The Altered Case

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘No matter.’ Webster looked at the ground though it told him nothing. He saw only stubble protruding from the rich brown soil. ‘In fact, too precise a location would suggest to us that you and Mr Allerton had contrived something.’

  A blue tractor pulled an empty trailer along a hidden sunken lane to their right, the driver looking with undisguised curiosity at the three men in the field, one of whom being a police constable. Their presence in the field would doubtless, thought Webster, be the talk of The Black Bull and The Three Horseshoes that evening and throughout the weekend. He looked skywards and saw a silver jetliner crossing the blue and, by then, cloudless sky, leaving four vapour trails behind it. ‘Well,’ he said, lowering his head and turning to Middleton, ‘if you and the constable would care to return to the car, I will remain here. The second constable can escort Mr Allerton and we’ll see what part of the field he points at.’

  It was Saturday, 12.35 hours.

  Sunday

  George Hennessey focussed his mind on the situation in hand: the field near the village of Catton Hill, the constables in white shirts and serge trousers, Detective Constables Ventnor and Webster, Detective Sergeant Yellich, the ominous white inflatable tent that had been erected close to the corner of the field, from which two SOCOs were emerging looking grim-faced and carrying photographic equipment. The senior Scene of Crime Officer walked slowly up to where Hennessey and Yellich stood and said solemnly, ‘All finished, sir, both colour and black-and-white photographs have been taken.’

  ‘Thank you.’ George Hennessey slowly nodded in appreciation. He then noticed a police constable emerge from the wooded area at the side of the field carrying a highly polished Gladstone bag and who was closely followed by Dr Louise D’Acre. Dr D’Acre was a slender woman, tall, and with a well-developed muscle tone which Hennessey knew was the result of her lifelong passion for horse riding. She wore her hair closely cropped and her only make-up was a trace of lightly shaded lipstick. Hennessey’s heart leapt as he saw her and at the same moment his chest swelled with pride. Dr D’Acre turned upon emerging from the wood and walked across the stubble towards Hennessey with the constable still carrying her bag, but by then walking reverentially behind her.

  ‘Good afternoon, Chief Inspector.’ Dr D’Acre had a soft speaking voice with an accent of received pronunciation. Her manner was polite but always professional; when working, the job, and only the job, mattered.

  ‘Good afternoon, ma’am.’ George Hennessey doffed his Panama as he replied.

  ‘Thank you for the advance notice.’ Dr D’Acre glanced at the tent. ‘It meant I was able to acquire an early lunch. I am always exhorting my two girls to eat and so I like it when I can set an example.’

  ‘Of course, ma’am.’

  ‘So,’ Dr D’Acre said, ‘a mass burial I am told?’

  ‘Well.’ Hennessey cleared his throat. ‘Hardly mass, ma’am, that is a bit of an overstatement. I’ll tell you the story of how we came to be notified of it but the upshot is that we had to wait until this morning before we could get the G.P.R. down here.’

  ‘G.P.R.?’ Dr D’Acre asked.

  ‘Ground Penetrating Radar.’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘when it arrived . . . it had to be brought down from our headquarters at Northallerton . . .’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We had good information and we were able to concentrate on a small search area, and pretty well as soon as the operators turned the thing on they picked up an image of something down there, but exactly what, they couldn’t say.’

  ‘I see,’ Dr D’Acre said again.

  ‘So we brought in a mechanical digger, now returned, to get down as close as we could without damaging whatever it was that the G.P.R. had seen. We had to assume that they were human remains until we knew otherwise.’

  ‘Of course.’ Dr D’Acre brushed a persistent fly from her face and reflected how fortunate it was that the recent rain had kept the insect activity to a minimum.

  ‘For the last foot or so,’ Hennessey continued, ‘we used manpower, good old mark one manpower, just one constable with a spade scraping the soil away, keeping the bottom of the pit as near horizontal as he could. He did a very good job of it.’

  ‘Yes, I see the spoil.’ Dr D’Acre glanced at the mound of soil beside the tent. ‘It is very rich-looking soil.’

  ‘It seems so,’ Hennessey agreed. ‘It’s very wet and heavy; it was hard work for the mechanical digger and it was especially hard for the constable who dug the last few inches, and it will still all have to be thoroughly sieved and sifted, for any vital evidence it might contain.’

  ‘I can imagine how hard it must have been,’ Dr D’Acre murmured. ‘I do a little gardening. It looks to be very heavy, as you say.’

  ‘And they have to put it all back.’ Hennessey laughed softly. ‘I haven’t told the boys yet, but they will have to put it all back with spades, the digger having been returned as I said. I couldn’t justify the expense of keeping it here.’

  ‘So . . .’ Louise D’Acre said, ‘what is down there?’

  ‘At the moment, just two skeletons, ma’am,’ Hennessey replied. ‘They appear to be human and radar images indicated something, possibly more skeletons, beneath them, as if they were buried on top of each other.’

  ‘Layered?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hennessey held brief eye contact with Dr D’Acre. ‘That’s a better way of putting it, ma’am. So once we had exposed two skeletons we stopped digging and requested the attendance of a forensic pathologist.’

  ‘And you got me for your sins.’ Louise D’Acre inclined her head. ‘So hard luck you.’

  ‘I would hardly say that, ma’am,’ Hennessey replied diplomatically.

  ‘Well, it was Hobson’s choice in fact. Tom Pembroke is at an arson incident in Driffield and Clarissa Pugh is engrossed in a post-mortem. I was writing a report, so this incident fell to me.’ Louise D’Acre paused, and being out of earshot of any other police officer, she lowered her voice and added, ‘Look, George, I have to tell you that Clarissa’s p.m. is looking like a case of Sudden Death Syndrome.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Hennessey felt as if he had sustained a blow to his stomach.

  ‘I am sorry, but I thought that I had better warn you, better coming from me than for you to read about it in the Yorkshire Post.’

  ‘Yes.’ Hennessey held another very brief period of eye contact with Louise D’Acre. ‘Thank you . . . I appreciate it. It’s very sensitive of you.’

  ‘Well.’ Louise D’Acre glanced around her, the vast blue sky, the flat, rich green landscape. ‘It’s just one of those conditions, one of those medical conditions that will remain a mystery until medical knowledge advances sufficiently to explain just what it is that causes a young person in perfect health to suddenly fall down dead in mid stride, as if the life force within them has been suddenly extracted by some unseen power.’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘I have puzzled that many, many times.’

  ‘I am sure you have and I am sorry we do not have an answer for you, and from what I know, Clarissa’s case appears typical. Just twenty years old, and just too good to be true, non-smoker, non-drinker, active in his local scout group, churchgoing, bank employee with a promising future, and yesterday he was taking a stroll along the banks of the river after attending Holy Communion and he just collapsed. He was Condition Purple upon his arrival at York District Hospital. And his family . . . they’re still numb with shock.’

  ‘I attended Sunday School when I was a nipper,’ Hennessey said. ‘we had the most formidable teacher who told us that “Even if we are perfect, the Almighty can still and will punish us in some way. It is just the way of the world”. I know what he meant now.’

  ‘Yes . . . just the way of it,’ Louise D’Acre echoed. ‘It’s an unidentified medical condition, so it will remain a syndrome, until . . .’

  ‘Until . . .’ Hennessey repeated, ‘until . . .’

  ‘B
ut anyway,’ Louise D’Acre said with finality, ‘we have our own job to do.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘you’re right; come on, I’ll show you.’

  Inside the inflatable tent both Hennessey and Dr D’Acre found the air very difficult to breathe and both gave thanks that it was the slightly cooler month of September and that they were there after a morning’s rainfall. They both knew that if it was earlier in the year, in the high summer, the air in the tent would be nearly unbreathable. Dr D’Acre stood on the lip of the neatly excavated hole and peered into it. She saw, perhaps four feet below the surface of the field, two skeletons, human, adult, both lying on their side as if gently facing each other. Even their arms seemed to be interlinked.

  ‘Adult human,’ Dr D’Acre observed, ‘one male and one female. They are highly likely to be white European, although there is a possibility that they could be Asian. They are definitely not Afro-Caribbean. It’s quite a deep grave. Unlawful disposals are usually in much shallower pits, in my experience anyway.’

  ‘And in mine,’ Hennessey growled. ‘Somebody had time to dig this hole.’

  ‘I can’t tell at a glance how long they have been buried,’ Dr D’Acre continued, ‘but I see no flesh or internal organs, so quite some time, and no bits of non-degradable items of clothing either, such as zip fasteners or wooden toggles. So they may have been naked when buried.’

  ‘We think they were buried thirty years ago.’

  ‘You can be as sure as that?’ Louise D’Acre glanced at Hennessey.

  ‘Yes, we can,’ Hennessey replied, and he then related the tale told by Cyrus Middleton and Tony Allerton.

  ‘That’s an interesting story.’ Louise D’Acre glanced at the skeletons. ‘It definitely marks the time of burial . . . thirty years ago this month. A story to dine out on and taking thirty years to come forward . . . but having said that I can understand the way memories are buried by the mind and only surface much later, often only when the person concerned is able to deal with it.’ She paused. ‘You know I once read an account of an incident in the United States, wherein a young girl, when aged about five years old, witnessed her father murder her friend and bury the body. She blocked the whole incident from her conscious mind, but some twenty years later the memory surfaced and she clearly felt that she owed more to her friend and her friend’s family than she did to her father, and she was able to take the police to the precise location where the little girl had been buried.’

  ‘As our two witnesses did.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Louise D’Acre continued, ‘and he spent his retirement as a permanent guest of the state. Well, I’ll collect my tool kit and start to earn my crust.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘And there’s more beneath those two, you say?’ Dr D’Acre snapped on a pair of latex gloves.

  ‘So we believe, ma’am,’ Hennessey replied. ‘The G.P.R. “looks” into the ground at a forty-five degree angle and thus provides a three-dimensional image, and there does indeed seem to be something else beneath the upper two skeletons.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Dr D’Acre prepared to gently lower herself into the grave. ‘Let’s see what we find.’

  ‘I’ll leave Webster and Ventnor here with you, plus the constables. I’ll ask them to avail themselves to you, ma’am.’ Hennessey made to leave the tent.

  ‘That would be appreciated. Thank you, Chief Inspector.’ Dr D’Acre lowered herself into the hole, taking care not to put any weight on to any part of either skeleton.

  ‘I have a notion to pay a visit,’ Hennessey added.

  ‘Oh?’ Louise D’Acre looked up at him from the grave.

  ‘Yes . . . I have.’ Hennessey smiled. ‘Just a notion that I and Sergeant Yellich should pay a courtesy call to the landowner. I mean, I wouldn’t want the police to dig up my back lawn without paying a call on me.’

  ‘Well a field is hardly a back lawn.’ Dr D’Acre knelt and began to scrape away soil from the head of one of the skeletons. ‘But I know what you mean.’

  ‘It’s just a courtesy call really,’ George Hennessey explained in a soft, calm and what he hoped was a reassuring tone of voice to the man who answered the door to himself and Yellich. ‘I am Detective Chief Inspector Hennessey and this gentleman –’ Hennessey indicated to Yellich – ‘is Detective Sergeant Yellich. We are from Micklegate Bar police station in York.’

  The man remained silent.

  ‘We understand from the land registry that you own the field near here?’

  ‘Which field near here? There’s plenty of fields round here, so which one in particular? No shortage of fields round here.’ The man was in his middle years, Hennessey assessed, probably mid to late fifties. He was tall, and perhaps could be said to be of aristocratic bearing, his near-perfect physique being marred only by a large pink birthmark on the back of his left hand. He wore casual but expensive-looking clothes and an equally expensive-looking watch. His attitude was, Hennessey found, far from aristocratic. He was, in fact, openly hostile to the police. His attitude was more akin to that of a career criminal, Hennessey found, than it was akin to the attitude of the establishment.

  ‘You are Thomas Farrent?’ Hennessey asked, coping very easily with the man’s hostility, though he was grateful for Yellich’s supportive presence.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Farrent sneered. ‘That is I.’

  ‘Good, good.’ Hennessey smiled. ‘We just have to be certain that we are talking to the right man. The field in question is the one by the wood close to the village of Catton Hill.’

  ‘Yes, that will be mine. I own all the land round here.’ Farrent’s voice was cold, suspicious, guarded.

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Yes, all the land round Catton Hill. You can walk from York to Selby without stepping off land I own. Sometimes it’s a narrow path, and the route is not direct, but it can be done.’ The man looked a little smug, Hennessey thought. ‘So yes, I will own the field you mention, and the wood, and the leases on the properties in Catton Hill village.’ Despite the brief show of smugness Farrent continued to seem wary and was very defensive of his house. He stood solidly in the doorway in a manner which stated very clearly that he had not the slightest intention of allowing Hennessey and Yellich to enter, keeping, as he did, the door half closed behind him. Nobody, Hennessey realized, was going to get into that house without a fight or a warrant, and most probably both. Farrent’s height of in excess of six feet, plus the elevated step upon which he stood made it possible for him to look down upon his unexpected callers and he did so with the steely eyes of a hungry predator. Farrent, Hennessey sensed, was looking upon him and Yellich as if looking upon fair game, and when he did take his eyes off the officers it was to look beyond them from left to right, carefully scanning the shrubs beyond the driveway of his house as if he was searching for any lurking prey or adversaries.

  ‘This really is just a courtesy call,’ Hennessey explained. ‘There is no need to be worried.’

  Farrent seemed to relax, though only slightly. Hennessey still sensed, with the intuition of a very experienced police officer, that Farrent was a man with something to hide and, or, something to fear. ‘We got the precise directions to your house from a farm worker,’ Hennessey explained.

  ‘Oh? Which one?’

  ‘We never asked his name.’

  ‘Where was he working?’ Farrent snapped the question.

  ‘We feel most disinclined to tell you,’ Hennessey replied calmly.

  ‘I see,’ Farrent growled, ‘but yes, the house is difficult to find, that’s how my father liked it. You’d have to know this area very well in order to know the house existed. It occupies a natural hollow in the landscape.’

  ‘Long driveway,’ Hennessey commented.

  ‘Half a mile long,’ Farrent advised, ‘narrow gateposts, thick shrubs and trees between the house and the road; my father planned it like that. He valued his privacy and, quite frankly, so do I.’

  ‘Well, we won’t take up too much of your
time,’ Hennessey reassured Farrent. ‘The situation is, you see, that there has been a development, quite a significant development in fact.’

  ‘What sort of development?’ Farrent’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘A development as in the form of a discovery.’

  ‘Like someone with a metal detector? A hoard of coins has been found?’

  ‘No . . . nothing as lucrative, I am afraid. It is the discovery of human remains.’

  Thomas Farrent’s neatly chiselled jaw dropped. Blood drained from his face. His brow furrowed. ‘A body? Not ancient, otherwise the police would not be involved.’

  ‘No, two bodies in fact, at least two, and yes, recent enough for the police to be interested.’

  ‘In my field?’

  ‘Yes . . . though you don’t seem to be like a farmer . . .’

  ‘I am not. I own the land. I rent it to tenant farmers. They do all the work. I get paid the rent.’

  ‘Seems like a nice, comfortable way to make a living,’ Hennessey observed drily.

  ‘Possibly it is. But that’s how it should be.’

  ‘It is?’ Hennessey queried.

  ‘Yes . . . it is,’ Farrent sneered. ‘In this case it is. The land has been owned by our family, the Farrents, since the English Civil War. It used to be in the possession of a Royalist family, but after the war the deed of ownership was acquired by my ancestor who was a Parliamentarian. The deed was bestowed upon him by Oliver Cromwell, no less.’