The Bones in the Attic Read online

  “Yes. Bermondsey.”

  “I’m Brixton. Come up when you signed for Bradford, did you?”

  “No. We moved to Colchester when I was a boy. But I’ve never wanted to go back.”

  “Me neither, though I’m not sure why. I thought London was the bee’s knees when I was living there. Sheer ignorance, I suppose. Now, are you the owner of this house?”

  “That’s right. As of last Friday.”

  “Who was the seller?”

  “Man called Carl Farson. Son of the actual owner, Cuthbert Farson, who’s a man of nearly ninety.”

  “So the son’s got power of attorney, has he?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Any idea how long the father lived here, if he did?”

  “No idea, but he did live here. I met the son briefly at the estate agents’. He’s a man of around sixty himself, and he said he didn’t grow up in the house, though he visited his dad here often.”

  “I see. Who were the estate agents handling the sale?”

  “Sewell and Greeley, in Pudsey.”

  “Right. So you were just looking around, were you?”

  “Yes, with a decorator, name of Tony Tyler. We were planning what needed doing, and wondering whether the attic could be used as a bedroom or a games room. I’m beginning to think we’d better put any plans like that on hold for a bit.”

  “Yes. The kids are bound to find out.”

  “And children have very long memories,” said Matthew thoughtfully. “About some things, anyway.”

  “They do. Looked to me, at a glance, as if the attic hadn’t been much used.”

  “That was our impression. May be one end, near the trapdoor, had had a few tea chests there, or ordinary luggage, or just this and that. It was less dusty there. But anybody clearing them out wouldn’t necessarily go to the far end, where there’s no flooring, in fact, there’d be no reason for them to do that at all. We only went because we were wondering about this bedroom.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. Now—oh, that looks like theteam.” Outside two police cars were drawing up in the lane. “There’s not much you can do here for the moment, Matt. Could I have a home and a work telephone number for you?”

  “Sure. Home is 2574 945 and at Radio Leeds it’s 2445 738.”

  “Right. I’ll be in contact as soon as I know anything. If I get your partner, she’ll know about it, will she?”

  “Aileen’s away at the moment. I plan to tell the children tonight if circumstances are right.”

  “Fine.” Charlie opened the door to the forensics team and directed them up to the attic. He was silent until he was sure they were well out of earshot, then he turned to Matt.

  “In confidence, Matt: if we’re right that this was a child, but the bones have been up there a long while, this is not likely to be a high-priority investigation.” A grimace passed over Matt’s face at the thought of the child’s brief life being considered of so little account, its death—its murder, or whatever it turned out to be—passed over so casually. “I know, I know,” said Peace. “It’s sad, and I know what I’d feel if I’d made the discovery. It’s a question of priorities, of the likelihood of getting results, of police resources and budgets. You’re into news gathering. You’ll know all about the pressures on us. I’d be willing to bet the best we can hope for is putting a name to him or her. OK, I hope we can do better than that, but I’d be wrong to make any promises.”

  “Right,” said Matt with a sigh. “I’ll be off.”

  “Good to have met you,” said Charlie, shaking hands. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I have any concrete information. And of course I’ll tell you the moment the forensicspeople have finished and the house is your own again.”

  Matt thanked him, but a flash through his brain asked the question whether the house would ever be his own. He put the thought from him. Of course it would. It would have to. He slipped out the back door, dodging another carload of policemen and -women clad in white overalls, and went out the little back gate and toward his car.

  “Excuse me.”

  Matt turned round and looked down. A small man had come out from the house next door to his, and was standing beside him looking up. He was about five feet four, thin and weedy in appearance, with sparse hair and frown lines in his forehead. There was a sort of self-importance about him that was neither comic nor impressive.

  “Yes?” The moment Matt said the word it sounded ridiculously cold, and, concealing a degree of reluctance, he held out his hand and said, “You must be one of my new neighbors. I’m the new owner of Elderholm. I’m Matt Harper.”

  “Ah . . . Edward Cazalet. I believe I should have heard of you. The estate agent has mentioned it to someone. You’re some kind of footballer.”

  Matt, mischievously, decided to take him literally.

  “Center half as a rule. My footballing days are over now. I work for Radio Leeds and ‘Look North.’”

  The man nodded. Those two things had swum within his ken.

  “Ah . . . I—I hope there’s nothing wrong ?”

  He cast a limp hand in the direction of the police activity, as if he was nourishing the hope they were rehearsing for The Pirates of Penzance. Matt felt a strong disinclination to give him a reason for their presence in Elderholm.

  “I hope not. That is what the police team is here to find out.”

  “My wife and I do hate any unpleasantness.”

  “No more than I do myself.”

  The little man shook his head, as if that was impossible, and to show he had dire forebodings.

  “Such a bad way to begin.”

  “Very true. It was a great shock, finding what I found.”

  “Ah. This concerns something that you found, or say you found?”

  “Something that I found. Not something I could conceivably have brought with me. I am not at liberty to say what it was, of course.”

  “N-no, of course not.”

  “But it is something that has been in the house for a long time.”

  “Oh. Oh, dear! Well—I don’t know what to say.”

  And he retreated back behind his little gate.

  Getting into his car and driving away, Matt felt dissatisfaction with the encounter, and with himself. He had always thought of himself as good at reading signs, judging people by their outward appearance and behavior. This man he could hardly even guess the age of. He looked the sort of person who, even in his cradle, had seemed worried by the human condition, or perhaps the state of the property market. And as a consequence, now he could have been forty, sixty, or any stage in between. Querulous, pernickety, with an old-fashioned concern about keeping up appearances. He couldn’t hide it from himself: he didn’t like the man. And Cazalet in his turn had seemed determined from the start not to like him.

  Then he shook himself. What did it matter? He was only one of seven sets of neighbors in the old stone houses. And he could well have a pleasanter side to him that did not show through on a first, casual encounter.

  Still, there was no disguising the fact that this rated very low on the thermometer of warm welcomes.

  *Soccer

  †Pool

  CHAPTER TWO

  Broadcasting It

  Matt didn’t tell the children that night. For some reason they were off on a tangent about getting another animal “as company for Beckham,” though since they had never even considered the possibility of a second dog, Matt regarded that as a bit of a smoke screen for acquiring something new, interesting, and different. As the various possibilities—cat, rabbit, hamster, parrot—were canvassed he kept out of the discussion, rather as he would in an exciting radio talk-in, expressing himself forcefully only when someone proposed a snake. “It’s your mother who’ll have the final say,” he said, “so nothing will be done until she’s back. Imagine her coming home and finding a cobra curled up in front of the fire.” It was a topic, though, that he did not feel inclined to shatter by breaking the news of the skeleton. He po
stponed that without regret until they were in a more receptive mood.He was scheduled to do the local news bulletins on television during the morning and afternoon of the nextday. As he went through from the Woodhouse Lane entrance to his studio, he paused to listen to his current bête noire talking on the phone in her office.

  “Well, get your fucking finger out,” she was rasping. “I told you what I want, Terry. I want that fucking program broadcast. It’s bloody brilliant, and it’s going to be shown. What the fucking hell are you, a man or a mouse?”

  Liza Pomfret belonged to one of the BBC dynasties. Not one of the visible ones, like the Magnussens or the Michel-mores, but traceably a Corporation dynasty. Her grandmother had been one of the high-ups in charge of early-evening magazine programs on television in the early sixties, and her father had been one of John Birt’s faceless apparatchiks in the nineties. As part of her grooming process Liza had been shunted up north into local broadcasting after a spell on one of the various holiday programs. One of the latter had been held up or canceled because a young reporter investigating an adventure holiday had been decapitated while emerging incautiously from a helicopter. Since she had arrived in Leeds, Liza had spent a great deal of her time on the phone pressuring her old colleagues to get it shown, behaving as if it were a combination of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Apocalypse Now and its loss would be a cultural tragedy.

  “Approach the family again, ” she was yelling, her face an ugly puce shade. “Put more pressure on them. Tell them it’s what Simon would have wanted.”

  Oh, yeah? thought Matt cynically. And the next thing we know, by a slip in the editing process, Simon’s beheading will be on TV for the nation to gawp at, earning itself a “First on terrestrial television” tag and splashed all over the tabloids.

  As he turned to continue his walk to the news studio, Vic Talbot, his producer, padded up behind him.

  “Keeping your eye on the opposition?” he asked softly.

  “Opposition?”

  “The center forward of the other team.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “You’re playing for the local-chap-makes-good team, and she’s playing for the national highflyers team. With a bit of luck she’ll either shove her foot in her mouth or be swiftly translated to greater things in the great wen.Leaving you with your foot firmly on the ladder going up.”

  Vic said it encouragingly, even admiringly. It was the first time Matt had realized he was regarded as a man with a bright future at BBC North.

  Not long after the eleven o’clock news bulletin he was phoned by Sergeant Peace.

  “I’ve got one piece of positive information,” he said, “and the rest is very interim. The positive part—”

  “Is that the bones are human,” said Matt with a heavy heart. “You wouldn’t bother with anything further if they weren’t.”

  “True enough. Right, beyond that: presumably a child, around eighteen months or two years old, but they’re still cagey on the sex. And been there quite a time, though they won’t be naming any figure for a while yet.”

  “I could have guessed they weren’t put there yesterday,” said Matt ungratefully.

  “We don’t much like guesses in this business,” said Charlie. “I’ve been doing a bit of rummaging myself.Elderholm was bought in 1977 by Mr. Farson—the elder one, that is—from Hannah Beeston, who was moving to a bungalow in Armley Ridge Road. She died of cancer in 1985.”

  “I see. So the date the bones came there is going to be very important.”

  “It’s likely to be. But it’s worth noticing that both the owners were elderly. Mrs. Beeston was born with the century—1900. Farson was born in 1913. It sort of adds to the oddity, doesn’t it?”

  It certainly seemed to Matt, on thinking it over afterward, that it did.

  He was abstracted for the rest of the morning, and in the twelve o’clock bulletin stumbled on the pronunciation of “Harewood.” When they went down to the staff canteen for coffee and a sandwich at twelve-fifteen, Vic Talbot said, “Got something on your mind, Matt? Was that the police who rang you earlier?”

  “Yes. . . .” He thought for a moment, then said: “Funny thing happened to me yesterday. Rather nasty too. I went to see the new house in Bramley with the decorator I’ve got lined up.”

  “And?”

  “We went up into the attic and found a little skeleton. The police phoned me today to say that it was definitely human.”

  Vic was unusually slow taking it in.

  “A child’s, you mean?”

  “Yes. Just laid out, covered with dust, in a place where no one would see it unless they were really inspecting the place. It was sort of touching as well as eerie.”

  Vic Talbot thought.

  “So someone, at some time, has had a dead child on his or her hands—may be he’s killed it—and he just put the body up there and left it.”

  “Something like that,” said Matt slowly. “Unless . . . but I don’t want to think of other possibilities.”

  “But, Matt—that’s a marvelous story!” came a voice from behind the table. “And one of our people involved!”

  Matt raised his head, looked first at Vic, then turned to confront Liza Pomfret with the sort of expression he might have put on for a circling vulture. “Our people” indeed! Liza was as much one of “us,” he thought, as a fox in a chicken run.

  “No-go, Liza. Not for the moment.”

  “Yes! This moment! Someone else might get onto it. They’re pretty sure to if you’re not making a secret of it. I’ve got a vacant slot in my program this afternoon.”

  “Play a Spice Girls record. Anything but me.”

  “Matt, I know you’re not a newsperson by training—”

  Matthew breathed a “Thank God” and said: “There will be no media coverage of this by us or by anyone else until I’ve told the children. That is not negotiable.”

  “When are you telling them?”

  “Tonight, if the circumstances are right.”

  “There you are, then,” said Liza, putting her inadequately skirted leg on one of the chairs at their table and reassuming an air of good nature. “Let’s do the interview now: you can tell the story quite simply, and I’ll put it in tomorrow’s show if you give me the go-ahead. Don’t you want to find out who this poor kid was? You’re not going to do that without publicity, I’d be willing to bet.”

  She nearly ruined her case by using the word “kid.” Matt distrusted educated people who did that—people like both the main political leaders in the country. They would never use it except to sound like men of the people.But her final remarks went home. They were surely not going to get anywhere without publicity.

  “Look, Liza, I’m busy at the moment. When I’ve got a spare minute I’ll get in touch with the police, see what their reaction is. If Sergeant Peace gives it the OK, I’ll ring you—say about half past three.”

  Liza Pomfret removed her leg from the chair, put her hands splayed downward on the table, and fixed Matt with her world-hardened teenage eyes.

  “Matt, I want it done now, while it’s hot. ”

  “Sorry, Liza, I’m busy,” said Matt, getting up. He fixed her with his equally determined eyes. “No way are you going to talk to me about it before three o’clock.”

  Liza’s chat show on Radio Leeds ran from two to three. She got his point immediately, turned, and marched out of the canteen. Matt turned to his producer.

  “Defeat of the infant commissar,” he said. He was rather liking the idea of a war of attrition between him and Liza.

  When he rang Charlie Peace soon after three, Charlie took a few moments to think it over, then said, “On the whole I think it’s a good idea. This isn’t any ordinary case. We’re going to need all the assistance from the public we can get. If we take it that it was twenty, thirty years ago the body got there, then most or all of the people living in those houses then will be scattered around West Yorkshire now, or very likely out of the area entirely.People don’t
stay put the way they used to. This could be a way of getting in touch with them.”

  Very reluctantly Matthew rang Liza Pomfret and told her he’d be along to record an interview at quarter to four. Then he turned to Vic Talbot.

  “If she tries to get any part of the interview on to one of the TV or radio news programs tonight, send her away with a flea in her ear. If you stand firm, I’ll do an interview for the ‘Look North’ program tomorrow. If you cave in, that’s the end of the subject as far as I’m concerned.”

  When he took himself along to the “Liza Pomfret Talk-In” studio at a quarter to four, she was very cool and businesslike, and said she’d just ask a wide-open question and let him tell the story in his own way. Wanna bet? Matt said to himself. He sat down while she fiddled and made Führer-like gestures to the technician on the other side of the glass panel.

  “I’ve got Matthew Harper here,” Liza began in her bright, hard voice. “Most of our listeners, and viewers too, will know him from our sports and news broadcasts. You played football for—where was it?”

  “Bradford City. For seven years.”

  “Right. Now, Matt, you had an experience yesterday that was way outside your football experience, didn’t you? More Jane Eyre than . . .” But here she stopped. The idea of the attic had triggered Jane Eyre, but the football field didn’t trigger the name of any work of fiction. “Well, just tell the listeners, will you, Matt?”

  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 . . . !”