Old Bones Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles From Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Party Politics

  Chapter Two: Posh and Vexed

  Chapter Three: The Anguish of the Marrow

  Chapter Four: De Profundis

  Chapter Five: How Beautiful Are the Feet

  Chapter Six: Gripes and Wrath

  Chapter Seven: Skin and Blister

  Chapter Eight: Making the Red One Green

  Chapter Nine: Downtown Addy

  Chapter Ten: Occam’s Razor

  Chapter Eleven: Reason as a Way of Life

  Chapter Twelve: Death and Glory

  Chapter Thirteen: Rocking the Cash Bar

  Chapter Fourteen: Ingots We Trust

  Chapter Fifteen: More Sinned Against Than Sinning

  Chapter Sixteen: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Diarrhoea?

  Chapter Seventeen: O Tempora o Maurice

  Chapter Eighteen: Armed and Dangerous

  Chapter Nineteen: Females of the Species

  Chapter Twenty: Matchless

  Chapter Twenty-One: Pedes Fictilis

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Oh Spite! oh Hell!

  Chapter Twenty-Three: A World More Full of Weeping

  Recent Titles by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles from Severn House

  A RAINBOW SUMMER

  ON WINGS OF LOVE

  EVEN CHANCE

  LAST RUN

  PLAY FOR LOVE

  A CORNISH AFFAIR

  NOBODY’S FOOL

  DANGEROUS LOVE

  REAL LIFE (Short Stories)

  DIVIDED LOVE

  KEEPING SECRETS

  THE LONGEST DANCE

  THE HORSEMASTERS

  JULIA

  THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER

  HARTE’S DESIRE

  COUNTRY PLOT

  KATE’S PROGRESS

  The Bill Slider Mysteries

  GAME OVER

  FELL PURPOSE

  BODY LINE

  KILL MY DARLING

  BLOOD NEVER DIES

  HARD GOING

  STAR FALL

  ONE UNDER

  OLD BONES

  OLD BONES

  A Bill Slider Mystery

  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and the 2017 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2017 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.

  The right of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8665-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-768-5 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-835-3 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Tony, without whom very little would ever get done. With thanks and love.

  ONE

  Party Politics

  There comes a point in the life of a balloon when it has lost so much air that its taut, festive body becomes sagging, wrinkled and – well, frankly, sad. DCI Ron Carver’s retirement party had reached that stage.

  Slider cast an experienced look round the upstairs room of the White Horse and saw that the inevitable end was not far away. The young marrieds were eyeing their watches and wondering how soon they could leave. The young unmarrieds were eyeing each other and wondering how soon they could leave. The divorced and miserable were trying with increasing desperation to neck the equivalent of the gross national product of Belgium. A few career bunnies were holding the centre of the room and talking hard about Home Office initiatives and crime statistics. And a few old lags, Carver’s bosom buddies, were making a lot of noise in the corner where Carver himself was getting determinedly bladdered.

  Carver was a miserable bastard, who had raised resentment to an art form, and his leaving do was appropriately cheerless. The Osman Room – named with no apparent irony after some dreary character in a popular soap – had clearly been decorated by someone with terminal depression. There was a table with food – mini pork pies, scotch eggs, and the sort of sausage rolls that bend. There was drink – party kegs of beer, and a few grudging bottles of Australian shardonay for ‘the wimmin’: female police officers, and a boot-faced civilian clerk who had already done eight years hard as DS Benny Cook’s mistress, with no hope of parole.

  There was even a cake, a vast flat rectangle covered in rubbery fondant icing, decorated with Carver’s name and two dates, as though it were his tombstone. Inside, Slider knew from sad experience, the cake would be a desiccated industrial ‘sponge’, sandwiched with a red substance in which even the most detailed DNA test would fail to find anything related to the raspberry.

  It wasn’t just that Carver was retiring. Because of the cuts every borough was having to make, his departure was being made the excuse to disband his firm. It was the end of an era, as someone was bound to say – as Borough Commander ‘Dave’ Carpenter did actually say in a short, all-purpose speech delivered when he ‘popped in’. No one had expected him to find the time in his busy schedule. Slider couldn’t decide whether it was a tribute to Carver’s long service, or relief that he was going.

  Carver belonged to the old-fashioned, Gene Hunt school of policing. Whatever it took to get chummy sent down, do it – just try not to leave marks. He’d had many brushes with the internal complaints system, but thanks to his golf and Masonic connections he’d always been snatched from the brink by some patron among the brass. But the times they were a-changing. When Slider and Carver had joined the Job, everyone, from the commissioner downwards, began the same way, out of Hendon and onto the beat to learn policing from the bottom up. It created a brotherhood. Now the brass parachuted in from the universities with degrees in sociology, and spreadsheets instead of blood in their veins. One could not imagine the likes of Commander Carpenter pulling Carver’s chestnuts out of the fire. Carver had known when Carpenter’s predecessor, Commander Wetherspoon (one of his greatest fans) got kicked upstairs that his time was running out.

  ‘You should grab the chance and go as well,’ he had told Slider at the be
ginning of the party, when he was still comparatively sober (his breath smelt of whisky, but he’d started early with a bottle in his room). ‘Don’t be a mug. Get out while you’ve still got some life in you.’

  ‘And what are you going to do, Ron?’ Slider had asked.

  ‘Me? I’m retiring, full stop. More time for golf and the missus,’ he’d declared smugly.

  Most of Slider’s firm had left the party now, and there was a definite feeling of winding down. He’d only stayed this long to see his own people safely off, and because Joanna was working, so home was not the irresistible attraction it might otherwise have been. But enough was enough. He drained the last of his flat beer and looked round for somewhere to deposit the plastic cup; and suddenly Carver was by his side.

  ‘You going?’ he demanded. Either he was swaying slightly or a tube train was passing under the building.

  ‘Just off, Ron. Lovely do. I wish you all the very best,’ Slider said.

  Carver had reached the sad and frank stage of inebriation. ‘It’s a rotten party,’ he said, slurring slightly. ‘End of a rotten career.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that.’

  ‘What’ve they done to the Job, eh? Answer me that. Real coppers shat upon from a great height. Load o’ bloody ponces in the top jobs, never walked a beat in their lives. And now there’s not even going to be any beat.’

  It was the latest pronouncement from on high: coppers were better employed in front of computers. Walking the beat never solved a crime. There would be no more of it. No more local bobby. No more evenin’ all. No more size twelves pounding the pavement.

  ‘It’s the end of an era,’ Slider said, with more sincerity than Carpenter had managed.

  ‘You and me, we’re old school. We know what’s what. These bloody ponces, like Carp-Carpenter …’ He stared at Slider, and veered off on a new tack. ‘You should have got out while you had the chance. They’ll be after your head now. You must have been bloody daft to go after Millichip. He won’t forget it.’

  ‘It wasn’t just him. There are others.’

  ‘He’s the one that matters. Get him, you’ve got the lot. They gotta protect him. What were you thinking? He was gonna hold his hands up just like that? Operation Neptune, my arse! My dimpled bloody arse! He’s not going down, chum, you are. He’s an assistant commissioner. You must have been off your chump, accusing him. And you got no evidence, that’s what gets me,’ he went on peevishly. ‘Nothing. One witness – a crackhead tart, say anything for a price. What made you think the CPS would wear it? You’re fricking bonkers! But she won’t testify – you mark my words. The fix has gone in.’

  Slider felt a slight chill down the back. Carver had contacts. ‘What have you heard?’ he asked.

  Carver didn’t answer. His mind had wandered off, and he was surveying Slider with an expression usually reserved for things found on the bottom of a shoe. ‘I never liked you, Slider,’ he pronounced.

  ‘And I never liked you, too, Ron,’ Slider answered warmly. It didn’t matter what he said now – Carver wasn’t listening.

  ‘You know what your trouble is? You never had any loyalty. It’s us and them. Coppers and slags. That’s it, in the Job. We stand together. But no, you thought you were better than the rest of us. Had all these fancy ideas about integ—’ He belched. ‘—rity. Where’s the bloody integrity letting some slag get off on a technicality? Rule number one,’ he said, poking a forefinger into Slider’s chest. ‘You never. Shop. One. Of. Your. Own.’

  The finger hurt. Slider gently redirected it. ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

  ‘Going after Millichip,’ Carver said with a disgusted shake of the head. ‘He may be brass, but he’s one of us, when kick comes to shove. But that’s you all over. No bloody loyalty.’ He swayed. Another abrupt change of tack. ‘How’s the wife? She not here tonight?’

  ‘She’s working,’ Slider said. ‘She’s doing a West End show.’

  Carver goggled at him in astonishment, trying to focus eyes and thought. ‘Irene’s in a musical?’

  ‘Joanna,’ Slider said patiently. ‘I split up with Irene years ago.’

  ‘I liked Irene,’ said Carver. ‘Nice girl. Smart dresser. Not like my old cow. You know what I hate most in the world? In the whole bloody world?’

  Slider couldn’t guess.

  ‘Trousers on wimmin’. What’s erotic about that? Whatever happened to skirts and stockings, eh?’

  ‘Beats me,’ Slider said.

  ‘Wimmin everywhere. Menstruating. Having babies. Menopausing. Can’t get a lick of work out of ’em. And they’re all wearing bloody trousers! No more legs. No more stockings. What’s the point of it all?’ Actual tears came to Carver’s eyes, and eased out onto his cheeks. ‘Elastic-waisted trousers. That’s what mine wears. Looks like a bloody whale. Arse the size of a football pitch. And I’m retiring. You know what that means?’ His voice went right off the pathos scale. ‘More time for golf and the missus.’

  A hullabaloo behind Carver resolved itself into half a dozen voices shouting, ‘The cake! Cut the cake! Time to cut the cake, Ron!’

  ‘Fuck the cake,’ Carver said quietly and with great sincerity. He looked into Slider’s eyes. ‘Real coppers, we were,’ he said. There was an instant of connection between them, and a sense washed through Slider of all that was lost when the modern world forgot where it came from; a sense of time running out for all of them. Then Carver wiped the tears off his cheeks with a forefinger, turned and walked away, his normal cocky, slightly rolling walk, to join his cronies.

  Slider was left with a bolus of sympathy he didn’t know what to do with. It was most unwelcome.

  Monday morning began with bones. McLaren took the phone call, breaking off from hand-to-mouth combat with a bacon baguette.

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ Swilley said as he sprayed crusty flakes in the attempt to say ‘CID room’. ‘What would your girlfriend think if she could see you now?’

  McLaren put down the baton carefully, balancing it across the top of his coffee mug, said, ‘Yeah, I’ll hold,’ into the receiver, and had the leisure to answer Swilley. ‘Nat wun’t care,’ he told her. ‘She likes a bloke with an appetite. She’s only little, but she can put it away herself all right.’

  ‘Ah,’ Atherton murmured on his way out. ‘A gastro-gnome.’

  But McLaren was now listening to the call. He didn’t generally catch Atherton’s witticisms anyway. He thought wit was a description of the weather in New Zealand.

  A garden contractor starting to dig out foundations for a shed had unearthed a large bone and called the police. Uniform decided it ought to be investigated and Mackay from Slider’s team went out. When he reported back that he thought the bone was human, Slider sent McLaren to assist while the SOC diggers were sent for, carefully to uncover whatever else might be there.

  Mid-morning, Swilley appeared at Slider’s door. ‘The bones, boss,’ she said. ‘Mackay says they’re definitely human.’

  Slider looked up. ‘How definitely?’

  ‘The whole skeleton’s there. Doc Cameron’s on his way. The builder had the sense to stop when he uncovered the first one, so there’s not too much damage. Uniform’s got the owners corralled in the house – yuppie couple. The husband’s kicking up blazes, apparently – wants to be let go to work.’

  ‘All right, send someone down to keep him happy.’

  ‘I’ll go, boss.’

  Slider eyed her. Tall, athletic, blonde and attractive. ‘No, you might inflame the wife,’ he said. ‘Send Gascoyne – he’s got an emollient personality.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Swilley, though Slider didn’t know whether she was doubtful about the man or the vocabulary.

  He returned to the sea of paperwork that these days covered his desk. It never grew any less, because every time he left the room for a moment, elves would come and deposit some more. There had always been annoying paperwork, but of recent years, what with political correctness, pressure groups and the increasing
litigiousness of the British Public, it had seemed to become not an adjunct, but the whole purpose of The Job. Sometimes he made an attempt at sorting the stuff into piles, but searching for something specific just spread them out again. It was an intractable mass. There were layers at the bottom that were turning into peat.

  On a trip to the loo, to get away from it for a minute or two, he bumped into Detective Superintendent Porson, his boss, coming out, shaking his big chalky hands to dry them. ‘Out of paper towels again,’ he said irritably, glaring at Slider as though it were his fault. ‘I hate them bloody blower things.’ Slider whimsically pulled out his handkerchief, but Porson, with a stern look, advanced one hip and said, ‘Get mine out of my jacket pocket.’ And while he wiped his hands dry, still staring at Slider, he said, ‘Got anything on?’

  Slider repressed the facetious answer that sat up like a dog smelling sausage, and said, ‘Human remains unearthed this morning in a garden in Laburnum Avenue.’

  ‘Laburnum?’

  ‘On the Trees Estate.’ It was the officially unofficial name for a small development off the Uxbridge Road.

  ‘Right. Laburnum. What sort of remains?’

  ‘A whole human skeleton, apparently.’

  Porson looked pleased, for some reason. ‘Old bones. Lovely. Something for you to get your teeth into.’

  ‘Sir?’ Slider said with an effort. Down, Fido!

  ‘Keep you busy,’ Porson explained. ‘Usefully employed and out of everyone’s hair. You can’t upset anybody looking into old bones.’

  ‘You mean—?’

  Porson took on a worrying hint of kindness. ‘You know you aren’t Mr Popular in some circles. Now this won’t put anyone’s toes out of joint. Sort it out, it’s good publicity for The Job, bit of bon for you.’