A Room Full Of Bones

offered to drive him as far as Snettisham.

‘I went to see Caroline,’ Cathbad is saying.

‘Who?’

‘Smith’s daughter. She’s a friend of mine.’

‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

‘No one asked. Caroline’s interested in archaeology. She’s even been on a few digs. She’s friends with Trace.’

‘Did Bob go with you?’

‘Bob? No. He dropped me off on the King’s Lynn road. I walked the rest of the way.’

‘But why? Surely it was a bit late for a social call.’

‘I wanted to talk to her about tomorrow’s conference. Are you still coming?’

‘Oh, the Elginist thing? I suppose so. If I can get a babysitter. So, is this Caroline one of the Elginists?’

‘She’s definitely interested. I thought she might like to go to the conference.’

‘But why go so late?’

Cathbad smiles. ‘I was following my instincts.’

They have reached the university. As soon as Ruth parks the car Cathbad jumps out, thanks Ruth, says he’ll see her tomorrow and disappears through the doors of the chemistry block. Ruth realises that she’s not going to get any more answers out of him. But as she gathers up her papers and her bag and heads towards Natural Sciences, her head is swirling with words and images.

Cathbad and Judy in her bed, the snow falling outside.

Lord Smith in the attic rooms at the museum, telling her about his great-grandfather’s collection. There’s some wonderful stuff. We’ve got some of it in the museum downstairs: snakeskins, dingo traps, branding irons…

Janet Meadows telling her about Bishop Augustine. Sometimes in the morning he was black and blue after having tussled with the devil all night.

The statue with its stone foot on a snake.

Nelson’s face when he first saw Kate. Standing in the maternity ward with Michelle beside him.

Fireworks exploding in the night sky.

Cathbad grinning at her across the table. You should point the bone at him, Bob.

Bob’s face, so different when he isn’t smiling. He’s dead now. The ancestors are powerful.

Ted chomping his pizza. Maybe the devil was about to have his revenge.

The skulls, the sightless eyes.

The room full of bones.

CHAPTER 17

Nelson is in a sauna. It’s not his preferred way of spending the time. Michelle loves all the gym stuff – exercise classes, Jacuzzi, aquarobics, the lot – but he finds it all rather embarrassing. He likes a swim (as a teenager he had a holiday job as a lifeguard) but that’s about it. He hates the recycled air, the recycled music, the little bottles of shampoo that smell like a Thai meal, the fluffy towels, the frothy coffee. He hates the women in their designer sportswear; they make him feel both lustful and disapproving, an uneasy combination. Why haven’t they got jobs to go to, for God’s sake? And the water’s too hot too. At the Derby Baths you used to be blue when you got out of the water, despite being indoors. That was proper swimming in a proper Olympic-sized pool with diving boards that seemed to reach up to the sky. It was salt water, he remembers, made your eyes sting and your skin turn crusty. He’d once challenged a fellow lifeguard to a race over fifty lengths. When they’d got out, their legs had buckled. Like he said, proper swimming.

But today’s visit is business not pleasure. Nelson has a meeting with Jimmy Olson, his informant. Nelson suspects Jimmy of choosing increasingly bizarre meeting places. Last time it was a cinema, the time before in a seedy arcade. It’s like going on a series of terrible dates. At least today’s venue, in a health club attached to a hotel in Cromer, is relatively upmarket. How had Jimmy, for whom the words low life might have been invented, come up with a place like this?

‘Mate of mine’s a member,’ he says, in answer to Nelson’s question.

Does Olson have mates? Nelson looks at the skinny figure opposite, physique miserably exposed in a pair of skimpy Speedos, and concedes that it must be possible, though it seems unlikely. Olson looks back at him out of eyes so pale blue that they look almost white. He sniffs noisily. Nelson hopes that he doesn’t catch Olson’s cold, these places must be a breeding ground for germs.

‘Have you got anything for me?’ he asks.

‘I told you,’ says Jimmy. ‘There hasn’t been a dicky bird on the ground.’

‘There must be something.’

A woman looks in through the glass door but decides against entering the sauna. Nelson doesn’t blame her. They must look an odd couple, the thin, red-eyed twenty-something and the tall, greying man in slightly too tight swimming trunks (they only had one size for sale in the lobby; cost a bomb too). They must look strange but they probably do look like a couple. Jesus wept, what a way to spend his birthday.

‘There’s a lot of charlie around. It’s good stuff, clean, but no one knows where it’s coming from.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Honest to God.’ Jimmy found God while serving time for dealing. He credits the Almighty for keeping him out of prison for the past three years but he would do better to thank Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, who has got him off a number of smaller charges in return for information. And now Nelson is impatient; he is sure Olson must know something. He is close to a number of dealers, including a deeply unpleasant character known as the Vicar. Yet here’s the market being flooded by cheap foreign cocaine and no one knows anything about it. Call themselves businessmen.

Jimmy gets up to put water on the hot coals. The room is filled with steam and Nelson catches a whiff of Jimmy’s body odour over the smell of pine and lemongrass. He starts to feel slightly sick.

‘Do you know a character called Neil Topham?’ asks Nelson.

He can’t see Jimmy very well but he’s sure that he’s looking shifty.

‘Why?’

‘I ask the questions.’

‘I think I may have heard the name. He’s a customer.’

‘Of yours?’

‘No! I swear to God, Inspector Nelson, I haven’t dealt for years. No, a customer of a friend of mine.’

‘Good customer?’

‘I think so. Why? What’s he done?’

‘He’s dead.’

Jimmy’s mouth opens in a silent O.

‘Would your dealer friend have anything to do with that? Has he been hanging round the Smith Museum?’

Jimmy starts violently then tries to conceal the fact by jumping to his feet.

‘Getting a bit hot in here,’ he says.

Nelson pushes Jimmy back down into his seat. He looms over the cringing younger man. The woman, who has reappeared in the window, beats a hasty retreat.

‘What do you know about the Smith Museum?’

‘Me? Nothing. What would a bloke like me know about a museum?’ Olson reminds Nelson of a character in a classic TV serial, years ago. Uriah something. Always banging on about being humble, but evil through and through.

‘Why did you jump like a cat on hot bricks when I mentioned it?’ The simile is all too apt. Nelson feels the sweat running down his back. He feels more nauseous than ever.