The Bones in the Attic

by Robert Barnard

  Matt shut the studio door on her voice. She made it sound as if they were running some kind of competition to get on air, like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” He began to think how, should the need arise, he could go about getting further publicity for the case without involving Liza Pomfret.

  But Liza had her uses, though he would never in a million years admit it. Among his mail at the studio next morning he found a letter without a signature. It just ended “with best wishes,” and he didn’t think that was due to an oversight. Such letters were not unknown. He had had amorous propositions—suggesting times and places for them to meet but not vouchsafing names. He sometimes got letters objecting to items he had read in the course of duty on news bulletins, and sometimes—particularly if they were from racists or religious nutters—the authors jibbed at giving him their names. He generally just considered them sick, and as often as not simply put the letters in the wastepaper basket unread.

  He looked at the envelope. Neither expensive nor cheap—standard chain-newsagent stuff, addressed by computer. He unfolded the letter again. It too eschewed handwriting or typewriter. Computers, someone had learned, were difficult to trace back to their user. Or perhaps the writer was just computer-bound, like so many.

  Dear Mr. Harper,I heard today on Radio Leeds an item about a child’s skeleton in a house in Houghton Avenue. I am not now a resident of Leeds, or of the north, but by chance I caught part of an earlier item on the same subject. Having just heard the second item I thought I should write to you because this time I heard your name. Or perhaps this time I just registered it, as I hadn’t done before—registered who you are, I mean. Because it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?

  I thought I should write because it occurred to me that you might be worried. You are the little whippersnapper who came and played football with us that summer of sixty-nine, aren’t you? I’m afraid I don’t follow football at all closely these days, otherwise I might have identified you earlier. Football was always a possibility as a career for you, wasn’t it? I can still call you to mind on that field. You were so good—out of our league entirely.

  Since I heard the item today I have sat here wondering what to do, wondering whether you are worried that you might have had a part in what happened that year. You were so young—seven, wasn’t it?—that your memories must be rather few and scattered, and you may think you did something, even withoutknowing it, that contributed to what happened then. I’m writing to you to tell you that was not the case. You were too young to understand and anyway you were told nothing. You left to go home the day before it all happened. Your conscience can be clear, and you can get on with your life. I hope it is a happy one.

  With best wishes.

  Matt sat looking at the two sheets of paper in front of him. Then he read through them again. Something in the letter was ringing a bell. A memory was struggling deep down in his subconscious to surface, to make itself felt. It was only in fact at the end of his shift, as he came out into the sun and was making toward his car, that it came forward and took hold of him.

  He had to steady himself with a hand on the roof of his Volvo. Then, after a minute or two, he got into the car and drove off, possessed by memories.

  There was no possibility of playing football that day. The rain was so constant and so penetrating that anything outdoors was out of the question. They were sitting on the floor playing Totopoly, and the older ones had been teaching Matt the rules. He considered it a rotten game. They were in Peter and Sophie’s house, and Marjie was there as well. Peter’s mother had just put her head round the door and said that she had to go up to the little row of shops on the Stanningley Road.“You stay in the dry,” she said. “Matt will get wet enough when he has to go home.”

  So she knew him, had accepted him as part of the group.

  “You didn’t think much of that game, did you, Matt?” said Marjie, who had been watching him.

  “Not much,” said Matt, who had childish honesty. “Even Chinese checkers is better than that. Anyway, I like to do things.”

  “Do things?”

  “I mean, not just sit.”

  “Well, why don’t you start training to be a footballer?” suggested Peter. That interested Matt. He had thought you just became a footballer, because you were good at it. “We could start with some limbering-up exercises.”

  There was lots of room in Dell View’s big living room. They could never have done exercises in any of the rooms in Matt’s home in Bermondsey. They did limbering-up exercises, with Peter telling him that this was to loosen up the upper body, this was to strengthen the thighs and calf muscles. Matt went along dutifully, but was conscious of feeling ungrateful.

  “We do this sort of thing at school, ” he said at last.

  He was aware of Peter casting his mind around for some routines that he wouldn’t yet have done at school. Probably both of them were relieved when they heard the back-door bell. Marjie went to open it, and brought back the boy called Colin, and another boy of about his age. Concentrating, the grown-up Matt could not put a name to him yet, but he could put a face. He was one of the footballers, but not a boy who put himself forward.

  “We’ve been watching,” announced Colin.

  “Careful,” said Peter in a low voice. “Remember we’ve got Jack-the-lad here.”

  “She went there,” said Colin.

  “Who?” Marjie asked, her voice scarcely rising to the level of a whisper. Colin mouthed his reply.

  “Lily.”

  They thought they were being very clever, but Matt understood. He wasn’t just a pair of nimble legs.

  “What do they do ?” asked Sophie out loud. There was a pause. Peter, behind him, mimed the taking off of clothes, starting to pull his open-necked shirt sexily off his shoulder. He thought Matt couldn’t see him, but he saw in the long hall mirror. The little boy looked at Sophie. The girl’s eyes were avid with interest. But when she spoke her tones were scornful.

  “Fancy someone paying for that, ” she said.

  “I don’t think she earns much,” said Marjie, still whispering.

  “I should think not,” said Sophie. “Lily!”

  “She looked pleased an’ all ’appy-like as she went up toward the ’ouse,” said the other boy.

  “That’s Lily, Harry,” said Peter with a sigh. “You don’t know her like we do. She’s pleased with herself. ”

  “You’d have to be,” said Sophie, “to think it’s worth getting paid, to show off that. ”

  “Watch it,” said Peter. “Remember Young Whippersnapper.”

  That was the word that had done it. Not just the word, but other similar ones that seemed to sum up the relationship: Jack-the-lad, Georgie Best, the Young Hopeful, and so on. Matt ought to have hated it, found it condescending, but he hadn’t. He’d seen the jokey names as protective—felt there was someone looking after him in this strange environmentof older children who were—now he could define it, then he could only feel it—out of his class. Not just older, but better off. He felt now that Peter was trying to act toward that solitary little boy he had then been as a substitute father. Even now he felt a glow of gratitude.Perhaps some remnants of that feeling of responsibility had lodged in the grown man’s brain, and that was why he had used the word in his letter. Because Matt felt sure it was Peter Basnett’s letter: it wasn’t just the word “whippersnapper,” it was the whole mind-set. Matt took up the letter again, and read it through, slowly and carefully.

  That sentence at the end about his being too young to understand and being told nothing of what was going on smacked to him of wishful thinking—of convincing himself after the event of what he wanted to believe. Yes, he had been too young to understand in the wider sense of the word, but no, he had not been too young to know that something was going on, and that it was something to feel uneasy about. It was true he had never been told anything, but still things were said in his presence that, in spite of Peter’s best efforts, he could, even at the age of seven,
piece together and half understand. He felt sure he had known even then what they thought Lily had shown to the man she had gone to visit, whom she had been paid by. He was a boy with two elder sisters.

  There was something else puzzling in the letter. Peter said he didn’t live in Leeds or in the north. Yet he had heard both the original interview and Liza Pomfret’s update of the day before. Rather odd. Was he on an extended visit to Leeds? Or was he lying? No—wait: he said he had “caught” an earlier item on the same subject. That could have been Liza Pomfret’s interview on Radio Leeds, but itcould equally be the piece he did on “Look North.” That had a much larger catchment area, extending down to Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lincolnshire. If he lived so far south, it would justify him saying that he no longer lived in the north.

  One other thing was useful about the letter. The memories it provoked had brought the boy Colin into focus: pushy, opinionated, pretty pleased with himself. The other boy in the partnership, Harry, had been the junior one, and Colin made pretty sure he stayed that way.

  When he got home and had heard the children’s competing accounts of their awful days at school (which sat very ill with their determination not to change schools if it could be avoided) he reached down the Leeds telephone directory and the old Bradford one he had had when he lived in that area. There was a handful of Basnetts in Leeds, but no P. Basnett. There was an L. P. Basnett in Horsforth, and he dialed the number and asked for Peter Basnett.

  “No Peter Basnett here,” he was told. “I’m Laura Phyllis.”

  When he tried the only P. Basnett in Bradford he found that it was Philip, and the voice was much too young. Radio Leeds could be heard in Halifax and all sorts of other towns in the immediate area, but somehow he did not feel he was going to get anywhere that way. It was too easy. Peter would not have told a lie he could so easily be caught out in.

  Except that . . . Matt tried to put into words the thought at the back of his head. If he wanted to write to someone to reassure him that he had played no part in a terrible event without revealing his own identity, he would have kept it very brief and matter-of-fact: I fear you may be worried. . . . I can assure you, you had gone home before it happened. . . . You can put your mind at rest. Nothing more was required.

  Yet this letter went beyond that, well beyond. It almost seemed as if the writer would like to resume a relationship, one of which he had happy memories—as Matt himself certainly had of his relationship with Peter.

  He would even go further. He felt that, fighting a rearguard action against the eighty percent of himself that wanted to remain anonymous and unknown, wanted to have heard the last of the matter of the dead child, there was twenty percent that wanted to be found, wanted to see how the young Matt had grown up, wanted—even—to have the matter of the child out in the open at last.

  Could it be that he had used that word “whippersnapper” deliberately to set him on his track? Was Peter waiting somewhere in West Yorkshire, half hoping and half fearing that he, Matt, would get a lead on him? A lonely person, perhaps? An unfulfilled one? Feelings of guilt contending with instincts of self-preservation?

  The next morning, at breakfast time, and on his way to another job, Tony Tyler dropped round to see if he had made any decisions about decorating the bedrooms.

  “I’m not going to pick anything for the main bedroom until Aileen is here to OK it,” said Matt. “More than my life is worth. As to the other bedrooms, the children have been hemming and hawing.” He turned to them, sitting over their cornflakes and Frosties: “The one who makes a firm decision and sticks to it will be the one who gets their bedroom done first.”

  Isabella, Stephen, and Lewis sat, spoons poised, thinking for a moment. Then they downed tools and ranupstairs, talking and arguing. Matt looked at Tony and grinned.

  “I haven’t made any decision about whether I’ll try to do some of it myself, or with their help, such as it will be. But it’s beginning to look as if I shall be too busy. There is one thing I’ve been wanting to talk to you about, though. This kitchen ceiling”—he looked heavenward—“it looks to me as if it could do with another coat.” Tony Tyler, also looking up, grimaced.

  “I think you’re right. We thought we might get away with two, but it looks as if we were wrong. To tell you the truth we were covering years of grime—decades, probably.”

  “Yes, Mr. Farson doesn’t seem to have been house-proud. I think he was a widower by the time he moved here.”

  “I could get someone to you tomorrow morning.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll send Harry. He says he knows you already.”

  “Oh? Harry who?”

  “Harry Sugden.”

  “Don’t register the name.”

  “Harry says he used to play football with you when you were a lad.”

  Matt was conscious of Tony’s eyes on him.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “I never told you I’d been in these parts before.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Teammate

  Harry Sugden was already on the job when Matt slipped home from work the next day. Matt dallied behind the back gate and looked at the overalled figure standing on a metal stepladder, methodically coating the ceiling with a further layer of paint. A good, systematic worker, he decided. Whether that meant anything more—that he would be a reliable witness to events that had happened thirty years ago—Matt reserved judgment.He opened the gate and went forward. He thought he saw Harry register his approach by a flicker of the eyelids. Matt opened the door and went up to him, his hand outstretched.

  “Hello, I’m Matt Harper. I gather I don’t really need to introduce myself.”

  Harry leaned down and took his hand. He was a man in his forties, his fair hair starting to recede, but with an uncomplicated smile and a feeling of honesty about him.

  “Well, I’d not say I’d ha’ recognized you if I’d passed youin the street,” he admitted, “though I might ha’ done if I’d stood beside you at the bar. Any road, who doesn’t change between seven and thirty-seven?”

  “I have, anyway. Ready for a cuppa? Tea or coffee?”

  “Tea, please.”

  Harry came down his ladder and set paint pot and brushes out on the newspaper laid over the floor.

  “By ’eck, it’s been a long time,” he said. “But now I look at you properly I can see the little lad still there in the face.”

  “I’m surprised you remember me at all,” said Matt, busying himself with the teapot and milk bottle.

  “You were that good,” said Harry simply, “a reet little Georgie Best, and we all said the same. And back then you weren’t much bigger than the football you were kicking. It were a pleasure to see you score goals, even if they were for t’ other side.”

  “I’m afraid I never quite lived up to that early promise.”

  “Don’t say that. You were playing in t’ Second Division, as it wor then—I don’t call that not living up to promise. I’d’ve been proud to ha’ played wi’ you if you’d only been playing i’ the Fourth!”

  “Well, I’m not saying it isn’t nice to be remembered,” Matt said, always more proud of his promise than his achievements. “After all, I suppose I was only here for three or four weeks.”

  “Happen it wor about that. We tried to make a little northerner of you, because half the time we couldn’t understand your Cockney. You’ve lost all that, lad. Is it working for the BBC ’as done that to you?”

  “No, I lost it, most of it, when we moved to Essex. My father got a good job in an engineering works inColchester. . . . Funny thing, but I can’t even imitate Cockney particularly well now.”

  “Well, you could ’a acted in ‘East Enders’ then, if it’d been goin’. It were ‘barf’ for ‘bath’ and ‘bruvver’ for ‘brother’ back then. You stood out, I can tell you, and you wouldn’t ’ave if you’d talked like you do now. . . . Mind you, we both stood out. We were outsiders, like.”

  “Oh? I’m guessing you weren’t fr
om round here.”

  “I weren’t,” said Harry cheerfully. “I were from down the ’ill, like you. I were at a loose end because me best mate were away in a caravan in Brid, and the kids here were always one or two short of players for their five-a-side games. You probably didn’t realize it, but I wasn’t part of the group. I were with it, but not of it, if you take my meaning.”

  “No, I don’t think I did realize that at the time. I was very young, and I probably missed a lot. That’s what I’m afraid of, when I try to think back to that time. What I do remember about you is your going around with someone called Colin.”

  “Oh, aye? Well, Colin were a bit of an outsider an’ all. He used to come in the summer to stay wi’ his grandparents. His mum and dad were teachers, an’ they liked to use their long holidays to travel round Europe. They wanted a bit o’ time wi’out kids, which I reckon you can understand.”

  “Teachers were they? I remember him as a bit bossy, a bit of a know-all, so that figures. We had teachers’ sons at my Colchester school, and they were often like that. Who were his grandparents?”

  “The people at the far end house.” Harry nodded in the direction of the curve in the lane. “I think their name wasMather? Colin were always there a month or more i’ the summer.”

  “What I remember about you two was you both keeping an eye on a girl called Lily,” said Matt. Harry put down his mug of tea on the stepladder, frowning.