EQMM 2005-06 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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

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