The Bones in the Attic (4 page)

Matt shifted in his chair, still not entirely comfortable with what he was doing.

“Of course,” he began. “Yesterday I went to look over a house I'd just bought in Bramley—going over it with the decorator to see what needed to be done before we moved in. Eventually we went up to the attic to see what potential it had to be used, may be as a games room, and while we were up there, in a far dark corner, we found, neatly laid out and hidden by a low wall, a small skeleton.”

“But, Matt! How absolutely thrilling! I've never heard anything so
spooky
!”

“It is a dead child we're talking about, Liza.”

“Yes, but I mean . . . !”

She faded into silence. Matt felt a bit sanctimonious, reminding himself of a nonconformist cleric he had once interviewed on the subject of Sunday shopping. But the whole rebuke had got home to her, and the fact that her reaction was a delayed one was attributable either to her insensitivity or to her stupidity, Matt was not greatly concerned which.

“The skeleton was not just a collection of bones, but a complete one and laid out—as if a dead child had been put there. It was very dusty, like everything else, and we certainly got the impression that it had been there a long time, not just put there in the last few weeks while the house had been empty.”

He had kept his voice even and unemotional, and Liza's reaction was now distinctly more subdued too.

“So what did you do?”

“I don't think there's much option in matters like this. You have to call the police. They've been to the house, sealed it off, and I've just had it confirmed that what we found is the skeleton of a child, may be eighteen months or two years old.”

“And how long do they think the skeleton has been there?”

“I think it will be a while before they are willing to give an opinion on that. It's a complicated matter.”

“Of course. I see. So what do you want to say to our listeners?”

Matt considered a moment before replying.

“The houses are stone houses, fronting onto Houghton Avenue, in Bramley, with a dirt lane leading round to the back doors. The house is called Elderholm. The police would be interested to hear about any disappearance of a child, boy or girl, twenty, thirty years ago—in fact, I'd say anything over ten years. Particularly any disappearance that for one reason or another didn't get reported to the police.”

“Could you suggest some reason for that?”

“Perhaps a surprise move away from the district, with nothing being heard of the child later? May be a family of travelers? But I agree it's not easy to account for the disappearance of a child this young that doesn't get reported to
some
one.”

“Well, Matt,” said Liza, having regained something of her chirpy radio tone, “you really have frozen our blood today. If anyone out there thinks they may know something that's relevant, however small, they can call the police, or why not call us—”

But Matt had pulled out his earphones and left the studio.

On thinking it over he wondered if he had been wise, recording the appeal so early on. If he could have put a more definite date for the death of the child, he could have pinpointed the people who were living in the Houghton Avenue houses at the time. As it was, the catchment period was too wide.

Then he remembered Charlie Peace's remark about people not staying put in the same houses the way they once did. True enough. But twenty or thirty years ago they did, so that, whenever the child was put there, many of the same people would have been around for quite a while
before and after. Except, of course, for the children, who would have grown up and mostly set up home elsewhere.

Having recorded the piece for Liza, he had reduced his options, and he had no choice but to tell the children before it went out on air and people started talking about it. If Aileen were there she could probably have told him how they would take it, but he himself could only guess. That night he cooked supermarket pizza with lots of favorite toppings added. It was a way of ensuring that all the children would eat together. He let them go at their favorite food for a fair while, and it was when they were picking at the remains of the pastry edges that he broached the subject.

“I've got something I want to tell you all,” he said. They all looked at him, including Beckham, who was waiting by the table for leftovers and gazed at him through the fronds of his Old English sheepdog mop. “I don't think we want to make a big deal of it, because it's something that happened a long time ago.”

“What
happened a long time ago?” asked Isabella, thinking rightly he was putting the cart before the horse.

“The death of a child,” said Matt simply.

“It's the new house, isn't it?” asked Lewis. Matt nodded. They thought for some time, then two spoke at once.

“How old was the child?” asked Stephen, who was seven.

“Most houses would have had deaths in them, wouldn't they?” asked Isabella.

“The child was about two or under,” said Matt. “And, yes, most old houses would have had deaths in them, including the deaths of children. A lot of children died in the past, when doctors didn't know as much as they do today.”

“So why is this special?” asked Lewis.

“It's special because yesterday, when I was at Elderholm with the man who's going to do the place up, we found the child's skeleton in the attic.”

“Oooh!” The children shivered exaggeratedly. Matt waited to let it sink in.

“Had it just died there all alone?” asked Isabella. “Got shut in or something, and nobody knew it was there?”

“We don't think so. We think it was probably taken there, laid out there, when it was already dead.”

“Why didn't they bury it?” asked Lewis, age eleven.

“Everybody gets buried or cre—cre . . . don't they?”

“It's because it was murdered, isn't it?” asked Isabella. She was the brightest, as well as the most sensible, of the brood.

“It's possible,” said Matt, unwilling to go down the hopeless slope of trying to deceive her. Even Aileen couldn't tell Isabella what to think. “But we shouldn't jump to conclusions. There may be some other reason we haven't even thought about.”

“We don't
have
to go up into the attic, do we?” asked Stephen, which also struck Matt as sensible.

“No, of course we don't. We can just put boxes and cases and things up there, and shut them away.”

“Still, you'd sort of look up and think, wouldn't you?” said Lewis. Matt could have hit him.

“Can we go round?” asked Isabella. Matt regretfully shook his head.

“No, we can't. I wish we could. You could have seen that there's nothing to be afraid of. But the police have sealed the place off till they're finished with their work.”

“Who's afraid, anyway?” said Lewis, offended. “I just meant it was sort of . . . yucky.” An idea occurred to Matt.

“We can't go into the house, but we could take Beckham for his evening walk there.”

“First tiddle-tour in Bramley,” said Lewis. “Yes!”

Beckham was notoriously unreliable at night if he didn't get a properly accompanied evening walk. By now it was eight, and the late-April sky was darkening. They piled into the car, Beckham taking his place between the two boys in the backseat, looking intelligently round him. It was a journey of three miles or so, and Matt noticed that the subject of the dead child was not mentioned the whole way. Were they avoiding it, or did it not mean so much to them as he had imagined it would?

Matt drew up on his parking space on the other side of the lane, and Beckham jumped out, barking. He had been there before, but just into the house and not often enough to dull the novelty. They put him on the long lead, because they would have been at a loss to look for him if he went off exploring as he liked to do. They all went over to the gate of Elderholm, which was wreathed in police tape, and looked over it to the back door, properly sealed up.

“Do they do that every time there's a murder?” asked Isabella.

“I don't know. Whenever there's an unexplained death, I suppose, or something involving a mystery. When that happens the forensics people need to go over the house carefully to get clues.”

He kept his tone matter-of-fact, and the children nodded.

“Who are forensics people?” asked Lewis.

“People with a scientific training in solving crimes,” answered Matt, thinking that was near enough.

“Thank you for telling us like this,” said Stephen, and put his hand into Matt's.

And that seemed to be it. Isabella soon turned away, and they all began to walk. Matt drew up the rear, wondering if this really was all, or if they were still mulling over the death, and they would quite soon come to a decision about it and the house. They went along the lane, then turned down toward the road. Beckham was in an ecstasy of sniffing and leg raising, the two things intimately connected. Once down into Houghton Avenue proper, the messages came thicker and faster, and he was visibly committing every odor to memory when suddenly he froze. After a second or two he turned his head cautiously back. All four of them turned too.

Caught in the light of a streetlamp as it crossed from one of the gardens to the lawns of the church opposite a long, skinny creature with a bushy tail. It was part reddish gray, part dirty cream, and it looked toward them with alert, calculating eyes without a trace of fear.

“Is it a dog?” whispered Stephen.

“No, it's a fox,” said Matt. “What they call an urban fox.”

“What's that?”

“One that lives in a town instead of the country. They scavenge from dustbins, live on anything they can get.”

Beckham was transfixed. Something told him to run at it, but prudence held him back. The fox, having sized them up, thought for a minute, then proceeded, brisk but unhurried, on its way, hopping through the church gates and disappearing from sight.

The children seemed to have been holding their breath for minutes.

“That was
won
derful!” said Isabella.

“I wish Mummy could have seen it,” said Stephen.

“She will,” said Matthew heartily. “There's probably a family of them.”

Beckham now charged forward, hectically sniffing at the places the fox had been, whining operatically and implying that he would have chased it if only they had let him off. The magic moment was over. But Matt had a feeling that, whatever doubts there might have been about the new house in the children's minds, they had now been wiped away.

“That takes time. Bones in themselves are near impossible to date. It could be a question of what's been discovered in the vicinity. But I have got a piece of good news.”

“That makes a change.”

“The boffins are moving out of your house as we speak. You can get your man in and start the decorating at once.”

That was a relief. Matt rang Tony Tyler's mobile number straightaway, and said he'd add a couple of hundred to
the agreed price if they could start within the next day or two. They arranged to meet in Houghton Avenue when Matt's shift on Radio Leeds ended at twelve o'clock, or as soon after that as Tony could manage.

When he drew up and parked by the hut that served the house as a garage, Tony was nowhere to be seen, but he saw at once that the police tape was gone from the back door of Elderholm. At last he could go inside again. It was time for instant decisions about colors and floor coverings.

“Excuse me.”

His hand had been on the latch of the back gate, and the voice came from behind him. A woman—fair rather than blonde, and perhaps in her late forties—had come up, expansively smiling, with perhaps a slight nervous consciousness that she was intruding. She was smartly dressed for gardening—no contradiction in terms, because Matt could guess that her gardening consisted of a snip here, a strict tying back there, with the heavy work being done by hired help or by her husband.

“Yes?” He smiled, though: he didn't want to be on bad terms with all his neighbors.

“I think you must be Matthew Harper.”

“That's right.”

“I heard you on the radio yesterday. I was just trying to find some nice music and heard the name Houghton Avenue. Such a fascinating story about the bones. Rather horrible and terrifying too, of course! But happening here!”

Matt rather thought the stuff about the bones had come well before there had been any mention of Houghton Avenue. The lady was clearly of the type that wouldn't admit to listening to anything less than Radios Three or Four.

“It was certainly a rather unpleasant surprise to come across them,” he said.

“It
must
have been! I'm Delphine Maylie—Del to my friends. I can
just
hear that like me you're from the south.”

Except that I'm Cockney, and you're stockbroker Sussex, thought Matt.

“That's right. Bermondsey. But I left when I was eleven.”

“I
bet
you wouldn't go back, would you?”

“Well, no, not willingly.”

“People down there have such a strange view of the north, don't they? They think it's all blackened stone and belching chimneys, but it's
lovely
!”

Something in Delphine aroused a spirit of contrariness in Matt.

“There are plenty around who wouldn't mind seeing a few belching chimneys, I'd guess.”

“Oh, come
on,
” she said protestingly, with a winsome smile. “There's hardly any unemployment in Leeds, and all the jobs now are much cleaner and more hygienic than the old ones. When you consider the asbestosis and the phthisis and all that sort of thing that people got from the old jobs . . . But now, tell me about the bones.”

“There's really nothing to tell beyond what I said on the radio. The police got a few calls after the program, and they're following them up, but they're pretty cagey about details. You probably know more about who used to live around here than they do.”

“Not really,” said Delphine, her eyes showing her sense that he had failed in his duty of gorging her curiosity. “We've only been here five years. Mr. Farson was one of the old-timers. He'd been here about twenty years, I think. But the families who'd been here almost since the
houses were built have all gone now, and had even when Garrett and I arrived.”

“I suppose that's not surprising,” said Matt. “I believe the houses are eighty or ninety years old. I suppose you don't know where any of the old-time people are now?”

Delphine frowned.

“Now you mention it, I have heard talk about someone who grew up here—I don't remember which house. She's living down in Lansdowne Rise—which is
rather
going down in the world, in spite of its name. Now what was the family? But I don't think that would help, because I'm pretty sure she married. I expect Mr. or Mrs. Cazalet could help you.”

He gave her a loaded glance, which she returned in good measure.

“I'm not sure they would want to,” Matt said. “He gave me the impression that he blamed me for finding the skeleton at all.”

She raised her eyebrows, then leaned forward and tapped her forehead.

“Not the neighbors one would have chosen for you. But you'd think they'd want the poor little thing to have a decent burial, wouldn't you?”

“You would,” said Matt, mentally making the decision to pay for it himself if necessary.

“Here's your decorator,” said Delphine as Tony's van drew up. “I
do
hope things go smoothly. Good luck with your inquiries. And I do hope you and your partner will come for drinks with Garrett and me as soon as you're settled in.”

Her eyebrows were raised a fraction, as if inviting him to confide in her why his partner had not so far put in an
appearance. Matt did not feel impelled to tell her that Aileen was currently nursing the father of her children through leukemia in his native South Africa. Still less did he want to confide that the man was still legally her husband. He was not yet sure that he wanted to get on terms of personal confidence with his neighbors. But he registered, as he went to greet Tony, that Delphine knew who his decorator was, and knew he had a partner—and also that the word came naturally to her sort of circle. He thought she was someone he could do business with, but beyond that? He didn't so far feel called upon to make her a bosom buddy.

For the next half hour he and Tony were totally businesslike. Matt picked out a suitable floor covering for the kitchen, and a paper that reached out and grabbed him for the dining room. Now he chose paint for the kitchen, sitting room, hallway, and landing. The last area would cause the most disruption if it was not done before they moved in. But otherwise he did not see why he shouldn't organize the movers to bring most of the furniture from the Pudsey flat the day after work was finished.

“Then we can make decisions about the other rooms in our own time,” he said to Tony, “so the children can have their say. Either we can have them done one by one, or else I can take the children away for a week and have several done at once.”

“You're wanting to get the children settled in as soon as possible, I suppose,” commented Tony.

“Well, yes, I am. Get them settled in before their mother comes back. I brought them round the other night, and we all saw an urban fox, and somehow—there's no rhyme nor reason to it—”

“I know, I know. I've got children. And you want to strike while the iron is hot and they're in love with the place. I think you're wise.”

“That is exactly it. I'm afraid it might wear off. I'm probably hoping for the impossible but it would suit me fine if they never mentioned the bones in the attic again.”

“Not much chance of that, with appeals for information on the radio, and the police conducting an investigation.”

“Not very much of an investigation,” commented Matt.
“They're doing about as much as if it was a long-ago teenager's bad mistake.”

“Which it wasn't?”

“Of course not. Like we said at the time, it was too big.” Matt shook his head in frustration. “But the police high-ups seem to be allotting it zilch in terms of time or money.”

But they were doing something. Five days later, when Matt had been given a date by Tony for organizing the move, Charlie came by appointment to the studios of BBC Leeds. Matt had been intending to take him to the canteen when he suddenly had a mental picture of Liza Pomfret taking the next table to theirs and straining her ears for what she could make out of their conversation. He changed his mind immediately. They went out into the spring sunshine and down to the Merrion Centre pub, where they found a dim corner devoid of shoppers devouring shepherd's pie or lasagna, and settled down over two pints to discuss developments.

“First of all,” said Charlie, “something I didn't know before, because this isn't the sort of case that comes up every day: it's not possible to ‘date' bones in themselves—say when they were alive, roughly when the person died.
Bits of flesh might be another matter, but there were none.”

“I see. So no joy on the date?”

“Well, not initially. Come back to that. The scientists are leaning in the direction of a little girl for the victim.
Obviously we'll be interested in the houses and their inhabitants, particularly the children. By the way, on the question of date, we made a bit of an assumption based on the dust and the area around the bones—frankly, it was more of a guess than anything. We thought the bones were over twenty years old. Going on that, we found that the last house owner who'd been there more than twenty years was your Mr. Farson, who moved there in 1977. Now eighty-seven, and living in a nursing home in Rodley—intermittently compos mentis, but about as unreliable as you'd expect. We've spoken to the son, who as you told me has never lived there. Visited his dad frequently, but had no call to go up into the attic, not surprisingly, though he'd been up to move a few tea chests out before he put the place on the market. It was all a great surprise to him, of course.”

“What happened to the other families in the vicinity?”

Charlie shrugged.

“We haven't found out a great deal about them yet. There's only one person still around in Bramley, and her name's Lily Fitch.”

“Is this someone who lives in Lansdowne Rise?” Matt asked. Charlie Peace raised his eyebrows.

“Been doing some detection on your own, have you?”

“Just talking to a neighbor about who among the old-timers is still around.”