A Dreadful Past, page 5
‘Whatever …’ Jenny growled, ‘but just wait till he’s looking down the barrel of a .22 with a telescopic sight. But to continue … The house cleaner who called once a week had a key but she was also cleared of all suspicion. She found the bodies, poor woman … and her emotion was genuine. I saw her later that day – she was still as white as a sheet, still totally unable to speak, clearly in a state of shock. I couldn’t, and I still cannot, see her as having any involvement, especially since she had cleaned for the family for years. She was fully trusted by the Middletons and was small and frail looking. She was just not capable of that level of violence, not even against one person, let alone three.’
‘Fair enough,’ Hennessey acknowledged. ‘And, as you say, she reported the crime, she remained in the vicinity of the crime scene and is said to have been traumatized. She made the phone call to the police then went into shock. Not the actions or response of a guilty person but we’ll visit her anyway – that is, if she’s still alive.’
‘Yes, if she’s still alive,’ Jenny replied, ‘and it’s a big if. A very big if indeed. As I recall she was no spring chicken at the time.’ Jenny sipped his tea. Then he said, after a pause, ‘You know, in hindsight I don’t think that we inquired as much of the neighbours as we could have done. It’s something you and your team might like to consider doing.’
‘Neighbours?’ Hennessey glanced at Jenny. ‘I didn’t know that there were any neighbours.’
‘There weren’t, not as in the sense of neighbours in a street in a city, but there were other homes dotted about the area. We went to the adjacent farms and spoke to the residents. The Middleton home used to be a small working farm; Charles Middleton bought it and let the greater part of the acreage return to wilderness. He obviously liked a lot of space around him, and that was his downfall because there was no safety in numbers in his household situation, no close neighbour to report a disturbance,’ Jenny explained. ‘The sort of folk who live out that way would be the sort of folk to come forward if they had information but we should still have knocked on more doors than we did. I think that we should have cast a wider net; that’s a bit of wisdom in hindsight for you, George. We didn’t inquire widely enough.’
‘Well, we’ll do that,’ Hennessey replied. ‘That’s a stone for us to turn over. Do you mind if I have the last muffin? And look …’ he added, with a broad grin, ‘the rain has held off. We were lucky.’
The man stood in the gloom hunched over the thick leather-bound ledger, slowly licking his thumb and then using that thumb to turn each page. ‘I don’t understand computers,’ he explained softly, ‘and I don’t like change and I don’t like modern technology. I know very well how to get energy from running water with the use of a water wheel or turbine, I know how to get heat from a lump of coal and I know how a windmill works. I know all that but I don’t understand nuclear fission or fusion or whatever it’s called so I don’t like nuclear power. I don’t like it at all.’ He paused. ‘Oh, yes … oh, yes … here it is … a Wedgwood vase, a Jasperware fumigating pot vase, made in the 1860s for Piesse and Lubin of Londinium.’ Bernard Wilcher rotated the ledger so that Yellich and Webster could read the entry. ‘And I don’t like credit cards either,’ he added. ‘That’s because I don’t … can’t understand how money can go down a telephone line or bounce off a satellite or whatever it does. I like hard cash or a cheque. I can understand hard cash or cheques. Did you know the first cheque for one million pounds was written in the Cardiff Coal Exchange during the nineteenth century?’
‘I confess I didn’t,’ Yellich replied patiently as he read the ledger and copied the details of the transaction into his notebook. ‘You paid one hundred pound for the vase, I see,’ Yellich commented, ‘and then sold it to Mr Middleton for two hundred pounds.’
‘Yes, both fair prices given my costs.’ Wilcher took the spectacles off his nose and cleaned the lenses with his cardigan. ‘Shops in this part of York have a very high rent … really extortionate rents, if you ask me. But I pass the cost of renting on to my customers and I make a comfortable enough living.’
‘Fair enough,’ Yellich replied absentmindedly. ‘Sorry, I can’t make out your handwriting, sir. Who did you buy the vase from?’ He rotated the ledge so that Bernard Wilcher could consult it.
‘Yes, my handwriting … I get many complaints about my handwriting. It has not improved over the years but at least it hasn’t got worse either. So who did I buy it from? Yes … I bought it from a gentleman called Jerome Aspall. At least he said that that was his name – Jerome Aspall. I do not check identities; I cannot, in the sense that I have no legal right. All I can do is write down the name that the selling customer provides. I can and could believe Aspall. I once knew a man by that name, a long time ago now, but Jerome … Well, I confess that I thought that that was a little fanciful, most fanciful, in fact,’ Wilcher mumbled. ‘He stuck in my mind, the man from whom I bought the vase in question. I remember him well. He had a patch over one of his eyes and a Staffordshire bull terrier on a chain. He cut a menacing image. Most menacing. Damned dog kept growling at me … came into my shop, if you please, and growled at me. I confess that I fancied the dog had taken the young man’s eye out.’
‘Young man?’ Yellich commented.
‘Yes … late teens, early twenties,’ Wilcher advised. ‘That sort of age.’
‘Did you ask him where he had obtained the vase?’ Yellich wrote the vendor’s name and his approximate age in his notebook.
‘Yes, yes. I do have to ask that question but as with the names all I can do is record what information I am given. The antiques business has a dark side, not unlike the motor trade, and it can be conduit to crime and the underworld. At the top end of the business it’s above reproach, again, like the motor trade.’ Wilcher sniffed as if suffering from a slight cold. ‘There are gentlemen in the motor trade and there are gentlemen in this business but, as I said, both trades have their ne’er-do-wells, as no doubt you two police officers will very well know. A rogue motor trader will sell you a replacement gearbox for your car at a tenth of the price of a new one if you don’t ask too many questions about its provenance. In much the same way a rogue antiques dealer will give you significantly less than the fair price for a carload of antiques without asking too many questions about where said items came from, but he would not be a dealer who is local to the burglary.’
‘No?’ Yellich glanced round the gloomy interior of Wilcher’s shop. He saw more and more items as his eyes adjusted to the gloom.
‘Oh, no.’ Wilcher replaced his spectacles. ‘No. You see, if you burgle a house in York you won’t want to sell the proceeds to a local dealer only to then have said proceeds displayed locally. The rightful owners might see them in the shop window and the game will be up.’
‘Which is what happened in this case,’ Yellich observed dryly.
‘So I believe … so the gentleman who bought the vase told me,’ Wilcher replied, ‘thus neatly illustrating that danger. But you see, local felons all know each other and suspect antiques dealers all know each other, and so if a house in York is burgled the villains will approach a local suspect antiques dealer for advice about where to sell the items and the dealer will put them in touch with a suspect antiques dealer in another part of the UK. The felons will transport the stolen goods to Wales or up to Scotland or down south or whatever, and a suspect dealer in York will purchase the proceeds of a burglary in Wales or Scotland or the south of England and be happy to display them in his shop.’
‘But you don’t do that?’ Yellich said warmly.
‘No … no … I don’t,’ Wilcher replied confidently. ‘I like to sleep at night. I wouldn’t do it anyway, having been a victim of a burglary myself, but I like sitting at home with my wife, and if the doorbell should ring I like responding to it out of curiosity and not out of fear that it might be the police.’
‘Yes. I cast no aspersion, Mr Wilcher, I assure you,’ Yellich answered quickly.
‘I know,’ Bernard Wilcher replied equally rapidly. ‘I sensed that in the tone of your voice. I am not at all offended.’
‘So …’ Yellich continued, ‘… who would you know in York, in the antiques trade, who might be a little suspect? Especially a little suspect twenty years ago?’
‘It didn’t come from me.’ Wilcher became guarded. ‘I don’t want a brick through my window, and that would be the least of my fears. Antiques shops burn very well, or so I am told.’
‘Understood,’ Yellich assured Wilcher. ‘It didn’t come from you.’
‘Twenty years ago …’ Wilcher pondered. ‘Well, in those days it would have been old Harry Lister. He really gave the antiques trade a very bad name. He’s retired now. He had a shop further down Stonegate. It’s a food shop now, selling locally sourced produce. I buy my lunch there on occasions. Their steak and stilton pies are delicious. They are most highly recommended.’
‘So,’ Yellich wrote Harry Lister on his notepad, ‘back to Jerome Aspall. What address did he give?’
‘Tuke Avenue, Tang Hall, 297 Tuke Avenue. He said it was near Coniston Drive, as I recall,’ Wilcher read from the ledger. ‘That was the address he gave anyway – 297 Tuke Avenue.’
‘A Tangy,’ Yellich exclaimed. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
‘Yes.’ Wilcher nodded. ‘The eyepatch and the fighting dog on a chain, not a leather leash, the vase in its broken condition … the rough, self-inflicted tattoos on the back of both hands. His whole image seemed to say “criminal” to me but that vase had been put back together very carefully and with very powerful adhesive. It was “strong in the broken places” as Hemingway said in A Farewell to Arms. The welds were stronger than the fragile bits the glue held together. But one hundred was a fair purchase price for me to offer and he seemed to be happy and content enough with that.’
‘Self-inflicted tattoos, you say?’ Yellich clarified. ‘That could be interesting.’
‘Yes. He made a right mess, a real dog’s breakfast of the job as well,’ Bernard Wilcher sniffed, ‘but I did note the initials B.W. on the back of his left hand. It’s the sort of thing I’d notice and also remember because they are also my initials.’
‘B.W.’ Yellich committed the initials to memory but also wrote them on his notepad. ‘B.W.’ he repeated. ‘B.W.’
George Hennessey took his leave from the Jenny household, expressing gratitude for their hospitality as he did so, and took the opportunity to wish Frank Jenny a good-humoured ‘good hunting’ in respect of the ‘wretched’ magpie. He then drove slowly to his home in Easingwold, following the B roads through Norton and Malton, and found himself greatly enjoying the quiet drive in the late spring weather. Upon arriving at Easingwold he drove through the town and exited on the Thirsk Road and then, when on the extreme outskirts of the town, he turned his car into the driveway of a detached house. At the sound of his car tyres crunching the gravel a dog began to bark loudly within the house, and did so excitedly in a welcoming manner. Hennessey entered the house by the front door and was met by a black mongrel that leapt up at him with a vigorously wagging tale. Hennessey knelt and patted the dog, and together they walked to the back of the house from which the dog exited via a dog flap set in the back door. Hennessey unlocked the back door and stood for a few moments watching his dog crisscross the lawn in search of recently laid scents.
Leaving the dog contentedly exploring the lawn, Hennessey returned into the house and made himself a large pot of tea which he allowed to infuse for the prescribed three minutes before pouring a portion of it into a tartan-patterned half-pint mug. He carried the mug of tea and once again stood on the patio at the rear of the house. ‘An interesting development.’ He spoke quietly. ‘Well, perhaps it’s still early days yet, but we are taking a very interesting fresh look at a cold case …’ And so he continued talking as if to the air or to his garden or to Oscar, his dog, and an observer coming upon the scene would think he was talking to himself. But, dear reader, only those closest to him – his family, and also the new lady in his life – would know that he was in fact talking to Jennifer, his wife, who had died just three months after giving birth to their son. Jennifer, who had been walking through Easingwold one hot summer’s afternoon and who had suddenly collapsed as if in a faint. Other foot passengers had gone to her aid but no pulse could be found. An ambulance was summoned which took her to hospital, where she was declared ‘dead on arrival’ or ‘condition purple’ in ambulance code. At the inquest, the doctor giving evidence had declared that Jennifer Hennessey had died of ‘Sudden Death Syndrome’, which is the nearest the medical profession could get to explain why a young person in absolute and perfect health and still in her youth should fall down dead while doing nothing but walking in the street, quite calmly going about her business, all life having been removed from her in an instant as though, suddenly upon some whim, her life force had been switched off. It had been a great tragedy but Hennessey had picked himself up and had carried on ‘for Jennifer’s sake’. Over the next few years George Hennessey had set about rebuilding their rear garden, observing a design Jennifer had drawn up while heavily pregnant with Charles. She had determined that the long back garden, which had been a dull, totally unimaginative expanse of lawn, should be divided widthways halfway down its length by a privet hedge with a lawn in the foreground, and beyond the hedge an orchard should be planted, with access to the orchard being gained by a gateway set in the hedge. Beyond the orchard a small area of wilderness was to be permitted in which a pond was to be dug and amphibians introduced.
It had then become his established practice, upon returning home each day, to stand on the patio, looking out over the garden where Jennifer’s ashes had been scattered and to tell her of his day. ‘It is still very early on in the piece, as I say, and we are only able to address the case because things are quiet at the moment. Relatively speaking, that is. So back into the case we go with enthusiasm and gusto, but after twenty years memories will have blurred and become confused. Evidence will have been lost. Not all the players will still be with us. Well, all I can say is that we’ll give it our best shot. It’s all we can do.’
Later, after a wholesome, home-cooked chicken bake, George Hennessey settled down to read from a book about the Spanish Civil War which he had recently acquired as an interesting addition to his library of military history. The book, he found, transpired to be a pleasing mixture of highly detailed scholarly research combined with readability. It was, in his experience, a rare combination, and most pleasing because of it.
Later still, he and Oscar walked together enjoying each other’s company to beyond the edge of Easingwold, where he took the dog off his lead and allowed him to roam freely across a meadow and in and out of a small wood. Later still, having returned Oscar to his house, George Hennessey strolled calmly into Easingwold, again another established practice, to enjoy a pint of brown and mild at the Dove Inn – just one – before last orders were called.
It was Wednesday, 22.00 hours.
TWO
Wednesday, 10.05 hours – Thursday, 01.35 hours.
In which more is learned about the Middleton household, two men have an Oriental experience, and both Reginald Webster and Thompson Ventnor are at home to the too kind reader.
Tang Hall, dear reader, of which there has been repeated mention in the preceding chapter, is a housing development or ‘estate’ which lies to the east of the centre of the city of York. It is a largely low-rise estate with steps within the buildings enabling tenants with flats on the upper floors to access their homes in keeping with the tenement design in Scotland and Continental Europe. In addition to the low-rise flats there are also streets with linked housing and pairs of houses at ground level with each house comprising of the ground floor and one upper floor, plus attic space and a small back garden. The estate is of a red brick appearance and dates in the main from the 1920s and 1930s. It is, by and large, neatly and cleanly kept by the local authority which maintains the small front gardens and the hedgerows which separate the gardens from the pavement and ensures that they are neatly trimmed. It is an estate wherein motorbikes are chained to the lampposts and where old motor cars line the kerbs. The majority of the adults under pensionable age are unemployed and many are known to the police. It is widely regarded to be the least desirable estate in York in which to live, but it is nevertheless an oasis of gentle manners and good conduct when compared to the notorious ‘sink estates’ in cities such as Moss Side in Manchester, Easterhouse in Glasgow, St Paul’s in Bristol and Seacroft in Leeds. One man’s floor, the gracious reader might ponder, is another man’s ceiling.
Carmen Pharoah drove the car into Hewley Avenue on the Tang Hall Estate and halted outside number 237. She and Thompson Ventnor found Hewley Avenue to be one of the streets in which the buildings were in pairs with a ground floor and an upper floor with small back and front gardens. The road, they also noted, was a mixture of old original, pre-World War Two developments which stood near the entrance to the avenue at the junction with Burlington Avenue and more recent 1960s housing which stood deeper within the avenue, yet the recently built housing blended, both officers thought, sensitively with the original houses. Carmen Pharoah and Thompson Ventnor left the car after securely locking it and walked up the short and narrow front path of number 237, which was lined with a waist-high privet hedge at the side. Carmen Pharoah knocked on the blue-painted front door using the soft yet still authoritative police officers knock, of tap … tap … tap. There was no immediate response. Pharoah and Ventnor glanced at each other and Pharoah was about to knock a second time when at that moment movement was to be heard from within the house in the manner of an internal door being opened with a distinct ‘click’ and then shut. Moments later the front door was opened and a short and finely made woman stood on the threshold of the house. She had, noted the two officers, gaunt and drawn features, piercing green eyes and straggly, uncombed grey hair which reached to her shoulders. She wore a long black dress, the hem of which hung just below her knees, revealing thin calves which stopped in heavy black ‘sensible’ shoes. The woman wore a necklace of multi-coloured plastic beads which she had looped twice around her long neck, and she wore equally inexpensive plastic bangles around each wrist. ‘Yes?’ she said, with a trace of curiosity but without any trace at all of fear or alarm caused by the two strangers who had suddenly presented themselves on her doorstep.
‘Fair enough,’ Hennessey acknowledged. ‘And, as you say, she reported the crime, she remained in the vicinity of the crime scene and is said to have been traumatized. She made the phone call to the police then went into shock. Not the actions or response of a guilty person but we’ll visit her anyway – that is, if she’s still alive.’
‘Yes, if she’s still alive,’ Jenny replied, ‘and it’s a big if. A very big if indeed. As I recall she was no spring chicken at the time.’ Jenny sipped his tea. Then he said, after a pause, ‘You know, in hindsight I don’t think that we inquired as much of the neighbours as we could have done. It’s something you and your team might like to consider doing.’
‘Neighbours?’ Hennessey glanced at Jenny. ‘I didn’t know that there were any neighbours.’
‘There weren’t, not as in the sense of neighbours in a street in a city, but there were other homes dotted about the area. We went to the adjacent farms and spoke to the residents. The Middleton home used to be a small working farm; Charles Middleton bought it and let the greater part of the acreage return to wilderness. He obviously liked a lot of space around him, and that was his downfall because there was no safety in numbers in his household situation, no close neighbour to report a disturbance,’ Jenny explained. ‘The sort of folk who live out that way would be the sort of folk to come forward if they had information but we should still have knocked on more doors than we did. I think that we should have cast a wider net; that’s a bit of wisdom in hindsight for you, George. We didn’t inquire widely enough.’
‘Well, we’ll do that,’ Hennessey replied. ‘That’s a stone for us to turn over. Do you mind if I have the last muffin? And look …’ he added, with a broad grin, ‘the rain has held off. We were lucky.’
The man stood in the gloom hunched over the thick leather-bound ledger, slowly licking his thumb and then using that thumb to turn each page. ‘I don’t understand computers,’ he explained softly, ‘and I don’t like change and I don’t like modern technology. I know very well how to get energy from running water with the use of a water wheel or turbine, I know how to get heat from a lump of coal and I know how a windmill works. I know all that but I don’t understand nuclear fission or fusion or whatever it’s called so I don’t like nuclear power. I don’t like it at all.’ He paused. ‘Oh, yes … oh, yes … here it is … a Wedgwood vase, a Jasperware fumigating pot vase, made in the 1860s for Piesse and Lubin of Londinium.’ Bernard Wilcher rotated the ledger so that Yellich and Webster could read the entry. ‘And I don’t like credit cards either,’ he added. ‘That’s because I don’t … can’t understand how money can go down a telephone line or bounce off a satellite or whatever it does. I like hard cash or a cheque. I can understand hard cash or cheques. Did you know the first cheque for one million pounds was written in the Cardiff Coal Exchange during the nineteenth century?’
‘I confess I didn’t,’ Yellich replied patiently as he read the ledger and copied the details of the transaction into his notebook. ‘You paid one hundred pound for the vase, I see,’ Yellich commented, ‘and then sold it to Mr Middleton for two hundred pounds.’
‘Yes, both fair prices given my costs.’ Wilcher took the spectacles off his nose and cleaned the lenses with his cardigan. ‘Shops in this part of York have a very high rent … really extortionate rents, if you ask me. But I pass the cost of renting on to my customers and I make a comfortable enough living.’
‘Fair enough,’ Yellich replied absentmindedly. ‘Sorry, I can’t make out your handwriting, sir. Who did you buy the vase from?’ He rotated the ledge so that Bernard Wilcher could consult it.
‘Yes, my handwriting … I get many complaints about my handwriting. It has not improved over the years but at least it hasn’t got worse either. So who did I buy it from? Yes … I bought it from a gentleman called Jerome Aspall. At least he said that that was his name – Jerome Aspall. I do not check identities; I cannot, in the sense that I have no legal right. All I can do is write down the name that the selling customer provides. I can and could believe Aspall. I once knew a man by that name, a long time ago now, but Jerome … Well, I confess that I thought that that was a little fanciful, most fanciful, in fact,’ Wilcher mumbled. ‘He stuck in my mind, the man from whom I bought the vase in question. I remember him well. He had a patch over one of his eyes and a Staffordshire bull terrier on a chain. He cut a menacing image. Most menacing. Damned dog kept growling at me … came into my shop, if you please, and growled at me. I confess that I fancied the dog had taken the young man’s eye out.’
‘Young man?’ Yellich commented.
‘Yes … late teens, early twenties,’ Wilcher advised. ‘That sort of age.’
‘Did you ask him where he had obtained the vase?’ Yellich wrote the vendor’s name and his approximate age in his notebook.
‘Yes, yes. I do have to ask that question but as with the names all I can do is record what information I am given. The antiques business has a dark side, not unlike the motor trade, and it can be conduit to crime and the underworld. At the top end of the business it’s above reproach, again, like the motor trade.’ Wilcher sniffed as if suffering from a slight cold. ‘There are gentlemen in the motor trade and there are gentlemen in this business but, as I said, both trades have their ne’er-do-wells, as no doubt you two police officers will very well know. A rogue motor trader will sell you a replacement gearbox for your car at a tenth of the price of a new one if you don’t ask too many questions about its provenance. In much the same way a rogue antiques dealer will give you significantly less than the fair price for a carload of antiques without asking too many questions about where said items came from, but he would not be a dealer who is local to the burglary.’
‘No?’ Yellich glanced round the gloomy interior of Wilcher’s shop. He saw more and more items as his eyes adjusted to the gloom.
‘Oh, no.’ Wilcher replaced his spectacles. ‘No. You see, if you burgle a house in York you won’t want to sell the proceeds to a local dealer only to then have said proceeds displayed locally. The rightful owners might see them in the shop window and the game will be up.’
‘Which is what happened in this case,’ Yellich observed dryly.
‘So I believe … so the gentleman who bought the vase told me,’ Wilcher replied, ‘thus neatly illustrating that danger. But you see, local felons all know each other and suspect antiques dealers all know each other, and so if a house in York is burgled the villains will approach a local suspect antiques dealer for advice about where to sell the items and the dealer will put them in touch with a suspect antiques dealer in another part of the UK. The felons will transport the stolen goods to Wales or up to Scotland or down south or whatever, and a suspect dealer in York will purchase the proceeds of a burglary in Wales or Scotland or the south of England and be happy to display them in his shop.’
‘But you don’t do that?’ Yellich said warmly.
‘No … no … I don’t,’ Wilcher replied confidently. ‘I like to sleep at night. I wouldn’t do it anyway, having been a victim of a burglary myself, but I like sitting at home with my wife, and if the doorbell should ring I like responding to it out of curiosity and not out of fear that it might be the police.’
‘Yes. I cast no aspersion, Mr Wilcher, I assure you,’ Yellich answered quickly.
‘I know,’ Bernard Wilcher replied equally rapidly. ‘I sensed that in the tone of your voice. I am not at all offended.’
‘So …’ Yellich continued, ‘… who would you know in York, in the antiques trade, who might be a little suspect? Especially a little suspect twenty years ago?’
‘It didn’t come from me.’ Wilcher became guarded. ‘I don’t want a brick through my window, and that would be the least of my fears. Antiques shops burn very well, or so I am told.’
‘Understood,’ Yellich assured Wilcher. ‘It didn’t come from you.’
‘Twenty years ago …’ Wilcher pondered. ‘Well, in those days it would have been old Harry Lister. He really gave the antiques trade a very bad name. He’s retired now. He had a shop further down Stonegate. It’s a food shop now, selling locally sourced produce. I buy my lunch there on occasions. Their steak and stilton pies are delicious. They are most highly recommended.’
‘So,’ Yellich wrote Harry Lister on his notepad, ‘back to Jerome Aspall. What address did he give?’
‘Tuke Avenue, Tang Hall, 297 Tuke Avenue. He said it was near Coniston Drive, as I recall,’ Wilcher read from the ledger. ‘That was the address he gave anyway – 297 Tuke Avenue.’
‘A Tangy,’ Yellich exclaimed. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
‘Yes.’ Wilcher nodded. ‘The eyepatch and the fighting dog on a chain, not a leather leash, the vase in its broken condition … the rough, self-inflicted tattoos on the back of both hands. His whole image seemed to say “criminal” to me but that vase had been put back together very carefully and with very powerful adhesive. It was “strong in the broken places” as Hemingway said in A Farewell to Arms. The welds were stronger than the fragile bits the glue held together. But one hundred was a fair purchase price for me to offer and he seemed to be happy and content enough with that.’
‘Self-inflicted tattoos, you say?’ Yellich clarified. ‘That could be interesting.’
‘Yes. He made a right mess, a real dog’s breakfast of the job as well,’ Bernard Wilcher sniffed, ‘but I did note the initials B.W. on the back of his left hand. It’s the sort of thing I’d notice and also remember because they are also my initials.’
‘B.W.’ Yellich committed the initials to memory but also wrote them on his notepad. ‘B.W.’ he repeated. ‘B.W.’
George Hennessey took his leave from the Jenny household, expressing gratitude for their hospitality as he did so, and took the opportunity to wish Frank Jenny a good-humoured ‘good hunting’ in respect of the ‘wretched’ magpie. He then drove slowly to his home in Easingwold, following the B roads through Norton and Malton, and found himself greatly enjoying the quiet drive in the late spring weather. Upon arriving at Easingwold he drove through the town and exited on the Thirsk Road and then, when on the extreme outskirts of the town, he turned his car into the driveway of a detached house. At the sound of his car tyres crunching the gravel a dog began to bark loudly within the house, and did so excitedly in a welcoming manner. Hennessey entered the house by the front door and was met by a black mongrel that leapt up at him with a vigorously wagging tale. Hennessey knelt and patted the dog, and together they walked to the back of the house from which the dog exited via a dog flap set in the back door. Hennessey unlocked the back door and stood for a few moments watching his dog crisscross the lawn in search of recently laid scents.
Leaving the dog contentedly exploring the lawn, Hennessey returned into the house and made himself a large pot of tea which he allowed to infuse for the prescribed three minutes before pouring a portion of it into a tartan-patterned half-pint mug. He carried the mug of tea and once again stood on the patio at the rear of the house. ‘An interesting development.’ He spoke quietly. ‘Well, perhaps it’s still early days yet, but we are taking a very interesting fresh look at a cold case …’ And so he continued talking as if to the air or to his garden or to Oscar, his dog, and an observer coming upon the scene would think he was talking to himself. But, dear reader, only those closest to him – his family, and also the new lady in his life – would know that he was in fact talking to Jennifer, his wife, who had died just three months after giving birth to their son. Jennifer, who had been walking through Easingwold one hot summer’s afternoon and who had suddenly collapsed as if in a faint. Other foot passengers had gone to her aid but no pulse could be found. An ambulance was summoned which took her to hospital, where she was declared ‘dead on arrival’ or ‘condition purple’ in ambulance code. At the inquest, the doctor giving evidence had declared that Jennifer Hennessey had died of ‘Sudden Death Syndrome’, which is the nearest the medical profession could get to explain why a young person in absolute and perfect health and still in her youth should fall down dead while doing nothing but walking in the street, quite calmly going about her business, all life having been removed from her in an instant as though, suddenly upon some whim, her life force had been switched off. It had been a great tragedy but Hennessey had picked himself up and had carried on ‘for Jennifer’s sake’. Over the next few years George Hennessey had set about rebuilding their rear garden, observing a design Jennifer had drawn up while heavily pregnant with Charles. She had determined that the long back garden, which had been a dull, totally unimaginative expanse of lawn, should be divided widthways halfway down its length by a privet hedge with a lawn in the foreground, and beyond the hedge an orchard should be planted, with access to the orchard being gained by a gateway set in the hedge. Beyond the orchard a small area of wilderness was to be permitted in which a pond was to be dug and amphibians introduced.
It had then become his established practice, upon returning home each day, to stand on the patio, looking out over the garden where Jennifer’s ashes had been scattered and to tell her of his day. ‘It is still very early on in the piece, as I say, and we are only able to address the case because things are quiet at the moment. Relatively speaking, that is. So back into the case we go with enthusiasm and gusto, but after twenty years memories will have blurred and become confused. Evidence will have been lost. Not all the players will still be with us. Well, all I can say is that we’ll give it our best shot. It’s all we can do.’
Later, after a wholesome, home-cooked chicken bake, George Hennessey settled down to read from a book about the Spanish Civil War which he had recently acquired as an interesting addition to his library of military history. The book, he found, transpired to be a pleasing mixture of highly detailed scholarly research combined with readability. It was, in his experience, a rare combination, and most pleasing because of it.
Later still, he and Oscar walked together enjoying each other’s company to beyond the edge of Easingwold, where he took the dog off his lead and allowed him to roam freely across a meadow and in and out of a small wood. Later still, having returned Oscar to his house, George Hennessey strolled calmly into Easingwold, again another established practice, to enjoy a pint of brown and mild at the Dove Inn – just one – before last orders were called.
It was Wednesday, 22.00 hours.
TWO
Wednesday, 10.05 hours – Thursday, 01.35 hours.
In which more is learned about the Middleton household, two men have an Oriental experience, and both Reginald Webster and Thompson Ventnor are at home to the too kind reader.
Tang Hall, dear reader, of which there has been repeated mention in the preceding chapter, is a housing development or ‘estate’ which lies to the east of the centre of the city of York. It is a largely low-rise estate with steps within the buildings enabling tenants with flats on the upper floors to access their homes in keeping with the tenement design in Scotland and Continental Europe. In addition to the low-rise flats there are also streets with linked housing and pairs of houses at ground level with each house comprising of the ground floor and one upper floor, plus attic space and a small back garden. The estate is of a red brick appearance and dates in the main from the 1920s and 1930s. It is, by and large, neatly and cleanly kept by the local authority which maintains the small front gardens and the hedgerows which separate the gardens from the pavement and ensures that they are neatly trimmed. It is an estate wherein motorbikes are chained to the lampposts and where old motor cars line the kerbs. The majority of the adults under pensionable age are unemployed and many are known to the police. It is widely regarded to be the least desirable estate in York in which to live, but it is nevertheless an oasis of gentle manners and good conduct when compared to the notorious ‘sink estates’ in cities such as Moss Side in Manchester, Easterhouse in Glasgow, St Paul’s in Bristol and Seacroft in Leeds. One man’s floor, the gracious reader might ponder, is another man’s ceiling.
Carmen Pharoah drove the car into Hewley Avenue on the Tang Hall Estate and halted outside number 237. She and Thompson Ventnor found Hewley Avenue to be one of the streets in which the buildings were in pairs with a ground floor and an upper floor with small back and front gardens. The road, they also noted, was a mixture of old original, pre-World War Two developments which stood near the entrance to the avenue at the junction with Burlington Avenue and more recent 1960s housing which stood deeper within the avenue, yet the recently built housing blended, both officers thought, sensitively with the original houses. Carmen Pharoah and Thompson Ventnor left the car after securely locking it and walked up the short and narrow front path of number 237, which was lined with a waist-high privet hedge at the side. Carmen Pharoah knocked on the blue-painted front door using the soft yet still authoritative police officers knock, of tap … tap … tap. There was no immediate response. Pharoah and Ventnor glanced at each other and Pharoah was about to knock a second time when at that moment movement was to be heard from within the house in the manner of an internal door being opened with a distinct ‘click’ and then shut. Moments later the front door was opened and a short and finely made woman stood on the threshold of the house. She had, noted the two officers, gaunt and drawn features, piercing green eyes and straggly, uncombed grey hair which reached to her shoulders. She wore a long black dress, the hem of which hung just below her knees, revealing thin calves which stopped in heavy black ‘sensible’ shoes. The woman wore a necklace of multi-coloured plastic beads which she had looped twice around her long neck, and she wore equally inexpensive plastic bangles around each wrist. ‘Yes?’ she said, with a trace of curiosity but without any trace at all of fear or alarm caused by the two strangers who had suddenly presented themselves on her doorstep.
