The Bones in the Attic (22 page)

“But what was she planning to do with Bella?” asked
Matt. “I can hardly believe what she'd been talking about was anything but talk.”

“She was planning to take her down to ‘my friend.'”

“Whom you didn't know the identity of.”

Peter hesitated, and Marjie chipped in with “Not then.”

“So Marjie started saying we should go to the police, or ring them, and Lily started crying, and saying, ‘You can't. I'll be arrested.' And we dithered . . . fatally . . . until at last Marjie said, ‘I'm going to ring them anyway.'”

“If only we'd just gone, as a gang, a group, and taken the poor little mite from her,” said Marjie, anguish in her voice.

“But we weren't a gang, weren't united,” said Peter. “There were those who were on her side: Rory Pemberton for a start, and Colin Mather too. What happened next has been in all my nightmares since—probably in all our nightmares. Marjie started off in the direction of her house—”

“Sandringham.”

“Yes. But she'd only gone a few steps when Lily grabbed the baby from the pushchair and started off toward the road. I took a step toward her to stop her, but the nearest to her was Eddie. He had been horrified by all this talk that was going on, talk about people not breeding, the future of the race, and crap like that. Eddie'd had a baby sister who died. He rushed forward and began tussling with her to get the baby from her. Rory Pemberton ran over to drag him off her. That's when it happened.”

Peter looked at Matt. Matt felt he was being willed to supply the words Peter left unsaid, words he didn't want to supply. He remained silent. Peter had to go on.

“The fight only lasted a second or two. Bella fell onto the
balustrade, on her head. She'd been crying, and suddenly the cries stopped. We just stood there, gaping. When we went to pick her up, she was dead. But we'd all known that anyway.”

“I don't suppose we need to go into our feelings,” said Marjie. “After a time, after all the recriminations, and there were plenty of those, we had to decide what to do. Lily wanted to take the body down to her friend's, but that seemed horrible to us: like a cat bringing a dead rat home as a sign of its hunting prowess. We said we'd be on the phone to the police the moment she started down the gill. Somehow that transferred the onus of what to do on to us. Lily began to get terrified we were going to ‘dob her in,' as she kept calling it. We couldn't hide from the police the fact that she had taken the baby, and she knew it. And yet after a time we began to think that the last people hippie squatters would go to would be the police. We began to think that though we couldn't deal with the squatters, may be Lily's ‘friend' could. We sent her off to try to fix that, and we'd somehow or other conceal the body.”

“And you decided to put it in the attic of the house you were looking after for Mrs. Beeston,” Matt said to Marjie. She looked down into her lap.

“It seemed the best thing. It seems fantastic now, but remember we were just children. We thought of throwing the body into the canal, but that was too horrible, and we thought it would be dragged if the disappearance became official. I had the key, and I went in every day to give an appearance of its being lived in, and I aired it periodically, so if there was a smell, open windows wouldn't cause any comment among the neighbors.”

“It was mad,” said Peter.

“Yes, it was mad. But we knew Mrs. Beeston, who was arthritic, would never go up there, couldn't if she'd wanted to. So after a bit it seemed the sensible thing to do.”

“We took the body up there,” said Peter, “just Marjie and me and Eddie, and we laid it out at the far end, behind the little raised walls, and we thought even if anyone went up to the attic, no one would go to that bit. We thought something more was needed, so Eddie said a prayer. He was the only churchgoer.”

“Then we stood around awkwardly for a moment,” said Marjie. “Not knowing what to do, feeling we couldn't just leave the poor little body. Suddenly Eddie sort of exploded in tears and—oh,
cries
they were, like a wild beast. He stumbled down the ladder, ran out of the house, and to his own home, and really he was never the same again. He'd never associate with us, feeling terrible guilt, I suppose.” She stopped, and there was a few seconds' silence, as if for the dead baby. Peter took up the story.

“And in fact the whole gang broke up, quite quickly. We just didn't want to be with one another, didn't want the sort of feelings and recollections the others brought back to us. I suppose what we wanted was to avoid guilt by association.”

“I see.” Matt sat for a long time, then looked at his watch. “I have to go. I can't leave the children waiting around after a football match. . . . One thing bothers me.”

“Yes.”

“The parents. The hippies. I'm taking it they disappeared that night. I know from their neighbor that's what happened at some point. How was that managed?”

“We don't know in detail,” said Peter. “But Lily said her friend had managed it. When we talked it over we thought
there must have been talk of a ‘tragic accident,' of not wanting the children's lives ruined by a piece of carelessness, and perhaps of money changing hands. But that was one problem we couldn't have handled ourselves. We were just glad someone had done it for us.”

Somehow the parting could not be the same as the reunion. The joy had gone, the worm had entered the rose, and the worm's name was suspicion: Peter and Marjie were uncertain how far their version of events had been accepted, and they were right to be so.

“We'll meet up again when all this is over,” said Matt, wanting to make it clear this was not the end. “Then we can be more . . . more as we were.”

“May be,” said Marjie. “A little more as we were.” She knew, and Peter knew, that their lives had changed forever on that day in late August 1969.

They embraced again and Matt went back to the car. He was thoughtful on the way back to Nottingham, but then the problems of dealing with a departing football crowd took his mind off other things. The children, when he picked them up, were so exuberant, even Lewis, that he had no chance to retreat into pensiveness, and the mood remained rowdy over four massive platefuls of pizza—Lewis nicely balanced quantity and quality in his choice of pizza chain.

It was only at night, when the children had finally sunk exhausted into bed, that Matt sat in his favorite chair, with a can of beer, and went through the day's new information. And when he did, he became still more certain than before that something, may be
the
vital thing, had been left out.

“I believed them as a working hypothesis,” he replied. “It will do to be going on with. . . . On the purely human level I felt myself rather often being looked at—quick glances, you know?—to see if I was accepting the tale.”

“Hmm. That's not necessarily conclusive,” Charlie said, being judicious if not actually judicial. “They may have been conditioned since that day to a belief that their story would
not
be accepted. They couldn't account for the baby-snatch without bringing Lily's ‘friend' into it, and his belief that some people should not be allowed to breed. That being on the table, a death that's pure accident starts to seem distinctly unlikely.”

“But not impossible. None of those children had brothers or sisters who were babies, so none of them had any training in how to treat them. They seem to have fought
over it as if it were a doll. But you're right, and I'll believe the story they told me until I have reason to do otherwise. These are two seriously nice people, and if they're lying or holding something back it's to protect someone else, not themselves.”

“What are you going to do next? Contact the Farsons, I suppose.”

“Has to be. I'm expecting Aileen back in the next few days, so I'll leave it till after then. In any case, I doubt there'll be any point in talking to the father. . . . You know, I should have latched on to him much earlier—we both should.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Here's someone who moves from a modest house to a much larger and a rather more prestigious place when he's approaching retirement age. People don't do that. Wife or husband dead, children leaving home, you start looking for a place that will be
less
trouble, usually a bungalow, something much cheaper to maintain and run. That's what Mrs. Beeston did. It should have been what Farson did, but instead he went in the opposite direction.”

“Point taken,” Charlie agreed. “But if we're suggesting that he bought the house to make sure no one else discovered what was in the attic, then that creates another problem, doesn't it?”

“Yes, it does. Why didn't he dispose of it while he lived here?”

“Was he physically capable of getting up there?”

“I think so. The Goldblatts talked of him working in the garden right up to the time he started losing the plot and doing it in his pajamas. And if he couldn't get up there, what was the reason for buying the house?”

“To make sure no one else did in his lifetime,” said Charlie.

“That's a point.”

“But you need to think this through before you go and see the younger Farson. You mustn't think you can go on a sort of fishing trip using half-baked allegations as bait. Better than that would be a simple, open-minded talk aimed at getting information, painting in the whole picture.”

“Thanks, Grandmother,” said Matt genially. “You know, one day I hope you have a really serious case involving football and footballers—not the current bunch of yobs misbehaving at nightclubs, but something really baffling.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Then you can call me in as consultant, and I can be as condescending to you as you are on this case to me.”

“Well! And I thought I was just being of help.”

Thinking things through over the next few days was hardly on the agenda. Matt and the children were getting increasingly excited about Aileen's return, and on Tuesday evening they had the call they'd been waiting for: she was in Johannesburg, and would be boarding a plane for Manchester in three and a half hours' time. Elderholm went ballistic with delight, and when Matt tried to calm the children down and form them into a sort of Pioneer Corps to put the house in some kind of order, their resistance was total.

“Mummy's not going to care one little bit if the house looks a tip,” said Isabella, and Matt had to admit that she was right. He busied himself doing all the obvious things to make the place look fairly tidy, more for something to be doing than for any other reason, and the children went into
the garden and managed to pick a great bunch of Mr. Farson's perennials, accepting contributions from Mrs. Goldblatt's more kempt and couth garden to make a monster display in the only large glass vase they could find. Matt silently agreed it did more for the house than his cleanup.

Next morning Matt rang the two schools in Pudsey the children attended, and said their mother was coming home after three months' absence and he was taking them to meet her. When one school demurred he said they'd been very unsettled by her absence, he not being their father, and he felt it important they actually meet her on her homecoming—“so that the process of bonding can begin again,” he actually said, feeling a terrible phony. The school caved in immediately. They had more than enough problem children from broken relationships, and they felt obliged to be supportive where it seemed necessary.

They all packed into the car, including Beckham, who loved long journeys and controlled his urinary weakness remarkably well on them. Matt had always thought airports were hell on earth, and though many people said Manchester was several cuts above Heathrow or Gatwick, to Matt it was a pretty standard sort of hellhole. Still, they were able to take Beckham into the arrivals area, registered that Aileen's plane was only half an hour delayed, and settled down to junk food and coffee. They were by the passageway leading out of customs at least half an hour before Aileen could reasonably have been expected to get
through, surveying the streams of passengers as they emerged. Stephen even demanded of one lot whether they were off the Johannesburg plane, and had they seen his mother. His siblings pretended they weren't with him.

And then there she was. Wheeling a single suitcase, as she had when she left, and with an old airline bag slung over her shoulder, she marched out into freedom looking so pleased, and tired, and excited, and desirable that Matt could hardly bear to let the children go first and jump up and kiss her, scream their ecstasy at seeing her again, take her case, push Beckham's whiskery nose in her face, and generally forget all about Matt.

“Time's up!” he announced commandingly, and folded Aileen into his arms in a long, long kiss and embrace that almost had him whimpering with pleasure and relief. And certainly when he held her at arm's length to get a good look at her, her cheeks were blotchy, though she also looked wonderfully happy.

“Celebratory drink, or home?” he asked.

“Home. I've had enough of those damned little bottles,” Aileen said.

So it was back to the car, with Beckham in the luggage area this time, his old place, and a return to the motorway, through the gloom of Saddleworth moors, the spiritual backdrop to mass murder, then over the border into Yorkshire, with lots of singing, innumerable questions, and all too many bad jokes treasured up from the playground, then finally the horror of the Armley gyratory and home.

It occurred to Matt, as he got them all inside, that not one of their questions had been about their father.

He'd prepared a meal before they left, of lamb chops and fresh peas, that could be ready in half an hour at the touch
of a few switches. At nine o'clock Stephen fell asleep on the sofa, and by half past the older children were unashamedly wilting too. When he and Aileen were alone Matt poured two glasses of wine, looked at her, and said, “You do like the house?”

“Love it. Matt?”

“Yes?”

“Do you want to get married? Somehow?”

“Don't give a damn. We are married.”

“I love you so much.”

And then it was back together, the first time in what seemed an age, and endless pleasure and sleepiness. Matt had cunningly arranged two days free by swaps with colleagues, and when the children had been got off to school next day it was back to bed, more lovemaking, and then lots of talk. Most of it was about the children, but one little bit was about the dead baby. When Matt had brought Aileen up-to-date, she said, “I can tell from your voice that you're not entirely satisfied. You want to believe what they told you, because you like them so much, but there's something—I don't know—something that doesn't gel, isn't there?”

“Yes. But I can't pin down precisely what it is.”

Aileen lay there, considering.

“I'm not sure I can pin it down, but I see what you mean. I can understand all the stuff about poor Eddie Armitage. Feeling that he was responsible for the baby's death was enough to send a boy already pretty unsure of himself over the edge. . . . Is it the conspiracy to protect Lily Marsden that doesn't gel?”

“Not in itself, I don't think. Peter was always by nature a protector. I used to feel that. If there was any chance of
Lily being taken to court on a serious charge—at the least kidnapping Bella—then I think both he and Marjie would persuade the others to gang up to protect her.”

“Then is it his reluctance to give a name to her friend, even though it seems he and Marjie know it now?”

“No, it's not that. You couldn't accuse the friend without accusing Lily too, even if the influence he had would lessen her guilt—a strong personality twisting an under-aged and unhappy girl. You might just accuse Lily and keep the friend out of it, but you couldn't do the reverse.”

“I suppose not. . . . It beats me. A collection of adults who don't particularly like one another, who have had little or nothing to do with one another for thirty years,
except
this conspiracy to keep stum about the baby.”

“But that
is
a very important matter. Have you or I had anything remotely as important in our lives, let alone our
young
lives? It was potentially a murder or a manslaughter charge. I can see that, once the conspiracy was entered into, it was vital to keep it up.”

“There's only one thing to do.”

“What's that?”

“Go and talk to the younger Mr. Farson.”

“He's all of sixty. But you're right. That's where the answers are. I've just got to get my mind around the right way to approach him, Charlie says.”

It was a week later—the happiest week of his life, Matt thought—that his car pulled up outside Carl Farson's gate. He had been given the address in the correspondence over the purchase of Elderholm, but it had meant nothing to him. It was, he now saw, a house for people who didn't bother about their house. It was one of a collection of boxes, probably built in the last five years, varying slightly
in size, offering the buyer a choice between a triangular arch or a flat slab over the front door, but otherwise a machine to live in, in the most soulless and dispiriting meaning of that phrase. Only the vicinity of Farnley Park gave the estate even the faintest semblance of desirability. The ridiculous thing was, these houses had probably not been cheap.