The Bones in the Attic (23 page)

It was half past six. Carl Farson, the estate agent had told him, was manager of one of the branches of Freshfare, the supermarket chain. If he was on the evening roster Matt was out of luck, but there was a light on at the end of the hallway and when he rang he heard footsteps almost at once.

“Oh—it's Mr. Harper, isn't it?”

“Matt, please. Are you busy?”

“No, not at all. Just finished my meal—one of our own convenience foods, I'm afraid, with a convenience pudding to follow. I never learned to cook while I was married, and I've never bothered to learn since we split up. Come on through.”

Not interested in his home, not interested in his food. Matt wondered idly what button you would have to press to get from him commitment, involvement, enthusiasm. What sort of buff was he? Snooker, darts, the Masons, table-tapping, steam locomotives? He came into a room where a bit of minor untidiness was the only relief from the prevailing anonymity. The television was showing “Look North,” and Carl Farson reached to switch it off.

“You're not on tonight, then?”

“I usually only do fill-ins,” said Matt. “Though there's talk of something a bit more challenging.”

“I've not seen anything recently about this baby business,” said Farson, looking him in the eyes.

“No. There's been nothing that could be broadcast. Really, we could only tell the full story if we had a trial and a conviction, and I don't think that's on the cards. But it's about that, that I've come.”

“I thought it might be. But I think you'll be wasting your time. I know so little about those houses. . . .”

“I realize that. Just to fill you in: we think that the baby was taken from her father in Armley Park, taken back to Houghton Avenue, there was some kind of struggle over it between two of the children who lived in those houses, in the course of which it fell onto the stone balustrade at the front of Dell View and was killed instantly.”

“I see. . . . You've done good work.”

“The thing I'm interested in is why the child took the baby in the first place. It was just one of the group who did the snatch. It seems she had come under some very strong external influence. Let's not beat about the bush: let's say a malign influence.”

Carl Farson's face was a mask of thought. By his side in the armchair his hands started clutching and unclutching themselves. He saw Matt noticing them, and stopped.

“And?”

“This particular child was visiting during the day a house off the Raynville Road on a regular basis. It was a matter of comment—smutty speculation—among the other children. The house was eight Leighton Terrace.”

“Yes.” Something like a sigh escaped him. “I suppose that would be the reason you've come.”

“Were you still living there at the time?” Matt asked.

He shook his head emphatically.

“No. I married when I was twenty-five. We were still pretty much in the lovebird stage in 1969, with a new baby. Sad . . .”

“And your father is, I suppose, beyond questioning now?”

“Oh, yes, mostly. Even on his best days you couldn't get anything out of him about what happened in 1969. You might as well say 1469 or 69
B.C.
In any case, at that time, as I think I told you, my father was still working.”

Matt creased his brow.

“I think you did. But I don't see your point.”

“My father did not work as a night watchman or a night manager in a hotel. Apart from weekends he was never there during the day.”

“And you were married—” A dim shaft of light shone in Matt's brain. “Someone mentioned a daughter.”

“My sister, Nesta.” He shifted uneasily in his chair. “She died last year, so I can tell you about her. Even so, it's not easy.”

“If she was the person who had this child under her influence, then I'd guess she wasn't an easy person,” Matt said gently.

“She wasn't. It's funny, I always felt slightly scared of her, even though she was a year younger than me. Later on I tried to tell myself that it was jealousy, not fear: she got on, made something of herself, in a small way made a name. But it wasn't that. Almost from the first it was uneasiness. She never wanted to inspire love in people—not in our dad, not even in our mam, who died when I was about fifteen. She preferred to arouse uneasiness, shading off into fear. You never knew where you were with Nesta. And she
came out with things that nobody else could ever have found words for: things about yourself, things about our background, how it held her back, locked her in. . . . She was bitter, she specialized in saying nasty things that you suspected might be true, but were better left unsaid. There was no doubt she was bright. With other bright kids you might say ‘bright as a button,' but she wasn't bright like that. She was sharp as a knife.”

Matt suspected that this was the key that had to be turned to unlock Carl Farson's mind, the thing that had obsessed him, rankled with him, and had done all his childhood and throughout his adult life. His sister was a phenomenon he had wrestled with, tried to get to the bottom of. And probably failed.

“I can see she was rather an unnerving family member to have,” he said.

“She was terrifying at times,”
Farson said abruptly. Then he swallowed. “Anyway, she got a place at a teachers' college. She could have gone to university, but she said we couldn't afford it. I think Father could have managed it, and there were grants then, but I think she wanted the shorter course and the independence it would give her earlier. She did psychology and PE, and came top of her year. I remember reading her references from college once, and was surprised at a certain lack of enthusiasm that seeped through, as though they were holding something back. But it didn't stop her getting a good job as games mistress at a good private school near Harrogate.”

“And was there trouble there?”

“Not in the way I think you mean. Not that I knew of. She'd been there teaching for two years when she had a bad accident in the gym: she fell from a climbing rope, or
rather it wasn't properly secured and she fell with it and injured her spine very badly. She was in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.”

“I think I'm beginning to understand,” said Matt, getting a sense of a fiery, awkward, contradictory spirit horribly imprisoned.

“She got good compensation—good for that time, when they didn't hand out small fortunes at the drop of a hat. It was handled by Morley-Coombs in Armley, and he was brilliant. There was no doubt it was part of the caretaker's job to set up and maintain the gym equipment, not my sister's. But there she was, back in a home she hated, spending day after day in the front room, watching people pass by, listening to the radio, doing the crossword in the paper. ‘Being banged up,' she called it.”

“I can't imagine the girl you have described really being content with that. There must have been escape routes.”

“There were, of a kind. She enrolled for an Open University course the moment it started up. The major component was philosophy. She did incredibly well, got special help, and eventually—but this was several years after the year you're interested in—got a job with them. They put her in a special flat in Milton Keynes, with all the aids to independence you could think of, and she learned easily to do most things for herself. Yes, she made her escape.”

“But that left her emotional life unsatisfied.”

Carl Farson considered this.

“I think may be her emotional life was always going to be a problem, accident or no accident. There was talk when she was on the staff at Milton Keynes about an unhealthy influence on students, but it never came to anything, because of course they were all adults, and presumed to be
capable of taking care of themselves. More serious, when this ‘political correctness' idea came in, there were complaints that she was peddling obnoxious ideas in her lectures and seminars. They had some kind of inquiry or official hearing into those complaints.”

“I suppose this was notions of racial purity, was it? Eugenics, I think they used to call it.”

“That and other things. Denying the Holocaust, what she called the paralysis of democracy, sterilization of the unfit.”

“They all seem to point in a certain direction.”

“Yes. But Nesta argued that she threw around other arguments of a quite different political color, but they didn't arouse the same ire in the ‘political correctness' people. And Nesta was clever—she probably did. In any case her answer was that it was her business to test students' responses to ideas, to float apparently outrageous theories in front of them, to stimulate their reactions and test their philosophical judgments. Students needed to know, she said, why notions that were perfectly acceptable in one generation could become intellectually beyond the pale in the next. I'm sorry if I'm not explaining this very well. I'm rather out of my depth.”

“Far from it. I think you must have heard her talking about it, didn't you?”

“Only now and then. But when she did, I certainly remembered it. Nesta had a hold on me, you might say. She wasn't a frequent visitor back home, as you might guess. Her physical condition made visits difficult unless she was fetched, but in the early days Dad could drive down and get her, or I could. It didn't happen often. She wasn't really interested. But by the way, if she did come up to Leeds, you
could be sure she'd go and visit Lily Fitch, as she had become.”

“I see. So we can be open about who we're talking about.”

“Oh, yes. She was the favorite among the disciples. ‘Acolytes,' Nesta used to call them. I had to go and look the word up. The acolytes started back in the late sixties, the time you're interested in. They were all children: early teens or a bit later. First it was doing errands for her, for small sums of money—things from the butcher's or grocer's, magazines from the newsagent's. Then may be it was into town for library books. And soon she had them in her coils. Don't ask me how, don't ask me what they did together: I think there was a sexual dimension, but I've no evidence of it. And if there was, it wasn't the really important aspect. That was filling their minds with her ideas: taking a sort of mental control, and then using it to its fullest extent. I suppose Nesta would be called a control freak these days.”

“I think she would,” Matt said. “Were you never with them when they were together, she and Lily? So that you could get an idea what the relationship depended on?”

“Never—only if I happened to be visiting, opening the door and showing Lily through to her, that kind of thing. . . . I did once listen.”

“Outside the door?”

“Window, actually. One summer much later on, in Elderholm. Those houses, though they're attached, are very private, shielded—as of course you'd know. In any case Nesta could hardly run out and catch me at it, and Lily was just a visitor. Still, I felt pretty scared, I can tell you, just like when I was a boy.”

His voice faded into silence. Matt waited, but then had to prompt him.

“When was this?”

“Late seventies, I'd say. When she was back on one of her rare visits from Milton Keynes, and Lily was a mother, with a child just starting school. They were talking about the things you've mentioned, and it was almost as if Nesta was giving her a sort of refresher course. She always had a lot of the teacher in her—or preacher, you might say, preacher of a particularly twisted kind. I heard her say: ‘In the long term sterilization is probably the answer. In the short term, it has to be human extermination.' My blood ran cold. It brought back all those terrible pictures of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. . . .”