A Room Full of Bones: A Ruth Galloway Investigation

couple of days surfing with some pals,’ he says. ‘Hope we won’t disturb you.’
    He has a very posh accent, far posher than his parents, but he seems friendly enough. Who on earth would go surfing in November? A public schoolboy called Cameron, that’s who.
    ‘No problem,’ she says. ‘Make as much noise as you like. You won’t disturb me.’
    ‘Dada,’ says Kate.
    Inside, she makes Kate some supper (though she isn’t very hungry after the roast potatoes) and gives her a bath. Sitting in her cot, fluffy-haired, clutching her bottle, Kate looks angelic, the sort of baby who is going to sleep for eight hours without a murmur. What will Kate think if Max starts visiting regularly? She seems to like him but will she resent him taking up Ruth’s time? What if Max and Ruth break up and Kate misses him terribly? What if Claudia savages Flint or vice versa? Stop it, she tells herself. The relationship hasn’t started yet and you’reworrying about it ending. From next door she can hear the soothing thump of rock music.
    Maybe it’s
Guns ’n’ Roses
or Ruth’s minor key version of
Wheels on the Bus
but Kate is soon fast asleep. Ruth tiptoes out of the room. Six o’clock, just time to catch the end of
Time Team
. Maybe she can have a glass of wine too. She realises that she is smiling.
    The phone rings. Ruth answers, still smiling.
    ‘Ruth. It’s Judy. It’s about the boss. About Nelson.’
    She isn’t sure when she stopped smiling. She just knows she isn’t smiling now.
    ‘What about him?’
    ‘He’s ill. In hospital. It looks pretty serious. I thought you’d want to know.’
    Why, Ruth wonders. Why did Judy think she’d want to know? As far as Judy knows, Ruth and Nelson are just acquaintances, professional colleagues who’ve worked together on a couple of cases. Why this urgent phone call on a Sunday night? But, of course, she does want to know.
    ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Her voice comes out in a whisper.
    ‘No one really knows. Cloughie’s just spoken to Michelle. They think it could be a virus, one of those that’s resistant to antibiotics.’
    ‘Is he—’ Ruth stops, afraid to go on. Judy’s voice is kind, professionally concerned.
    ‘He’s in a coma but his internal organs seem to be shutting down. It doesn’t look good. Michelle and the girls are with him.’
    Michelle and the girls. From a long way off, Ruth hears her voice saying, ‘Thanks for telling me Judy. I’ve got to go now. Bye.’
    Ruth puts the phone down and realises that she is shaking. In all her worst fears, in all her most fevered ‘what ifs’, she has never imagined this. She had thought that Michelle and Nelson might move away, even that Nelson might be killed in the line of duty, never that he would succumb to something as prosaic as a virus. It’s like Hercules dying of a common cold. It just can’t happen. She sits down, stands up again, switches on the TV, switches it off again. What can she do? She can’t exactly ring Michelle or turn up at the hospital. She tries to remember the last thing that she said to Nelson. It was at the museum, wasn’t it? Nelson had just been winding up their interview when Danforth Smith had barged in. ‘We’ve finished, haven’t we?’ she’d said to Nelson. And he’d answered, ‘Yes. We’ve finished.’ So is that it? Finished. Over. Can there really be a world without Nelson? She thinks of her daughter sleeping upstairs. Now Kate may never have a chance to get to know her father. Ruth realises that she is crying.
    The phone rings and she snatches it up. She steels herself to hear Judy saying, compassionately, ‘It’s over, he’s gone’ or any of the hundreds of platitudinous things people say to avoid telling you that someone is dead. But it’s Shona. Ruth feels quite weak with relief.
    ‘Hi Ruth! What are you doing?’
    ‘Nothing much. Watching TV.’ Not for anything in the world is she going to tell Shona about Nelson.
    ‘Cool. Can I come over? Phil’s got the flu and he’s being such a man about it. I’m so bored. I haven’t been out of the house all day. It’s hell being pregnant.’
    But to Ruth now it seems like heaven. When she’d been pregnant, Nelson had been alive and well and Kate had been safe, safe inside Ruth.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she hears herself saying, ‘but I’ve got a lot of work to do.’
    ‘OK. Not to worry.’ Shona sounds disappointed, then her voice picks up again. ‘Did you go to that Aborigine conference? Phil