Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  The child changed tack with a suddenness that suggested she’d been thinking about it for some time. ‘Why can’t I come home with you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yeah. People do. They, like, foster, don’t they?’

  ‘I’m not in the market for fostering. I doubt they’d think I was suitable anyway.’

  ‘What? You’re a copper. You’re a guard,’ she changed the word beguilingly, and smiled up like the world’s cutest crocodile. ‘They gotta like that.’

  ‘I work long hours, unsocial hours,’ Connolly began. ‘I’d never be there.’

  ‘I don’t mind being on my own,’ Julienne jumped in. ‘My mum was always going out. I could get your tea ready for when you come home from work. I done it for my mum – not that she ate a lot anyway. I’m all right left alone. I can look after myself,’ she added pleadingly.

  ‘I know you can,’ Connolly said kindly, ‘but that’s not the point, is it? The idea is that you should be looked after. That’s what fostering’s about – to give you people to take care of you, like parents would.’

  ‘I could keep house for you,’ Julienne said. ‘I could do … dusting and stuff.’

  It was too sad. ‘Sorry, Jule,’ Connolly said with all the firmness she could muster. ‘You’ll just have to get through this part as best you can. Keep your nose clean, work hard at school, then when you’re older you can go where you like and make a proper life for yourself.’

  Julienne’s face was down and her lower lip out. She looked up at Connolly pathetically from under her eyebrows. ‘But you’ll still be my friend? You’ll still come and visit me?’

  ‘If you behave yourself,’ Connolly said sternly. ‘No shenanigans.’

  ‘No what?’ Julienne asked, bouncing back on the instant to her default setting of lively curiosity.

  ‘Messing. Playing silly beggars.’

  ‘She– what?’

  ‘Shenanigans.’

  Julienne repeated it to herself several times, grinning. ‘You don’t half talk funny! Is that Irish? Say some more.’

  ‘Well,’ Connolly obliged, ‘our prime minister’s called the Taoiseach.’

  ‘The Teapot?’

  ‘And the present one’s name is Enda Kenny.’

  ‘That’s a girl’s name! Your Teapot’s called Edna!’ Julienne crowed delightedly. ‘Say some more!’

  They were heading back for the car park and the journey into darkness, but Julienne hopped along beside her, chatting and giggling, clutching her bag of small treasures, and Connolly felt horribly like someone taking their unknowing pet to the vet to be put down. So when a small, sticky hand was slipped into hers, she let it stay there. She didn’t have the heart to shake it off.

  St Margaret’s School did not keep its old records on the premises. ‘We’re a venerable foundation,’ the current head told Swilley, ‘and there just wouldn’t be room. We keep ten years’ worth to hand. Everything else is in the archive, which is looked after by one of our former headmistresses, Miss Wheatcroft. I can give you her address.’

  ‘Thank you. And where is the archive itself?’

  ‘Oh, in her house. Or rather, she has a barn next to her house which we’ve had specially remodelled – fireproofed and humidity controlled. But she’s the present archivist, and she’s also tremendously knowledgeable about the school, so if anyone can help you, she can.’

  And so on Saturday morning Swilley found herself driving out into the countryside to a village on the border of Essex and Hertfordshire. Into the countryside again, she thought – she who hated winding lanes, hedges, cows and mud with a visceral passion. She liked pavements, shops, tube stations, red buses – she was a Town girl through and through, which made it all the stranger that she so often got sent to these one-horse, carrot kingdoms.

  Even she, with her inbuilt prejudice, could see it was a pretty village, on a river, with a desperately cute little twelfth-century church, and more timber-framed houses than you could shake a stick at. The Dower House, where Miss Wheatcroft lived, at least had the decency to be on the main road, and was easily spotted, a square fifteenth-century house, painted white between its black beams, with the massive Tudor barn standing right next to it with – thank God – a wide gravelled parking area between the two. Whoever had converted the barn to a modern storage facility had done a good job: butter wouldn’t have melted in its mouth. You couldn’t see a thing, and even the building behind which housed the generator for the climate control had been designed to match and looked like the big barn’s timber-clad offspring.

  Miss Wheatcroft was expecting her, and came out to meet Swilley as soon as she got out of the car. It had been clear during the night, and evidently cold out here in the sticks, for there was still frost lingering along the shadowed edges out of the sunshine, and Swilley saw her breath rise as she spoke a greeting, to join the misty haziness that clung to the surrounding trees. She shivered involuntarily at the realization that it was all trees and fields for miles around.

  Miss Wheatcroft misinterpreted the shudder and said, ‘Come inside, come – it’s lovely and warm in there, and I’ve got coffee on the brew. I don’t notice the cold myself any more, but I expect it was much warmer in town when you left, wasn’t it?’

  She was hospitable and exuded a calmness and warmth that Swilley thought would be invaluable in a head teacher, as they were called now – though if anyone was ever a headmistress, it was this lady. She must have been in her eighties, but was brisk and healthy and bright-eyed and handsome, dressed in a smart tweed skirt and a lavender twinset, with a silk scarf round her neck twisted together with a string of pearls, pearl earrings in her ears, and her silvery hair prettily waved and styled. She could have opened the annual flower show there and then, without changing a thing.

  Inside the house it was, as promised, warm. It was spacious and beautiful with antique furniture and pictures on the walls, if you cared for that sort of thing, but the kitchen was modern and well-equipped, and it was to the kitchen Swilley was led, to be greeted with slow stretching and peaceful smiles by two Siamese cats and two dogs – a black Lab and a terrier mix – who had been lying in baskets in front of the gleaming new Aga.

  ‘You don’t mind the chaps, do you?’ Miss Wheatcroft asked. ‘They’re very well-behaved. I can’t stand people’s pets that jump on you without being invited. Just ignore them if you don’t like them and they won’t come any nearer.’

  ‘I like animals,’ Swilley said cautiously. She held out a hand and the dogs came to sniff, but the cats sat on their tails and squinted at her from a polite distance, then went back to their basket. The dogs went to the back door and Miss Wheatcroft let them out, then brought coffee to the table in bone china mugs, with a plate of shortbreads.

  ‘How do you take your coffee?’

  ‘Just as it comes,’ said Swilley. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Good girl,’ said Miss Wheatcroft. ‘I always think of Steinbeck: “If ya wanted a cup a cream an’ sugar, why’d ya ask for coffee?”’ She did a passable American accent. Swilley didn’t know the quotation and smiled politely but blankly, and Miss Wheatcroft pulled herself together. ‘Now then, you wanted to pick my brains, I understand, about some of my girls from back in 1990?’

  ‘That’s right. Or at least, one particular girl, who would have been about fourteen then.’

  ‘Yes, quite. That could have been either the third year or the fourth year, so I looked up both. They have a yearbook, American-style nowadays – there’s so much copying of the Americans these days, isn’t there? – but we didn’t have them then. But I’ve got out school magazines and various other bits of the records, so I hope we can find what you want. The class registers, to begin with. If you have a name, that’s the place to begin.’

  ‘All I know is that she was called Melissa – that is, if she existed at all. Our victim told people that she had a new friend called Melissa, who went to St Margaret’s, but of course she may have been making it up.’

  Mis
s Wheatcroft had lifted a number of files and documents onto the table, and was now examining an attendance register, running her finger down the names. ‘Well, there was a Melissa in class F,’ she said. She examined two more registers, and said, ‘The only one in the year, fortunately – or unfortunately, as the event dictates. Here—’ she showed Swilley – ‘Melissa Vickery. This is the record for the summer term, 1990. Quite a lot of absences, I note. Is she the one you’re looking for?’

  ‘I think she may be. What can you tell me about her?’

  ‘Let me find her pupil record – that will probably trigger something. There’ll be a photograph, and it’s faces that bring back the memories for me, more than names. It’s remarkable,’ she added as she searched through files, ‘how many children one can remember out of the thousands that pass through one’s hands. Of course they’re all unique, but children do like to disguise that uniqueness by behaving in accordance with pack dictates. Strange little creatures … Do you have children?’

  ‘One,’ said Swilley, shortly.

  Miss Wheatcroft smiled. ‘Sorry. Unprofessional of me to ask. I never had any myself. I never married. Dealing with a school of six hundred girls and thirty-odd teachers day after day, not to mention governors and civil servants, was quite enough emotional exercise for me. I couldn’t have gone home to more demands. I always marvel at teachers who can. Here we are. Melissa Vickery.’ She opened the file and took out the photograph on top. ‘Oh yes! I remember her now. Quiet little thing. Poor attendance record. Not in the top rank academically, but I remember she had a sweet smile. And helpful – always the one to offer to carry books, that sort of thing.’

  She passed the photograph to Swilley. The girl in school uniform gazed at the camera with a closed-mouthed smile, thin fair hair in a bob with a fringe and slightly anxious brown eyes. An ordinary face – a face there was nothing to say about.

  ‘We kept a copy of each year’s school photograph on file, but she left at the end of that term, so that’s the last photograph we have of her,’ said Miss Wheatcroft. ‘It was rather sad. Her mother died the previous year. She lived with her father, and I remember there was an adjustment period when she was coming to school without breakfast and in dirty clothes, until he got into a new routine. After that, they seemed to be managing quite well together. Often girls in that position have to do a lot of growing-up very quickly, have to take over their mother’s role in the house. They learn to cook and iron and control the household budget – it can be very good for them in the long run.’

  ‘Do you have an address?’ Swilley asked.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She looked up. ‘Though it’s hardly likely she’ll still be there, all this time later.’

  ‘I know, but it’s a place to start.’

  ‘Quite. Here we are. Father’s name David; mother Caroline, deceased. No other siblings. Address: 22 Colville Avenue – do you know where that is?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Swilley.

  Miss Wheatcroft was still reading notes. ‘Ah, I thought I remembered something like that – you certainly won’t find her still at that address, because the reason she left school was that they moved away. It was quite sudden. He sent a letter halfway through the summer holidays, and she didn’t come back to school that September.’

  ‘Did he say where they were going?’

  ‘You’re still hoping to interview Melissa?’ Miss Wheatcroft said curiously.

  ‘If she was close to our victim, she may be able to tell us something about her circumstances in her last days. What was going on in her life.’

  The level brown eyes said they understood what was being suggested here. ‘Sometimes they confide in their friends about that sort of thing,’ she said, ‘but more often they don’t. They get very secretive. Just so you don’t get your hopes up too high. Here we are. He says in his letter they are moving to Gloucestershire, to Tetbury. He was going to enrol her in the Edward Tenney school there.’ She looked up. ‘We have to inform the Department of Education, to ensure that schooling continues. They will have checked that the girl did arrive there.’

  ‘What did the father do – does it say?’

  ‘Yes, where is it? He was a technical designer, self-employed. Whatever that means. I think they were pretty well off – the houses in Colville Avenue were large and expensive in my day.’

  ‘Even more so now,’ said Swilley.

  ‘So I imagine,’ said Miss Wheatcroft. ‘I have a photocopier – I expect you’d like copies of some of this?’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Swilley.

  She left twenty minutes later with a neat manila folder and triumph in her heart. Melissa Vickery! Surely, surely that couldn’t be a coincidence? And if not – well, what ramifications were they looking at? She looked around at the village as she drove away with more kindly eyes, not even minding that there were miles of countryside between her and the factory. All those country lanes had led her to a pot of gold. The road to glory could take many different forms.

  THIRTEEN

  Rocking the Cash Bar

  Joanna was working on Saturday, rehearsal in the morning and concert in the evening, but she would be home for a couple of hours in the afternoon. ‘We can have a late lunch together and take George out to the park or something,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ said Slider. ‘I’ll look forward to that.’ They didn’t all that often have time together as a family. His father and Lydia were happy to have George in the morning and take him grocery shopping with them, so he didn’t feel bad about going into the office for a couple of hours and bashing through some paperwork he had been neglecting for the Amanda Knight case.

  So he was at his desk when a call was put through from Mrs Knight. She sounded quavery and infinitely old. He could imagine that she had lived the past twenty-five years in a sort of rigid state, braced against the loss of her daughter, with the unanswered question pervading her bones like cancer. Now the question was answered in the worst possible way, the bones had crumbled, and there was nothing left to keep her upright.

  He pushed the pity away and tried for professional kindness. ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I wondered – you said – I keep thinking about what you told me, but you – you didn’t …’

  ‘Yes?’ he encouraged.

  ‘You didn’t say how. I mean, what happened to her. I suppose you think she was – killed deliberately …’

  ‘That’s not necessarily so,’ he said. ‘It could have been an accident, and the person panicked and tried to get rid of the body for fear of the consequences.’

  ‘But how? I mean, how was she killed?’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no way of knowing that,’ he said. It was an awful question. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any traumatic damage to the bones. No skull fracture, for instance.’ Which left all the other possibilities – poison, strangulation, smothering, drowning. The mind could run riot – a mother’s mind perhaps particularly. There was nothing he could do about that.

  ‘Why do you think it must have been my Ronnie that did it? It could have been anyone.’

  ‘There’s the problem of access to the garden, you see,’ he said carefully.

  ‘You don’t even know it’s Amanda. You don’t even know it’s her.’ He didn’t answer that, and she went on fiercely: ‘Even if it is – you didn’t know him, you didn’t know my Ronnie. He would never have harmed her, not a hair on her head. I’m glad he’s not here now to hear all this. It would have killed him.’

  It was said without irony. There was nothing he could say except, ‘I’m sorry.’

  There was a pause, and then she said, ‘When do I – get her back?’

  ‘It shouldn’t be long,’ he said. ‘A few more days. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s possible to release her.’

  ‘And then what do I do?’

  ‘I’ll have someone talk you through it all, when the time comes. Try not to worry.’

  ‘I got nothing else to
do,’ she said, and rang off.

  He feared there was never going to be any closure in this case – not for her, but not for him either. They would assemble every bit of information they could, and it would still all add up to an implausibility wrapped in a mirage inside a figment.

  Gascoyne had tracked down Karen Beales, the supposed mistress of Amanda’s uncle Brian. Given that she had been, in the words of the wronged wife, a ‘twinkie’, he had assumed she had been a good deal younger than the old dog, and would therefore still be working. And once an estate agent, always an estate agent. That was the easy part. The hard part was that estate agencies had proliferated in London like black beetles in a basement.

  But he found her at last employed by one of the newer entries to the field, Zingybrix, who went in for a bright, breezy advertising style and fluorescent orange-and-lime plastic fascias on their shops. Her name was now Karen Redondo, and she was working at the Acton branch.

  The former good-time girl was now an overweight woman, and the once-pneumatic bust was now a solid shelf that blended into the general bulk without differentiation. She wore a lime green skirt suit over an orange blouse – presumably corporate wear – which didn’t help; but she had done her best with full make-up, perky highlighted hair, funky earrings, and heels so high it made Gascoyne queasy just to look at them.

  She greeted him with many teeth, perky and flirty, until she learned who he was and what he wanted. Then she seemed to abandon the whole act with something like relief and relax into worn middle age for a bit of a rest.

  ‘I read in the paper about the skeleton being found. I must say I didn’t put it together with that old business. So that poor little girl was dead after all? All this time … I have sometimes wondered what happened to her.’

  She conducted him through the shop into the employees’ lounge, which had a cheap sofa and chair and a coffee machine, but was made less than welcoming by the presence of two filing cabinets and a photocopier which presumably wouldn’t fit into the shop, or into its image.