“Oh, hel lo! You found us! So good of you to come. It’s a pity your partner’s not back, but that means we can do it again when she is, can’t we? This is Garrett, by the way.”
“I’m the gardener,” said Garrett, lurking in the dimmer part of the hallway and having generally the appearance of a human dishcloth. “She lets me off in the house with just a bit of washing-up now and again.”
“Don’t mind him—I don’t,” said Delphine. Then lowering her voice, she said, “Now come through. I’ve got a couple to meet you. I realize the Cazalets might have been more useful, but I couldn’t endure the thought of them asking if we had Ribena and sitting there saying they did think there were standards that should be kept up and what did we think about the problem of dog dirt. Now come along. . . . This is Matt Harper the footballer, and the man you’ve heard on Radio Leeds. This is Jacob Goldblatt, and this is Hester. From The Willows.”
Jacob looked comfortable and intelligent, with thinning gray hair and a neat round paunch. His wife struck Matt as more intense, and perhaps brighter and more observant. It seemed to go with her lean, well-defined long face. Matt sat down, allowed Delphine to get him a vodka and tonic, and let the conversation swirl around football and his transition to the media world, and whether local radio was doing a good job. It was when the talk seemed in danger of getting on to Leeds United’s prospects in the PremierLeague that Matt asked the Goldblatts, “Have you been here long?”
Mrs. Goldblatt looked relieved that the trivialities were over. She liked to make use of her observancy skills and insight.
“Twelve years. That makes us not quite the oldest inhabitants, but not too far off. We know about your interest in the houses, by the way, and the reasons for it, though we didn’t hear you on Radio Leeds or ‘Look North.’ We knew Mr. Farson, of course, who used to own Elderholm.”
“But not much more than just to speak to,” said her husband.
“What was he like?”
“Perfectly nice to pass the time of day with,” said Hester. “Being a widower, he didn’t entertain or anything like that. Mostly we talked over the garden hedge. The only time I set foot in the house, and that was just in the kitchen, was when I’d taken delivery of a parcel for him. The kitchen looked as if it hadn’t been changed since the houses were built, and I did wonder whether an elderly chap like him wouldn’t be better off with some modern cooker rather than an Aga. But of course, you’ll know what the kitchen looked like.”
“The modern cooker has just been installed,” said Matt, smiling. “I cook but I don’t slave if I can help it. Did you notice Mr. Farson becoming senile?”
They cast looks at each other.
“Well . . . not at first,” said Jacob. “Just little things like saying something a second time a minute or two after he’d said it the first time—the usual sort of things. He seemed to be losing his grasp, but quite gradually. Then—when wasit?—one day last year it must have been, Hester saw him in the middle of the day gardening in his pajamas.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” said Hester, looking at Matt with genuine compassion in her face. “If I’d gone out and said anything he would have been so embarrassed and ashamed. On the other hand he could have walked up to the shops like that, which would have been even worse. Luckily we had his son’s telephone number—old Mr.Farson had given it to us when he went to stay for a few days with his daughter in Milton Keynes. So I rang the son up and he was round like a shot. He came to see us later to thank us, and said he’d been noticing the signs for some time. That was really the beginning of the end for poor old Mr. Farson. They say he’s hardly capable of any sort of conversation now.”
“I heard he was a bit better than that,” said Matt. “I suppose it’s a question of which day you catch him on.”
“Comes to all of us,” said Jacob Goldblatt.
“It does not!” said Delphine brightly. “We’ve all got to live in the hope that we can keep that particular wolf from the door. Tell him about the woman, Hester.”
The long, concerned face paused for a moment in thought.
“Well, I didn’t tell anyone at the time, apart from Jacob. It was a while ago now—five, six, seven years, I couldn’t really say.”
“Seven or even longer,” said her husband.
“Probably you’re right. It usually is longer than one thinks, at our age. Anyway, it was nothing more than an incident, really. I was at my back door putting milk bottles out, and I saw this—this figure go past down the back lane. There must have been something about her, perhaps about the wayshe moved, almost floated, but anyway, I stood there for a moment, and the footsteps stopped outside Elderholm. We’re two down from you, Mr. Harper, by the way: the Willows. So I was curious, frankly, and went down to my gate and looked along. She was outside what is now your house, looking over the gate, up at the house. This was another situation where I didn’t quite know what to do. One doesn’t want to seem like a busybody, does one?”
“Doesn’t usually bother you,” said her husband.
“Ignore him. I wondered for a moment if it was Mr. Farson’s daughter, whom I’d never seen: but I’d heard she was crippled. And if it was her, why was she looking up at the house? Eventually I just called out, ‘Can I help you?’”
“What happened?” asked Matt. Hester looked troubled.
“She turned and came toward me. I realized at once she was mad, or disturbed, or whatever euphemism one cares to use. She actually answered my question, though she was reluctant, hesitant. She said, ‘I don’t think so. There’s nothing anyone can do. It’s still there. I can sense it’s still there.’ This was beginning to get uncomfortably like an Elizabethan play—poor Ophelia or someone like that, going mad in white satin. But I did ask her what was still there, and she looked at me wildly and said, ‘You shouldn’t know. Best you don’t. Nobody should know. But I feel it’s there. Poor little thing.’ And then she just hurried off down the lane and then round the corner and out of sight. I went into the house, and saw her hurrying up Houghton Avenue toward the main road and the buses.”
“And you never saw her again?”
“No. I won’t say I never gave it another thought, because you do, don’t you? As with Mr. Farson and his senility, it’s a reminder of how fragile one’s grip on things is.”
“What was she like?”
“Oh, dear. It’s a long time ago. Thirty to thirty-five, I’d say. The face wasn’t particularly lined, but the hair was going gray—fairish hair going gray. I attributed that to the . . . madness. Quite tall for a woman . . . willowy. I did wonder whether it could be the daughter of Mrs. Beeston, the owner before Cuthbert Farson. I knew she’d had a daughter who went to Australia. The woman didn’t speak with an Australian accent, but then she wouldn’t necessarily, would she? Then I thought she’d have to be a lot older. Before long I forgot about it, and just remembered it when Delphine told us about the . . . about your discovery.”
She looked at Matt, as if challenging him to make sense of it all. It was a challenge he felt he’d taken up already.
That afternoon Charlie managed to leave the police headquarters at Millgarth at five o’clock for once. When he told Matt that the case of the bones in the Elderholm attic was likely to get low priority because of the pressure of more recent and serious crimes, he was telling no more than a half-truth. Crime was rather below its usual high level in Leeds that late spring, whether because the minor villains had taken off for the Continent to join in the cheap booze and fags racket, and the major villains had flown to Spain to confer with their fellows in exile on the Costa del Crime, Charlie couldn’t guess, but he relished the prospect of a lazy evening at home. The fact that the little bones were being treated in the usual way the police had of treating cases there was no serious prospect of finding a solution to niggled away at the back of his mind, though.“There we are, young Carola,” he crooned, taking hisbaby daughter out of the little tub he had bathed her in and enveloping her immediately in a towel three times her si
ze.
Carola gurgled with pleasure. She did a lot of gurgling.
“You’re better at it than I am,” said Felicity, without jealousy, watching them over her computer. “I wonder if it’s true that fathers go a bit bonkers over a daughter, and mothers a bit bonkers over a son.”
“I’ve known mothers desperate to have a daughter,” said Charlie, intent on what he was doing, gently drying the tender flesh. “In human relationships the only possible generalization is that there is no possible generalization.”
“Still, it’d be a good thesis topic,” said Felicity. “‘Fathers and daughters in Victorian fiction.’”
“I thought you were giving up on English lit to write the great novel,” protested Charlie.
“I am. I have, apart from my two classes. But there’s plenty of students hungry for a good thesis topic. They could use Dombey and Son. And Wives and Daughters. ”
“Doesn’t sound as if either of those is about fathers and daughters.”
“Oh, but they are, though. The firm of Dombey and Son ‘turns out to be a daughter after all,’ as one of the characters says. Then there’s Mary Barton. I wonder why none of the Brontës was interested in father and daughter relationships. In fact, none of their characters has any parents at all for long.”
“I’ve got a case at the moment of parents who didn’t have their daughter for long,” shouted Charlie from across the hall, as he lowered Carola into her cot. “She was murdered thirty years ago and nobody seems to have given a toss. At least, nobody reported it.”
Felicity’s face twisted in distress.
“How horrible. How come you know about it now?”
Charlie came over and stood in the doorway, half his mind still on his daughter, and whether she would go straight off to sleep. When he was satisfied with the sound of her breathing, he came in and told Felicity the story from the beginning. It was rare for Charlie to bring his work home, but this seemed a matter a mother might help on.
“What chance of finding out what happened?” she asked, when he came to a stop.
“Practically none, I guess.”
“So resources are not being lavished on it?” Felicity knew all about the stern exigencies of police priorities.
“A dribble of interest for a week or two more is the most we can expect,” said Charlie.
“What about this footballer? He’s obviously interested.”
“Oh, yes. I realized he was interested from the beginning. Now I know why. Yes, he definitely wants to know what happened.”
“And that’s not because he’s a media person now?”
“Absolutely not,” insisted Charlie. “He’s interested because he was around at about the time, and because, though he was very young, he was getting vibes from the setup in those stone houses that disturbed him. I guess that as time passes more will come back to him, particularly if he finds out anything. One thing may trigger memories of more things—that’s a pretty frequent pattern in crime investigations.”
“And couldn’t you feed him things that you’ve got hold of?”
Charlie shot her a glance. She knew him through and through by now.
“Not systematically. On the other hand, there are ways of dropping items of information casually into a conversation.”
“That’s what you intended to do anyway, wasn’t it? That’s why you brought the case up now.”
Charlie spoke slowly and carefully.
“Having a daughter of my own, whom I love to bits, makes me care a lot about a kid who apparently was killed, hidden away, and then forgotten. Having gone through the hideous agony of a formal church wedding for this beautiful little girl—”
“You loved it.”
“—not to mention three days in Morecombe for a honeymoon because you wanted to use it in this damn novel I’m not allowed to see—”
“That, I admit, was beyond the call of duty.”
“—I just feel that this is a little girl I’ve gone through a lot of suffering for. And there’s this little bundle of bones shut away in an attic that apparently nobody cared for or compassionated at all. It’s about time someone did.”
“So you’re using me as some sort of sounding board—”
“I am using you as a moral touchstone. Having a father whose only morality is rampant egotism, you are especially sensitive on moral issues.”
“You always see my father off, no problem. Don’t gloat. So you’re using me to give you the moral backbone to bend police rules?”
“Something like that.”
“Go for it. You’re just wanting me to confirm what you intend to do anyway. So do it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Blackout
The move came about ten days later. He could have roped in some friends, hired a van, and gone in for some macho heaving and pushing, but he decided against it. Being the wage earner and full-time caregiver surely excused him from that sort of posturing. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t afford professionals. He gave the children responsibility for their own possessions, allotting them a tea chest each, and that kept them occupied on the Friday night and on the Saturday of the move. The moving men turned out to be the usual crazy gang, but luckily there was only one interested in football, and he was happy enough with ten minutes’ chat at the beginning and the end of the operation. By five o’clock they were camped in Elderholm and beginning the shift-around of their furniture and their possessions. By Sunday evening the house was beginning to feel like a home.Three nights later Matt had a dream that was not quitea dream. It came to him, like most dreams we remember, just before waking. It involved no action, no people, not even any faces. It was in fact nothing but a voice. It was a child’s voice, one his mind must have conjured up from thirty years ago. The voice was just breaking, the voice of a boy edging into adulthood. It was shouting, with the flavor of a jeer strong in it.
“Lily Marsden, Lily Marsden,
Face like a bath bun.”
A silly, childish rhyme. With the name Lily in it. But Matt knew his mind was increasingly taking him back to the summer of sixty-nine.
They were all on the front lawn of Ashdene, kicking a ball around aimlessly, after they’d all enjoyed a game on the playing fields of the Catholic school.
“Lily Marsden, Lily Marsden,
You’re not a very fast ’un.”
It was one of the younger boys, not Peter, who had praised his footballing skills the day before.
“The name is Elizabeth,” said the girl. “Nobody calls me Lily. It’s a horrible name.”
The words were unwise.
“Horrible name, horrible girl,” muttered Peter, who began dribbling the ball down toward the laburnum at the end of the garden near the road.
Young Matt looked anxiously at Lily. He had not particularly noticed her in the football game the day before,but he had in the one that had just been wound up—in which she had not played very well. Matt couldn’t think of anything worse than being told you couldn’t play football well, but on reflection he was not sure the rhyme had had anything to do with football. Lily’s face was pudgy, with a small mouth and bright eyes that seemed to look through you, when they looked straight at you. That wasn’t often, however, and then only the quick, sharp glance of someone who was weighing you before looking away again.
Otherwise she looked at the ground, or at the treetops, and gave the impression of thinking her own thoughts.
“Come on,” said Rory, a boy of about eleven, whose house Ashdene was. “Let’s go and raid the fridge, see what we can find.”
A house with a fridge was something new for Matt. He knew of shops with refrigerators, but not houses. He trooped behind them through the front door with a pleasurable sense of anticipation. The inside of Ashdene struck him at first as not very different from his own home in Bermondsey, but then he realized that all the rooms were much bigger. The kitchen especially. That was where they all congregated, perching on the table or on the kitchen chairs, watching while Rory
opened the fridge and took out big bottles of Coke. The next phase was even more interesting. Rory opened up a special little box in the top of the fridge and drew out a good-sized carton of ice cream. He put it in the middle of the table and fetched them each a spoon from a drawer in the kitchen cabinet. To the young Matt it was as good as being given the freedom of the kitchens at Buckingham Palace. He tucked in, driving his spoon deep in, and slowly eating the strawberry concoction. Heaven! He always liked relishing luxury. He had learnedyoung to space out his pleasures and little treats. All his life he was to eat his vegetables first, before the delights of going on to the meat or fish.
He was not the only one to be impressed.
“Your parents must be very rich,” said a girl called Sophie, about Rory’s own age. “Having a fridge. And whenever we come here there’s ice cream in the freezer box. And they don’t care if we eat it all up.”
Rory shrugged. He had an early sense of his grandeur, though in other respects he seemed to lack confidence.
“No, they don’t care. They just say, ‘Have you had friends in, then?’”
“Do you get lots of pocket money?” asked Matt. That was a bone of contention at home in the East End, and the supply had become very erratic since he came to lodge with Auntie Hettie.
“Not bad,” said Rory, preserving the mystery by not being too specific.
“Parents just don’t know the cost of things,” said Peter.
“Ours don’t, anyway,” agreed Sophie feelingly.
So Sophie was Peter’s sister, was she? In Matt’s drowsy memories she was blonde, curly-haired, and very forward—or perhaps determined was a better word. She knew what she wanted. He remembered this because it contrasted so completely with Rory Pemberton, who seemed to have no idea what he wanted, beyond showing off about his parents’ money.
“There’s other ways of getting money than holding out your hands for more pocket money,” said Marjie. Matt pricked up his ears at this, but Marjie didn’t volunteer any further information, and Matt was puzzled because she seemed to be looking at Lily Marsden. Lily, however, wasnot returning her gaze, but was digging deep into the ice cream as if her spoon were a pickax.
The Bones in the Attic Page 5