The Bones in the Attic

by Robert Barnard

  “Was there anything else?”

  Carl Farson shook his head regretfully. “Lots. Too much to want to remember. The sort of thing I’ve just mentioned she might have hinted at to Dad and me: playing with us, teasing us, apparently just wanting to shock. She did shock, but that kind of thing seemed so remote by the 1970s, so much a part of the terrible past, that it seemed to have nothing to do with our everyday lives. But I heard her say to Lily: ‘The governing impulse of all creatures is to control. You see that in animals, you see it in humans: in the schoolroom, in the workplace, the family. I control this family, poor little victory though that is. The impulse to control takes many forms. Its ultimate expression is what people call murder: the assertion of authority by the canceling out of another existence—one that threatens or offends. Because it’s the ultimate expression of the most basic impulse, it is also the ultimate thrill, and the ultimate satisfaction.’”

  Matt and Farson both sat for a moment lost in thought.

  “Yet she never did anything about the body,” at last Matt said.

  “Nesta wasn’t in a position to do anything herself.”

  “But she could get Lily to do it, on one of her visits.”

  “Not easy, with Dad retired by then and usually pottering around the house or the garden. How do you justify having sent your visitor up to a virtually empty attic if Dad was to find Lily coming down the stepladder? Not easy to think of an excuse.”

  “True. Yet I suppose it was Nesta who persuaded your father to buy the house.”

  “Oh, yes. She put up half the money herself, from the money she got as compensation for her terrible injury. If she were still alive she’d get the whole house when Dad dies and I’d have the rest—the cash. Oh, she nagged him into it: he’d no wish to have four bedrooms, a large dining room, that kind of thing, particularly at his age. She said it was a better house for a disabled person—no steps at the back, and she could take over the ground floor for herself, apart from the kitchen, and leave the upstairs to Dad. Dad wasn’t at all keen, but what Nesta wanted, Nesta got. She had, as she said, control over the family. And the house was no sooner bought than she was offered the job in Milton Keynes—a lectureship as it was then. It was genuinely out of the blue, I’m quite sure about that, but once she got over the surprise she was over the moon. Accepted like a shot and never looked back. In the event, having just moved, Dad enjoyed the garden, perhaps enjoyed being on his own, and didn’t care a bean about the house. He didn’t even bother to furnish some of it, and never did any redecoration. He was a typical retired person: only happywhen he was pottering about weeding and mowing and tying things up.”

  “I begin to understand about the body,” said Matt. “She didn’t need to do anything about it. She was safe for the rest of her life.”

  “Yes. . . . And there’s another thing,” her brother said. “I think it appealed to her sense of danger. She was an active woman, imprisoned in a damaged body. She desperately needed excitement—the sort of thing that other people get from sex, affairs, travel, driving fast—whatever. Her excitement was up there in the attic.”

  “A rather safe kind of excitement,” commented Matt. “In her lifetime the house couldn’t be sold.”

  “Perhaps—I don’t know—perhaps she wanted it known, after her death.”

  Matt remembered Charlie’s remark about Harold Shipman: in the end serial killing was not enough. He needed to be acknowledged as one of the world’s most successful mass murderers.

  There seemed to be nothing more to be said, so Matt got up, and extended his hand to Carl Farson.

  “I’m grateful to you,” he said. “It can’t have been easy.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Nesta is dead. No great bravery called for. What I would have done if she had still been alive, I don’t know.”

  “Referred me to her, I suppose,” said Matt. “She doesn’t sound the sort of person to welcome anyone acting as her spokesman.”

  “No, she wasn’t . . . Do you know what she was when she died?”

  “What she was?”

  “Her title in the Open University. It was professor ofmoral philosophy. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Makes you hope she didn’t influence a whole generation of students who took her courses. God help us if she did!”

  Later that evening, after a half hour’s talk on the phone with Matt, Charlie Peace sat down over a late-night coffee and said to Felicity, “Looks as if Matt has identified the influence behind those Houghton Avenue children.”And he told her about Nesta Farson, her life and ideas, and the sense he got of her single-minded perverseness.

  “Odd,” said Felicity when he had finished. “It is all a bit like Dombey and Son. ”

  “Why Dombey ?”

  “It turned out to be a daughter after all. And the man who wasn’t there turned out to be a woman.”

  “Anyway, that seems to wrap up the case. She’s dead; there’s no way we can prove any intention to kill or harm at this late stage, so Lily Fitch is in the clear. All neatly wrapped up, though Matt will be upset, and I’m not happy.”

  “The little bones crying out for justice?”

  “Something like that. I don’t have your turn of phrase, but it’s something I feel in my bones, my blood. Put unromantically, it’s unfinished business.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Aftermath

  But there were still one or two pieces missing from the jigsaw.The high-ups in the West Yorkshire police reacted to Charlie’s report in the way he expected them to: there was no possibility of securing a conviction, no reason to think a major crime had been committed, so no further action would be taken. Charlie, bringing the news to Matt, said that there was no way he could quarrel with that decision: there was no conclusive evidence that the bones were those of little Bella, and no certainty about how the child had met its death. End of story.

  Matt, having mulled over the decision for a few days, decided to ring Peter Basnett and Marjie Humbleton with the news. He knew there was more to be got from that quarter, and he hoped this might be the means of getting it. In the event it was Marjie who was in.

  “Basically the case is shelved, and that means permanently,” he said, after the initial salutations and courtesies.“There’s really no chance at this date of getting new evidence of the sort that would persuade the Crown Prosecution Service that it was worth bringing a case—you probably know they take some persuading, even in cases that don’t have this difficulty about the length of time since the offense and so on. So that’s it, really. . . .”

  “You’re disappointed?” Marjie asked.

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “I’m not. Oh, not for any tenderness toward Lily—it’s more than twenty-five years since I’ve seen her, and she may be a quite different person to the one I knew, but somehow I don’t think any new Lily is likely to be my type. It’s just that it’s such a long time ago, everyone has gone on—scarred, sometimes irreparably, but . . . Oh dear: I’m afraid in essence I feel what we made, through our decision, is such a mess that a trial would leave it still more of one, not less of one.”

  “At any rate Lily is now in the clear over it. Does that make it any easier for you?”

  There was silence at the other end.

  “I’m not sure I get your meaning.”

  “I got a strong impression that you and Peter were holding back on something when we talked at Belling Joyce. If Lily is now in no danger of prosecution, I’m just wondering if that alters matters for you.”

  Silence again.

  “Perhaps . . . The thing we held back on could probably never have been part of any case, but . . . oh, it’s the thing that shocked us most, made us do what we did when the child died. And perhaps it explains—even better than what we told you—what happened to poor Eddie Armitage.”

  “Tell me. I promise it will go no further.”

  This time the silence was to get her words into their best order.

  “We told you about the scu
ffle, when Eddie tried to grab the baby. We—Peter and I—were several feet away, and that’s all it was to us: a scuffle. But when the poor little girl lay dead on the stone floor of the balustrade and we’d all run up to stand beside and over it, Eddie turned on Lily, panting and sobbing: ‘You threw her down,’ he said, crying, sobbing. ‘You’d got her back from me and you threw her down. I could see your face. It was horrible. You were smiling. You’re evil!’”

  “Oh God,” said Matt. “I see why you held it back.”

  “So then we knew, you see, what we’d spawned, as a group. Not that we’d initiated it or nurtured it, but that we’d let it grow up among us. Eddie looked around at all of us. Rory Pemberton said, ‘You’re making it up,’ but nobody believed him. Rory had been close to the scuffle, and he had tried to intervene. He’d been the one who was most sympathetic to Lily’s ideas, or the ideas that had been fed to her. I don’t know if you can understand this, but it was the fact that we knew Lily was guilty that made us determined to cover the whole thing up.”

  “I see,” said Matt, “or think I dimly do. I suppose if you’d thought she was innocent you might have trusted to the justice system.”

  “Yes—we might. But knowing she was guilty, not just of kidnapping but of killing the poor little thing, meant we couldn’t. It was partly that we had to protect her, little though we liked her, but partly too that we had to protect ourselves. We felt that we were all involved. Peter and I were the obvious ones to do something, but we just shrugged it off: we’d heard the talk, we’d rubbished it andridiculed it, but we’d done nothing. Not gone to her parents, not gone to our own. And some of us—Rory, Colin—were a bit more involved, more sympathetic. And so we made the pact, and so we kept it, until now. I don’t say we were wise, I don’t say we would have done it if we’d been a bit older, I certainly don’t say it was better that we did it, but that’s why we concealed the evidence.”

  Matt was still digesting this when Marjie spoke again.

  “We did it. We were probably wrong, and the consequences—just the ones we know about—were terrible. But—that awful phrase!—we meant well.”

  “I suppose so,” said Matt carefully. “But I still have the impression of a lot of lives that went wrong, just because of that decision.”

  “Not because of the decision,” said Marjie, with steel in her voice. “Our lives went wrong the moment we saw that little body lying on the stone. . . . Matt?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think we should keep hold of our memories of the good times. Just the memories. Good-bye, Matt.”

  And before he could say anything he heard the click of the phone being put down at the other end. But if he’d been quicker, what could he have said? His bones told him that Marjie was right. Among the other, more important things that that frail, tiny body had destroyed was any possible relationship among the three of them. The burden of their concealments spoiled any possibility of their coming together in any sort of unshadowed way. He honored both Peter and Marjie, but he felt he had heard the last of them, and he didn’t protest.

  By pure coincidence Matt met up with Lily Fitch again only a few days after his talk with Marjie. He had beeninterviewing a resident of an old people’s home about Bramley in the days before Town Street had been vandalized by the local council. On his way home he popped into the Bramley Shopping Center to pick up some steak for a cozy meal for two with Aileen—the children being off to the swimming pool with friends. It was as he was heading for the meat section that he saw Lily coming toward him, pushing a trolley laden with sliced bread and assorted bottles.

  She saw him a second later. She was by then only a few feet away. A cunning little smile spread over her narrow lips, and Matt could have sworn she was going to ask some pert question about the dead baby or comment on the lack of progress in the investigation. But the habit of a lifetime reasserted itself, and she passed him, still smiling, but silent. Immensely self-satisfied, but silent.

  Matt slowed down, grabbed some steak, and tried to plot her progress. He saw her pass between stacks, and from a distance he could swear the smile was still on her face. When he saw her piling her trolleyload onto the checkout counter, it was still there.

  He had obviously made Lily Fitch’s day.

  It was several weeks after this that Matt received a communication that surprised him because he had forgotten entirely his conversation with the genealogically inclined Mr. Woof of Morley. Mr. Woof himself, it was clear, had let the matter slip from his mind for a long time until, chancing to have business in his attic, he had remembered Matt’s interest in his research among the various twigs and branches of the Woofs. He had retrieved his plastic bag of notebooks and got Matt’s address from the pad by the telephone.

  Anyway, he wrote, after profuse apologies,

  . . . in all my papers there’s only one Douglas Woof, so if he’s not your man then I’m afraid you’re up against a blank wall. He is the son of people who I think may have been distant cousins of my parents—their birthdates are both in the 1920s, so it’s perfectly possible that one or both of them is still alive: Richard and Gladys Woof, of Grantham. They had two children, one of them a son, Douglas, and he was born in 1945. Good luck in your search.

  Work next day was distinctly interesting. The possibility that he might be promoted to share the presenter’s job on “Look North” had firmed up and become a matter of general discussion. He found the prospect enticing, both for the chance to make changes to a stale and overcoy format, but also of course from the money point of view. Not least of his causes for satisfaction was that the moment the possibility of his promotion spread round the BBC North complex, Liza Pomfret began spitting blood. She had never forgiven him for being interviewed on developments in the case on “Look North” rather than her own show. Her list of the unforgiven was longer than Pooh-Bah’s list of victims. He heard her on the phone during the day using all her wiles (mostly bullying and abuse) to get a transfer back to London and the big time. It made sense. It was the only place she did feel at home in, and it was full of like-minded people she could make unhappy.

  Her holiday program had been shown, including a clip of the young reporter in the door of the helicopter, carryingon the shot to within a fraction of a second before the chopper decapitated him. O brave new world, that has such gritty television journalism in it!

  But he found time, in among his pleasanter preoccupations, to look in the Lincolnshire telephone directories, where he found a Woof, G., living in Grantham. Going into surrounding towns he lighted on a Woof, D., in a Nottingham directory, resident in Retford. That night he decided to approach Dougie, if that were he, indirectly. He had always been an indirect footballer, relying on cunning quite as much as speed and accuracy. He felt he should know a little more before he set up any sort of meeting. So the next day at work he dialed the Grantham number.

  “Nine-six-three-five-seven-four-four,” said an elderly voice. Didn’t bother with the area code, Matt thought, because almost all her callers were local.

  “Hello, is that Mrs. Woof?”

  “It is. Who’s calling?”

  “My name is Freddie Morton,” said Matt, thinking to limit the number of lies that could later be laid to his account. “Excuse me ringing you out of the blue, but I have a feeling I used to know your son.”

  “Oh?” An element of reserve entered her voice.

  “Could you tell me, if I’m not being intrusive, whether you are the mother of Dougie Woof?”

  “He never likes being called Dougie these days,” said the voice with a touch of sharpness. “It’s always Douglas.”

  “Most people called him Dougie at school, I seem to remember,” said Matt, chancing his arm. The voice unfroze a little. Knowing Dougie at school, Matt guessed, was more acceptable than knowing him in the years immediately after school.

  “Oh, you knew him at school? Yes, they did, but I never liked it, and it doesn’t do now. If you’re an accountant you can’t do with a nam
e that sounds rather comic, can you?”

  “No, of course you can’t. So Doug—Douglas is an accountant, is he? I seem to remember he was always good with figures.”

  “Oh, he was, ” said the voice, pride entering into it for the first time. “Mathematics was always his very best subject—a top mark in his GCE. He could have gone to university but—”

  “Oh, I chose not to go to university myself,” said Matt, with some truth. At the age of sixteen his world had been the world of football, and he had left education behind.

  “I suppose at that age,” said the voice vaguely, “and at that time, when the world seemed to go mad, it’s forgivable to go a little wild, do odd things. . . . Anyway, that’s all in the past. Douglas is very well settled now, has got a lovely house in Retford, lovely family, and is doing so well in his job. Independent, you know, and lots of clients. What was it you wanted him for?”

  “Oh, it was about another school friend I think he may have kept in touch with.”

  They chattered on for a minute or two, and then rang off. Matt was so confident he had now identified his man that he almost forgot to ask for his telephone number. It was the number he had already, and he felt sure that he had got him. All that remained was to consider how to approach the father of the dead Bella.

  He devoted a great deal of thought to that, and decided that the only way he had any chance of getting anything personal out of Doug was face-to-face. That being so, he had to abandon the old-schoolfellow lie and come upwith something that couldn’t be contradicted by their respective appearances—all of seventeen years between them, he calculated. He consulted the Nottingham directory again, saw that Douglas Woof had a business as well as a home address, and rang it.