The Bones in the Attic Read Online Free PDF

down into Houghton Avenue proper, the messages came thicker and faster, and he was visibly committing every odor to memory when suddenly he froze. After a second or two he turned his head cautiously back. All four of them turned too.
    Caught in the light of a streetlamp as it crossed from one of the gardens to the lawns of the church opposite a long, skinny creature with a bushy tail. It was part reddish gray, part dirty cream, and it looked toward them with alert, calculating eyes without a trace of fear.
    â€œIs it a dog?” whispered Stephen.
    â€œNo, it’s a fox,” said Matt. “What they call an urban fox.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œOne that lives in a town instead of the country. They scavenge from dustbins, live on anything they can get.”
    Beckham was transfixed. Something told him to run at it, but prudence held him back. The fox, having sized them up, thought for a minute, then proceeded, brisk but unhurried, on its way, hopping through the church gates and disappearing from sight.
    The children seemed to have been holding their breath for minutes.
    â€œThat was won derful!” said Isabella.
    â€œI wish Mummy could have seen it,” said Stephen.
    â€œShe will,” said Matthew heartily. “There’s probably a family of them.”
    Beckham now charged forward, hectically sniffing at the places the fox had been, whining operatically and implying that he would have chased it if only they had let him off. The magic moment was over. But Matt had a feeling that, whatever doubts there might have been about the new house in the children’s minds, they had now been wiped away.

CHAPTER THREE

Learning Curve

Over the next few days Matt felt his body churning with a growing and nagging impatience. Ridiculous, when the bones had been there years, decades, but still. . . . He phoned Charlie Peace the day after the Radio Leeds appeal, and Charlie said there’d been three or four people ringing in and volunteering information, and that they would be followed up. He sounded very official, as if someone were listening in. He was hardly more forthcoming on the question of the little skeleton.
    â€œThat takes time. Bones in themselves are near impossible to date. It could be a question of what’s been discovered in the vicinity. But I have got a piece of good news.”
    â€œThat makes a change.”
    â€œThe boffins are moving out of your house as we speak. You can get your man in and start the decorating at once.”
    That was a relief. Matt rang Tony Tyler’s mobile number straightaway, and said he’d add a couple of hundred to the agreed price if they could start within the next day or two. They arranged to meet in Houghton Avenue when Matt’s shift on Radio Leeds ended at twelve o’clock, or as soon after that as Tony could manage.
    When he drew up and parked by the hut that served the house as a garage, Tony was nowhere to be seen, but he saw at once that the police tape was gone from the back door of Elderholm. At last he could go inside again. It was time for instant decisions about colors and floor coverings.
    â€œExcuse me.”
    His hand had been on the latch of the back gate, and the voice came from behind him. A woman—fair rather than blonde, and perhaps in her late forties—had come up, expansively smiling, with perhaps a slight nervous consciousness that she was intruding. She was smartly dressed for gardening—no contradiction in terms, because Matt could guess that her gardening consisted of a snip here, a strict tying back there, with the heavy work being done by hired help or by her husband.
    â€œYes?” He smiled, though: he didn’t want to be on bad terms with all his neighbors.
    â€œI think you must be Matthew Harper.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œI heard you on the radio yesterday. I was just trying to find some nice music and heard the name Houghton Avenue. Such a