The Locked Room (Ruth Galloway #14)(8)

‘Is it?’ Leah must live somewhere, Nelson supposes, but he’s never really thought about where.

‘I think my mum knew her. The woman who committed suicide.’

‘Samantha Wilson?’

‘Yes. Mum was very shocked when she heard.’

‘Was she?’ Nelson is listening now.

‘Yes,’ says Leah, heading towards the door. ‘But you never know when people are desperate, do you?’

And she is gone, leaving the door swinging gently behind her.



Ruth is looking into a grave. Council workers digging up a street in the centre of Norwich have found what looks to be a human skull. Ruth is not too surprised by this. The road is in Tombland, the ancient area around the cathedral, and human skeletons have been found here before. She has decided to bring some of her students so that they can watch the excavation at first hand. They stand in a nervous and expectant group by the ‘Road Closed’ sign while Ruth and Ted Cross from the field archaeology team consult the foreman.

‘I knew it was human at once,’ he says, ‘so we stopped work immediately.’

‘Thank you,’ says Ruth. ‘We’ll excavate as quickly as we can.’ She knows that the delay will be costly and inconvenient for the council.

‘Do you think it’s been here a long time?’ asks the foreman, whose name is Cezary. The yellowing skull is clearly visible in the earth, lying beside a broken pipe. The skull itself looks undamaged and Ruth feels an excavator’s thrill.

‘Probably,’ said Ruth. ‘There was a medieval cemetery nearby.’

‘Is that why it’s called Tombland?’ asks Cezary.

‘Tombland comes from a Danish word meaning empty space,’ says Ruth. ‘I know that’s disappointing.’

‘Plenty of tombs here though,’ says Ted. ‘We’ve found skeletons before, haven’t we, Ruth?’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth. ‘The graveyard of St George’s once covered this whole area. There are rumours that there’s a plague pit here too, although nothing has ever been discovered.’

‘Plague?’ says Cezary, rather nervously.

‘There were several outbreaks of the plague in Norwich in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So many people died that there wasn’t room in the graveyards,’ says Ruth. ‘It’s thought that the bodies were probably thrown into pits. Mass graves.’

‘The outcast dead,’ says Ted. There’s a service of this name every year, to remember the bodies buried in unmarked graves. Ruth always tries to attend, despite not believing in an afterlife.

Ted climbs into the trench and Ruth beckons her students nearer.

‘Human bones must always be treated with great care and respect,’ she says, as Ted brushes away the soil from the skull. ‘Every bone and fragment must be preserved. When I was excavating war graves in Bosnia, my mentor used to say that if you leave a bone uncharted, then you are an accessory to the crime.’

The students, who are only in their second term, look at each other nervously.

Ted only needs to work for a few more minutes before it becomes clear that an entire skeleton is present. Cezary goes to tell his workforce to go home for the day.

‘See the way the body is laid out,’ Ruth tells her students. ‘This suggests a formal burial. The corpse may have been shrouded. There may even have been a coffin.’

‘What’s happened to the coffin?’ says someone. It’s an obvious question but Ruth is glad it’s been asked.

‘It would have rotted away,’ she says.

Erik, Ruth’s mentor at university, used to say, ‘Wood returns to earth, only bones and stone remain.’

Ruth takes a measuring rod and lays it next to the emerging bones.

‘It’s important to photograph the bones in situ next to a suitable scale,’ she says, in lecture mode. ‘We need to take samples from the context – the surrounding soil – too. That will help with dating.’

‘How do you know it isn’t recent?’ says someone, a man with a full-face beard. Ruth doesn’t do much teaching now that she’s head of department, and the students are starting to look very much alike.

‘Very recent burials are comparatively easy to spot,’ says Ruth. ‘You can tell by the grave cut, for one thing. But it can be hard to differentiate between bones that are fifty years old and those that are a thousand years old. That’s why we need carbon-14 testing. But, in this case, it’s an established medieval site so I think we’re looking at skeletal matter from that era. I could be wrong, of course.’

No one thinks this is likely.



By three o’clock, the skeleton has been excavated. It’s not very tall and, from the pelvic bones, Ruth thinks that it is female. She allowed the students to help with the final stages and they are in a state of high excitement as they load the numbered paper bags into a box marked ‘Archaeology Lab’. Ruth is in a more sombre mood. She always feels that she should handle the bones as if the dead person’s relatives are watching her and that’s no different if they died ten years ago or in the fourteenth century. Besides, her back is aching.

Ruth walks back to the car park with Ted. It’s been a grey day and is already getting dark. Lights shine in the cathedral close and the church itself looms above them, birds circling the tower and steeple. An omen of something, Cathbad would say.