House of Bones (7 page)

“She had also heard thunderous footsteps, as if people were running up and down uncarpeted stairs.

“‘I was glad when I heard the place was going to be knocked down,' she said. ‘Now they've discovered all these skeletons. It's horrible.'“

John lowered the paper, feeling breathless.
Number
7,
Laverdale Square
. That was one of the houses on Mr Vane's list! And it had “
a bad atmosphere
” just like 66 Mountjoy Avenue. He had felt it for himself. And he had heard strange noises, too. How much of a coincidence could it be that
two
of Mr Vane's special properties had such a threatening feeling about them?

There was no question about it. He should go and look at some more houses on the special list, and see if they were just as threatening.

As he was about to step off the bus, he saw two police cars parked right outside Blight, Simpson & Vane. Immediately he thought,
Oh, no! They've found out that I made that anonymous phone call
. He didn't know whether to go back into the office and brazen it out, or stay on the bus and go home.

“Make your mind up,” said the bus conductor. “We're supposed to be back at the depot by the end of August.”

He took a deep breath, jumped off the bus, and went into the office. Inside, he found two plainclothes detectives talking to Mr Vane and Mr Cleat. Mr Cleat gave him a sharp
where-have-you-been
? look, but didn't say anything. Mr Vane was
saying, “We have the property on our books, yes, but the owners are no longer with us.”

“Dead?” asked Inspector Carter.

“Oh, good Lord, no. Torremolinos. Mr Anderson's arthritis, don't you know. He needed the sun.”

“Can you think of any reason why anybody should have suggested that Mr Rogers was still there?”

“Not at all. I suppose it may have been a practical joke.”

“If it was, I don't think it's particularly funny, do you?”

“No, I don't. Unless it was a competitor, trying to stir up trouble for me.”

“Oh, yes? And why should they want to do that?”

Mr Vane gave one of his yellow grins. “Estate agency isn't as dull as it appears, Inspector. There's plenty of cut and thrust. Agencies stealing each other's clients from under their noses – agencies undercutting each other's percentages.”

“Sounds like pretty hair-raising stuff,” said Carter.

“Oh, it can be, it can be. And people do bear grudges.”

Carter flipped open his notebook. “So Mr Rogers came in here, borrowed the key to 66 Mountjoy Avenue, and went off to look at it? But when you came back to the office, Mr Cleat, and
discovered what had happened, you went after him, to stop him?”

“That's right. 66 Mountjoy Avenue isn't yet fit for inspection. I would have been doing the owners a disservice if I had let Mr Rogers see it in that condition.”

“So he didn't actually enter the property?”

“Absolutely not, no.”

John could feel Mr Rogers' ring in his pocket, and he was tempted to bring it out and show that Mr Cleat was telling a lie, but Lucy must have read his mind. She gave him a quick shake of her head and mouthed the word “no”.

Inspector Carter said, “Who dealt with Mr Rogers when he came to pick up the key?”

“Young John here. It was his first day. He shouldn't really have given him the key – but Mr Rogers was very insistent.”

“Get into trouble, did you, John?” asked Carter.

“Mr Vane was very understanding,” put in Mr Cleat, before John could answer.

Carter said, “What sort of a state was he in, Mr Rogers? Was he agitated, at all? Or anxious?”

“He was normal, that's all,” John told him. “He was in a hurry, you know. But he didn't look worried or anything.”

“So he didn't look as if he was going to top himself? Drown himself, or throw himself in front of a train?”

John shook his head.

“All right, then,” said Carter, putting his notebook back in his pocket. “Thanks for your cooperation, Mr Vane. I think you're probably right. Whoever made that phone call was just trying to stir up a bit of trouble for you.”

Mr Vane gave him another grin. “Believe me, Inspector, if I ever find out who it was, I'll wring his neck for him.”

At four o'clock, Mr Vane and Mr Cleat left the office together. As soon as they had gone, John took out the ring.

“What's that?” asked Liam. “You're not going to propose to me, are you?”

“It's Mr Rogers' wedding ring. We found it at 66 Mountjoy Avenue. So Mr Cleat was telling a lie.”

Liam came over and examined the ring closely. “Are you sure that's his? Why didn't you tell the police about it?”

“What, and get the sack?” said Lucy.

“Lucy's right,” said Courtney. “And apart from that, Cleaty and the police are like
this
—” he crossed his fingers. “He's a mason and a Rotarian and member of the Neighbourhood Watch committee. If he says that Mr Rogers didn't go into the house, and you say he did, who do you think the police are going to believe?”

“You need more evidence,” said Liam.

“Well, I think there's something really weird going on with Mr Vane's special list,” said John. “You know that house where they've found all those skeletons? That was one of Mr Vane's houses, too.”

“That house in Norbury? I hadn't realized that.”

“Number 7, Laverdale Square,” said Courtney. “The council bought it because they wanted to widen the road. Don't you remember? Mr Vane was in a terrible temper about it for weeks.”

“You're not trying to say that
he
killed all of those people?” said Lucy. “I know he's a bit scary, but he doesn't look like a mass murderer.”

“I think he looks
exactly
like a mass murderer,” said Liam.

John said, “I went into his office and I copied out the whole of the special list. I think we ought to go and look at some of the other houses.”

“Oh, come on,” said Courtney. “If Mr Vane had anything to hide, he would have kept the list and the keys locked up in the safe.”

“Perhaps he didn't think that anybody would ever suspect him,” said Lucy. “I mean, those skeletons were all hidden in the walls, weren't they? If the council hadn't knocked the house down, who would have ever found out?”

“It's much more likely he didn't know anything about it,” Courtney replied. “And it's much more likely that Mr Rogers went into the house, dropped his ring, and then disappeared somewhere else.”

“If he did that, why did Cleaty lie to the police?”

“I don't know,” said Courtney, “and I can't say that I particularly care. This is all a lot of wild speculation, that's all.”

“I'm still going to go and look at Mr Vane's other houses,” John declared. “There's one in Brighton – 93 Madeira Terrace. I'll go down on Saturday.”

“Well, there's a coincidence,” said Liam. “I'm going to Brighton for the racing on Saturday afternoon. We could go down together.”

“That would be
great
,” said John.

“Don't let Liam persuade you to put any money on the horses,” Courtney warned him. “You'll end up bankrupt before you've even earned anything.”

They sped down to Brighton early on Saturday morning in Liam's Golf GTi. The sun was shining and it was warm enough to drive with the roof down. John had borrowed a pair of sunglasses from his sister Ruth which pinched his nose. He felt scruffy. He wished he had a black polo shirt and a pair of chinos like Liam, instead of his grey, washed-out jeans and his saggy maroon top. But his spirits lifted as they drove up over the South Downs, through Devil's Dyke, and he could see the farms and fields of mid-Sussex spread out behind him, and the English Channel glittering in front.

They drove along the seafront, past the Palace Pier, and along Marine Parade. John felt almost as if
he were on holiday. “Should have brought our buckets and spades,” said Liam, cheerfully.

Madeira Terrace was a dark, steep street on the borders of Hove, and out of sight of the sea. It was lined on both sides with narrow, four-storey terraced houses, built of hard red brick. Each house had a small walled garden in front, but very few of them were well tended. Most of them were cluttered with broken bicycles and bent dustbins and crumpled newspapers. Liam parked in front of a Dormobile with flat tyres and tugged on the handbrake hard. “This is it. Number 93. Looks as if it's empty.”

The windows were dark and filmed over with dust. The blue paint on the front door was peeling. There was a small crowd of empty milk bottles on the step, and the letterbox was crammed with circulars.

John and Liam climbed out of the car and went up to the front door. John pressed the doorbell and heard it buzz faintly like a bluebottle in a jar. They waited, and tried the bell again, but nobody answered.

“Right,” said Liam. “It looks as if we'll have to try a different approach.”

“What do you mean? We can't break in.”

“Of course we can break in. The property's empty and we're the sole agents. There's nothing illegal in making an inspection.”

“Well, all right,” said John, uncertainly, looking up and down the street. There was nobody in sight except for an old woman toiling up the incline with a tartan shopping trolley.

Liam went back to the car and returned with a black leather case. “Lock-picks,” he explained. “I took a locksmith's course, once upon a time. I was going to follow my dad into the hardware business. I did some work for a couple of estate agents and then I realized that they were making ten times more money than I was.”

He fiddled around with the door for a while, and then abruptly opened it. He pushed back all the papers and letters that were stacked up behind it and stepped inside. “Smells damp. It could do with an airing.”

John waited on the doorstep. He didn't like the house at all. It smelled not only of damp, but of decay: of dry rot and dust and something else, too – something deeply unpleasant, like blocked drains, or rotting seaweed, all tangled up with dead dogfish.

“I don't know, Liam,” he said, cautiously.

“Come on, will you?” Liam encouraged him. “It was your idea, after all. And I agree with you. Ever since I first worked for Mr Vane I thought that he was up to something queer. Now we can find out what it is.”

John hesitated a moment longer, and then he
stepped inside. The house was in a desperate state of repair. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls like dead skin, and there were spots and smudges of mould on the ceiling. The house was unfurnished and uncarpeted, and as they walked along the narrow corridor to the kitchen at the back, their footsteps echoed flatly in every room.

The kitchen overlooked a small, dark yard, overgrown with weeds. Liam opened the larder but there was nothing in it except an ancient packet of Scott's Porridge Oats and a spattering of rat droppings. John turned the tap over the stainless steel sink but there was no water.

“So what are we looking for?” said Liam, as they went back through to the sitting-room. There were dusty rectangular marks on the walls where pictures had once hung. “Mr Vane is up to something or other with all of these properties, but what?”

“I don't know,” said John. “But 66 Mountjoy Avenue felt like this, too. You know – it had the same kind of horrible atmosphere.”

“Most empty houses have a horrible atmosphere,” Liam told him. “It isn't houses that make homes, it's the people who live in them. Houses, on their own, are nothing at all. They're dead.”

They looked around the tiny dining-room. A single fork lay on the floor, as if somebody had dropped it years and years ago and never bothered to pick it up.

They climbed the steep, uncarpeted stairs. “You'd never guess it, but this is a good sound property,” said Liam. “Some attention to the roof, and a lick of paint, and you could get a good price for this.”

“I wouldn't buy it if you paid me,” said John. He was beginning to wish that he had never come.

They looked into the bathroom and all the bedrooms. Empty, their bare walls patterned with fingerprints and screw-holes and Sellotape marks. In one of the smallest rooms, a cut-out picture of a teddy bear still remained, stuck to the side of the fireplace.

“Well,” said Liam. “That's it. Nothing here at all, as far as I can see.”

They were about to go back downstairs when John thought he heard a footstep in one of the bedrooms.

“Stop,” he said. “Did you hear that?”

“Did I hear what?” asked Liam.

They waited and listened, and then they heard another footstep, and another. There was no doubt about it. Somebody was walking across the bare boarded floor.

“John, you wait here,” Liam cautioned him. He tiptoed across the landing and gently nudged open the bedroom door. From where he was standing, John couldn't see anything, only the bedroom window, and a dark horse-chestnut tree outside.
Liam went into the room and the door swung back.

John waited for almost a minute. Then he called, “Liam? What's going on?”

There was no answer. “Liam?” John repeated. “Come on, Liam, stop messing about. Let's go.”

Still no answer. John went over to the bedroom door and opened it a little way. “Liam?”

He looked around the door and what he saw he couldn't immediately understand. He felt as if his entire skin surface was prickling and his stomach was tightening up into a tennis ball.

“
Liam
?”

Liam was kneeling on the other side of the room. Except that it wasn't all of Liam. Half of his head had disappeared into the wall, so that all John could see of it was his right eye and his right nostril and the right side of his mouth, dragged wide open in agony. His left arm had disappeared and most of his chest, too. His left knee had gone, but his left foot was still free, even though it was trembling uncontrollably, like the hoof of a recently-shot stag.