Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  TEN

  Occam’s Razor

  LaSalle had been searching public records in Swindon for Ronald Thomas Knight. There were about 200 Ronald Knights nationwide, but the ‘Thomas’ narrowed the field considerably, and none of them was working or voting in Swindon. However, given that the age of the subject would now be close to eighty, he had one last place to look.

  ‘Found him, sir,’ he said, tapping respectfully at Slider’s open door.

  Slider examined the expression being presented to him. ‘You don’t look happy about it.’

  ‘Dead,’ LaSalle admitted glumly.

  ‘Damn!’ said Slider.

  He didn’t say, ‘Are you sure?’ – he was that good a boss – but LaSalle told him anyway.

  ‘Found him in the register of deaths, seven years ago, checked the address against the 2001 census and it had him and a Margaret Emerald Knight living there. Well, you don’t get many of them to the pound, so it’s got to be the right one?’

  ‘It sounds like it.’

  ‘It’s a bummer he’s copped it,’ LaSalle grumbled. ‘Cardiomyopathy – that’s heart failure, isn’t it?’ Slider assented. ‘The wife’s not still at that address, and I couldn’t find her in Swindon, but then I thought, maybe when her old man popped his clogs, she’d want to go back somewhere they were happy together.’

  ‘We’ve searched in Shepherd’s Bush.’

  ‘No, not there. I meant relatively happy,’ LaSalle said. ‘It must’ve been a relief to get away at first, and Ronnie got a job, and they must’ve thought they were making a new start – I meant Reading. So I had a look.’

  ‘And?’ Slider prompted patiently. LaSalle evidently liked a story and an audience.

  ‘Found her!’ he said triumphantly. ‘In a rented house in Tilehurst. She’s on the 2011 census, and the current electoral register, living alone. D’you want me to go out and interview her?’

  He looked so hopeful Slider was almost sorry to have to crush his dreams. But Mr Porson had told him to prioritize, hadn’t he? And if Ronald Knight was dead, this was now the last link, and the last hope of finding out what had really happened. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll go myself.’

  The house was one of a terrace in a new development, and represented the meanest of ambitions on the part of the builders. Slider had looked up the layout online before they left, part of his preparation, gauging the subject’s prosperity. The basic house was an oblong shoebox thirteen feet wide, with a living room at the front, which had an open-plan staircase in it, and a kitchen at the back, just big enough to turn round in. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, thirteen by nine, with a windowless bathroom between them, and at the back the garden, inevitably thirteen feet wide, was twelve feet long, just about big enough to house a rotary washing line.

  Slider stared at the terrace with disfavour as they stepped out of the car. The façade was flat, the roof line was unsullied by chimneys, and had each house not been blessed with a tiny porch tacked on the front, there’d have been nothing to break the outline at all.

  Atherton read his expression and said, ‘It’s no different from a Victorian two-up two-down – probably bigger, in fact.’

  ‘But a Victorian two-up two-down would have window detail and a bit of fancy brickwork to lift the spirits,’ he said.

  ‘Not everyone cares about architecture.’

  ‘Not everyone knows they do, but it affects them all the same. And the ceilings would have been higher and it would have had a fireplace with handy alcoves for shelving, and picture rails, and cornicing, and pretty architraves round the doors.’

  Atherton made a dismissive ‘pfft’ noise. ‘You can’t eat architrave.’

  ‘That doesn’t even make sense.’

  ‘You know what I mean. It’s clean and new and full of straight lines, which is what people want. Cornice just harbours the dust, and who wants a fireplace when you’ve got central heating? I wonder if she’s in.’

  ‘She’s seventy-two, of course she’s in. Where else would she be?’ But he felt an unusual thrill of nervousness as they walked up the path of the unfenced front garden (seven feet by – yes, you’ve guessed it – thirteen). The enormity of Margaret Knight’s experiences, plus the question about how much she knew at the time or had learned later, made it a delicate, even a nerve-racking interview to contemplate.

  The television was on, spewing out its daytime Prozac, and there was an elderly armchair with a dent in the seat facing it, while next to it the top table of a nest bore an empty mug, the TV remote and a glasses case. Slider concluded she had been sitting watching – or at least staring in the direction of – the screen when they rang the doorbell.

  She seemed almost dazed when she opened the door, and stared at them, not so much questioningly as apathetically, the archetypal victim waiting to be told what to do by the friendly conman or crim.

  Slider spoke to her gently, trying to ease her into an understanding of who he was, placing his warrant card into her hand and giving her plenty of time to look at it. He expected some reaction of shock, or fear, or even horror, but she only looked up and said helplessly, ‘I’ve not got my glasses on. I can’t read it.’ Then, catching up with his words, she said, ‘Shepherd’s Bush? You said you were from Shepherd’s Bush?’

  ‘That’s right. Detective Chief Inspector Slider. And this is Detective Sergeant Atherton.’ He gave their names again, carefully. ‘May we come in and talk to you?’

  ‘You’re police?’ She got there at last.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. May we come in?’

  And so she let them in. She moved back towards the chair as if there were rails along the carpet, and having reached it, waved her hand vaguely at the sofa. ‘D’you want to sit down?’ she said.

  ‘Thank you – and could we have the television turned off?’

  ‘I forgot it was on. I wasn’t really watching,’ she said. She picked up the remote, and with one click produced a blessed silence.

  She was small, thin, old, with a lined face, glasses, and grey hair in what Connolly called a ‘mammy hairdo’ – cut short and permed. In a supermarket with a shopping trolley she would have been indistinguishable from any other lone female pensioner. She had not let herself go completely, Slider concluded, for the perm looked relatively recent; and she was decently dressed in a grey wool skirt and a blue jumper, with a grey cardigan open over the top, and nylon tights on her legs, and bedroom slippers on her feet that were not old and broken down. But she was not wearing make-up, or any jewellery apart from a plain broad wedding ring. She had dressed for decency, but not to be seen.

  The furniture in the room was old, brought with her, presumably, from previous homes, and there were no pictures on the walls, and no ornaments apart from a struggling maidenhair fern in a fancy cachepot, and some framed photographs on the sideboard under the window. One of them, he could see, was a wedding photograph – presumably of Margaret and Ronald; one, he thought, was of Amanda in school uniform; and a third, a family group of some sort, seemed much older and browner, so perhaps it was something from her childhood.

  It was not a great deal to show for seventy-two years of life, and for a moment the thought of what she had lost appalled him. It was not something you could ever get over, was it? And if she didn’t know, if she had never known, if she had not been involved, how much worse was what they had come here to do?

  ‘Mrs Knight,’ he began.

  She forestalled him. ‘It’s about Amanda, isn’t it?’ She had turned her head towards him and the light from the window reflecting in her glasses stopped him reading anything from her expression. ‘After all these years,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d finished with all that. Why have you come bothering me now? Ronnie’s dead and gone, don’t you know that? Driven to his grave, by the worry of it. The shame. All that stuff in the papers – he never got over it. People thinking he’d done away with his own daughter. Hounded, that’s what he was. How could you even think such a thing? I pity your poor wives
and families, if you’ve got minds like that.’

  The unexpected fluency, coming out of the previous silence, surprised Slider. While he was digesting the content, Atherton picked up the cue and said, ‘Mrs Knight, there’s been a development. Haven’t you seen anything about it on the news?’

  ‘I don’t watch the news. It’s all rubbish. Nasty rubbish, too, all death and bombs and such like. As if we didn’t have enough trouble in our lives without that.’ She caught up with the word and stopped herself abruptly. ‘Development? What development?’ She looked from Atherton to Slider. He had moved slightly so that he no longer caught the reflection from the window, and he saw instead a slow and agonising hope that must have burned like gall all the way up from her heart to her throat. Her thick, misshapen hands gripped the chair arms. ‘You’ve found her?’ she whispered. ‘You’ve found our Amanda?’

  There was no way round it. You had to tell them. ‘I’m afraid it isn’t good news,’ Slider said. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that human remains have been found—’

  ‘Remains?’ She jumped on the word, and then repeated it, her face screwed up with pain. ‘Remains?’

  ‘A skeleton has been found. I’m afraid that’s all that would be left, after twenty-five years.’

  ‘She’s dead?’ Mrs Knight looked from one face to the other, but she was not seeing them. ‘Amanda’s dead?’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ Slider said.

  She didn’t cry. She was absorbed with thought, and he wished he could interpret it. When she spoke, it was unemphatically, more to herself than to them. ‘I suppose I knew it, really, after all this time. I mean, we’d have heard something. But I never believed it, not inside. You don’t, do you? You can’t. I kept hoping one day she’d come back. You see things on telly, where people have been found years later. Daddy used to say, “Face it, Mags, she’s gone,” but you can’t, not a mother, not after you’ve carried them for nine months and given birth to them and …’ She fumbled a handkerchief out of her cardigan pocket, but it was to wipe her mouth, not her eyes. ‘The last time I saw her,’ she said in a stronger voice – and Slider guessed it was something she had said many times – ‘was having a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea at the kitchen table. We had our bit of lunch together, just as normal as could be, and then she went out in the garden and I went to my sewing machine, and I never saw her again. But I always thought she’d come back in the end.’ She looked at Slider and said, almost indignantly, ‘She was only fourteen! Who did this? Who did it?’

  ‘That’s what we have to find out,’ Slider said gently. ‘You see, up until now Amanda was officially a missing person. Now I’m afraid we have to investigate a murder.’

  Her expression sharpened. ‘Why d’you say that? Maybe it wasn’t murder. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe she fell down a quarry or fell in a river and it was just an accident. I don’t want …’ She swallowed. ‘I can’t think of her being killed deliberately. I can’t.’

  ‘I know it’s hard for you, but—’ Slider began.

  ‘No!’

  ‘The body had been buried, you see. That was a deliberate act by someone. Someone buried the body to conceal it, which I’m afraid suggests it was no accident.’

  ‘Buried? Where?’ Mrs Knight asked sharply.

  Was her keenness anything more than a desire to know the worst? Slider wondered. ‘In the garden of number fifteen, Laburnum Avenue,’ he said.

  Her lips moved soundlessly, rehearsing what he had said. Then she said, ‘In our garden? Oh my God. Oh my good God. In our garden?’

  Well, he thought, glancing at Atherton, she hadn’t known the body was there, that at least was clear. However much she had known – or suspected – about the rest, she hadn’t known that.

  ‘What did …? How did she …? But she left the garden. She was sitting out there, and then when I looked out, she wasn’t there, so she must have left the garden. So … someone brought her back?’

  ‘It looks that way,’ Slider said, giving her time to come to terms with it.

  ‘Someone brought the – brought her back and buried her there?’ She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘But I don’t see how they could. I mean, without us knowing? Digging and suchlike? I mean, we’d have heard something. We’d have seen. We’d …’ Her eyes widened, her lips tightened, and a look of old, old anger came over her face. ‘You’re thinking he did it, aren’t you? Ronnie. You’re back on that old story.’

  Atherton took over. ‘As you say, it would have been hard for anyone else to do it without you knowing. But your husband could come and go at times when he knew you wouldn’t be at home. Or he might creep out at night when you were asleep.’

  She was red with anger now. ‘He wouldn’t do that! You can’t come here saying these things to me! It’s disgusting, when he’s not here to defend himself. I won’t listen to any more of it. You get out! You hear me? Get out this minute or I’ll …’ She tripped herself, obviously having been about to say, ‘or I’ll call the police’.

  Into the silence, Slider said, ‘I’m very sorry to have to put you through this, but we have to talk to you. You must see that. It’s our job to find out what happened to your daughter, and you’re the person now who was closest to her.’

  ‘You think he did it,’ she accused, but quietly.

  ‘I don’t think that. I don’t know. And I have to try and find out.’

  ‘He wouldn’t, you see,’ she said. ‘You didn’t know him. He was so proud of her. He would never lay a finger on her, I promise you that.’

  ‘Wasn’t he sometimes prone to losing his temper?’ Atherton asked.

  Slider flicked a glance at him. He didn’t want her provoked, he wanted her talking. But she seemed now to want to explain things, rather than protest about them. ‘He did have a bit of a temper on him,’ she agreed, ‘but it wasn’t violent. He would never hit anyone. Pat – my sister Pat?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve spoken to her,’ said Slider.

  Her mouth soured. ‘Oh, have you. Well, no doubt she gave you a few of her ideas to be going on with. She made a big thing afterwards that he had a temper, but it was only shouting with him. You see, he wasn’t all that good with words, and he’d get in a muddle sometimes and blow up, but it was all over in a moment. Pat, she was always hinting that him blowing up meant he’d hit us, but he never lifted a hand to either of us, nor would he. He was a kind soul, always ready to do anyone a good turn – as she ought to know. Did all their plumbing for them for nothing, when she had that second bathroom put in. It was that good-for-nothing husband of hers she ought to have been looking at. Running around with other women! I say if a man breaks one law, he’s more likely to break another. My Ronnie never did a dishonest thing in his life. Paid his taxes, worked hard – he never even took a cash job, like most of ’em do. Honest as the day is long, Ronnie. But her Brian – well!’

  ‘What did he do that was against the law?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘He committed adultery,’ she said hotly. ‘That’s against God’s law, isn’t it?’ And seeing Atherton was not impressed, she went on: ‘And he was a great one for things that fell off the back of a lorry, things he got from a man down the pub. That’s how he got a microwave before everybody else had one. And a video player. Loved his toys, Brian did. And how come he always had hundred-packs of cigarettes around the house? And a sideboard full of bottles of gin and whisky and you name it?’

  ‘You think they were stolen?’

  She sniffed. ‘All I know is, they were supposed to be some great bargain. He got Pat this fancy watch. I said to her, I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing something that I didn’t know where it came from, but she wasn’t so particular as me. And Brian, he wasn’t particular at all.’

  Slider noted that while she resented unproved allegations against her husband, she didn’t mind doing the same for Pat’s. The sisters were more alike, perhaps, than either of them thought.

  ‘But Brian had an alibi for the whole day, didn’t he?’ Athert
on asked innocently.

  ‘Pat said he was home with her all afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t believe her?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be like him, on a Saturday. More likely he was off with one of his floozies, and she didn’t want to admit it.’

  She was sharp, Slider thought. She saw through that one. But she didn’t follow through to realize it was still an alibi. ‘I believe you suggested at one time that he might have been interested in Amanda in an inappropriate way,’ said Slider. ‘Did you ever see him do or say anything to her that you didn’t like?’

  She looked slightly shamefaced. ‘I said that really to rile Pat, because she’d been saying things about Ronnie. I mean, he was a devil for the women, but Amanda, she was only fourteen, he didn’t look at her that way. He used to give her sweets, and tease her, you know, like the way uncles do, but I never thought …’ She pondered. ‘No, I never saw anything like that. She used to like going over there, but that was for the dogs, really. She was mad about dogs. She was always asking why we couldn’t have one, but Daddy always told her we couldn’t afford one. Truth was, he didn’t like dogs. He’d been bitten more than once, when he was doing work at people’s houses. He was afraid of them, if you want the truth, but of course he wouldn’t say that. A man has his pride. It was one of the things him and Amanda used to row about, her wanting a dog and him saying no.’

  ‘They used to row about it?’ Atherton asked, trying not to sound too interested.

  But she wasn’t spooked, well into her memories now. She probably hadn’t had many people to talk to in the last twenty-five years. ‘Well, they were a lot alike, Daddy and Amanda. Quiet, not big talkers, but there was a lot going on inside. And stubborn, once they’d set their minds on something. But she’d got the schooling that he hadn’t, she was really bright. Not that he was stupid, not by a long chalk, but he’d not had much education. Growing up during the war, there was a lot of disruption with the bombs and everything. And he couldn’t wait to leave at fifteen and start his apprenticeship. He got his City and Guilds, he was a good plumber, he made a good living, but he always regretted he hadn’t had the book education. He had all these thoughts he couldn’t find the words for, and Amanda, she could talk rings round him. It used to make him mad. And he’d end up shouting and banging out of the room. It was just frustration,’ she added pleadingly. ‘He’d never hurt a fly, really.’