Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  LaSalle was tall and gangling and rather retiring, and reminded Slider a little – painfully – of the late lamented Hollis, except that where Hollis had had feeble, failing hair, LaSalle’s was red and tough. It sprouted out of his scalp and upper lip with so much vigour he looked as though he had a head full of coir under high pressure. Inconspicuous he could never be. Perhaps that was why he was so self-effacing, in a vain attempt to compensate.

  They had worked together a lot on Carver’s firm, the two outcasts. Their nicknames, Hart had told Slider on the way in, were Funky and Rang.

  ‘Funky ’cos of the funky beard. And Rang’s short for Rangatang. ’Cos he’s got red hair and long arms.’

  ‘He’s tall,’ Slider objected. ‘He’s bound to have long arms.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’re weird long,’ Hart said. ‘Like, he’s always got to get his jackets made special.’

  ‘I don’t know why the fuss about orang-utans, anyway,’ Slider complained. ‘They’re only auburn gorillas.’

  The two newcomers looked at Slider with doubtful but hopeful eyes, like rescue dogs wondering whether their new home was going to be better or worse than life in the pound. Carver had not been an easy boss for those he did not favour.

  Slider was not going to make any great speeches. He liked to see how people performed and judge them on that. He shook their hands and said, ‘Good to have you aboard. You’ve brought some case files with you, I understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Just ongoing stuff – nothing urgent,’ said LaSalle.

  ‘We heard you got some human remains this morning,’ Lessop added hopefully. He had a faint Hertfordshire accent, oddly disarming in a pirate.

  ‘Skeletal. Laburnum Avenue,’ said Slider.

  ‘My aunt used to live round there,’ LaSalle offered. ‘She was in Cherry Avenue. I used to visit her.’

  ‘I expect you’ll be useful, then,’ Slider said. ‘At ease, everyone’ll get a chance to get out and about on this one. For now, find yourselves a desk and settle in. I’m sure you’ll fit in just fine.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ they said formally, and shuffled off.

  This concludes our little initiation ceremony, Slider thought. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Happily he sat down and removed the entire centre section of his nascent compost heap to clear a space for Laburnum Avenue. Who had buried that body so long ago, and why? And why had it taken so long for it to re-emerge?

  A new case, he thought with relish, without the fresh pain usually involved. Where there was death, there was always pain, but the old pain of old bones would be easier to cope with.

  All he wanted now was a nice cup of tea, and he wouldn’t have a care in the world.

  The SOC team was still painstakingly scanning and searching the property – Bob Bailey, the head honcho, indicated to Slider that Mr Freeling had strutted some attitude at him and got right up his nose, so he wasn’t going to hurry – and the Freelings had packed night bags and gone to stay with friends in Chiswick. Bailey was obviously hoping to find further remains, but Slider forgave him for that. His was essentially an archaeological discipline, and no archaeologist wants a dig that doesn’t turn up anything.

  ‘But there are things we can be getting on with,’ Slider said to the assembled troops.

  Atherton was still absent, but he had Lessop and LaSalle to make up the numbers; and Mr Porson had wandered in, being as unobtrusive as was possible for someone who looked as though he belonged up to his neck on Easter Island.

  ‘Hart, you can make a start on tracing the people who owned the house before the Freelings …’

  ‘The Barnards,’ she supplied.

  ‘Right. They’re the obvious suspects. Find out where they are now. And how long they owned the house. If it was less than twenty years you might have to go back to the people before them. Maybe several owners before.’

  ‘Whoever it was, they didn’t half take a chance,’ said Hart, ‘leaving the body behind for someone else to find.’

  ‘Connolly, you can go through missing persons. McLaren, Mackay, have a look at any murder cases with similarities – same area, same age of victim, same disposal method.’

  ‘Right, guv.’

  ‘We mustn’t rule out the possibility that it was someone from outside who used the garden to dispose of the body. It’s unlikely—’

  ‘But fantastic if it worked,’ Mackay put in. ‘Pick someone who doesn’t do gardening, never goes out there – why would it ever be discovered?’

  Slider nodded. ‘And I suppose on the same basis we must look at the local sex offenders and child molesters. Any ideas, anyone?’

  ‘Roger Radcliffe,’ Mackay offered. ‘The Hammersmith Strangler.’

  Porson spoke up. ‘He’s in Wakefield. Leastways, he was. Could be out on parole by now, I suppose. Or dead.’

  ‘Better check on that,’ Slider said to Mackay. ‘Who else?’

  ‘Dismal Desmond?’ Lessop suggested. ‘He’s more Acton, but it’s not out of his range.’

  ‘But he’s only in his thirties,’ Swilley objected. ‘Makes him a bit young for a murder twenty years ago.’

  ‘I was forgetting,’ said Lessop. ‘We need to look for someone who was active then, not who’s active now.’

  ‘There was that priest,’ LaSalle said. ‘He come from round there. That was back in the nineties, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lessop ‘What was his name?’

  LaSalle scowled with effort. ‘Father something,’ he came up with.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Swilley muttered. ‘Another McLaren in our midst.’

  LaSalle gave her a wounded look but carried on. ‘He was from that church, Our Lady of Sorrows – that’s only half a mile from the house. I remember there was a fuss about him when I used to visit my auntie.’

  ‘But he only did boys, didn’t he?’ said Mackay.

  ‘You never know,’ said LaSalle. ‘He was only caught for boys.’

  ‘All right,’ said Slider. ‘You and Lessop can look into the sex offenders. You’ll have to go back into history. Newspaper archives might be a shortcut for you.’ They nodded thanks for the suggestion. ‘Swilley, you and Gascoyne can make a start on the neighbours.’

  ‘Now, boss?’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Slider saw Porson stir.

  ‘No overtime,’ the Old Man barked.

  ‘Not until and unless it becomes necessary.’ Slider softened the blow. ‘Tomorrow will do. Find out if any of them were around at the time. And who was in the two adjacent houses – track them down if possible. Once it gets into the papers you might have people coming forward.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Hart with broad irony. ‘If I read a house I’d once owned had a body in the garden, I’d come running to get meself stuck on a spike and grilled.’

  ‘Even if you were innocent?’ Swilley asked.

  ‘Specially if I was innocent,’ Hart asserted.

  ‘I hear I missed all the excitement,’ Atherton said the next day, idling in casually like a cat that’s been gone for two days and wonders if anyone’s noticed.

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ Slider asked.

  ‘That pirate DVD ring. I had some leads to follow up. Looks as if it might get interesting – could be other goods involved as well. Not as interesting as a corpus, though.’

  Hart came to the door at that moment. ‘Guv, I’ve got something from Kintie’s on the Barnards.’

  ‘Did you say Kintie’s?’ Atherton said with an air of pricking up his ears.

  Hart looked withering. ‘I say a lot of things. Why pick on that?’

  She knew, of course, as did Slider – Atherton had been doinking a solicitor from the firm of Kintie and Abram of Acton High Street. At least, he had before Emily came back. Slider assumed the affair was over, and hoped it was even more than he assumed. It was time that Atherton, the serial romancer, settled down. He was tall, handsome, elegant, and irresistible to females. Pure catnip. He could commit sexual harassme
nt by sitting quietly in another room. Really, the world needed him to be taken out of circulation.

  ‘Go on,’ he said to Hart. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Well, guv, the estate agent that sold the house to the Freelings told me the Barnards’ had used Kintie’s for the sale. So I got onto Kintie’s, and they give me an address for ’em in Ealing. Bad news is, it was only a temporary address – apparently they were getting ready to emigrate to Australia, so the guy said, the guy at Kintie’s. They got family there, in Adelaide – a son and daughter-in-law.’

  ‘Blast,’ said Slider. It would complicate matters horribly if they had to conduct an investigation on the other side of the globe, even with an Anglophone police force.

  ‘But maybe they’ve not gone yet,’ Hart said. ‘Kintie’s haven’t had anything to do with ’em since, so they don’t know. I’ve tried ringing the number they give, but there’s no answer.’

  ‘Better get over there and see what you can find out. Do you know how long they were in Laburnum Avenue?’

  ‘Yes, guv. The Land Registry’s got them there twenty-two years. So that puts them smack in the target zone. Before them was a Mr and Mrs Knight. They had it from 1974 to 1992, and before that the council owned it for six years and it was rented out.’

  ‘We’d better hope it happened under either the Barnards or the Knights, then,’ said Atherton. ‘If you’ve got to start tracing council tenants of forty years ago, you’re in real sticky.’

  The SOC head man, Bob Bailey, rang through to say that the GPR had not discovered any more remains under the garden or the ground floor of the house.

  ‘Searched the rest of the house too,’ he said in leisurely tones, ‘just to be sure. No stone unturned, sort o’ style. Took my time over it. Couldn’t have that lovely young couple coming back home to a house we hadn’t checked out thoroughly, now could we?’

  ‘He’s been on the phone this morning to Mr Porson,’ Slider told him, to cheer him up. ‘Threatening to write a formal letter of complaint to the borough commander. He wants to sue the Metropolitan Police for inconvenience, casting aspersions on his character, and probably distraint of trade.’

  ‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke,’ said Bailey. ‘However, our meticulous and very lengthy searches have not revealed any further bodies lurking in cupboards, alcoves or attics. Sadly.’

  ‘Did you check for false walls? Boarded-up chimneys?’

  ‘We certainly did.’

  ‘The secret passage behind the panel in the library?’

  ‘Come again?’ Bailey was more literal than literary.

  ‘I noticed a drain inspection cover in the front garden.’

  ‘And there was one down the side entrance as well. It’s all clean. Not so much as a dead mouse. So just the one body, looks like. Sorry about that.’

  Slider wasn’t sorry. He didn’t want another multiple victim case, especially if they were young girls. He said, ‘Good to know you’ve been thorough.’

  In the Christie case, a human femur had been used to prop up the garden fence and the police had missed it. This was not the time for any of them to look foolish.

  Freddie Cameron rang to say that closer examination had not found any evidence of trauma on the bones. ‘No healed fractures, either. It looks as though she didn’t break anything during her short lifetime.’

  That was a relief in one way – made it less likely she had been abused – but healed fractures were a tool in identification, so it was disappointing in another.

  ‘Now, there does seem to be a very fine fracture to the hyoid,’ he went on.

  Slider’s ears pricked. ‘Strangulation?’ he said.

  ‘In an adult, a fractured hyoid does strongly indicate throttling,’ Freddie agreed, ‘but it’s not necessarily the case in children and adolescents, before ossification is complete. And remember, unlike other bones, the hyoid is only distantly articulated to other bones by muscles or ligaments.’

  ‘Which means?’ Slider prompted.

  Cameron dumbed it down for him. ‘It’s a sort of floating bone, held in place by muscles. And when the processes of corruption destroy the muscles, there’s nothing to keep it from dropping and possibly sustaining a hairline fracture from the process.’

  ‘But it might be an indication of strangulation?’

  ‘It might,’ Freddie agreed. ‘And there’s nothing else to suggest any method of killing. But without the soft tissues, there’s not much to go on. I’ve sent off samples of the grave soil, but after this long it’s unlikely there could be any traces of, for instance, poison.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ve also taken a record of the teeth, for identification purposes,’ Freddie went on. ‘And I’ve sent off a sample for DNA profiling.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Slider. ‘Anything else to tell me?’

  ‘I’d put her height at about five feet one or two. No sign of congenital disease. Age, I’d stand by thirteen or fourteen.’

  ‘And you’d still say the bones are twenty years old, more or less.’

  ‘Sorry I can’t be more exact, but that’s how it is. Are you getting anything from your end?’

  ‘It’s early days yet.’

  ‘Well, let me know if there’s anything else I can do,’ said Freddie, with a hint of dissatisfaction in his voice.

  Worst case scenario, they would have to call in a facial reconstructionist to make a 3-D model from the skull of what the person would have looked like, and circulate it, hoping someone would recognize it. But it was a time-consuming and, above all, expensive process, which would not bring Slider and his firm any love or praise from upstairs. But they were a long way from those dire straits yet. The overwhelming likelihood was that the body had been buried there by an occupant of the house, probably these Barnards.

  Identification was the one consideration that made it better that it was a child rather than an adult, for children were always missed and searched for. Adults disappeared all the time, and often nobody even noticed.

  Hart came back from Ealing disappointed. ‘The Barnards – they’ve moved on, guv,’ she reported to Slider. ‘The neighbours on one side said they’d heard they’d gone to Scotland. The ones on the other side said they thought it was Norfolk.’

  ‘Well, not much difference there,’ Slider remarked.

  ‘One said Shetland and the other said Sheringham,’ Hart translated. ‘Neither of ’em had an address, though. And cos it was a rented, the estate agents’ll be no help. The good news is, neither of the neighbours mentioned Australia, so maybe the bloke at Kintie’s got that wrong.’

  ‘He’s more likely to be right than the neighbours,’ said Slider. ‘And I’m sure there are places in Australia beginning with “Sh”.’

  ‘Yeah, but one of the neighbours did give me the Barnards’ car index, so there’s a chance we might be able to trace ’em through that, if they are still in the UK – and only if they’re pukka. If the body was theirs, they’ll probably switch it again, but it might be worth a try.’

  ‘All right – give that to Fathom. He’s always happiest with cars. You can try the Post Office – see if they put in a request to have their mail forwarded. If not, you’re back on electoral rolls.’

  ‘Yeah, guv,’ Hart said, without enthusiasm. She preferred a more hands-on sort of policing. She adhered to the maxim that what you were doing wasn’t good police work unless someone somewhere wished you weren’t doing it.

  Connolly called him as he was returning to his room from a routine meeting, and he tacked over to her desk. ‘I’ve hit a brick wall, boss.’

  She turned her green eyes up to him. She was wearing navy mascara and eyeliner, he noticed, which made them look even greener.

  ‘I’ve been through the Mispers and filtered out the unresolved ones, but they’re all too recent. I checked anyway to see if there was any connection between them and Laburnum Avenue, in case it was part of a series, but I’ve come up with nothing. The trouble with this case is it’s to
o long ago to be in the computer system. Did they even have computers in 1990?’ she added fretfully.

  ‘The world was not then as it is today,’ he told her.

  ‘I know,’ she said, outraged. ‘I mean, no email, no mobile phones? Love a’ God, how’d people live like that?’

  ‘I can’t believe we survived,’ he agreed. ‘But somehow we did. We had these things called pens and paper.’

  ‘Woegeous,’ she said – portmanteau of woeful and outrageous.

  ‘As a system it had its advantage,’ Slider defended. ‘The thing with ink is that it’s very difficult to alter without it showing. A computer whizz can alter an electronic record so that only an even better whizz can tell.’

  ‘But I don’t know where to even begin looking for a pen and paper yoke,’ said Connolly. ‘Assuming that’s what there was back then.’

  ‘You’ll have to go and search the paper archive,’ Slider told her. ‘It’s in the basement at Hammersmith. Every station used to keep their own, but it was all amalgamated years ago in the interests of efficiency, or thoroughness, or maybe just to have a handy source of paper for lighting the boiler. I don’t know. Connie Bindman is the archivist. She’s an institution – knows everybody and everything. She’ll be able to help you.’

  ‘A basement in Hammersmith,’ Connolly grumbled, getting to her feet. ‘It sounds dusty. And me with me hair washed this morning.’

  ‘I thought you washed it every morning,’ said Slider.

  Connolly stopped, startled, and looked at him with a hint of wariness. ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘I notice everything,’ he said. ‘That’s why I get the big money.’ And he went away, hearing Connolly’s uncertain laugh behind him. He smiled inwardly. He liked to keep his staff guessing.

  FOUR

  De Profundis

  If Connolly had thought about it logically, she would have guessed the archivist would be old. You’d hardly call a young person an institution.