A Room Full of Bones: A Ruth Galloway Investigation

it.
    ‘The police have finished with the room now. There’s nothing to see.’ But he doesn’t open the door.
    At the far end of the gallery is the curator’s office, and at the opposite end a little door that Ruth hadn’t noticed before. Smith opens it now. ‘The storerooms are down here.’
    The staircase leads down into a brick-lined cellar. Ruth has never liked underground spaces and now, after the events of two years ago, finds them almost unbearable. As she descends the stairs, the air seems to get thicker and hotter. Heating pipes snake overhead making a low humming noise. She takes a deep breath and tries to feel professional. This is a museum, not a dungeon. At the foot of the stairs, Danforth Smith stops to fumble for a key. Ruth only just avoids crashing into his tweed back.
    ‘Ah, here it is.’
    In front of them is a plasterboard wall with two doors. Danforth is unlocking the left-hand door and reaching for a light switch. Rather reluctantly, Ruth follows him.
    A flickering fluorescent light illuminates a narrow room with brick walls and cement floor. The walls are curved, a half-circle bisected by the plasterboard wall. The straight side of the room is lined with metal shelves and the shelves are stacked with cardboard boxes. Each box is scrawled with a single word. Bones.
    The room is full of bones.
    Ruth is an expert on bones; her students even once presented her with a life-size cardboard cutout of Bones from
Star Trek
. She has excavated mass graves, dug up prehistoric bodies, but she has never seen anything like this. Boxes of bones just piled up together in a cellar. No names, no dates, just ‘bones’. Are they all human? shewonders. There must be fifty, maybe sixty, boxes here.
    She suddenly realises that Danforth is speaking to her and, incredibly, there is pride in his voice.
    ‘My great-grandfather was a real character. Travelled to Australia in the 1800s, the pioneer days. He was after gold. Did you know that gold was discovered in Australia in the 1850s? My great-grandpa started a gold mine in New South Wales. Had a few clashes with the old Abos over the land, but he must have been a fierce old codger because he stuck to it and made a mint. Came back to England in about 1870 but he was never the same again, apparently. My pa remembered him as quite dotty. Anyhow, he brought his collection back with him, God knows how. There’s some wonderful stuff. We’ve got some of it in the museum downstairs: snakeskins, dingo traps, branding irons, convict-made bricks.’
    Great-grandpa must be Lord Percival Smith, adventurer and taxidermist, thinks Ruth. Clearly his collecting extended beyond slaughtering and stuffing local wildlife. She was right when she thought he looked an ugly customer.
    ‘Where do the bones come from?’ asks Ruth. She is starting to feel seriously uncomfortable. There isn’t much room to stand in the space between the boxes and Danforth Smith seems to be looming over her. He has to duck his head under the curved ceiling. She can see the sweat on his forehead. It’s very hot and there’s a faint smell of gas in the air.
    ‘They’re Aboriginal bones. And the skulls too. I think the old man had the idea that the Abos were put togetherdifferently from us, that they were linked to cave men or some such. So he started collecting bones. There must be hundreds here.’
    Ruth shakes her head. As an expert in prehistory she detests the term ‘cave men’, but that almost fades into the background compared with the mind-boggling idea of a man who collected human bones for fun and a great-grandson who seems almost proud of the fact.
    ‘Where did he get the bones?’ she asks faintly.
    ‘From all over. Some of them come from one of the islands. Those are the ones that these Elginist nutters are on about. My great-granddad had a share in a salt mine on one of the islands.’
    The word ‘island’ rings a faint bell. Does salt come from mines, wonders Ruth irrelevantly. It sounds like something from
Alice in Wonderland
, one of Cathbad’s favourite books. She remembers how, the first time she visited the museum, she had felt like Alice, plunged into an underground world, faced with arbitrary but somehow sinister choices. The little door or the big one. Eat me. Drink me. Aloud, she asks, ‘But where did they come from? I mean, did he just dig them up or …’ Or what, she thinks.
    ‘Oh I think so,’ says Danforth airily. ‘The Aboriginals just dumped their dead bodies