A Room Full of Bones (16 page)

‘Psalms,’ says Ruth. ‘He will order his angels to guard you wherever you go.’

Janet looks surprised.

‘My parents are Born Again Christians,’ Ruth explains. ‘I know the Bible.’

‘Do you have any faith yourself?’

Ruth shakes her head. ‘There are people I respect who do believe but I don’t. What about you?’

Janet laughs. ‘I was brought up a Catholic. A Polish Catholic too, which is like being Catholic cubed. I’m a historian, I like evidence but … I don’t know. I think there are things that can’t be proved.’

Once Ruth would have disagreed violently with this, but after the last few years she isn’t so sure any more. About anything.

Janet stands up. ‘Let’s go and have a look at the old boy. Or girl, as the case may be.’

Judy arrives at the yard to find the gates open and Nelson nowhere in sight. She walks through the archway and comes face-to-face with a large chestnut horse whirling around on the end of a lead rope. Judy makes a wide arc round him. The stable girl is trying to get the horse into his
box but he’s having none of it, throwing up his head and clattering round in furious circles. As Judy watches, two lads come up to help subdue the horse. ‘Steady, steady …’ she hears one of them say. The girl is almost in tears. ‘I can’t …’ she’s saying. ‘Don’t be such a girl,’ says one of the men, seemingly without irony. The horse continues to plunge and snort.

Judy makes her way towards the office where an older man is on the phone. He covers the handset and looks up enquiringly.

‘Detective Sergeant Judy Johnson,’ says Judy.

‘Len Harris, Head Lad. Can you excuse me a moment? I’m just getting the declarations done.’

Judy nods and settles down to read the
Racing Post
. Unlike Nelson, she does not feel at all out of place in these surroundings. Her father is a bookie and she comes from a horse-loving Irish family. She used to ride as a child and once even had ambitions to be a jockey. What was it that stopped her, she wonders now. Was it discovering boys or getting boobs? Come to think of it, the two things probably happened at the same time.

‘Sorry about that,’ says Harris. ‘Everything’s a bit frantic at the moment.’

Judy looks up from the paper. ‘Jumping Jack hasn’t got a hope in the 2.10 at Newmarket.’

For a second, Len Harris looks angry, then he grins. ‘No, but we don’t want him handicapped too heavily for Cheltenham. Do him good to lose a few races.’

‘What will the owners say?’

Len Harris shrugs. ‘They’re in Dubai. They won’t know.’

Judy stands up. ‘I’m sorry about your boss.’

Harris’s face doesn’t show emotions very easily but, for a second, he looks genuinely bereft. ‘It’s hard. He was a one-off, the governor. Some people thought he was stuck-up, but around the yard he was one of the lads. And he loved the horses, he really understood them.’

‘What will happen with the yard now?’

Harris’s face darkens. ‘That’s up to the kids, I suppose. Caroline would probably like to take over but she hasn’t got the experience. Randolph’s a waste of space. Tamsin’s up in London. I suppose the yard’ll be sold. Owners are already taking their horses away.’

‘Already?’

‘Oh yes. There’s not much sentiment in racing, you know.’

Judy does know. She wonders what will happen to Len Harris if the business is sold. Plenty of racing stables in Norfolk but he looks a little old to go job hunting.

‘I’ve been asked to look at the CCTV footage,’ she says. ‘Is there anywhere I can do that?’

‘Yes. There’s a room in Caroline’s cottage. I’ve got the key.’ He fumbles through sets of keys hanging over the desk. Not a very secure system, thinks Judy.

As they go out into the yard, there is a tremendous banging and clattering from one of the boxes in the far corner. Harris sets off at a run. Judy follows him.

Inside the box, a bay horse is sprawled awkwardly on the ground, almost sitting, front legs straight, back legs collapsed. Its eyes are rolling and it’s clearly in agony. Two stable lads are struggling to get the horse on its feet, hauling on ropes, pushing at its rump. Len goes into the
box and joins in the effort, bracing his legs against the wall to push with his back.

‘What’s happened?’ asks Judy.

‘Cast himself,’ pants Len. ‘Probably colic.’

Judy can see that the animal’s stomach does look distended, a symptom of colic. The horse appears in terrible pain, almost bellowing, the white of his eyes yellow. She looks at the laminated card on the stable door. The horse is called Fancy, she reads, and he’s a four-year-old colt.

‘Shouldn’t you get the vet?’

‘He’s coming,’ says Len shortly. ‘Now, please, can you leave us to get on? The cottage is by the gates.’

Judy walks back through the yard with Fancy’s tormented neighing ringing in her ears. She feels very shaken. It’s part and parcel of looking after horses, she knows, but she can’t forget the look in the poor animal’s eyes. She hopes the vet gets there soon. She’d wanted to be a vet once too, before she’d realised that you needed three As at A-Level.

Judy had imagined Caroline very elegant, a grown-up version of the sort of girl who used to intimidate her in her pony club days. But the woman who greets her at the cottage door couldn’t be further from the twin-setted Home Counties lady of her imagination. To be frank, Caroline looks a mess; her dark hair is unbrushed and her eyes are red and swollen. She is wearing jeans and her top is on inside out. She hardly seems to take in Judy’s explanation about who she is and what she wants to do.

‘I thought you were my sister Tamsin,’ says Caroline. ‘She’s coming from London.’

‘I’m so sorry about your dad,’ says Judy.

Caroline’s eyes fill with tears. ‘It just doesn’t seem possible that he’s gone. I keep expecting him to walk in.’

‘It’s hard, I know,’ says Judy. Empathetic echoing, the books call it.

‘I just feel so terrible …’

It must be awful to lose your dad, thinks Judy, however old you are. She hopes that Caroline’s family gives her some support, but she doubts it somehow.

‘The tapes?’ she prompts gently.

‘Oh, yes …’ Caroline gives her a tremulous smile. She keeps looking towards the door, which is freaking Judy out slightly. ‘This way.’

The room by the front door is full of screens. There are five cameras in different parts of the yard: one by the main gates, one by the house gates, one in each quadrangle and one at the far gates, ‘where the original house once stood’ Caroline explains.

Judy settles down to look, gratefully accepting the offer of coffee. Look at last night’s footage, the boss said. She starts at eight p.m. It’s incredibly boring. Hours of night vision camera showing empty driveways. The only distraction is when Lester the cat appears, walking delicately along the footpath, sitting to wash himself in the empty courtyard. Occasionally a horse’s head looks out over one of the stable doors, but, for the most part, Lester is the only living thing to be seen. Judy’s eyes start to blur. She sips her cold coffee. Outside she hears a car draw up and voices talking. This must be the famous Tamsin. She hears a woman’s voice, very loud and upper-class. ‘For fuck’s
sake have some respect, Randolph.’ Happy families.

She fast-forwards to ten o’clock. At twenty past midnight, the camera by the house starts to get interesting. A car draws up and a man gets out. He’s carrying a case, so Judy assumes he’s the doctor. The door opens to let him in. A few minutes later, a sports car screeches to a halt by the house. A Porsche, thinks Judy. She likes cars as well as horses. Really, there’s a speed demon in there somewhere trying to get out. A man gets out of the sports car. She can’t see his face but she thinks it might be the son. What was his name? Randolph. The one Len Harris thinks is useless. The one who needs to have more respect. Ten minutes later and an ambulance is through the gates. Lights, running footsteps, a sense of urgency. A figure is carried out on a stretcher. A woman climbs into the ambulance and the man follows in the Porsche. Then the gates shut behind them and she’s back to Lester and the empty yard. Where was Caroline when all this was going on? she wonders. More footage of silent horse boxes. What is she looking for anyway? The boss didn’t seem convinced that there was anything suspicious about Danforth Smith’s death. Does he really believe that someone sneaked in and shot him a poisoned dart or something? He’s getting fanciful in his old age. She’ll tell him so when she gets back to the station. She won’t, of course.

More empty pathways. An owl hooting. Lester prowling through the long grass. A clock striking. Then — Oh my God. The main gates opening and a man appearing.

Judy peers closer. ‘Bloody hell,’ she says aloud. ‘I don’t believe it.’

Although Ruth has lived in Norfolk for thirteen years now, she has never before been to Norwich Cathedral. It’s more the sort of thing tourists do, and one way or another she isn’t really into churches, though she has a sneaking liking for vast Catholic edifices full of pictures of the end of the world. So, although she has often shopped in the lanes nearby, the evocatively named Tombland, and she has seen the cathedral’s spire pointing up through the rooftops like a medieval space rocket, this is the first time she has entered the building.

They walk through the cathedral close across manicured green lawns. Janet Meadows has absolutely no truck with any sign saying ‘Private’. At the main entrance, Janet points at two modern statues on either side of the door. One depicts a man, his finger on his lips in a rather threatening adjuration to silence, the other is a woman, head draped in a flowing scarf, holding a book.

‘Who are they?’ asks Ruth, peering up.

‘Saint Benedict and Mother Julian. Julian of Norwich. Another fourteenth-century holy woman.’

The name rings a faint bell with Ruth. ‘Who was she again?’

‘She was an anchoress.’

‘A what?’

‘A hermit if you like. She lived on her own in a cell attached to Saint Julian’s church. She spent her life praying and people used to come to her for advice. When she was about thirty she became very ill and had a series of visions of God. She wrote about them in a book called
Revelations of Divine Love
. It was the first book written in English by a woman.’

‘I don’t think that’s on my reading list somehow.’

‘There are some wonderful things in it.
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well
. Julian was incredibly optimistic given the times she lived in.’

‘Do you think she knew Bishop Augustine?’

‘I’ve been wondering about that. The dates just about coincide, though Prior Hugh doesn’t mention Julian much.’

‘Maybe Augustine pretended to be a man because her only other option was becoming an anchoress and shutting herself away from the world.’

‘Maybe,’ says Janet, looking up the statue. ‘But Julian’s name and her writing live on today. That’s more than can be said for most bishops.’

They enter through the visitor’s entrance, modern smoked glass fused onto ancient stone. Automatic doors glide open at their approach, and in the lobby interactive displays wink and hum. Ruth is surprised to see men busily erecting scaffolding outside.

‘They’re filming,’ explains Janet. ‘Lots of films are set in the cathedral.’

‘It’s all very commercial,’ says Ruth disapprovingly. She may be an atheist but she likes her churches traditional.

‘Wait till you get inside.’

Ruth ignores a sign asking for donations and follows Janet into the cathedral. At first she is simply struck by the height and space. The cathedral resembles the monastery it once was, long and narrow with a high gothic roof, stone pillars branching out like great trees. The air is cold and smells of candle wax. The stone floor is uneven, and with a slight jolt Ruth realises that she is walking over gravestones. ‘Dearly beloved … Here lies … Rector of this parish … Beloved father …’ A phrase from Ruth’s churchgoing days comes back to her: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

The high altar is at the back of the church, flanked by pillars, but around the outside there is a sort of pathway, like an arched cloister. Ruth follows Janet past tombs and statues, tiers of candles glittering with wax. Crusaders lie in stone splendour, gruesome crucifixes run with blood, the occasional piece of modern artwork looks small and rather sad. You need centuries to achieve gravitas.

‘Here’s Augustine,’ says Janet.

Bishop Augustine’s statue is in a shadowy corner, placed on a plinth so high that Ruth has to tilt her head back. It shows a figure in flowing robes with a mitre on its head, holding a crosier. It looks like hundreds of other such statues and reminds Ruth of visiting Rome with Shona – the cool of the churches after the heat of the
day, the myriad stone effigies of saints, their names and deeds forgotten.

‘Look at the feet,’ says Janet.

Ruth looks. In contrast to his formal clothes, the Bishop is barefoot and from under his big toe peeps the head of a snake.

‘It’s hardly a great serpent,’ says Ruth. ‘Looks like a grass snake.’

‘He’d subdued it,’ says Janet. ‘Evil has been defeated. He was a great saint.’

Ruth squints up at the statue’s face. It’s rather beautiful, certainly, but she supposes that all such images are idealised. Shoulder-length curly hair flows from under the ceremonial headgear.

‘He could be a woman,’ she says.

‘The hair doesn’t prove anything,’ says Janet. ‘Look at all that fuss about St John in
The Last Supper
, people saying that he must be a woman because he’s so beautiful with such long flowing hair. Da Vinci just liked painting beautiful men.’

Ruth thinks about
The Da Vinci Code
which, reluctantly, she rather enjoyed. Is there a clue here? Is there something she’s missing? Something about a coffin, a snake and a shoe. About an anchoress and a bishop, a man who could be in two places at once. She walks on, deep in thought. A minute or so later Janet calls her back. She is standing by what appears to be a side chapel, a small altar surrounded by a few pews. Stained-glass windows turn the stones blue and green and gold.