Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

Old Bones by Eileen Dewhurst

Born in Liverpool, England, Eileen Dewhurst read English at Oxford University. After graduation, she worked as a journalist, and in 1975 her first mystery novel was published. She has continued to produce highly regarded books in the genre ever since. Readers interested in her novels will want to look for the latest, Naked Witness (Severn House/2004).

I’d been thinking for some time anyway about going back to Bangor, cathedral city of North Wales with its maelstrom of wartime memories, and when I read about the female skeleton that had tumbled into view at the feet of some city-council ditch diggers, I set off as soon as I could find a few days’ space.

I’d spent my school holidays in Bangor during the war while there was the likelihood of air raids on Liverpool, in the flat above my uncle’s jeweller’s shop in the High Street, only a flight of stone steps and a road-crossing from Bangor Mountain, where the skeleton had been found.

The High Street! In 1942 it was my Champs Elysées. All human life was there, its apotheosis the BBc’s Light Entertainment Department, which when the Blitz began had moved lock, stock, and barrel from London. The glamour of it washed over us round the clock. Summer evening after summer evening, my cousin Bea and I would stand with our autograph books outside the old County Cinema round the corner, waiting for the likes of Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, the cast of Happidrome, and many other celebrities of the day to emerge and give us their signatures and a bit of chat. Neither of these blessings, if I remember rightly, was ever denied the two little girls, and I can still recall the number of Arthur Askey’s modest car.

Day after day we would stand at our first-floor sitting-room window, watching for stars on the High Street pavements below and seldom having long to wait. What our grandmother was waiting for was one of us to spell out aloud the shaky white letters chalked on the grey stone wall of the bank building opposite. Eventually it was my ten-year-old cousin Bea (I was a majestic — but no less innocent — twelve) who obliged. “S-H-I-T... That’s a funny word. Grandma, what does it mean?”

“Just something not very nice, chick. It’s a silly word, no one with any sense would use it.”

Something else not very nice, according to Grandma, had invaded Bangor Mountain that summer of my keenest memory.

No one had ever monitored our frequent disappearances up the flight of steps at the end of the narrow alley separating our shop from the next one up the High Street, content to think of us on our way to our lofty playground. Until the day Grandma told us, with uncharacteristic hesitancy, that she didn’t want us to go up Bangor Mountain anymore because... well, because some dangerous snakes and lizards had been found there, beasts with poisonous bites. This behest followed the arrival in the city of a small contingent of American soldiers — GIs — but girls of my cousin’s and my age at that time were far too innocent to interpret our grandmother’s metaphor and understand that the beast she was afraid would soon be infesting Bangor Mountain was the beast with two backs.

Now, on my latter-day return, I discovered that my great highway is so narrow it’s unable to accommodate two-way modern traffic. And that I couldn’t stay at the Castle Hotel, that fondly recalled pinnacle of ‘forties sophistication near the cathedral precinct, because it had closed down. This wasn’t the shock the other changes were, because I’d heard the news, of course, when I’d been unable to reach the hotel by phone and booked into a place in the nearby countryside.

The biggest shock of my return was the overall erosion of the close-knit grey stone city, holes blasted first by the numerous extensions of the university, and then, offered the precedent, by the iconoclastic jerry-builders of the 1960s. Builders of roads as well as buildings: the High Street isn’t just narrow, it’s become irrelevant. Oh, sic transit!

I drove to Bangor the morning after I’d checked into my hotel, and when I’d managed to find a parking space I went on foot round my old haunts, and the places that had figured in the final drama. Not yet up the mountain — partly because my climbing days are just about over, but also because I was pretty anxious to get to the police station and try to learn more about the unearthed bones. But I did pause in front of my uncle’s old shop and remember, as I looked sentimentally at its unchanged facade and the small recessed space where the two windows stand proud of the door, that the manager had once locked Bea and me into that space when the outside gate had gone up at closing time and we were being especially obstreperous, and left us there for a corrective ten minutes, to our chagrin and the amusement of passersby.

A few doors up there was no trace of Dai Jones’ the newspapers, and when I went the short walk to Dean Street I discovered that the County Cinema building had become an unsavoury-looking nightspot called the Octagon.

So it was in a queasy mood of mingled nostalgia, sorrow, and apprehension that I went into the police station, announced my maiden and married names, and asked if I could speak to a senior member of the CID.

“May I inquire what about, Mrs. Anderson?”

“About the female skeleton that’s just been discovered on Bangor Mountain. I was in Bangor during the war; my uncle was a jeweller in the High Street. The shop’s still there. Nearly sixty years on.” So, surely, there was no one left I could hurt. “If you haven’t been able to identify the skeleton, I just might have some helpful information.”

A young-looking detective chief inspector was there within minutes, and took me into an interview room.

“A young woman?” I asked him, as we sat down. “About five foot six? Blond hair, though I don’t suppose there are any of those still around.”

He didn’t say yea or nay, but he looked cautiously interested and asked me to go on.

“It’s a long story, and it may have nothing to do with the skeleton.”

“Of course. But I’d like to hear it.”

I recalled it as I told it. The story of Megan and Dai and Gladys Lewis and the American soldiers.

But I began with the BBC Light Entertainment department, in order to lament aloud the less-than-complete attention my cousin and I had given the real-life drama.

“Perhaps you can imagine the excitement of one’s radio heroes suddenly there in the flesh. I mean, my uncle actually got to know the cast of Happidrome, and invited them home. My cousin and I used to go to sleep with the live sounds of their signature tune floating up from the sitting room. Even the American soldiers couldn’t compete with that!”

“American soldiers?”

“That’s right. I’m afraid I can’t remember precise dates, how long they were there, or how many of them, but they were there that summer — nineteen forty-two, it must have been — when Megan Evans disappeared.”

I can see Megan now, her health glowing through her pancake makeup, her enhanced blond hair piled high in the front and flowing down the sides of her lovely, animated face à la Veronica Lake (I had to explain that reference to the DCI), the beloved locket she always wore bouncing between her big breasts as she leaned over to kiss us in succession in greeting or farewell. I once heard the word blousy under my grandmother’s breath (I remember it because neither Bea nor I knew what it meant and long pondered it together), but she was no more immune to Megan’s charm than anybody else, and after all (my grandmother said), she had been chosen by that lovely boy from the newsagent’s to be his girl.

And whatever happened in the end, Megan and Dai did have a lovely relationship for a while, the sort that at one and the same time included other people in their laughing affection and proclaimed them exclusive to each other. The only jarring note was the frequent presence of Gladys Lewis, another local girl, but as lumpen and unattractive as Megan was sexy and charismatic. (Neither of those words was current in 1942, but I used them because the DCI seemed so young.) Gladys nursed an unrequited passion for Dai, which used to amuse Bea and me as much as it made us uncomfortable, the way her large mournful eyes scarcely ever left his face. But neither Dai nor Megan was put out by Gladys’s devotion, they were so secure in each other.

Until the arrival of the American soldiers. And we had no idea they had affected that happy relationship until Bea and I, finding our indoor occupations suddenly grown stale, disobeyed our grandmother one warm early evening when she was out, and went defiantly up Bangor Mountain in the face of her injunction to keep away.

And came upon the beast with two backs.

And saw that half of it was Megan.

It was what modern politicians might call a double whammy — the beast itself, and half of it being so familiar to us. If it hadn’t been Megan, I think the beast itself would have troubled us more than it did in the aftermath of our shock. We knew, of course, in theory, what it would probably look like, but in those days there were no magazines or TV programmes or movies to fill out our timorous imaginings, and to find out the truth of it so totally unprepared had to be a trauma.

But one immediately on the back burner as the man tumbled sideways and we saw who the woman was.

She must have had plenty of sangfroid, our beloved Megan, because even in that horrendous situation — her legs apart and what was between them hidden by her crumpled skirt through luck rather than management — she put a finger to her lips as she stared gravely from one to the other of us. I remember we both nodded violently before we turned and fled.

Neither of us spoke until we had skittered almost to the foot of the mountain, and then Bea muttered, “Grandma has to have done that!”

“Only twice,” I reassured her. “Once for your father, and once for my mother.”

“So why should Megan... ?”

“I don’t know.”

Although we had managed to pick up the technicalities, we had no concept of desire, of sex for its own sake.

“Girls of ten and twelve, which my cousin and I were, were too young in those days to get excited about men in real life; it was our dream heroes that absorbed us. Which is why we didn’t pay all that much attention to the GIs. Until we found one of them with Megan on Bangor Mountain. And then... well, it was too awful for us to be able to think or talk about and we threw ourselves even more enthusiastically into the arms of our radio heroes. Metaphorically, of course.”

“Of course. I presume it was so awful because you caught them in flagrante delicto?”

“Yes. And it was awful too because of Megan going steady with Dai and Dai expecting to marry her.”

“Dai wasn’t in the forces?”

“No. He was a bit of a wizard with gadgetry — I suppose today it would be electronics — and although he worked at a local RAF station, he was a civilian in what was called a reserved occupation. If you were in one of those, you weren’t called up.”

The next day, in silent apprehensive accord, we’d taken ourselves off to the milk bar.

At first it was a relief to see that they were there, and on their own, but we were still in the doorway when we realized all was not well between them: There were no smiles, no movements towards one another of the hands. No conversation, just Megan with downcast eyes, and Dai’s eyes pleading as he gazed at her.

So although she’d told him something, she hadn’t told him that. And he hadn’t found out.

Without a word between us we crept out of the milk bar and slunk home. But I remember that on the way we passed Ronnie Waldman, the head of BBC Light Entertainment, and his glamorous wife Lana Morris, and were distracted from our concern for Megan and Dai.

“This is interesting, Mrs. Anderson, but how are we moving towards the old bones?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that there’s so much coming back to me... That evening Megan came to the flat and asked our grandmother if she could take us for a walk.”

Sometimes the three of us had gone up Bangor Mountain together, but that night Megan led us another way, into a little local park. None of us said anything until we were lined up on a seat with Megan in the middle. I’ve just remembered that the sun was in my eyes and I was glad I couldn’t see Megan properly when I turned towards her. As soon as we were settled, she began to speak. She thanked us in a soft, sad voice we’d never heard from her before for not having said anything about what we’d seen, then told us she and Dai had broken up.

“I can’t love him enough, can I, chicks, if I could do that?”

“You got to love the American soldier pretty quick,” Bea said.

“I don’t love him.”

Then we sat in silence while Bea and I digested another shock: The knowledge that that could happen without love. I didn’t look at Megan, but out of the corner of my eye I could see her hand playing feverishly with her locket. It was very unusual, that locket. Bea and I admired it so much we used to ask to hold it, the small round of gold framed in gold coils with a tiny emerald frog set in its centre. It had been left to Megan by her grandmother, and inside were tiny photos of both her grandparents, which she told us she had had to poke in with a pin, it was so fiddly.

“This is relevant to my story, Chief Inspector.”

Eventually I asked Megan if she would be seeing the American soldier again. Doing that again, I suppose is what I meant.

I remember she took quite a long time to answer, and then said, “Yes. If he wants to see me.”

She didn’t make any excuses, try to soften it. Looking back now, I think there was a sort of nobility about that. And just before we got up and went home, she said, “Two people I do love are you both. That’s easy.” Then she got up off the seat and stood looking down at us, making us meet her big troubled eyes. “Do you both still love me?”

I think I spoke first, but the two of us assured her eagerly that of course we did, and I’m sure Bea meant it as much as I did.

“I wish I could ask her, Chief Inspector. I wish she could be here with me now, she’d probably be more help to you. But she died last year.” And that’s something I shall never get over.

Megan said, “Thank you, chicks. And if I... if maybe you don’t see me anymore, you’ll love me still? You won’t stop?” There was a sob in her voice and I saw her breast heave (it’s astounding, what the catalyst of the bones is telling me I remember) and we were both even more fervent in our assurances of undying love.

But then, alas, we were taken actually to see one of our favourite programmes being recorded, and when we recovered from the excitement of anticipation, event, and aftermath, we discovered that the Americans had moved on, Megan had disappeared, and Gladys Lewis was sitting with Dai Jones in the milk bar.

He didn’t seem to be taking any notice of her — that was our one consolation. So perhaps she had just sat down at his table without being invited. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed her; his head was down in his hands. For the second time we stood still in the doorway, and for the second time we turned without a word and went out, when we saw Dai was allowing Gladys’s extended hand to lie on his without shaking it off.

“As far as I could understand at the time, Chief Inspector, Dai Jones was given a bit of a hard time of it by the police. If Megan had managed to keep her secret from him, he wouldn’t have been able to cite the GIs in his defence, and he had to admit that he and she had broken up against his will because just about everyone in town apart from BBC Light Entertainment knew what had happened, and were concerned for him and Megan both. The police even interviewed Bea and me because of being told how friendly we were with Megan, and when they asked us straight out if she’d perhaps been friendly with an American (like so many of the other pretty local girls) we did say yes, we thought she had, and that she’d sort of suggested to us that she might go away. I honestly can’t tell you whether or not we’d worked it out — that if she’d gone off because of a GI it would take the heat off Dai — but I think that must have been what happened, because they left him alone after a while. And there wasn’t a body, there wasn’t a shred of evidence that Megan Evans was dead. Until now, perhaps?”

Again the DCI didn’t look a yea or a nay, but he asked me if I knew what had happened to Dai.

“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “He married Gladys Lewis. Not right off. When I came back to Bangor at Christmas I didn’t hear anything about it. But by the next Easter holidays they were engaged, and they were married in the summer. My uncle told me... oh, it must have been ten years or more later, that Dai had had a heart attack and died. Chief Inspector, if there was a locket like the one I’ve described among the bones, would you tell me?”

“If there was a locket like the one you described among the bones, Mrs. Anderson, there’d have been a closeup picture of it by now in the national press.”

“Ah... Thank you for telling me.” And for telling me the bones couldn’t be Megan’s.

“And thank you for telling me about the locket, Mrs. Anderson. If your Megan always wore it, you could have given us some useful negative information. Our inquiries would, of course, have dug Miss Evans up eventually... ” The DCI coughed, and asked me to excuse his unfortunate choice of metaphor. “And without what you have told me today we might well have spent time considering her at the expense of other more likely candidates for ownership of the bones. Although we will still, of course, have to retain her on our list of suspects.” And here, for the first time, the young detective chief inspector smiled and then laughed. Which I thought was pretty stoical of him, seeing as it looked like he had just lost the straw which had appeared to be within his grasp. “May I get you a cup of tea?”

I declined, because suddenly, having imparted what information I had, I was eager to acquire more.

The Joneses had been chapel, and I went straight off to the most central one, directed by the PC on the desk.

It was easy. There in the register was the evidence of the marriage of Dai “work of national importance” Jones and Gladys “shop assistant” Lewis in 1943, and the minister told me for good measure that Evan Williams, son of the minister who had solemnised the marriage, was alive and well and living in Penrhyn, just outside the city.

So by five o’clock I was in his immaculate semi, drinking tea, having told him on his doorstep that I was the niece of the jeweller who for a spell during the war had owned J. Welch & Co. in the High Street — the goodwill name over the shop that my uncle had retained and which was still there as I spoke in its original handsome old glass facade.

“What do you know, then?” he responded excitedly when we were sitting down with the tea and his silent, eyes-down wife. “J Welch... It gives on to the steps leading up to Bangor Mountain, don’t it? Where they’ve just found some old bones. You heard about them, lady?”

“Yes, I’ve heard. I was interested because... I used to stay over the shop as a child during the war, and my cousin and I were always going up the mountain.”

“But you didn’t find a body, bach, or we wouldn’t have this mystery now, eh, girl?” This last to his wife, who looked up for a moment, half smiled and nodded, then returned her gaze to her teacup. Perhaps her ebullient husband embarrassed her, but he was just the type I had hoped for.

“You’d have been around during my visits, wouldn’t you, as a very small boy?” He was clearly younger than me, but not all that much. I decided to take the plunge. “When Megan Evans disappeared, it was thought she might have gone with the American soldiers. d’you remember that, Mr. Williams?”

The eager face brightened even further. “Well, I don’t rightly know if I remember it, or if I got told later on. Bit of a legend it became, you know.”

“So you’re thinking, Mrs. Anderson, that she might not have run away after all, Megan Evans, that it might be her bones on the mountain?” Mrs. Williams’s straight question, asked as her head came up and her penetrating gaze was transferred to me, made me jump slightly.

“It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Williams shrugged, and her husband leaned forward and shouted, “Yes!”

“Nobody suspected at the time that she might have come to grief?” I asked, looking now from one of them to the other. “Did the police suspect foul play?”

“I wouldn’t know that,” Mr. Williams responded reluctantly. “But I do remember my da saying that young Dai Jones had to be feeling uncomfortable. Son of Jones the newspapers, he’d been going steady with Miss Evans but she’d broke it off just before she disappeared.”

“I think I remember that, too.” He had brought me to where I wanted to be. “And I remember he married... ” I pretended to fumble for the name, and Mr. Williams supplied it.

“Gladys Lewis,” he said. “I remember my mother saying she’d got what she wanted, but that she wouldn’t have had a look-in if Megan hadn’t taken herself off. Dai worshipped the ground Megan walked on; my mother reckoned he only married Gladys because nothing really mattered to him after Megan disappeared.”

“Gladys Jones is still alive,” Mrs. Williams supplied as she poured me a second cup of tea. My hand was trembling as I took it from her. “In the Craig Bueno nursing home in Upper Bangor. Not that I’ve seen her, but I’ve a friend who visits old people’s homes with a dog for them to pat, and the Megan-Dai-and-Gladys drama’s still a local legend. No mind, I’m told, but a good appetite.”

“Gladys was terrible ugly,” Mr. Williams said. “And never a word to say for herself. Dai Jones must have been out of his mind to take so much as a second look at her. But I suppose that’s what he was, seeing he’d been so crazy for Megan. I didn’t go to his wedding, o’ course, but I remember it because of all the drama that had gone on, see?”

Mrs. Williams asked me then how I thought the Bangor of today compared with the Bangor of sixty years back, and I was happy to sit back and exchange nostalgias, having got far more than I’d hoped for.

Gladys Jones having no mind made it easy for me to present myself at the nursing home the next morning as being on a trip down memory lane and having known her as a child.

But I decided I might learn more if I didn’t help the head of the establishment out when she tried to break Gladys’s condition to me gently.

“So I’m afraid there’s no possibility of her knowing you,” she concluded. “She doesn’t know anyone.”

“Not even her own children?”

“Mrs. Jones has no children.”

I don’t know why, but something inside me rejoiced for Megan, that no other woman had carried on Dai’s line. And I was rejoicing for him, anyway, that he hadn’t lived a long life with his second choice.

“Here we are! She doesn’t walk now, but she can still give a good kick if she suddenly doesn’t like someone, or thinks they’re too close to her... So sit down here beside her, pull the chair round a bit... HERe’s SOMEONE TO SEE YOU, GLADYS! It’s a long time since she’s had a visitor. I’ll be in my office if you’d like to look in before you go.”

I wouldn’t have known Gladys. For a start she was so much smaller, her bristly dark hair was thin and white, and the aggressive teeth had gone. Her eyes, though, were still large and mournful, larger even than I remembered them in what was now her thin little face. The hands, though, hadn’t changed much, lying together in her lap. On a reflex I started to move one of mine towards them, then to my surprise drew it back.

“Hello, Gladys,” I said.

The head took a few moments to turn towards me, and there was no new expression in the eyes. “Kill her, God!” Gladys said.

“It’s Mary, Gladys. Mary Rowe. d’you remember? I used to see you in the milk bar in the High Street.”

I knew it was a total waste of time, but one can’t help trying. And now Gladys’s eyes softened, and she said, “I love you.”

I was about to make myself say, “And I love you, too, Gladys,” when she shifted in her seat and something she had round her neck swung forward. A small gold circle framed in gold scrolls, with something green gleaming in the heart of it. For a moment I was lightheaded, feeling my heart pumping in my throat. The next I had to hold my hands together, to prevent them ripping it from between her shrivelled breasts.

“She’s fallen asleep,” I lied, in the director’s office. “At least I’ve seen her. That’s a very interesting locket she’s wearing, by the way. Did she come in with it?”

“She came in with a small locked strongbox,” the director said reluctantly, looking embarrassed. “When she got bronchitis last year we thought we were going to lose her, and as she’s no family, we decided to open it. There was no key, so I’m afraid we had to force it. There were one or two other bits of jewellery, a few papers, and this locket. She seemed to have a bit of an excited reaction when she saw it, so we put it on her. Then when we tried to take it off, she got so distressed we just left it. We like to keep them as individual as possible, even if they’re unaware of it.”

“Very commendable,” I heard myself say. “Any photographs in it?”

“No. It was empty.”

No doubt emptied with a pin, it was so fiddly. I felt my eyes fill with tears.

“It is upsetting,” the director said. “It was very good of you to come.”

I thanked her and left, and left the car in the nursing home car park and went walking without deciding where I was going, the picture suddenly in my mind playing over and over: the picture of Megan pleading for her life before a pair of implacable hands. One moment they were fastening round her neck, the next they were lifting a stone for the lethal blow, the next they were pushing her down a slope. Each time they buried her.

At least I knew they couldn’t be Dai’s. Dai would never have taken her locket from her. But now there’s no BBC Light Entertainment to distract me, and I’m terribly afraid that the picture will run and run.

Even though I’ve done what I realized as I walked that I would have to do. Megan had pleaded in vain for her life, and sixty years on she was pleading with me for justice. Well, I could give her that.

So I went back to my car and drove down to the police station.

Copyright © 2005 by Eileen Dewhurst.