Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Connolly made a point of not responding to any of it, and thought in exasperation that now she’d got something on her hands that would be hell to get off.

  TWENTY

  Matchless

  Porson was not a happy bunny. Somewhere he had picked up a cold, and it had ripened by Thursday morning into its full chesty glory. Slider didn’t need the flapped hand and terse warning to position himself well out of spray range.

  ‘You don’t seem to be getting on with this Laburnum business.’ Porson tried to bark, but it came out as a croak, and set him coughing fruitily into his handkerchief. ‘You should see what I’m bringing up,’ he said as he wiped his lips. ‘I swear the last lot had hands.’

  ‘Get well soon, sir,’ Slider murmured, with sincerity.

  Porson gave him a sour look. ‘Glad you’ve kept that famous sense of humour. I was worried you might be feeling low. I thought this case would be an easy job for you – get a result, boost your self-extreme, do you a bit of bon with our masters. But you don’t seem to have got anywhere.’

  ‘It’s tricky when it was so long ago,’ Slider said. ‘Many of the principle players have died.’

  ‘Excuses are all very well, but it’s you I’m thinking of. A failure in something like this can leave a nasty taste in the eye. Let alone having to justify the budget expenditure on a bag of blasted old bones.’ He blew his nose.

  Not lovely old bones any more, Slider observed.

  ‘Dammit, man, you get handed a sitting catch and you fumble it,’ Porson went on. He emerged suddenly from the handkerchief and fixed Slider with a disconcerting glare. ‘And what’s this I hear about visiting Shannon Bailey?’

  Damn and blast, the old man really did know everything, Slider thought, half admiringly, half in irritation. ‘It was one officer only. And very discreet.’ He couldn’t help himself. ‘How did you hear about it?’

  ‘Walls have ears,’ Porson said inscrutably. ‘You know you shouldn’t have done it, don’t you? I’m not going to have to tell you how wrong, dangerous and bloody stupid it was, am I?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good. What did you find out?’

  Slider hesitated, trying to untangle the facts from his own prejudices. ‘She withdrew her testimony because she’s unsure now what, if anything, she really saw.’

  ‘She withdrew voluntarily?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘She wasn’t frightened into it?’

  ‘No, sir. She’d been drinking and taking drugs, and her memories of the evening are unclear.’

  Porson gave a grim nod. ‘Right. Exactly. Just what everybody’s been saying all along. So are you happy now?’

  Slider didn’t answer, unsure what the truth about that might be.

  Porson began pacing. ‘Let’s put it another way. I know you aren’t happy about the hit-and-run girl, and I don’t like the fact that we’ve never found the driver, but these things happen in war. Are you prepared to accept that you don’t have a case, that you never had a case.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Slider said.

  ‘I blame myself for letting you run with it,’ Porson said restlessly. He honked into his handkerchief. Slider could hear his chest rattling from here. The old man didn’t look well. There was a shiny, sucked-boiled-sweet look to his eyes. ‘I should have known better. Truth to tell, I fancied having a pop at the heads on the parapet myself, God help me.’ He gave a mirthless grin, drew breath to speak and set himself coughing.

  ‘I’ll go and leave you in peace,’ Slider said, turning away.

  Porson flapped at him to stay. ‘So,’ he wheezed, when he could, ‘we’re all clear now on the Adams thing, are we? I’m not going to have any more temper tantrums? No more toys thrown out of the plane? You’re all done with it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Right.’

  As Slider reached the door, Porson called after him, ‘End of the week for this Laburnum business. Can’t spend any more time on it. There are some big initiatives coming up next week and we’ll need all hands.’

  Initiatives, Slider thought as he trudged away. We used to fight crime, now we progress initiatives. Welcome to the twenty-first century.

  It had got so that he could smell trouble. He felt the electric charge coming out of the CID room halfway along the passage. As he turned in at the door, all eyes turned on him. It was Gascoyne who spoke.

  ‘Sir, the DNA test result on the remains has come back. It was in the non-urgent queue. I think they must have—’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Slider goosed him.

  Gascoyne looked unhappy. ‘It’s not a match. No matches at all to Mrs Knight’s sample. The remains couldn’t have been Amanda’s.’

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ Swilley looked round the assembled troops. They’d all got consolatory teas and coffees and sought their own or the edge of someone else’s more convenient desk.

  ‘All bets are off,’ said McLaren. ‘It’s a whole new ball game.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, we’ll manage without the Bumper Book of Clichés today,’ said Slider.

  ‘I feel bad about your man, Ronnie Knight,’ Connolly said, swinging short arcs on her swivel chair. ‘Suspecting him all this time. It’s cat!’

  ‘Still prob’ly was him,’ McLaren grumped. ‘Who else could’ve done the burying?’

  ‘Let’s not forget, Amanda’s still missing,’ said Lessop. He tugged unhappily at his chin-plaits. ‘Does that mean we have to drop her?’ he asked Slider.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Slider answered. That poor girl would remain forever a misper, practically an un-person, her meagre file crumbling gently to dust in the basement. He threw them a counter-irritant. ‘We can’t spend any more time on her. We only have to the end of the week to sort out the bones. Ideas?’

  ‘Well, we’re back to square one, aren’t we?’ said Swilley. ‘We don’t even have a date to work on.’

  ‘Local searches,’ said Slider. ‘Other missing persons. Other sex- and abduction-cases, possible links with. Other local perpetrators, similarities with MO.’ They looked profoundly unexcited by this turn of events. ‘Come on,’ he said sharply. ‘Let’s not lose sight of the fact that someone died, and was probably murdered. A crime was committed. That is our proper concern, what the generous public pays our wages for, to catch criminals.’

  ‘What if they turn out to be Roman bones or something like that?’ Fathom said gloomily.

  ‘Idiot!’ Swilley said roughly. ‘Doc Cameron said they’re about twenty years old. I know it’s an estimate, but he’s not going to be a couple of thousand years out, is he?’

  ‘What if it’s the other side of twenty?’ LaSalle said. ‘We’ve been looking at the Knights because of Amanda, but what about the people who came after them?’

  ‘The Barnards?’ said Swilley.

  ‘Oh! Guv!’ Fathom said, jumping as though he’d been prodded with a sharpened pencil.

  ‘We didn’t look at them properly because of Amanda being a misper,’ LaSalle went on. ‘There was no point when it was obvious it was her.’

  ‘Guv?’

  ‘But now it’s all thrown open again—’

  ‘Guv, about the Barnards,’ Fathom said, managing to get over the top of LaSalle.

  Slider turned to him. ‘Yes, you were looking for them, weren’t you?’

  ‘I found ’em,’ Fathom said. ‘I forgot to say. They’re coming in this morning.’

  The estate agent had got it all wrong. They had not sold the house in Laburnum Avenue because they were going to Australia. It was their son who was going to New Zealand, and they had sold their house to realize some cash for him and their daughter-in-law to put down on a house when they got there. The agent had thought there’d been a reference to Adelaide, but that was the name of the daughter-in-law, not the Barnard’s destination. He hadn’t properly been listening. He hadn’t really been interested.

  Meanwhile the Barnards were looking for something smaller for themselves and, having re
tired early and prosperously, and having no particular place in mind where they wanted to settle, they were renting in order to try out different places, until they found their spiritual home.

  Laborious work and much dedicated cross-checking on Fathom’s part – he might be slow, but he was thorough – had finally located them in North Norfolk. He had telephoned them and checked that they were, indeed, the Barnards who had once lived at 15 Laburnum Avenue, and when he told them about the skeleton and said there were some questions they wanted to ask them, they had volunteered at once to drive up to London and be interviewed.

  ‘Well, that’s not a good start,’ Hart said. ‘If they’ve volunteered to come in, they must be innocent. If they was guilty, they’d be having it away in the opposite direction.’

  ‘Could be a double bluff,’ said Connolly. ‘If they’ve got away with it all these years, they’ll be super-confident. If it was me, I’d want to come just to find out what the Pols really know.’

  ‘If they was a Fred and Rose West couple, there’d’ve been more bodies,’ Hart objected.

  ‘Maybe that was the only one they buried on the premises,’ Fathom said eagerly. ‘The others could be anywhere – out on the moors or something.’

  ‘The Shepherd’s Bush moors?’ Hart said witheringly.

  ‘They got a motor,’ Fathom pointed out. ‘And twenty-five years ago there was no ANPR cameras.’

  Slider was getting a headache. ‘I’m going to my room, to go over what we’ve got that hasn’t just fallen apart. Let me know when the Barnards arrive.’

  He left them to it. There was something bothering him, had been bothering him since yesterday. Something he should have remembered, or should have known. Or had noticed without realizing it. At his desk he settled down to look at the story in the order they had discovered it, page by page, interview by interview.

  Atherton came into his room. ‘They’re here.’

  Slider, startled out of deep thought, jumped like an actor hearing the phone ring. ‘Don’t you believe in knocking?’

  ‘No, only in constructive criticism. Downstairs just called up. There’s a couple asking to see you. By the name of Barnard.’

  ‘Ah. The moment of truth, perhaps?’

  ‘Or a moment of truth. Or possibly more lies. D’you want me to come?’

  Slider stood up. ‘I wouldn’t be so cruel as to deny you.’

  Mr and Mrs Barnard were a respectable-looking couple in their fifties who were out of place waiting in the front shop with the sad cases. He was wearing a sports coat and flannel trousers and actually a tie – it was a long time since one of those had come in the front door without being attached to someone in uniform – and she was in a jersey dress and wool jacket with one of those enormous scarves that BBC female correspondents wear, looped about her neck and shoulders. They didn’t look like serial killers. They didn’t look like people who had come all this way to tell lies. They looked, in fact, eager, intelligent and very slightly nervous – quite a good combination, Slider thought.

  ‘Are you the person dealing with the Laburnum Avenue thing?’ the man asked as Slider opened the pass door and caught his eye.

  ‘Yes – come on through.’

  Atherton was waiting at the door of the interview room, held it for them, followed them in.

  ‘Fancy it being our old house,’ Mr Barnard was saying.

  ‘Please sit down,’ Slider said.

  ‘It gave us quite a shock when that policeman rang up,’ said Mrs Barnard, sitting. ‘We hadn’t seen anything in the papers about it, had we, Eric?’

  ‘Not a thing, and I think we’d have noticed because you do, don’t you, if you see your own name or the name of your street? You just naturally pick up on it.’

  ‘I suppose being in Norfolk we’re a bit cut off. It’s so remote up there.’

  ‘That’s why we’re trying it out, because it’s so peaceful and quiet.’

  ‘I think it might be a bit too quiet, though,’ Mrs Barnard said with a nervous laugh. ‘When your nearest neighbour’s out of sight and out of earshot … I mean, you hear such awful stories about rural robberies, where gangs just come in broad daylight with lorries and take everything, because there’s no one around to see them. And the police don’t seem to be able to do anything.’

  ‘Di,’ Mr Barnard said warningly. ‘They are police.’

  ‘Oh, no offence,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m sure it’s different here. Well, I know it is – we lived in Shepherd’s Bush for most of our lives.’

  ‘It was good of you to come all this way to talk to us,’ Slider said, in the hope of stemming the flood.

  ‘Oh, but we had to,’ Mrs Barnard said.

  ‘As good citizens,’ said Mr Barnard. ‘And to make sure we’re not suspected of anything.’

  ‘Because we didn’t have anything to do with it, you know.’

  ‘We had no idea there was a body buried in our garden,’ said Mr Barnard. ‘No idea at all.’

  ‘Such a horrible thought,’ said Mrs Barnard with a shudder. ‘If we had known … Well, I couldn’t have stayed.’

  ‘We don’t know who it is or anything,’ said Mr Barnard, keeping to the important point. ‘It must have happened before we lived there.’

  ‘Or after.’

  ‘Not after, Di,’ he corrected gently. ‘We’ve not been gone that long. It was a skeleton. That doesn’t happen in one year.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I forgot. But you do believe us, don’t you?’ she asked Slider anxiously. ‘It‘s such an awful thing to be connected with, even though we’re not, except that it was in our garden. All those years. With our children playing there. Horrible!’

  ‘Let’s just start at the beginning,’ Slider said soothingly.

  They had bought the house in Laburnum Avenue from the Knights, but had never met them. Their dealings had been all with the agents. ‘Were you told anything about them?’ Slider asked. They shook their heads. ‘Why they were selling? Where they were going? Anything at all?’ he prompted.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Barnard. ‘The agent didn’t say and we didn’t ask. I don’t suppose he knew there was anything funny about them.’

  ‘What about the neighbours? Did they tell you anything about the previous owners?’

  They looked at each other and shrugged. ‘We never really got to know the neighbours, not the first ones. Only to say hello to if you happened to be going in or out at the same time,’ Mrs Barnard said.

  Mr Barnard looked embarrassed. ‘You know how it is in London. And we were very busy in those days, juggling careers, bringing up children.’

  ‘The people afterwards, in number 17, the Slaters, we got quite friendly with them,’ she went on. ‘They moved in about ten years after us, and their children were the same age as ours.’

  ‘So this … body?’ Mr Barnard said hesitantly. ‘It’s something to do with those people, is it? The ones we bought from?’

  ‘Because if it is, it’s horrible,’ she said with energy. ‘To sell a house knowing that’s in the garden. And not say anything.’

  ‘We don’t know, Di. It could be people before them.’ He looked at Slider, hoping for enlightenment, but Slider only looked back blankly.

  Atherton recognized the symptoms of deep thought, and took over, easing the Barnards through some more routine questions about themselves, their family, Laburnum Avenue and the environs, while whatever it was brewed in his guv’nor’s mind.

  Slider came back a little while later when there was a pause. ‘Tell me about the garden,’ he said. ‘You must have done things to it, over the years.’

  ‘Well, not a lot,’ Mrs Barnard said apologetically.

  ‘You’re wondering why we didn’t come across the body ourselves,’ Mr Barnard said shrewdly. ‘But we didn’t do a lot of digging.’

  ‘I’m glad we didn’t,’ Mrs Barnard said, wincing, ‘as it turns out.’

  ‘We’re not really gardeners, you see,’ said Mr Barnard. ‘Mowing the lawn once a week was as m
uch as I wanted to do.’

  ‘Once we had a lawn to mow,’ she added, looking at him. ‘Once we got rid of that hedge.’

  ‘Oh, Lord, yes, I was forgetting. That hedge!’

  ‘Hedge?’ Slider asked.

  ‘A great, big laurel hedge,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘Right across the bottom. Eight foot high.’

  ‘Six, Di,’ he corrected.

  ‘Taking up half the garden,’ she went on complaining.

  ‘She’s exaggerating,’ Mr Barnard said hastily, with a little negating wave of his hands, as though Exaggerating to a Police Officer might be an arrestable offence. ‘But you know what laurels are like. They creep.’

  ‘Creep?’ Atherton asked. He was not a gardener. But Slider knew what he meant.

  ‘They grow outwards, so you get a shell of leaves on the outside, and it’s all bare on the inside, and every year it pushes out a bit more, so you get an empty space behind it,’ Mr Barnard tried to explain, with much use of his hands. ‘That hedge was really old, must have been there fifty years, I should say, so it was taking up about four feet of garden. It was practically pushing the shed down, as a matter of fact. The leaves were scratching against the boards.’

  ‘It was an ugly thing, anyway,’ Mrs Barnard said. ‘I’ve never been keen on laurels. My grandmother had them all round her house. Made it so gloomy.’

  ‘And you decided to cut it down?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Well, yes. The garden wasn’t that big, and we felt we couldn’t afford to waste so much of it,’ Mr Barnard said. ‘We moved in in the February, and we had it down in the September or October. No point in waiting for winter for something like that, because it’s evergreen.’

  ‘And what was it like, behind it, when you took it down?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Well, there was just a single trunk in the centre, all the growth came from there.’ He looked to see if he had answered to Slider’s satisfaction, and seeing more was wanted, went on: ‘The hedge was just like a thin wall, making a sort of cave. Bare earth. And the fence was in very poor condition.’

  ‘Yes, we had to repair it,’ she jumped in. ‘Though by rights it wasn’t our fence, it belonged to the people behind, and they ought to have paid for it.’