A Room Full of Bones: A Ruth Galloway Investigation

Galloway.
    ‘Have next of kin been informed?’
    ‘DS Johnson’s at the hospital now.’
    That’s good. Judy Johnson’s the best at that kind of thing. Get bad news from Clough and you might never recover.
    Nelson looks at his watch. It’s now three-thirty. ‘Did you manage to stop the vultures descending?’
    Henty coughs deprecatingly. ‘I rang Superintendent Whitcliffe and informed the local press.’
    ‘Whitcliffe isn’t coming is he?’
    ‘No. He said he’d let you deal.’
    I bet he did, thinks Nelson savagely.
    ‘Rocky turned away the rest of the public,’ says Henty. ‘Your friend was there. The warlock.’
    Nelson grunts, recognising the description without difficulty. ‘Cathbad? Of course he was there. Opening a coffin would be just his idea of fun.’
    ‘He said he wanted to talk to you,’ says Henty impassively. ‘Something about skulls and the unquiet dead.’
    Nelson grunts again. ‘Well it’ll have to wait. Can you show me the room where the body was found? Clough,wait here with Dr Galloway.’ And he stalks away without a backward glance.
    There is something strangely calm about the Local History Room. It’s a long, narrow space, slightly too high for its width, as if it was once part of a larger room. The floor, like the rest of the museum, is covered in black and white tiles and the walls are painted in cheerful primary colours. The window is open and the breeze blows the dusty curtains inwards. The coffin, with its straining sides, stands four-square in the centre of the room. There is a single glass case in a corner containing what looks like a stuffed grass snake. The only other objects on the floor are a guidebook and a single shoe, a brown suede slip-on, about a foot away from the coffin. Nelson stares at it dispassionately. Typical arty shoes. Real men – real Northern men – always wear lace-ups.
    ‘Think that’s his? Topham’s?’
    Henty shrugs. ‘I suppose so.’
    ‘Did you see him earlier? You delivered this thing didn’t you? You and Rocky.’
    ‘Yes. I saw him. Only a few hours ago.’
    ‘How did he seem?’
    ‘I don’t know. A bit excited. Wound up. I suppose he was looking forward to the big event.’
    Henty does good deadpan; Nelson approves. The man could be a Northerner.
    ‘No palpitations? Signs that he was going to drop down dead?’
    ‘No. He was youngish. Not overweight. Looked in reasonablehealth. A bit overwrought, as I say. Screamed at Rocky when he knocked something over.’
    ‘We all scream at Rocky. That doesn’t mean anything.’ Nelson looks around the room. ‘You haven’t touched anything in here.’ It’s a statement more than a question.
    ‘No, sir. Scene-of-the-crime boys are on their way.’
    Quite right. That was the way modern policing worked. Don’t touch anything until the SOCO team get there with their space-age suits and brushes and little plastic boxes. In the old days, when Nelson was a young PC in Blackpool, they’d be in there right away, moving the body, getting their fingerprints over everything. Now Nelson rotates slowly on the spot, taking in the crime scene at a distance. If it
is
a crime scene.
    There are a few streaks on the floor which might be blood and the tiles, though obviously recently swept, are still grubby in places. That’s good. The forensic boys love a bit of dirt, perfect for catching prints, DNA, all the stuff they like. The curtains flap more wildly. The wind is getting up.
    Nelson turns to Henty. ‘Was the window open when you got here?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Strange to have an open window in October. Nelson walks over to it and looks out. They are on the ground floor and it would be fairly easy to get in that way. Outside is the car park, a few dustbins and a charity recycling box. No handy soil for footprints but someone in the adjoining offices may have seen something. He’ll have to send Rocky house-to-house.
    Nelson walks slowly round the room. He realises that the patterns on the walls are in fact a series of pictures. Norfolk Through The Ages. One scene in particular catches his eye: a circle of wooden posts on a beach, a crudely drawn figure in a white robe in the centre of the circle, arms stretched out like a scarecrow, an improbably yellow sun shining overhead. Nelson goes closer. ‘Bronze Age wooden henge on Saltmarsh Beach,’ he reads, ‘discovered in 1997 by Professor Erik Anderssen of the University of Oslo.’ And by Ruth Galloway, he thinks. He thinks also of the Saltmarsh,