The Bones in the Attic (13 page)

“Don't have to watch it now I'm on my own,” he said, almost as if talking to himself. Matt was doubtful whether watching it had ever had any effect on his intake. He was doubtful too whether he had any idea whom he was talking to, but he was glad when, having weaved across the room and sat down carefully, almost like an old man, in
his bloated armchair, he said, “Lily Marsden.” His voice seemed to come as if from some ancient, distant telephone line.

“What sort of relationship
did
you have with her?” Matt asked. The question seemed to puzzle Rory, and required cogitation.

“No different from any of the others. Except that we neither of us were liked. It was
them
I wanted to be part of. She never wanted that. She teased them . . . not
teased
exactly. Not in a nice way. But she knew she wasn't liked, and she . . . dangled things in front of them.”

“Things? What do you mean? She wasn't any better off than the others, was she?”

“Not
things
like that. Not material posh . . . possessions. Why do people always sneer at material . . .
things,
eh? Eh? I've always loved material . . .” His voice faded.

“But what did Lily dangle before the others?”

“What did Lily dangle? Sounds like a dirty joke. . . .
Who?”

“Lily Marsden. Whom you used to play with as a child. You said she used to dangle things in front of everyone.”

“She did. . . . We thought she was terrible. We thought she used to take her clothes off for money. Weren't we naive? It seems like another world. These days all of us boys would be having it off with her. These days girls of her age are on the streets of Bradford and Leeds, all organized, and with their own pimps. I've—”

But Matt didn't want to hear about his personal delinquencies.

“Do you think she did take her clothes off for money?”

“Don't know. It's what we thought. I expect she wanted
us to think that. . . . But then she came up with this other thing. And of course we were horrified . . . at first.”

He was going off into a hazed, dazed, drunken mood of reminiscence, but there was about his face, pouched and bloated as it was, the wisp of an expression of horror and fear.

“But only at first?” Matt pressed him. But Rory wasn't going to be pressed. The expression never left his face, and it was a long time before he spoke again.

“The thing, lying there.”

Matt had to suppress his irritation at the abundance of “things” in the drunken man's thoughts.

“The thing?”

“
Not
a thing!” Rory said abruptly, almost angrily. “The baby. Lying by the balustrade. Almost as if it were asleep.”

“But it wasn't.”

“It was like it was laid out. You couldn't see the wound on the back of its head. Her head. It just had a few scraps of clothing on—it was a hot day. And someone had wrapped it in a shawl, and it lay there like it was on a bed. Like it was just asleep. That's how I remember it.” There was pain on his face as his voice faded into silence.

“And how did it get there?”

Pemberton looked ahead. The expression, as the memory faded, lost its horror, and became merely glazed, as it had come and then faded perhaps a thousand times in his life.

“
How
had it got there?” Matt asked urgently.

The eyes closed, then suddenly the heavy body fell forward, the drink falling out of his hand and spilling over the
chair and carpet. Matt darted forward to retrieve the glass, and realized that the chair had several stains on it, all but the new one dried. Looking around he realized there were other stains on the beige carpet, as if a puppy were being trained. But it wasn't a puppyish sort of household. Rory Pemberton, clearly, made a habit of drinking himself into insensibility.

Matt stood there, wondering what to do. First he took the glass out to the kitchen, where the detritus of several days' glasses and plates testified to Rory's woman's growing dissatisfaction. Matt sympathized with her obvious determination not to spend her life cleaning up after her man. When he went back into the living room Rory was still slumped forward in his chair. Matt meditated moving him to the sofa, but decided his weight would make that more trouble than it was worth. In the end he just straightened him so he slept upright in his chair, then he left the room with the lights still on. Pemberton would wake up as he was used to waking up. The fact that he no longer had a woman would worry him much less than if he no longer had a bottle.

In the hall Matt paused for a moment. Was it worth making a brief search of the rest of the house? A moment's thought told him that it was not. The study, if there was one, would contain details of his latest financial coup, not the doings of a gang of children thirty years ago. The only record of those doings in this house was in the troubled brain of the unlikable man slumped in his wet chair in the plush living room.

Matt let himself out into the twilight.

The next day he spoke to Charlie. He was at home,
having a rare weekend off, and baby noises of pleasure and grievance marked his side of the conversation. At the end of Matt's account of his evening at Bingley, Charlie thought for a moment or two.

“Right. I think I've absorbed all that. Let's get a few things straight. This Pemberton mentioned a baby, and described it lying dead by a balustrade.”

“I don't think the word ‘dead' was used. He said it lay there as if it were asleep.”

“Right. And you didn't get out of him how it came to be there, or whether he was responsible.”

“No. He keeled over at that point.”

“Right. He sounds like my idea of a nightmare witness.
But he did call the baby ‘she'?”

“Yes, definitely.”

Charlie thought for a moment. Clearly he was uncertain how important the new information was—if, indeed, it was information at all.

“And throughout this conversation the man was drunk.”

“Oh, yes, no question.”

“That doesn't help, of course.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“He can say he remembers nothing about it, that he was just talking nonsense. That's what plenty of drunks do. We couldn't pin him down on things said in his cups.”

“I'm afraid you'd have to get there very early in the morning to find him sober, and then he'd be ferociously hungover.”

“If necessary we could try doing that. He might benefit from a couple of hours in the cells.”

“You think that's possible?”

He could feel Charlie shaking his head in doubt.

“I just don't know. I have to justify every hour I spend on this case. It's getting old and stale.”

“It always was.”

“Ah, yes, but three weeks with no great progress makes it doubly so. If there'd been a stink at the time, with relatives who were still around to kick up a fuss, then there might be some slight urgency, or some pretense of it. But a dead baby who nobody even knew was missing? Forget it.”

“It seems a pretty funny attitude for a police force,” said Matt caustically.

“Tell me about it. But there you are. It's pretty sure to be the baby of some kind of transient population, so we only put up a show of being interested.”

“What exactly would you class as transient population?”

“Oh, travelers, tramps, rough-sleepers, squatters.”

“Ah,” said Matt.

Sundays were a bit of a burden to Matt, sitting through the Catholic Mass, which he thought a decidedly rum affair, so that on Saturdays he organized things that all four of them would enjoy: on this one a long walk for Beckham in the Hollies, with the children playing Swallows and Amazons in the winding walks, and splashing in the fast-running streams; then a long-promised trip to the Royal Armories; and then—after the hurried phone call to Charlie—a supper of shepherd's pie followed by jam sponge and ice cream out of the deep
freeze. The schedule worked to perfection. All the children, even Isabella, were in bed by half past nine.

Matt was tired too, but his head was buzzing. He poured himself a stiff whiskey and soda, and when that was gone was on the point of pouring himself a second one when he thought of Rory Pemberton and put the stopper back in the bottle.

He sat back in his favorite easy chair and remembered something that had happened that morning on the way to the Hollies. He had stopped the car at the newsagent's just by Amen Corner and the path to the Kirkstall Power Station. He had put his hand on the door handle to get out and buy his morning paper when something stopped him.

On the grass patch beside the newsagency two children were playing, tots of about five or six, one white, one black. And coming out of the door of the little shop was the woman people now knew as Lily Fitch. She turned in the direction of the children, as she passed them he saw the hand that was not holding a paper give a quick and vicious clip across the ear of the black child. He waited, watching the disappearing woman and the bawling tot.

“She hit that little boy,” said Isabella indignantly.

“I know,” said Matt. Lily was now well away, and he went to fetch his
Guardian.
When he got back to the car he saw that the incident had aroused memories in Aileen's daughter. Until they got to the Hollies she was very thoughtful.

He slept well that night, at first. But when he woke, not long after four, he soon gave up the idea of going back off. His head was a jumble of new ideas, and of memories. Harry Sugden had mentioned squatters, but then it hadn't
rung any bell. For some reason Charlie's mention of them had not only connected up with Harry's, but had also triggered memories.

Only they hadn't called them squatters. They'd called them hippies. Or occasionally, with heavy childish satire, flower people. The pair had been as good as street entertainers for the children in Houghton Avenue.

“Here come the dippy hippies!” shouted Sophie Basnett.

“Here come the pot smokers, high on cannabis!” said Colin, whose schoolteacher parents had educated him about drugs.

The children were coming up from the field beside the Kirkstall Power Station, a large area that could be used not just for football, but for anything else they cared to play. They'd all decided to go to Matt's auntie Hettie's house, knowing she would be pulling pints at the Unicorn. Matt had been worried that there would be nothing much in the pantry, but Marjie had considerately bought a large bottle of Coke at the grocer's, and a bottle of Orange Squash as well. Some of the children drank Squash because their parents told them Coca-Cola was bad for them; some of them drank Coca-Cola for the same reason.

“Dopeheads!” shouted Harry Sugden.

“Fucking flower people,” bawled Lily Marsden, who swore.

“Pot smokers,” said Eddie Armitage under his breath.

They were certainly different. He wore a crotch-length smock over baggy Oriental-style trousers. Her dress was down to her calves, in similar thin, almost diaphanous
material of a muddy color. On good days, and this was one of them, she really did wear flowers in her hair. The children called him Dippy and her Flowery Fay, which was their version of a word Colin's grandparents had used about her when they had passed the couple in the car. “She's fey,” they had said. She did indeed have a sort of distant, elfin charm, and was nearly pretty, though in a style that no one would have recognized in the strident sixties.

The hippies were wandering back home from the grocer's (Where
to
? wondered the grown-up Matt.
Where
was home?). The children had caught up with them, and chanted at them as they dogged their footsteps, quite unafraid of them. Weren't hippies dedicated to peace and love? Nothing to fear from
them
! Peter and Marjie hung back, and so did Caroline. Eddie Armitage only joined in halfheartedly. Matt had a clear picture of him now, and a fairly clear impression of what he was like. Physically he was short for his age, and slight, and he wore hand-knitted Fair Isle jumpers and short trousers. He gave the impression of being only half formed. He never quite seemed to know what he should be doing. He wanted to be part of the group, yet something held him back. Just like Rory Pemberton, in fact, but nicer.

The pair were just about to turn off from Raynville Road (turn off
where
? into which street?) when the man they called Dippy seemed to take a sudden resolution and turned to face them. The two knots of children stopped immediately. The adult Matt, remembering, felt a kind of fear, mirroring the child Matt's fear, though he was in the hindmost group with Peter and Marjie. The man's hair was fair, almost white—the adult Matt realized it must have been bleached—and his eyebrows were
bleached too, but not the eyelashes. A wispy brown beard was forming on his chin, under a small mouth, and the eyes were a queer color that Matt had never seen before, and seldom since: a sort of violet, almost as if he'd dyed those too. The adult Matt decided that they were scary, but only because they were the sort of people he as a child had never seen before. He had never come across hippy squatters in Bermondsey. Probably they weren't common even in Leeds. Children, particularly young children, only feel safe with the known.

“Is something troubling you?”

The voice was soft, nerveless. The children swallowed. They had not been expecting to be called upon to speak, answer questions. Only Lily could summon up a reply.

“No,” she said. But she said it aggressively.

“Then why are you following us, and shouting?”

“Because you're hopheads,” sneered Harry Sugden, his courage returning.

“Do you know what hopheads are?” asked the young man, still quietly.

“Druggies. Dope-takers.”

“They use opium. Hop is opium. We don't use opium.”

“Bet you smoke cannabis,” shouted Colin.

“Now and again. It's very pleasant, and a lot less harmful than the nicotine most of your dads kill themselves with.”

“My dad doesn't smoke,” said Rory Pemberton, but the others just looked disbelieving.

“So why don't you go about your business, eh? And let us get on with ours?”

He looked at them silently for a moment, then turned back to Flowery Fay. They crossed the road, then went up
one of the small roads that branched off from the Raynville Road (
which
one did they go up? Matt still could not work that out). The children stood there, silent, bewildered by their novel experience. Then Lily and Rory started them off trouping behind the two outré figures—well behind this time. They were only at the junction of the two roads when the pair turned into the gate of a house rather larger than the other narrow Victorian two-story ones. The children could hear a baby crying, and when the front door of the house was opened the cries became louder. Lily looked round, and then began to lead them up the street. She stopped after a few yards, and they all stopped behind her. Flowery Fay had come out through the open door and began to walk up and down the little scrap of front garden, a baby in her arms. It was crying lustily, and the mother was rocking it in her arms and speaking low, crooning comfort to it.

“Come on,” said Peter. “Let's go up to Matt's auntie's.”

When they arrived none of the other children said anything about the restricted space or the general air of near-poverty, though Lily Marsden looked around her with a twist of her lip and an air of contempt. Marjie opened bottles and found some glasses, but her chattering on to Matt only emphasized the quietness of the rest: they had had an experience that they were having trouble absorbing. It was, in fact, Matt who broke the taboo on the subject.

“I was frightened,” he announced.

“You didn't need to be,” said Marjie calmly. “They're just a bit out of the ordinary, that's all.”

“He was talking nonsense about drugs,” said Colin, the expert. “If you smoke pot you go on to take other things. My mum and dad know all about that.”

“Just smoking pot is bad,” said Caroline (Matt still had difficulty getting Caroline's face in focus). “Look how they went out and left the little baby all on its own.”

“They've got to do shopping,” said Eddie.

Caroline wasn't having any. She loved babies.

“Why couldn't one go shopping and the other stay at home? Or why couldn't they take it with them? Other mothers do.”

“They don't do what other people do,” said Peter.

“They probably don't
shop
anyway,” said Rory. “They shop
lift.
They don't hold with money, the hippies and the flower people. That means they bludge off other people.”

“You don't know they shoplifted,” said Peter. “I expect the shopkeeper kept a pretty close eye on them. If you want to shoplift you do best to look like everyone else.”

Matt absorbed this piece of wisdom, and wondered how he knew.

“She looked like a good mother to me,” said Marjie.
“Rocking the baby and talking to it. A lot of mothers think it's best to leave a baby to cry for a bit, but not her.”

“How can she look after her baby when half the time she'll be stoned out of her mind?” demanded Colin self-righteously. “And he'll be no better.”

“At least they're both with the baby most of the time,” said Peter. “Not many children have that.”

“That's because they're living on the dole, and in a house that they've stolen,” said Rory.

“You shouldn't be sticking up for them,” said Sophie to her brother. “They're scum. Just scum.”