The Bones in the Attic

by Robert Barnard

  “Better not, I’m driving.”

  “Fucking police! . . . Er, what was it?”

  “Beer, please.”

  Thought, for Rory Pemberton, was a matter of intense and visible concentration. When it was over he pulled at a door, selected a can, then poured it uncertainly into a glass. As he did so the door behind Matt swung open, a hard-faced young woman marched in and over to the stereo unit, turned off the music, then marched out again. Rory at first seemed uncertain what had happened, then inclined to protest, then registered it was too late. He shrugged, and gestured Matt toward the glass. Probably he thought it would be better for the carpet if Matt went over and got it, and Matt agreed.

  By now Rory seemed uncertain as to why he was there, or if there was any reason why he had invited him in.

  “Like I said,” Matt began as if they were in the middle of a conversation, “we used to know each other.” Not surprisingly there was no recognition. Rory just blinked,which he did a lot. “I used to come and play five-a-side football one summer with you children in Houghton Avenue.”

  Rory thought heavily.

  “Used to enjoy football,” he eventually said thickly. “Used to play it every school holiday. We never took to cricket.”

  “That’s right. It was the summer holiday when I came up and played five-a-side. The summer of 1969.”

  He looked for a reaction in Rory’s face. At first it was totally blank, then the tiniest suspicion of a frown came into the center of the forehead. It stayed there for a second or two, then the face went blank again and he raised his glass.

  “Cheers,” he said. Matt resumed the burden of the discussion.

  “I used to come up the gill from Grenville Street, where I was staying with my auntie. I played with your group over several weeks. There was Peter Basnett—I’m sure you remember him: he was rather my protector, because I was a lot younger than all of you. And there was Marjie Humbleton—she was very kind too. And I remember at least once going into your kitchen and eating you out of house and home, or at least out of ice cream in your freezer.”

  He had been afraid he had been chattering on to the human equivalent of a blank wall, but the last reminiscence seemed to arouse a memory or strike a chord in the dull consciousness of the man.

  “Little scrap of a thing, with a common accent,” Rory Pemberton said, almost clearly.

  “That’s right.”

  “What was the accent? London?”

  “That’s right, Cockney.”

  “What happened to it? You move upmarket?”

  “We moved away.”

  “You could play. You could play football. You were fast and you were incred . . . incredibly accurate.”

  “Thanks.”

  “They welcomed you in because you were so good.” His attitude puzzled Matt. This was beginning to sound less like praise than an arraignment, a recital of charges by a prosecuting counsel. “You just barged in and became a member of the gang, and nobody minded that you spoke like a prole.”

  “I was only seven. I suppose I didn’t know all the initiation procedures,” said Matt, thinking apology was the best option. Rory considered this heavily, then downed his glass and got up for a refill. In the silence Matt heard luggage bumping against the stair rail, and then the front door closing. He wondered whether this was one more woman walking out on Rory.

  “I’m not surprised you remember the ice cream,” said Rory, coming back and sitting opposite Matt, speaking with a sort of complacency. “They all came for our ice cream.” Then the mood darkened again. “Fucking better than their parents ever bought. Everyone knew it. . . . Fucking spongers. ”

  “I expect we were,” said Matt. That seemed to ignite a small spark of anger.

  “Listen to him! We! Some little tyke from the Old Kent Road barges in and then it’s ‘we’! Makes me puke. I was never ‘we.’ I was cheaper than the ice cream van, that’s all I was.” Inside, Matt was torn between laughing at themaudlin self-pity of the man and admiring the surprising accuracy of his assessment. “I never had any friends. Still don’t. That was Vara walking out on me just now.”

  “I expect she’ll be back.”

  Rory shook his head, apparently not greatly concerned.

  “No, she won’t. She gave me a warning. Said she’d leave me if I didn’t get a grip on things. . . . Who wants to get a grip on things, for chrissake?” He looked around the plush living room—conspicuously, almost distastefully proclaiming a good income. “Does it look as if I can’t make a living? Drinking doesn’t stop me knowing where to put my money, I can tell you. If I was as hopeless as she says I am I’d be in some crappy doss-house begging for pennies on the street. . . . I can do without her. I can do without anybody. I’ve never needed friends.” He looked at Matt fiercely. “Some people can do without friends.”

  People like Genghis Khan and Count Dracula, thought Matt. But Rory Pemberton was not in that class. He wasn’t even in the Andrew Lloyd Webber class. Matt felt he’d never met anybody more in need of friends.

  “Other people resent you if you’ve got money. They think you’re trying to buy them. I wasn’t trying to buy them! But they never wanted me for myself. . . . Even Lily Marsden never liked me.”

  “I know Lily,” said Matt. “She still lives in Bramley.”

  His face showed—or perhaps pretended—that that was news to him.

  “Christ, does she? You’d have thought she’d have got away from that dump. She always had her eye on the main chance, did Lily. I admired her for that.”

  “But it never brought you together?”

  He blinked, and a petulant expression took over his face.

  “I didn’t say that. I said she never liked me. . . . And anyway, she was never willing to share. She never introduced me to her friend.”

  “Oh? Who was that?”

  “I told you, thickie, she never introduced me. Said the friend wouldn’t be interested. You can imagine how good that made me feel. That was typical. She kept all the good things to herself. Just used people.”

  “Yes, I think she’s still like that,” said Matt. “Where did the friend live?”

  “Down those streets at the bottom of the gill. Can’t have been much, living there. . . . That’s where you came up from, didn’t you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you’ve pulled yourself up, haven’t you?”

  “I suppose I have,” said Matt, rather glad that the aggressiveness he had cultivated in his footballing days had long ago left him. “Do you remember which of the streets Lily’s friend lived in?”

  “Oh, for chrissake, it’s thirty years ago! Thirty bloody years! Anyway, it’s not something anybody’d want to remember.”

  “Isn’t it? I don’t think I’m understanding.”

  But Rory Pemberton didn’t reply. He smiled down into his remaining whiskey, then got up and went over to the bar, refilling generously.

  “Don’t have to watch it now I’m on my own,” he said, almost as if talking to himself. Matt was doubtful whether watching it had ever had any effect on his intake. He was doubtful too whether he had any idea whom he was talking to, but he was glad when, having weaved across the room and sat down carefully, almost like an old man, inhis bloated armchair, he said, “Lily Marsden.” His voice seemed to come as if from some ancient, distant telephone line.

  “What sort of relationship did you have with her?” Matt asked. The question seemed to puzzle Rory, and required cogitation.

  “No different from any of the others. Except that we neither of us were liked. It was them I wanted to be part of. She never wanted that. She teased them . . . not teased exactly. Not in a nice way. But she knew she wasn’t liked, and she . . . dangled things in front of them.”

  “Things? What do you mean? She wasn’t any better off than the others, was she?”

  “Not things like that. Not material posh . . . possessions. Why do people always sneer at material . . . things, eh? Eh? I’ve always lo
ved material . . .” His voice faded.

  “But what did Lily dangle before the others?”

  “What did Lily dangle? Sounds like a dirty joke. . . . Who?”

  “Lily Marsden. Whom you used to play with as a child. You said she used to dangle things in front of everyone.”

  “She did. . . . We thought she was terrible. We thought she used to take her clothes off for money. Weren’t we naive? It seems like another world. These days all of us boys would be having it off with her. These days girls of her age are on the streets of Bradford and Leeds, all organized, and with their own pimps. I’ve—”

  But Matt didn’t want to hear about his personal delinquencies.

  “Do you think she did take her clothes off for money?”

  “Don’t know. It’s what we thought. I expect she wantedus to think that. . . . But then she came up with this other thing. And of course we were horrified . . . at first.”

  He was going off into a hazed, dazed, drunken mood of reminiscence, but there was about his face, pouched and bloated as it was, the wisp of an expression of horror and fear.

  “But only at first?” Matt pressed him. But Rory wasn’t going to be pressed. The expression never left his face, and it was a long time before he spoke again.

  “The thing, lying there.”

  Matt had to suppress his irritation at the abundance of “things” in the drunken man’s thoughts.

  “The thing?”

  “ Not a thing!” Rory said abruptly, almost angrily. “The baby. Lying by the balustrade. Almost as if it were asleep.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “It was like it was laid out. You couldn’t see the wound on the back of its head. Her head. It just had a few scraps of clothing on—it was a hot day. And someone had wrapped it in a shawl, and it lay there like it was on a bed. Like it was just asleep. That’s how I remember it.” There was pain on his face as his voice faded into silence.

  “And how did it get there?”

  Pemberton looked ahead. The expression, as the memory faded, lost its horror, and became merely glazed, as it had come and then faded perhaps a thousand times in his life.

  “ How had it got there?” Matt asked urgently.

  The eyes closed, then suddenly the heavy body fell forward, the drink falling out of his hand and spilling over thechair and carpet. Matt darted forward to retrieve the glass, and realized that the chair had several stains on it, all but the new one dried. Looking around he realized there were other stains on the beige carpet, as if a puppy were being trained. But it wasn’t a puppyish sort of household. Rory Pemberton, clearly, made a habit of drinking himself into insensibility.

  Matt stood there, wondering what to do. First he took the glass out to the kitchen, where the detritus of several days’ glasses and plates testified to Rory’s woman’s growing dissatisfaction. Matt sympathized with her obvious determination not to spend her life cleaning up after her man. When he went back into the living room Rory was still slumped forward in his chair. Matt meditated moving him to the sofa, but decided his weight would make that more trouble than it was worth. In the end he just straightened him so he slept upright in his chair, then he left the room with the lights still on. Pemberton would wake up as he was used to waking up. The fact that he no longer had a woman would worry him much less than if he no longer had a bottle.

  In the hall Matt paused for a moment. Was it worth making a brief search of the rest of the house? A moment’s thought told him that it was not. The study, if there was one, would contain details of his latest financial coup, not the doings of a gang of children thirty years ago. The only record of those doings in this house was in the troubled brain of the unlikable man slumped in his wet chair in the plush living room.

  Matt let himself out into the twilight.

  The next day he spoke to Charlie. He was at home,having a rare weekend off, and baby noises of pleasure and grievance marked his side of the conversation. At the end of Matt’s account of his evening at Bingley, Charlie thought for a moment or two.

  “Right. I think I’ve absorbed all that. Let’s get a few things straight. This Pemberton mentioned a baby, and described it lying dead by a balustrade.”

  “I don’t think the word ‘dead’ was used. He said it lay there as if it were asleep.”

  “Right. And you didn’t get out of him how it came to be there, or whether he was responsible.”

  “No. He keeled over at that point.”

  “Right. He sounds like my idea of a nightmare witness.But he did call the baby ‘she’?”

  “Yes, definitely.”

  Charlie thought for a moment. Clearly he was uncertain how important the new information was—if, indeed, it was information at all.

  “And throughout this conversation the man was drunk.”

  “Oh, yes, no question.”

  “That doesn’t help, of course.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “He can say he remembers nothing about it, that he was just talking nonsense. That’s what plenty of drunks do. We couldn’t pin him down on things said in his cups.”

  “I’m afraid you’d have to get there very early in the morning to find him sober, and then he’d be ferociously hungover.”

  “If necessary we could try doing that. He might benefit from a couple of hours in the cells.”

  “You think that’s possible?”

  He could feel Charlie shaking his head in doubt.

  “I just don’t know. I have to justify every hour I spend on this case. It’s getting old and stale.”

  “It always was.”

  “Ah, yes, but three weeks with no great progress makes it doubly so. If there’d been a stink at the time, with relatives who were still around to kick up a fuss, then there might be some slight urgency, or some pretense of it. But a dead baby who nobody even knew was missing? Forget it.”

  “It seems a pretty funny attitude for a police force,” said Matt caustically.

  “Tell me about it. But there you are. It’s pretty sure to be the baby of some kind of transient population, so we only put up a show of being interested.”

  “What exactly would you class as transient population?”

  “Oh, travelers, tramps, rough-sleepers, squatters.”

  “Ah,” said Matt.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Nightpiece

  Matt’s talk with Charlie was snatched from a busy day with the children. Aileen had insisted that the children keep up their churchgoing while she was away, so Matt liked to give them plenty to occupy their bodies and minds on a Saturday. Saturdays during the football season were always taken up for him, but now that it was limping to its close he often got them off: his cricket commentaries were not highly regarded by connoisseurs.Sundays were a bit of a burden to Matt, sitting through the Catholic Mass, which he thought a decidedly rum affair, so that on Saturdays he organized things that all four of them would enjoy: on this one a long walk for Beckham in the Hollies, with the children playing Swallows and Amazons in the winding walks, and splashing in the fast-running streams; then a long-promised trip to the Royal Armories; and then—after the hurried phone call to Charlie—a supper of shepherd’s pie followed by jam sponge and ice cream out of the deepfreeze. The schedule worked to perfection. All the children, even Isabella, were in bed by half past nine.

  Matt was tired too, but his head was buzzing. He poured himself a stiff whiskey and soda, and when that was gone was on the point of pouring himself a second one when he thought of Rory Pemberton and put the stopper back in the bottle.

  He sat back in his favorite easy chair and remembered something that had happened that morning on the way to the Hollies. He had stopped the car at the newsagent’s just by Amen Corner and the path to the Kirkstall Power Station. He had put his hand on the door handle to get out and buy his morning paper when something stopped him.

  On the grass patch beside the newsagency two children were playing, tots of about five or six, one white, one blac
k. And coming out of the door of the little shop was the woman people now knew as Lily Fitch. She turned in the direction of the children, as she passed them he saw the hand that was not holding a paper give a quick and vicious clip across the ear of the black child. He waited, watching the disappearing woman and the bawling tot.

  “She hit that little boy,” said Isabella indignantly.

  “I know,” said Matt. Lily was now well away, and he went to fetch his Guardian. When he got back to the car he saw that the incident had aroused memories in Aileen’s daughter. Until they got to the Hollies she was very thoughtful.

  He slept well that night, at first. But when he woke, not long after four, he soon gave up the idea of going back off. His head was a jumble of new ideas, and of memories. Harry Sugden had mentioned squatters, but then it hadn’trung any bell. For some reason Charlie’s mention of them had not only connected up with Harry’s, but had also triggered memories.

  Only they hadn’t called them squatters. They’d called them hippies. Or occasionally, with heavy childish satire, flower people. The pair had been as good as street entertainers for the children in Houghton Avenue.

  “Hip-hip-hippy! Here come the hippies!” shouted Rory Pemberton.“Here come the dippy hippies!” shouted Sophie Basnett.

  “Here come the pot smokers, high on cannabis!” said Colin, whose schoolteacher parents had educated him about drugs.

  The children were coming up from the field beside the Kirkstall Power Station, a large area that could be used not just for football, but for anything else they cared to play. They’d all decided to go to Matt’s auntie Hettie’s house, knowing she would be pulling pints at the Unicorn. Matt had been worried that there would be nothing much in the pantry, but Marjie had considerately bought a large bottle of Coke at the grocer’s, and a bottle of Orange Squash as well. Some of the children drank Squash because their parents told them Coca-Cola was bad for them; some of them drank Coca-Cola for the same reason.

  “Dopeheads!” shouted Harry Sugden.

  “Fucking flower people,” bawled Lily Marsden, who swore.