Old Bones

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  She thought about it, and her mouth turned down. ‘It was all Melissa’s fault, stupid idiot. There was no need for her to make a fuss.’

  ‘What happened?’ He pressed her gently.

  ‘David was working on something up in his room. Melissa and I were sitting on a rug in the garden. It was really hot that day. I said, “I bet David could do with a cup of tea”. We went in, and Melissa made tea, and I took it up in his special mug. Well, he was just ready for a break. Working always made him randy, especially if it was going well. So we started … you know. We were getting into it when Melissa came in and shouted at us. I was on his desk with my legs round him, and when she shouted it made me jump and I knocked the mug over. Luckily most of the tea went on the floor, but she started screaming about his papers on the desk and how important they were. What if the tea had gone all over his work and ruined it? I told her to calm down but she didn’t. She started going on about what was I doing in there anyway? She said she was never even allowed into his room, but I seemed to think I could go anywhere I liked and do anything I liked.’ She shook her head. ‘She was raving. She was mad and scared and jealous and crazy. She said she was going to tell everyone and we’d be locked up. She wouldn’t stop. She just – wouldn’t – stop! Stupid girl!’

  ‘So David stopped her,’ Slider suggested, the merest breath of a question.

  She was grave now, all the poke gone out of her. ‘He didn’t mean to – you know – be so rough, but he was angry. Well, a man doesn’t like being interrupted at a moment like that. And she wouldn’t stop screaming. He grabbed her by the neck, just to shut her up, really, but she fell over and he fell with her. They were both on the ground. She grabbed the coffee mug from the floor and started hitting him on the head with it, so I grabbed her arms, but she wouldn’t stop struggling, so I knelt on them. When she stopped screaming he let her go and got up. He said, “Come on, Mel, get up now”, but she didn’t move.’ She sounded sad, almost quite regretful. ‘I think we overdid it,’ she concluded.

  You think? Slider said inwardly, in broad irony. What he said was: ‘So then you had to decide what to do with the body.’

  The sadness went, the grit came back. ‘It was mostly me. David went to pieces. He wanted to go to the police and say it was an accident. I said, with those bruises? And what about me? God knows what would have happened to me. I said no way I’m going to prison. He said you won’t, it was my fault, and I said at the very least they wouldn’t let me see him again, and I wasn’t having that. I told him to calm down, we could get out of this all right if we kept our heads.’

  ‘And you came up with a plan. Which was, for you to become Melissa,’ said Slider.

  She shrugged. ‘We were the same height, same age, same colour hair. I could fit into her clothes. But it had to be somewhere we weren’t known. And we had to leave right away, because as soon as I went missing, they’d start looking for me. So I just didn’t go home.’

  ‘Then there was the problem of the body,’ Slider suggested.

  ‘Yeah. That was a hard one,’ said Amanda. ‘He wanted to take her out in the car after dark, but you only had to watch the news to know they always get seen by somebody when they do that. I said we had to bury her in the garden. But he said we couldn’t leave any sign of newly dug earth. Then we both thought of the space behind the hedge – between his fence and our hedge. Nobody knew about it, and nobody would be able to see anything from the outside.’ She shrugged. ‘So that’s what we did. In the middle of the night. We took turns holding the torch and digging, because there wasn’t much room in there and it was difficult. But we got it done.’

  ‘You put some paving slabs on top of the grave.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten. David was scared cats or foxes would dig it up. He had some slabs left over from when the patio was laid, so we put a couple on top. And the next morning, he told the people next door we were going on holiday – he always gave them the keys when they went away, so it had to look natural – and we never came back. Well, David did, to collect stuff before the house was sold, but I didn’t. I couldn’t risk anyone there seeing me.’

  ‘Did he telephone his brother during that evening?’

  She had been thinking, and looked up, surprised. ‘His brother? Oh, I know. No, the brother phoned him. They were supposed to get together or something on the Sunday, but David told him he was going on holiday.’

  ‘Did he tell him anything else?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t hear all the conversation. He was on a long time.’ She frowned. ‘But he’d hardly have told him he’d killed Melissa, would he? I mean, you don’t.’

  No, Slider thought, perhaps you don’t. But he’d told him something – enough, at any rate, for Edgar Vickery to put two and two together the following day and make a considerable sum, large enough to make him compromise his conscience, sully the law he served, and destroy his career. Enough, probably, to ruin his mental health and bring him to an early grave.

  ‘Did David keep in touch with his brother after you left?’ Slider asked.

  ‘I’m sure not,’ she said indifferently. ‘That was the whole point – we had to make a clean break, go where we weren’t known, and start a new life together. And we did.’

  ‘You went to school in Tetbury,’ he said.

  ‘David said I had to, or the authorities would be after me. We had to pretend I was Melissa until school-leaving age. I went as little as possible, I can tell you. And as soon as I was sixteen, I left school and we moved out of town. To the farm.’ She stopped, sinking back into thought. She roused herself a moment later, to say: ‘And that’s the end of the story.’

  Slider and Atherton were both reeling from the casual recounting of so Gothic a horror story. Atherton recovered first. ‘Did you never think, in all that time, of how your parents must be suffering?’

  She looked up at him in surprise. ‘No. Why should I?’ she said. And then, perhaps thinking that did not reflect too well on her, she said, ‘They wouldn’t care. They didn’t even like me very much. They’d think I’d just run away, and after a bit they’d forget me.’

  ‘Your father was suspected of having murdered you,’ Atherton said.

  To their shock, she burst out laughing. ‘No! That’s rich! My dad, murder me? He’d never have had the nerve. He used to shout a lot, but that’s all he did. He was scared of me, if you want the truth. He was scared of anything he didn’t understand, and boy, he didn’t understand the first thing about me! That’s why he shouted so much. Shouting was all he could do, faced with anything above his level of intelligence,’ she concluded contemptuously.

  Slider heard Atherton take a breath, and stopped him with a movement of his hand. He wanted to keep her on side, keep her wanting to tell. ‘So you had twenty years, more or less, living with David as his wife. Was it worth it?’

  ‘What do you think?’ she said; but then the animation faded. ‘I knew it had to end one day. He was a lot older than me, after all. I didn’t know it would be that soon, though. It’s a bastard thing, that cancer.’

  ‘It must have been awful for you,’ Slider said gently, ‘watching him suffer.’

  ‘It was,’ she said, her eyes inward. ‘Seeing him go downhill. He wasn’t my David any more. Well, he’d been going downhill for years. The fire went out of him, he didn’t work any more, he just slumped about the place. I got fed up with him. Then he got ill. At the end he was just bones covered in skin.’ She stared at nothing. ‘He didn’t smell too good, either,’ she added out of the blue.

  ‘So one day …’ Slider prompted.

  ‘You don’t let them suffer,’ she said slowly. ‘I’ve always loved animals. I wanted to be a vet when I was a kid. And that was the first rule. You don’t let them suffer. You put them out of their misery. I told him there was a loose panel on the hen house that needed fixing. I followed him out with the twelve-bore. He was kneeling down, trying to hammer a nail in. I got up close, called his name, and when he looked up, I
shot him in the head. That way it would look like suicide.’ She drew a sigh. ‘I wanted to bury him on our land, where we’d been happy, but the regs were so complicated, in the end I had to let it go, and he’s buried in the cemetery. They make simple things so difficult these days.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘I suppose they do.’

  Everything she had done had seemed simple to her, he thought. It was a function of obsession.

  TWENTY-THREE

  A World More Full of Weeping

  They went up to the canteen to get a cup of tea while they waited for the duty solicitor to come in, so they could take her statement.

  ‘She’s mad, of course,’ said Atherton. ‘Mad as a ferret in a blender. How do you think this is going to go? We haven’t got much except the confession. I’m surprised, really, she did.’

  ‘What else would she do?’ Slider said. ‘He’s dead. He was her whole life. There’s nothing left for her but to talk about it, and no one but us to tell.’

  ‘What a story,’ Atherton said. ‘If that’s what love does to you …’

  ‘Not love, passion. Love ages, puts on weight and gets comfortable, but passion goes on burning. The topless towers …’

  ‘Topless Towers sounds like some kind of adult theme park.’

  ‘I was referring to Ilium,’ Slider said with dignity.

  ‘I know. But that was Helen’s face, not her passion.’

  ‘Comes out the same,’ said Slider.

  Taking the statement took all night. They drove back to London as a pink dawn was breaking, and Slider went home for a shower and breakfast before going back in to start the ball rolling their end.

  Despite his cold, Porson was in early, after their telephone conversation the evening before. ‘You look whacked,’ he said as Slider came through his door. He stood still, unusually, arms folded across his chest and chin lowered while he listened to Slider’s report. ‘So, no problem with the statement?’ he said afterwards.

  ‘No. She told it all the same the second time. Even added some detail. She seemed happy to have the extra audience. Cocky, almost.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Porson, broodingly. ‘As well she might. I don’t like it, don’t like it at all.’ Now he began walking. ‘If she’s as intelligent as you say, barmy or not, she’ll know what the score is. She’ll think she can get away with it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s a mess. I can’t see the CPS running with it. They don’t like going in when all we’ve got is a confession. No hard evidence.’

  ‘The DNA?’ Slider suggested.

  ‘Doesn’t tie anything down.’ He paused to mop his eyes and nose. ‘It’s a hell of a complicated story. A jury might not get it. Or if they did, they might not convict. After all, it was him that killed his daughter, according to her.’

  ‘She held her down,’ said Slider. ‘It’s common purpose. And she’s not a sympathetic character.’

  Porson shrugged. ‘A good brief can make anyone look sympathetic.’

  ‘She’s showed no remorse. She made her plan and carried it out. The people who got in her way didn’t figure with her at all. She even killed him in the end.’

  ‘Well, what’s goose for the gander is good for other,’ Porson said. ‘And that raises the question of her sanity, doesn’t it?’ He stopped in the middle of his walk and faced Slider. ‘I’m just trying to prepare you for disappointment, that’s all.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. You’re very kind.’

  Porson gave him a raised eyebrow. ‘Oh, irony! You could cut yourself with that. Also, there’s this Kellington-Vickery aspic as well. You’ve got to think about that. Another reason the CPS might give it the bum’s shoulder. It wouldn’t reflect well on the Job.’

  ‘Vickery’s dead. And Kellington won’t last much longer, from the look of him,’ said Slider. ‘And it was all a long time ago.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Porson. ‘Where’s the public interest in prosecuting something that happened twenty-five years ago? But look on the bright side,’ he added, walking again. ‘You got it done – and before the end of the week.’

  ‘On time and on budget,’ said Slider. More irony.

  Porson ignored that. ‘You did good. This’ll go in your record, whether they prosecute or not. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a commendation for you in it.’

  Take two attaboys out of petty cash, Slider thought. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ said Porson, dusting his hands. ‘When’s she arriving?’

  ‘She’ll be on her way here after the statutory rest. So she’ll be here this afternoon some time.’

  ‘Good. That gives you time to set up a psychiatric assessment. That’s the first thing. My guess is that she’ll be found unfit and referred for treatment. So she’ll get locked up, one way or another. And this way it’s indefinite. So don’t brood about it.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Slider.

  He was almost out when Porson said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve got some news that may interest you. Shut the door.’ When Slider had complied, he said, ‘It’s about Assistant Commissioner Millichip. I’ve just heard this morning he’s been required to resign.’

  ‘Sir?’ Slider brightened. Required to resign, for the higher ranks, was the equivalent of being sacked.

  ‘Yes, I thought that’d cheer you up.’ Porson nodded.

  ‘Is it over Operation Neptune?’

  ‘No, it’s not. I told you, Neptune’s been filed. It’s a Fraud Squad thing. The North Kensington Regeneration Trust. He was well involved, and as I understand it, there are going to be prosecutions. Quite a few of them. Now this is sub-judice, so don’t talk about it, but I thought you deserved to know, seeing as you set so much store by it. Millichip’s gone, Marler’s been deselected, the parties have been stopped, all’s well with the world, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Slider said.

  ‘All right, off you go,’ said Porson. ‘Go and bask in glory while you can. It doesn’t last long.’

  Slider didn’t need to be told that.

  The troops listened in silence as he and Atherton unreeled the story from Amanda’s point of view, tacking it down here and there with a deft stitch to the evidence from their own end. At the end there was a thoughtful silence as they digested it all.

  Then Swilley said, ‘What gripes me is that he got away with it, David Vickery. He seduces a schoolgirl, kills his own daughter, and goes on to lead a normal life.’

  ‘Until he got a twelve-bore in the face,’ Connolly reminded her.

  ‘I wonder,’ Atherton said, ‘whether that actually happened. It might have been fantasy on Amanda’s part – what she feels in retrospect she ought to have done. It came out rather too pat in the confession. More likely he did it himself.’

  ‘Why would she confess to murder and put herself in danger of prosecution if she didn’t do it?’ Gascoyne asked.

  ‘Because she knows she’s safe. We’ve got no evidence,’ Lessop said. ‘Can’t go just with a confession.’

  ‘She wouldn’t know that,’ LaSalle said. ‘The public think a confession is everything.’

  ‘I think David Vickery suffered his own punishment,’ Slider said to Swilley, to comfort her. He’d used the same thought himself. ‘He went into exile, and I’d like to believe he was haunted by what he did every day of his life.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ she sniffed.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said Hart. ‘Boss, what are we going to get her for, Amanda?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Slider. ‘It depends on the psychiatric assessment, to begin with. And then on the CPS.’

  ‘They won’t touch it,’ McLaren said with gloomy conviction. ‘Too messy. Too long ago. And she’s an obvious nut job.’

  ‘So we busted our humps for nothing!’ Fathom complained.

  ‘It wasn’t for nothing,’ Slider said. ‘We did excellent work. We solved a very difficult and obscure case. Two cases, in fact, a misper and a homicide. We should be proud
of ourselves. I’m proud of all of you.’ They looked back at him.

  Connolly said, ‘Talking of bodies …’ Everyone looked at her. Slider’s heart sank. She was going to bring up the point he had been trying not to think about. ‘The bones,’ she said. ‘We’re saying now they’re Melissa? But how do we prove it? There’s no rellies to get DNA from. And what happens to them?’

  ‘Yes, and what do we tell Mrs Knight?’ Swilley asked.

  ‘And her sister,’ Connolly added.

  ‘I suppose we couldn’t let ’em have the bones and say nothing,’ Hart said wistfully. ‘Let the Pearl and the Emerald give them a decent burial. Two birds with one stone.’

  ‘That’s really very witty,’ said Atherton. ‘Two birds with one headstone. I wish I’d said it.’

  ‘Oh, have manners!’ Connolly snapped. ‘We’re talking about human feelings here.’

  ‘No, we’re talking about processes of the law,’ Atherton objected.

  ‘Well, I bagsie you be the one to tell Mrs Knight that her daughter’s been alive all along, but that she’s a cold-hearted murdering bitch who let her mammy suffer all these years because she didn’t give a tinker’s about her,’ Connolly retorted hotly.

  ‘And that she’ll never see her again because she’ll be banged up in a psycho unit,’ McLaren added. ‘Nice one.’

  ‘What will happen to the bones, sir?’ Gascoyne asked, restoring sanity. ‘If there’s no relatives?’

  ‘That’ll be for the coroner to decide,’ said Slider.

  ‘Buried on the parish,’ Swilley said.

  ‘Don’t get sentimental,’ said Atherton.

  ‘It will be done respectfully,’ Slider said. ‘And anyone who wants can go.’

  There were no immediate takers. Talk was free, but free time was precious. But Slider thought that he would probably go. And glancing at Atherton, he thought that he probably would too, despite his slick words.

  His missing night’s sleep was beginning to catch up with him, so he went up to the canteen, as much for the exercise as for a cup of tea strong enough to trot a mouse across. When he got back, he found Joanna was there, with George, who was sitting on the edge of Swilley’s desk, swinging his stout little legs and holding court. He loved company.