The Bones in the Attic (19 page)

Sooner than he expected, the foot showed cheering signs of improvement. Matt phoned Radio Leeds and told them he would definitely be in the next day. In midafternoon he took the two hefty sticks he had used on previous recurrences of the ankle problem and took himself out the back door. Slowly he made it to the back gate, then began an exploratory walk along the lane. He found Hester Goldblatt in her garden, and received meekly a mini-lecture from her on new varieties of roses. He had no intention of planting roses in his garden, having a vague notion they were a major cause of premature aging. Plants that flourished with minimal care and attention were his aim. Probably he'd land up with a garden of bay trees.

Moving away he heard a door opening farther down the lane. Then he heard a voice he thought he recognized.

“It was really good of you to see me like this, on your dad's day off.”

Similar but different. Was that because last time it had been drunk?

“No problem, Rory old sport.” Guess immediately confirmed. The second voice was that of Jason Morley-Coombs, and it immediately was lowered, but not so far that Matt could not distinguish the words in their assumed upper-class twang. “As I say, Dad's advice would be the same as mine: go on playing it with a straight bat as far as the police are concerned. But when it comes to the push, you've no reason to go on shielding that one person, particularly as she's nothing to you.”

“No . . . I wish I knew who was behind it all.”

“Does it matter? Probably no one who means anything to you either.”

“Probably not. . . . I'm wondering whether Peter Pennymore knows. . . .”

“I wouldn't think of contacting him if I were you. The less you know, the less the police can get out of you.”

“Right . . . Right . . .”

Rory Pemberton sounded irresolute, but also sounded as if he had nothing more to offer on the subject, so Matt turned and hobbled back to his gate. Standing just inside his back garden he watched as the man came out of Dell View's gate and strode to his car. The confident steps seemed assumed, a pose, but Matt noticed that they were at least steady, and not the walk of a drunken man.

That evening Matt had a sick visit from Charlie Peace, with Felicity and Carola. The baby made Stephen's day, and even Isabella, who said, “Babies! Yuck!” when she saw them coming up the front path, was after half an hour glancing with surreptitious fascination at Carola's perfectly ordinary baby motions. Charlie and Matt took advantage of the general absorption in her to swap a few words on developments.

“Peter Pennymore? So you're assuming that's Peter Basnett?”

“Don't come the cautious detective with me,” said Matt sharply. “I'm not assuming anything. But he's obviously someone who's very much in the know about the baby business.”

“Do you want me to get on to it?”

“May be, eventually. But we've got all the telephone directories for the region ‘Look North' covers at work. Leave it with me for the moment. I've got a duty Saturday
tomorrow, but if anything emerges from my drive around the Raynville Road streets tomorrow night, I might need your help on that.”

The drive the next evening threatened to be a trip down memory lane in the wrong sense. Ben Worsnip had no sooner got Matt into his car than he began banging on about goals and confrontations and yellow cards and everything he remembered about Bradford City ten years previous (which wasn't all that accurate, because naturally he had been a Leeds United supporter). Matt tactfully put a stop to it by suggesting that they concentrate on the matter in hand until they'd been round the streets in the hope of a house, or one or two houses, ringing bells in Ben Worsnip's brain. After that they'd find a pub, settle down over a pint, and talk football. Ben was delighted, but even then it took some time before his brain began to wean itself off the excitement of being sat in a car with a real footballer. With gentle encouragement from Matt, however, he slowly recovered his mental processes back to the old days and the other excitement of salacious childish gossip. Gradually the lure of the past began to get a grip.

“That's my old home. Nothing much, but it was quite a happy one. My mother's in sheltered accommodation now. I know it wasn't in my street that Lily Marsden went visiting, but I'm just trying to get my bearings. . . . That was Harry Sugden's house. I was back and forth between Lansdowne Avenue and Grenville Grove, where we lived for most of my teenage years. And now this is where Edwina Smithy lived—with her horrible mum.”

“I've talked to her. She's Edwina Bartlett now.” “Have you? What did she know about?”

“Keep driving. You might remember yourself.”

“Let's see: we're in Millais Terrace. Ah, this big house. Squatters. A drippy pair with—oh, yes, a baby. It's not . . . ?”

“Keep your mind on the matter in hand.”

“Grenville Street. I don't have any memories of this one, but that's perhaps because none of my mates lived here.”

“My auntie Hettie did, at number twelve. Did you know her?”

“I don't think I had the pleasure . . . Lansdowne Rise. Hmm. Don't think it was here.” He drove slowly on. Matt, though, kept his eye on the mirror, and he saw the door of number 8 open and the figure of Lily Fitch emerge from the front door, coated and handbagged, and clip-clop down the street assertively in their wake. He was glad when they turned off into Raynville Road. She aroused in him feelings that were partly irritation and partly—may be a hangover from his childhood—fear, unease, distaste. “Now we're getting closer to the canal. The houses here were a bit posher than ours were, thirty years ago . . . Leighton Terrace . . .”

He pulled the car up. Matt saw a two-sided street of Victorian two-story houses, most of them with attic conversions. Possibly these days the attic rooms were let to students from the Leeds Metropolitan University—the old polytechnic in new (and lucratively confusing to foreigners) guise. Matt could see that the rooms would be higher and larger than in the Victorian house six streets away where his auntie had lived. In the sixties the social gradations would have been of greater importance than they were today.

“Let's get out,” said Ben.

They got out, Matt still walking rather gingerly. Ben
immediately made for the higher corner, away from the Raynville Road. He looked around him with a growing excitement.

“I'd bet my bottom dollar we used to stand here, waiting and watching. In sight of the school, see, but that didn't bother us because it was summer holidays. We stood on
this
side, because the house was on the other side. . . .
That one!”

He pointed to a house halfway down that section of Leighton Terrace. Matt walked slowly down to it.

The house seemed to have little to mark it off from its neighbors, beyond the number 8 on the front door. It was a heavy old door, probably the original one. There was a little bay to its right, with dormer windows, and before the front door was a solitary substantial step. Matt looked round inquiringly at Ben Worsnip.

“You're sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Ben pointed upward. On the lintel above the door there was an old stone flower container, a long oblong the length of the lintel itself. It was now profuse only in prickly weeds and dandelions.

“It had geraniums then. It was the only house that had flowers over the door. I'm as sure as I can be that it's here that Lily used to come.”

He looked at Matt expectantly, like a puppy that has retrieved a stick and expects a reward. So they got into the car, drove to Matt's auntie's old pub, the Unicorn, and sat for an hour or more discussing Lineker and Robson and John Barnes, and how the kind of football played in that millennium year differed from the kind played ten years
before, and was light-years away from the sort that had been in vogue when England won the World Cup in 1966. Matt had to restrain himself from expressing the view that British footballers earned a ridiculous amount of money for playing pretty poor football. It would sound like sour grapes.

Next day Matt rang Charlie from work and gave him the address: 8 Leighton Terrace. Within twenty minutes Charlie rang back with the information: in 1969 the house had been owned by Mr. Cuthbert Farson.

Between bulletins and his own radio show Matt settled down with Television North's collection of telephone directories. He first tried the reasonably local ones—Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Harrogate. Then he went a bit farther afield: Doncaster, Sheffield, York. Then he tried Nottingham. He'd assumed that Charlie Peace was right when he guessed that the second anonymous letter being posted in Nottingham did not mean that the sender lived there. But Charlie was wrong—at least potentially so. There was a P. Pennymore, and an address: The Cottage, Hurst Green, Belling Joyce. He looked it up in his AA map and found it was a village south of Nottingham. He got his
colleague Phil Bletchley to ring the number, telling him to use his bloody imagination if it was answered, but though Matt sat close to hear the voice, the rings went on and on.

He was pondering after the midafternoon bulletin what to do next, whether he wanted to take off as soon as he had a spare day and see if this was indeed Peter Basnett, when he had a call from reception that Charlie Peace was there to see him. He went down and fetched him, and sat him in an easy chair opposite his desk.

“I mustn't get comfortable,” said Charlie. “This is all borrowed time. I remembered the other day what you told me about the Armitages worshiping at the Methodist Church in Bramley Town Street, then moving away. The Methodists aren't exactly flourishing these days—I know that because my mum is a Methodist, among other religions. I thought it might be worthwhile ringing around all the obvious towns in the area with a Methodist presence. I struck lucky in Halifax. The family worshiped in Southowram for years, getting smaller and smaller.”

“The congregation, you mean?”

“No, the family. There was a son, and he committed suicide many years ago, so I knew it was the same lot. Now there's just the mother, and she's in a hospice with cancer. When I got this routine matter at police headquarters in Halifax, I got it out of the way quickly and used the time afterward to go along to this hospice, which was on the road to Hebden Bridge, and speak to her.”

“Brilliant!” said Matt, rather too cheerfully. “Was she compos mentis?”

“Oh, yes. But in a lot of pain. She was just lying there, trying to cope. The sister said the effects of the last painkiller were wearing off.”

“Poor old thing,” said Matt, rather more appropriately.

“Yes. But she talked. She'd lost everybody close to her—been alone for quite a while, and really I don't think it was distressing for her, talking about her son. I think she thought of herself as about to join him.”

“That's what religion does for you.”

“Yes. Nice if you can believe it. Anyway, she talked, like your Mrs. Carpenter, about the changes that came over the children that summer. . . .”

“Did you try to talk to him about it?” Charlie asked.

“Of course!” said May Armitage, with a slight access of force in her weak voice. “Over and over. He said he wasn't feeling well, but the doctor couldn't find anything the matter. He didn't want to go around with the other children anymore—in fact, the group seemed to have broken up. Eventually we moved, thinking that might help. There was always a fish-and-chip shop up for sale somewhere. First we went to the other side of Bramley, then to Halifax. We thought a change of company would do him good, but Eddie was never a child who made friends easily.”

“So it made things worse rather than better?”

“It did. Even before the move he'd got really troubled—you
know, in his mind. He'd had to go away for a time. It nearly broke us. But it wasn't just us, you know. By the time we moved other parents were noticing changes in their children. A lot of them moved too. I don't know that it did any good.”

“I know the Carpenters had trouble with Caroline for many years,” said Charlie.

“Did they? Oh, poor people.”

“I suppose it affected his schoolwork?”

“Of course. Eddie was never brilliant, but he did
have
a brain. The school said he had potential. That was all lost. His whole life fell apart. We could have used him in the chippie, but we thought it would be better if he cut himself loose from us. He went to work for Morrison's supermarket, and we hoped he might put in for trainee manager. That was just us not facing up to things, I think. He swept the floors and stacked the shelves and rounded up trolleys in the car park and that was it. He had no thought of aiming higher.”

“He never had a girlfriend?”

“Oh, nothing like that. No friend of any kind. Never went with the other lads to films or football or anything. He had no life. . . .” She grimaced with pain, and Charlie felt it was not her cancer alone that caused it. “You'll want to know about—
you know.
” Charlie nodded. “I came home on a Saturday afternoon after we closed, and there he was hanging from the stair rail. He'd been dead for several hours. Please, can we not talk any more, not about
that.
”

Charlie waited a minute until she was calmer, then leaned over her.

“He sounds a lovely boy, Eddie. That's the impression we've got. I'd have thought he'd have left you a message.”

She looked into his eyes.

“There was a note on an old school pad in his bedroom. It said: ‘Mum, if there's ever any trouble, tell them it was an accident.' The police didn't think it had anything to do with his suicide, so it never came up at the inquest.”

Charlie nodded, squeezed her hand, and left.

“Sure,” said Charlie. “The police knew nothing about that then, remember.”

“I'm not criticizing them. I expect they thought it was a pathetic attempt by a mentally unbalanced young man to hide the fact of his suicide. But that phrase ‘if there's ever any trouble' is a giveaway that he's not talking about his suicide. He's practically looking ahead to what's actually happened: the discovery of the baby's remains.”

“Looks like it,” agreed Charlie. “But then, what weight can we place on the second part?”

“Not much,” said Matt reluctantly. “He's certainly not saying outright it
was
an accident.”

“Why cover up an accident anyway?”

“Oh, I think we could make a guess at that,” said Matt, who had thought about the situation a lot more than Charlie, had it with him day and night. “Because they'd taken the baby, or one of them had, or some of them in collusion had. Once that happened the baby's death was serious, however it died.”

“Fair enough,” admitted Charlie, thinking it through. “And that is probably why they seem to have taken some kind of collective vow of silence after the death—or may be just some mutual support scheme that makes
them clam up, or only talk about people who are dead and whom they can't harm.”

“Yes.” Matt thought for a while. “Either all the children were involved in the taking of the child—let's call her Bella, even though we're not absolutely certain—or they were all somehow participants in the death.”

“Not actively,” said Charlie. “That's impossible.”

“No, but by collusion, or just witnessing. Or perhaps this mutual support scheme, as you call it, is just to hide the fact that one of their number
was
responsible.”

“One such as Eddie Armitage,” suggested Charlie.

“Yes. That seems much more likely than if it was Lily Fitch,” said Matt. “Except for one thing. No, two.”

“What's that?”

“Eddie seems the last sort of boy to take the initiative. Uncertain, unformed, a born follower. And it's continued long after his death. It seems to me most likely that the main participant is still alive.”

He sat for some time in deep thought. Charlie stirred, preparing to go.

“Just ring Peter Pennymore,” Matt said, noticing his movements. “It won't take a minute. Please. A colleague tried earlier, but there was no reply.” He handed Charlie a slip from his pad with the number on it. “He'll recognize my voice from radio and television.”

Charlie took the slip, held the telephone as near to Matt's ear as he could, then dialed.

“Two-three-five-seven-six-oh-seven,” said a male voice.

“Who's that? I wanted to speak to Esmeralda,” said Charlie, nothing if not inventive.

“I'm afraid you've got the wrong number,” said the voice.

“It's him,” said Matt, as Charlie put the phone down. “That was Peter Basnett.”

He had a rare weekday off the next week, but he felt insufficiently prepared both factually and emotionally. The next day entirely free was on Saturday, and he penciled this in. He wondered whether he could drive the children over to Nottingham and leave them at a football match while he went on to Belling Joyce and tried his luck. The football season was in its very last gasp, and when he rang City Ground he was told there was a friendly against a team from Estonia. No likelihood of crowd violence there. No likelihood of much of a crowd, except last-ditch addicts. Ideal. It would be Lewis who would protest at the plan, not Isabella: how football was changing! Like most parents he considered in his mind various plans for bribing Lewis into agreement.

He was feeling tender about the children at that time, after the sad little night talk with Isabella. He felt that he had in some way taken them for granted—not neglected them, but failed to realize that their trust in him was still fragile, had to be protected and nourished. They had needed to have things made explicit and definite to them,
and like most English people he had preferred to leave the emotional things unspoken and—because the words had not been spoken—fuzzy round the edges.