Elly Griffiths - A Room Full Of Bones

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.

It seems impossible that six children can make this much noise. Ruth’s little house seems to be swelling with sound, its sides straining under the pressure of chocolate fingers, party games and an exuberant rendering of ‘Happy Birthday Dear Katie’. This last reminds Ruth uncomfortably of Nelson, who persists in calling her Katie. Why can’t people just accept that Ruth knows her own daughter’s name, even if it does scan better with an ‘ie’ on the end?

Kate’s little friends include two toddlers, both clients of Sandra’s, who ignore each other and run round bursting balloons, and two older children belonging to a colleague of Ruth’s. The older kids, who are called Daisy and Ben, try to organise the babies but end up playing pass-the-parcel solemnly by themselves. Ben wins a rag doll and hands it silently to his mother.