David Roberts - Bones of the Buried

D AVID R OBERTS 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
Winstons 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

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 Olivers 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 fathers wealth nor his mothers celebrity was anything to be proud of at Eton. What was worse, his fathers 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 sons 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 fathers 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 Chandlers, and hurry.

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

Well, youd better run then, said Hoden unsympathetically. When a boys 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 Judys Passage, the narrow pedestrian way which threaded the redbrick buildings, the last of which was Stephen Thayers 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 isnt he?

Olivers 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 Hodens note. He couldnt 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.