All Bones and Lies Read online

  About the Book

  Colin is in many ways an ideal citizen. He works for the council. He visits his aged mother, Norah, cooks for her, and listens to her grumbles. He also keeps in touch with his sister Dilys, long estranged from her mother, in a vain attempt to maintain family ties. But neither Dilys, Norah nor Colin’s colleagues know about his other, secret life – which involves a garden shed, a circus acrobat, a much adored three-year-old charmer, and a certain Mr Haksar’s penchant for squabbling with his neighbours.

  What Colin does not know is that, thanks to an incorrectly filled in house insurance policy, his two lives are set to collide, and there is nothing he can do to stop them.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Fine

  Copyright

  ALL BONES AND LIES

  Anne Fine

  For Geoff W.,

  and in memoriam

  A.R.W.

  1

  COLIN STOOD IN the kitchen doorway, wondering how others managed when it came to this. His fingers tightened round the saucer, causing the cup to rattle horribly as, once again, from the bedroom, came that rising, two-note bird call.

  ‘Co-lin.’

  A crow. A vulture, even, pecking away at the scraps of him before he was even dead.

  ‘Co-lin!’

  She didn’t usually start calling quite so quickly. How long had he been standing there? Long enough to imagine himself creeping out to the woodshed and fetching a hatchet, then phoning the police to explain. ‘I’m sorry, but it reached the stage where I knew, if I heard her calling “Co-lin” one more time . . .’ They’d understand. They probably came across this sort of thing all the time. Regretfully, though, they’d have to remind him that wheels of justice would still have to turn. Better to—

  No. He’d not admit there was anything ‘better’ about it. But, laying aside all thought of hatchets, he crossed the hall and took the stairs slowly, noticing with interest that, even though his hands had steadied, the tea kept slopping.

  ‘You’ve taken your time. It’ll be cold.’

  ‘It’s your own fault for choosing to sit upstairs.’

  ‘I like it here. It’s easier on my poor leg.’

  ‘Open your letter,’ he told her, to steer her off that grisly topic. ‘After all, it took long enough to reach you.’

  She flapped the thick cream envelope at him as if he hadn’t been the one to notice it stuck in the gap between the rusting umbrella stand and the wall, and bring it up to her. ‘I know it’ll only be more trouble.’

  He set the teacup on the wobbly table beside her chair. More trouble, indeed! You’d think, from the way she said it, she lived in war-torn Kuzubukhstan, or on some city street with drug dealers and pimps for neighbours, and gunfights and screeching whores for evening entertainment. You’d never think she lived in an enviably spacious old house in pretty West Priding, and no one had ever crossed her, and nothing serious had ever gone wrong. ‘Why your lady mum so miserable, anyway?’ Mr Stastny had asked once, dumping the box of groceries into Colin’s arms. And, for the life of him, Colin couldn’t answer. Trawl as he might through family history, there was nothing to justify such unsparing self-pity. She was born, just like everyone; had a childhood with some ups, some downs; landed a smart job which took her all over, and, just as that was beginning to prove too much of an effort (and time might, by some, have been thought to be running out), had the good fortune to meet and marry the man who, after fathering the conveniently time-saving twin babies, Colin and Dilys, had done his best for her for a decade more before popping his clogs and leaving her with a quite adequate pension. If, now, she only had one son to brighten her sunset years, it was entirely through choice. It wasn’t as if anyone forced her to stop speaking to Dilys.

  But she was still Our Lady of the Sorrows. Fascinating, really. It could have been the perfect life, if you translated ‘Colin was such a sickly child’ into ‘I was so lucky to have an excuse not to go back to work’, and took ‘stuck in this one-eyed hole’ to mean ‘yes, I’ve been fortunate enough to live here long enough to get things exactly the way I want them’. Not that she looked at it that way. ‘I’m a woman the Fates don’t like,’ she said sourly and often. And it was a matter of principle to hoard old misfortunes, fetching them out regularly for a brush and a polish.

  And welcome in new ones, as she was doing now. ‘I do hope it’s nothing terrible. I think I would rather live on an island all alone than have any more upsets.’

  ‘Maybe it’s good news,’ he couldn’t resist suggesting, to annoy her. ‘Maybe you’ve won some lottery.’

  She gave him a scathing look, then took to examining the smudge of a postmark. ‘Does that say Scarborough? What could I possibly have to do with anyone in Scarborough?’

  ‘You could open it and see.’

  She lifted a face set like a roughcast wall. ‘You wait,’ her eyes said. ‘Wait till your life has turned so thin and dull you like to savour every little thing that comes your way. Let’s hope some snotty bugger comes along and scoffs at you.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, guilt fuelling irritation, ‘what’s that printed on the front?’

  Unwillingly, she admitted, ‘It says, “Be properly insured”.’

  ‘That’ll be it, then. Something to do with insurance.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  Oh, for God’s sake! He bent down behind the wingback chair, ostensibly to pick up the cardigan that had slid to the floor but really to hide his grimace. What was the matter with old people? Why couldn’t they simply rip open a letter and read it? Why did they have to mull over the postmark and franking stamp as if they were bloody runes? There ought to be a way of putting a rocket under them when they were being so tiresome. If he arranged his Eurovision Frost-Top Contest a different way, then he could strip them of points each time they—

  No. Better to keep the scoring the way everyone was used to seeing it, with points awarded rather than taken off. She was still fretting. ‘The insurance renewal can’t be due for months.’ But he wasn’t listening. He was pitching his idea to a television commissioning panel. Everyone knew there were far too many old people. All over Europe pension funds couldn’t cope and standards of care were atrocious. So every year there’d be a cull. Run like the Eurovision Song Contest (but without the pizzazz), everyone over seventy would be up for grabs, and everyone else would have twenty points (‘That’s vingt points!’) to distribute. So if, for example, the old dear next door was forever hobbling around with home-baked cookies and offering to babysit, then naturally, on the Big Night, Mr and Mrs Frayed Parent would award her as many points as they could rake up between them, to keep her alive, and at it. And if, sadly, that meant they had nul points left over for their own parents – always a little bit too wrapped up in their own affairs to be helpful – then they’d end up in that year’s cull. Simple. And very moral. Because, like the Song Contest, the aim was always to reward the best, and in this case best meant unselfish, useful, loved. Standards in over-seventies would shoot sky high. Entire personalities would change for the better overnight, or pay for it drastically.

  The sound of an envelope tearing drew his attention back. He tracked the sense of the letter through her grumbling. ‘Overheads! That’ll be fancy cream envelopes you can hardly rip open . . . Increasing costs? More fat cats farting through silk, if I know anythi
ng about insurance companies . . . Rise in premiums? I knew it! When push comes to shove, it’s always bad news for the consumer . . . Barefaced cheek!’

  The sudden fall of silence didn’t bode very well. But he was well aware she wouldn’t take it up with him, and risk letting him in on any of her secrets. Anyone else, he reflected, might ask their only son, ‘You can’t remember how much I paid for house insurance last year, can you, Colin?’ Or even, ‘Can you nip down to the breadbin and bring up that big blue envelope?’ But not her. She’d wait till he took the dog out, and then she’d be down the stairs like greased lightning, leg or no leg, to see exactly what was meant by ‘rise in premiums’.

  ‘Bad news?’

  ‘Nothing that won’t keep,’ she said cagily, shovelling the letter back in its envelope and pushing it behind the cushion. But there was an air of rising distraction about her. It might, he thought with that sinking sense of coming events casting their shadows before, be worth laying his hands on this letter to find out exactly what was going on.

  ‘Changed your mind over the muffins?’ he asked her, to allay suspicion.

  ‘No, thanks. I’m not hungry.’

  That was another thing that ought to lose old people points, thought Colin. Pretending they didn’t eat. He couldn’t for the life of him work out what pleasure could be gleaned from affecting indifference to a treat someone offered to put in front of you, then secretly pigging on bran flakes. He’d checked it out with one of his sister’s outgoing friends. ‘Is this behaviour normal?’ Val had, after all, been a qualified and experienced Health Visitor. She ought to know. And her reply had astonished him. ‘Well, maybe not normal, Colin. But not uncommon. All part and parcel of some vertiginous urge towards the very thing threatening them: in this case, Death. Next time you’re there, take a peek at the photos on her walls. I expect you’ll find everyone in them is already six feet under.’

  And there they all hung still. Aunt Ida. His father. Viv. Tanka the dog. Betty from Swannington. All dead and buried, except for—

  ‘My photo! Where’s it gone?’

  She barely lifted her head from the loose thread she was tracking through her woolly. ‘What photo?’

  ‘That one of me and Teresa Fuller in nursery school, dressed up as two very large ducks.’ (No point in harping on about the fact that it was the only one left after his quite unwitting act of sibling suttee, thanks to the bonfire that followed her bust-up with Dilys.)

  ‘I don’t remember that one.’

  ‘Of course you do! We were about to be killed by the farmer’s wife. I certainly hope that you haven’t got rid of it.’

  She swatted at him. ‘Oh, really, Colin! Do you think I have nothing better to do than keep track of your old photos? Why don’t you do something useful? Take Floss and go and get a paper before I go out of my mind.’

  Well, look at that. She couldn’t wait to get him out of the house so she could scurry down and root through her paperwork. Proof, at the very least, her leg was getting better.

  And he’d escape for ten minutes.

  ‘A paper. Right you are. Anything else?’

  Wait for it . . .

  ‘Well, while you’re there you could just ask Mr Stastny about those special teabags I ordered.’

  Bring back the tea. Right.

  ‘And some Golden Churn.’

  And butter.

  ‘And if those Crispy Gingers are in again . . .’

  Biscuits.

  ‘Just have a little look around. And if there happen to be any nice bananas . . .’

  Fruit.

  ‘Oh, and candles. If he’s got any on the shelves. Just in case.’

  Candles.

  ‘But don’t go to any trouble.’

  ‘No.’

  He rested his hand on the door latch, and waited.

  ‘Oh, and Colin! Before you go, could you just give the room a little squidge of air freshener?’

  He picked it up and squirted. ‘It’s fresh air you need,’ he scolded. ‘Not more of this stuff.’

  But she was already pulling her cardigan round her, ready for the great dash to the breadbin.

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Colin. Fresh air doesn’t smell nearly as nice as this.’

  Oh, but it did. The moment he was out in it he felt his spirits soar. How did the people in Val’s profession manage it? Were they saints? Some, of course, ended up poisoning their clients, or unhooking vital drips. But most of them presumably chugged on, wiping up messes, seeing frightful sights, and steadily answering the same daft questions ten times in a row. ‘So Nurse Tippet’s still on holiday, is she?’ ‘Did Doctor tell you all about my feet?’ ‘Aren’t you terribly young to be properly qualified?’ The wonder was, he thought, that every paper wasn’t crammed from first to last with details of the trials and appeals of nursing staff who had lost patience. Fully inspirited by fresh wind and sky, Colin made for the corner, hampered only by Flossie’s recalcitrant dragging that made him a prey to civilities from neighbours.

  ‘Visiting your poor mother, are you, Colin? I do hope the dear soul’s feeling a little bit better.’

  ‘Out shopping for Norah? Splendid! I’m sure she can do with the help. And the company.’

  But soon he was round the backs, and feeling a little safer, on home ground. Light years ago he used to go this way every morning, endlessly dawdling, picking bits out of walls, inspecting insects and berries. He knew each crevice, every moss pattern, each rise and fall under his feet. This was the route of his imaginary life. At school, of course, his name had been a byword for clumsiness and failure. ‘Lost your match?’ ‘Yup! Colled it up totally.’ ‘Whoops! Done a Col. Spilled it.’ But it was a very different Colin who scuffed his way past these overhanging hedges twice a day for years and years: a sturdy, popular Colin who led the gang, rescued the drowning toddler, and showed the firemen the only safe way out of the building. Was that why that record of Dilys’s had haunted him all through his teens? Del and the Stompers. ‘Look fancy, have fun, act fearless’? Even back then he must have realized he could scarcely have fallen much further short. Not that he’d had the best start, what with their mother constantly bragging to everyone about what a monstrously ugly baby he had been, and pinning his sticky-out ears back against his head while she wondered aloud about the risks of operations. As for ‘have fun’, the words were never used inside their house without a slick of sarcasm. French exam? ‘Have fun!’ Unheated pool? ‘Have fun!’ The very concept filled his mother with suspicion. Even when other people floated the fat, bright, ballooning prospect of it within his or Dilys’s reach, she’d try to shoot it down. ‘I expect that the beach will be heaving.’ ‘Don’t you think, with this rain, it’ll probably be cancelled?’ ‘By the time you get there it’ll be time to come home again.’ Under this barrage, only someone as tough as his sister could fail to grow up fearing the worst. So Colin had hidden behind his twin, terrified of anything new – of parties, strangers, introductions even. Sometimes it got so bad it reached the stage where every single word he knew he ought to be saying sounded so ludicrous sitting waiting in his brain that he became incapable of spitting out even the basics like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ without turning as red as a radish. ‘Look fancy, have fun, act fearless!’ It was so foreign to him, it was unforgettable. He would have done a whole lot better to have lit on a song more his own style. ‘Look drab, feel grey, don’t risk it.’ That would have done him nicely, fitted him perfectly, and maybe he could have grown up and forgotten it.

  Red alert! He could hear leaf-scrabbling on the far side of the hedge.

  ‘Colin, dear. Is that you?’

  For God’s sake! How did the grizzled frumps manage it? Spectacles thick as bottle bottoms, yet they could spot him creeping past a privet hedge. He came to a halt by a balding patch of greenery and pawed the ground in his anguish, knowing there was no escape.

  ‘You don’t happen to be popping along to Mr Stastny’s, do you?’

  More bloody shopp
ing. This one had had him down for skivvy since he was five years old. Already she was rooting in her purse. What would it be this time? Cod liver oil? Sanatogen? Support stockings?

  ‘Rizla papers, dear. Just the one packet.’

  ‘Rizla papers?’

  She gave him a reproving look. ‘For art class, dear. Snowflakes on my little collage.’

  Another? She must have thousands of the things. She had been taking the same old art class for years and years. And wearing the same green turban. (His mother called it The Bogey.)

  ‘Oh, and if he’s got any cornplasters . . .’

  Too loud. She had been heard over the other hedge.

  ‘Is that Colin off to the shop, Elsie? Would you mind asking him if he’d bring me back twenty Kensitas?’

  ‘Did you catch that, Colin?’

  ‘And a Telegraph. If it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘No trouble, no.’

  ‘And I happen to know Larry and June over the wall would appreciate a nice fresh white loaf. He was only this minute complaining that their breadbin was empty.’

  Bread. Yes. ‘Anything else?’

  But, orders given, the hoar-heads had happily gone back to fretting over Mr Al-Khatib’s peach rot.

  ‘Yes, very nasty.’

  ‘Most disappointing.’

  ‘It does seem to me, Ahmed, that this entire back strip of yours has become little more than a grow-bag for garden diseases.’

  He left them at it and fled along the alley towards Mr Stastny’s, all hope of idle musing driven from his brain by his snowballing list. It was like being back at secondary school, when he used to mutter his way between the hedges, rehearsing the names of the elements, the virtues of vitamins, or the causes of wars and revolutions. Now it was teabags, two Telegraphs, butter, biscuits, bananas, candles, cornplasters, cigarettes, bread . . . What had he forgotten?

  Oh, yes. Rizla papers.

  Mr Stastny seemed equally taken with this part of the order. ‘You got some nice stuff, Colin?’

  He toyed with the idea of getting a bit of a reputation locally, and then confessed. ‘They’re for Mrs McKay’s new collage.’ Mr Stastny vanished into the back in search of one item or another, and Colin sank on the old person’s chair and stared around glumly. How long had he been shopping in this dingy hole? Thirty-five years. Longer! And nothing had changed, except that, instead of pushing past him to the front, or speaking over him, now the rude crumble-brains simply snaffled him as he crept past their back gardens to hand in their orders. He couldn’t stand old people. He was at the end of his tether with them. Dilys was right. The moment he got back to the house he was going to—