The Bones in the Attic (15 page)

“What can you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. And Isabella's not the only one who wonders how a Catholic regards her not-even-in-name-ex husband.”

“Any message?”

“Said to ring him. And can we have a chat about your slot tonight? I wondered whether you'd like to man a phone afterward to collect any information that comes in.”

“I would, but—” Matt felt greatly tempted, but his experience with Isabella made him wary of seeming to neglect the children. “The thing is, it could go on forever. I suppose it wouldn't be possible to have the children in here, would it? They're very interested in the case, naturally. The fact is, one of them's missing her mother, and I've only just realized how upset she is. I wouldn't want to leave them alone till late on.”

“Don't see why they shouldn't come in. Square it with the powers that be.”

“I will, so long as that doesn't mean you-know-who.”

“The teenage bride of Frankenstein? Not yet, thank God, not yet.”

When Matt rang Charlie he was at his most sardonic.

“We've got him in the cells, Matt. I sweated blood to get permission to follow him up—it's been a quiet weekend, thank the Lord. When we went out to Bingley to speak to him he was already well into the hair of the dog, and he got obstreperous, which I wasn't altogether upset about. It means we could bring him in, and at the moment he's cooling his heels in the cells. . . . How do you cool your heels?”

“I suppose it's after you've been caught in a chase. When do you expect to talk to him?”

“Hmm—well, I'm not hurrying it. You've talked to him drunk, so I'll try him sober. Sober takes time. We've got the best drying-out clinic in the world here—it beats the Betty Ford into a cocked hat.”

“Except that when you let them out they go straight to a pub.”

“Nothing's perfect. Our results may be a little shortterm, but they serve our purposes.”

“How long are you going to leave him?”

“How long does it take to sober up after a lifetime's soaking? By rights we ought to give him a week at least, but there are rules about these things. I'll give him another three hours or so, then see how it goes.”

“Ask him about a family of squatters living just off the Raynville Road.”

When Matt went along to talk to Phil Bletchley he stressed that he wanted to keep all his options open. Ideally he wanted to twitch all sorts of memories in the viewers, particularly people who had lived around
Houghton Avenue and the Raynville Road, and then dredge them in and sort them through.

“The new information—new line of inquiry, rather”—he corrected himself—“is about a pair of squatters, hippyish types, who took over a house in the vicinity at the time, the summer of sixty-nine, and had a baby.”

“The baby in question?”

“May be,” said Matt in a way that emphasized his desire for caution. “But I shan't exclude anyone who just wants to talk about the houses in Houghton Avenue—the people who lived there, and particularly the children. I'd like to know what happened to them later. You have a much larger catchment area than Radio Leeds, so we could easily pick up something about one of them who has moved away but has stayed in the north.”

“One of the children themselves, may be?”

Matt thought.

“Somehow I doubt it. I'm getting a feeling of a vow of silence that somehow or other they've maintained. I'm also getting the feeling of some kind of outside influence.”

“What do you mean? Not witchcraft?” said Phil Bletchley feelingly. “I can't stand another spate of witchcraft stories. Sacrificial babies along with eye of newt and toe of frog.”

“No whisper of that yet. All options are open.”

“But you're talking about a person, are you? Not just the zeitgeist, but someone spurring the children on?”

“Yes. Or cleverly pulling their strings. Finding the way their developing minds work and then applying gentle pressures or dangling subtle inducements.”

“Have you any evidence these children's minds were working in the direction of killing a baby?”

“No.” Matt sighed. “Not really. I may be talking about one or two of them, not the whole bunch. The only concrete thing I have is a memory of talk about some people who shouldn't be allowed to have babies.”

Phil raised his eyebrows, then leapt in on that.

“A memory? Is there something about this story that you haven't been telling us, Matt?”

“Yes. I knew these children. I was around in the summer of sixty-nine.”

“Up from the smoke?”

“Refugee from East Enderville. Staying with my auntie Hettie while my mother recovered from a botched hysterectomy, as I now know.”

“Right. And are you going to let this out tonight?”

“I've thought about that. I don't rule it out for the future, but I think now is too soon. Better to leave it as a police investigation, sparked off by the discovery of the bones. Getting in the personal element at this stage might frighten somebody who'd be better left in a state of comparative serenity.”

“Fair enough. So you are thinking of one of the children in particular, are you?”

“May be. I have had an unsigned letter. Or there's that shadowy figure in the background, applying the pressure or pulling the strings. I'd really love to hear about him.”

“I've been to breweries that smelled better,” whispered
WPC Younger, who was sitting in with Charlie. Pemberton fixed them with a savage stare.

“I'm getting my lawyer on to you, you know that, don't you? Wrongful detention, that's what this has been. It's been downright persecution.”

“Why should we want to persecute you, Mr. Pemberton?” asked Charlie sweetly.

“That's what I'm bloody waiting to find out.”

“Fair enough.” Charlie read the mantra into the tape, and then sat facing him, wishing they'd used an air freshener before they called him in. “I'm questioning you about the death of a baby some thirty-odd years ago in the Bramley area.”

“Taken your bloody time to get round to it, haven't you?”

“The bones of the baby were discovered three weeks ago in the attic of Elderholm, one of the houses in Houghton Avenue where you lived thirty years ago.”

“Me and a lot of others.”

“Exactly,” said Charlie equably. “We have already questioned Lily Fitch, or Marsden, as she then was. Now we're questioning you.”

A shade had passed over Rory's face at the mention of Lily's name. However, he stuck with aggressiveness as his best bet.

“Well, you're wasting your time. I know bugger-all about it, so you're wasting my time as well.”

“But on Friday night you were talking to a visitor to your house, Matt Harper, about a long-ago dead baby.”

This time he was really puzzled, but he was frightened too. His brow creased, and for a long time he said nothing.

“Visitor?”

“Not someone you know, or not someone you know well, at any rate. He called on you the night I believe your partner left the house.”

He stuck out his bottom lip.

“Vara? That cow? Good riddance.”

“You were drunk at the time, and you talked about an incident in the past in which a baby died.”

Pemberton spread out his hands in a gesture of feigned matiness.

“Well, there you are. I was drunk. When I'm drunk all sorts of nonsense goes through my mind. That's all there is to it.”

“I don't think so,” said Charlie, still soft and low-key. “You're drunk most of the day, but you seem to be able to function as some kind of freelance financial speculator. I feel pretty sure that when you were talking about a dead baby you were remembering the real world, an actual baby that you had seen.”

“Well, search me. You say I'm drunk most of the time. Probably I saw it when I was drunk. Some kind of road accident, may be.”

“You don't drive, do you, sir?”

“No, I do not drive. I'm driven. When I was being driven I could have seen a dead baby in a car accident.”

His voice had become irritable again, as if he were talking to an idiot.

“I'd prefer to connect a dead baby in one of the houses where you used to live with the memory you had on Friday of a dead baby. Then you mentioned a balustrade where the baby lay. The houses in Houghton Avenue have little balustrades in the front, with two or three steps down to the front gardens.”

“So what? Windsor bloody Castle has balustrades. The Palace of bloody Versailles has balustrades.”

“I don't think it was at Windsor or Versailles that you saw a dead baby lying on a balustrade,” said Charlie.

It was an exceptionally newsless Monday, so he got a good position on the program, around twenty to seven. He was interviewed by Patrick Priest, one of the stalwarts of the local news programs, and a good friend. With the children watching thirstily from a sofa in a far recess of the studio he went over the story of the bones in the attic, suggested the likely date of the baby's death, and made clear the area of Leeds that he and the police were interested in. Then he got to the new possibilities.

“We're pretty sure that at that time—1969, remember—there was a little family of squatters—I think the locals called them hippies—living illegally in a house in the area. Man, woman, and baby.”

“
The
baby?” asked Patrick as agreed beforehand.

“May be, may be not. We're making no assumptions. The three were squatting, we think, in a house on one of the small roads leading off from Raynville Road in the summer of 1969.”