Read The Bones in the Attic Online
Authors: Robert Barnard
The Bones in the Attic (17 page)
Pemberton shook his head arrogantly.
“Why should I have one? I've done nothing illegal. But I'm getting on to him the moment you let me go.”
“Right,” said Charlie, suddenly changing his tone to brutal-directness. “Let's stop faffing around, shall we?
Thirty-one years ago you and the other children in Houghton Avenue were a little group playing together, in and out of one another's houses. At some point the attention of all of you was caught by a family of squatters living just off the Raynville Road.”
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“A young couple, with a baby.”
“How would I know?”
“That's the baby in the attic of Elderholm, isn't it?”
“I don't know anything about any baby in an attic.”
“Oh, yes, you do. At some point you and the others decided to take the baby and kill it, didn't you?”
The bloodshot eyes were staring now, wild with memory and fear, but he just spluttered, “No!”
“Was it some other plot that went wrong, then? Some sort of kidnap, perhaps?”
“Talk sense! What could we have done with a kidnapped baby? Who would pay ransom? The hippie couple? Don't make me laugh!”
“Then what does that leave? Did you all get the idea that a baby born to hippie parents was better off dead?”
“No!”
“Better . . . off . . . dead?”
“No, of course we didn't! We were just children!”
“Then how did the baby die?”
The man's face screwed up in anguish, and he burst into sobbing, throwing himself across the interview desk toward them. The shoulders heaved, the sobs kept breaking into something like howls, and he seemed to be blubbering out a word that Charlie, before he turned the tape off, tried hard to catch. Afterward he and WPC Younger agreed that what the word sounded like was “Bella.”
“Why?”
“We had nothing on him. Later, in the third session, he spun us a story about a plan to kidnap the baby being talked about among the children, and he'd thought it a joke at the time, but when he heard recently about the bones in the attic . . . and so on and so on. It was pure flimflam, but we've got nothing to go on to prove anything else, or to prove that he was involved.”
“Have you talked to Matt about the television appeal?”
“No, I'll ring him tomorrow. . . . Matt thinks there's someone in the background, some dim figureâ”
“Manipulating the children, prodding them into doing things?”
“Something like that. Perhaps even someone that most of the children never saw, never talked to.”
“âAs I was going up the stair / I met a man who wasn't there. / He wasn't there again today. / I wish, I wish he'd go away.'”
The rhyme amused Charlie immensely.
“Hey, that's rather good. Well, if Matt is right, what we
really should be going after is the man who wasn't there. And if he was a lot older than the children, it's quite likely he's dead, and not there nowadays in that sense.” He grimaced. “I can see why the big bosses upstairs don't want to waste police time or money on this.”
An expression of pain crossed Felicity's face.
“And yet when I think of those little bonesâ”
“You think of Carola. Do you think I don't?” And turning to her he began to make a sort of exhausted love.
When he woke in the early hours he lay on the bed as light began to glimmer through his curtains and thought of his involvement with the hippies and little Bella. None of the things that came back into his mind gave rise to anything but disgust and self-loathing.
Fallout
There were letters from people who had lived in the Houghton Avenue houses, but not at the time he was interested in. One reminisced at length and said the houses “had a good feel” to them; another did the same, but thought “there was something sinister” about the old
stone residences. Several phone calls mentioned the hippie pair in number 14, Millais Terrace, but it was only Bill Welland, his memory returning, who phoned in with a surname.
“How could I forget?” he said to Matt when he phoned him at home around nine, he himself being as usual on his way to his club. “It was Woof. Pronounced to rhyme with âroof,' may be to make it sound less doggy. Though if you're called Dougie Woof, it's going to sound doggy anyway. It was
his
surname. I don't think I ever heard hers, but if you called her Sandra Woof she didn't object, in spite of being against marriage. It's not a common name, is it, so that might help, if you're going to be looking for him.”
It was out of the way, but still there were four in the Leeds telephone directory. None of them was a D., and when Matt rang them none had a Douglas in their immediate or extended family. One of them, though, was quite chatty.
“It's not a common name,” he said, he himself being Frederick Woof of Morley, “and you might strike lucky if you cast your net a bit wider than Leeds. It's a corruption of âWoolf.' The books say a lot of Woolfs were European immigrants, often Jews. I did some family research once, and I rather hoped I might find some relationship with Virginia Woolf, or her husband, rather, but I never did. All the Woofs I found were irredeemably English.”
Matt perked up his ears.
“Have you still got the work you did on your family?” he asked.
“Probably. Up in the attic, I expect. Want me to rummage around in it and see if I can find a Douglas?”
“I'd be very grateful if you would,” said Matt, giving
him his phone number. Frederick promised to be in touch, but said it might take time.
The most interesting of the letters came the day after the broadcast. That in itself was interesting. Someone had gone out to a central post office with a late-night collection. The postmark was Nottingham. Though the address had the usual anonymity of a computer effort, Matt thought he had seen that particular printer before. When he tore the letter open, he was sure.
I hope you don't mind me calling you that. It seems the most natural way to talk to you. I wrote to you before, if you remember.
I saw you tonight on “Look North.” I've been watching it, wondering whether you'd be on, because of course I know you work there at Radio Leeds. I may be on the wrong track, but I thought you looked happy, underneath the worry about the dead baby. That pleased me.
But there was something about the way you talkedânot
what
you said, but the toneâthat made me think you'd got the idea that the children in Houghton Avenue had got together and planned to murder that little child. That pained me. Did we really strike you as a gang of teenage murderers? They exist these days, as I know all too well from my job. Am I naive in thinking such a group would be very rare back in 1969? And is that really how we struck you? Do you remember us as seething with vicious impulses?
And even if you had never known us, doesn't it strike you that this is a pretty unlikely scenario?
We were a group, we played together, but like most groups we were a mass of conflicting personalities, impulses, tastes. Perhaps that is the reasonâor
one
of the reasonsâwhy most of us have had very little to do with one another as adults.
Some of us are dead. I think none of us really knew what we were doing. I don't know how much you have found out, and can't guess how much you are likely to find out, but I do know that nothing you learn is likely to increase anyone's happiness, soothe anyone's grief or unease. In fact, I truly believe your investigations will do nothing useful at all.
I hope you will consider this, though I am not optimistic about its making any difference. I expect you, like all of us, are haunted by the thought of that pathetic, unprotected little baby.
Sincerely
Again there was no signature. This time there was nothing to mark it out as coming from Peter Basnett, yet Matt felt sure that it did. He took the letter round to Charlie Peace at Millgarth next morning on his way to work. When they had talked about the location of the hippies' squat, and Charlie had told Matt in outline about the interview with Rory Pemberton, Matt handed him the letter.
“What do you make of it?” he asked. “Is he anxious for us to find him?”
Charlie read it through carefully, then pursed his lips skeptically.
“Let's say I wouldn't bank on him living in Nottingham.”
“Why not?”
Charlie's mind went to a recent case of what the British
are really good at: serial murder. It was a case on everybody's mind, not just those of policemen.
“Take Harold Shipman. He's already murdered from fifteen to one hundred eightyâodd women. Then for the first time he decides to forge a will leaving an entire estate of an elderly widow he intended to kill to himselfâquite a big estate, not a piddling little amount. Never any financial motive before. He types the will on a decrepit old manual typewriter that he keeps in his home. As any fool knows, matching a typescript with a manual typewriter is the easiest thing in the world. And where would be the first place that you'd look for the typewriter that typed a will leaving everything to one person? Added to which, the daughter of the woman supposedly making the will, soon to be murdered, is a solicitor. That was Harold Shipman's equivalent of the letters murderers sometimes write to the police or newspapers. What does it add up to?”
“He wanted to be stopped.”
“May be.” Charlie's expression showed his skepticism. “But did he want to be stopped because he was sickened by what he was doing? I prefer another explanation. He'd done murder on elderly women so often that it had lost its thrill. Now he'd moved on, and he wanted the thrill not of doing it, but of having it
known.
Of being the most successful mass murderer in British history. Being a secret killer wasn't enough any longer. He wanted his cleverness trumpeted.”
“Eat your heart out, Fred West and Yorkshire Ripper?”
“Exactly. Now, do you see either of these impulses in the letter that you received? The desire to be caught, or the desire to be known as a murderer? Quite the contrary, I'd have said.”
“What do you see?”
“Muddle, most of all. A muddled mind. A man who's got himself into a moral dilemmaâhe's been in it for decades, rememberâand who is pulled all ways, part excusing, part protesting grief and guilt. He's so mixed up about himself, his life and prospects, the morality of what he's done, that he's desperate to say something about it, even to justify some aspects of what he did all those years ago, and particularly to you, so young, an outsider, yet on the fringes of what happened,
almost
involved.”
“Still, it's interesting, what he says about the children.”
“Very. If it's true. If it's not just part of a process of self-justification.”
It was characteristic, not of Charlie, who was spot on at least as often as most policemen, but of the unusualness of the case that he was quite wrong in at least one of his guessesâthe home location of the letter writer. How far he was right in his other comments would be a matter of opinion even after the case was closed.
Oddly enough, some confirmation of the letter's account of the children came two evenings later. Isabella and her brothers had found a family of friends through talking to them at the bus stop, and they were down the hill in Armley Ridge Road, cementing a new alliance. It was soon after seven when the doorbell rang, and Matt opened it to find an elderly woman, gray giving way to white, standing nervously on the doorstep.
“Mr. Harper?”
“That's right.”
“My name's Carpenter.” Matt's lack of recognition showed in his face. “We used to live, many years ago, in the Willows, two doors down.”
“Ah!” Matt stood aside. “Please come in. The children are all out, so we can talk.”
“Oh, you have children. That's nice. But upsetting for them, to find what you found.”
“Yes. Though more for me, really. The children were shocked at first, but they came to terms with it quite quickly. Perhaps children do.” A shade passed over the woman's face, and Matt said quickly: “I'm sorry. That was insensitive. You are Caroline's mother, aren't you?”
“Yes. But perhaps I came on a fool's errand. You seem to know already what I've come to tell you.”
“I don't
know
anything,” said Matt, painfully aware of the truth of that. “But I think your daughter may have been mentally disturbed by things that happened many years ago.”
He gestured Mrs. Carpenter to a seat, and she sank into it gratefully, glad to take the weight off her feet. She accepted Matt's offer of a sherry, talking nervously as she sipped it.
“I've got a sister in Armley, so Desmond and I could get away without too many questions from Caroline. I saw you on television two nights since, when luckily she was out of the room, so I could switch it off before she came back. She heard you on the radio some weeks back, and itâwell, it gave her one of her bad spells. Please understand: I'm not blaming you. All sorts of things can give her bad weeks. But you see, she's got a job nowânothing splendid, just a dinner lady at a primary school, but she's so pleased and proud to have it, and to be bringing home money thatâ”
“I understand,” said Matt.
“They know about the problem, the people at the school, and they're very sympathetic, and as a rule it's only
perhaps once or twice a year that she gets troubledâthat's the word we use among ourselvesâand has to take a week or so off. They've got someone who's glad to cover.”
“And all this began when?”