Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I think he did know something,’ Slider agreed.

  ‘And he doctored the file so that if the case ever got revived, there’d be nothing in there to implicate—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, the brother, I suppose. I mean, it could hardly be our Mr Vickery. Or could it? Or both of them together? No, look, I assume you’re thinking that the body, which is not Amanda, is a victim of David Vickery’s and that Edgar Vickery for some reason suspected. Maybe David had done weird stuff before, and Vickery knew about it, or at least suspected it, and decided to protect his little brother. But this time it was too much for his conscience and he had a breakdown and quit.’ He frowned. ‘But that still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why would that stop them searching for Amanda? What’s Amanda got to do with it at all? What does the diary have to do with it?’

  ‘Melissa Vickery is the key,’ said Slider.

  ‘Well, I guessed that,’ Atherton said. ‘But give me a clue, will you?’

  ‘I’ll give you several. Amanda Knight had a crush on David Essex. She was mad about animals. David Vickery ran away with his daughter and never came back. Melissa Vickery never married.’

  Atherton shook his head. ‘Not there yet.’

  Slider went on. ‘And though the two little girls were superficially quite alike, there was one major difference.’

  ‘Do tell,’ said Atherton with taut patience.

  ‘Melissa Vickery had brown eyes.’

  Because of the firearms at the farmhouse, Porson insisted they get the local police involved. ‘You don’t want to be interviewing her at the house. And you don’t want some kind of nutty siege situation developing. We need to get her out of there and interview her in some neutral place.’

  ‘There are the firearms violations,’ Slider said. ‘Assuming she has a licence at all – which the locals will know – the guns are supposed to be kept in a locked cabinet, not hanging handily over the fireplace. They can ask her politely to come in to discuss certain irregularities, and we can talk to her at the station. As long as they make it sound routine, that ought to work.’

  ‘All right,’ said Porson. ‘I’ll have a word with their super. But what if she doesn’t come in voluntarily?’

  ‘I think she will,’ Slider said. ‘Her whole life has been dedicated to pretending everything’s normal. But if she doesn’t – well, she has to leave the house sometimes, to shop and so on. I’d recommend stopping her in the town or outside the supermarket or wherever. Just tell them not to alarm her.’

  Porson regarded him for a moment. ‘D’you think she’ll cough?’

  Slider thought. ‘I think underneath she’s longing to. It’s a hell of a story never to have told anyone.’

  Cirencester police station was, like so many of them nowadays, a yellow-brick barracks of no charm whatsoever.

  ‘All serene?’ Slider asked the custody sergeant, a good-looking young man with blue eyes and a firm jaw – a poster-boy for the Job if ever there was one.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, exactly,’ he said. The gentle Gloucestershire burr only added to his charm. ‘She’s not a happy bunny. We asked her to come in and discuss the renewal of her licence. When she got here we said there were irregularities, and someone was coming to talk to her about it. She’s in an interview room now, waiting for you.’

  ‘You didn’t tell her—?’

  ‘Anything about you? No, sir. Or what you want to talk about.’ He grinned. ‘I’m not sure we actually know. No, all she knows is we’ve discovered firearms irregularities. She’s had a cup of tea, and the last thing she was complaining about was being delayed because she’s got animals to feed.’

  ‘Right. Thanks.’

  ‘Do you need backup? Is she likely to be violent?’

  Slider considered. ‘I don’t think so. I think she knows the game is up.’

  ‘Well, there’ll be one of our uniform lads waiting outside if you need him.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Oh Spite! Oh Hell!

  They had a peep at her before they went in. She was looking bored, wearing dungarees and the wellingtons, her hair dragged back unbecomingly behind. Under the dungarees was a man’s red and green plaid shirt. He remembered the cord trousers. Did she keep all David’s clothes to wear herself? Slider wondered. It was a rather horrid evidence of obsession, if so.

  Despite her apparent sang-froid, she jumped when Slider came into the room, lurched to her feet, and if this had been a western saloon she’d have been reaching for her shootin’ iron.

  He got in quickly before she could speak. ‘Sit down, please,’ he said, so firmly that she obeyed automatically.

  ‘Well, well,’ she said sourly, ‘if it isn’t Butch and Sundance.’ Odd that she was thinking the same thing, Slider mused. ‘The old man and the talent. I suppose it was you that shopped me to the local plod?’

  ‘I did tell them about your unsecured shotguns, yes,’ said Slider.

  ‘Didn’t like me making you look small,’ she sneered, ‘so you got them to do your dirty work for you.’

  ‘I wanted to have another little chat with you, and I thought it would be more comfortable here,’ said Slider, sitting down. Atherton, prudently, took a lounging position behind him, near the door. She was not a big woman, but they knew she was full of passions, and strong from strangling chickens.

  ‘Comfortable for who?’

  ‘Oh, for all of us. We may be here a little while.’

  ‘You may be. What if I decide I don’t want a chat with you? What if I decide to leave?’

  ‘Then I’m afraid we will have to arrest you. But it needn’t come to that. Why don’t we just talk, and see how we get on? I have some questions for you.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, go on then. What do you want to know?’

  ‘To begin with, why didn’t you tell me that Amanda used to come through the hedge at the bottom of the garden to visit you?’

  Her eyes opened wide. Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t that. ‘Why on earth should I? What does it matter?’

  ‘She went through the hedge, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into a magical place, a world of possibilities,’ said Slider. She looked at him quizzically. ‘That’s how she came and went without being seen,’ he went on, ‘without going out onto the street. And it made it extra exciting – like a secret passage that only she knew about. Added to the thrill of it all.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she said witheringly, but he saw she was alert.

  ‘She came through every day during those summer holidays, didn’t she?’ he went on. ‘Her parents were both at work, she had nothing to do, no friends but you. And most importantly, she was in love with David Vickery.’

  She was still for a moment, then said robustly, ‘Don’t talk such rubbish.’

  ‘I suppose it began with an ordinary teenage crush. He did look a bit like David Essex, didn’t he? Even had the same first name. And it’s a mistake to underestimate the power of a teenage girl’s first love. It’s all-consuming, it can burn down cities, and sometimes it lasts a lifetime – especially if, unusually, it crosses over from fantasy into reality. All those girls who screamed and fainted for the Beatles, never got to meet them in the flesh, never got to have sex with them, live with them. How did the reality match up, in the end? Was it worth it?’

  ‘What are you asking me for?’ she demanded, but her eyes were fixed on his.

  ‘She was lonely, an only child, and very bright, and her parents couldn’t keep up with her mentally. She was isolated at home – isolated at school, too, where all the other girls came from a different sort of home. She longed for someone who understood her, she was ready, desperate, to give her heart to someone. She wanted to love – and being the age she was, that emotional yearning got mixed up with burgeoning hormones. It’s a potent mixture. David Vickery ticked all the boxes: handsome, extremely intelligent – and available.’

  A little fire was burning
deep down in those eyes now. ‘What are you talking about – ticking boxes? Available? You make it sound like—’

  ‘Yes?’ No answer. ‘I make it sound trivial?’ He saw agreement in her face. ‘I assure you, I don’t think it’s trivial. Far from it. I understand. I get it, I really do.’

  ‘You don’t know anything!’ she exclaimed, standing up. ‘And I don’t have to sit here and listen to you talking rubbish. I’m leaving.’

  He stood too. ‘I did warn you earlier, that if you try to leave, I shall have to arrest you.’

  ‘Arrest me for what? Not having my guns locked up?’

  ‘Oh, there are any number of things I could arrest you for, some of which I hope we’re going to discuss. But just for a start, and most easy to prove, is financial fraud.’

  She looked at him searchingly, warily. ‘Fraud? What are you talking about.’

  ‘You know very well. You’ve been receiving money, royalties from patents owned by the late David Vickery.’

  ‘He left them to me!’ she said angrily.

  ‘He left them to Melissa Vickery,’ said Slider, holding her gaze. ‘And you are not Melissa Vickery.’

  She was silent, her mouth open, her mind evidently frantically computing behind the puzzled eyes.

  ‘If we arrest you,’ said Slider, ‘we will fingerprint you and take a DNA sample. That’s normal procedure. And we will compare your DNA with that of Mrs Margaret Knight – a sample of which we have already sequenced – and prove that you are, in fact, her daughter Amanda.’

  She sat, slowly, looking dazed.

  He felt, most unwillingly, sorry for her. He said, ‘I’ve told you that I get you, Amanda. It’s true, I do. And I would like to hear your story from you. This is your chance to tell it all, everything, from the beginning. No need to hold anything back now. I think you’ve been wanting someone to tell it to for a long time. Well, here I am. We’ve got as long as you like. No one will disturb us. Tell me.’

  ‘Dear God,’ she said faintly, hoarsely. She shook her head, but it was bewilderment rather than denial. ‘Where do I start?’

  ‘Start with how you first met them – David and Melissa,’ said Slider. ‘Start there.’

  It was David she had met first, not Melissa. The earlier story about the gloves had been a lie.

  She had been walking back from school one day, dawdling, bored, not wanting to go home to the empty house with its limited resources.

  ‘When was that?’ Slider asked.

  ‘May. Some time in May.’

  She had gone to the newsagent-tobacconists on the corner of Colville Avenue to see if the latest issue of Jackie was out. David was ahead of her at the counter and turning too quickly when he had finished, almost knocked her over. He caught hold of her to steady her, their eyes met, and she was in love.

  ‘The way he’d grabbed me, his hands were sort of touching the side of my breasts. He started to say sorry, but he could see I didn’t mind.’ He had lingered outside the shop, and when she came out, he apologized again. ‘He asked where I was going, and I said, home, but I didn’t want to because there was no one in, my parents were at work. So then he said he had a daughter about my age, and would I like to go home and have tea with them.’

  Nothing, Slider understood, could have stopped her. All those teenage girls who went into stars’ dressing rooms at pop concerts were not more eager to embrace their fate than Amanda Knight that day.

  She’d never seen Melissa before. ‘She went to a different school. I didn’t particularly like her when I met her. She was a drip. Nothing to say for herself. Never looked up, never spoke above a whisper. You practically forgot she was there. I didn’t care. David and I did all the talking, which suited me just fine.’

  It was a warm summer day, and they had tea out in the garden.

  ‘I mentioned we lived in the next road, and David and I got up and walked down the garden to see if we could work out which was my house. It was just an excuse to get away from Melissa. While we were standing there looking, I could feel him sort of pressing against me from behind – like, accidentally-on-purpose.’

  Finding that the Knights’ house was just through the fence at the bottom was a bonus. ‘I saw a bit of his fence was missing, and I said, “I bet I could get through there. It’d be a short cut”.’

  David encouraged her to try, knelt down by the hole and looked through after she’d gone in. ‘It’s like a cave in there,’ he’d said. She’d discovered that she could wriggle under the laurel hedge at that end. ‘“Look at that,” I said. “I don’t need to go out into the road at all.” And he said, “It can be our secret passage. Now you can come and visit whenever you like.”’

  ‘What did you think he meant by that?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Well, it could have meant, come and visit Melissa. But I was hoping it was more than that,’ she said.

  ‘What about Melissa’s mother?’

  ‘Oh, I knew she was dead. That came out when we were having tea. He told me Melissa needed a friend because her mother had died the year before. Then he said, “I think I need a friend, too. I work at home alone all day, and it can get pretty lonely.”’

  ‘So you think he was attracted to you from the beginning?’ Slider asked, concealing his distaste.

  ‘I know he was,’ she said complacently. Her eyes were distant, and he could see she was reliving the early days of the romance, when her pop-star hero had taken flesh and dwelt right next door.

  ‘And when did the relationship take on a physical aspect?’ Slider asked.

  ‘A couple of weeks later,’ she said. ‘I went through the hedge like usual after school—’

  ‘Through the hedge?’

  ‘I’d started going home first,’ she said impatiently. ‘To change. I didn’t want to see David in my school uniform. Anyway, I went through, I walked into the house, and when I called out, “Anybody home?” he called for me to go upstairs. He worked at the top of the house. He met me halfway down, on the middle floor. He said Melissa had gone on an outing with a school club, and wouldn’t be back until about seven. He said he hoped I wasn’t disappointed. I said far from it. We were standing very close together. I was praying he’d kiss me. And he did,’ she concluded simply.

  They went to his bedroom and consummated her love. ‘It was magical. The most wonderful moment of my life,’ she said.

  They had only managed to do it twice more before the summer holidays. But then, with so much more time on her hands, she had virtually lived at the Vickerys’ house. ‘At first, we could only do it when Melissa was out, but he managed to make sure she was out quite a lot. But after a while, we were so hot for each other, we took to going to the bedroom whenever we wanted, and just locking the door. Sometimes we didn’t make it to the bedroom. We did it all over the house,’ she said proudly.

  ‘Your birthday,’ Slider said, ‘was in June, wasn’t it? You asked your parents for a diary that locked.’

  She looked surprised. ‘You’re not on about that diary again?’ And then, unexpectedly, she blushed. ‘You haven’t found it? Oh God, you haven’t read it, have you?’

  ‘No, it disappeared. I assumed asking for one that locked meant you had something to write down that you didn’t want your parents to read.’ She looked away. ‘You wrote down all about your affair with David, didn’t you?’

  She nodded. ‘Every blessed word. Every kiss. What was I thinking? But they would never have peeked, my parents. They were stupid, my dad was an ass and a bully, but he was honest. He’d never have read it, even if I forgot to lock it.’

  ‘Tell me about Melissa,’ Slider said next.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Well, she must have started to suspect something. Eventually.’

  For the first time she looked uncomfortable. ‘Oh, Melissa. She really was a pain in the neck. I suppose she must have suspected. Even she couldn’t be that stupid. I didn’t care. I never really thought about her at all. She was such a nothing. It wouldn’t h
ave mattered, anyway, if she hadn’t got jealous.’

  ‘Jealous?’

  ‘I mean, she still had him to herself all night. Actually, I’m not sure she liked that side of it, really. But since her mum died she’d been sort of looking after him, doing the cooking and washing and cleaning, sort of being like a wife to him, and I think she felt he ought to have appreciated her more.’

  Slider felt cold all down his insides, as though he swallowed an ice cube. ‘When you say she didn’t like “that side of it”,’ he said as casually as he could, ‘do you mean …?’

  She shrugged indifferently. ‘It started with just sharing the bed, because they were both lonely and upset. But one thing led to another. David was a very physical man. You’d think she’d be glad, really, that I took that over from her.’

  ‘Weren’t you afraid she might tell someone? Wasn’t he afraid she might?’

  ‘She’d never have said anything,’ she said harshly. ‘She worshipped him. And she was too much of a wimp. Like I said, she was wet. A complete drip.’

  Slider thought of Edgar Vickery. Was that what he had suspected – or known? Or had there been something else in the past? ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘whether there were others before you.’

  He thought that might cause an explosion, but she only shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that. There were others after me. He had a taste for schoolgirls. I had to keep an eye on him. But I never let it go too far. As soon as I saw the signs, I jumped on him. And it faded away as he got older.’ She sounded almost disconsolate. ‘The fire burned down, if you like. He’d look, but he never had the energy to touch.’

  ‘Tell me about that last day,’ Slider said. He felt Atherton tense behind him. This was the testing part. So far, she had talked freely, but she hadn’t incriminated herself. He had to keep her talking without alarm, to get her to tell the rest, to run out the thread without knotting it.

  ‘What last day?’ she said absently, busy with her thoughts.

  ‘Saturday the 18th of August, 1990. The day Amanda went through the hedge, and never came back. What happened that day?’