The Bones in the Attic
Page 4
“First of all,” said Charlie, “something I didn’t know before, because this isn’t the sort of case that comes up every day: it’s not possible to ‘date’ bones in themselves—say when they were alive, roughly when the person died.Bits of flesh might be another matter, but there were none.”
“I see. So no joy on the date?”
“Well, not initially. Come back to that. The scientists are leaning in the direction of a little girl for the victim.Obviously we’ll be interested in the houses and their inhabitants, particularly the children. By the way, on the question of date, we made a bit of an assumption based on the dust and the area around the bones—frankly, it was more of a guess than anything. We thought the bones were over twenty years old. Going on that, we found that the last house owner who’d been there more than twenty years was your Mr. Farson, who moved there in 1977. Now eighty-seven, and living in a nursing home in Rodley—intermittently compos mentis, but about as unreliable as you’d expect. We’ve spoken to the son, who as you told me has never lived there. Visited his dad frequently, but had no call to go up into the attic, not surprisingly, though he’d been up to move a few tea chests out before he put the place on the market. It was all a great surprise to him, of course.”
“What happened to the other families in the vicinity?”
Charlie shrugged.
“We haven’t found out a great deal about them yet. There’s only one person still around in Bramley, and her name’s Lily Fitch.”
“Is this someone who lives in Lansdowne Rise?” Matt asked. Charlie Peace raised his eyebrows.
“Been doing some detection on your own, have you?”
“Just talking to a neighbor about who among the old-timers is still around.”
“And did she say Lily Fitch was the only one still in the area?”
“Yes, though she didn’t know the name, only where she lived, which apparently in her eyes is a social drop.”
Charlie nodded.
“She’s the only one we’ve come up with.”
“No, wait a minute,” said Matt, remembering the conversation. “She—Delphine, no less—didn’t say she was the only one still in the area. She said she was the only one she knew about. She’s new around here—only been here five years.”
“Right. And who’s the longest resident at present?”
“The Cazalets next door, apparently. We had a little encounter on the day I found the skeleton. Mr. Cazalet didn’t think police added to the tone of the neighborhood. He blamed me. My having been a footballer was another black mark in his eyes. He probably foresaw Gazza-style drunken binges.”
“Sounds like a nice type of neighbor. Our neighbors in Headingley have all been incredibly welcoming. They seem to think having a black living next door adds tone to the neighborhood. It gets rather wearing. Anyway, we went to talk to this Lily Fitch, and she couldn’t tell us much. Came up with one name, Eddie Armitage, living in Halifax. We followed it up, and it turns out he’s dead.”
“And that’s as far as it’s gone?”
“’Fraid so. We need names, and we haven’t got any. But back to the little kid. Like I said, there was no way the death could be dated from the bones, and insects and rodents had left nothing of the flesh.” Matt involuntarily shuddered. “Yes, it’s not a nice thought, is it?” Charlie agreed. “The flies and mice feeding, while downstairs Mrs. Beeston or Mr. Farson were getting on with ordinaryliving. Did they know, or did they not know? Anyway, no remains of flesh or organs, but there were some scraps of material under the body—tiny scraps, which you wouldn’t have noticed even if you’d disturbed the body and looked underneath. Probably no one but a forensics team would have picked them up.”
Matt had immediately pricked up his ears.
“What kind of material?”
“Cotton and wool, a few fragments of each.”
“So the little mite was clothed when she was put there?”
“Unless she was laid out on a sort of bed—may be a sheet and a blanket, or smaller things. The forensics people thought that was probably the case at first.”
“But?”
“But then they made an analysis of the cotton. It was a type that was imported widely for a time thirty years or so ago, from Bangladesh, as it now is.”
“East Pakistan it was then, wasn’t it?”
“I think so. Before my time. It’s a cheap sort of cotton, of the kind you might make children’s clothes with—not designer-label stuff by a long chalk, but the sort of underclothes you might find sold in street markets or car-boot sales, if they had them then.”
Matt digested this.
“So, this is some poor kid, of poor parents?”
“Most likely.”
“Who never reported her missing. That’s what I can’t grasp.”
Charlie shook his head in agreement.
“No. It’s baffling. Neither thing ties in with the sort of location she was found in. Houghton Avenue, and thosestone houses, were and are eminently respectable. The people there wouldn’t clothe their children off market stalls, and they would be on to the police the moment they went missing. If for no other reason than that the neighbors would be outraged if they didn’t. If it was as long ago as we think, the codes of respectability would be very much operative in a street like that.”
Matt was taking his time to think this through.
“So what do we have? May be a swimsuit or a pair of pants on the body?”
“That sort of thing, they thought. And may be a jersey, or a shawl, or perhaps a blanket to lie on, like we said.”
“So presumably it was a summer crime, when the tot was running around without much on. A hot summer?”
“Could be.”
“Children grow out of their clothes quickly.”
“That’s right.”
“And there would be a quick turnover of goods in any street-market sort of enterprise.”
“Your mind’s working along the same lines as ours,” confessed Charlie, as if he didn’t quite like a member of the public successfully playing at being detective. “It would be at the time this cotton was being imported in the form of cheap clothes. They wouldn’t sit around in a warehouse for years and years. So any summer in the late sixties or early seventies.”
“When was the hot one?”
“The hottest was the summer of sixty-nine.”
“The summer of sixty-nine,” repeated Matt softly, his face rapt in thought.
Charlie shot him a quick glance, but it was some seconds before he took in the implications of what he saw.
“You’ve been here before, haven’t you? You knew those houses in the past.”
Matt shook himself.
“Yes. The summer of sixty-nine. I’ve been meaning to tell you before.”
“Tell me now.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Summer
of Sixty-Nine
It all seemed very strange to the little boy of seven. Not the house: his own home back in Bermondsey was not so very different, though this one was rather bigger—a late-Victorian terrace house with two bedrooms on the first floor and two more in the attic. He and his brother and sisters would have killed for so much space. Usually this one just housed his auntie Hettie. But it was the open spaces around the house that fascinated him: the fields gone to scrub, the little gill as his aunt called it, with the stream beside it, leading up the hill toward the main road, and Armley. He had the ambition to go beyond that: he knew there was a Catholic church and school and even an orphanage (the mere name fascinated him, and he thought it would be something like Oliver!, which his parents had taken him to see at Christmas). Those buildingswere beyond the hilltop, which he had so far only seen from below, and he would go and see them soon. Definitely.“Eat up, Young Matt,” his auntie Hettie would say as he sat at breakfast. “There’s a squirrel out there as wants to have a word with you.”
She knew he was fascinated by the wildlife, how it could exist in the midst of a big city
. She called him Young Matt to distinguish him from his father, who was also Matt. But whereas his father had been christened by an evangelically inclined mother after the author of the first Gospel, Young Matt had been named after Matt Busby, the Manchester United football manager. Aunt Hettie did not need to distinguish between them in this way because his father hadn’t come north with him. He was back in London with Young Matt’s mother, who had had a hysterectomy, with ensuing complications.
Aunt Hettie had married a soldier soon after the end of the war, and had come north with him to his native Leeds. He was now living with another women in Pudsey, and if Matt ever mentioned his name Aunt Hettie said, “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” and seemed to mean it. She made a living, a poor one even by Matt’s family’s standards, cleaning and pulling pints at the Unicorn at lunchtime. Matt was left to his own devices as often as not, but he was used to that in Bermondsey. He had been trained in the ways of the streets by his older brother and sisters, then left with the freedom which that training gave him. It stood him in good stead in Bramley.
Aunt Hettie washed up after breakfast, then dusted and hoovered until it was time for her to go to work, which was about ten to eleven. After that Matt was free till after three.There were sandwiches in greaseproof paper on the draining board, and if he felt hungry he took them with him. If he didn’t feel hungry, he often didn’t eat them till just before his aunt came home. He had no watch, and sometimes let himself into the house in Grenville Street to look at the clock on the mantelpiece in the front room. At other times he went and peered in at the butcher’s shop down toward Amen Corner, where a clock with bold black hands was fixed to the wall facing the window. When she came back his aunt sometimes asked him where he’d been and what he’d done, but less so as the days stretched into a week, and then into two. She treated him more like a lodger than a young nephew. That rather suited Young Matt. On the whole he was happy.
“I miss you, Mummy,” he said on the memorable occasion when Aunt Hettie took him down to the phone box on Raynville Road and rang by arrangement the number she had been given for the hospital. He said the same to his elder brother and sisters, who were there too, and he meant it when he said it. It sounded more pathetic than his state warranted, though, because on the whole he was managing very nicely without them.
He heard the shouting, that Wednesday afternoon, when he got to the top of the gill. He had toiled upward in the middle-of-the-day heat, following the well-trodden path by the side of the stream, and this time he made it all the way for the first time.
“Kick it!”
“It’s a foul!”
“Goal!”
The shouts acted as a magnet whose pull was irresistible. Certainly it was not in the seven-year-old toresist it. They brought back memories of innumerable games in the street at home (and, incidentally, of the odd broken window and spanking). He walked into Houghton Avenue, then forward as the shouts directed him past the church, turning off eventually to a rough field, with, beyond to his right, a playground and a low building that he decided had to be the Catholic primary school. If he had turned around he would have seen the two terraces of stone houses that dominated the bottom end of Houghton Avenue.
But he didn’t turn around. He stood there, his eye following the ball, unconsciously estimating the skills of the ten boys and girls playing five-a-side, the play ranging from one end to the other of the improvised pitch, with blazers and pullovers marking out the goals at either end. He watched, his body still, his eyes glittering. There was never any doubt what he would do if the ball came his way. When it did, the result of a duff kick from one of the older boys, he ran forward, got the ball at the tips of his heavy shoes, then began dribbling it down toward the far goal, swerving to avoid challenges, ducking and diving, weaving in and out, until finally, without needing to take aim, he shot it fair and square between the pullover and the navy jacket, nice and low to avoid dispute.
He turned round, and saw that the game had halted, and they were all looking at him.
“That was bloody brilliant,” said one of the big boys.
“He’s light on his feet,” said a girl.
“He’s better than that,” said the boy, and repeated: “He’s bloody brilliant.”
“They say I’m good at school,” said Matt, trying to say it modestly. “Even me bruvver says I’m good.”
He brought this out with a conviction that said “that’s proof positive,” and the others seemed to accept it.
“I’m Peter,” said the big boy, and pointing to the girl: “And this is Marjie.” He added regretfully, “We can’t count that goal, you know.”
“O’ course you can’t,” said Matt. “I just couldn’t help meself.”
“I’ve got to go to dancing class,” said Marjie, the girl who had spoken. “He can have my place.”
So he played on—played with eleven-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, and older. It was like an initiation into the world of near-grown-ups, the world that his elder brother and sisters usually kept him away from. He scored two more goals, both of them good ones. It was amazing. By the end they were treating him as one of them, forgetting his age and his size (it was not till three or four years later that Matt was to grow from “a bit of a runt,” as his family called him, to a normal height for his age). He counted it from then on as one of the happiest days of his life.
“Coming for a Coke or something?” asked Peter, when they wound up the game, and gesturing toward the stone houses.
“Could you tell me the time, please?” Matt asked.
“It’s a quarter to three.”
“No. I’d better go. Me auntie’ll be back from work soon.”
“Want a game tomorrow?” asked Peter. “We’ll probably play again.”
“Yes, please !” said Matt, and raising his small fist he ran off back to the gill and down toward Grenville Street.
When he had finished telling Charlie all this, or at least a flattened, less moonstruck version of it, there was amoment’s silence as they finished their beers, and while Charlie tried to get his mind around all that he’d been told.“And this was the summer of 1969?” he asked.
“Yes, the summer of sixty-nine.”
“Nothing to link it to the bones in the attic?”
“No. It was just a start, though. . . . My memories are so vague.” Matt sat up straight and looked at Charlie Peace, his face both puzzled and troubled. “I remember when I was called home I was relieved to go, as if I had escaped from something. And I remember for weeks afterward I was wondering. ”
“Wondering what?”
“Wondering if . . . I don’t know . . . if anything had happened. If what I was uneasy about had actually happened.”
Charlie cogitated on this.
“How did you come to buy Elderholm?”
Matt had been expecting this question.
“When I played for Bradford City I lived in the Bradford area. But even so I remember coming to see where my auntie Hettie had lived—she died in the early eighties—and walking up the gill to look at the stone terraces of houses, and the field where I’d played football. When I moved in with Aileen in Pudsey I was nearer, and I’d sometimes drive off the Stanningley Road on my way to work at Radio Leeds and have a look at them.”
“And then you saw the estate agents’ sign?”
“No, actually I saw a property ad in the Thursday edition of the West Yorkshire Chronicle. I knew at once I had to have it. We were looking for a bigger place, and suddenly it felt as if we had just been waiting for this one.”
“But why? I don’t see why.”
“Because . . . because the memory of that footballgame is one of the high spots of my life. Something I cherish and look back on, and laugh, feel happier, feel proud about. The time when I was recognized, when people—OK, kids, but older kids—outside my own family and friends saw that I had talent. Daft, I know, but—”
“So that outweighed the uneasiness about what came after?”
“And nothing has come back to you?”
“Nothing concrete. Vague memories. I’ll get on to you the moment a concrete one comes to me, if it does.”
“Good. I must go,” said Charlie, collecting his things, becoming instantly more of a policeman.
“Me too,” said Matt, standing. “I’ve got a couple more bulletins to do, then I’m off for drinks with a new neighbor tonight. Delphine ‘call me Del’ Maylie, the one I told you about. Condescending, interfering type of body, but that could be useful. Actually, I’m wondering if she has something for me.”
“If she does, pass it straight on to me.”
Matt nodded, but he didn’t sense any great urgency in Charlie’s tone to match his words. The low priority allotted to the case was if anything getting lower rather than higher. He finished his stint at Radio Leeds, then drove back to Pudsey, stood over the children while they did the little homework they’d been given, than packed them into the Volvo and took them over to Elderholm. He gave them four pounds each to get their chosen take-awayfrom the joints at the top of Houghton Avenue, where take-aways had replaced shops that sold the necessities of life—or had take-aways become one of the necessities? Then Matt straightened his tie and strolled along to the Maylies at Ashdene, the first house in the other terrace.
It was Delphine who opened the door.