Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  And it wasn’t just because you would lose the work if you failed. There was an imperative beyond that: the work itself. Music called you like the grim god in a pagan world, demanding service, utter dedication, the whole self. And, of course, you wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s what the outsider couldn’t grasp – why you would do that to yourself, serve such a rigid tyrant, when you might lollygag about at some other employment and probably earn twice as much. They didn’t understand. Musicians and policemen did.

  George was watching him, curiously, and when he said quietly, ‘Want to come downstairs, boy?’ he held out his arms and made that impatient snatching motion with his hands, so Slider went and reached into the cot, lifted out the divine weight and lodged it on his hip, smelling the warm, new-bread scent of his sleep on his skin. He kissed the perfect curve of hot, silken cheek, and thought that some years hence such kisses would be rebuffed as the self-consciousness of boyhood kicked in. He couldn’t kiss Matthew any more – would probably never kiss him again in the whole of his life. Kate allowed kisses, but they were counters in her own private power game, not tokens of affection. But for now, any touch of his was welcome to George. Love bloomed between them, uncomplicated and perfect. He had a few years of it yet; and this time around, he knew it and would cherish them.

  But in the kitchen, as he made tea and boiled George’s egg, and his child chattered to him, he listened and responded with his whole heart but only half his mind. The fog outside was thinning and the world was claiming him. He was remembering the scene at work when the Neptune report had finally arrived, and he had summoned his firm to give them the bad news. They had listened in stony silence, and he realized that it had already reached them, in that mysterious way that ‘grapevine’ worked.

  ‘I know you feel let down,’ he had concluded. ‘You feel your work has not been rewarded, you made all that effort for nothing. But sometimes that’s the way it goes. Not all cases come to court – you don’t need me to tell you that. Sometimes it just isn’t possible to assemble the evidence that will carry the thing home. As long as you know in yourself that you have done everything you could have done, there’s nothing to regret. Put it aside, and move on. We’re here to do a job, not win awards.’ He observed their expressions and added the old saw. ‘If you wanted to be popular, you should have joined the fire brigade.’

  They gave him reluctant laughter for that, and seeing he had finished, got up and began gathering themselves to go home, looking more relaxed.

  He had told Joanna about it in the evening as she prepared supper, and she had looked at him over her shoulder from in front of the gas stove and said, ‘Nice speech, but was that really what you thought? That it was just one of those things?’

  ‘I’ve read the report. It’s very carefully phrased, very balanced. It makes sense. Not to believe it – to believe there’s some sort of conspiracy going on – would make me a paranoid nutter, wouldn’t it? A swivel-eyed loony.’

  She looked at him carefully, and went back to stirring the ragu. She said, ‘Was every lead followed up the way you would have done it? Were there things not done that you would have done? I know it was taken away from you before you’d properly finished.’

  He hesitated. ‘I’m starting to wonder, you see, if I wanted to see more than was there. If it all unravels when you pull one thread, maybe it was bad knitting to begin with. If it weren’t for Kaylee … But as Porson kindly pointed out to me, Freddie Cameron isn’t God. His opinion could be wrong. It’s far more likely that she was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. The simplest explanation is generally the right one.’

  Joanna turned the gas off from under the spaghetti, carried the pot to the sink and tipped it into the colander. ‘But you don’t think she was, do you?’ she said from within the cloud of steam. ‘Knocked down?’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he said fretfully.

  She ladled the sauce over the pasta. ‘Can’t you just forget it?’ she asked. ‘Take your own advice, set it to one side and move on? Maybe you were wrong: it’s possible.’

  He thought about it as he followed her to the table. ‘When you play,’ he said, ‘you know when it’s right, don’t you?’ He saw her raised eyebrow and said, ‘I don’t just mean you’re playing the right notes. I mean, when it’s right.’

  She nodded. ‘I know what you mean. Like when you’re playing darts and you need a double top to go out – you know as it leaves your hand, before it reaches the board, that you’ve done it.’

  ‘I’ve developed an instinct over twenty years of being a detective. And if I lose that, I lose everything.’

  She heard the frustration in his voice, and the fear underneath it, because a musician lives with that fear all the time: can I still do it? Am I finished?

  ‘Well,’ she said lightly, ‘if you were right all along, something else is bound to come up, sooner or later. After all, look at this Laburnum Avenue thing. Everybody must have believed that poor child would never be heard of again. But here you are, twenty-five years later, hot on the scent.’

  He smiled at her painfully. ‘I can’t wait twenty-five years! I shall be too old to care.’

  ‘Good God, I hope not!’ she said sharply, as she served him. ‘George won’t even have finished his education.’

  ‘In twenty-five years?’ Slider protested.

  ‘Oh, he’s going to be a doctor, didn’t you know? Look at his hands.’

  ‘I thought they were the hands of a concert pianist.’

  ‘He can do both, can’t he?’

  ‘Of course he can. Silly me.’

  One of the few statements included in the Knight file was from a schoolmate, Adrienne Tusk, and she turned out to be quite easy to find. Her parents still lived at the same address in Adelaide Grove, and were able to give Swilley her new address.

  ‘We saw that about the skeleton on the local news, on the telly,’ Mrs Tusk said in a suitably hushed voice. ‘And that was Amanda, was it? What a terrible thing.’

  ‘Terrible,’ her husband echoed. They were meek and decent people in their sixties, on their best behaviour in the presence of the police; retired now, growing closer and more alike now that there was just the two of them. They sat side by side in their meek and decent sitting room, the same height, the same build, the same short grey hair – almost, with the androgyny of age, the same face.

  ‘That poor girl,’ said Mrs Tusk. ‘I remember at the time, when she went missing, we were so sorry for her parents – weren’t we, Geoff?’

  ‘So sorry!’ he agreed.

  ‘And now it turns out that she was there all the time. Buried in the garden.’

  ‘Shocking,’ said Mr Tusk.

  ‘Really shocking,’ Mrs Tusk echoed.

  ‘Do you remember Amanda?’ Swilley asked, since she was there.

  They looked at each other, as if swapping thoughts. ‘Not really,’ said Mrs Tusk. ‘I suppose we saw her a couple of times, but she didn’t sort of stand out, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘She was ordinary,’ said Mr Tusk.

  ‘Ordinary,’ Mrs Tusk confirmed. ‘A quiet little girl, I’d say. Of course, they said at the time our Addy was her best friend, but I don’t know really that they were close. Addy had lots of friends – she was a very popular girl – and I suppose Amanda must have been one of them. I remember she came to Addy’s birthday party that year – that was in May, the May before it happened. So they must have been friends then. But she wasn’t in and out of the house all the time, like the other girls.’

  ‘Girls in and out, all the time. Our Addy had lots of friends. Very popular girl.’

  ‘But I don’t recollect that she was ever invited to Amanda’s house – do you, Geoff?’

  ‘No, I don’t recall that she was. Mind you,’ he added, striking out an independent line for once, ‘I’d be at work then. I wouldn’t get back until gone half-past six. It’d be Lin – the wife – who’d know more about it.’

  ‘That’s right.’
She lifted a daring look to tall Swilley’s face. ‘I s’pose she was – murdered – poor thing?’ The word was mouthed, soundlessly, as though that would make it less real. ‘Do you know who did it?’

  Mr Tusk was more robust. ‘I s’pose it’d be the father, wouldn’t it, with the body being in their garden?’

  Swilley didn’t indulge them. ‘Did you know them – the Knights?’

  ‘No,’ Mr Tusk said with regret, as though knowing a murderer would have added to the richness of his life. ‘I don’t know that we ever met them.’

  ‘Oh, we did, Geoff – once, at school, at the concert, you remember? Our Addy pointed them out. They were standing with Amanda, over in a corner, not talking to anybody.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s right.’

  ‘But we never heard anything bad about them,’ said Mrs Tusk quickly. ‘The police asked us that at the time, and we told them.’

  ‘We never really knew them,’ said Mr Tusk. And he exchanged another look with his wife, as if the not-knowing of them was a significant factor – because a murderer would be bound to keep himself to himself, wouldn’t he?

  Adrienne Tusk was now Adrienne Hopper, living in St Albans, and working for a computer training company there. Her husband had his own specialist commercial and domestic cleaning firm, and she had two children at school, a boy and a girl, aged eleven and twelve. All these facts were matters of intense pride to the Tusk parents, as Swilley gathered from the array of framed photographs on the sideboard behind them, which included one of the whole family standing in front of the Hoppers’ house – new and, she was assured, detached. ‘Her Tony’s doing ever so well for himself,’ Mrs Tusk had cooed.

  Swilley caught up with Adrienne Hopper at work, so she never got to marvel at the discrete nature of her abode. She was a neat, brisk woman with tidy hair and a black cloth skirt and jacket over a white shirt that had ‘work suit’ stamped all over it. When Swilley introduced herself, she surveyed her with intelligent eyes and said, ‘Is this about Amanda? I did wonder if you’d be wanting to talk to me. Let’s see – the small conference room’ll be empty. Come this way. Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘Unusual name, Adrienne,’ Swilley said to warm her up, when they had settled at the conference table with mugs of coffee in front of them.

  ‘I was named after Adrienne Corri,’ she said. Swilley looked the question, and she smiled. ‘No, I didn’t know, either. She was an actress my dad had the hots for – used to be in all those schlocky horror films. I always quite liked it as a name. Better than being another Sarah or Lisa. There were two Sarahs and two Lisas in my class.’

  ‘But only one Adrienne,’ Swilley said. ‘And only one Amanda?’

  The smile became a frown. ‘Oh dear, poor Amanda. You know, the press at the time said I was Amanda’s best friend, but I’m not sure that was really true. Or, at least, it probably was true, but only because she didn’t have any other friends.’

  ‘Why was that, do you think?’

  ‘Oh, she was very quiet. And – maybe a little weird.’

  ‘Weird how?’

  She thought about it. ‘Maybe that’s not fair. She probably wasn’t weird, exactly, just different from the rest of us. We were all miniskirts and eyeliner and Afro hair. She looked like something out of the fifties – skirts down to her knees, lace-up shoes with socks, page-boy haircut. But I suppose that was her mum and dad’s fault. And we were all Stones and Rod Stewart, and she had this thing for David Essex.’

  ‘I get the picture. So how did you become friends with her?’

  ‘We sat next to each other in class for a while and … well, I suppose I felt a bit sorry for her. Some of the other girls used to tease her, and she was never really in with any of the groups. Not that she seemed to mind – she was a bit of a loner, really – but of course afterwards you do wonder whether she was a loner by choice, or because it was forced on her, don’t you?’

  ‘Afterwards?’

  ‘After she disappeared. I mean, of course, at the time we all thought she’d run away.’

  ‘Did that surprise you?’

  She thought about it. ‘No, not really. I always knew there was something underneath that mousey front – I mean, she wasn’t stupid, by any means. She was always near the top of the class, and she gave the impression of thinking a lot. We’d all be messing around and making a noise, and she’d be just standing there watching us, and you always got the feeling her brain was running at higher level and she was thinking we were pretty silly really. The idea that she’d got sick of her life and gone off to find a better one sort of appealed to me. I liked to imagine her living in a commune somewhere, you know? Smoking dope and having free love and laughing at the rest of us nine-to-five clones.’ She gave a nervous laugh. ‘Of course, we had no idea then she’d been murdered.’

  ‘Even when she didn’t come back?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I must say I never thought that. I suppose you don’t when you’re a teenager. You assume you’re all going to live for ever. I’m disappointed really,’ she said with an apologetic smile. ‘I thought she was the one that got away. I don’t like to think of her being …’ She stopped and bit her lip, staring into the past thoughtfully.

  ‘So how close were you?’

  ‘Well, she sort of hung around with me and my group the last year. I saw quite a lot of her at school. I suppose – yeah, we were friends.’

  ‘After school?’

  ‘No, not really. We lived in opposite directions, and she’d go off home and I’d go off home and that’d be that.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know what she did in her spare time. Homework, probably.’ She gave a nervous smile at her own joke.

  ‘What about boys?’ Swilley asked.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I assume you all had boyfriends by then – age fourteen. Just the age to be boy mad. Were you sexually active?’

  She blushed and looked annoyed. ‘What a question to ask! No, I wasn’t, as it happened, but some in our class were. I had a boyfriend, sort of. Someone I was keen on, but it wasn’t serious, and we never really did anything.’

  ‘Did Amanda have a boyfriend?’

  She expected a quick negative, but to her surprise Adrienne thought about it. ‘I wouldn’t have said she was the sort to,’ she said slowly. ‘You know, with the old-fashioned clothes and no make-up and so on. And she was mad about David Essex – I mean, really dopey. Had a big picture of him on the inside of her locker, and she carried one around with her, a little thing this size she’d cut out of a magazine and kept in her purse. She used to talk about him as if he was a real person – I mean, as if she knew him. She was always going on about what he liked and didn’t like. “I wouldn’t do that,” she’d say. “David wouldn’t approve.” And she’d say stuff like, “David doesn’t drink coffee, he only likes tea.” It was a bit weird.’

  ‘So you think that took the place of a real boyfriend in her life?’ Swilley asked.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what I would have thought, if I’d thought about it at all. I mean, I was fourteen, you don’t analyse. But looking back, she’d changed the last few months, and I wonder whether that wasn’t part of it – that she’d got a boyfriend. A real one.’

  ‘Did she say anything about a boyfriend?’

  ‘No. But if she did have one, I reckon she’d have to keep him secret – I mean, I can’t see her parents approving.’ She paused a moment in thought. ‘But she did talk about a new girlfriend. Somebody called Melissa.’

  ‘You didn’t know this Melissa?’

  ‘No, she wasn’t at our school. We went to Poplar Road. According to Amanda, Melissa went to St Margaret’s, where the posh girls went. She was very proud of that fact, was Amanda. Melissa lived in a big house, Melissa went to St Margaret’s, Melissa had everything, she was the bees knees. A couple of times I wanted to say to her, if she’s so marvellous, why’s she interested in you? But I didn’t.’

  ‘You were jealous?’r />
  ‘Good God, no!’ But she blushed a little as she said it. Then she said, ‘Well, maybe I was, looking back. I mean, I’d always been the only one standing up for Amanda. I felt sorry for her and took the trouble to be friends with her, and then suddenly—’

  ‘Instead of being grateful she went off with someone else?’

  ‘It sounds silly when you say it now.’

  ‘No, it’s very understandable,’ said Swilley.

  Adrienne shrugged it off. ‘Anyway, I got fed up with hearing about wonderful Melissa. And then Amanda stopped talking about her.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘That summer. The summer term. I suppose, the last few weeks before we broke up. She didn’t talk about anything, really – went all silent and distant. She changed, you know? She even looked older. Thinner in the face and more – more like a teenager and less like a kid. I think she had a secret.’

  ‘But you have no idea what it was?’

  ‘Not really. She never said anything to me. But – well, looking back, it’s the sort of change you might see if a girl like that suddenly gets mixed up with a boy. A real one, not David Essex.’

  It was also, Swilley thought, the sort of change you might see if a girl suddenly found out about sex from the wrong end of the spectrum. Becoming silent and withdrawn is often a first sign that abuse is going on. And abuse could so easily lead to murder.

  ‘This Melissa – do you know her other name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or where she lived?’

  ‘No. Just that it was a big house.’ She looked at Swilley unhappily. ‘If she existed at all,’ she said.

  ‘Did you think she was made up, then?’

  ‘Not at the time, no. But now – well, you’ve found her bones, haven’t you? Which means she must have been murdered. So maybe something was going on at home – you know what I mean. And she made up a new best friend to sort of comfort herself. I mean, I’m not a psychiatrist, but …’

  ‘Quite,’ said Swilley. ‘Did you talk about this to anyone else at the time? To the police who interviewed you back then?’

  ‘No, of course not. I was just a kid. And they were grown ups. You don’t tell stuff to grown ups. And in any case, this is really stuff I’ve thought about since.’ She read Swilley’s face. ‘I know, hindsight and all that sort of thing. Maybe I’m making too much of it. But she really did change that summer.’