Free The Bones in the Attic by Robert Barnard

known each other. They went through to an overfull and shabby living room.
    â€œLike a drink?”
    Matt was about to refuse when it struck him that accepting one might start the forming of bonds between them.
    â€œThat would be nice.”
    â€œGin? Or I’ve got lager.”
    â€œLager’s fine.”
    While she fetched a can and a glass, pulled the tab open and poured, Matt looked surreptitiously at her face. Very puffy and blotched red, but the same small, unattractive mouth, now with a strong expression of discontent and disappointment.
    â€œYou say we’ve known each other in the past,” Lily Fitch said, sitting down, her glass of gin on one arm of her chair, clutched but not sipped at.
    â€œI think so. A long time ago, when I was a little lad.”
    â€œOh? When was that?”
    â€œThe summer of sixty-nine.”
    This time the expression of wariness that came into her face was palpable.
    â€œWould that be the matter the police were here rabbiting on about?”
    â€œYes,” admitted Matt. “I’ve just moved into Elderholm, one of the stone houses on Houghton Avenue, and I found the skeleton of a small girl in the attic there.”
    â€œNasty for you.” She looked at her glass as if she needed a deep draft but didn’t feel she ought. “And was it there that we knew each other?”
    â€œYes. I was staying with my aunt Hettie, a couple of streets away from here. I was seven, and I came up and played football with all you children from Houghton Avenue.”
    She thought for a bit. Was she trying to remember, or trying to decide what to say?
    â€œDon’t remember you. Kids came and went.”
    â€œOf course. Naturally. I think you let me join in because I was very good at football for my age. Otherwise you’d have told me to scram. I later became a professional.”
    â€œNice.” She gave the impression that she would have liked to cast an appraising and sexual eye over him, but was holding herself back. “I don’t see yet what this has to do with me.”
    â€œWe think the child, or its body, may have been put in the attic about that time: the summer of sixty-nine.”
    The face briefly screwed up, as if she didn’t like that phrase.
    â€œI still don’t see what it has to do with me.”
    â€œNo, of course not. We were just children, weren’t we? But all the old house owners have died or moved away. You’re the only one we know about still in the area—but the children will mostly be alive, won’t they, even if many of the parents will have died or gone into homes?”
    Uncertainty about what to say was obvious in her long pause.
    â€œThe only one I can remember, Eddie Armitage, died, I think. I remember reading about it in the West Yorkshire Chronicle.”
    â€œYes, you mentioned him to the police, and they’ve established that. He died a few years ago in the Halifax area. Isn’t there anyone else you can remember?”
    â€œNo—I’d have told the police if there were.”
    â€œSurely you’d remember the other children in the other houses, the ones you played with?”
    â€œWho says I played with them?” Her voice momentarily became strident with the strain of maintaining the lie. “I don’t think I did much, except may be in the school holidays. Mostly I went around with others from my school. I was at Armley High, but a lot of the kids in those houses went to the Catholic schools.”
    â€œI see.”
    Perhaps she sensed a degree of skepticism in him, because she said: “Wait a minute. There was a family called Best, or Beest—”
    â€œBeeston?”
    â€œThat’s it. There was a daughter a few years older than me, and she married an Iti waiter and went to Australia.”
    â€œShe’d have left quite a bit before 1969, wouldn’t she?”
    â€œMay be. I’m no earthly good with dates.”
    â€œWhen