Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Swilley said. ‘Thank you for racking your memory for us.’

  ‘I suppose you can’t tell me what it’s all about? They weren’t Russian spies or something, were they?’

  ‘They weren’t Russian spies.’ Swilley heaved herself up with immense effort, and tried not to punch her head right through the ceiling. Alice-like, she seemed to have grown bigger in the time they had been here. She handed over her card. ‘If you do remember anything else about them, anything at all, please let us know.’

  ‘I will. But I don’t think I will, if you know what I mean. They were a funny couple, or I don’t think I’d remember them at all. But I think I’ve told you all I know.’

  Hart was as surprised as dismayed to discover how many beauty salons there were in the general Hammersmith area. It struck her as astonishing that so many women were willing to put on a nylon cape, lie down and have some teenage mouth-breather do things to their faces. How could they regard it as a treat? As something desirable to book in advance and look forward to? And how come they had the time and the money for it? Why weren’t they at work? Or getting on with something productive, or at least useful? She came from an old-fashioned West Indian family where the mother was the lynchpin, and quite capable of lynching any of her children who lazed around, leeched on others or just generally wasted their substance when they could be Getting On.

  Besides, Hart had always hated anyone touching her head. It was bad enough having to have your hair done, but the face was the place more than anywhere else in your body that you lived. To close your eyes and allow a stranger to put their hands all over it, let alone come at it with sharp implements … And for what? Eyebrow tinting – what was that all about? What did they think God gave them eyebrow pencils for? Dermabrasion, peeling – yeow! It made her think uncomfortably about Egyptian mummies, embalming, and what they’d told her at school about pulling the brains out through the nose with a hook, which, even though it was done to dead people, had still caused her to scrunch up in horror.

  But it was evidently a lucrative field, because ‘Beauty Academies’, as they laughably called the training schools, had proliferated like spiders in a corner, and since they were all private enterprises, they wouldn’t have existed if there weren’t sufficient wannabe pluckers and buffers to take up the places. She made a list of the most likely ones, and started to work through them, but her enquiries were met with blanks, not to say frequently incomprehension, as though the idea of taking the names of trainees or keeping records was a ludicrous notion. Probably in many cases it was. At the smarter, longer-established academies, the administration was at a higher level, but so were their fees, and Hart doubted Shannon Bailey could have afforded them – if, indeed, Julienne’s guess had any merit. Connolly seemed to think it worth a try, and Hart had no other leads, so what the hay?

  And then, thinking again about ancient Egyptians generally, snake rods, golden masks and those tall hats, something clicked in her mind. Connolly had told her Julienne had said the beauty school Shannon and Kaylee talked about was ‘something with tits in it’, which she had dismissed as meaningless. Now she had a light bulb moment, and thought, Nefertiti!

  There was on her list a Nefertiti Beauty Therapy Training Academy. She parked the car and brought it up on her tablet.

  Make £££s as a Beauty Therapist!!! it urged the reader. Enter the exciting world of Beauty Therapy at one of our Training Academies! Our world-beating 11-day course will put you on the road to a satisfying and money-spinning career!! When you have completed the course you will receive a Beauty Academy Diploma which will open the door to Beauty Salons and Spas all over the country! Or treat paying customers in the comfort of their own homes! Nefertiti is recognized UK-wide. Become a Nefertiti Beauty Therapist and you can earn £££s!!!

  From the number of exclamation marks, they were looking for a more excitable and less thoughtful sort of candidate; and Hart, who had read a large number of advertisements for academies that day, noted that they did not mention NVQs or City and Guilds qualifications. She concluded the Nefertiti Academy was a gnat’s short of totally pukka. It said they had training centres in Birmingham, Manchester, Chelmsford and Basildon as well, but she didn’t know enough about those places to know if the addresses were genuine. But judging by their Hammersmith address, which was in one of the less gorgeous parts of Askew Road, they weren’t going to be palaces of learning.

  She had a look on Google Street View and found the place in the upstairs part of a neglected building whose street level was a shabby-looking estate agents. That, she thought, was much more Shannon’s speed. It was certainly worth a try. She drove down there, parked across the road, and settled down to watch the door. By any reasonable calculation the day’s course should be ending soon, and if Shannon was there, it was better to try and catch her coming out, than announce herself and risk her having it away down some back exit.

  Half an hour later, her vigil was rewarded. The door opened and two Asian girls came out, arm-in-arm and heads together, and walked off down the road. After a pause, two white girls and – surprise, surprise – a tall youth came out, paused talking for a moment, then split up, the youth and one of the girls one way, the other girl walking to the nearby bus stop where she waited, fidgeting from foot to foot in the cold wind. Another pause, and another female figure came out, so bundled up in a quilted coat and a woolly hat with lappets that Hart almost missed her. It was as she walked away, hands stuffed in her pockets, that she gave what seemed like a nervous look around, and Hart saw her face.

  The girl turned down Becklow Road. Hart slipped into gear and followed her, and caught up just as Shannon was turning into the gate of a terraced house, two storeys and a basement, which was obviously divided into flats. Gotcha! Hart thought. She idled past, noting that Shannon was going down the basement steps, and then had to find a parking space. Fortunately some of the residents were still out at work so she was able to snag a residents’-only space and slap the ON POLICE BUSINESS notice in her windscreen.

  Moments later she was facing a considerably startled Shannon, still in her coat but with the hat off, who opened the door, looked at Hart blankly for a moment, said, ‘Oh fuck!’ and tried to close it again.

  Hart’s booted foot was in the way. She smiled and said, ‘Too late, babe. C’mon, don’t get antsy, I’m not here officially. I just wanted to find out if you’re all right. Can I come in?’

  And Shannon, with an air of recognizing inevitability when it jumped up and peed on your leg, let her in.

  FIFTEEN

  More Sinned Against than Sinning

  Some nifty footwork on the part of Lessop, comparing census returns and electoral rolls, established that the householder at number 24 Colville Avenue had been there for thirty-five years, and had therefore been next-door neighbour to the Vickerys.

  They were a Mr and Mrs Clavering, Bernard and Georgette, in their late eighties. Lessop, who did the initial phone contact, said the woman had a dead posh accent, and combining that with the size of the house, Slider sent Atherton to interview them – him wot could talk the lingo, orright?

  The houses in Colville Avenue were a mixed bunch, from 1850s cottages through late-Victorian detached to a rash of 1930s maisonettes, and a couple of oddities slapped up post war where a bomb had dropped. Numbers 22 and 24 were detached, solid two-storey, late-Victorian, yellow brick and Welsh slate, with what looked like original dormers in the roofs, making them probably six-bedroom properties. Atherton noted that they were still single-occupancy. In an earlier age they would have been divided up into flats or even bedsits, but the wheel had turned and Shepherd’s Bush was attracting more wealthy people now, people who couldn’t afford Notting Hill, but still wanted a big house with high ceilings and ‘original feachers’ as the estate agents called them – cornices, doors and fireplaces. He also noted, with a little more interest, that number 22 was directly behind 15 Laburnum Avenue: their gardens backed on to each other.


  The old lady who opened the door certainly had a cut-glass accent. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘they rang to say you were coming.’ Atherton observed her taking mental note of his suit, and then, tellingly, his shoes. Evidently he passed muster, for she smiled and said, ‘Do come in.’

  It was certainly a big house – the hall was the size of most people’s principal reception room these days. It had stairs to one side, a door to the left and another straight ahead, with a passage off at right angles leading, one assumed, to the kitchen region. Mrs Clavering led him straight ahead into the living room, which had French windows looking onto a well-kept garden. ‘Please sit down,’ she said, gesturing towards a vast chesterfield, and taking a chair facing it, on which she perched very upright.

  She was tiny, her face wrinkled like a store apple, and she had evidently had difficulty in applying her make-up, for the lipstick was askew, one eyebrow was darker than the other, and the blusher had not been blended in, giving her a clownlike look – except that her natural air of authority made it impossible to find it amusing. She was neatly dressed in skirt, silk blouse and knitted jacket, with pearls, and most notably was wearing polished shoes rather than slippers.

  The house smelled cold and stale, and Atherton did not need a detective’s eyes to see that dust was thick on every surface. The grate contained the cold ashes of a fire that had not been burning very recently, on top of which several used tissues and an apple core were awaiting the final translation; and in a dim corner a forgotten vase of flowers had shrivelled to brown mummification. But she had got herself up in full fig, and he would have been willing to bet she did so every day, as a matter of course. One of the old school, he thought. Slider would probably have called her ‘old county’. The big, cold, dusty house reared round her, too much for her to cope with; but it was her home, and she would live there, whatever the struggle, and pride would keep her warm.

  ‘Is your husband here, ma’am?’ he asked, the ‘ma’am’ slipping out without his volition. ‘I had rather hoped to speak to both of you.’

  ‘My husband is in a home,’ she said, without emotion. She would never ask for sympathy. ‘Looking after him became too much for me. He has dementia, so I’m afraid he wouldn’t be much help to your enquiries. He doesn’t really remember anything very much now.’

  ‘I’m so sorry—’ Atherton began, but she waved it away with a small queenly gesture.

  ‘I understand you want to know what I remember of the Vickerys.’

  The Vickerys – David, Caroline and Melissa – had moved in only two years after the Claverings; but Mrs Clavering’s father had owned the house before, and it was where she had been born, so she had known the road all her life.

  ‘Next door was rather a mess,’ she said. ‘There was an old couple there, the Sweetings, when Bernard and I took over this house, and they’d rather let things go.’ She said it with no self-consciousness, Atherton noted. She evidently did not think of herself as an old person, or of her house as less than pristine. ‘They died within months of each other and the house went on the market.’

  ‘And the Vickerys bought it,’ he helped her along.

  She gave him a cool look that said she didn’t need helping, and continued, ‘We liked the look of them when they came to see the house. They were in their late twenties, I suppose, a very nice-looking couple. David, in fact, was strikingly handsome, very dark, lean, charismatic. We were glad it was a young couple. We hoped they’d take care of the house. It’s not good to have a neglected property next door.’

  ‘And what about his wife – what was she like?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘Caroline was a sweet person. Fair, quiet, rather shy. Surprisingly so, since she’d been a nursery teacher before she married. But Melissa, their little girl, was about five or six then, so she couldn’t have taught for long before she had her. She talked about going back to work now that Melissa was at school, but I gathered that there was no need for her to work – they were quite well-off. And I’m not sure she had the energy for it. She was always a bloodless creature, always seemed rather ailing, you know. Very pale, with that limp, fair hair. She always seemed to be getting colds and headaches.’ Mrs Clavering had been staring at nothing as she remembered, but now she looked up, sharply. ‘Of course, we learned later that she was ailing. She died dreadfully young. But one didn’t know that at the time. I’m just giving you my impression of her.’

  ‘Were you friends?’ he asked.

  She considered. ‘A little more than neighbours, a little less than friends. We had them in for drinks, for dinner sometimes, we babysat for Melissa once or twice. But I wouldn’t say we were very close. There was quite an age difference. Bernard and I were in our fifties, and we had our own circle. But we liked them – were fond of them, even – and we tried to be good neighbours.’

  ‘What did David do for a living?’

  ‘He was a design engineer, and apparently quite brilliant. An inventor. It was a little out of my league—’ she moved a deprecating hand – ‘but I understand some of his innovations were quite important. Some kind of new valve that revolutionized car engines, for instance. And something to do with the guidance system for those robots that land on the moon and Mars and so on. I can’t remember much about them, but he earned a great deal of money from his patents and licences. A very great deal. He worked tremendously hard. He had a study at the top of the house, and we’d see the lights burning up there late into the night.’

  ‘That must have been difficult for Caroline,’ Atherton suggested.

  ‘It must have been a lonely life for her,’ Mrs Clavering agreed. She pondered a moment. ‘I’ve always thought it important in a marriage that there’s a certain equality, that each partner brings a strength to the table. I didn’t see that with them. She was a sweet girl, but he was an extraordinary person. I had the impression that she worshipped him but didn’t understand him. That’s not healthy. And he could be quite brusque with her. She sometimes seemed quite cowed by him.’

  ‘Do you think he was ever physically abusive?’ Atherton asked.

  She look affronted. ‘Good heavens, no. Why do modern minds always jump to that? There are more ways of being cruel than with fists. But I don’t think he was consciously cruel. He was on a different intellectual plane, that’s all,’ she concluded. ‘He must have been hard to live with.’

  ‘What about the little girl?’

  Mrs Clavering gave a minute shrug. ‘She was just a little girl. Nothing unusual about her. She had nice manners, was always tidy and well turned out. Rather shy. I can’t say I noticed her very much. I had grandchildren of my own who were much more fascinating. As far as I could see she was never any trouble.’

  ‘Did her father have a good relationship with her?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say. He never talked about her, but then, when we were in company with him, it was at grown-up parties, and children were not a topic. He might have been devoted, for all I knew. The difference in generations meant we didn’t see that side of them.’

  Atherton took her back to the last year of the Vickerys’ residence there. Caroline’s death was quite sudden. ‘Pancreatic cancer. It takes them off horribly quickly. We hardly knew she was ill when she was gone.’

  ‘How did David Vickery take it?’

  A slight shrug. ‘We offered all the help we could, but there wasn’t much we could do. Of course, he worked from home, so that was one problem that didn’t arise – childcare. I think they rather turned in on themselves, and we didn’t see them … oh, for months.’

  ‘It’s Melissa I’m particularly interested in. Did she have a lot of friends?’

  She gave him a patient look. ‘She was just a child who lived next door. I had no reason to take notice of her.’

  Atherton nodded, and sought for another approach. ‘Do you remember the case of a little girl who went missing, who lived in the next road, Laburnum Avenue? It happened that summer, the last one the Vickerys lived next door.’<
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  She frowned. ‘I have a vague recollection of it. It wasn’t the sort of news story I would pay much attention to. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because the girl who went missing, Amanda, referred to Melissa as her “best friend”. She told the other girls at school that she was spending a lot of time with her.’

  Mrs Clavering looked at him blankly, waiting to know what this had to do with her.

  ‘We know that Melissa didn’t visit Amanda’s house, so the inference is that Amanda spent her time at Melissa’s.’

  The word ‘inference’ seemed to reassure her. ‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t …’ she began, and then stopped. ‘Wait, though. Now I think about it, I do remember a time when I was seeing two little girls playing in the garden next door. That would be not long before they went away, and it must have been in the summer, during the summer holidays, or they’d have been at school, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘What were they doing?’

  ‘Just sitting on a rug, talking. Exchanging secrets,’ she added with a deprecating smile, to show that she didn’t fully approve of flights of fancy. ‘Sitting with their heads together. The Vickerys’ garden was dreadfully overgrown – they’d never been very interested in gardening, and since Caroline died, David hadn’t bothered at all. It was upsetting to us, because we were keen gardeners, and weeds don’t recognize fences. And I’d often look down from our bedroom window and deplore the state it was in. That’s why I remember seeing them there together, day after day, on a rug, with the grass far too long around them. Like sisters.’

  ‘You mean they looked alike?’

  ‘From that distance – same size, same age, the same sort of mouse-fair hair, cut in the same bob. Of course, I’ve no idea who she was – whether she was this other child you’re speaking of.’

  ‘Did you ever see her close up?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware.’ She seemed a little impatient. ‘I don’t suppose I’d have recognized her if I passed her in the street. And it wasn’t long after that that they left, and I haven’t thought about them from that day to this.’