Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Amanda Knight,’ Slider said. ‘Laburnum Avenue.’

  They could see the names filtering, the machinery whirring, the index cards coming up. ‘What’s your interest?’ Kellington asked warily.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’d sooner not say until afterwards. I’d like your recollections of the case without … let’s say, contamination. The case just as it presented itself to you.’

  Kellington regarded him sharply for a moment, and then said, ‘All right. I suppose you’ve got your reasons.’ He settled himself more deeply into his chair, folding his hands across his stomach and interlinking the fingers, and stared into the garden with a little frown of concentration. ‘Amanda Jane Knight, age fourteen. Disappeared from her back garden one Saturday afternoon in August. Middle of the school holidays – would be about the eighteenth, nineteenth?’

  ‘Eighteenth,’ Atherton supplied. The frown deepened slightly and Slider gave him a quelling look.

  ‘She was playing in the garden on her own. Her dad was out at work – he was a plumber. Self-employed. Saturday’s a busy day for him. Mum was home. She worked Monday to Friday. Laundromat. She was in the sitting room working on the sewing machine. She made a lot of their clothes. She goes into the kitchen about three o’clock to put the kettle on, looks out the window and Amanda’s not there. There’s the rug she’d been sitting on, but no sign of the kid.’

  ‘She couldn’t see her from where she was working?’

  ‘Nah, the sitting room’s at the front.’

  ‘So she hadn’t seen her since …?’

  ‘They had lunch around half-twelve, Mum started sewing about one. So she’d had a long start.’

  ‘And it got longer,’ Slider said. ‘It seems the alarm wasn’t raised until after eleven that night.’

  Kellington frowned and sniffed. ‘Dad come home about half-five for his tea, by which time Mum’s anxious. It’s not like Amanda to wander off without saying. Dad tells Mum to wait. He’s more angry than frightened – says, I’ll give that young lady what for when she turns up, worrying her mother like that. He’s got another job to go to, so he goes out again. Comes home around half-ten. Amanda’s still not tipped up, so after a bit of argy-bargy, they call the police.’

  ‘But no one came out?’ Slider said neutrally.

  Kellington was unembarrassed. ‘There wasn’t the same atmosphere then about missing teenagers. You know what they’re like – go out with a friend, stay overnight, never think of ringing their parents. Turn up the next day full of attitude. Call handler told ’em to ring round friends and relations, report again in the morning if she wasn’t back. Which they did.’

  ‘And you attended?’ Slider asked. ‘On the Sunday?’

  ‘Duty sergeant went round first, and once he’d had a talk with them, he decided it was serious and rung me. Monday, the machine goes into gear.’ Kellington shrugged. ‘The usual routine. But there was never any trace of her.’

  ‘No sightings at all?’ Atherton put in.

  Kellington looked at him. ‘O’ course there was sightings, everywhere from Land’s End to John O’ Groats,’ he said sourly. ‘Once it goes public, everyone’s a clever clogs. But they was all rubbish. No one saw her leave the house, or walk down the street.’

  His daughter came in with tea on a tray, and there was a little bustle as it was distributed, questions were posed about sugar and milk, biscuits were offered, little tables placed. Then she went away to a sofa and took up some knitting, effacing herself and apparently uninterested in their conversation – though the room was too small for her not to have heard it.

  Kellington sipped his tea, watching the blue tits flicking from the creeper over the house wall to the feeder and back. Slider guessed he needed courting.

  ‘Please go on. You said no one saw her in the street?’

  ‘Not Laburnum or any other street nearby. We assumed she’d gone out the garden of her own accord. Gone to visit a friend or buy a comic or something. But she’d not been in any of the local shops. We canvassed the neighbours. Knocked on doors for streets around. The lib’ry, swimming pool, rec centre.’ He took out his handkerchief. ‘Never got a tickle. A whole lot o’ bloody nothing.’ He wiped his eyes again. The slow trickle of infirmity made it look as though he was weeping for the lost child. Slider hoped somebody had. ‘O’ course, there was no CCTV in those days. No mobile phones, either,’ he added. ‘And she didn’t have any friends.’

  ‘No friends?’ Slider queried.

  ‘Not that she visited, or visited her. Apparently she was a loner. Anyway, you know how it is with these cases. You don’t find ’em in the first forty-eight hours, you’re not going to. Either they’ve run away to London to go on the streets – though she didn’t seem like the type, but you can’t always tell – or they’ve been snatched. And if they’ve been snatched, you’re not going to find ’em anyway. Not alive.’

  ‘Did you suspect anyone at any time?’ Slider asked.

  ‘We thought she’d run away,’ said Kellington, ‘but naturally we had a look at the father, just in case. He’s out and about in his van, unaccountable. We looked into the jobs he was supposed to be at that day, and they looked pukka, but o’ course the timings weren’t exact, there was a lot of leeway. And there was a gap, when he was supposedly having his lunch in the van. The wife made him sandwiches and a flask, and he sat in his van with the Daily Mail from about quarter past one to about two. But there’s nobody to confirm it or otherwise. He could’ve come back. Trying to get confirmed sightings of a white van in a London street is like …’ He failed with a simile.

  ‘Quite,’ said Slider helpfully.

  ‘But we couldn’t get anything out of him, or on him. No blood in his van. No blood on his clothes. We kept an eye on him, in case he had done away with her, and led us back to where he’d stashed her, but nothing. Not a dicky.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing anywhere. So we let it go. You got to give it up some time or other. There’s always too much else to do.’

  ‘So you thought he was the most likely suspect?’ Slider asked.

  ‘No, like I said, we had no reason to suspect she was dead. No evidence of any foul play. We did look at local nutters and sex offenders as a matter of course, but there was nothing to link any of ’em to the girl or the place or the time. So, with no evidence and no leads …’ He shrugged again. ‘Course, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s most likely she was dead, and if she was, it was most likely the father, but at the time …’

  Behind him, Slider heard the knitting needles pause, and the daughter shift in her seat. It always was the nearest and dearest wot dunnit, and not for the first time he wondered what the nearest and dearest of policemen thought about that. Fortunately, most civilians never had cause to doubt their kin, but a copper’s family had their noses rubbed in it week after week.

  Kellington drained his tea mug, put it down, and fixed Slider with as firm a look as he could manage with eyes like a week-old cod. ‘So what’s all this about? You going to tell me? Don’t tell me someone’s confessed.’ It was not unusual for a murderer late in life to decide to unburden himself, to lead the police to the bodies. It was always portrayed in the press as ‘making their peace’, but Slider believed it had more to do with the last desperate bid of a failed man for fame and attention.

  ‘We’ve found a body,’ Slider said.

  Kellington was suddenly alert, seemed on the instant taller, his face younger by the tightening of the muscles and narrowing of the eyes. ‘Where?’ he barked.

  Slider hesitated, because he quite liked the old boy and didn’t want to show him up; and in that moment he saw that some of Kellington’s tautness was apprehension. He didn’t want to know.

  ‘Buried in the garden,’ said Slider.

  Kellington stared, as though trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. ‘The garden? What garden?’

  ‘Number fifteen. The Knights’ garden.’

  ‘No.’ Kellington began shaking his head slowly in denial. ‘No.�
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  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Slider.

  Kellington continued to shake his head, but in anger now. ‘God damn it,’ he said – growled, rather. ‘God damn it!’ His voice grew louder with each repetition. ‘God damn it! God damn him! He did it! He had to go and do it! Oh, God damn him!’

  He began to cough, and his daughter got up hastily from her sofa and said, ‘Dad?’ with a little, doubtful, birdlike cry. ‘Dad? You all right?’

  Kellington coughed, his face darkening, and flapped her away with one enormous, skeletal hand, the other fumbling for a handkerchief.

  She looked at them reproachfully. Atherton glanced at his boss in query, but Slider waited impassively. The coughing went on and on, and to Slider, each explosion sounded like another furious God damn it! from the angry old man.

  SIX

  Gripes and Wrath

  It seemed very peaceful in the room when the coughing was over. Kellington seemed to have passed almost into a pensive mood. The daughter (she didn’t seem, in her self-effacingness, to need a name) had ceased fussing and returned to her seat and her knitting. Outside the day was declining, and there was a hint of fog in the air. The little birds were coming and going with an air of urgency, getting one last meal in before dark.

  Slider didn’t advance the questioning. He was interested to hear what Kellington would say unprompted. Atherton was waiting for his lead, sitting back, seemingly relaxed in his chair, one elegant leg crossed, his long hands quiet in his lap. Slider knew that when he looked the most indifferent, he was listening the hardest.

  ‘Well,’ Kellington said at last. ‘Well. So he did it after all. I knew it. I said all along …’ He stopped himself, and looked at them with a sort of wariness, as if he suspected them of trying to trick him. ‘Ronnie Knight. Musta been him. Who else would have buried her in the garden?’ Then he frowned. He was a policeman. He would see the snag just as Slider saw it. ‘Wait a minute!’

  ‘You’d have noticed if there was any freshly-turned earth,’ said Slider.

  ‘There wasn’t,’ said Kellington ‘No signs of digging. We searched the house. That’s SOP. Searched the shed and the garden. Of course we did. Besides …’

  ‘It wasn’t likely the perpetrator would do the digging in broad daylight,’ Atherton supplied.

  Kellington nodded agreement without looking at him. His eyes were fixed on a very distant scene. ‘No, he must have stashed her somewhere else. Buried her there later.’

  ‘With only skeletal remains, there’s no way to tell if the body was moved at any time before burial,’ Slider said.

  ‘I suppose it was a calculated risk, burying the body where he could keep guard over it, see that nobody found it?’ said Atherton, with a faint question mark.

  Kellington shook his head. ‘By that point he wouldn’t have cared. Just get rid of her – that’s all he’d care about by then.’ He said it bitterly, almost as if he had a personal resentment.

  ‘What was the latest time you would have noticed any disturbance in the garden?’ Atherton asked.

  Kellington came back slowly from his thoughts, and had to have the question repeated. ‘Monday,’ he said. ‘It would have been the Monday. Yes. She went missing on Saturday, Monday we searched the house and garden. Not that we expected to find anything. We thought she’d walked out. Of course we did.’

  ‘Anyone would have,’ Slider said.

  Kellington fixed him with a resentful eye as if he’d disagreed. ‘There was no reason to think otherwise. We searched the house and garden the Monday. That was just routine. After that, we were in and out the house, talking to the parents, but I don’t recollect we ever looked at the garden again. There was no reason to.’

  Kellington pouched his lower lip and slowly scratched his sparse hair, thinking hard. He looked tired.

  ‘If it was the father—’ Slider began.

  ‘O’ course it was,’ Kellington interrupted sharply. ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘If it was him,’ Slider resumed evenly, ‘it’s likely that he had her in his van for some of the time.’

  ‘Obviously he must’ve used it to transport the body,’ Kellington said impatiently. ‘But there was none of this DNA business back then. We looked for bloodstains, signs of a scuffle, but what else would we do? Even if we’d found one of her hairs in there, there was no reason it shouldn’t be there.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Slider. ‘I’m sure you did everything by the book.’

  ‘Damn right we did!’

  ‘I wonder, though, why there’s so little in the file.’

  He seemed startled. ‘What? What file?’

  ‘The Misper file. There ought to be far more detail on how you conducted the search, dozens more interviews. Even if the actions proved unproductive, one would expect them to be logged in the file.’

  ‘One would. One would.’ Slider thought he was mocking him, but he seemed almost dazed. He was thinking. ‘Everything ought to be there. The whole paperchase. Everything – but it was so long ago. Twenty – twenty-five years. My God. Files – they get set aside. Forgotten. Things get lost. And,’ he seemed to rally, ‘once they go into storage, who knows what happens to ’em? You don’t ask, do you?’

  ‘Have you any idea what became of them – the Knights?’ Slider asked.

  ‘We kept an eye on ’em for a while, like I said, in case he led us to the body. They were still in the same house a year later, I know that. After that, I dunno. You move on, don’t you? You know you’re not going to find her.’ He fixed Slider suddenly with a terrible eye. ‘So you’ve not traced him yet?’

  ‘We’re working on it.’

  ‘He’ll be – what? – knocking on eighty now. You’d better get a move on. You don’t want him to die before you find him. Twenty-five years! It’ll be a wonder if any of ’em’s still alive.’

  ‘Speaking of which, have you any idea where we could find your old boss, Mr Vickery?’

  Kellington took in a breath to answer, and seemed to suck it the wrong way, because he burst again into a fusillade of racking, painful coughs. Through them he seemed to be trying to answer in the negative, shaking his head. His daughter appeared again at his side with a glass of water, and he took it and drank and the bout subsided, leaving him flushed and breathless.

  The daughter gave Slider a reproachful look, and he obeyed it and stood up. ‘I think we’d better be going,’ he said. ‘Thanks for all your help. If you think of anything else that might help us …’

  Kellington made a flapping motion with one hand to stay him, while the other fumbled the handkerchief to his face. Slider waited, feeling Atherton stirring uneasily at his side – fearing some inappropriate confession of failure from the old man, probably. A lead missed, a stone unturned.

  But when Kellington emerged from his mopping and blowing, what he said was, ‘Let me know what happens. All right? It was my case. I’d like to see it closed.’

  ‘I’ll let you know if we make any progress.’

  Something about that, or the way he said it, seemed to sting the old man. Kellington struggled to his feet, in itself a disturbing phenomenon to witness. Upright, even with the shrinkage of old age, he towered over Slider, and even topped Atherton by a couple of inches. He must have been daunting in his prime. ‘You lot have it easy these days,’ he wheezed angrily. ‘Mobile phones. Satellites. Cameras everywhere. Surveillance bloody society. We had to do it the hard way. Hands and knees. Every bloody inch. I’m telling you, there was no trace of her. Not – a – dicky.’

  ‘Nobody’s blaming you,’ Slider said.

  ‘Bloody right they’re not!’ It was almost a bellow – a bull with laryngitis. ‘Like to see any of you do as well without your fancy IT and all your gadgets!’

  Slider thought of the dusty, etiolated file with its meagre, nibbled pages. Twenty-five years ago was a foreign country, all right.

  Outside, Atherton said, ‘So all we have to do is find Ronnie Knight, and we’re home and dry.’

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nbsp; Slider knew he was half joking, but felt constrained to say, ‘We’d still have to prove it, and if they couldn’t do it back then when the trail was fresh …’

  ‘I don’t suppose they tried very hard,’ Atherton said. ‘I got the impression they assumed from the start she’d wandered off and would never be seen again.’

  ‘They had no reason to think it was Knight, after all,’ Slider said fairly. ‘They didn’t have the body.’

  ‘Once we nab him, he’ll confess,’ Atherton said with confidence. ‘After all this time, it’ll be a relief to him. Make his peace, as they say in the tabloids.’

  They got into the car, and Slider drove off.

  ‘Still, I wonder why he did bring the body back,’ Atherton mused.

  ‘As you said, a calculated risk. Someone might stumble on it if it was stashed somewhere else. In his garden he could keep an eye on it.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Atherton said, dissatisfied. ‘But how did he creep back in, heaving the body, do all the digging, and his wife not notice anything? Unless she was in on it?’

  ‘Seems unlikely.’

  ‘I didn’t mean in on the murder. But she might have been the sort of wife that felt she had to support her husband, no matter what.’ Slider threw him a sceptical look, and he said, ‘Joanna wouldn’t shop you if you’d murdered somebody, would she?’

  ‘I’d shop myself.’

  ‘Or she might have been terrified of him.’

  ‘That seems more likely.’

  ‘I suppose loyalty would depend to an extent on why he did it.’

  Uxbridge Road traffic was light in this direction, and Slider sped past the westbound build-up with the sense of smugness one always feels about other people in traffic jams. The street lights were on, and made haloes in the fog; the traffic lights looked pretty through it, like Christmas decorations.

  ‘Kellington didn’t suggest a motive,’ he said, ‘so I suppose they never discovered one.’

  ‘Mr Kellington doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who’d care about airy-fairy, arty-farty, psychological bollocks like motives. Find a man with a bit of lead pipe standing over another man with his head stoved in, and who cares about motive?’