Rattling the Bones

by Ann Granger

  Rattling the Bones

  ANN GRANGER

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2007 Ann Granger

  The right of Ann Granger to be identified as the Author

  of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law,

  this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted,

  in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing

  of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production,

  in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the

  Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7243 0

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Ann Granger has lived in cities in many parts of the world, since for many years she worked for the Foreign Office and received postings to British embassies as far apart as Munich and Lusaka. She is married, with two sons, and she and her husband, who also worked for the Foreign Office, are now permanently based in Oxfordshire.

  Ann Granger’s Mitchell and Markby novels are also available from Headline, as are those featuring Fran Varady. And don’t miss the first in her brand-new Victorian crime series, A Rare Interest in Corpses.

  To my dear husband . . . forty years on!

  Chapter One

  My late grandmother, Erszebet Varady, more or less brought me up. My mother walked out one day when I was seven and didn’t reappear for fourteen years. Grandma was what’s called a formative influence. I learned to like good coffee and spicy goulash, never sit on the seat in a public loo and beware of anyone in a uniform. She knew how to read the omens like an ancient shaman. ‘Sometimes when things get bad you just have to run,’ she would say philosophically. It would have been a good thing if I’d inherited her instinct but bad situations have always held a fatal lure for me. The more sticky the circumstances, the more I want to pitch in there. There’s no way it makes any sense. It’s what dramatists call a fatal flaw.

  Grandma had vivid personal experience of running away from a bad situation, having fled the aftermath of the 1956 Hungarian uprising with her baby (my dad) in her arms. She also had my grandfather with her but he was inconveniently recovering from a bad bout of influenza and not much help. He kept sagging at the knees at awkward moments. My grandma often expressed the opinion that no situation was ever so difficult but that any Varady male couldn’t make it worse.

  Despite the fact that my grandfather was himself a doctor, his health couldn’t have been too good. He was dead by the time I was born. I have a photograph of him taken when he was about the age I am now, twenty-three. It’s a professional portrait done in Budapest in a studio that had probably not changed its props since the days of Franz Josef. My grandfather is posed with one arm resting on a stump of Grecian pillar and the other propped dashingly on his hip. He is turned three-quarters on towards the camera and has a slight smirk on his face as if he couldn’t decide whether to smile or not. Or it might just be he was pleased with his appearance. He is wearing a single-breasted suit jacket secured by one button mid-ribs. In the breast pocket there is an artistically folded handkerchief and in the opposite lapel a carnation. His shirt collar looks tight enough to choke him and he has a striped tie. He also has a neat little moustache and for some reason is wearing a hat.

  This portrait held pride of place on our mantelshelf when I was a child. I decided early on that my father (who died about ten years ago) resembled him. Apart from the carnation and hat, that is. My father was also no great help in an emergency. After my mother’s defection, he had remained physically present but mentally he had left with her. In between a string of jobs all begun with great expectations only to fold shortly afterwards in failure, he just hung round the place. He was a nice man, friendly and kind-hearted, but in truth no great help. It’s always been down to the Varady women to take care of things and sort out problems. I sometimes wonder if it was the realisation that she would have to bear the entire burden of their marriage that resulted in my mother giving up the whole thing as a bad job, although I haven’t the slightest idea why she went. On the few brief occasions we spoke later when she reappeared she didn’t enlighten me and I didn’t ask. She’s dead too, now; so is Grandma. All those questions hover unanswered in the ether . . . taken to the grave as the Victorians liked to say. Some people try and discover old secrets. They rattle the bones and hope some inkling will fall out. I never have.

  However, perhaps that’s why, although my intention is and has always been to make a career in the performing arts, I have morphed into a part-time private detective. Possibly the above-mentioned high rate of mortality among my few relatives has something to do with it. After all, it left me alone in the world and homeless at sixteen. It abruptly called a halt to the drama course I was following. But I have another theory.

  From childhood I have always had to try and work out for myself what’s going on. In my family a child was to be loved, fed and taught good manners, but not included in important discussions. So they never explained where my mother had gone apart from some pathetic invention about ‘a holiday’ which wouldn’t have fooled anyone, let alone a seven-year-old with a child’s uncluttered logical mind. My father and grandmother, together with the motley collection of visitors who turned up at our door, communicated information of a sensitive nature by winks and nods and knowing looks. If it was necessary to speak they went into a huddle in the kitchen and got highly agitated in Hungarian which they had omitted to teach me. I used to think it just an oversight that they failed to instruct me in the language of my ancestors. Now I wonder if it wasn’t just cunning.

  The result of all this was that I learned early to look for clues. I sneaked around the place trying to find odd bits of paper and kept an ear tuned in for phone calls. I studied the expressions on the faces of both my father and Grandma when they thought I wasn’t watching. I searched through drawers when I was alone at home. Once I found a cache of old photos. I went through them looking for one with my mother in it but she didn’t appear in a single picture. Again, to this day, I don’t know if that was chance or whether someone had culled the snapshots of her and committed them to the fire. No one ever told me and, of course, I didn’t dare to ask. I’d have got the runaround instead of a straight answer, anyway.

  Old photographs have continued to fascinate me. They open a tantalising window into the past. Those silh
ouette pictures, too, which people made before they had cameras. I’ve seen brilliant ones in antique shops. Even though the features are blanked out I’m sure the sitters were instantly recognisable to those who knew them. Faces aren’t the only thing other people know us by. Body language is individual or a habit like twisting a lock of hair round a finger, even just a way of standing. Some people are identifiable the length of a street away and that’s how I recognised Edna the bag lady.

  Edna and I had once, in a manner of speaking, been neighbours. I had been living in a squat in Rotherhithe at the time, Edna in an abandoned churchyard nearby with a family of feral cats for company.

  Events recounted above had led to my living in a squat and I supposed some other misfortune had consigned Edna to the world of the truly homeless. She was one of those who had fallen through the holes in the safety net of social services, either by choice or through oversight on the part of the authorities. One of the lost tribe who have floated away from the shores of sanity to sink or swim alone; if not condemned to care in the community, which in effect is often little better.

  Not so long ago I took the first step out of the lost world and the Rotherhithe squat by a roll of Fate’s dice. City planners in bright modern offices decreed that progress and redevelopment should move us all on, little caring where we went. The houses of Jubilee Street and surrounding roads and Edna’s churchyard fell beneath the contractor’s bulldozer and it had led to the parting of our ways. I was now living in comparative comfort, but until that morning I’d had no idea where Edna had gone or even if she was still ‘with us’, as my Grandma Varady used to say. People referred to death very delicately in our house, as if it was something that didn’t happen in respectable families, another of those problems they had confronting reality.

  Edna might have been ‘with us’, in the Rotherhithe days, but she’d never been ‘with it’. Her mind had already moved on to inhabit a plane somewhere beyond anyone’s reach or comprehension. Unkindly we called her ‘mad Edna’, which was not only insensitive but inaccurate. If Edna’s mind did not work as others did, it was by choice. She wasn’t ill; she had opted out. A small figure dodging from tombstone to tombstone like a crab among the rocks, she’d always appeared incredibly ancient, though it had been hard to tell given the layers of clothing she wore and her liking for woolly hats crammed over straggling uncombed grey locks.

  I really had thought I’d never see her again, but there she was, not a shadow of a doubt, wobbling up Camden High Street towards the Tube station. Her gait had always been as distinctive as the rest of her. She moved both sideways and forwards at the same time. I wouldn’t have called it a waddle because that suggests moving a considerable weight. Edna’s bulk was due to her clothing and not obesity and she was light on her feet. She shifted her frame nimbly from one side to the other while pushing ahead of her the foot which had the weight taken off it, so that when she shifted the weight back again, she came down a few inches further than where she’d been to start with. It was a kind of hop, almost like a dance step. I once had a toy clown that whirred round the living room in the same way until someone trod on him.

  I broke into a trot and caught up with her easily. ‘Edna!’ I called out. ‘Wait! It’s me, Fran!’

  She kept her woolly-hatted head down and refused to look round or give any sign she had heard me. That was normal. Edna had never liked being hailed. She preferred to choose the moment of making contact and used, in the old days, to jump out disconcertingly from behind wonky gravestones giving people ‘a very nasty turn’, as they often complained afterwards. I returned the favour now, jumped in front of her and obliged her to stop. I’m not tall but she was shorter and the woolly hat only reached my chin.

  ‘Come on, Edna,’ I coaxed. ‘You remember me.’

  She wasn’t trying to edge round me and I was sure she had heard me. But she still said nothing, only stood there sullenly with her chin tucked in.

  ‘I’m Fran,’ I repeated to the grimy bobble of wool under my nose. ‘Fran Varady. I used to live in Rotherhithe, remember? In the squat in Jubilee Street where the girl was murdered.’

  It was unfortunate that a couple of tourists were passing at the time I spoke and because Edna was always a trifle hard of hearing, or affected to be, I had uttered the words loudly.

  The tourists looked at me aghast and hurried on.

  I got a reaction from Edna at last. ‘No,’ she muttered.

  ‘Yes, you do, Edna. Oh, come on, don’t sulk, please!’

  She changed her mind. She looked up at me, her sunken eyes gleaming with mischief. ‘Yes, of course I remember you, my dear. How are you? What do you want?’

  Her voice had always been extraordinary, totally at odds with her dishevelled appearance. It was quite deep and beautifully modulated, undeniably posh. Proper posh, I mean, not put on. I trained to be an actor and I know about voices. Once you heard Edna speak, she wasn’t the same elderly down-at-heel bag lady. In the old Rotherhithe days I’d seen coppers, who had tried to move her on, change their attitude and tone immediately once they heard her.

  I still am an actor, by the way. I might be ‘resting’ and I might fill in the time with odd jobs and a bit of detection, but I haven’t given up my dream.

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ I said, ‘only to say hullo and glad to see you.’ I noticed she had no bags with her. ‘Where are you living?’ I asked.

  ‘In a hostel,’ said Edna with disgust. ‘They put me in a hostel. First of all they put me in a home with a lot of old people all sitting round a television. The wretched contraption kept on flickering in a way that hurt your eyes and blaring out its nonsense fit to deafen you. Mind you, some of the old folk were already deaf and the others were asleep all the time. I wasn’t going to stay there, I told them that straight. So then they put me in the hostel. It’s no better except that they don’t make you watch that dratted box. But half the people there are bonkers and they don’t allow any animals! I don’t need people. I like animals.’

  The last words were spoken fiercely.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I expect you miss the cats.’

  ‘They took ’em away.’ Edna was in full spate now, moved by remembered anger. She flapped her arms and shuffled her feet in frustration and looked as though she was making doomed attempts at lift-off, although more like some stranded and bedraggled bird oil-smeared on a beach than anything as sleek as a rocket.

  ‘Something that called itself a cat charity took ’em, after chasing them all over the churchyard and trapping them in nasty little boxes. How could it be a charity? It took them from their home and from me. I looked after them.’ She abandoned the attempt to levitate, sidled a little closer and her faded eyes glinted up at me conspiratorially. ‘You know what they did with the cats? They did away with them, that’s what. Murdered ’em.’

  ‘Perhaps they rehoused them?’ I suggested.

  Edna showed that there was a difference between living in a parallel universe and not having your mind in working order. ‘Rehoused the kittens, maybe,’ she said sternly. ‘The older cats, no. They weren’t house-trained, they were used to roaming free and they were too old to change their ways.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  I was glad she was as sharp as ever she had been beneath that skilful pretence of battiness. If she had still been living in the old people’s home, sitting hour after hour before the television set, I doubted that her mind would still be in such good order. Hostel living might not suit her taste but in some ways it had benefited her. She was distinctly cleaner, skin washed and pink, clothes tattered but not whiffy, and she appeared generally better nourished.

  She cheered up and uttered an unexpected cackle of laughter. ‘They rehoused me, that’s what they did, just like the kits. But I’m no kitten. I’m one of the old ’uns, too old to change my ways.’

  She shook her head and looked baleful again. ‘I don’t hang around that hostel. It smells of baked beans. I spend my days walking round,’ s
he concluded in a satisfied tone, ‘like I always did.’

  But obviously she had not always done. Once, decades ago, Edna had had a different life. I wondered how much of it she remembered and how much she had consciously suppressed. But she hadn’t finished yet.

  ‘They even took the old tom.’ She returned to the topic of the cats. ‘He led them a merry chase before they trapped him with a bit of meat. I hope he scratched them all. He had a grand set of claws and his teeth were good ’uns. He’d crunch up mice bones like they were made of jelly.’ Her expression and tone became wistful, ‘He went down fighting, that’s what he did. They should have put me down with him.’

  ‘I’ve got a flat, now,’ I told her. I made myself sound as cheery as possible because she was grumpy and seemed still so upset about the cats. ‘It’s in a house that belongs to a charity that provides cheap housing for people like me. There are seven flats and a garden of a sort at the back. It’s really nice. Come and visit me.’