Bones of the Buried Read online

  DAVID ROBERTS worked in publishing for over thirty years, most recently as a publishing director, before devoting his energies to writing full time. He is married and divides his time between London and Wiltshire.

  Praise for David Roberts

  Sweet Poison

  ‘A classic murder mystery with as complex a plot as one could hope for and a most engaging pair of amateur sleuths whom I look forward to encountering again in future novels.’

  Charles Osbourne, author of

  The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie

  Bones of the Buried

  ‘Roberts’ use of period detail ... gives the tale terrific texture. Recommend this one heartily.’

  Booklist

  Hollow Crown

  ‘The plots are exciting and the central characters are engaging, they offer a fresh, a more accurate and a more telling picture of those less than placid times.’

  Sherlock

  Dangerous Sea

  ‘Dangerous Sea is taken from more elegant times than ours, when women retained their mystery and even murder held a certain charm. The plot is both intricate and enthralling, like Poirot on the high seas, and lovingly recorded by an author with a meticulous eye and a huge sense of fun.’

  Michael Dobbs, author of

  Winston’s War and Never Surrender

  Also by David Roberts

  Sweet Poison

  Hollow Crown

  Dangerous Sea

  The More Deceived

  A Grave Man

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2001

  This paperback edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable and Robinson Ltd, 2002

  Copyright © David Roberts, 2001

  The right of David Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-84119-587-2 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-84119-385-4 (hbk)

  eISBN 978-1-78033-420-2

  Printed and bound in the EU

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  For Olivia

  Don Adriano de Armado: The sweet war-man is dead and rotten; sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried; when he breathed, he was a man.

  William Shakespeare Love’s Labour’s Lost

  Contents

  Prologue – Eton, 1917

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Three

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Prologue – Eton, 1917

  ‘Boy!’ The call echoed round the house and a scurry of small black-garbed figures raced to answer it, slithering to a halt outside the library. Eight senior boys in the house constituted ‘the library’ and it was also the name given to the room they used as a common-room. It had almost no books in it – just a broken-backed sofa, several armchairs, all of which had seen better days, and a table with one leg amputated at the knee, supported uncertainly by a pile of textbooks. There was also a dartboard, a wind-up gramophone with a spectacular horn, a few records in brown paper sleeves and an ancient kettle. Next to the grate, beside a couple of toasting forks, a bunch of canes rested negligently against the wall, assuming an air of innocence which belied the very real threat that lay behind their willowy form.

  The last in line was, as always, Featherstone, a small boy dressed in bum-freezers. This was the uniform reserved for first-year Etonians below a certain height. The short coat, cut off just above the posterior, contrasted with the tail coats worn by all the other boys and marked him out as the lowest form of school life. Oliver Featherstone was very miserable. He badly missed his father who, out of love, had inflicted upon him this particular torture. His father was the owner of several oil wells in Persia but, to Oliver’s great grief, was also the proprietor of a famous department store on Oxford Street in London. His mother, whom he rarely saw, was a film actress whose photograph appeared in picture-papers on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Unfortunately, he had discovered that neither his father’s wealth nor his mother’s celebrity was anything to be proud of at Eton. What was worse, his father’s name was not really Featherstone but Federstein. There were several Jews at Eton, one of whom was a member of Pop, the select society of popular boys which ran the school, but the Jews whom Eton welcomed, as Oliver painfully discovered, were the sons of merchant bankers who had bankrolled the government and the monarchy for almost a century. None of these held out to him the hand of friendship. Despite his wealth, his father had himself been ostracised from polite society and, in a clumsy attempt to ease his son’s passage through the school and protect him from bullying, had tried to conceal his origins by changing the spelling of his surname. It took only three weeks for it to become known that Featherstone was really Federstein and that his father was ‘a grocer’. Oliver at once became the innocent victim of his father’s subterfuge.

  ‘Federstein!’ All the other small boys ran away chirruping gratefully like a swoop of starlings.

  ‘Yes, Hoden?’ said Oliver, wearily.

  Hoden scribbled on a piece of paper, folded it several times and thrust it at him. ‘Take this to Stephen Thayer at Chandler’s, and hurry.’

  ‘But Hoden, please! I’ve got an essay for tomorrow and I’ve already had three rips. My tutor said it would be PS next time.’

  ‘Well, you’d better run then,’ said Hoden unsympathetically. When a boy’s work was not up to scratch the master – or beak as he was called at Eton – would tear it at the top and the errant pupil would have to take it to show his housemaster. Too many rips would result in Penal Servitude – PS for short – which involved sacrificing already scarce free time on ‘extra work’.

  Highly disgruntled, Oliver set off at a run down Judy’s Passage, the narrow pedestrian way which threaded the redbrick buildings, the last of which was Stephen Thayer’s house. Half-way, he got a stitch in his side and slowed to a walk. There was a large stone, big enough for a small boy to sit on, where the path made a dog-leg and there, strictly against the rules, Oliver perched and unfolded the note Hoden had given him. It read: ‘Stevie, can you meet me underneath the arches tomorrow after six. Send word by the oily Jewboy, love, M. PS But he is rather pretty isn’t he?’

  Oliver’s eyes began to water. How dare this horrible man call him an oily Jewboy, and pretty. Neither his father nor his mother had
told him anything about sex before he went to school. Had he but known it, his mother was an expert on the subject but, in his eyes, she was as pure as a garden rose and it would have embarrassed him horribly if she had said anything with a view to preparing him for life in an English public school. As for his father, he assumed that in some magical way his son was to be transformed into an English gentleman, in his view a creature second only to the gods themselves. He visualised Eton as holy water in which his son would be purified. It was odd that a man so generally shrewd in the affairs of the world should be so naive when it came to baptism.

  Oliver looked at his hand with horror. In his anguish, and without being aware of what he was doing, he had scrumpled up Hoden’s note. He couldn’t deliver it now without Thayer knowing that he had opened it but he dared not go back without an answer. The tears began to trickle down his cheeks. Half-blinded by the savage grief of childhood, he did not notice that someone was walking down the passage towards him. It was the very boy to whom he was to deliver the note.

  ‘What’s up, Featherstone – that is your name, isn’t it? Come now, why are you blubbing?’

  He spoke not unkindly and Oliver was persuaded to hold up the crumpled piece of paper for his inspection. ‘I’m . . . I’m truly sorry, Thayer. I didn’t mean to open it. It just sort of came undone.’

  Thayer took the note, read it and blushed deeply. He bit his lip and tried to decide what to say. He knew he could get into bad trouble if the substance of the message came to the attention of his housemaster, and Hoden would certainly be sacked. Homosexual feelings, though common enough in a single sex school, or indeed because they were so common, were anathema to the authorities and no housemaster would hesitate to have a boy removed from the school if anything of the kind was proved against him.

  Damn Hoden, Thayer thought. He really would have to drop him. ‘Stop all that noise, Featherstone. No one’s going to punish you but really, you know, it was very wrong of you to open a private note.’

  ‘Ye . . . s,’ Oliver agreed. ‘Should I say anything to Hoden? He may want to whack me.’

  ‘No,’ said Thayer hurriedly. ‘Don’t do that. I got the message and no one else saw it. We’ll leave it at that. No harm done.’

  ‘No . . .? Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Don’t call me “sir”, you little idiot. You only call beaks “sir”.’

  ‘Yes, Thayer.’

  ‘Oh, and don’t get upset about people calling you . . . names. You can’t help being . . . whatever it is he said you were . . . not oily I mean but the other. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Now off you go, and remember: say nothing of this to anyone or you will get into trouble.’

  ‘Yes, Thayer. And thank you,’ said the small boy, managing a smile. Could it be that this god figure, a member of Pop and therefore one of Eton’s elect, was going to forgive him, to be compassionate? It never occurred to him for a moment that he, the most miserable of worms, had through an accident, through his own clumsiness, gained a measure of power over one so mighty. He looked at Thayer, noticing him for the first time as a person – his expensively cut hair, his coloured waistcoat, which only members of Pop could wear, gleaming like armour, his buttonhole freshly cut that morning in his tutor’s garden. From his white ‘stick-up’ collar to his shoes shiny enough to reflect his face, Thayer was perfect and Oliver felt an overwhelming desire to fall on his knees and worship.

  In his second ‘half’ at Eton, Oliver began to enjoy himself. In the way of small boys, he quickly forgot the misery of his first half, though he kept out of Hoden’s way as much as possible. He even made a few friends and almost anything is bearable with a friend to commiserate with you. And Eton had a lot to offer. He took to the pleasures of the river and would take a ‘whiff’ upriver to Queen’s Eyot, a little island where he could eat sausage and mash, drink the weakest of beer and read. Reading was his chief pleasure. With books he could escape to . . . to wherever he desired and he did still want to escape. He found too that he was musical and would spend hours in the music school trying to master the piano, with some success.

  In fact, sex was the only thing which spoiled Oliver’s life – not his own feelings, which had not yet begun to trouble him, but he was bewildered and distressed by the attention of some older boys. Hoden, in particular, would summon him to the library and maul him about until he wept, when he would be contemptuously dismissed. One afternoon – this was in the summer half and the days were long and hot – he happened to be in the house instead of on the river. He had strained a muscle in his leg and had been told not to take out his whiff for a couple of days. The dreaded cry of ‘boy’ sounded round the virtually empty building and, with a groan, Oliver left his book and ran to answer it. It did not cross his mind that he might safely ignore the summons. When he arrived, he found he was the only boy to have answered the call and resigned himself to carrying some stupid message to another house or making some lazy senior a cup of tea.

  He knocked on the door and opened it when a hoarse voice shouted, ‘Come!’

  He recognised the voice immediately as belonging to Hoden and his heart missed a beat. But, when he was in the room, he saw that Hoden’s friend, Tilney, was also there and his spirits rose a little. Surely Hoden would not try anything on in this other boy’s presence. But he was wrong.

  ‘Ah, Federstein.’ Hoden took pleasure in making the name sound as foreign as possible. ‘You’ve come at last. My friend Tilney here doesn’t believe that you can act but I heard you had a part in the school play – Shakespeare?’

  ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I’ve only a very small part, Hoden.

  ‘So I’ve always imagined,’ Hoden sniggered. ‘As a girl, I understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver miserably.

  ‘Well, Tilney and I want to “hear your lines”. Isn’t that what thespians say?’

  ‘Oh, I . . . I don’t know them yet.’

  ‘Well, we’ll assist you.’

  ‘No, I can’t remember . . .’

  ‘I think it might help,’ Hoden said, ‘if you took off some of your clothes.’ He pretended to appeal to Tilney who was smirking uneasily at his friend’s teasing. ‘He can’t pretend to be a girl dressed in trousers, now can he, Tilney old man?’

  ‘I should say not,’ said the other boy as heartily as he could manage.

  ‘Take off your clothes, Federstein. We want to see if you’re a girl.’

  ‘No, please, Hoden, let me go, won’t you.’

  Oliver was now very frightened. He was not physically brave and he was almost excessively modest. He hated undressing in the bathroom with other boys and one of the things he most appreciated about Eton was that even ‘new boys’ had separate rooms and did not sleep in dormitories.

  ‘I won’t, Hoden. Tilney, tell him to leave me alone.’

  ‘Oh, let the little sod go,’ Tilney said lazily, but Hoden now had the taste of blood.

  ‘No, Tilney, this little Jewboy has to be taught a lesson. Here, help me take his trousers off so I can whack him.’

  Reluctantly, Tilney got up from the sofa and seized hold of the wriggling boy as Hoden removed first his ‘bum-freezer’ jacket, and then his shirt. By this time Oliver was in tears and, as Hoden began to tug frantically at the boy’s trousers, Tilney said, ‘I say, I think we ought to let the little tyke go.’

  ‘No fear,’ said Hoden, picking up a cane from the pile in the corner and striking at Oliver’s back. ‘Stand still, you malodorous animal, if you don’t want to get badly hurt,’ he ordered, waving the cane over his head as if he were trying to swat a fly. Then he screamed. A lucky kick from Oliver’s flying heels had caught him on the shin. ‘That does it, Tilney, I’m going to show the little Jew what for.’

  He raised the cane above his shoulder but, before he could strike, the library door opened and Stephen Thayer entered. He took in the scene at a glance. He strode over to Hoden and tore the cane from his grasp. Without a word he swung it hard against Hoden’s cheek, r
aising a red weal as thick as the bamboo. Hoden screamed again and let go of Oliver who gathered up his clothes and fled.

  Oliver’s awe of Thayer was transformed in a moment to love. When several days later he met him as they were both taking boats off the racks, he tried to say something of what he felt.

  ‘Oh, Thayer, I wanted to thank you . . . but why are you going on the river? I thought you were a drybob.’

  ‘I am, but I like to scull when I have the time. And please – don’t thank me. I’ve told Hoden and Tilney if they ever come near you again I will have them sacked. I don’t think they will try anything like that again but if they do – tell me.’

  ‘Oh, Thayer, thank you. I suppose there’s nothing I can do for you, is there?’

  ‘No, certainly not . . . though wait a minute.’ He pretended an idea had just struck him. ‘Isn’t your mater the film star, Dora Pale?’

  Oliver blushed. ‘Oh yes, I’m sorry, Thayer. I keep it as quiet as I can.’

  ‘No, you silly beggar, you misunderstand me. I would like to meet her if that were possible. Does she ever come down to see you?’

  ‘No, I told her not to.’

  ‘Well then, ask her . . . to please me.’

  ‘Oh gosh . . . yes, Thayer, I will, but are you sure? You won’t . . . you won’t laugh?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Stephen said, ‘I won’t laugh.’

  Her skin was almost translucent. ‘Pale, pale Dora, adorable Dora Pale,’ he murmured, turning over in bed to stroke her cheek. ‘You’re not asleep so why pretend you are? Do you know you have freckles? Would you like me to lick them off for you?’

  ‘I do not have freckles,’ Dora said, her eyes still shut.

  ‘You do,’ he said stroking her stomach in the way he knew she liked.

  ‘You know, Stephen, you’re almost as good-looking as you think you are, but you’ve got a pimple coming just here,’ she pinched him quite hard on the cheek, ‘and what does that tell us?’

  ‘Ouch, that hurt. So what does it tell us, mistress mine?’

  ‘It tells us, Master Thayer, that you are still a child and I don’t sleep with children.’