Michelle. Both daughters are now at university. Laura reading marine biology at Plymouth, Rebecca doing media studies at Brighton. Nelson is rather in awe of higher education (he and Michelle both left school at sixteen) but he wishes his daughters would study subjects he understood. Still, Brighton’s a grand place. Perhaps they could have a mini break there.

‘We’ll go out for a meal tonight,’ he says, kissing Michelle on the cheek. ‘I’ll try to get off early.’

She smiles, rather forlornly. ‘Happy birthday Harry.’

Nelson leaves the house feeling depressed. He’s not wild about his birthday at the best of times and forty-three sounds worryingly old. His dad died at fifty. Bloody hell. Only seven more years. And Michelle had seemed so sad, so unlike the confident woman he had married. How can he make things better, short of obliterating the last two years? It’s ironical that now he thinks about Ruth more than ever. In the past, he was able to forget her when he was with Michelle but now she is there all the time, the invisible presence. The elephant in the room. He smiles thinly to himself. She’d love that description, he’s sure. He notes with irritation that there are two spent rocket cases in his garden. Why can’t people go to organised bonfire parties rather than trying to set themselves alight in their own gardens? It just makes more work for the emergency services. He opens the garage and starts up the Mercedes. He’ll make sure that he’s home early, take Michelle somewhere nice for dinner. But, before he has even left the cul-de-sac, he gets a message on his phone:
Danforth Smith found dead
.

Ruth has no one to cook her breakfast and right now she’s glad. Kate woke up twice in the night and then, inexplicably, slept in until eight. Ruth has got used to Kate being her alarm clock and so no longer sets the other kind. She rose in a panic, flinging on clothes and ignoring Kate (and Flint’s) demands to be fed. She usually drops her daughter off at Sandra’s at eight, and even then it’s a rush to be at the university for nine. She gets in early these days because she does so much more of her
work there – home no longer being a place where she can read for hours and forget the rest of the world. And today she has a lecture at ten. Bloody hell. No time for make-up, she’ll just have to scare her students with her naked face. Maybe they’ll think she’s wearing a Halloween mask.

Ruth slops cat food down for Flint, stuffs porridge into a resistant Kate and is just heading out to the car when her phone rings. The landline. She hesitates. Should she leave it? Surely if it was important they’d ring her mobile, but it might be her parents who regard mobile phones as the work of the devil (they are experts on the Prince of Darkness). Ruth goes back inside, still carrying Kate. Flint, delighted by this turn of events, climbs onto the table, purring loudly.

‘Doctor Galloway?’ Not her parents then.

‘Yes.’

‘This is Janet Meadows. I’m a local historian. Cathbad said that you wanted to talk to me.’

Not for the first time Ruth marvels at the efficiency of Cathbad’s information service. He left her house last night at nearly midnight yet has already had time to network. She looks at her watch. Nearly nine. Ruth hates being late, she can feel her facial muscles knotting into a tension headache.

‘That would be great. It’s just that I’m in a bit of a—’

‘What about today? Midday. At the cathedral refectory.’

‘I don’t think I can …’ Ruth tries to conjure up her timetable. She doesn’t think she has any lectures between eleven and three.

‘Cathbad said it was important.’

Why is Cathbad so keen for Ruth to meet this woman? It’s not important in any real sense but still … Ruth would like to talk to someone about Bishop Augustine before the press gets hold of the story. And lunch in the cathedral cafe sounds tempting. Weird but tempting.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you there.’

Nelson is surprised to find that it’s business as usual at the yard. He meets a string of horses coming through the gates and another set are being saddled up in the quadrangle.

‘Horses can’t wait, I’m afraid,’ says a leathery individual who identifies himself as Len Harris, Head Lad. ‘They need to be exercised. We’ve got runners today and the owners expect to see their horses run. So life goes on.’ He grimaces as if he realises how inappropriate this sounds. ‘Though we’re all devastated about the governor.’

Nelson can’t see any evidence of devastation in the faces of any of the riders but he has begun to realise that jockeys and stable lads don’t give much away. There is something watchful, almost withdrawn, about them. Perhaps it’s the strain of keeping their weight under ten stone. The only creature who seems at all upset is Lester the cat, who is meowing piteously in the office. When Nelson walks through the yard towards the house, Lester follows him.

This time, Nelson knocks at the front door, which is opened immediately by Randolph. He
does
look upset, Nelson acknowledges, his eyes are red and he seems almost
unhinged, running his hands through his hair and talking at random. ‘Detective … ah … good of you to come … we’re all … ah … well … you can imagine … yes.’

Nelson follows Randolph, still gibbering, into a large, light sitting room. There, looking rather lonely on a vast leather sofa, are two women. One he recognises as Caroline, the other is a slim woman with short, grey hair. The wife, presumably.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he begins formally. ‘Do you feel up to talking to me?’ He wishes Judy Johnson were here; he has asked her to join him as soon as possible.

‘Of course,’ says the woman, who introduces herself as Romilly Smith, Danforth’s wife. ‘It’s just been the most terrible shock. I’ve only just got back from the hospital.’

‘Was your husband taken ill in the night?’

‘It was so sudden,’ says Romilly. She’s about sixty, Nelson reckons, but still powerfully attractive. The sort of woman confident enough not to dye her hair. She’s distressed now, holding her handkerchief tightly in one hand, but still very much in control. ‘He seemed fine yesterday,’ she says. ‘He was full of the opening of the coffin, finding out that the skeleton was female. He was really intrigued.’

Randolph, who is pouring himself a whisky, lets out a sudden laugh.

‘Isn’t it a bit early?’ his mother indicates the drink.

‘I’ve had a shock, Ma.’

‘We’ve all had a shock,’ snaps Caroline. She, too, looks very shaken. Her dark hair is pulled up in a bun which makes her look older but rather beautiful.