“Marjie?” Peter looked at his watch. “She should be here soon.”
“Here? But why? You didn’t know I was coming.”
“She’s at a WI annual get-together. We live together. Have done for five years.” He saw that Matt was moved by this, and said quickly: “Oh, it’s not something terribly romantic. Both of us have tried romance. It works for us still less than it does for most. We’re just two bruised people who are better off together than hurting anyone else. And of course we always liked each other. We tell people here that Marjie’s husband is a Catholic, which is true, and that she shies away from divorcing him, which isn’t.”
“My partner’s a Catholic, with a husband,” said Matt. “Even more problematic. So what does Marjie do?”
“She’s a journalist. Works on the Nottingham Echo. ”
“And you?”
“I’m attached to the Home Office, with responsibility forchildren’s homes in the north—and I occasionally have to look at fostering arrangements too if big problems or controversies have arisen. Children, you see—the workings of conscience. I travel around, making spot-checks and unannounced visits. What I told you in my letter was basically true.”
“I’m sure.”
“What I didn’t tell you was that, once I’d heard you on Radio Leeds, on my car radio, I always turned to it if I was within range, and, knowing you worked there, I’ve always watched ‘Look North’ if I could, and sometimes have seen you doing local bulletins during the day.”
“Why? Did you want me to turn up, asking questions?”
“Half of me, Matt. Half of me. Ah—here’s Marjie.” The door, which had opened a crack, was thrown open when the newcomer heard voices, and a substantial woman burst in.
“Matt! I saw the car with a Leeds number plate parked by the green, and I wondered—no, I knew!” They threw arms around each other as if they’d been lifelong friends, then Marjie held him at arm’s length. “Well, I’ll say this for you: you’ve grown up bonny!”
“You too, Marjie.”
“Fat and frumpish, and nobody cares less about it than myself. If you can’t let yourself go when fifty beckons, when can you? Ah, tea—is there still some in the pot?” She poured herself a cup and grabbed a handful of biscuits. “Lunch was a Women’s Institute quiche that suggested the institute is losing its grip on the housewifely arts. Have they been taken over by professional women? I asked myself. If so it’s been done by stealth, because I’ve heard no whisper of it.”
The grown-up Marjie was plump, forthright, and funny, and if she was bruised as Peter said, she hid it better than he did. She was so evidently and undisguisedly pleased to see Matt that her enthusiastic manner warmed his heart.
“You know, I must have seen you doing the daytime bulletins in the past without realizing who you were. Once we’d identified you, Peter did call me in one time, but too late—I just caught a glimpse. But I do follow the local stuff on ‘Look North.’ I have to as a journalist, which we both are, in different ways.”
“I’m a sports journalist if anything. Otherwise I just do talk shows—interviews with local notables and would-be notables, and read things put in front of me.”
“Local radio seems all talk these days. The music used to be crap, but the talk is crap too. Present company’s excepted.”
“Not excepted. But I’m pretty good on football.”
“So you damned well should be. Well, you don’t want to be exchanging polite nothings with us, do you?”
“Actually that’s exactly what I would like to be exchanging for as long as you like. Trouble is, I have three children at a football match who have to be picked up afterward.”
“Yours?”
“Partner’s. As near mine as I can make them.”
“That’s nice. . . . We have talked about this, Peter and I. So we’re prepared.” She looked in Peter’s direction. He turned to look straight at Matt.
“We realized there was a strong possibility of your turning up. We disagreed a bit about whether to contact you directly. Marjie wanted to, but I thought we should stick to the line we’d agreed on all those years ago. As it was, ourcontacts with you probably fell between two stools—either saying too much or too little.”
“They were diagnosed by an expert as the product of someone in a muddle.”
“Between the two of us, we were,” said Marjie.
“But knowing you might turn up, we’ve thrown around the question of what we could tell you. We feel that we owe you an account of how the baby died. And that’s something that doesn’t incriminate anyone, not seriously, at any rate.”
Matt just nodded, not wanting to commit himself at that stage to being satisfied with what they were willing to tell him, or to accept the spin they put on it. Even if they were reluctant, the agreement with the rest of the gang would force them to do that.
“It’s quite simply told,” said Peter, and his voice took on the rote sound of someone who’s been over before what he is prepared to tell. “It was the day after you left to go home, like I said in the letter. We’d been kicking the ball around on the Catholic school playing field as usual. We were lacking you and Lily and Harry Sugden, so we didn’t have the men for a proper game. Then we all wandered along to my house, to Dell View, and there, on the stone-flagged bit in the front, was Lily Marsden. With a baby in a pushchair.”
“Why at yours?”
“She knew our mother was away, Sophie’s and mine, visiting her brother in Barnsley. And next door, the Pembertons were both out at work. Lily’s mother must have been in—probably subjecting herself to some new beauty treatment. She was obsessed with her looks, mad about preventing wrinkles or sagging cheeks, and spent hours pulling out gray hairs. She was a horror, and always makingdisparaging remarks about Lily’s lack of attractions. So there she was, standing outside our front door with a pushchair and a baby in a pair of cotton shorts and nothing much else.”
“And Rory Pemberton too?”
“Oh, no. Rory had been playing with us. But I saw a look pass between them. He knew she was planning to do something like this.”
“Fulfilling what she’d already been talking about quite a lot?”
Peter looked down, and there was a second’s pause. That was something that he might have tried to gloss over.
“Yes. You remember that?”
“I remember talk about people not being allowed to breed.”
“If it were only that. That was only the beginning. . . . I don’t think we can say much more about that.”
“She was being fed notions.”
“Yes. And some of the others in the gang went along with her. . . . Anyway, we were gobsmacked for a bit, just saying things like ‘But you can’t,’ and ‘That’s kidnapping,’ and so on. She’d done exactly what she always said she’d do, and we couldn’t believe our eyes. She said she’d met up with the male hippie, the one we called Dippy, in Armley Park. I expect, in fact, she’d followed him from home, or the squat, rather. He’d got a puppy with him, and he and the little girl, Bella, were playing with it. So she stood around for a bit, and before long it ran off. Dippy wasn’t sure what to do, and Lily said she’d mind the baby while he went to catch it. Once he’d run off in search she just wheeled the pushchair back home.”
“But what was she planning to do with Bella?” askedMatt. “I can hardly believe what she’d been talking about was anything but talk.”
“She was planning to take her down to ‘my friend.’”
“Whom you didn’t know the identity of.”
Peter hesitated, and Marjie chipped in with “Not then.”
“So Marjie started saying we should go to the police, or ring them, and Lily started crying, and saying, ‘You can’t. I’ll be arrested.’ And we dithered . . . fatally . . . until at last Marjie said, ‘I’m going to ring them anyway.’”
“If only we’d just gone, as a gang, a group, and taken the poor little mite from her,” said Marjie, anguish in her voice.
“Sandringham.”
“Yes. But she’d only gone a few steps when Lily grabbed the baby from the pushchair and started off toward the road. I took a step toward her to stop her, but the nearest to her was Eddie. He had been horrified by all this talk that was going on, talk about people not breeding, the future of the race, and crap like that. Eddie’d had a baby sister who died. He rushed forward and began tussling with her to get the baby from her. Rory Pemberton ran over to drag him off her. That’s when it happened.”
Peter looked at Matt. Matt felt he was being willed to supply the words Peter left unsaid, words he didn’t want to supply. He remained silent. Peter had to go on.
“The fight only lasted a second or two. Bella fell onto thebalustrade, on her head. She’d been crying, and suddenly the cries stopped. We just stood there, gaping. When we went to pick her up, she was dead. But we’d all known that anyway.”
“I don’t suppose we need to go into our feelings,” said Marjie. “After a time, after all the recriminations, and there were plenty of those, we had to decide what to do. Lily wanted to take the body down to her friend’s, but that seemed horrible to us: like a cat bringing a dead rat home as a sign of its hunting prowess. We said we’d be on the phone to the police the moment she started down the gill. Somehow that transferred the onus of what to do on to us. Lily began to get terrified we were going to ‘dob her in,’ as she kept calling it. We couldn’t hide from the police the fact that she had taken the baby, and she knew it. And yet after a time we began to think that the last people hippie squatters would go to would be the police. We began to think that though we couldn’t deal with the squatters, may be Lily’s ‘friend’ could. We sent her off to try to fix that, and we’d somehow or other conceal the body.”
“And you decided to put it in the attic of the house you were looking after for Mrs. Beeston,” Matt said to Marjie. She looked down into her lap.
“It seemed the best thing. It seems fantastic now, but remember we were just children. We thought of throwing the body into the canal, but that was too horrible, and we thought it would be dragged if the disappearance became official. I had the key, and I went in every day to give an appearance of its being lived in, and I aired it periodically, so if there was a smell, open windows wouldn’t cause any comment among the neighbors.”
“It was mad,” said Peter.
“Yes, it was mad. But we knew Mrs. Beeston, who was arthritic, would never go up there, couldn’t if she’d wanted to. So after a bit it seemed the sensible thing to do.”
“We took the body up there,” said Peter, “just Marjie and me and Eddie, and we laid it out at the far end, behind the little raised walls, and we thought even if anyone went up to the attic, no one would go to that bit. We thought something more was needed, so Eddie said a prayer. He was the only churchgoer.”
“Then we stood around awkwardly for a moment,” said Marjie. “Not knowing what to do, feeling we couldn’t just leave the poor little body. Suddenly Eddie sort of exploded in tears and—oh, cries they were, like a wild beast. He stumbled down the ladder, ran out of the house, and to his own home, and really he was never the same again. He’d never associate with us, feeling terrible guilt, I suppose.” She stopped, and there was a few seconds’ silence, as if for the dead baby. Peter took up the story.
“And in fact the whole gang broke up, quite quickly. We just didn’t want to be with one another, didn’t want the sort of feelings and recollections the others brought back to us. I suppose what we wanted was to avoid guilt by association.”
“I see.” Matt sat for a long time, then looked at his watch. “I have to go. I can’t leave the children waiting around after a football match. . . . One thing bothers me.”
“Yes.”
“The parents. The hippies. I’m taking it they disappeared that night. I know from their neighbor that’s what happened at some point. How was that managed?”
“We don’t know in detail,” said Peter. “But Lily said her friend had managed it. When we talked it over we thoughtthere must have been talk of a ‘tragic accident,’ of not wanting the children’s lives ruined by a piece of carelessness, and perhaps of money changing hands. But that was one problem we couldn’t have handled ourselves. We were just glad someone had done it for us.”
Somehow the parting could not be the same as the reunion. The joy had gone, the worm had entered the rose, and the worm’s name was suspicion: Peter and Marjie were uncertain how far their version of events had been accepted, and they were right to be so.
“We’ll meet up again when all this is over,” said Matt, wanting to make it clear this was not the end. “Then we can be more . . . more as we were.”
“May be,” said Marjie. “A little more as we were.” She knew, and Peter knew, that their lives had changed forever on that day in late August 1969.
They embraced again and Matt went back to the car. He was thoughtful on the way back to Nottingham, but then the problems of dealing with a departing football crowd took his mind off other things. The children, when he picked them up, were so exuberant, even Lewis, that he had no chance to retreat into pensiveness, and the mood remained rowdy over four massive platefuls of pizza—Lewis nicely balanced quantity and quality in his choice of pizza chain.
It was only at night, when the children had finally sunk exhausted into bed, that Matt sat in his favorite chair, with a can of beer, and went through the day’s new information. And when he did, he became still more certain than before that something, may be the vital thing, had been left out.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Families
“And did you believe them?” Charlie asked, when Matt rang him late that night. Charlie’s voice, though not unfriendly, had bed tones in it, and Matt felt rather guilty.“I believed them as a working hypothesis,” he replied. “It will do to be going on with. . . . On the purely human level I felt myself rather often being looked at—quick glances, you know?—to see if I was accepting the tale.”
“Hmm. That’s not necessarily conclusive,” Charlie said, being judicious if not actually judicial. “They may have been conditioned since that day to a belief that their story would not be accepted. They couldn’t account for the baby-snatch without bringing Lily’s ‘friend’ into it, and his belief that some people should not be allowed to breed. That being on the table, a death that’s pure accident starts to seem distinctly unlikely.”
“But not impossible. None of those children had brothers or sisters who were babies, so none of them had any training in how to treat them. They seem to have foughtover it as if it were a doll. But you’re right, and I’ll believe the story they told me until I have reason to do otherwise. These are two seriously nice people, and if they’re lying or holding something back it’s to protect someone else, not themselves.”
“What are you going to do next? Contact the Farsons, I suppose.”
“Has to be. I’m expecting Aileen back in the next few days, so I’ll leave it till after then. In any case, I doubt there’ll be any point in talking to the father. . . . You know, I should have latched on to him much earlier—we both should.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Here’s someone who moves from a modest house to a much larger and a rather more prestigious place when he’s approaching retirement age. People don’t do that. Wife or husband dead, children leaving home, you start looking for a place that will be less trouble, usually a bungalow, something much cheaper to maintain and run. That’s what Mrs. Beeston did. It should have been what Farson did, but instead he went in the opposite direction.”
“Point taken,” Charlie agreed. “But if we’re suggesting that he bought the house to make sure no one else discovered what was
in the attic, then that creates another problem, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does. Why didn’t he dispose of it while he lived here?”
“Was he physically capable of getting up there?”
“I think so. The Goldblatts talked of him working in the garden right up to the time he started losing the plot and doing it in his pajamas. And if he couldn’t get up there, what was the reason for buying the house?”
“To make sure no one else did in his lifetime,” said Charlie.
“That’s a point.”
“But you need to think this through before you go and see the younger Farson. You mustn’t think you can go on a sort of fishing trip using half-baked allegations as bait. Better than that would be a simple, open-minded talk aimed at getting information, painting in the whole picture.”
“Thanks, Grandmother,” said Matt genially. “You know, one day I hope you have a really serious case involving football and footballers—not the current bunch of yobs misbehaving at nightclubs, but something really baffling.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Then you can call me in as consultant, and I can be as condescending to you as you are on this case to me.”
“Well! And I thought I was just being of help.”
Thinking things through over the next few days was hardly on the agenda. Matt and the children were getting increasingly excited about Aileen’s return, and on Tuesday evening they had the call they’d been waiting for: she was in Johannesburg, and would be boarding a plane for Manchester in three and a half hours’ time. Elderholm went ballistic with delight, and when Matt tried to calm the children down and form them into a sort of Pioneer Corps to put the house in some kind of order, their resistance was total.
“Mummy’s not going to care one little bit if the house looks a tip,” said Isabella, and Matt had to admit that she was right. He busied himself doing all the obvious things to make the place look fairly tidy, more for something to be doing than for any other reason, and the children went intothe garden and managed to pick a great bunch of Mr. Farson’s perennials, accepting contributions from Mrs. Goldblatt’s more kempt and couth garden to make a monster display in the only large glass vase they could find. Matt silently agreed it did more for the house than his cleanup.
The Bones in the Attic Page 18