The Bones in the Attic by Robert Barnard Page A

nothing anyone can do. It’s still there. I can sense it’s still there.’ This was beginning to get uncomfortably like an Elizabethan play—poor Ophelia or someone like that, going mad in white satin. But I did ask her what was still there, and she looked at me wildly and said, ‘You shouldn’t know. Best you don’t. Nobody should know. But I feel it’s there. Poor little thing.’ And then she just hurried off down the lane and then round the corner and out of sight. I went into the house, and saw her hurrying up Houghton Avenue toward the main road and the buses.”
    â€œAnd you never saw her again?”
    â€œNo. I won’t say I never gave it another thought, because you do, don’t you? As with Mr. Farson and his senility, it’s a reminder of how fragile one’s grip on things is.”
    â€œWhat was she like?”
    â€œOh, dear. It’s a long time ago. Thirty to thirty-five, I’d say. The face wasn’t particularly lined, but the hair was going gray—fairish hair going gray. I attributed that to the . . . madness. Quite tall for a woman . . . willowy. I did wonder whether it could be the daughter of Mrs. Beeston, the owner before Cuthbert Farson. I knew she’d had a daughter who went to Australia. The woman didn’t speak with an Australian accent, but then she wouldn’t necessarily, would she? Then I thought she’d have to be a lot older. Before long I forgot about it, and just remembered it when Delphine told us about the . . . about your discovery.”
    She looked at Matt, as if challenging him to make sense of it all. It was a challenge he felt he’d taken up already.

That afternoon Charlie managed to leave the police headquarters at Millgarth at five o’clock for once. When he told Matt that the case of the bones in the Elderholm attic was likely to get low priority because of the pressure of more recent and serious crimes, he was telling no more than a half-truth. Crime was rather below its usual high level in Leeds that late spring, whether because the minor villains had taken off for the Continent to join in the cheap booze and fags racket, and the major villains had flown to Spain to confer with their fellows in exile on the Costa del Crime, Charlie couldn’t guess, but he relished the prospect of a lazy evening at home. The fact that the little bones were being treated in the usual way the police had of treating cases there was no serious prospect of finding a solution to niggled away at the back of his mind, though.
    â€œThere we are, young Carola,” he crooned, taking his baby daughter out of the little tub he had bathed her in and enveloping her immediately in a towel three times her size.
    Carola gurgled with pleasure. She did a lot of gurgling.
    â€œYou’re better at it than I am,” said Felicity, without jealousy, watching them over her computer. “I wonder if it’s true that fathers go a bit bonkers over a daughter, and mothers a bit bonkers over a son.”
    â€œI’ve known mothers desperate to have a daughter,” said Charlie, intent on what he was doing, gently drying the tender flesh. “In human relationships the only possible generalization is that there is no possible generalization.”
    â€œStill, it’d be a good thesis topic,” said Felicity. “‘Fathers and daughters in Victorian fiction.’”
    â€œI thought you were giving up on English lit to write the great novel,” protested Charlie.
    â€œI am. I have, apart from my two classes. But there’s plenty of students hungry for a good thesis topic. They could use Dombey and Son. And Wives and Daughters. ”
    â€œDoesn’t sound as if either of those is about fathers and daughters.”
    â€œOh, but they are, though. The firm of Dombey and Son ‘turns out to be a daughter after all,’ as one of the characters says. Then there’s Mary Barton. I