A Room Full of Bones: A Ruth Galloway Investigation

bed. Kate is awake too, looking at the light reflected on the ceiling. Her dark eyes are wide open and she’s smiling.
    ‘Good morning darling,’ whispers Ruth.
    Kate’s smile turns into a full-on beam. ‘Mum,’ she says.
    Ruth picks up Kate and carries her downstairs. In the sitting room she is startled by a large furry shape hurtling towards her. Christ, she’d forgotten the dog. Claudia is friendly but she is anxious to tell Ruth that she’s hungry. Ruth heats up a bottle for Kate and pours milk into instant porridge. Then she puts on the kettle and gives Claudiaa piece of bread. It disappears in a second and Claudia looks at her expectantly. Feeling treacherous, she puts some cat food in a bowl and pushes it towards Claudia. There’s no sign of Flint.
    It’s eight o’clock. Still early for normal people but afternoon as far as Kate is concerned. Ruth switches on the radio and is surprised to hear organ music blasting out. Of course, it’s Sunday. She turns off the radio and puts bread in the toaster. Claudia is sitting hopefully under Kate’s high chair. Kate drops porridge onto her head.
    It takes two cups of tea before Ruth can think about last night. After Kate had fallen asleep in Max’s arms, he had put her into her cot and opened his arms to Ruth. As simple as that. In the end, she hadn’t thought about it at all. Like sleepwalkers they had moved into the spare room and made love on the narrow bed. Not one word was spoken. The whole thing had seemed natural and right, as if they really had been the married couple who had entered the house with their baby only hours before. Very different from Ruth’s last sexual encounter with Nelson, when they had come together through fear and a mutual, desperate longing. In fact, the intensity of emotion had been almost unbearable. But some time during last night Ruth had vowed never to think about Nelson again.
    She takes her tea and toast to the table by the window. Flint comes in and sits in a patch of sunlight, washing himself with his leg in the air. Kate plays with one of her birthday presents, a miniature garden complete with plastic flowers and vegetables that must be slotted into the correctly shaped holes. Kate is quite good at this gamethough she sometimes loses patience altogether and throws the plastic flowers around the room. Where does she get this temper from? Ruth is a simmerer, slow to anger and slow to forget. She bets that Nelson had tantrums as a child. In fact he probably has them now, yelling at his team, driving off in a cloud of exhaust smoke. ‘Just fucking do it,’ she heard him say once to Clough. Not the most tactful management style in the world. But then Ruth has never had to manage anyone but herself. And she’s thinking about Nelson again.
    It’s a beautiful crisp winter morning. The sky is a clear pale blue, the sea, glimpsed over the miles of white grass, is a darker blue, almost grey. Occasionally a cloud of birds will rise up out of the reeds, wheeling and turning in the vast sky. Some birds will spend the winter on the mud flats, others are preparing for the long journey south. A few days ago Ruth saw a peregrine, swooping down on some unsuspecting prey in the long grass. Is that like Max, she wonders now, swooping down on her when she is alone and vulnerable? It hadn’t felt like that but what does she know? She doesn’t exactly have a good track record in romance.
    ‘Morning.’ Max stands in the doorway, looking less like a bird of prey than a large dog, a wolfhound maybe, hair dishevelled, rangy body at ease with itself. Claudia goes mad with delight, rushing round the room for something to bring him and coming up with one of Ruth’s bras, tugged out of the laundry basket. Max looks at Ruth and they both laugh. Kate, carefully fitting vegetables into holes, laughs too.
    ‘Tea?’ says Ruth.
    It isn’t going to be so difficult after all.
    Whitcliffe calls the team together and they sit in the briefing room, sleepy and resentful at being summoned on a Sunday morning. Whitcliffe tells them about Nelson; he pitches it just right, sympathetic yet businesslike. Judy stands behind him, feeling horribly self-conscious. She can see the faces of her colleagues as they take in the news. Clough looks stunned; he opens his mouth to speak and then shuts it again, a half-eaten chocolate bar falls to the floor. Tanya looks concerned, ‘Can we send flowers or something?’ Tom Henty is stolid, unmoveable, though Judy