A Dreadful Past, page 15
‘Yes, ma’am.’ George Hennessey nodded slightly and returned the smile. ‘I fully understand.’
‘Good.’ Dr D’Acre returned her attention to the corpse upon the dissecting table. ‘I confess those television police dramas have done much damage to people’s perception of the role of the forensic pathologist.’ She pondered the corpse and then continued: ‘Self-inflected tattoos are noted on the forearms of the deceased, one of which seems to be in the rough shape of a cross … no initials but definitely self-inflicted as if they are so-called “gaol house tats”, and thus strongly indicating prior convictions. SOCO will be here later to take fingerprints so you’ll likely find his identity that way,’ Dr D’Acre informed him. ‘His fingerprints are very likely to be on the Police National Computer.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Hennessey replied, ‘I have a very strong feeling that we’ll know him … I instinctively feel that he is connected to an ongoing inquiry.’
‘Well … I dare say you’ll find out very soon whether you’re right or not. So to continue … the abdomen is beginning to swell with the build-up of gases, again indicating death within the last twelve hours, but only indicating,’ Dr D’Acre emphasized. ‘I’ll take a quick peek in the stomach. I am performing a standard midline incision.’ She took a scalpel from the instrument tray and made an incision into the flesh from the neck down to the middle of the corpse. She then drew an incision from that point down to the left thigh and a second down to the right thigh. She then peeled the skin back from the incisions. ‘Yes,’ she commented, ‘the stomach is beginning to expand. Can we have the extractor fan on, please, Eric?’
Obediently, as he was earlier, Eric Filey walked a few feet to this left and flicked a switch. An extractor fan began to whirr softly and steadily.
‘Deep breath, gentlemen.’ Dr D’Acre turned her head to one side and penetrated the stomach with the scalpel, allowing gases to escape with a loud but short-lived ‘hiss’. ‘Well, that was not bad,’ she announced once she had exhaled and had taken another breath. ‘Not as bad as the so-called “bloated floater”. Poor man. He was pulled out of the Foss one summer, so bloated with gas that he could have exploded at any time. You have doubtless heard the story, Chief Inspector. We put the fans on full blast, Eric left the laboratory, then I took a deep breath, stabbed the stomach and ran out after Eric. It was a full hour before the air in here was breathable once more, probably more than an hour, in fact.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Hennessey replied diplomatically, having heard the story of the ‘bloated floater’ quite often.
‘There was no way of identifying him so they gave him a name, John Brown, and buried him in an unmarked grave with two other paupers. I must visit his grave; I have not been there for a while. In fact, I think I’ll go there after I have completed here – we have no other work to do at the moment. Would you like to accompany me, Chief Inspector?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Hennessey replied. ‘Yes, I would like that.’
‘Good, we’ll do that, you and I. So … to the present corpse,’ Dr D’Acre continued. ‘Well, I think I can detect the reason for his look of undernourishment … he didn’t masticate.’
‘Sorry, ma’am?’ Hennessey asked. ‘Masticate? What does that mean?’
‘Chew,’ Dr D’Acre explained. ‘He swallowed his food without chewing it first. It’s the reason why the Almighty in his wisdom gave us teeth. It’s not so we can tear flesh from bone like the early hunter gatherers did, but rather so we can chew our food. It’s the chewing action which releases the nutrients in food. You cannot assume the stomach will do that job … you, me, all of us must chew our food if we are to obtain the most benefit from it.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Hennessey replied. ‘I’ll remember that.’
‘I can even venture to say that his last meal was a pizza. So inefficient was his eating practice that I can detect thin strips of ham and bits of pineapple. He would have felt full but his food would have passed straight through him without depositing any goodness on the way. He would have pretty well flushed all the goodness in that meal down the toilet.’ Dr D’Acre moved away from the stomach and pondered the throat of the deceased. ‘This will be the cause of death, I am pretty well certain: a severed carotid artery. Death would have been almost instantaneous – a few seconds of consciousness when he would have known what had happened … and then … and then … eternity. May God rest his wretched soul. You know, I won’t make a definitive statement but I can detect a right-to-left tearing of the flesh around the wound which suggests a left-handed attacker, if the attacker was standing behind him.’
‘That is interesting,’ Hennessey commented. ‘That could be very useful. I will make a special note of that observation.’
‘Only an indication,’ Dr D’Acre emphasized. ‘Only a possibility.’
‘Nonetheless, possibly very useful,’ Hennessey replied. ‘It is something to note, as I said.’
‘Well, that concludes the post-mortem. My finding is one of death by the severing of the carotid artery. I will, of course, send a blood sample to the forensic science laboratory at Wetherby and ask that they trawl for poison but I am pretty well certain that it will be a negative result, there being no outward signs of poisoning. And the identity has still to be confirmed. So, Mr Hennessey, let’s get out of these greens and I’ll see you in the car park. We can leave Eric to wrap up here. Yes?’
‘Yes.’ Hennessey smiled. ‘In the car park.’
Thirty minutes later Louise D’Acre parked her 1947 red-and-white Riley RMA by the kerb outside Fulford Cemetery. She and Hennessey walked from the car to a patch of closely mown grass within the cemetery which itself was surrounded by solid, Victoria-era housing. They stood in silence, side by side.
‘They planted him just here. This is his final resting place.’ Louise D’Acre looked down at the grass, breaking the silence. ‘Just here with two other paupers, but they were already there and so John Brown’s coffin got the top place. He was somebody’s son, maybe even someone’s brother, possibly even someone’s father, but he became lost in the world and nobody noticed him missing. Nobody had reported him as a missing person so they called him John Brown and put him in the plainest of pine coffins and laid him atop of two others like him. I felt I had to attend the funeral … There was me, the priest, the four men who lowered the coffin and another man from the funeral directors who sprinkled a little soil.’ She fell silent for a few moments. ‘I like to lay a flower when I come,’ she continued. ‘This time I didn’t bring one. I will bring a flower next time I visit … which will be in a few months’ time, that being the sort of frequency I visit.’
George Hennessey moved his right hand slightly away from him so that the edge of his hand touched the edge of Louise D’Acre’s left hand.
‘Don’t put too much emphasis on my observation that the killer might be left-handed.’ Louise D’Acre kept her hand pressed against Hennessey’s. ‘A right-handed person standing in front of the victim moving the blade in a so-called “backhanded” motion will cause similar injuries.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Hennessey replied. ‘But thank you anyway.’
‘Twenty years ago?’ The publican of the George and Dragon sat in the public bar which was not yet open for the day’s business. A middle-aged woman in a smock ran a vacuum cleaner up and down the same area of carpet as if reluctant to leave the room, seemingly anxious to overhear some snippet of conversation between the publican and the police officers. A young man in a black shirt and a red bowtie with a gold nameplate busied himself racking up behind the bar while a young woman, also in black and also behind the bar, pulled line cleaner through the pumps and emptied it into galvanized iron buckets. The publican himself was evidently dressed in his ‘off-duty’ clothing: faded denim jeans, sandals without socks and a loud yellow T-shirt on which ‘I Woke up like This’ was emblazoned in black. ‘Let’s see … twenty years … well, yes, I was head honcho here by then, probably about two years in the post. I had just taken over from old Ken Short. He really turned this pub round and made it a money-spinner. He was able to retire when he was still in his fifties, so maybe not-so-old Ken Short. He and his wife had a villa in Spain. They have both returned to the UK now. He’s pushing eighty, as is Muriel, his wife, and his health particularly is failing. So yes … I was here then.’
‘It’s a gang of four we are interested in,’ Yellich advised. ‘We were told they drank here from time to time about twenty years ago. They were regular enough to know you, we are told, and address you by your first name, but our informant was at pains to point out that you didn’t seem to like them and were not wildly happy about them coming here. They were three men and one woman. Two of the men were tall … one was apparently a bit of a loudmouth, and then one small man and a short woman. The woman wore a jacket with the logo of an American baseball or football team on the back. You know, something like the San Francisco 49ers or the Green Bay Packers … some such name like that.’
‘This is a big ask.’ Frank Peabody glanced up at the dark-stained wood-panelled ceiling. ‘I’d like to help … but remembering one customer or a group of customers from twenty years ago, well, that’s not easy. You know, my brother-in-law is a school teacher. He’s older than me and been a school teacher since he was in his early twenties. He once said to me about his past pupils, “You remember the types, you remember the good ones and you remember the bad ones, but the rest, and that is by far the majority, just fade from your memory”. I said I knew exactly what he meant because it’s the same in the licensed retail trade – you remember the good customers and you remember the troublemakers but the rest … and they are also by far the majority, the rest, well … they just fade from your mind, but it certainly sounds like I should remember the gang you mention … three men and a woman, who knew me by my first name …’
‘If it helps you,’ Carmen Pharoah sat opposite Frank Peabody and found herself becoming increasingly annoyed by the cleaning woman who steadfastly refused to move away and work in another room, ‘the person who told us you might remember the four people we are looking for described a very minor incident one evening. He said that one of the tall men, the loudmouthed one, in fact, was wearing a jacket, and he put his pint of beer in the top inside pocket of his jacket then lifted the lapel, thus bringing the glass up to his lips, then further lifted the lapel, thus tipping the glass towards him and then drinking from it, and when he’d done that he said to you, “A new way of drinking it, Frank”.’
‘Oh …’ Frank Peabody, clean-shaven with short blonde hair, raised a finger. ‘My heavens …’ He glanced down at the dark red, deep pile carpet. ‘It’s all coming back to me now, it’s all flooding back. That crew … and yes, your information-giver was right – I didn’t like them in the pub but they gave me no reason to refuse to serve them. And yes, they used to come in, quite often late at night, not usually early doors drinkers, but occasionally they did come in during the early evening and if they called in here for a quick one when on their way somewhere they often used to boast about beating people up or threatening to beat people up, often saying, “We’ll beat somebody up on the way home tonight”.’
‘And you didn’t report them?’ Thompson Ventnor asked. He was more than a little surprised, and also more than a little disappointed.
‘That’s the pub trade.’ Frank Peabody glanced at Ventnor. ‘I tell you it’s as much about people watching as it is about selling the product. You get to learn that the loudmouths are full of hot air. I mean, the British Army would have to be twice as large as it is if all the “ex-soldiers” you get in here were telling the truth about serving Queen and country. And there was never any mention of the police wanting to talk to “four persons” following any attack that might have been reported. So I just put it all down to hot air. And no, I didn’t report it.’
Thompson Ventnor shrugged. ‘So what can you tell us about them, the gang of four?’
‘It isn’t much but as I remember, and my memory is a little hazy, the loudmouthed one of the two tall ones, he was heavily built, not particularly fit, just big and fat and overweight. He spoke with an East London accent, anxious to be popular. When he … when they first came in he said I could call him “Keith”, pronouncing Keith as “Keef”. Regional accents are an interest of mine, you see. I put him down as an East Londoner originally, I mean originally from East London. I never heard the other tall one talk. I don’t remember his talking much at all, in fact. He always used to sit very still and very quietly. I always thought he was quite sinister in that he never gave anything away. The other two, the small male and the female, were also quiet but quiet in the sense that the other two kept them subdued and in their place.’
‘Would you say the girl was a full member of the gang?’ Carmen Pharoah asked. ‘Not a hanger-on or a girlfriend of one of the males?’
‘Full member, I’d say.’ Frank Peabody considered his reply. ‘Yes … full member. She was very masculine in her movements, drinking beer, wearing male boots … walking like a male. As I recall I didn’t think she would find it easy to attract men; she might not even have been interested in men.’
‘I see.’ Carmen Pharoah wrote in her notebook. ‘We knew a girl was involved in one of the attacks we are investigating but we didn’t know whether the girl was fully part of the group … now it seems she was.’
‘Do you know,’ Frank Peabody drummed his fingers on the recently polished table top, ‘like I said, it’s all coming back; little details are drip-feeding back into my mind … and I think, only think, mind you, that she was called Molly.’
‘Molly?’ Carmen Pharoah repeated.
‘Yes, as in the song, “In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone” …’
‘Molly is usually short for Margaret,’ Thompson Ventnor offered, ‘so two names … Keith and possibly Margaret, who was also known as Molly.’
‘And the small guy,’ Frank Peabody continued, ‘always looked like he had a chip on both shoulders, him with those vicious-looking shoes he always wore with the pointed toe caps. I am sure that he was called Gerry.’
‘Gerry,’ Carmen Pharoah wrote in her notepad. She glanced to her side as the cleaner eventually unplugged the vacuum cleaner and carried it out of the room. ‘So “Gerald” perhaps? This is very good,’ she observed. ‘Very good. So just the other tall man, the sinister one, the quiet one … just him to name.’
‘Yes … just him.’ Frank Peabody smiled. ‘But he turned out all right.’
‘He did?’
‘Yes. About five years ago now I was called up for jury service here in York. I really enjoyed it. I didn’t think I would but we formed into a good group, the twelve of us, for a trial that lasted two weeks. Personalities emerged and some people swapped names and telephone numbers on the final day because friendships had begun, and one of the jurors, a retired coalminer called Desmond, he was a natural comic … We just had to laugh, so much so that the usher had to leave the court during legal submissions to come and tell us to be quiet, but he did so with a wink. I think he, and possibly the lawyers too, realized that we needed that stress release.’
‘Yes,’ Carmen Pharoah nodded, ‘I think that would have been the case … they would not have been upset by the sound of your laughter.’
‘Well, we found the guy guilty and I had no sleepless nights. I was the foreman, in fact. I stood up and said “guilty”. The Crown’s case was as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar and the other accused – there were two of them – the other one, well, he threw in the towel halfway through and changed his plea to guilty, which made our job easier because if one was guilty then so was the other … But the second one, he was a real psychopath … no guilt, no remorse. Nothing. He insisted on sticking to his not guilty plea. Anyway, we were asked to retire to consider our verdict. The judge told us to enter into “conclave”, which was a word I didn’t know and so I had to look it up. It means “a meeting held in private to discuss a specific issue”, which I dare say is exactly what a jury is. We voted on the issue and within two minutes we found him guilty, twelve to nothing … unanimous. And very safe. We decided to stay out for two hours to give a better impression and got a free lunch in the process, but the point of this is … once we had returned and had delivered our verdict the judge asked for a probation officer to enter the court, and so one did. He stood in the witness box and the judge asked him for a helpful social background report, providing “insight” to assist him in sentencing. The upshot was that two weeks later the geezer who had changed his plea got eight years and the psychopath got twelve.’
‘Very interesting,’ Carmen Pharoah pressed, ‘but where is this going?’
‘Well, where it is going,’ Frank Peabody rested his elbows on his knees, ‘is that the probation officer who entered the court and stood in the witness box was none other than the quiet, tall one of the gang you are making inquiries about, the one I always thought very sinister. When I saw him I could hardly believe it. I really just could not believe my eyes and I thought, well, well, well, haven’t you turned over a new leaf? Haven’t you just.’
‘A probation officer.’ Carmen Pharoah turned to Thompson Ventnor. ‘He isn’t going to enjoy having his collar felt. He isn’t going to enjoy it at all.’
