A Room Full of Bones: A Ruth Galloway Investigation

settle for
E lucevan le stelle
from
Tosca
for the cremation. The church organist can be relied upon to muddle through
Sheep May Safely Graze
for the church service.
    ‘When will we know if the police want a post-mortem?’ Tamsin asks, when the undertaker has bowed himself out.
    ‘I don’t know,’ says Romilly. ‘Detective Inspector Nelson was here this morning but the hospital don’t think Dan’s death was suspicious. Heart attack, they said. They’ve issued an interim death certificate.’
    ‘I know.’ Tamsin has already been to the hospital. She declined the invitation to view her father’s body – ‘I’d rather remember him alive’ – though Caroline has already paid a tearful visit. Now Tamsin is keen to get on with the business of burying her father – tastefully, of course.
    ‘Bit of a cheek, that policeman coming round,’ she says. ‘Can we make a complaint?’
    ‘For goodness sake, Tammy, he was only doing his job.’
    ‘And there was a bloody policewoman in Caroline’s house going through the CCTV footage. I told her she shouldn’t have let her in but Caro even made her a cup of bloody coffee. Typical.’
    ‘Caro’s very upset,’ says Romilly mildly.
    ‘Not so upset that she doesn’t want to go to some barmy Aboriginal thing tomorrow,’ says Tamsin, straightening her blameless little black skirt. ‘I told her it was disrespectful.’
    ‘Did you?’ says Romilly. ‘I thought it might make a nice change for her.’
    Caroline puts down the phone, having told some faceless Russian oligarch that his horses will continue to be looked after. But who will train them? Len has a licence but he’s only a few years off retirement. She knows that she would be useless. She rides out, but only on the more docile horses. Even as a child she was a bit of a wimp, dawdling along on her pony while all the other children galloped away over the horizon. She was always grateful that their mother refused to let them hunt, smugly adorning her riding helmet with anti-hunt stickers. ‘It’s cruel,’ she would say, but really the thought of galloping hell-for-leather over the countryside scared her to death. She’d only learnt to ride to please her father, just as she’d joined Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to please her mother.
    Caroline used to be close to her father. ‘A real Daddy’s girl,’ her mother used to say, in a tone comprising affection and derision in equal measure. Caroline always felt that she irritated her mother; she was too slow, too clumsy, not clever enough. Romilly used to play these word games, making up puns, poems, even songs, and Caroline remembers Randolph and Tamsin lounging around the kitchen table, coming up with outrageous rhymes, silly metaphors, clever little limericks. She could never think of anything fast enough and, besides, she didn’t like making fun of people. ‘Oh lighten up, Caro,’ her mum used to say. But the world seemed a dark place to Caroline even then.
    But Dad had understood. He hadn’t minded that shecouldn’t write a haiku about Margaret Thatcher. He had been happy for her to trail around the yard after him, helping to groom the horses and polish tack. Even now, the smell of saddle soap brings back happy memories. When had it started to change? Probably when she came back from travelling, having seen the world through such different eyes. Dad had supported her when she had decided not to go to university. ‘I’m sure you could get in somewhere not very competitive,’ her mother had said kindly, looking at Caroline’s less than impressive A Level results. But she hadn’t wanted to go on studying. She knew she wasn’t really stupid; it was just that sometimes it seemed to take her a long time to absorb new ideas. That was the trouble at school. By the time that Caroline had got her head round a concept, the class had moved on to something else. Anyway, at eighteen she’d had enough of trying to understand things. Now she was just going to experience them.
    And she had. She has visited King’s Canyon, the Lost City, the Garden of Eden. She has walked in the Valley of the Winds. She has seen the sun rise over Uluru and set over the Southern Ocean. She had penetrated the red heart of Australia and walked with the dead in the Dreaming. But back home everyone still seemed to treat her like the slightly stupid little sister. She had been full of ideas about how to revolutionise the yard. She’d created a website and organised an