The Bones in the Attic

by Robert Barnard

  “I would, but—” Matt felt greatly tempted, but his experience with Isabella made him wary of seeming to neglect the children. “The thing is, it could go on forever. I suppose it wouldn’t be possible to have the children in here, would it? They’re very interested in the case, naturally. The fact is, one of them’s missing her mother, and I’ve only just realized how upset she is. I wouldn’t want to leave them alone till late on.”

  “Don’t see why they shouldn’t come in. Square it with the powers that be.”

  “I will, so long as that doesn’t mean you-know-who.”

  “The teenage bride of Frankenstein? Not yet, thank God, not yet.”

  When Matt rang Charlie he was at his most sardonic.

  “We’ve got him in the cells, Matt. I sweated blood to get permission to follow him up—it’s been a quiet weekend, thank the Lord. When we went out to Bingley to speak to him he was already well into the hair of the dog, and he got obstreperous, which I wasn’t altogether upset about. It means we could bring him in, and at the moment he’s cooling his heels in the cells. . . . How do you cool your heels?”

  “I suppose it’s after you’ve been caught in a chase. When do you expect to talk to him?”

  “Hmm—well, I’m not hurrying it. You’ve talked to him drunk, so I’ll try him sober. Sober takes time. We’ve got the best drying-out clinic in the world here—it beats the Betty Ford into a cocked hat.”

  “Except that when you let them out they go straight to a pub.”

  “Nothing’s perfect. Our results may be a little shortterm, but they serve our purposes.”

  “How long are you going to leave him?”

  “How long does it take to sober up after a lifetime’s soaking? By rights we ought to give him a week at least, but there are rules about these things. I’ll give him another three hours or so, then see how it goes.”

  “Ask him about a family of squatters living just off the Raynville Road.”

  When Matt went along to talk to Phil Bletchley he stressed that he wanted to keep all his options open. Ideally he wanted to twitch all sorts of memories in the viewers, particularly people who had lived aroundHoughton Avenue and the Raynville Road, and then dredge them in and sort them through.

  “The new information—new line of inquiry, rather”—he corrected himself—“is about a pair of squatters, hippyish types, who took over a house in the vicinity at the time, the summer of sixty-nine, and had a baby.”

  “The baby in question?”

  “May be,” said Matt in a way that emphasized his desire for caution. “But I shan’t exclude anyone who just wants to talk about the houses in Houghton Avenue—the people who lived there, and particularly the children. I’d like to know what happened to them later. You have a much larger catchment area than Radio Leeds, so we could easily pick up something about one of them who has moved away but has stayed in the north.”

  “One of the children themselves, may be?”

  Matt thought.

  “Somehow I doubt it. I’m getting a feeling of a vow of silence that somehow or other they’ve maintained. I’m also getting the feeling of some kind of outside influence.”

  “What do you mean? Not witchcraft?” said Phil Bletchley feelingly. “I can’t stand another spate of witchcraft stories. Sacrificial babies along with eye of newt and toe of frog.”

  “No whisper of that yet. All options are open.”

  “But you’re talking about a person, are you? Not just the zeitgeist, but someone spurring the children on?”

  “Yes. Or cleverly pulling their strings. Finding the way their developing minds work and then applying gentle pressures or dangling subtle inducements.”

  “Have you any evidence these children’s minds were working in the direction of killing a baby?”

  “No.” Matt sighed. “Not really. I may be talking about one or two of them, not the whole bunch. The only concrete thing I have is a memory of talk about some people who shouldn’t be allowed to have babies.”

  Phil raised his eyebrows, then leapt in on that.

  “A memory? Is there something about this story that you haven’t been telling us, Matt?”

  “Yes. I knew these children. I was around in the summer of sixty-nine.”

  “Up from the smoke?”

  “Refugee from East Enderville. Staying with my auntie Hettie while my mother recovered from a botched hysterectomy, as I now know.”

  “Right. And are you going to let this out tonight?”

  “I’ve thought about that. I don’t rule it out for the future, but I think now is too soon. Better to leave it as a police investigation, sparked off by the discovery of the bones. Getting in the personal element at this stage might frighten somebody who’d be better left in a state of comparative serenity.”

  “Fair enough. So you are thinking of one of the children in particular, are you?”

  “May be. I have had an unsigned letter. Or there’s that shadowy figure in the background, applying the pressure or pulling the strings. I’d really love to hear about him.”

  When at last Charlie had Rory Pemberton brought in from the cells, he looked terrible. It was obvious he felt terrible too. He cast his eyes around the spare, bare interview room as if he expected to see a bar there, and couldn’t believe a room could be empty of such a convenience.“I’ve been to breweries that smelled better,” whisperedWPC Younger, who was sitting in with Charlie. Pemberton fixed them with a savage stare.

  “I’m getting my lawyer on to you, you know that, don’t you? Wrongful detention, that’s what this has been. It’s been downright persecution.”

  “Why should we want to persecute you, Mr. Pemberton?” asked Charlie sweetly.

  “That’s what I’m bloody waiting to find out.”

  “Fair enough.” Charlie read the mantra into the tape, and then sat facing him, wishing they’d used an air freshener before they called him in. “I’m questioning you about the death of a baby some thirty-odd years ago in the Bramley area.”

  “Taken your bloody time to get round to it, haven’t you?”

  “The bones of the baby were discovered three weeks ago in the attic of Elderholm, one of the houses in Houghton Avenue where you lived thirty years ago.”

  “Me and a lot of others.”

  “Exactly,” said Charlie equably. “We have already questioned Lily Fitch, or Marsden, as she then was. Now we’re questioning you.”

  A shade had passed over Rory’s face at the mention of Lily’s name. However, he stuck with aggressiveness as his best bet.

  “Well, you’re wasting your time. I know bugger-all about it, so you’re wasting my time as well.”

  “But on Friday night you were talking to a visitor to your house, Matt Harper, about a long-ago dead baby.”

  This time he was really puzzled, but he was frightened too. His brow creased, and for a long time he said nothing.

  “Visitor?”

  “Not someone you know, or not someone you know well, at any rate. He called on you the night I believe your partner left the house.”

  He stuck out his bottom lip.

  “Vara? That cow? Good riddance.”

  “You were drunk at the time, and you talked about an incident in the past in which a baby died.”

  Pemberton spread out his hands in a gesture of feigned matiness.

  “Well, there you are. I was drunk. When I’m drunk all sorts of nonsense goes through my mind. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Charlie, still soft and low-key. “You’re drunk most of the day, but you seem to be able to function as some kind of freelance financial speculator. I feel pretty sure that when you were talking about a dead baby you were remembering the real world, an actual baby that you had seen.”

  “Well, search me. You say I’m drunk most of the time. Probably I saw it when I was drunk. Some kind of road accident, may be.”

  “You don’t drive, do you, sir?”

  “No, I do not driv
e. I’m driven. When I was being driven I could have seen a dead baby in a car accident.”

  His voice had become irritable again, as if he were talking to an idiot.

  “I’d prefer to connect a dead baby in one of the houses where you used to live with the memory you had on Friday of a dead baby. Then you mentioned a balustrade where the baby lay. The houses in Houghton Avenue have little balustrades in the front, with two or three steps down to the front gardens.”

  “So what? Windsor bloody Castle has balustrades. The Palace of bloody Versailles has balustrades.”

  “I don’t think it was at Windsor or Versailles that you saw a dead baby lying on a balustrade,” said Charlie.

  Matt rang home when he knew the children would be back from school and asked if they’d like to come and see him do his slot on the “Look North” program, and stick around while he manned the phone afterward to see if there was any feedback. He did not need to ask. The children had always been desperate to see more of the place where he worked. What he was really doing was telling them to throw together something to eat and be at the studios in Woodhouse Lane by six-thirty.It was an exceptionally newsless Monday, so he got a good position on the program, around twenty to seven. He was interviewed by Patrick Priest, one of the stalwarts of the local news programs, and a good friend. With the children watching thirstily from a sofa in a far recess of the studio he went over the story of the bones in the attic, suggested the likely date of the baby’s death, and made clear the area of Leeds that he and the police were interested in. Then he got to the new possibilities.

  “We’re pretty sure that at that time—1969, remember—there was a little family of squatters—I think the locals called them hippies—living illegally in a house in the area. Man, woman, and baby.”

  “ The baby?” asked Patrick as agreed beforehand.

  “May be, may be not. We’re making no assumptions. The three were squatting, we think, in a house on one of the small roads leading off from Raynville Road in the summer of 1969.”

  “The year the Beatles made Abbey Road, ” said Patrick.

  “The year Man City won the FA Cup,” amended Matt. It seemed like another era. “But there must be quite a lot of people out there watching this who remember that year well. For example, we don’t think there were that many squatters in northern towns at that time. They would have stood out, and we think some of you”—he turned with a practiced transition to look straight into the camera—“may remember this family. They dressed in hippie style, so this fact, and the fact that they took over an empty house illegally, would have made them conspicuous, talked about. We want to know who they were, and which house they took over, in which street. That is, one of the streets off the Raynville Road, on the border of Armley and Bramley, in West Leeds. If you have anything to offer us in the way of information, ring the police on 0113 2435353, or ring and talk to me here tonight, on 0113 2445738, in the next two hours.”

  “Matt is hoping to hear from you,” concluded Patrick Priest.

  Matt raised a hand in thanks to his interviewer, beetled out of the studio gesturing to the children to follow him, and headed for the room that had been assigned to him for the phone-in. The telephone was already ringing. He told the children they had to be dead quiet while he was on the phone, and took it up.

  “Is that Matthew Hartwell?”

  “Er—”

  “Well, I’m ringing about these squatters.” An elderly female voice. Promising. “I think it’s absolutely dizgoosting, I mean, they just take over places, don’t they, and the police do nowt about it, and they get their electricity andgas free, and there’s them living off the fat of the land, and it’s all at our expense, isn’t it, uz ratepayers, we’re the ones who pay in the long run, aren’t we? Am I on the air?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve noted your views, Mrs. . . . Thank you very much.” And he put the phone firmly down.

  “Who was it?” demanded the children.

  “Someone who thought it was a phone-in on squatters.”

  The next one was hardly more promising.

  “Matt Harper? It’s Len Hainsworth here.”

  “Yes, Mr. Hainsworth.”

  “I wanted to ring and tell you I saw all your home matches when you were with Bradford City, and I thought you were brilliant—the best thing in the team when you were on form. Ee, I remember that goal you scored in the FA Cup second round in eighty-seven—”

  “Mr. Hainsworth, do you have any information for me—”

  “No, lad. I just wanted to have the pleasure of telling you that—”

  “Then would you please get off the line?” said Matt, banging down the phone. “Nutter,” he said to the children. “Celebrity hunter.”

  “Are you a celeb-rity?” asked Stephen, handling the word with care.

  “Minor-league celebrity of a local kind. I appear on television, that’s why.”

  Matt thought that from that point on the only way forward was up, and gently upward it duly went, with the occasional hiccup. At least fifty percent of the later calls did deal with squatters. He took down details of squats inHeadingley, Kirkstall, Bramhope, Pudsey, and Cookridge, with highly conjectural dates and any other details that the caller could remember. All these could conceivably be checked against police records. He was not convinced that if the couple somehow or other lost their baby in a way that made them unwilling to contact the police, they would have stayed on in Leeds, simply moving to another squat.

  Stephen was beginning to get restless, and the other two to get positively bored, when something closer to gold was struck.

  “Sorry it’s taken me so long to get through,” said another elderly female voice, very down-to-earth sounding, “but I’ve tried twice before and you were engaged, and I’m minding the grandchildren—”

  “Yes—you are?”

  “Edwina Bartlett. I was brought up in Millais Terrace, and I was still at home in 1969. I think that’s the street you’re after. There was a pair of hippies with a baby took over the house two down from us—it would be number fourteen.”

  “That’s very helpful. Have you any more information?”

  “Not much. It was a rather larger house than the rest in that street, and it had been up for sale for quite a while because the neighborhood wasn’t in its favor. They were there for some months, and then suddenly they were gone—overnight, it was, but that’s usual, isn’t it? I suppose that’s what squatters generally do, disappear into the night.”

  “You didn’t talk to them, get to know them?” “Not on your life! Me mam would have been down on me like a ton of bricks. How old are you, Mr. Harper?”

  “Coming up to forty.”

  “I can give you ten years or so. I can tell you, children and adolescents were not encouraged to talk to hippie squatters in 1969. In fact, me mam was the holy terror of Millais Terrace.”

  “You’ve not followed in her footsteps?”

  A fruity laugh came down the line.

  “Not on your life. Nor my daughters either. When I was eighteen I got pregnant, and me mam and I didn’t exchange so much as a word for more than twenty years.”

  That, at any rate, was concrete information, and pointed the way to further investigation. The children, however, were unimpressed. Their restlessness was becoming distracting, and they signaled their boredom by saying things like “You haven’t got much ” or “I don’t see what use that is.” It was nearly half past nine, and Matt was just putting together his papers when the phone rang again.

  “Mr. Harper? I’m glad I’ve caught you. I’m not on the phone, you see, and I delayed ringing till I was on the way to the club.”

  “I’m still here, Mr.—”

  “Welland. Bill Welland. I used to live in Millais Terrace.”

  “Ah—Millais Terrace!”

  “Has someone got in first?” He sounded downcast.

  “Someone’s just been on, mentioning it. A Mrs. Bartlett.”


  “Would that be Edwina? Edwina Smithy as was—lived just up the road from us. Her mother could have taught Mrs. Thatcher a thing or two about intimidation. We lived—the wife and I, that is—at number sixteen, just next door to the hippie couple you’re interested in.”

  “Ah, really!” said Matt encouragingly. “Mrs. Bartlett said she’d never been allowed to talk to them.”

  “Well, she wouldn’t have been. It wasn’t just her battleaxof a mother: working-class folk didn’t take kindly to that kind of thing back in the sixties. Squatters did no work, and sponged off those who did, that was the general feeling. But we talked to them, the wife and I. Went in there now and then, even smoked pot with them. Still do that, if I get a chance.”

  “Then you can tell me who they were.”

  “Aye, I can. Dougie and Sandra, they were called. I’ve been straining my brain to remember the surname, but for the life of me I can’t. It’ll come back. If you’ll give me a number to ring of an evening, I’ll call you when it does.”

  “Thank you. It’s Leeds 2574945.”

  “Right you are. Of course, we never kept in touch because they were gone overnight. But we got on well. We loved little Bella—we were newlywed, and hadn’t had any of our own, then, though Milly—my late wife—was desperate to have them. So little Bella was a star in our eyes, and we were fond of Sandra too, though she was two sandwiches short of a picnic.”

  “Really? This is news.”

  There was a hemming and hawing at the other end as Bill Welland dithered as to how best to put it.

  “Not quite all there—know what I mean? A bit simple. Had no thoughts of her own. If Dougie said they were against marriage, she said they were against marriage. If Dougie said the world was made of blue cheese, it was Gorgonzola for her too. But she was sweet with it, a lovely mother, and she’d do anything for you if it was in her capacity. If it was something beyond her she’d just say no, she couldn’t, and that would be the end of it. She knew she wasn’t quite like other people.”