Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Mind if I take me shoes off?’ She heeled them off and sank with a huge sigh onto the sofa, whose cheap foam seat pads sank alarmingly under her onslaught. ‘I tell you I’m getting too old for these buggers.’ She bent and massaged her toes tenderly. ‘So, you want to talk about Brian, do you? Blimey, that’s a long time ago. Lot of water under that bridge. I was still on my first back then. Karen Beales, I was. Kevin Beales, my first. Karen and Kevin, what a lovely couple,’ she added with heavy irony. ‘We got married too young, that’s what it was. Thought we were in love. That didn’t last. Alec’s my third – Alec Redondo. He’s a bit younger than me,’ she mentioned with a coy look at Gascoyne, who was younger than her and also good-looking, in a clean cut, eager-young-fellow way.

  He was used to the reaction, and didn’t take it personally. A policeman got a lot of offers, and they were all fatal to accept. In any case, he was working, quietly and privately, towards an accommodation with the daughter of an old friend and colleague of his policeman father, who would therefore understand the Job. When he got married, he intended it to stick.

  He nodded a neutral reply, and she sighed again and let her face sag. ‘Big mistake, marrying a younger bloke. I’ve not got the energy for it any more. Get to my age, you see sex more as a chance for a lie-down.’

  ‘So, you and Brian Bexley,’ Gascoyne prompted her gently.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Course, you don’t want to hear my sad story. His was sad enough. Married to a real ball-cutter. She despised him – there’s a lot like that. They don’t want a real man, they want a tailor’s dummy – looks good, knows its place, never speaks. She was a go-getter. Ambitious. Always pushing him. He was out of his depth. Course, he’d’ve been out of his depth on a wet pavement. He came to me for a bit of a rest from it all.’

  Gascoyne nodded encouragingly but offered no comment. Anything he said at a moment like that could lead to trouble.

  ‘Funny thing, we’d been working at the same branch a while before it clicked. It was actually at a do at the golf club. Silver wedding bash, the club captain and his wife – pair of old farts! Mean, too. Not even a sit-down: catered buffet and a cash bar, then a disco and a charity raffle. Cheek of it! I’d gone with Kevin, Brian was there with Pat, they both had faces like boots. Pat never did like the golf club crowd, and Kev was in a mood about something, I can’t remember what. So Brian asks me to dance, and – well, I’d had a few drinks. So had he. Long story short, we slipped outside and did it on one of the greens. We got a bit silly. Coming back, we stuffed my knickers into the captain’s exhaust pipe.’ She grinned.

  ‘How did that work out?’

  ‘Didn’t hang around to find out. Anyway,’ she went on, ‘that was the start of it. I wasn’t the first. I knew that. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t interested in marrying him. I was happy just having a bit of fun. He wasn’t a bad bloke, really. Anyway, it was a change from Kevin, who, frankly, was an arsehole of the first water. Complete shit. And to be totally frank with you—’ Was she ever anything else? he wondered – ‘not all that well endowed in the bedroom department. I mean, I kid you not, it was like Braille down there. And no staying-power. Our first night together, I thought to meself, is that it? I’ve been vaccinated slower. But old Brian, well, he’d not got much imagination, real meat-and-potatoes man, but at least he had stamina. Anyway, that’s all it was, with Brian and me, a bit of fun, no pack drill, nobody gets hurt.’

  Gascoyne gave her a gentle push. ‘Do you remember the time when the little girl went missing – his niece?’

  ‘Oh my goodness, yes. You don’t forget a thing like that. I mean, you’re always upset when a kiddie goes missing, because so often they turn up dead a few days later, don’t they? But when it’s someone you know – I mean, when it happens to someone you know – it’s even worse, isn’t it?’

  ‘There was some question, I believe,’ Gascoyne said delicately, ‘about an alibi?’

  She gave him an open-eyed look. ‘For Brian, you mean? Oh yes, there was a rare old fuss about that. I mean, it was a lot of nonsense, him even needing an alibi, because he never done anything to that poor kiddie, and anyone who knew him would’ve known that. But I suppose the police have to do things by the numbers, don’t they? I mean, they didn’t know him personally. Poor old Brian was really upset about it, though, just the thought that they could suspect him at all. It would have made him a kiddie-fiddler, and it made him sick just to think about that. Because he was as normal as white bread, poor old Brian, in that department, if you get my drift. He liked it a lot – and I mean a lot – but it was plain vanilla all the way with him.’ She looked at Gascoyne with an anticipatory smile, as if waiting to see if she had made him blush.

  Gascoyne made sturdy notes in his notebook. ‘But did he, in fact, have an alibi?’ he asked, without looking up, as though it was a matter of not very much importance.

  ‘Oh yes. Well, he was with me all afternoon, the day she went missing, wasn’t he?’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I thought that was what you come here asking about.’

  ‘You’re quite sure about that?’

  ‘Course I am. See, the thing was, he was worried about me having to give evidence in case anything happened, and it all coming out, me being married at the time. I told him, I don’t care if Kevin does know, because he’s not Snow White. He was doing it with this barmaid down the Sun in Barnes, which I knew all about, though he didn’t know I knew, so if he’d wanted to make something out of me and Brian I had my defence all ready. But when it came to the point, his wife told the police that he’d been home with her all day.’ She gave a malicious smile. ‘I reckon she was just yanking Brian’s chain, because she made out they were doing a jigsaw together, like he was some poor old henpecked hubby – which he was, in a way, but he didn’t like to think it. It put him in a right old froth. I reckon he was half hoping it’d all come out about him and me, so’s he look like a real lad, you know what I mean? But once she’d said it he had to go along with it, didn’t he? But he was with me all right, the whole afternoon, so there was no harm in it, from that point of view.’

  She seemed both frank and honest on this point, and Gascoyne put a line under another possible theory with an inward sigh.

  ‘Did he talk much about his niece?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, not before it happened,’ she said. ‘We had other things on our minds, if you get my drift. But afterwards, yes, he did talk about it a lot. In the office, generally, and when we were alone. He was very upset, you know,’ she said, giving him a nod. ‘Actually, he was sure at first she’d run away, but as time went on—’

  ‘Run away?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, her and her dad were always rowing. Brian thought she’d run away, like teenagers do – like a cry for help, if you know what I mean?’

  ‘What did they row about?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Everything. Brian said they were at it like knives all the time. He said she was very bright, and her dad was a bit stupid, and they couldn’t see eye to eye on anything, but they were both stubborn as donkeys, so it was all shouting and banging around.’ She heard herself and stopped, and looked at Gascoyne round-eyed again. ‘Here, d’you think he done her in, her dad? Is that what this is all about? I thought you were after poor old Brian again, but all this, you were just trying to get to his opinion of her dad, weren’t you?’

  ‘You’re very sharp,’ Gascoyne said, to flatter her.

  ‘Oh, I’m not just a pretty face,’ she said.

  ‘Did Brian suspect anything like that?’

  ‘Well,’ she said reluctantly, unwilling to pass up on a drama, ‘he never said anything to me about it, no. He just said they rowed all the time. See, Amanda, she wanted to be a vet when she left school, and her dad wanted her to work in a bank or a building society or something like that. Nice steady job with good prospects. Didn’t want her messing about with animals and earning peanuts. They had a big blow-up about it not long before she went missing, round Brian’s house – they used
to go there for Sunday lunch. Brian reckoned that argument’d been going on a long time, and he thought she’d finally run away from home to, like, draw attention to herself. Sort of blackmail – let me be a vet or I’ll run away again. Of course, he thought she’d come back.’

  ‘And when she didn’t come back,’ Gascoyne said, ‘what did Brian think then?’

  ‘Well, that some pervert’d done her,’ Karen said, looking serious. ‘He was very fond of her, and of course when the days went by and she wasn’t found, he knew, same as we all did, that it was most likely she was dead. You know when you see it on the telly, if they’ve been gone a few days, that’s it. It’s a rotten thing to have happen.’

  ‘So it never occurred to him that her father might have killed her?’

  ‘Not that he ever said to me.’ She thought for a moment. ‘No, he never thought that, I’m sure. He’d have talked to me about it if he had. We talked a lot, between the time the kid went missing and we broke up. Tell the truth, talking was about all we did. And we didn’t last a lot longer. He sort of went off sex, and I didn’t feel the same about him. I mean, it was just supposed to be a bit of fun, but it’s no fun with a missing kiddie always between you. And him talking about her being raped and murdered by some pervert. It was in the August, as I remember, that it all happened, and the end of September I got myself a transfer to another branch, because it’s awkward working with a bloke when you’re not sleeping with him any more. And all the talk about the kid give me the willies.’

  ‘Well, thank you for your help,’ Gascoyne said, closing his book and getting up.

  She rose too, and looked up at him, considerably shorter without her five-inch heels. Under the make-up her face looked old and plain. ‘So she was murdered after all?’ she said glumly. ‘Where was it she was found?’

  ‘In the garden of the house where they lived.’

  She nodded seriously. ‘So it must have been her dad. I see now why you were asking. Well, all I can say is that Brian never suspected him. Poor old Brian. I wonder what he’d think if he was here now? It’s probably a good thing he never knew, because he was really fond of that little girl. It’d have broke him up. He was a nice man, really,’ she added with a sentimental smile. ‘His wife never understood him.’

  Atherton rang Slider on Sunday morning to tell him that they had got into the Sunday papers. ‘The Times and the Telegraph,’ he said.

  Slider rarely had time to read the papers, and depended on his friend to catch him up. ‘Much in there?’

  ‘No, it’s just a short piece, tucked away on page five. Interview with the Freelings about how it feels to have a skeleton found in your garden. Interview with the gardener about how it feels to dig one up. Separate boxed shortie from an archaeologist about how to date old bones – bit out of left field, that one, because he’s talking about carbon dating and dinosaurs. Nothing about the Knights.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Slider said.

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Proves we’re not leaking. Anything else?’

  ‘There’s a photograph of the house. Mentions the road but not the number.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see if that stirs anything up.’

  It was a delightful rarity to have a Sunday at home when Joanna was not working, and he intended to enjoy it to the top of his bent. His other children, Matthew and Kate, were coming over. Their mother, Irene, delivered them at around two o’clock – Matthew had had rugby in the morning – and when she mentioned that her husband Ernie was away, at a high-flying bridge tournament in Gatehouse of Fleet, Joanna invited her to stay for lunch, and she accepted with apparent eagerness.

  Slider tried not to feel dismayed. It was like Joanna’s generosity to ask her, but she and Irene were always awkward with each other, and though there was no longer any animosity between him and Irene, she never seemed at ease in his presence, and particularly not in his house.

  He gave her a sherry and she sat on the edge of the sofa and made brittle small talk. She was looking well, he thought. She had put on a little weight, which suited her – she had always tended towards the too-skinny. She was perfectly turned out, even for delivering children, in expensive-looking slacks and a nice wool jacket, silk scarf and some chunky costume jewellery; Ernie was both well-off and generous. Her make-up was perfect, her short dark hair shiny and trim as though it had been painted on. She looked what she was, a prosperous middle-class wife, and he found himself staring at her with amazement at the idea that he could ever have lived with her, slept in the same bed with her, talked to her across the breakfast table. She seemed so alien to him, even when she met his eyes and called him ‘Bill’, that it was, frankly, an embarrassment to remember that he had once known what she looked like naked. He felt hot and ashamed at the thought – as if he had been caught looking up the Queen’s skirt.

  It was a relief when Dad and Lydia arrived, coming in from the granny flat, for Dad had always had a soft spot for Irene – in a slightly sorry-for-her way, but nevertheless – and Lydia had terrific social skills. She could make anyone feel comfortable, and soon had Irene chatting easily about colour schemes and soft furnishings, from which Slider concluded she was about to begin on one of her restless redecoration jags.

  So with George in his booster seat, they were eight around the dinner table, which was very pleasant. He carved the beef and dispatched plates and felt like a paterfamilias. This was what it was all about, wasn’t it? The reason for living. Perversely, by the time the roast beef and Yorkshire course was getting down to the dirty plates, the same thought had shunted him off into a copper’s siding, from which he observed the happy, animated faces chewing, talking and smiling like someone shut out from the feast.

  Yes, it was what it was all about: keeping the city safe for ordinary happy families like this; and because on the whole they were successful, it meant that for the vast majority of people, the world of crime was a parallel universe which they had heard about but knew nothing of.

  But it was where he lived for much of his life. It was the contaminated flood water through which he waded day after day, with the turds of pointless stupidity and greed bobbing against his legs, and the sewage smell of lies and cruelty clinging to his clothes and hair. He climbed out of it onto dry land when he came home, but he was always afraid he would bring some infection back with him.

  He worried for his children. Knowing what he knew of the Dark Side, he wondered what sort of world would be there for them when they grew up. Little George, frowning in concentration over the mechanical challenge of marrying roast potato and fork, had no other concern at present but the mastery of his own body. Matthew, looking more like Dad every day, was pinkly scrubbed from his post-rugby shower, and had an interesting bruise and scratch on the side of his face. His eyes were on his empty plate, his mind, Slider was sure, far away. He was a dreamer, and had still to discover what direction his dreams ought to take him. And there was Kate, who was doing her hair differently – parted in the middle and long and straight, the current yard-of-tapwater style. She had already acquired the tic that went with it: every few seconds she would tilt her face upwards and shake it once each way, to get the hair out of her eyes – like a swimmer coming up out of the water. She was confident and knowing, with the automatic slight contempt for the hopeless, bumbling male half of creation that she had learned from her mother. But would that be enough to protect her?

  She had caught him staring at her. He managed a feeble smile, but she twitched her hair again and said loudly, ‘You can stop giving us the third degree with your old detective eyes, Dad. I’m not doing drugs and Matthew isn’t watching porn – are you, Matt?’

  Matthew turned crimson and threw his father a brief, horrified glance. It looked like guilt, but Slider recognized pure embarrassment when he saw it.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ he said.

  ‘I bet you were. You’ve been staring at me for hours.’

  ‘Thinking how pretty you look with your new hairdo.’<
br />
  Kate contorted her face wildly and said, ‘Oh yuck, yeuch! Hairdo? What am I – forty with a perm? Get with the programme, Dad! Twenty-first century, hello?’

  She meant it humorously, but Slider was suddenly cold to his core, and couldn’t respond. He was looking at her, but he was seeing the huddle of lonely bones, yellowing and forgotten, all that remained of Amanda Knight. He had thought bones less unsettling than the flesh, but it wasn’t so. He felt his own inside him, warmly fed with roast beef and family cheer, but grimly marking time all the same, waiting for their eventual, inevitable cue to appear at the end of everything. It was what they all came to, what was waiting for them all. Golden lads and girls all must …

  He saw his father look at him, then was aware of an exchange of looks between Dad and Joanna. And then Joanna stood up and said, ‘Can you help me clear the plates, darling? No, don’t you move, Irene. We’ll do it.’

  And in the general movement and clatter of plates being put together and passed along, he was able to stand up, received his freight of gravy-stained china, was able to stir his frozen limbs into movement, stepped out of the cold pool of horror and walked the few yards along to the kitchen. He put the plates down carefully and turned as Joanna came in. She put down her stack too, and put herself into his arms. He wrapped his around her, rested his face on the top of her head, closed his eyes, felt her pressing hard against him all the way down, giving him her heat and life. Her bones pressed against his. No, he wouldn’t think about bones any more. He could smell apple pie and custard in the air, and it was the smell of home, of childhood, of safety.

  ‘But she wasn’t safe, even there,’ he said.

  He hadn’t meant to say it aloud. But Joanna’s response was a grunt, and a harder squeeze. He drew a long breath, then gently released her. She looked up into his face. ‘Better?’ she asked.

  He gave a shaky smile. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Foolish question. Your face is not a kabuki mask, you know.’