A Room Full of Bones: A Ruth Galloway Investigation

Len Harris was apprehended at King’s Lynn airport, where he kept a private plane. He must have come back to the yard, seen the police cars and made a run for it. He is in the process of singing to the rooftops. Tamsin, on the other hand, drove calmly back to London, where she attempted to resume her life as a blameless solicitor and mother of two. ‘You should have seen the house,’ one of the London PCs tells Judy over the phone. ‘It was like something out of a magazine, everything perfect, a Range Rover and a BMW in the garage, two kids at private school. Poor little sods. I felt for them, setting off for school in their boaters while their mum was on her way to prison.’
    Was this why Tamsin had masterminded the drugs smuggling operation, just so that she could send her children to private schools wearing boaters? It doesn’t seem enough to Judy. Tamsin was born into a wealthy family; she had obviously worked hard and established herself in her career. Her husband is a successful banker. (Does he know about it, Judy wonders, or does he think that the Range Rover and the BMW came from the Top Gear fairy?) Surely Tamsin had enough of everything without turning to crime? Maybe the more you have, the more you want. Maybe it was the adventure that appealed to her, the idea of carrying on a complicated illegal operation under the noses of her father and sister. Or maybe she just resented all the time spent on the horses. Because Tamsin, according to Caroline, was the one who really couldn’t stand horses. Randolph had been an amateur jockey, Caroline toiled away in the yard for little reward or appreciation but Tamsin really hated the animals.
    Tamsin had got as far as possible from the world of mucking out, dawn rides and endless backbreaking work, only to be drawn back in at the suggestion of Len Harris, a man with vast experience, both of horseflesh and drugs. But Harris says that it was all Tamsin, right down to the idea of using the horses themselves to smuggle the drugs. ‘She got a real kick out of that.’ Harris claims that Tamsin forced him to comply, he was only obeying orders. Judy, when she has heard more about the actual process involved, feels absolutely no sympathy for Harris. Sometimes the drugs were fed into the horses’ stomachs through a tube (hence the condom in the manure) butmore often they were inserted vaginally into mares and sutured to keep them in place. Apparently stud mares routinely have vulval sutures so, even if the procedure had been discovered, it wouldn’t have seemed unduly suspicious. The whole thing makes Judy feel sick. Tamsin is currently denying everything.
    Romilly Smith, who arrived home on Tuesday morning to find her driveway full of police cars, was even more interesting. She didn’t seem in the least surprised to find out that her eldest daughter had been drug smuggling or that she and her accomplice had tried to murder two members of the police.
    ‘Poor Tammy,’ she had said, sinking into a chair. ‘I never gave her enough attention.’
    ‘Rubbish,’ said Randolph, who was still charging around like Ben Hur. ‘She was just greedy. And she wanted to pull a fast one over us. Show how stupid we are.’
    What Judy thought strangest of all was that no one enquired where Romilly had been all night. She was wearing jeans and a black jumper and looked, to Judy’s critical eye, rather dishevelled. Where had she been all night? With a boyfriend? Caroline had apparently been in the Newmarket Arms. When Tamsin hadn’t turned up she’d been unexpectedly joined by Trace, probably still seething at Clough’s desertion. Judy thought of the shabby little pub, lights blazing, music blaring, a beacon in the dark woods. She couldn’t quite imagine Caroline and Trace at the microphone, belting out
I Will Survive
. Well, maybe she could. Randolph had been at a ‘private’ club in King’s Lynn. Witnesses? Plenty, apparently.
    When Judy got back to the station, she found, to her slight annoyance, that Operation Octopus had not been the only excitement of the night. Head office received a call at one o’clock in the morning, informing them that a suspicious device had been sent to the University of North Norfolk. A special squad had been dispatched and had discovered not a bomb but a poisonous snake in a jiffy bag. Who would send a snake to a university (apparently it was addressed to someone in the science department)? Animal rights nutters, says a laconic Tom Henty,