The Bones in the Attic (25 page)

“Oh, he
was,
” said the voice, pride entering into it for the first time. “Mathematics was always his very best subject—a top mark in his GCE. He could have gone to university but—”

“Oh, I chose not to go to university myself,” said Matt, with some truth. At the age of sixteen his world had been the world of football, and he had left education behind.

“I suppose at that age,” said the voice vaguely, “and at that
time,
when the world seemed to go mad, it's forgivable to go a little wild, do odd things. . . . Anyway, that's all in the past. Douglas is very well settled now, has got a lovely house in Retford, lovely family, and is doing so well in his job. Independent, you know, and lots of clients. What was it you wanted him for?”

“Oh, it was about another school friend I think he may have kept in touch with.”

They chattered on for a minute or two, and then rang off. Matt was so confident he had now identified his man that he almost forgot to ask for his telephone number. It was the number he had already, and he felt sure that he had got him. All that remained was to consider how to approach the father of the dead Bella.

He devoted a great deal of thought to that, and decided that the only way he had any chance of getting anything personal out of Doug was face-to-face. That being so, he had to abandon the old-schoolfellow lie and come up
with something that couldn't be contradicted by their respective appearances—all of seventeen years between them, he calculated. He consulted the Nottingham directory again, saw that Douglas Woof had a business as well as a home address, and rang it.

“My name is Harper,” he told a secretarial voice at the other end, “and I work for Radio Leeds and on ‘Look North.'”

“Oh, how interesting!”

“The thing is, it seems I'm about to get a good promotion, quite a lot more money, and just possibly a shift to the Nottingham area, and it seemed to me that I ought to get myself an accountant.”

“I'm sure Mr. Woof would like to talk to you about that. Will you hold the line while I get him for you?”

The fatal lure of television. But the upshot was a long talk with a very respectable-sounding Douglas Woof. Matt explained his prospects in mendacious detail, explained that he'd got Woof's name, highly recommended, from a man he'd got talking to in a pub, and the conversation continued with Matt telling him quite a lot of true things (football, chat programs on radio, football commentaries on both media) as well as quite a lot of lies. The upshot was an enthusiastic invitation to come over to Retford (“Spy out the territory, eh, old man?”) for a business dinner together.

“Quite a good little Italian place in the center. They give me a table in a little alcove when they know I'm with a client, so everything will be perfectly confidential,” said Douglas in his reassuring voice. “Nothing will go beyond those four walls.”

Three walls if it's an alcove, thought Matt pedantically. Still, a bit of privacy was best if the conversation
went as he hoped. The dinner was fixed for the following Tuesday, which turned out to be the first real downpour of rain for some time. Matt found the Tavola Toscana without difficulty, asked for Mr. Woof, and was shown across to a little box with a table and window in it and shook hands with a man with a fair, well-tended mustache, a less-well-controlled paunch, and a convincingly trustworthy manner. He was not as tall as Matt remembered, well below him in height, but then his memories were those of a seven-year-old of someone in his mid-twenties. Someone different, somehow “other,” and therefore rather frightening.

“Good to meet you,” said Douglas Woof heartily, giving his fair mustache a loving stroke or two. “A drink to start with? Then we can get the menu read and get down to a chat.”

The strictly business matters, mainly fictitious on Matt's part, lasted through the soup and antipasto, and it was Woof himself who nudged the talk in the direction of the personal.

“You're very wise, you know, getting your finances properly looked after, though of course it's not my place to say so. You've no idea how many silly things people do with their own money. It's not just themselves they should think about, but their widows and children, should the worst come to the worst.” Another stroke of the mustache. “Are you a family man yourself?”

“Partner and her three. I regard them as my own.”

“Still at school?”

“Oh, very much so,” said Matt, bringing out a snapshot.

“Lovely-looking kids,” said Douglas, with the sort of sincerity that suggested he would have said “rotten-looking
kids” if he had really thought so. He too fished in his pocket and brought out a picture of his own, all around the swing in a back garden, all three of them of primary school age.

“You started late,” commented Matt. Douglas nodded as if it was a matter of pride. “No bad thing,” Matt continued. “We're contemplating one of our own. I was married before, very briefly and when I was much too young. Thank heaven it was childless.”

Douglas Woof seemed about to say something, but they were interrupted by the arrival of the
vitello milanese
and the grilled prawns they had ordered.

“Sorry, you were about to say something, weren't you?” resumed Matt as he took up his knife and fork. “Did you have another, earlier family? Don't tell me if you'd rather not. I know it can be painful if you lose touch. It's something a lot of people call in about on our phone-ins.”

Douglas thought for a moment, then said, “I wouldn't tell this to everyone—not your respectable local businessman, for example. But you having been in the sporting world, and now in television—well, you're a man of the world.” He leaned forward as if about to divulge a budget secret: “I went through a really wild phase in the sixties.”

Matt raised his eyebrows and suppressed a grin.

“No! I'd not have guessed that. But I do just remember that time. A lot of people went through a wild phase then. Some didn't live to come out of it. What form did your wild phase take?”

“Oh, the lot. Flowers in my hair, ghastly smock-thing, a nice little chick and a baby—you name it, we did it, including squatting and marijuana. Still indulge now and then, in the privacy of my own home. No harm in it so far
as I'm concerned, but I wouldn't want the children to find out. Thank God I never went on to anything dangerous, though.”

“Well, well,” said Matt, putting on a wondering look. “And I suppose you and the chick broke up and you lost contact with the child?”

Douglas shook his head. He was quite enjoying the confessional.

“Not quite. She was a lovely girl, by the way, but she went a bit far—swallowed all the prevailing notions, going a bit over the top.”

“And you never did?”

“Not like
that.
Don't get me wrong—she was a real sweetie, and she thought the world of me—we did of each other, of course, but I don't think it could have lasted, she was just too . . . otherworldly. And then our little Bella died, and that was the beginning of the end for us. Within a year I was back in the real world and studying accountancy. Funny old business, life.”

From hippie to barroom (or in this case Italian restaurant) philosopher in thirty glorious years.

“There's a lot of sadness around,” contributed Matt. “Nothing more devastating than a child's death. What was it? Meningitis?”

“No, it was an accident. Child was looking after it—perfectly responsible teenage girl I'd thought—and the next thing we knew poor little Bella had been dropped—landed on her head on a stone balustrade and that was that.”

“How terrible! And you weren't there at the time?”

“No—I was chasing a little puppy we'd got for Bella. Never caught the poor little thing. This was in Leeds, your
neck of the woods. That was where we were squatting. Anyway, when I got back the girl and the pushchair had disappeared. I was worried but not frantic. It was a park we were in, and something could have happened to make her uneasy. I went to the houses where I knew the girl lived, but they were silent as the grave, and I didn't know which she lived in, nor even her name. But she knew where we lived—squatted—so I went back, expecting to find her there, or that she'd come and bring Bella back soon.”

“And she came, but not with Bella?”

“No, but with someone else. When I got home I found Sandra—that was my girl's name—half stoned. I rolled myself a joint, but then I thought I'd better not smoke it in case I needed to go to the police and get them to look for Bella. In theory I despised the police, of course, but—you know—”

“I know. They have their uses.”

“Of course, of course. I'm talking about then,” Woof said very insistently. “No one is more supportive of the police than I am today. And I suppose there was a little of the later me lurking in the hippie one, waiting to get out. And then there was a knock at the door, and when I went to open it there was this woman in a wheelchair, being pushed by the girl who was looking after Bella. ‘Where's Bella?' I shouted, and the woman asked if they could come in.”

“Who was the woman, then?” asked Matt, feigning ignorance. “The girl's mother?”

“No. No relation. Friend, she said. She was trying to be nice, sorrowful, understanding, but somehow . . . There was an intensity, a terrible caged energy that—well, I'll be frank—that
frightened
me. They came in.
Sandra was far gone—and the woman looked askance at
that,
I can tell you. Anyway, the story came out: the accident, how it wasn't Lily's—that was her name—fault, just not being used to small children. And then there came a new thing: how the publicity over it could ruin Lily's life, how sensitive she was, how devastated by what had happened. And then there came an offer of money.”

The real Matt suddenly took over.

“Surely you must have smelled a rat?”

Douglas bridled a little.

“Oh, I did! ‘Hang on,' I said to myself, ‘what's going on here?' If this was an accident, how come I'm being offered money to hush it up? And the first thing I thought was that this woman wanted a baby, and she was offering us money for ours. For all I know now that could be the case, but somehow—”

“She just wasn't the maternal type, by the sound of it.”

“Not in the least. But the maternal isn't one type, is it? She'd be all right as the tigress guarding her cubs. It occurred to me we hadn't much to offer Bella, except love: a life of drifting and of benign neglect when we were high. And though Sandra was a good mother in her way, it was a sort of inadequate way. But I have to admit that as they went on talking, trying to argue me round, I became convinced that Bella was dead.”

“Why?”

“The dominance, the fearsomeness of the woman, the sullen smoldering of the girl who was supposed to be so penitent. But it was mainly the older one: somehow she had death written in her face. And I wondered whether I could go to the police now, when my stupidity in letting this girl barely into her teens take care of Bella had resulted in
her death. And then they started mentioning sums of money. I gulped at first. And then I thought: ‘If you've killed our Bella, you're going to pay for it!'”

“How much was it eventually?”

“It started at five hundred pounds. Of course I wasn't going to go along with the first offer. Eventually it was a thousand pounds. That was a lot of money in those days.” Something in Matt's expression alerted Woof to the fact that he was making a bad impression, and he added: “I'm not proud of myself.”