The Altered Case

by Peter Turnbull

  Ventnor signed out at Micklegate Bar police station, leaving a note as to where he was visiting and commenced to walk the short distance – about, he thought, one mile as the crow would fly and perhaps half as much again on foot – to the last given address of Michelle Lemmon. It was, he found, a good walking day in terms of the weather, not too warm, a near clear blue sky with just a hint of cloud at high altitude, and no indication of imminent rainfall. It was, he also thought, a good opportunity to refresh in himself the feel of the city. He believed that the police should not lose touch with the community they served, for policing does not, he thought, only mean controlling and investigating, but it also means caring for, being guardian of, and only by walking, he would argue, can a police officer retain the sense of being in touch. Once he had, for a very brief period, been a postman and he never felt closer to any streets anywhere than he had felt close to the streets of his ‘walk’. Even on his beat as a junior constable he had never experienced the level of contact he felt that he had experienced with the streets, the cul de sacs, the front gardens and letterboxes of his ‘walk’ as a postman.

  And so he walked, observing the broad sweep of the urban landscape, observing details closer at hand, always observing. As he turned into the Tang Hall estate he began to attract hostile glances from idle youths as though he had the word ‘police’ stamped in large letters upon his forehead. He walked through the narrow streets of the housing estate; low-rise council accommodation, narrow streets, small gardens, very second-hand cars and motorcycles chained to lamp posts. He turned into the common entrance of number 197 on Third Avenue and climbed the stairs, two at a time, until he read ‘Lemmon’ and also ‘Parkes’ on the nameplates on a door on the second floor. He knocked twice, tap . . . tap . . . using the metal knocker attached to the bronze letterbox. Ventnor’s knock was calm, methodical, and with a distinct pause between each tap. It was a police officer’s knock.

  The door was flung open almost the instant he tapped on the door for the second time by a small, finely built, waif-like woman, who glared up at Ventnor with undisguised hostility. ‘What!’ she demanded. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Police.’ Ventnor showed his ID while remaining calm and composed in the presence of the woman’s aggression.

  ‘What?’ The woman repeated her demand with no noticeable abatement of her anger, which by then was suggesting to Ventnor that the woman was mentally unwell. Certainly she was emotionally unstable. Behind her Ventnor could see the disordered state of the interior of her flat.

  ‘Mrs Lemmon?’ Ventnor asked.

  ‘No!’ And with that, the angry, waif-like woman slammed the door shut.

  ‘Where does she live? Do you know?’ Ventnor spoke softly to the closed door, not expecting a reply but he was clearly heard because the woman replied angrily from within her home, ‘Don’t know, don’t know . . . don’t know, don’t care. I don’t know and I don’t care.’

  ‘Well, thanks anyway,’ Ventnor whispered.

  Behind him the other door on the second floor opened. Ventnor turned. A late middle-aged woman stood on the threshold of her flat. ‘Did you say you were the police?’ she asked of Ventnor, softly, pleasantly.

  ‘Yes . . . yes, I did.’ Ventnor showed the woman his ID. ‘DC Ventnor, Micklegate Bar Police Station.’

  ‘And you are looking for the Lemmons? Sorry I was in my hall by the door and I could not help but overhear.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Ventnor replied. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘You’re a little late.’ The woman smiled. By her wedding ring Ventnor noted she was ‘Mrs’, and by the name on her door he noted she was ‘Wheatley’. ‘They don’t live there any more, Mr and Mrs Lemmon. Bit sad that time was. Nice couple. She –’ Mrs Wheatley pointed to the door across the landing – ‘Hilda Parkes, she is just too lazy to take their name off the door, and as you might have guessed, she bounces in and out of the mental hospital, and I think she’s about ready for another bounce in there. That’ll give me peace and a quiet life for a few weeks. Anyway, the Lemmons, they never got over the loss of their daughter. She disappeared twenty-five . . . no . . . more than that . . .’

  ‘Thirty,’ Ventnor said. ‘She disappeared thirty years ago.’

  ‘Yes . . . I remember her, quiet sort of girl, but horrible for her family never knowing what happened to her. It’s worse than her predeceasing them, that would be bad, but the not knowing . . . horrible way to have to live. It would gnaw away at me . . .’ Mrs Wheatley sighed. ‘Horrible for them.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ventnor agreed, ‘I’d feel the same. I’d rather know than not know, even if it is bad news . . . I’d still rather know than not know.’ Ventnor paused. ‘Are there any relatives of Michelle Lemmon living?’

  ‘Just her brother, Harry Lemmon.’

  ‘Is he close by?’

  ‘Yes, he’s on the estate, he’s “tangy” born and bred.’

  ‘Do you know his address?’

  ‘Well so long as it didn’t come from me.’ Mrs Wheatley smiled. ‘He’s still a bit of a wide boy . . . even at his age.’

  ‘Deal.’ Ventnor winked. ‘Mum’s the word.’

  ‘OK. He lives just two streets away on Eighth Avenue.’

  ‘That’s two streets away? But this is Ninth Avenue?’ Ventnor queried.

  ‘Turn right as you leave this address . . . go right at the end of our street and just follow your nose.’ Mrs Wheatley was a portly lady, smartly dressed with a neat hairstyle and with, Ventnor thought, eyes which had a real warmth about them. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’

  ‘OK, thank you, ma’am. Appreciated.’

  ‘Second entrance on the right on Eighth Avenue, first floor, no name on the door. I visit that stair, you see.’

  ‘Got it. Thanks again.’ Ventnor turned away as the door to Mrs Wheatley’s flat was gently closed. He walked down the stairway, which he found to be cleanly swept and smelling of disinfectant. He reached the street and followed the directions to Eighth Avenue. He climbed the narrow stairway of the second address up to the first floor and on finding the door with no nameplate he knocked upon it, using the same authoritative police officer’s knock that he had used just a moment ago. He noted that the door had a battered and a scarred surface, as if, Ventnor mused, it had been used for knife throwing practice. He knocked on the door a second time after there was no response for thirty seconds to his first taps.

  ‘Wait!’ The shout came from deep within the flat and had an irritated ring to it: an angry man. Ventnor waited, noticing as he did so that the stair had a musty smell but was nonetheless cleanly swept. Eventually the door was opened in a calm, casual manner.

  ‘Yes! What?’ The man had a hard face with cold, blue piercing eyes.

  ‘Mr Lemmon?’ Ventnor asked. ‘Mr Harry Lemmon?’

  ‘Aye.’ Lemmon spoke with a chilling voice and he seemed to be openly hostile.

  ‘Police,’ Ventnor explained.

  ‘I know . . . I know who you are, I can tell. But just one of you? You usually come in threes and fours when I am to be lifted . . . at least four. Once it took six of you to get me in the back of the van.’

  ‘I can believe that.’ Ventnor smiled, trying to calm the situation. ‘But I am not here to arrest you.’

  ‘You’re not?’ A note of relief crept into the man’s voice.

  ‘Nope.’ Ventnor continued to smile. ‘Why? Should I?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say you could if you knew,’ Lemmon replied icily. ‘Mind you, I dare say you could arrest half this estate if you knew what they’d been up to.’

  ‘It’s often . . . in fact, always the way of it.’ Ventnor spoke softly and was pleased that Lemmon’s manner appeared to be relaxing. Ventnor noted the man to be short but powerfully built, barrel-chested, a weightlifter of a man, and he could understand why it had once taken six constables to get him into the back of a police van. ‘You know, if we knew all that’s been did, and all that’s been hid, well, there just would not be enough prison spa
ce, we’d be arresting half the population.’

  ‘Seems that way to me, so why pick on me? Why knock on my door?’

  ‘I . . . well, we need information.’

  ‘Hey . . . listen . . . I don’t grass.’ Lemmon began to close the door. ‘Not for anyone . . . not for any money . . . and no matter how much is in it for me.’

  ‘About your sister,’ Ventnor explained quietly. ‘We need information about your sister.’

  ‘My sis—’ Lemmon gasped.

  ‘Michelle, about your sister, Michelle.’

  ‘She disappeared.’ Harry Lemmon relaxed fully and became curious.

  ‘We know,’ Ventnor replied. ‘We might have some news but I am afraid it’s not good news.’

  ‘Any news of Michelle is good news, even if it’s bad.’ Lemmon stepped slowly aside. ‘You’d better come in, boss.’

  Ventnor entered a small, two bedroomed, untidily kept flat. Harry Lemmon, barefoot, padded after him, clad only in faded denim jeans and a saggy, baggy blue tee shirt.

  ‘It’s not Buckingham Palace,’ Lemmon said, ‘and I am not expecting a visit from Ideal Home to do a photo shoot, not until next week anyway, but it’s where I live, comfortably . . . as comfortably as I can on what the Government allows.’ Lemmon shook his head slowly. ‘Job Seekers Allowance, no one can live on it. No wonder we doley’s have to bend the law.’

  ‘Not break it?’ Ventnor grinned.

  ‘The old black economy in the main, boss, work for hard cash and on the hush-hush.’ Lemmon shrugged.

  ‘Are you sure that you want to tell me that?’ Ventnor began to warm to Harry Lemmon, detecting an essential honesty about the man, ‘wide boy’ that he may be.

  ‘Somehow I don’t think you’d be very interested, boss,’ Lemmon replied. ‘It would be a cheap conviction for you. I mean if I told you I burgled houses or stole cars for the extra money then . . . then I reckon you might be interested, but washing up at the Indian restaurant three nights a week for a free meal and a few pounds cash in hand, somehow I think that would be too small beer for you.’

  ‘And you’d be right, that is illegal, and I am very not interested despite it being against the law.’ Ventnor glanced round the flat. He saw nothing that could be of interest or concern to the police. ‘Very not interested.’

  ‘It’s all I get up to these days.’ Lemmon sighed. ‘My crooking days are gone, well behind me. I’m in my fifties now. A bit of extra cash and a quiet life, that’s all I need . . . all I want, and when I said it took six cops to put me in the back of a van, well that did happen, but it was twenty years ago.’

  ‘Didn’t think I knew your name.’ Ventnor grinned. ‘Not a recent or a regular customer of ours.’

  ‘Hope it stays that way . . . and working the black economy . . . well the government snoopers have to catch me at it and who’s going to follow me home at two a.m. on a winter’s night? I mean, not many, Benny, not many.’ Lemmon paused. ‘And I take a different route to work and a different route home from the routes I used two days before.’

  ‘I reckon you’re safe,’ Ventnor said, ‘as safe as houses.’

  ‘I can’t work on a building site or wash cars in the second-hand car garage but, in the kitchen of an eatery, at night, no one will see me. So, my sister, Michelle . . . sorry, boss, where’s my manners? Take a seat.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Ventnor sat on a plastic upholstered armchair and read the room which was inexpensively furnished, with a small television standing in the corner. Harry Lemmon sat opposite him and grappled to his left for a packet of cigarettes and a yellow disposable lighter. He took a cigarette and offered one to Ventnor.

  ‘No thanks, I don’t smoke. But your sister . . .’ Ventnor looked at Lemmon. ‘So, as you say, Michelle disappeared.’

  ‘And now her body has been found?’ Harry Lemmon lit the cigarette.

  ‘Possibly,’ Ventnor replied, ‘but only possibly. We’ll need a sample of your DNA to be certain.’

  ‘You’re not getting that.’ Harry Lemmon grinned as he exhaled smoke through his nostrils. ‘I might need to make a bit more money than I make at the Indian eatery and so far my DNA is not on file.’

  ‘You’ve been lucky.’

  ‘Careful . . . I’ve been careful, covered my tracks and any convictions I have had were before DNA was invented.’

  ‘Discovered.’ Ventnor smiled. ‘It was discovered, but, anyway, so you are withholding your DNA even if it means making a positive identity of your sister?’

  ‘I can let you have a lock of her hair.’ Lemmon grinned. ‘That’s even better than my DNA. I would think that will suit us both.’

  ‘Agreed, and I will take it with pleasure and gratitude.’ Ventnor sat back in the armchair. ‘So can you tell me anything about your sister’s disappearance . . . anything that might not be in the missing person file?’

  ‘Such as?’ Lemmon also reclined in his chair.

  ‘Well, for example, any difficulties at home, within the family, any boyfriend harassing her . . . that sort of thing?’

  ‘I remember her disappearing, I remember it so well. What brother wouldn’t, even after thirty years?’ He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘But what was happening at the time?’ Lemmon paused, looking down at the carpet. ‘She had a fight with our dad, she packed her bags and went away, but after a few days she didn’t contact us . . . it was then when we reported her missing.’

  ‘She went to London. I read that in the file.’

  ‘She said she was going there . . .’ Lemmon corrected Ventnor, ‘and that’s what we told the police. It seems that everyone who runs away runs to London. I mean, who runs away to Belfast or Glasgow? And she did go there . . . sent us a card. So she made it. She got herself there.’

  ‘You didn’t report that,’ Ventnor said accusingly.

  ‘No, we didn’t. That was our dad’s idea. He said if we told you we had received a card then you wouldn’t have taken the report, or you would have closed the case. Our dad thought that it was better if she was listed as a missing person; he thought it was better if the police . . . you guys, had an open file on her. You see, I think he thought that would mean that you would search for her, but I knew you don’t search for adults, but I never told him that.’

  ‘In exceptional cases we have in fact been known to search for adults,’ Ventnor replied, ‘but do carry on.’

  ‘OK . . . I think it helped him to think that our Michelle was being looked for,’ Lemmon explained, ‘that the Metropolitan Police were organizing search parties, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘That’s why he never reported the cards.’

  ‘Cards?’ Ventnor queried. ‘You mean that there was more than one?’

  ‘Yes, there were seventeen in all, they all were from London. You know the type . . . tourist cards . . . Tower Bridge, Nelson’s Column, and the message was always the same just, “Still OK”, that’s all she ever wrote, “Still OK”, and signed “M” for Michelle. We recognized her handwriting so they came from her all right.’ Lemmon leaned forward and flicked ash from his cigarette into the empty fire grate. ‘Then we got the last one, still in her handwriting which said, “This is not working, I am getting a lift up next week”.’

  ‘A lift?’

  Harry Lemmon gave the thumbs up sign. ‘Hitching, boss.’ He smiled. ‘That’s what I assumed she meant; it was the only way she could get back up north unless she made some money. She had no skills to get a job and she wouldn’t have sold her body, not our Michelle, she was too proud to do that. She had too much self-respect.’

  ‘Getting a lift,’ Ventnor quoted. ‘Sounds like she had met someone who was giving her a ride up here, don’t you think? Rather than taking a gamble on hitching a ride, she sounded very certain of returning on a particular day.’

  ‘Aye, that’s a possibility, come to think of it.’ Lemmon glanced upwards at the ceiling. ‘She hitched down to London, so we just assumed she meant she was going to hitch back
. . . and she just got in the wrong car, it happens . . . such happens. So why are you interested after all these years? You said you want to make a positive identification.’

  Ventnor told him.

  Harry Lemmon fell silent, then he said, ‘You mean she made it? She got back to York only to be done in, murdered when she was practically home, right on her own doorstep?’

  ‘That would seem to be the case,’ Ventnor replied softly. ‘I am very sorry.’

  ‘And she was found with the family who vanished? I remember the news about them disappearing and now they’ve been found –’ Lemmon pointed to the small television set – ‘I saw it on there.’

  ‘The Parrs?’ Ventnor replied. ‘Yes, if it’s her she was found with the Parrs.’

  ‘So that means that she was in their car.’ Lemmon slowly stood, turned his back on Ventnor and walked to the window of his flat and looked out over the back gardens of Tang Hall Estate.

  ‘It’s now a distinct possibility,’ Ventnor confirmed, ‘but the identification still has to be made. How long was she in London?’

  ‘Sixteen – seventeen weeks. We got a card once a week. It always arrived on a Saturday, posted second-class, so she would have posted the card each Thursday.’

  ‘Do you have the cards?’ Ventnor asked.

  ‘No . . . no . . . we let our dad take them.’ Harry Lemmon fell silent and then said, ‘He pined for our Michelle once the cards stopped arriving and he carried those postcards with him wherever he went . . . poor old guy. He loved Michelle . . . father and daughter . . . there was always a closeness between those two despite the arguments. So we let him take them with him, put them into his coffin . . . poor old soul. Might sound a bit daft but it’s the sort of thing you do when a loved one dies.’