Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  In one corner was a wooden kennel, at the entrance to which an Alsatian dog barked monotonously, jerking at his chain with every woof. The top of the kennel was covered with several layers of sacking, on top of which a large cat couched looking inscrutable, and rather spoiling the dog’s reputation for ferocity. There were several other cats, slinking in the shadows or looking out from hidden places amongst the junk, and a number of chickens, some fancy bantams and a few ducks were foraging about, unconcerned about the cats or the visitors.

  They got out of the car. Atherton took two steps, paused, lifted his foot to inspect the sole of his shoe. He gave Slider a grim Sundance Kid look, and said, ‘Bolivia! Hah!’

  ‘It’s the countryside. You get mud in the countryside,’ Slider said serenely. ‘This could be the Atlantic City, New Jersey of all Gloucestershire for all you know.’

  ‘Let’s go. There’s nobody home.’

  ‘She’s home,’ Slider said, pointing to the faint smoke rising from one chimney.

  ‘Why doesn’t she come out, then?’

  ‘Probably got her hands all floury making a fresh batch of scones for us. Are you going to sulk all day?’

  They approached the door. The dog reached a crescendo of warning and then stopped abruptly, the rubber nubbin of its nose working frantically in what Slider assumed was astonishment. Probably never smelt Townies before.

  There was no knocker on the door, or a doorbell – ‘Not keen on visitors,’ Atherton remarked – so Slider rapped good and hard with his knuckles on the wood. The dog watched them with interest. And just at the moment when Slider concluded there would be no answer and a new strategy would be needed, the door was opened roughly, and a woman stood there, frowning at them.

  She was of middle height, and looked bulky in layers of multiple woollens topped off with a chocolate-brown cardigan with holes in the sleeves. Below were what looked like a man’s brown cord trousers which were too big for her, tucked into green wellingtons, the whole ensemble bound in the middle with a webbing belt. Her hair was no-coloured and frowsy, the front parts held back with a child’s plastic hair slide; her face was weathered, with deep creases from nose to mouth and a sullen underlip. And far from being innocently floury, her hands were ingrained with dirt like a gardener’s, and her first and second fingers were heavily stained with nicotine.

  Of more immediate and piercing interest was the fact that she was holding a twelve-gauge shotgun. It wasn’t raised and aimed at them, but even from the casual position she had it in, she couldn’t have missed them at that range.

  Slider raised his hands very gently to chest level in a don’t-shoot-till-we’ve-talked gesture. ‘It’s all right, we’re police officers,’ he said.

  She hefted the gun suggestively. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded. Her voice was harsh and toneless, as if she hadn’t used it much recently. ‘I didn’t call you.’

  ‘We’re not local police. We’re from London,’ Slider said. ‘We’d just like to talk to you. You are Melissa Vickery, aren’t you?’

  He had not noticed her eyes before, but now as they widened slightly, he saw a flash of blue, as though light had shone through from two sudden rips in her skin. Then it was gone. Her eyelids were heavy and shielded her eyes very effectively from scrutiny, and her frown, which seemed habitual, all but concealed them.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ she growled.

  Slider introduced them.

  ‘Have you got some ID?’

  Slider reached for his, and the gun shifted slightly in warning, so he drew out his warrant card slowly and held it out to her. She inspected it. ‘What do two policemen from London want to come out all this way for?’ she said, her voice grating with suspicion.

  ‘We want to talk to you about Amanda Knight,’ said Slider.

  In the silence that followed, he could hear a crow yarking some distance away, and closer to hand the croodling of the hens in the weeds, and the jingle of the dog’s chain as it shifted position. He was aware of the tension of Atherton beside him and the alertness of the woman in front of him.

  ‘That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time,’ she said at last. Her suspicion seemed to have lowered a notch.

  ‘May we come in and talk to you?’ Slider asked politely.

  She seemed to consider, looking round the yard behind them as if expecting to spot commandos wriggling through the undergrowth on their elbows. Then she said, ‘All right,’ and turned away, letting them in.

  Slider gestured Atherton to go first – Atherton gave a grim quirk of the mouth to express dismay, disbelief, and comical alarm as he passed – then followed him and closed the door. It caught against the stone-flagged floor, until he tried lifting it a little – the hinges had dropped and the door had swollen. Inside it was dark, chilly, and smelled damp. He caught a glimpse of a dim brown parlour on the right – the best front room, he supposed – but she led them to the left and into a large farmhouse kitchen which, while not exactly straight from House & Gardens, was at least comparatively light and, thanks to the range, warm.

  The floor was stone-flagged, and a large wooden table took up most of the centre of the room. There was a wooden bench under the window, and the range and its surrounding chimney dominated the opposite side. On the wall above the mantelpiece were two gun rests, one empty and the other holding a four-ten. There was an old-fashioned wooden dresser against the far wall. There was a rug on the floor in front of the range, on which two collies were lying tangled together, asleep, a cat was sitting on top of the cool plate, and two more cats perched on the windowsill.

  So far, so Famous Five. Sold to a yuppie, it would have been made into a delightful room. As it was, it smelled of dogs and cigarettes, and it was comfortless and cluttered. There was a single very old and disgusting armchair beside the range, the seat worn into a basin by years of use, the wooden arms runnelled with cigarette burns. The dresser was buried under old correspondence, items of clothing, tools, balls of string, nameless bits of metal, tins and jars, a box of dog biscuits; all the things carelessly put down there and never cleared away. Likewise every other surface in the room; and on the kitchen table, in addition, was a large bucket crusted inside with what looked like chicken meal, a heap of muddy vegetables, and two dead and bloodied rabbits. Even the front bar of the range, which should have been decorated with a pretty dishtowel depicting common English wild flowers and perhaps a cheery red-and-white checked oven glove, bore instead a very dirty towel that might have been used to dry a dog and some rather grey underwear.

  The woman stood by the table, watching them come in, her head slightly lowered, like a bull wondering whether or not to charge, her brows frowning, her lower lip stuck out. She examined them afresh, and then sighed slightly, straightened, and put the gun back in its rest. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, with a jerk of her head towards it. ‘When strange men come up the lane in these parts, you get nervous.’ She gave a mirthless grin. ‘No use calling the police. Time they get here, you’re dead, and they’ve stripped the house bare. You learn to look after yourself when you live in the country.’

  ‘I understand,’ Slider said soothingly.

  She gestured towards the bench under the window. ‘Sit down if you want. Shove those things on the floor.’ They did as they were told, and she came and perched on the edge of the table, thereby putting herself at an advantage, and between them and the guns. ‘Why the sudden interest in Amanda?’ she asked. ‘That was a hell of a long time ago.’

  The question sounded casual, but Slider sensed an alertness, perhaps a tension, in her as she asked it. Well, that was natural enough, he supposed. Anything unexpected tends to put you on your guard.

  ‘You didn’t read anything about it in the papers?’ he countered, watching her face.

  ‘Don’t read papers,’ she said gruffly.

  ‘Well, then – I’m sorry to tell you that human remains were found.’

  She frowned. ‘What? You’re saying you’ve found Amanda? What m
akes you think it’s her?’

  ‘They were found in the garden of the house where she lived. 15 Laburnum Avenue.’

  She stared. She repeated the words, ‘15 Laburnum Avenue!’ as though it were a thing of wonder. She seemed to remember something. ‘I never went to her house. Never once.’

  ‘It backed on to your own house in Colville Avenue.’

  ‘People were never invited in. They never had people in. She couldn’t have friends like a normal kid. If you don’t invite them home, they don’t invite you.’

  ‘But she had you. You were her friend,’ Slider said.

  ‘Yes. She had me.’ She sounded almost dazed. ‘It was such a long time ago. I never thought I’d hear that name again. Amanda Knight!’ She stood up abruptly, walked away to the dresser and, with her back to them, rummaged around until she found a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches, and lit one. She turned back with it in her mouth, her face screwed up against the rising smoke. She gestured with the packet. ‘Want one?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Slider answered.

  She resumed her place, seeming more collected, almost brisk. ‘So, what do you mean, remains were found? What remains?’

  ‘A skeleton,’ said Slider.

  ‘You mean she was buried? In her garden? And nobody found her? All these years and nobody found her?’ She gave a short bark of laughter. ‘All those people scouring the park and dredging the canal and thinking she’d run off to live on the street, and all the time she was dead and buried in her own garden.’ She examined their expressions. ‘Oh, come on, you have to laugh.’ She sucked on the cigarette, and shrugged. ‘All right, you don’t have to laugh, but you have to see the irony.’ She sighed out the smoke. ‘Poor old Amanda. No, I’m sorry for her, really. So she’s dead, is she? How did she die?’

  ‘We don’t know that yet. That’s why we’ve come to see you.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ she said sharply.

  ‘To try to find out what was going on in her life the last few weeks or months. It seems as though you were the person closest to her at the end.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said vaguely. ‘I don’t see how I can help, really.’

  ‘Well, if we could just ask you a few questions,’ Slider said.

  She shrugged. ‘Go ahead. For what good it’ll do. It was a long time ago. I don’t remember much about those days.’

  She looked at Slider for a question, then at Atherton. Atherton, seeing Slider had gone into a frown of thought, took up the cue.

  ‘Let’s start with how you met her,’ he tried.

  ‘Who? Amanda? I don’t remember,’ she said unhelpfully.

  ‘You didn’t go to the same school,’ he said.

  ‘No. I was at St Margaret’s, where the posh kids went. Amanda had to go to Poplar Road. She was really bright. If anyone should have gone to St Margaret’s it was her. She’d have got a good education there, she’d have got a chance to get on in life. It was wasted on me. I was dumb as a nail.’

  ‘So how did you meet?’ He tried slipping the question in isotonically.

  ‘Walking home,’ she said without thinking. She looked at him. ‘Yes, walking home one day. I dropped something. My gloves. I dropped my gloves and she picked them up. Gave them to me. I said thanks. We got talking. She said where did I live. I told her. She said her parents were both out at work, so I asked if she’d like to come home with me for a bit. I think I said, for tea.’ She pronounced it with an ironic emphasis, as though it was an extraordinary thing to have said.

  ‘Did you have a lot of friends?’ Atherton asked.

  She seemed to think. ‘No,’ she said, quite abruptly, and lapsed into silence.

  Atherton thought he’d better prod her, or they’d be there all night. ‘Your mother had died the year before, hadn’t she? Quite suddenly. You must have been still learning to live with it. You must have been lonely.’

  She stared at him, her mouth turning down. She removed the cigarette deliberately, and said, ‘Oh, very nice! Yes, tactful reminder. “By the way, your mother’s dead, how does that feel?” And you do this for a living, do you?’

  ‘It was a long time ago, as you’ve already noted,’ he said, interested by her reaction.

  ‘You never get over losing your mum. Take it from me. You’re right, I was upset, I was bewildered, I was lonely. I was a mess. Amanda – she was different. She always knew what she wanted, and she was determined to get it. Anyone who got in the way – look out. She was tough. A tough kid.’

  ‘And she befriended you. That must have been nice for you.’

  ‘Nice?’ her eyebrows went up. Then she took a last drag on the cigarette, butted it, folded her arms over her chest, and said, ‘Yes, it was nice. Nice for poor little me to have a friend. Amanda was nice. I was nice. We were nice together.’

  Atherton nodded receptively, thinking that Melissa Vickery might just be a little bit bonkers. But living alone in a place like this, where anyone knocking at your door unexpectedly needed to be met with a twelve-bore, might well send a person spiralling off to a distant planet. And from where she started – losing her mother at age fourteen – it might not have been a very long journey.

  NINETEEN

  Females of the Species

  ‘That summer, you saw a lot of Amanda, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’d meet after school and she’d come home with me for a bit, until her mum and dad got home from work. She helped me with my homework sometimes. Or we’d talk. Or have tea. We were better off than her, we always had cake and stuff. They didn’t have nice stuff at home. And I had sweets. She didn’t get much pocket money.’

  ‘And when the summer holidays came?’ Atherton prompted.

  ‘She came most days. Her parents were out at work, so she was on her own.’

  ‘Your father worked from home, didn’t he?’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘He didn’t mind. He had his study up at the top of the house. But he liked Amanda, anyway. He was glad I had a friend.’

  ‘Did you go out together, during the holidays?’

  She shrugged. ‘Sometimes. But mostly we just stayed in. Talking and so on.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  She looked irritated. ‘How do I remember? All those years ago! What kids talk about.’

  ‘So she spent most days with you, at your house. But her parents didn’t seem to know about it. Her mother didn’t seem to have heard of you.’ The woman shrugged again. ‘Why do you think Amanda didn’t talk about you?’

  ‘How should I know?’ she said roughly. ‘Maybe she just wanted to keep something for herself. I don’t think she liked them very much. They didn’t understand her. They were stupid and uneducated. Her dad was like some kind of dinosaur. They were always rowing, he was always trying to stop her doing things.’

  ‘What things?’

  She seemed to regret her sudden expansiveness, and answered that with a closed-mouthed shrug.

  Atherton glanced at Slider but got no message from him, so he carried on. ‘That last day, the day she disappeared—’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said indifferently.

  ‘It was in the middle of the summer holidays, August the 18th. A Saturday. Did Amanda visit you that day?’

  She was irritable again. ‘I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I don’t remember dates.’

  ‘When did you find out that she had gone missing?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘All right, how did you find out? Did a neighbour mention it? Did someone ring up? A schoolfriend, perhaps? Did your father see it in the newspaper? How?’ She just shook her head, and reached for another cigarette. ‘When you did hear about it, why didn’t you go round to her parents and offer your condolences?’

  She looked incredulous. ‘I was just a kid!’

  ‘Well, then, your father. You said he liked Amanda, was glad you had a friend. Why didn’t he?’

  ‘I
don’t know. He didn’t know them, why would he?’

  ‘You went away on holiday about that time,’ Atherton said, watching her light the fag.

  ‘Did I?’ she said through the smoke.

  ‘Was that because you were upset about Amanda? Did your father take you away for that reason, to get you away from it all?’

  She took the cigarette from her mouth and looked at him consideringly. ‘Maybe. How would I know? Look, I was a kid, what do kids know about why their parents do anything? You just go along with it, don’t you? You’re asking the wrong person.’

  ‘But we can’t ask your father, can we?’

  ‘No. because he’s dead. Want to make a joke about that? I’m an orphan, isn’t that hilarious?’

  Atherton had decided it was best to ignore her changes of mood. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘He blew his head off with the shotgun,’ she said brutally, looking to see if she had affected him. He returned the look steadily. ‘He found he’d got cancer. He didn’t want to go the way my mother went. He was suffering. So he took the shotgun and went behind the barn and blew himself away.’

  ‘That must have been terrible for you,’ Atherton said gently.

  She blinked. She seemed about to say something and change her mind. Then she took another drag on the cigarette and said on the exhale in a quieter voice, ‘It was a quick end. You do it for a dog – you don’t let them suffer. It’s better that way.’

  ‘You must miss him dreadfully,’ Atherton said. ‘It’s been just the two of you all these years.’

  ‘Of course I miss him,’ she said harshly, turning her head away. ‘What do you think?’ She removed a fleck of tobacco from her mouth with a forefinger and examined it. ‘I loved him.’

  ‘It was quite a sudden decision, when you moved from Shepherd’s Bush out here,’ Slider said. His voice, quiet, unemphatic, seemed to ease into the air between them like a gentle zephyr from an open window, nothing to be regarded.