Bones In the River

by Zoe Sharp

Queenie managed to hold herself together until she reached the vardo and climbed stiffly inside. Bartley was with her, his arm apparently loose around her shoulders.

  But she could feel him trembling, all the same.

  And once they were inside and the doors were closed behind them, she felt her legs go from under her. Bartley scooped her up and laid her onto the bunk, boots and all, despite her half-hearted protests.

  “Now then, darlin’, calm yourself,” he said, as though gentling a horse. “You’ve had quite the shock.”

  “Where’s Sky?”

  “It’s OK, Nell’s taken her.”

  Queenie pushed his hands away but when he let go she gripped his sleeve. “How do you know it’s…him?”

  He stilled his fussing and met her gaze, holding it for a long time. As if he was reckoning how she’d take a piece of news he knew she wouldn’t want to hear. At last, he took in a deep draught of air, let it out again. And something of the man himself seemed to go with it.

  “Because of where they found him,” he said simply.

  “Because of where they…?” Queenie started to echo. But then her brain caught up with her mouth and the full weight of what he’d said—of what he’d admitted to—settled onto her, pressing down on her chest until she could hardly fill her lungs. She sat up, heard something break inside her head that might have been her very soul. She whispered, “Oh, Bartley…”

  “No.” He took a step back, raised both palms to ward off her grief, her pain. Her accusation. “I didn’t kill him, Queenie. I swear to you by all that’s holy, we only meant to—”

  “‘We’?”

  He closed his lips on too much said. She snatched at his hand, held tight when he would have pulled free of her.

  “‘We’?” she queried again, quieter this time. She saw shame in his eyes, something small and base, and she knew. “You and Vano.”

  He started on a denial, she saw it plain in his face. But he recognised a lost cause when it was right in front of him. His shoulders slumped a little and he nodded. “Aye.”

  “So, scaring him wasn’t enough for the pair of you?” she said, her voice bitter. “A beating wasn’t enough?”

  He said nothing, folding in on himself with the guilt of it. A heavy burden, she thought, carried all these years…

  “When?” she asked roughly. “How long…?”

  He swallowed. She saw the convulsive bob of the Adam’s apple in his throat before he mumbled, “Eight years past.”

  “Eight years,” she repeated flatly. “Eight. Years? Eight years you’ve known what became of him. And you never told me. You never told me…”

  Her hand dropped away. She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them.

  Bartley stepped back, almost stumbled. “How could I?” he asked, the pain twisting his voice into something close to anger. “When could I? When would the time have been right to say to you, ‘oh, by the way, you want to know what we did—me and your brother…?’ You answer me that, hey—when? On our wedding day?”

  “No—”

  “Well then, that’s—”

  “Before then, Bartley. You should have told me well before then.”

  And if you had, there might have been no wedding.

  He nodded, as if she’d said the words out loud, and blew out a quick, derisive breath, sounding like the colt when he was up on his toes and ready for flight.

  “Vano, I can understand,” she said at last. “But you? What did you get from it?”

  He looked at her with disbelief. “Are yer blind, Queenie?” he demanded. “Only, he had the last laugh, didn’t he? Because I may have got you, but I never really got the whole of you, all this time, did I?”

  She stared at him, feeling the tears pool behind her eyes. A fierce pride had her willing them not to fall.

  “That we’ll never know,” she said. “Because you and my brother never gave me the chance to put him behind me.”

  She turned her head away, rested her cheek on her knees and closed her eyes.

  His hand touched her shoulder and she flinched.

  “Queenie, I—”

  “Go,” she said. “Leave me be.”

  She thought he’d argue. Maybe she even hoped he would. But his hand fell away. She heard his boots on the wooden floor, the latch of the doors opening, closing, and the shudder as he jumped down on the grass. Then nothing.

  Queenie wept.

  41

  The address Nick was looking for was on the outskirts of one of the little villages just south-west of Penrith. It was an area of pretty stone cottages and converted barns, with not a house number in sight. Property names, where they appeared at all, were on signage that was designed specifically, it seemed to him, to be virtually invisible from the road.

  He was getting used to that since he moved up to Cumbria.

  Eventually, after waylaying a couple walking two stout Labradors—who turned out to be tourists with less idea of local geography than he did—Nick asked the woman delivering the post. She pointed him to a house he’d driven past three times already because it bore a different name from the one he was looking for.

  “Oh yes,” the postie said cheerfully. “They changed it a few years back, I think.”

  Nick smiled wearily at her, left his car where it was and walked down the driveway indicated. There were two cars parked outside, which he took as a good sign of occupancy, and bed linen flapping gently on a line strung between two apple trees.

  He’d already worked his way through half the list of dormant phone owners emailed to him by the efficient Alex—the ones who lived in Cumbria, at any rate. He’d divided the others into the different force areas and sent them off to colleagues around the country with a plea for a speedy response. How effective that might prove was anybody’s guess.

  Some of the names in his own area he’d been able to cross-reference against the local authority property register. If they were still listed, he knew he could discount them. He very much doubted that the long-deceased Eden Man had kept paying his Council Tax all these years.

  Nick wasn’t entirely sure why he’d decided this particular name deserved a personal visit, though. Only that something about it set his Spidey sense tingling. It seemed to tick all the wrong kind of boxes but in the right kind of ways. Even down to the fact that the young man in question—Owen Liddell—had never been officially reported missing.

  And that in itself was suggestive.

  There didn’t appear to be a doorbell of any kind, but the rusted iron knocker made enough racket when he rapped it against the door to set off frenzied barking somewhere inside the house.

  “Oh joy—dogs,” he muttered. “I should have brought Grace…”

  The door opened at that moment to a woman who was perhaps in her early thirties. She was Asian—possibly of Indian or Pakistani descent, if Nick had to guess—and not quite what he was expecting at all. But, having learned his lesson from the phone call with Alex, he produced his warrant card and said in an entirely neutral tone, “Hello, I’m DC Nick Weston with Cumbria police, ma’am. I’m sorry to trouble you but I’m making enquiries about Owen Liddell. I understand he was living at this address?”

  The woman was clearly startled by his presence, both by sight of his official ID and mention of the man’s name. Nick felt his pulse rate step up, just a little, as adrenaline pushed into his system.

  The woman turned her head slightly, still keeping her eyes on Nick, and called, “Catherine! I think you better come.”

  She had a classless English accent and long bare legs below frayed cut-off denim jeans and a loose shirt.

  “Can’t you deal with it, Shanaya? I can’t really leave this right now.” The voice, also female, drifted from the far reaches of the property.

  “Not really,” Shanaya said, rolling her eyes at Nick. “It’s—”

  At that moment there was a terrific scream from the direction of the second woman. Nick charged past Shanaya into the house, s
houldering through the doorway off the square hall.

  He found himself in a long kitchen-diner with a huge island unit in the centre. A woman wearing an apron and brandishing a very large chef’s knife was chasing a pair of Irish Wolfhounds around the island, yelling. One of the Wolfhounds appeared to have an entire joint of meat clenched in its jaws.

  When Nick burst in, the dogs saw an escape route and sprinted for the doorway. The woman pointed the knife at Nick and roared, “Stop them!”

  More out of instinct than anything else, he succeeded in snagging a hand through the collar of the main culprit as it bounded for the gap. The jolt of it almost took his arm out at the shoulder but he managed to keep his grip and bring the dog up short. Just in time for Shanaya to arrive and cup both hands beneath its jaws with a firm command of, “Give!”

  The dog, realising it was outmanoeuvred, dropped its slightly chewed and spat-on prize, with great reluctance, into her hands.

  “Oh, well done, that man,” said the woman with the knife, rushing toward him. Nick let go of the dog’s collar and took a precautionary step back with both hands raised.

  “Catherine,” Shanaya protested. “For heaven’s sake put that thing down. You’re going to get the pair of us arrested. I’ll throw these two out into the garden. You…make a cup of tea or something.”

  “To hell with that,” Catherine said, dumping the knife in the Belfast sink. “I think I’m going to open a bottle.” She ran the tap, washed her hands and picked up a towel, giving Nick a shrewd gaze. Her voice held the faintest trace of a local accent, long since smoothed over. “So, apart from being slightly pushy but very good at dog-catching, who are you?”

  “DC Nick Weston, Cumbria police,” Nick said again. “I’m here about Owen Liddell.”

  The woman froze, just for a second or two, her eyes losing focus. Then she threw the towel onto the worktop and said, “That settles it—I’m definitely opening a bottle.”

  “So, what’s all this about Owen?”

  It was Shanaya who put the question. Nick frowned, was about to pick his way into the conversation with as much delicacy as he could manage, when Catherine reached over to squeeze the other woman’s hand.

  “Whatever you would say to me, you can say to Shanaya as well,” Catherine said. “We’ve been married for two years, and were civved for another seven before that.”

  Now he saw them together, he saw the tell-tale lines beginning at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and realised Catherine was the older of the two by half-a-dozen years. Her hair was a glossy brown with a few hints of grey in her parting, which he knew Lisa would have tutted over. Both were dressed with casual trendiness.

  The two women were sitting side-by-side on the high-backed sofa in the sitting room. The fireplace was filled with dried flowers and the French windows were open onto a part of the garden that was not accessible to the thieving Wolfhounds—or so Nick hoped. He sat across from them in a wingback chair, his notebook open on his knee. The paint scheme in the room was bright—sunshine yellow walls and sage green woodwork. The contrast between the décor and the very old-fashioned furniture was marked.

  “First of all, if I may, what’s your relationship to Owen Liddell?” He glanced from one to the other.

  “He’s my brother,” Catherine said. “Although I haven’t seen him since before our parents died.” She gave a ghosted smile. “We were not exactly what you’d call a close-knit family.”

  “I understand he hasn’t been seen for around ten years, would that be correct?”

  “I… Yes,” she said, more cautiously now.

  “But nobody ever reported him missing?”

  “As I said, we were not a close-knit family.” Any trace of humour about her had vanished. “Look, what’s this about?”

  “Oh.” Shanaya turned abruptly, straightening, her eyes flicking between Catherine and Nick. “It’s to do with those bones found in the Eden valley, isn’t it?” she said. “It was on the news this morning.”

  “My God, is that true?” Catherine said softly. “Have you found Owen?”

  And there was something in her voice that Nick had heard many times before in his years as a copper, a combination of both hope and sorrow.

  “Things are at a very early stage, ma’am. We have a list of possible identities and we’re just trying to eliminate as many as we can from our investigation. Your brother’s name—and this address—came up during our enquiries.”

  He reached into his inside pocket, brought out his phone and opened up the image of the medallion that Blenkinship had issued.

  “Can you tell me if this looks familiar? Is it something you might have seen your brother wearing?”

  Catherine took the phone with trepidation that turned to puzzlement as she looked at the design. Shanaya leaned in, too. Neither of them showed any hint of recognition.

  “I’m sorry,” Catherine said at last, disappointment in her voice as she handed back the phone. “It doesn’t look like his kind of thing at all. But I left home when he was still at school.”

  “Any other siblings?”

  She shook her head. “No, just the two of us—both disappointments to them in our own way.”

  “How so?”

  Catherine gave Shanaya’s hand another squeeze. “Well, they didn’t approve of my…life choices, for a start.”

  “And your brother? What did he do?”

  “Fell in love with the ‘wrong sort of girl’, if you please.”

  “In what way was she ‘wrong’?”

  “I don’t know that much about her. I’d left by then, don’t forget. She was Romany, that I do know, which made her beyond the pale as far as my parents were concerned—and far too young for him.”

  Nick raised an eyebrow, frantically running the numbers in his head. If the date of birth he had for Liddell was correct, he’d only be twenty-nine or thirty now. So, if he’d been missing ten years or so…

  “How old was this girl, do you know?”

  “Not old enough to be legal, when they first met, that’s for sure. They met at the Horse Fair, of course. And I don’t know if you’ve seen those Gypsy girls, detective, but some of them are very…adult for their age.”

  “She led him on, you mean?” Nick tried to keep the scepticism out of his voice.

  “I don’t know,” Catherine said. “But her tribe, or clan or whatever it is, didn’t approve any more than ours did. They set about him—put him in hospital.”

  Nick made a note on his pad. “There would be some kind of record of that, presumably?”

  “Maybe not.” She shrugged. “He wouldn’t press charges, so…”

  “How badly was he injured?”

  “They broke his arm, apparently. Apart from that and concussion, he was just battered and bruised.”

  Nick hesitated. “Did your brother have any other injuries—broken bones when he was a kid, perhaps?”

  “I don’t think so… Oh, wait, no, he broke his collarbone years ago. We were both pony mad. I grew out of it before he did. I think that’s what drew him to the Horse Fair to begin with.”

  Nick made a note of that, too, circled it and the arm.

  “Would you still have anything of Owen’s here?”

  “Something that might contain his DNA, you mean?” It was Shanaya who asked.

  Catherine threw her a glance that held amusement, despite her alarm.

  “She watches too many cop shows on TV,” she said. “And I’m not sure there’s anything like that around.”

  “If we have a place to start, we can request his official medical and dental records,” Nick said. “I was thinking of diaries, letters, photos?”

  “Oh.” She let go of Shanaya’s hand and rose. “There might be something still in his room. I’ll…go and have a look.”

  When she’d gone, Shanaya asked bluntly, “Is it him?”

  “It’s really too early to—”

  “If you hadn’t thought there was a good chance, this would have been
a phone call, not a home visit.”

  Nick returned her level gaze. “Yes. It might be him.”

  “Oh, thank God for that.” She slumped, gave a half-hearted smile at his slightly shocked expression. “You have no idea of how this has been hanging over her—over us. Her parents never made Wills. So when they died, this place passed equally to Catherine and Owen. We’ve been putting rent money aside for his half, every month since. Just in case he came back.” She gestured to the sofa and the wingback chair. “She wouldn’t even get rid of the furniture, just in case he might want it.”

  “You shouldn’t get your hopes up,” Nick said, unconsciously echoing, “just in case.”

  “I know but, still… It would be such a relief, finally just…to know.”

  Catherine returned, empty handed. She faltered in the doorway at their expectant air.

  “I know I boxed up some of his stuff but…I’m not sure where we put it,” she said. She sounded almost forlorn.

  Shanaya jumped up, went to her and rubbed her arm. “Don’t worry, love, we’ll look for it later.” Her eyes went to Nick. “Can we drop it in to you—when we find it?”

  “Of course,” Nick said. He dug in his phone case for a business card, held it out. As Catherine moved to take it, he asked, “Tell me, why did nobody report your brother missing, all that time ago?”

  Catherine frowned, staring at the card as if it might provide answers. “When he wouldn’t give up his Gypsy girlfriend, my parents gave Owen an ultimatum—something along the lines of shape up or ship out. Then, when he went, I think they assumed he’d simply…made his choice.”

  42

  If there was one thing Bartley Smith was good at, it was the putting on of the brave face. Well, to be right, it was but one of many things at which he considered himself a pretty handy sort of feller. A man with a little of all trades at his fingertips, you might say. And, if he was pushed to boast, mastery over one or two of them as well.

  So, he’d spent a few hours abroad on The Sands, taking in the craic with any of his large circle of friends and acquaintances. Smiling and laughing and joking for all he was worth. Being seen about with Ocean by his side, showing him for the good family man.