Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘You want me to prioritize it?’ Slider queried innocently.

  ‘Get stuck in!’ Porson invited, with a nod of his massive head, and strode on.

  ‘Roger that sir,’ Slider murmured. Direct order from the boss. Bye bye paperwork, hello fieldcraft. He returned via the CID room, where his minions were toiling over their various routines. ‘I’ll give it half an hour more for Doc Cameron to do his stuff, then I’ll go over to Laburnum myself,’ he announced. Eyes were raised in hope. DS Atherton, his friend and usual bagman, wasn’t there – out on some business with the sergeant’s envied freedom. He thought of the indignant yuppie couple and Fido grinned and wagged again. ‘Hart, you can come with me.’ Hart was black and sassy with a gorblimey London accent. Emollient she was not.

  ‘Right, boss,’ Hart said with a happy grin. ‘Old bones. Lovely!’

  Odd that Porson had used the same words, he thought.

  When Slider’s firm had uncovered an underage sex ring implicating many high-ups, including an MP, Gideon Marler, and their very own Assistant Commissioner, Derek Millichip, he hadn’t expected to be Mr Popular. He half expected it to be buried. But the story had broken in the newspapers, so there was no covering it up. The media were all over it, as they always were in cases of celebrity sex. Glee, schadenfreude and prurience made a heady mix – one sniff, and newshounds bayed at the stars and lost all sense of proportion.

  So a special investigation team had been set up by the Sexual Offences unit, and – the high point for Slider’s optimism – they had issued the code name Neptune. A code name conferred legitimacy on an investigation. Operation Neptune had entered the media’s vocabulary, and after the first excitement, there had been a steady updating of interest, with a piece every week or ten days to keep the show going.

  But lately things had gone quiet and there had been no mention of Neptune in the papers for weeks. This was not altogether unusual when a complicated investigation was going on, but Slider couldn’t help feeling uneasy. None of his firm had been included in the Neptune Team, which had disturbed him from the beginning. It looked as though they didn’t trust him or his people. All their papers and notes had been taken away, and they had been told to keep their heads down and mind their own knitting.

  The only aspect of Neptune that continued to exercise the great and good, as far as Slider was concerned, was the question of who had leaked the story to the newspapers. Officially, a witness had gone voluntarily to the press, and there was nothing anyone could do about that. But internally, the brass was convinced that someone had taken the press to the witness, and they wanted to know who. They wanted to discipline someone. They wanted revenge. The freelance journalist who started it all had decided, unusually, to remain anonymous and, in the face of police pressure, the fourth estate had closed ranks and kept it that way. Officially, nobody knew who it was. Unofficially, the grapevine said it was a female journalist newly returned from the States.

  Slider was the obvious suspect for the leak, having been told over and over to back off, and having refused to. He had been in trouble before and was not liked at headquarters. Furthermore, Atherton’s current lady friend, Emily, was a journalist and, coincidentally, had recently returned from the States. It looked like a dead cert: Slider, or Atherton with Slider’s connivance, had brought Emily and Shannon Bailey together. Every member of Slider’s firm had been separately questioned, and Slider and Atherton had been called in and grilled several times.

  Slider had simply said it wasn’t him and he didn’t know who it was, or even if there had been a leak at all, which was the truth. What Atherton said he would never enquire. He had always been very down on leaks, and he did not want to suspect anyone in his own firm, particularly Atherton.

  He didn’t like to think that Atherton would deliberately leak the story, but he could see a scenario where, for instance, he hinted to Shannon that she go to the press, and dropped Emily’s card somewhere Shannon would find it. Would that be enough for Atherton to face the IPCC and say, ‘I didn’t leak the story,’ without blushing?

  But here was another point: there was little doubt that without the pressure from the press, the case would probably not even have got as far as being assigned a code name. Was it unfair of him to believe that Atherton was capable of breaking the rules in a good cause and lying about it afterwards with a clear conscience? Was that even an accusation? Perhaps there was another, equal standard of morality that said achieving the right outcome was more important than following the rules.

  He had always been something of an absolutist about the law. It was his way of dealing with an impossible world: the morass of human fallibility; the confusion of emotion and self-justification he met every day; the cruelty, stupidity and selfishness of wrongdoers. Something had to be clear-cut. You obeyed the law, whether you agreed with it or not, because anything else was chaos.

  At the other end of the spectrum lay Carver and his boys. No doubt they had started off doing what they did for the very best of motives; but he was aware out of the corner of his mind that they had slipped from that purity. All power eventually corrupts. There had been shady doings that were not for the benefit of the community. There had been sexual favours and kickbacks. There had been revenge, prejudice, self-advancement – and just plain carelessness.

  The question before Slider now was, did there exist a middle way that was morally superior to either end? As Carver had said, where was the morality in letting a slag get off on a technicality? Slider had always resisted that lure, because it led to a slippery slope. If the law does not decide, who does? Whose opinion, whose judgement, is better than whose? And yet, and yet … Those girls. Their casual abuse. Tyler and Kaylee, dead and tossed aside like screwed-up sandwich wrappers. It hurt him to let them down; and it hurt him more to think that perhaps he could not do his job within the constraints laid upon him by the law, by his superiors, by himself. If you could only beat corruption with corruption, the game was over.

  He shook that thought away. No self-dramatising. Pragmatism was the way to go. Take it day by day, step by step. You did your best, and that was all you could do. And since he had difficulty with lying in response to a direct question, it was perhaps to the good that Atherton had done what he had done – if he had indeed done it; and better still for him, Slider, simply not to know about it, so as to be able to keep saying so with conviction.

  Meanwhile, he could not help noticing the looks of dislike he got from senior brass when he happened to bump into them at Hammersmith, or the attitude of the inquisitors when he was called up yet again for questioning. Perhaps Porson was right, and these old bones might be a step on the way to rehabilitation. Of course, when Porson had told him to prioritize it, he had probably not meant Slider should go in person and do the footwork. But Slider was willing to interpret it any way that put a respectable distance between him and the festering midden of paperwork waiting for him on his desk.

  Now that was pragmatism.

  TWO

  Posh and Vexed

  The Trees Estate, so called because the streets had the names of flowering trees, was built by a speculator in the 1890s. Some had terraced houses, but Laburnum had small neat semis in red brick with white trim, designed for aspiring clerks and shop assistants. With the recent London property boom, they were now highly desirable properties, with the single drawback that they had been built, of course, without garages. That didn’t prevent the current owners from buying cars. The kerb on both sides was parked, reducing the roadway to one car’s width, and many of the houses had had their front gardens converted to hard standing.

  Number fifteen was towards the middle of the street, and the SOC sprinter and Dr Cameron’s Jaguar were parked on its apron. Presumably they had removed the owner’s cars and the contractor’s van to make room. Uniform had got the blue-and-white tape going, had temporarily closed the road to traffic and were keeping interested residents at a respectful distance.

  Slider was aware of an unusual s
ensation as he hunted for a parking space, and paused mentally to examine it. Ah yes, that was it: time. With a skeleton, the murder had to have happened long ago. There was no desperate race to collect clues while they were still warm and interview witnesses before they dispersed, colluded or forgot. No pressing need to canvass the neighbours, leaflet at the nearest tube station, examine CCTV tapes. The old saying, you have forty-eight hours to solve a murder, didn’t apply. You could go at it in a leisurely manner. It was a refreshing change.

  He and Hart stepped out into the hazy autumn sunshine. The sky was milky blue, the sweet, warm smell of pavements was in the air, and though there was a marked absence of laburnums, those front gardens that hadn’t been sacrificed to the great god Car were still bright with summer bedders in jolly primary colours. ‘It’s a pity we didn’t bring a picnic,’ Slider said.

  ‘Boss?’ Hart gave him a worried look.

  ‘I said, it’s a lovely day.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Hart, her expression clearing. ‘I’d prefer a fresh corpse, but bones is all right. Better’n the Clapp family and their thievin’ bloody kids.’

  ‘Still having trouble with them?’ It was a problem family on an estate she’d been dealing with.

  ‘Sometimes think I should just move in with ’em,’ she said.

  Number 15, like its neighbours, was a halls-adjoining semi, built on the enduring plan of the London Dog-leg, with the stairs straight ahead and the passage dodging round them, past two reception rooms, to the kitchen at the back. D’Arblay, the uniform holding the door, told them that the owners, the Freelings, were in the front room with Gascoyne, and the contractor, whose name was Hobbs, was in the back room with McLaren.

  ‘I’ll have a look at the garden first,’ Slider said.

  The house was obviously a work in progress, because the two rooms he glimpsed as he passed seemed to be freshly decorated in modern style, but the kitchen had tired melamine units, and beige wall tiles decorated with a motif of tomatoes and corncobs. The worktops, however, were littered with top-of-the-range gadgets that had yuppie written all over them. His eye was caught by a gleaming multi-function coffee machine so complex it looked as if it could have launched space probes. It reminded him he hadn’t had his mid-morning tea. If the householders were friendly and open-hearted, maybe they could be induced to brew up.

  But first, the garden. It was a decent size for inner London, about eighteen feet wide by twenty-five long. There was six-foot high wooden fencing round the three sides, looking new and orangey, not yet faded by the weather to decent unobtrusive brown. Down the right side of the house was a passage leading to a high gate, the normal arrangement, and the only access into the garden other than through the house. The growing part of the garden was typical of the efforts of people who don’t like gardening, consisting of a rectangle of lawn, an unkempt flower bed down the left-hand side, and a concrete path down the right side, scored in a clumsy attempt to make it look like crazy paving.

  Beyond the side fences, all that could be seen were the taller plants in the neighbour’s gardens. Over the back fence waved the top of a leylandii hedge, and behind it a glimpse of the upper parts of the house in the next street, Colville Avenue. It was an altogether more substantial building, evidently three-storeyed by the size of the dormer window in the roof. Laburnum was the last street in this particular development: beyond it the houses were from an earlier Victorian period.

  The path on the right had evidently led to the old garden shed, which was now a heap of fractured wood in the middle of the lawn. Beside the heap was a wheelbarrow standing on a plastic tarp, together with some tools, a bag of sand and a bag of cement. Where the shed had stood, the forensic tent had been erected. Inside, the shed’s footprint was a patch of bare earth about four feet wide and six feet long, and beyond that, between it and the back fence, was the grave. Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, was kneeling beside it under the arc lamps, while a forensic digger leaned on his spade observing, in case he was needed.

  ‘So he didn’t find the body under the shed?’ said Slider to Mackay, as they stood in the tent’s entrance.

  ‘No, guv. He took the old one down first, but the new one’s going to be bigger, going right up to the fence, so he cleared that space and—’

  ‘Cleared the space? What was there?’

  ‘Plastic water butt. Empty. Then he starts digging out the foundations, and up comes this femur. He’s a bit upset, the builder,’ Mackay added, free of charge. ‘The owners are more mad than anything.’

  ‘I’ll have a look at the grave first, before I talk to them,’ said Slider.

  ‘The Freelings have only been here ten months,’ Mackay mentioned.

  ‘Could hardly be their corpse, then,’ said Hart chirpily. ‘No wonder they’re mad. I bet that weren’t included in the fixtures an’ fittings.’

  Freddie Cameron, as always, was dapper as an otter, despite being clad in protective overalls. He gave Slider a minatory look as he approached, but Slider could not fathom what it was about. It was quickly replaced by his usual urbanity. ‘Nice change of pace from the usual frenetic investigation,’ he said. ‘Dem bones aren’t in any hurry.’

  ‘I was just thinking that,’ said Slider.

  He looked down over Freddie’s shoulder. The skeleton looked up at him blankly, naked of flesh and infinitely pathetic. There was something intrinsically disturbing about this huddle of bones, all that was left of a human life once nature had had its way. It made you suddenly, uncomfortably aware of your own bones, safely tucked away out of sight, as they were meant to be, but waiting in the wings, as it were, for their ultimate emergence. There was nothing cheerful about a skeleton. It was the grin that put young people wrong. With no breath of mortality chill on their neck, they could think it was a jolly thing to get dressed up as. That grin was one of God’s awful jokes. Slider had long suspected the Almighty had a somewhat warped sense of humour.

  It was lying on its back, parallel with the back fence, and apart from some derangement of the right leg, presumably from the contractor’s initial contact, it looked to have been laid out tidily, as though for a lesson in anatomy.

  ‘What can you tell me?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Definitely female,’ Freddie said. ‘From the dentition, I’d say young – thirteen, fourteen, that sort of age.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Slider. That was not something he’d wanted to hear.

  ‘Probably been here twenty years at least. The bones are bare and disarticulated, no shreds of periosteum or cartilage, but they still feel relatively solid. This is a nice, dry corner, thanks to the old British Leyland there sucking up the moisture.’ He nodded upwards at the fronds of the hedge waving over the top of the fence. ‘So the rate of deterioration won’t be as fast as it would have been in wet, acid ground.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘So, taking one thing with another, I’d plump for twenty years, give or take.’

  ‘Give or take what?’ Hart enquired over Slider’s shoulder.

  Freddie gave her an old-fashioned look, the sort that showed itself to best advantage over a pair of half-moon glasses. ‘It’s not an exact science. Twenty years is an opinion based on experience. Could be twenty-five. Could be fifteen. What am I sure of? That it’s not as much as fifty, not as little as five.’

  ‘That’s me told,’ said Hart meekly. ‘Sorry, Doc.’

  ‘An historic case, then,’ Slider said. ‘Any obvious injuries?’

  ‘No visible fractures. No trauma. Everything seems intact and undisturbed, bar the builder’s work. Interestingly, there are no remains of any clothes.’

  ‘Would there be?’ Hart queried.

  ‘Cloth, especially man-made fibre, deteriorates more slowly than human tissue,’ Freddie told her. ‘And it doesn’t get eaten by ants and beetles and so on. It’s not unusual to find scraps of clothing even after fifty years. Leather, as in shoes and belts, lasts even longer. Metal zips and buckles, longer still. Jewellery, more or
less for ever. But there’s nothing at all here. I’d say the body went into the grave naked.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Slider again. His mouth turned down at the implication, but he said neutrally, ‘It’s quite a shallow grave, isn’t it?’

  ‘Amazing how often they are,’ said Freddie. ‘Idiot mentality – out of sight is out of mind. Like sweeping the dust under the carpet. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘You’d think they’d worry about someone digging it up by mistake,’ said Hart.

  ‘I’m slightly surprised that it wasn’t disturbed at any point,’ said Freddie. ‘Urban foxes weren’t as prevalent twenty years ago as they are now, but they were around, and there are still dogs and cats and rats that can dig. But apparently there was a rainwater butt standing on top of it. Perhaps that protected it.’

  ‘Perhaps it was meant to,’ Slider said.

  ‘Well, I’ll get the remains back to the lab and do some more investigation, work out the height, make a record of the teeth, see if there’s anything more I can tell you. Worth taking a DNA sample?’

  ‘There’ll have to be an official identification at some point,’ Slider said. ‘If we can find anything to match it against.’

  ‘Right. I’ll get one off, then.’

  ‘Garden contractor’ was too grand a description for Jim Hobbs: it appeared he was a one-man band, and only did small jobs, clearing overgrown gardens, putting up fences and building walls, laying patios and so on. He was a big man in his late fifties, weathered face, grizzled hair, and enormous hands, thick-fingered, scarred of knuckle, wooden from long and cruel exposure to cold and wet. He lived in Acton, where he had once had a larger enterprise employing several men and undertaking full garden makeovers.

  ‘But you can’t get the help nowadays,’ he said. ‘Kids don’t want to do physical work. Sooner muck about with computers. Every time I get myself a boy, he only lasts a couple of weeks. I can do without that aggro. So I reckon I’m better off on my own.’ He offered the first, tentative smile, as if he wasn’t sure it was all right to smile at a policeman, or in the presence of death. His eyes were pale blue and direct. ‘It’s my semi-retirement, if you like.’