The Bones in the Attic

by Robert Barnard

  “I could try, Mr. Harper. May be we could drive around all those little streets slowly. Something might come back.”

  Matt repressed the remark that Ben could drive around those little streets on his own. He knew perfectly well the man was trading his knowledge for insider football chat.

  “That would be fine,” he said. “I’m laid up at the moment with a recurrence of an old injury. Doesn’t usually last more than two or three days. What about early Saturday evening?”

  “Couldn’t suit me better.”

  And so it was fixed up. Matt relaxed, slept pleasantly, and cosseted his painful foot and ankle. The children cooked him a meal (though Isabella announced that cooking was “boring”) and waited on him when they remembered. Their new friends from down the hill and the Quinton boy from along the lane called on them in the evening, and the house resounded with a terrible din that Matt rather liked. It reminded him of football crowds. He whiled away time, without consciously deciding to, by entertaining in his mind his impressions and memories of the Houghton Avenue children. Peter Basnett, lively but responsible—a carer in the older sense, who had been driven for a time into moroseness after the baby’s death, but who, to judge by his letters, had come through that now. Marjorie, who must have been one of the leaders in the hiding of the body, also a carer, who had fled her memories by making an early move out of the area. Pathetic Caroline, whose memories drove her further—into madness, to the margins of society. Rory Pemberton, the nonbelonger, the never-accepted, who embraced drink as his only friend. Colin Mather, apparently confident and decisive, whose parents’ endeavors to educate him about the dangers of drugs had, as so often, precisely the opposite effect to the intended one. Most pathetic of all, Eddie Armitage, who never came to terms with the baby’s death, perhaps because he never really knew who he was. Then there was Sophie Basnett, his opposite: pretty, sexy, effective in getting what she wanted—he’d never heard talk of her being scarred.

  And then the ambiguous figure of Lily Marsden—the willing outsider, the promoter of unease, the propagandist of unacceptable notions, that she sowed among themlike poison weeds. Was his predominant impression of her one of hardness, or unhappiness?

  Sooner than he expected, the foot showed cheering signs of improvement. Matt phoned Radio Leeds and told them he would definitely be in the next day. In midafternoon he took the two hefty sticks he had used on previous recurrences of the ankle problem and took himself out the back door. Slowly he made it to the back gate, then began an exploratory walk along the lane. He found Hester Goldblatt in her garden, and received meekly a mini-lecture from her on new varieties of roses. He had no intention of planting roses in his garden, having a vague notion they were a major cause of premature aging. Plants that flourished with minimal care and attention were his aim. Probably he’d land up with a garden of bay trees.

  Moving away he heard a door opening farther down the lane. Then he heard a voice he thought he recognized.

  “It was really good of you to see me like this, on your dad’s day off.”

  Similar but different. Was that because last time it had been drunk?

  “No problem, Rory old sport.” Guess immediately confirmed. The second voice was that of Jason Morley-Coombs, and it immediately was lowered, but not so far that Matt could not distinguish the words in their assumed upper-class twang. “As I say, Dad’s advice would be the same as mine: go on playing it with a straight bat as far as the police are concerned. But when it comes to the push, you’ve no reason to go on shielding that one person, particularly as she’s nothing to you.”

  “No . . . I wish I knew who was behind it all.”

  “Does it matter? Probably no one who means anything to you either.”

  “Probably not. . . . I’m wondering whether Peter Pennymore knows. . . .”

  “I wouldn’t think of contacting him if I were you. The less you know, the less the police can get out of you.”

  “Right . . . Right . . .”

  Rory Pemberton sounded irresolute, but also sounded as if he had nothing more to offer on the subject, so Matt turned and hobbled back to his gate. Standing just inside his back garden he watched as the man came out of Dell View’s gate and strode to his car. The confident steps seemed assumed, a pose, but Matt noticed that they were at least steady, and not the walk of a drunken man.

  That evening Matt had a sick visit from Charlie Peace, with Felicity and Carola. The baby made Stephen’s day, and even Isabella, who said, “Babies! Yuck!” when she saw them coming up the front path, was after half an hour glancing with surreptitious fascination at Carola’s perfectly ordinary baby motions. Charlie and Matt took advantage of the general absorption in her to swap a few words on developments.

  “Peter Pennymore? So you’re assuming that’s Peter Basnett?”

  “Don’t come the cautious detective with me,” said Matt sharply. “I’m not assuming anything. But he’s obviously someone who’s very much in the know about the baby business.”

  “Do you want me to get on to it?”

  “May be, eventually. But we’ve got all the telephone directories for the region ‘Look North’ covers at work. Leave it with me for the moment. I’ve got a duty Saturdaytomorrow, but if anything emerges from my drive around the Raynville Road streets tomorrow night, I might need your help on that.”

  The drive the next evening threatened to be a trip down memory lane in the wrong sense. Ben Worsnip had no sooner got Matt into his car than he began banging on about goals and confrontations and yellow cards and everything he remembered about Bradford City ten years previous (which wasn’t all that accurate, because naturally he had been a Leeds United supporter). Matt tactfully put a stop to it by suggesting that they concentrate on the matter in hand until they’d been round the streets in the hope of a house, or one or two houses, ringing bells in Ben Worsnip’s brain. After that they’d find a pub, settle down over a pint, and talk football. Ben was delighted, but even then it took some time before his brain began to wean itself off the excitement of being sat in a car with a real footballer. With gentle encouragement from Matt, however, he slowly recovered his mental processes back to the old days and the other excitement of salacious childish gossip. Gradually the lure of the past began to get a grip.

  “That’s my old home. Nothing much, but it was quite a happy one. My mother’s in sheltered accommodation now. I know it wasn’t in my street that Lily Marsden went visiting, but I’m just trying to get my bearings. . . . That was Harry Sugden’s house. I was back and forth between Lansdowne Avenue and Grenville Grove, where we lived for most of my teenage years. And now this is where Edwina Smithy lived—with her horrible mum.”

  “I’ve talked to her. She’s Edwina Bartlett now.” “Have you? What did she know about?”

  “Keep driving. You might remember yourself.”

  “Let’s see: we’re in Millais Terrace. Ah, this big house. Squatters. A drippy pair with—oh, yes, a baby. It’s not . . . ?”

  “Keep your mind on the matter in hand.”

  “Grenville Street. I don’t have any memories of this one, but that’s perhaps because none of my mates lived here.”

  “My auntie Hettie did, at number twelve. Did you know her?”

  “I don’t think I had the pleasure . . . Lansdowne Rise. Hmm. Don’t think it was here.” He drove slowly on. Matt, though, kept his eye on the mirror, and he saw the door of number 8 open and the figure of Lily Fitch emerge from the front door, coated and handbagged, and clip-clop down the street assertively in their wake. He was glad when they turned off into Raynville Road. She aroused in him feelings that were partly irritation and partly—may be a hangover from his childhood—fear, unease, distaste. “Now we’re getting closer to the canal. The houses here were a bit posher than ours were, thirty years ago . . . Leighton Terrace . . .”

  He pulled the car up. Matt saw a two-sided street of Victorian two-story houses, most of them with attic conversions. Possibly these days the attic rooms
were let to students from the Leeds Metropolitan University—the old polytechnic in new (and lucratively confusing to foreigners) guise. Matt could see that the rooms would be higher and larger than in the Victorian house six streets away where his auntie had lived. In the sixties the social gradations would have been of greater importance than they were today.

  “Let’s get out,” said Ben.

  They got out, Matt still walking rather gingerly. Benimmediately made for the higher corner, away from the Raynville Road. He looked around him with a growing excitement.

  “I’d bet my bottom dollar we used to stand here, waiting and watching. In sight of the school, see, but that didn’t bother us because it was summer holidays. We stood on this side, because the house was on the other side. . . . That one!”

  He pointed to a house halfway down that section of Leighton Terrace. Matt walked slowly down to it.

  The house seemed to have little to mark it off from its neighbors, beyond the number 8 on the front door. It was a heavy old door, probably the original one. There was a little bay to its right, with dormer windows, and before the front door was a solitary substantial step. Matt looked round inquiringly at Ben Worsnip.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Ben pointed upward. On the lintel above the door there was an old stone flower container, a long oblong the length of the lintel itself. It was now profuse only in prickly weeds and dandelions.

  “It had geraniums then. It was the only house that had flowers over the door. I’m as sure as I can be that it’s here that Lily used to come.”

  He looked at Matt expectantly, like a puppy that has retrieved a stick and expects a reward. So they got into the car, drove to Matt’s auntie’s old pub, the Unicorn, and sat for an hour or more discussing Lineker and Robson and John Barnes, and how the kind of football played in that millennium year differed from the kind played ten yearsbefore, and was light-years away from the sort that had been in vogue when England won the World Cup in 1966. Matt had to restrain himself from expressing the view that British footballers earned a ridiculous amount of money for playing pretty poor football. It would sound like sour grapes.

  Next day Matt rang Charlie from work and gave him the address: 8 Leighton Terrace. Within twenty minutes Charlie rang back with the information: in 1969 the house had been owned by Mr. Cuthbert Farson.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Guardian Angels

  When Charlie told Matt the name of the owner of 8 Leighton Terrace he said too that he was off to Halifax on a routine police matter but was hoping to squeeze in something that connected with the dead baby. If he got anything of interest he’d try to drop in on the way back, or if not call him later in the evening.Between bulletins and his own radio show Matt settled down with Television North’s collection of telephone directories. He first tried the reasonably local ones—Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Harrogate. Then he went a bit farther afield: Doncaster, Sheffield, York. Then he tried Nottingham. He’d assumed that Charlie Peace was right when he guessed that the second anonymous letter being posted in Nottingham did not mean that the sender lived there. But Charlie was wrong—at least potentially so. There was a P. Pennymore, and an address: The Cottage, Hurst Green, Belling Joyce. He looked it up in his AA map and found it was a village south of Nottingham. He got hiscolleague Phil Bletchley to ring the number, telling him to use his bloody imagination if it was answered, but though Matt sat close to hear the voice, the rings went on and on.

  He was pondering after the midafternoon bulletin what to do next, whether he wanted to take off as soon as he had a spare day and see if this was indeed Peter Basnett, when he had a call from reception that Charlie Peace was there to see him. He went down and fetched him, and sat him in an easy chair opposite his desk.

  “I mustn’t get comfortable,” said Charlie. “This is all borrowed time. I remembered the other day what you told me about the Armitages worshiping at the Methodist Church in Bramley Town Street, then moving away. The Methodists aren’t exactly flourishing these days—I know that because my mum is a Methodist, among other religions. I thought it might be worthwhile ringing around all the obvious towns in the area with a Methodist presence. I struck lucky in Halifax. The family worshiped in Southowram for years, getting smaller and smaller.”

  “The congregation, you mean?”

  “No, the family. There was a son, and he committed suicide many years ago, so I knew it was the same lot. Now there’s just the mother, and she’s in a hospice with cancer. When I got this routine matter at police headquarters in Halifax, I got it out of the way quickly and used the time afterward to go along to this hospice, which was on the road to Hebden Bridge, and speak to her.”

  “Brilliant!” said Matt, rather too cheerfully. “Was she compos mentis?”

  “Oh, yes. But in a lot of pain. She was just lying there, trying to cope. The sister said the effects of the last painkiller were wearing off.”

  “Poor old thing,” said Matt, rather more appropriately.

  “Yes. But she talked. She’d lost everybody close to her—been alone for quite a while, and really I don’t think it was distressing for her, talking about her son. I think she thought of herself as about to join him.”

  “That’s what religion does for you.”

  “Yes. Nice if you can believe it. Anyway, she talked, like your Mrs. Carpenter, about the changes that came over the children that summer. . . .”

  “I think we were the first to realize it,” said May Armitage, gazing up at the strong but sympathetic black face. “Eddie was such an open boy. He never quite found himself, even before that summer. Like he was somehow unfinished, a pot that was still on the wheel. Of course he was only a child, but he was more unsure of himself than most children. So we were watching him, waiting for him to find out who he was, what he wanted to make of his life. When he changed we saw it at once.”“Did you try to talk to him about it?” Charlie asked.

  “Of course!” said May Armitage, with a slight access of force in her weak voice. “Over and over. He said he wasn’t feeling well, but the doctor couldn’t find anything the matter. He didn’t want to go around with the other children anymore—in fact, the group seemed to have broken up. Eventually we moved, thinking that might help. There was always a fish-and-chip shop up for sale somewhere. First we went to the other side of Bramley, then to Halifax. We thought a change of company would do him good, but Eddie was never a child who made friends easily.”

  “So it made things worse rather than better?”

  “It did. Even before the move he’d got really troubled—youknow, in his mind. He’d had to go away for a time. It nearly broke us. But it wasn’t just us, you know. By the time we moved other parents were noticing changes in their children. A lot of them moved too. I don’t know that it did any good.”

  “I know the Carpenters had trouble with Caroline for many years,” said Charlie.

  “Did they? Oh, poor people.”

  “I suppose it affected his schoolwork?”

  “Of course. Eddie was never brilliant, but he did have a brain. The school said he had potential. That was all lost. His whole life fell apart. We could have used him in the chippie, but we thought it would be better if he cut himself loose from us. He went to work for Morrison’s supermarket, and we hoped he might put in for trainee manager. That was just us not facing up to things, I think. He swept the floors and stacked the shelves and rounded up trolleys in the car park and that was it. He had no thought of aiming higher.”

  “He never had a girlfriend?”

  “Oh, nothing like that. No friend of any kind. Never went with the other lads to films or football or anything. He had no life. . . .” She grimaced with pain, and Charlie felt it was not her cancer alone that caused it. “You’ll want to know about— you know. ” Charlie nodded. “I came home on a Saturday afternoon after we closed, and there he was hanging from the stair rail. He’d been dead
for several hours. Please, can we not talk any more, not about that. ”

  Charlie waited a minute until she was calmer, then leaned over her.

  “He sounds a lovely boy, Eddie. That’s the impression we’ve got. I’d have thought he’d have left you a message.”

  She looked into his eyes.

  “There was a note on an old school pad in his bedroom. It said: ‘Mum, if there’s ever any trouble, tell them it was an accident.’ The police didn’t think it had anything to do with his suicide, so it never came up at the inquest.”

  Charlie nodded, squeezed her hand, and left.

  “It had to do with his suicide,” said Matt decidedly. “And still more to do with the baby’s death.”“Sure,” said Charlie. “The police knew nothing about that then, remember.”

  “I’m not criticizing them. I expect they thought it was a pathetic attempt by a mentally unbalanced young man to hide the fact of his suicide. But that phrase ‘if there’s ever any trouble’ is a giveaway that he’s not talking about his suicide. He’s practically looking ahead to what’s actually happened: the discovery of the baby’s remains.”

  “Looks like it,” agreed Charlie. “But then, what weight can we place on the second part?”

  “Not much,” said Matt reluctantly. “He’s certainly not saying outright it was an accident.”

  “Why cover up an accident anyway?”

  “Oh, I think we could make a guess at that,” said Matt, who had thought about the situation a lot more than Charlie, had it with him day and night. “Because they’d taken the baby, or one of them had, or some of them in collusion had. Once that happened the baby’s death was serious, however it died.”

  “Fair enough,” admitted Charlie, thinking it through. “And that is probably why they seem to have taken some kind of collective vow of silence after the death—or may be just some mutual support scheme that makesthem clam up, or only talk about people who are dead and whom they can’t harm.”