Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And anyway, I love you. Custard in the saucepan, jug over there – can you transfer the one to the other while I get the pie out?’

  He knew what she was asking. ‘I’m all right now. It’s just – she was the same sort of age as Kate.’

  ‘I know,’ said Joanna. ‘I saw the photograph.’

  ‘So you did,’ he said, and went to the stove for the custard pot. ‘Thank God for you,’ he added, now in a normal voice.

  FOURTEEN

  Ingots We Trust

  In the absence of Hart, Connolly had gone down to Mike’s snack van for the breakfast sandwiches. Slider opened his paper bag, took one horrified look, and bellowed. Connolly appeared in the doorway with an enquiring expression.

  ‘Tomato sauce on a bacon sandwich? Were you raised by wolves?’

  ‘Sorry, boss.’

  ‘On a sausage sandwich, yes …’

  ‘Sorry, boss. You must a’ got McLaren’s by mistake.’ She glanced back over her shoulder. ‘Ah, Jayz, he’s already taken a bite. D’you want mine? I’ll swap you. I haven’t touched it.’

  ‘What have you got?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Fried egg.’

  Slider was tempted, but a fried egg sandwich took careful management. Like mangoes, they were best eaten in the bath. ‘I’ll pass, thanks,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Here, McLaren might as well have this one as well.’

  ‘Will I go back to Mike’s for you?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t matter. There’s not time before the meeting.’

  ‘I’ll get yiz a cup of tea,’ she said contritely. ‘And a biscuit.’

  Gascoyne was the first to report. ‘I don’t know that it’s helped much,’ he said, having précised his meeting with Karen Beales Redondo. ‘But it does look as if we can rule the uncle out.’

  ‘It’s given us a possible motive, anyway,’ Slider said. ‘A family row that got out of hand.’ Better than abuse, he added inwardly.

  ‘So, how does it work?’ Connolly mused. ‘He goes home. Finds Amanda, starts givin’ out to her, loses his temper and lamps her. Where does all this happen? In the garden?’

  ‘My view is that it must have been in the van,’ Atherton said. ‘Say he saw her walking along the road – it’d be natural to call to her to get in. If it was anywhere in the open air, it would surely have been seen.’

  Connolly shrugged. ‘In the van, if ya like. Makes it simpler. Now he’s got to think what to do. Maybe he drives around in a panic. Realizes he needs an alibi. Remembers the owl lady, knows she’s a bit confused. Reckons he can say he was at her house – she won’t remember which day he did the repair. Comes back for his tea, tells his wife not to raise the Gards. Goes and does his other job with the body still in the back of the van. Couple of days later, he brings the body back and buries it.’

  ‘No, he must’ve stashed it somewhere,’ Lessop said. ‘Once the police were called they’d’ve checked in the van first thing.’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t,’ said LaSalle.

  ‘Yes, but he’d have expected them to. So he couldn’t have left her there.’

  ‘People do stupid things all the time. And get away with it.’

  ‘And the police at the time don’t seem to have been very thorough,’ Gascoyne said apologetically.

  ‘Whatever,’ Connolly resumed, ‘it sounds reasonable, but how do we prove any of it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said McLaren, moodily peeling the paper bag off a rather squashed sausage roll, his second course. Or rather, Slider thought resentfully, remembering where his sandwich had gone, his third. ‘That’s where it all falls down, innit?’

  ‘I can’t see it matters anyway,’ said Fathom. ‘They’re all dead. S’not like we’re gonna bring someone to justice.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got something to throw in to the mix,’ said Swilley. ‘Might make it a bit more interesting for you, you poor delicate flowers.’ She told them about her visit to Miss Wheatcroft.

  Atherton sat up straighter. ‘Vickery!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s got to mean something, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, but what?’ Connolly said.

  ‘It’s not that uncommon a name,’ Slider put in.

  ‘It’s a Shepherd’s Bush name,’ LaSalle offered. ‘Quite a lot of Vickerys around when I was a kid.’

  ‘Was Detective Superintendent Vickery a local man?’ Swilley asked, but no one could answer.

  ‘We need to find that out,’ Slider said.

  ‘It could be just a coincidence,’ LaSalle said soberly. ‘Colville Avenue’s the next street to Laburnum. No reason she couldn’t have met the girl walking home from school one day and they became friends. The fact that the Det Sup on the case happens to have the same name—’

  ‘Yeah, what are you suggesting?’ Lessop said to Atherton derisively. ‘That Det Sup Vickery was involved somehow? That he killed the girl?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Atherton said, with a Vulcan eyebrow. ‘Keep your pants on. It’s a coincidence, that’s all, and it’s my belief that a coincidence is God’s way of telling you to pay attention.’

  ‘I said it would make it more interesting,’ Swilley muttered, with a glance at Slider. ‘Sorry, boss.’

  He shook his head slightly, cancelling the apology. ‘Let’s find out about Det Sup Vickery. LaSalle, you’re the local boy, you’re on it. Lessop, you can help. Where he lived, whether he had any family, what became of him after the Knight case. Did he have any connection to this David Vickery. It probably is just a coincidence, but we’d look like idiots if it wasn’t and we didn’t check. And of course we need to find Melissa Vickery. She might hold the key to the last days.’

  ‘I’m on that,’ Swilley said.

  ‘But boss,’ Connolly said restlessly, ‘what are you accusing Det Sup Vickery of?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Slider said. ‘I just want to know if there was any connection.’

  But it had jumped into his mind – as he suspected it had into Atherton’s – that the thinness of the Misper file might not have been accidental, or the attrition of ages, after all. He had an uncomfortable feeling that the sleeping god Complication had stirred, and opened one eye, and blearily but with incipient menace was looking – where else? – at him again.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Porson. ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You can’t make official enquiries about a detective superintendent. Dammit, man, that’s the very sort of thing I’m trying to keep you away from.’

  ‘But it was twenty-five years ago,’ Slider objected.

  ‘And what if he’s still in? Or only just left? Or still has friends among the high and mighty?’ Porson demanded. ‘You’ve got to learn to self-preservate. That’s why I thought these old bones’d be just what you needed. Keep your head down for a bit.’

  ‘Just a simple computer search—’

  ‘On our state of the ark computers? It’s diamonds to doughnuts any enquiry like that’d be flagged up. You don’t want people looking in your direction just now, you really don’t.’

  ‘I didn’t think there were no-go areas when it came to serious crime,’ Slider said sourly.

  ‘Oh, don’t pout at me. Why can’t you come at it the other way? Look into this David Vickery – you’ll soon find out if he was related. But even if he was, don’t come to me with anything but a cast-iron case, not unsupported innuendoes. You’re a good copper, Slider, but you’re too quick to think the worst of the higher echelongs.’

  ‘But if there is something there,’ Slider insisted.

  ‘If there is, and if you assemble some evidence that actually stands up, and doesn’t disappear overnight like mother’s gin …’

  ‘Then you’ll support me?’

  ‘We’ll see.’ He raised an eyebrow at Slider’s expression. ‘I’m trying to protect you. You’ve put up a lot of backs lately, but bring in a really clever case that doesn’t hurt anybody they care about – well, they’ll be laughing on
the other foot, then.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Meanwhile, call your dogs off this Det Sup Vickery, before they do any damage.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Porson looked at him for a long minute. ‘So what are you thinking now? If the father did it, what’s Vickery got to do with it? Either Vickery?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Slider admitted. ‘Maybe there was some connection between Knight and Vickery – our Vickery. The Mispers file was very thin. I want to know where the body was before it was buried. If it was in the van, why didn’t the police at the time find it? If it was elsewhere, surely to God someone must have seen something – and maybe they did, but the evidence was suppressed.’

  ‘There you go again.’ Porson gave him an incredulous look. ‘On the supposition express and heading for La-la Land.’

  ‘I just have a feeling—’

  ‘Oh, a feeling!’

  ‘You used to trust my feelings,’ Slider complained.

  ‘Shouldn’t’ve married me then, should you?’ Porson said, and jabbed a forefinger towards the door. ‘Out!’

  After the morning meeting, Swilley and Connolly had gone to Tetbury on the trail of David and Melissa Vickery. Outside the magic heat-circle of London it was bitterly cold, and the trees were at last shedding their leaves, bare branches scratching at a pale sky. The hedges were thick with rime, and the newly-ploughed fields were brown waves with white crests.

  ‘Bloody countryside again!’ Swilley snarled over the steering wheel. ‘I hate the bloody countryside.’

  ‘Ah, it’s grand to get out for a bit,’ Connolly countered cheerfully. ‘Don’t you get sick of it all, sometimes?’

  ‘Sick of what?’

  ‘The big city. People everywhere.’

  ‘I love London.’

  ‘All the gougers and the gobshites. The crime. Now here—’ she gestured out of the window – ‘nothing but fields and trees and cows as far as the eye can see.’

  ‘I hate cows. Going about with their tits hanging out. It’s indecent!’

  ‘Aren’t you the Miserable Margaret? Look on the bright side – we can get lunch out. Find a nice pub. I’m so hungry I could eat a baby’s bum through the bars of a cot.’ Swilley grunted unreceptively. ‘Anyway,’ Connolly tried, ‘I need to go.’

  ‘You should have gone before we left.’

  ‘That was two hours ago! Ah, c’mon, don’t be narky. A bit of time out is no harm. I won’t tell if you don’t.’

  Swilley gave her a glance, and gave in. ‘Ten minutes, then. And no beer. We can’t go breathing fumes over the general public.’

  ‘You’re no fun on a road trip, Thelma,’ Connolly remarked.

  Tetbury was a pretty town full of grey stone, mediaeval buildings, but it had the slightly worn air of a place that had hit hard times. The big old coaching inn, The Crown, was boarded up, and several shops were closed, but there were people about, and a teashop on a corner in the centre seemed to be doing brisk trade.

  The Edward Tenney school was easy enough to find, standing at the end of the main street, where the town gave way to the country again. It occupied a large stone house with mullioned windows, evidently once some great merchant’s pride; but behind it, the extensive grounds had been colonised by additional buildings from a variety of periods in a variety of styles, including Twentieth Century Insensitive.

  Inside the main building, they waited in a grand hall to see the head teacher, and Connolly had her own moment of the horrors. ‘You know how you hate the countryside?’ she whispered to Swilley. ‘Well, I hate schools!’ There was that institutional smell, and the distant murmur of voices, the whisper of movement, the sense that behind closed doors there were desks, and books, and teachers, and the seething mass of emotions and unsatisfied desires that were teenaged girls, all trapped together and forced to disobey the centrifugal power that was urging them to get the hell out of there.

  But their wait was not long, their request was well received; and being such a venerable institution, the school had comprehensive records, and looked after them. They were put in charge of Mrs Anderson, the librarian, who took them to the well-appointed library, produced old ledgers, and quickly found the evidence that Melissa Vickery had indeed joined the school that September, and had attended for another two years.

  Attended not very well, however. ‘A lot of absences,’ Mrs Anderson noted. ‘And she left school the moment she could, when she was sixteen. Of course, that wouldn’t happen nowadays,’ she added with disapproval. ‘We are a private, fee-paying school, and there’s tremendous competition for every place. Our girls work extremely hard to justify their parents’ investment, and our belief in them. But things were rather different then, when we were under the local authority. Back then, intake was a simple matter of geography.’

  Connolly, for some bizarre reason, felt driven to defend the absent. ‘She’d just lost her mother,’ she mentioned.

  Mrs Anderson bent a stern look on her. ‘We all have difficulties to overcome. The mark of a Tenney girl is that she has the character to turn negative experiences into positive strengths.’

  I bet that little gem’s appeared in a lot of speeches, Connolly thought.

  They got an address, and were directed to a plain, flat-faced stone cottage in a steep, cobbled lane called Chipping Steps. The house was cheerful with a newly painted green door and boxes of summer bedders hanging on in the tiny sliver of front yard behind the wall that divided it from the precipitous street. The door was opened by an alert-looking woman with unlikely red hair and two Manchester terriers.

  ‘Sorry, they’re a bit uppity. I was just about to take them out,’ she shouted over their clamorous greeting. ‘I’ll just shut them in the kitchen.’ Having muted the barking behind a stout oak door, she came back and said, ‘The school rang to say you were coming. Come in. I’m not sure I can help you much, but come in out of the wind. It roars down the Steps, doesn’t it? Straight from Siberia today.’

  They stepped straight into the living room, which was low-ceilinged and crammed with oaky and chintzy furniture and cottagey ornaments, so that every movement had to be thought out beforehand. She guided them to a saggy-looking sofa, which sank under them and absorbed them like quicksand, so that Swilley, who was tall, was wondering from the start how she would ever get out again.

  Mrs Bristowe was cheery, lipsticky, and salt-of-the-earth friendly. ‘So, you want to ask me about the Vickerys? The people I bought the house from. We, I should say – my husband passed away two years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Swilley said. ‘How long ago was it you bought the house?’

  ‘Twenty-three years last July. We’ve been very happy here. Our little nook, Henry used to call it. We had a big house before, but when the children went away, it seemed so empty. So Henry said, sell it, buy somewhere snug. It’s a white elephant, he said. It cost the earth to heat. You wouldn’t believe the draughts! It was listed, you see, so we couldn’t put in double glazing. Never buy a listed place, my dear, it just isn’t worth the hassle. Still, I wasn’t keen to move at first – all my memories were there. But when I saw this place, it all just clicked. I could imagine how we’d snuggle right in, just the two of us – and we did. It’s small, but I was sick to death of being cold.’

  Swilley nodded as if she was interested in all this. ‘So tell me about the Vickerys.’

  ‘I’m not sure there’s much to tell. We only met them a couple of times, when we came to look at the house. He was good-looking – trust me to notice that!’ She gave a social laugh. ‘Very dark, almost swarthy, with gorgeous black wavy hair and blue eyes. Irish looks, you know? A bit like that doctor on Grey’s Anatomy – the one they called McDreamy?’ Swilley nodded. ‘She was more mousy. I don’t really remember much about her. Except that she was more friendly than him. She seemed to want to chat, but he kept shutting her up. What else can I tell you? Hmm.’ She thought a moment. ‘Oh, he worked from home – I don’t know if that helps? One of
the bedrooms was his study. I think that’s partly why they were moving. The bedrooms are pretty small here.’ She thought again. ‘He didn’t strike me as a happy man. It didn’t feel like a happy household. But we didn’t mind – I knew we’d make it a real home. We’re nesters, Henry and me. Were, I should say.’

  ‘Do you know where they moved to?’

  ‘Only that she said they were looking at farms in the area.’ She thought. ‘That was one of the times he shut her up. I don’t think he wanted their private business talked about. You get people like that. Henry was a bit that way. “No need to tell everyone your shoe size, Bar,” he used to say. He always had a neat way of making a point, like that. And he was a private sort of person, except with people he knew well. Me, I’d tell anyone anything. Not that there’s anything interesting about me to tell!’ She laughed again.

  ‘How did she behave when he shut her up?’ Connolly put in. ‘Was she cowed? Afraid of him?’

  Mrs Bristowe shook her head. ‘You’re talking about a very long time ago. I don’t remember all the little details.’ She thought again. ‘I don’t think she was afraid of him – or I should say, I think if she’d seemed really scared of him I’d remember that. But maybe I wouldn’t. That’s all I can say, really.’

  ‘And they didn’t leave a forwarding address?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember any post ever coming for them. But if there had, I’d’ve just given it back to the postman.’

  ‘And you never saw them again?’

  ‘Not that I remember. If they did move somewhere in the area, you’d expect to bump into them now and then, when they came in to shop. People hereabouts are very friendly. And nobody ever moves far away. Once a Tetburyite, always a Tetburyite! Of course, they may have been closer to Cirencester and shopped there. Ciren’s only ten miles away, so say they were halfway between the two. That’s if they did buy a farm in the area. I don’t know why they’d’ve wanted a farm – I can’t believe they were farmers. Perhaps they just wanted the space. They could always have let the grazing. That’s what most people do.’ She gave them a rueful smile. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ve been much help.’