The Altered Case

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘Yes,’ Ventnor replied softly, ‘I can understand that. I can see myself doing the same thing.’

  ‘It made us feel better.’ Lemmon forced a smile and half turned to Ventnor.

  ‘Oh believe me,’ Ventnor replied, ‘I fully understand.’

  ‘You know . . . you know.’ Lemmon raised a finger and fully turned towards Ventnor. ‘You could try Mary Emery.’

  ‘Mary Emery.’ Ventnor took his notebook from his pocket. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Her school friend,’ Lemmon explained. ‘They were very close; it was Mary who told us that our Michelle had probably hitched to London. They were as thick as thieves were those two lasses. Don’t know where she is now. She’ll be a married woman with a different name, but her mother still lives in the same house Mary grew up in. She’s getting on now is old Mrs Emery.’

  ‘She would be.’ Ventnor took his pen from his jacket pocket.

  ‘Well, she was young when she had Mary, so I reckon she’ll be in her seventies now, well into them, but she still has it all upstairs.’ Lemmon tapped the side of his head. ‘She’s still as sharp as a tack. She’s at number 113, Ninth Avenue. That way –’ he pointed to his left – ‘so back towards Third Avenue, but not as far as Third Avenue.’

  Ventnor wrote on his pad and then stood, smiling as he did so. ‘So, Ninth Avenue is between Third Avenue and Eighth Avenue? That makes a lot of sense.’

  ‘That’s Tang Hall.’ Harry Lemmon shrugged. ‘You get used to it if you live here. I’ll get that bit of our Michelle’s hair for you then I’m going out. I’ve got a bit of cash . . . I need a drink.’

  Somerled Yellich, who often had to explain that his Christian name is Gaelic and pronounced ‘Sorely’, did not at first recognize the woman. He was strolling slowly through the city of York, along Davygate which, as was normal, was thronged with shoppers, with two sets of street entertainers engaging modest crowds, when the woman suddenly stepped in front of him. The first thing he noticed was the look of fear in her eyes. ‘Can I help you, madam?’ Yellich asked.

  ‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’ the woman said. ‘You came to my house a day or two ago, you and the older officer. I’m Mrs Farrent.’

  ‘Of course,’ Yellich replied. ‘Sorry, it was seeing you here, different context. I would have recognized you—’

  Thomas Farrent suddenly appeared, stepping out of the crowd as if from nowhere. He grabbed his wife roughly and tightly by her upper arm. He glared at Yellich and pulled her away with him, and they both seemed to vanish, seemingly swallowed by the throng of people.

  The woman was elderly, frail-looking, short and she could so very easily be overpowered, Ventnor assessed, yet she seemed to open the door to her flat with all the confidence of a Royal Marine Commando. She exhibited no fear as to who might have rung her doorbell. She just flung it open wide and demanded, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Police.’ Ventnor showed her his ID.

  ‘Yes, thought you might be.’ The woman spoke with a local accent. ‘I watched you walking up the road towards my flat, looking around you all the time, unconcerned for your own safety, then that knock . . . not too loud but it had an authority about it.’

  ‘Ah.’ Ventnor inclined his head. She had, he thought, just gone some considerable way to explain her fearless manner of opening the door of her flat. ‘You are Mrs Emery?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mrs Emery was smartly dressed in a yellow blouse and a dark grey skirt.

  ‘With a daughter, Mary?’

  ‘Yes, though she is a married woman now, but, yes, she is still my daughter and she is called Mary.’

  ‘Good . . . we would like to talk to her. Can you tell me how I can contact her?’

  Mrs Emery scowled. ‘She’s not in any trouble, I hope?’

  ‘No, none at all, I assure you,’ Ventnor replied, ‘really, but we believe she can be of assistance to the police.’

  ‘Good, I am relieved. She married well, you see.’ Mrs Emery seemed to Ventnor to stiffen with pride. ‘Her husband’s a solicitor, you see, very proper.’

  ‘I see . . . very good.’ Ventnor again inclined his head. ‘Where can we contact her?’

  ‘She lives at Stockton-on-the-Forest in a house called “The Mill”.’

  ‘“The Mill”,’ Ventnor repeated.

  ‘I’ll have to let her know that you’re on your way,’ Mrs Emery explained.

  ‘Of course. We’ll call tomorrow. “The Mill”, Stockton-on-the-Forest.’

  ‘I see, so not an urgent case for you?’ Mrs Emery surmised.

  ‘Serious.’ Ventnor turned to go. ‘Very serious, but, no, not urgent. One day won’t make a deal of difference.’

  ‘Can I say what it’s about?’ Mrs Emery queried, and did, so Ventnor thought, as much for her own sense of curiosity as it was to forewarn her daughter.

  Ventnor paused. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he replied, ‘it’s in respect of Michelle Lemmon.’

  Mrs Emery caught her breath. ‘Michelle . . . she went away and never returned. No one knew what happened to her. Her poor father, he was sick with worry . . . so were all her family . . . but her father especially.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘Mary and Michelle were very close,’ Mrs Emery advised, ‘really good friends. Neither my husband nor I cared much for the family as a whole but Michelle was a very pleasant girl who grew into a pleasant young woman, unlike her brother, Harold, though he’s calmed down now. He’s almost respectable.’

  ‘Well, if you could tell your daughter I’ll be calling on her tomorrow. Who do I ask for?’

  ‘Mrs Fleece. Mrs Mary Fleece.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Ventnor turned and went back down the stairs and into Ninth Avenue thinking, Fleece . . . Fleece, what an appropriate name for a lawyer.

  The man stood in his living room staring out of the wide window at the crimson sunset. ‘Keep calm,’ he told himself, ‘keep calm. So they have been found, after thirty years, but there is still a long way to go before anything can be proved. The important thing is not to panic.’

  Behind him, the woman lay on the floor, conscious but motionless, utterly motionless, too frightened even to breathe.

  Thomson Ventnor returned home in a quiet, calm manner. He chose to travel to and from work by public transport. Living, as he did, just outside the city centre in suburban Bishopton, a car, he felt, was a needless extravagance. He entered his modest, he thought, three bedroomed semi-detached house with a small garden, which, like the washing-up and the housework, stubbornly refused to do itself. His garden, he freely acknowledged, was the least tidy in the whole street, the pile of dirty dishes never got higher, but never diminished either, and the bed linen should have been changed days earlier.

  He put a ready cooked meal purchased from the supermarket into the microwave and listened to the mellifluous tones of the Radio Four newscaster while he waited for the meal to cook. After eating his meal, which he took in the kitchen, rather than in his dining room, he changed into a grey, lightweight Italian suit, and wearing a lightweight summer raincoat and hat he left his house and took a bus to the outskirts of the city. Alighting the cream single-decker Rider York bus at a stop in a leafy lane, he walked a hundred yards in the pleasant early evening, then turned into an imposing stone gateway and walked up the driveway to a large Victorian era house. He opened the porch door and signed in the visitors’ book, and then opened the main door of the house and was met by a blast of warm air. He removed his hat and walked across the deep-pile maroon carpet in the foyer, before nimbly climbing the wide staircase. A young woman in uniform came down the stairs and they smiled at each other as they passed. Ventnor had noticed before that the superstition about it being a bringer of bad luck to cross another person on the stairs does not extend to institutions.

  At the top of the stairs Ventnor walked across a landing and entered a room where elderly people sat in chairs placed around the walls of the room, where a television set, tuned into commercial television, was playing i
n the corner, and where carers in uniform appeared concerned and busy. A resident seated in the corner of the room smiled as he recognized Ventnor, but by the time Ventnor had crossed the carpet to sit beside the elderly man, the elderly man had become expressionless and stared into the middle distance. ‘Hello, father,’ was all Ventnor could say. He remained for a few minutes sitting beside his father then went to see the matron to enquire about the old man’s welfare. He then left the building and took a bus into York, where he went from pub to pub not wanting to settle in one for too long a time in case he was recognized by either colleagues or felons as being a lone drinker, and then went to Augusta’s night club where it was dark within. He therein got into conversation with a woman of indeterminate age who seemed obsessed with package holidays and who insisted that Portugal was always the better destination than Spain. He bought her a drink and then, mumbling his excuses, he walked home.

  Alone.

  It was Wednesday, 01.10 a.m.

  FOUR

  Wednesday, 09.30 hours

  in which Somerled Yellich and Reginald Webster travel south, Thomson Ventnor meets a lady who is much befitted by means of upward social mobility and George Hennessey is at home to the too kind reader.

  Somerled Yellich and Reginald Webster took the East Coast Mainline service from York to London. Yellich, as the senior officer, sat facing the direction of travel with Webster sitting opposite him with his back to the southwards. They were, they felt, fortunate to be able to acquire seats on the east side of the train which, at any time after ten a.m. is the ‘shady side’, thus their enjoyment of the view of passing landscape was not ruined by the glare of the sun. Upon arriving at King’s Cross station, the officers, as all passengers, were amused by the jovial train manager announcing over the public address system, ‘Well, as you can see ladies and gentlemen, we have managed to find London’, and continued expressing his hope that all customers had had a pleasant journey and urging people to ensure that they take all their belongings with them when they leave the train.

  From King’s Cross Yellich and Webster took the tube the short, two stop distance, to Camden. The distance in question they both accepted was walkable, easily so, but they both feared losing time by taking a wrong turn here and there, and were keen to keep their appointment. The officers duly arrived at 193A Delancey Street, NW1, a few minutes past midday, finding the address in question to be that of a Victorian era terraced property on four floors, set back from the pavement by just a matter of a few feet and which had, by its twin doorbells, been separated at some point into two independent properties.

  Yellich pressed the doorbell above the name ‘Parr’ which was displayed on a plastic tablet in black letters on a pearl-grey background. The front door of the house was opened within a matter of seconds by a middle-aged man. He was tall, almost as tall as the two officers and casually dressed in a blue tee shirt and denims, with his feet looking to be very comfortably encased in moccasins. His hair had greyed but was long and he wore it tied behind his head in a ponytail. He was, thought the officers, very Camden, very Camden, indeed. ‘Mr Yellich and Mr Webster?’ He extended his right hand.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Yellich accepted the man’s hand, finding Nigel Parr’s handshake to be manly, firm, but not overly compressing. ‘I am DS Yellich. This is DC Webster.’ Yellich showed Parr his ID as Parr and Webster engaged in a short shaking of hands.

  ‘You made good time, gentlemen.’ Parr stepped to one side. ‘Please do come in.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Yellich stepped over the threshold of the property. ‘It is an excellent service from York to London, just above two hours.’

  ‘Well, do come in, please, gentlemen. A nice day for September though rain is forecast, or “called” as my Canadian friends would say.’

  Reginald Webster followed Yellich into the corridor which he found surprisingly narrow and where he noticed mail was left neatly piled on the floor. At the far end of the corridor was a door which was at the moment shut and had the number 193B attached to it. As if reading Webster’s mind, Nigel Parr explained, ‘We’d like a table in the hall, even just a small one to place the post on, but as you see, there just isn’t room. Even a small table would not allow an adult to squeeze past it, so the mail goes on the floor. All we can do is to undertake not to walk on each other’s mail.’

  ‘I see,’ Webster replied. ‘I dare say that’s as good a reason as any for the post to be left on the floor.’

  ‘Yes.’ Parr closed the front door. ‘I visited a house in Glasgow once; it was a conversion, like this house, but very upmarket and very spacious, very, very spacious. Sufficient space for a huge nineteenth-century dining table to be accommodated in the hallway upon which all mail could be laid to await collection.’

  ‘Nice,’ Webster commented.

  ‘It was, but it had a downside. Apparently someone buzzed into one of the flats, so as to gain entry upon some subterfuge or other and the beautiful table was stolen. I recall it from a previous visit; large, beautifully made, highly polished. It could have been Georgian, but I thought Victorian. Anyway, a team of wide boys with a vehicle clearly found out that it was there and it vanished . . . in broad daylight. It was there when the residents went to work that morning and when they returned that evening the thing had vanished, just four lighter-coloured marks on the floor where the four legs had rested without being moved for the previous half century.’

  ‘Damn shame,’ Webster lamented. ‘That sort of theft is always very annoying.’

  ‘Yes.’ Parr shook his head in agreement. ‘Annoying, as you say. The residents didn’t think the theft was worth reporting. Well, do come in gentlemen.’

  Parr led Yellich and Webster into his part of the conversion, which was accessed by a door to the right of the door labelled 193B, his door being labelled 193A. The door accessed a small vestibule, beyond which was a sitting room at street level. Quite small, thought Yellich as he entered, but he found it tastefully decorated with comfortable-looking furniture and with books placed in neat order on shelves each side of the original sash window, and a Galileo thermometer on the mantelpiece about the fireplace. The room though was polluted with the sound of traffic on Delancey Street.

  ‘You get used to the noise from the road,’ Parr said, again as if reading the thoughts of his visitors. ‘The fumes are worse than the noise. Can’t open the basement door because carbon monoxide drifts in.’

  ‘That’s dangerous,’ Webster commented.

  ‘Yes.’ Parr nodded. ‘especially since that is where I sleep. My bedroom is below this room . . . downstairs front, the street side. The house is all upside down, well my part is. I live above the bedroom and I go downstairs to bed each evening. In the summer it gets very hot down there but I can’t open the door to let heat out because fumes get in. It’s pretty well burglar proof, even cat proof, but fumes know no boundaries. On hot nights it can be difficult to breath in the front rooms of the house but fortunately I have a small back garden. I can leave the back door open an inch or two, sufficient to let air in but keep the gap narrow enough to keep the neighbour’s cats out. I am able to ventilate the house by such means and thus can survive the summers. So . . . can I offer you gentlemen something? Tea? Coffee?’

  ‘Tea, please,’ Yellich replied, ‘that would be most welcome.’

  ‘And most appreciated,’ added Webster.

  ‘Earl Grey, English Breakfast, Jasmine, Lapsang?’

  ‘Whatever.’ Yellich smiled. ‘We really don’t know one tea from another.’

  ‘We’re just used to canteen tea,’ Webster explained.

  ‘English Breakfast, I think.’ Nigel Parr looked out of the window to the sky above the roofs of the buildings on the opposite side of Delancey Street. ‘It is an English Breakfast tea sort of day methinks. Please –’ he indicated the chairs with an upturned palm – ‘please do take a pew.’ He then turned and walked softly out of the room.

  Yellich sank deeply into the wide armchair beside the bookshelf
to the right of the window. Webster sat on the settee which stood against the adjacent wall facing the window. Glancing at the titles of the books he gauged that Nigel Parr was not a learned man. There was, he noted, a very wide range of books indicated by their titles, but none seemed to him to have any depth, many were even relics of childhood days. Presently Parr returned with a tray of tea and a generous plate of bread rolls and pâté.

  ‘Oh my.’ Yellich welcomed the unexpected food. ‘And we reproached ourselves for not getting some breakfast on the train.’

  Parr grinned. ‘Well, tuck in, gentlemen, it’s about lunchtime anyway.’ He poured the tea from a large white teapot decorated with a floral pattern, and served it correctly, Yellich observed, unadulterated with either milk or sugar. He handed a steaming cup of tea first to Yellich and then a second cup to Webster. He took a third cup for himself and sat in the vacant armchair. ‘So –’ he scented the tea before sipping it – ‘how can I help you, gentlemen? How can I be of assistance to the Vale of York Police?’

  ‘It is in respect of your late parents and their daughters, as I explained on the phone,’ Yellich replied.

  ‘It could only be that.’ Parr sighed. ‘That is the only connection this family ever had with York. The family who disappeared, the family who vanished without a trace. The press gave the story an awful lot of coverage, as they would do I suppose. Individuals who vanish are worrying enough, but an entire family at the same time, that was and still is newsworthy . . . and in the middle of the city, no less. I have agonized during many sleepless nights. It’s the not knowing, you see, it is that which is difficult.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Yellich held eye contact with Parr. ‘Yes, that I can so well imagine.’ And then fell silent as a red double-decker bus whirred loudly past, causing the lightweight ornaments to rattle and shake.

  ‘You are not used to noise from the street?’ Again, Nigel Parr seemed to read the officers’ thoughts.