The Altered Case

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘Is that possible?’ Webster asked. ‘I thought it was illegal and there are park wardens to stop that happening.’

  ‘Yes.’ Parr nodded his head slightly in agreement. ‘It most certainly is illegal and, yes, it’s also not easy, not easy at all. The park wardens turf the dossers out, helped by the police, and they walk every inch of the park footpaths once the gates are locked. I am told that that is a very pleasant duty during the summer months, having the whole park practically to yourself, but Oranges was a clever old soul and she had apparently found a huge rhododendron bush. She would crawl in there an hour or two before the park was shut and lay there still and quiet. Then, once the park wardens had gone, she settled down for the night, having eaten whatever she could find in the rubbish bins during the day.

  ‘My two sisters apparently found her in the rhododendron bush. Oranges got a little careless and my sisters saw some movement and investigated.’ Parr paused. ‘Well, the long and the short of it is that they, the three of them, got to chatting and they persuaded her to come back home with them, with the promises of food, a hot bath and the opportunity to wash her clothing, of which she had very little. So then it was, “Please, please can we keep her?” time. The girls were allowed to “keep” her and so Oranges joined the family. She was very gauche at first, north of England working-class, but the Parrs made allowances for her and eventually, quite rapidly in fact, she found her niche in the household as a sort of “maid of all work”. She became like a stowaway on a ship and she worked her passage; cleaning, laundry, washing up, shopping. She actually became a great help to my foster mother. She just wanted food and accommodation, but she also seemed to realize that she couldn’t settle, and that she couldn’t get comfortable. She knew she had to leave at some point. It was about then that my parents announced their plan to drive to York for some reason and Oranges seemed to take that as a sign that it was time for her to go, and so she probably asked them for a lift.’

  ‘Probably?’ Webster queried.

  ‘Yes,’ Parr replied, ‘probably. I wasn’t at home then, I had gone to the coast with friends. What happened was that I left a noisy, vibrant, happy house and when I returned it was quiet, cold and empty. Even the animals looked confused. They had been fed and watered and the dogs had been walked by a neighbour. By then Uncle George had reported them as missing to the Metropolitan Police who had also contacted the Vale of York Constabulary.’

  ‘Yes,’ Yellich replied, ‘we collated the information, ourselves and the Met that is. The family had already come to our attention as being suspected of running off without paying their hotel bill, but later their car was found in a car park in the city centre, as if abandoned. It was about then that they became the family who vanished.’

  ‘And Oranges was with them.’ Parr reclined in his chair. ‘Poor Oranges. I grew to like her. She just wanted to say “thank you” to the family by working her fingers to the bone. She was that sort of girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ Yellich replied, ‘it does seem that she was with them after all, but she had not booked into the hotel, nor had she gone home to her parents. So where she went remains a puzzle to be solved.’

  ‘Staying with friends perhaps,’ Parr suggested, ‘as a halfway house before returning home?’

  ‘It’s a possible explanation,’ Yellich conceded. ‘So if you can’t help with a DNA sample do you have anything we could use to confirm the identity of Mr and Mrs Parr and their daughters?’

  ‘Are their passports good enough?’ Parr asked with some reluctance.

  ‘Ideal.’ Yellich smiled. ‘Full-facial photographs. Ideal.’

  ‘I kept them, don’t know why. George Verity didn’t seem to want them so I kept them as keepsakes, I suppose. I’ll get them for you.’

  ‘Oh, Michelle.’ Mary Fleece put her long-fingered hand up to her forehead. ‘Do you know, sir, I think about her near daily, so near daily that with all honesty I can say every day – practically every day, anyway – especially as I have grown older. Michelle who vanished, went south and vanished, just when she was set to return home, just at that point. I also think of another girl from Tang Hall and schooldays, skinny Jenny Noble who was killed in a car crash on the York bypass. She was just twenty-four, more or less the same age as Michelle when she disappeared. Both her and Michelle, they come to mind virtually every day.’ Mary Fleece glanced up at the low ceiling of her house. ‘And the television news, those bodies dug up in a field, an entire family plus a young woman . . . that other woman . . . that was Michelle?’

  ‘It does seem that it might very well be so,’ Ventnor replied softly. ‘It all points that way.’

  Mary Fleece sighed. ‘Poor Michelle.’ Mary Fleece revealed herself to be, in Ventnor’s eyes, a handsome woman who had aged well. Now in her fifties she looked younger and healthier than some women in their thirties whom Ventnor had encountered. But, he thought, that is often the way of marriage. If you marry into poverty you will age; poor diet, stress, limited horizons, the tendency to give up on life, all can make a woman age rapidly, but, he also thought, if the selfsame woman was to marry wealth, as Mary Fleece had clearly done, then, whatever the emotional quality of her marriage, she is nonetheless still free of all those factors which make low-income women succumb rapidly to the years. Mary Fleece was the wife of a successful lawyer; she was expected to look the part and had evidently been given the means to do so. She had come up with the goods: a trim figure brought about by twice, perhaps thrice, weekly visits to the gym, expensive clothing, a maid to do the housework. A maid who had opened the door to Ventnor and who had asked him to kindly wait whilst she fetched ‘the mistress’, and when ‘the mistress’ had arrived, in her own time and at her own pace, she dismissed the maid, who was of at least sixty summers, guessed Ventnor, with an imperious, ‘Thank you, Pearl, you may carry on’. Mary Fleece née Emery had come a long way, a very long way from a second floor flat on the Tang Hall estate in York. The mannerisms of the English upper middle-class had clearly rubbed off on her, as she had clearly allowed and encouraged them to do, and, Ventnor felt, that Mary Fleece could now be taken for the daughter of a senior army officer and the product of an expensive boarding school education.

  ‘So how can I help the police?’ she asked.

  ‘By assisting us to piece together Michelle Lemmon’s life at about the time she left home and by throwing any light on where she might have gone when she returned to York.’ Ventnor glanced round the room in which he sat. It was, he saw, an old house, eighteenth century by the date of 1756 carved in stone above the fireplace. The roof beams were low and had been lovingly painted in black gloss paint, and had then been treated with a coat of varnish. A few pieces of wood burned in the grate and gave off gentle heat and created a homely feel. The chairs in which they sat were deep and leather-bound. The large coffee table which stood on the floor between Ventnor and Mary Fleece had magazines of the ilk of Yachting Monthly, Classic Car and Country Life resting upon it. The dark blue carpet was deep pile. Mary Fleece was casually dressed but still looked fetching in a brown and yellow horizontally striped rugby shirt, faded blue jeans, blue socks and Nike training shoes. She wore a small but expensive-looking gold watch and wedding and engagement rings. The wedding ring was broad and the rock in the engagement ring was, Ventnor thought, huge, and far, far beyond anything he could have afforded. The room smelled of wood smoke mingling with the scent of furniture polish, as if it had been visited by Pearl moments before Ventnor’s arrival. The broad window of the room looked out on to a large area of landscaped garden at the rear of the house.

  ‘She was following Dick Whittington’s footsteps,’ Mary Fleece explained. ‘The boy from York who became the first Lord Mayor of London. She grew up in an unhappy, highly stressed and quite dysfunctional family.’

  ‘Really?’ Ventnor queried.

  ‘Yes.’ Mary Fleece raised her eyebrows. ‘Really.’

  ‘I met her brother, yesterday,’ Ventnor said. ‘He seemed to be quite calm
and relaxed, and sane and sensible.’

  ‘That is probably because he lives alone and has calmed down now, or so I hear. I bump into people who know him, people from the estate, York being the big village that it is. A few years ago I even bumped into him, the boy himself, and, yes, he does seem to have matured . . . but once he could start a fight in an empty house.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Ventnor commented, ‘it helps explain why a girl would leave home for the bright lights of London.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mary Fleece replied, ‘unappealing but nonetheless interesting. A psychologist would have his or her work cut out trying to unravel the dynamics of the Lemmon family. Michelle wasn’t much for fighting; she was quite a meek girl in fact. I think she tended to try to make herself invisible when her brother and mother and father were screaming at each other . . . and eventually she had had enough and went to London to seek her fortune. I think she must have found out how hard the ground is when you have to sleep on it and how the cold and rain down south is just as cold and as wet as it is up here in the north.’

  ‘As many have also found out,’ Ventnor replied drily, ‘and doubtless will continue to find out.’

  ‘As you say.’ Mary Fleece smiled at Ventnor. ‘I assume you know she sent her family a few postcards?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She sent me some as well . . .’ Mary Fleece glanced upwards. ‘As I recall one said something like, “I want to come home but I can’t” or “I want to give in but I can’t”. Yes . . . yes, that was it, “I want to give in but I can’t come home”.’

  ‘“I want to give in but I can’t come home”?’ Ventnor echoed. ‘She was not a happy young woman.’

  ‘No . . . and she was also proud, too proud to admit defeat. It is a dangerous attitude if you ask me.’ Mary Fleece wound up her watch in an absent-minded manner. ‘Sometimes you just have to admit that you can’t go on and that you have bitten off more than you can chew.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ventnor raised his eyebrows. ‘That is a lesson we must all take on board.’

  ‘Over time,’ Mary Fleece added, ‘the messages got fuller.’

  ‘Fuller?’ Ventnor queried.

  ‘Yes . . . more in them. In one she told me that she had been taken in by a family who take in stray dogs and homeless girls.’

  ‘Do you still have the postcards?’ Ventnor sat forwards.

  ‘No.’ Mary Fleece gave a slight shrug of her right shoulder and smiled apologetically. ‘I regret that, whatever my faults, I will never be accused of hoarding.’

  Ventnor returned the smile. ‘I am of much the same attitude,’ he said.

  ‘The last postcard she sent, she said she was coming home. So she must have arranged to travel up with them.’

  ‘Must have,’ Ventnor agreed. ‘We think the family had been in York for a day or two before they vanished. Do you know where Michelle slept if she didn’t return home?’

  ‘No,’ Mary Fleece said softly, ‘no . . . I don’t. She had other friends in York; probably she slept on someone’s couch for a couple of nights.’

  ‘If that’s the case someone did not come forward,’ Ventnor growled. ‘Doubt if they’ll come forward now, but we can hope the publicity has jogged a memory or pricked a conscience.’

  ‘If you dig a hole you’ll fall into it’, the woman said absent-mindedly as she folded the teacloth.

  ‘What’s that about holes?’ Her husband spoke angrily.

  ‘Nothing . . . nothing,’ the woman replied, ‘just mumbling to myself. It was something that was said to me a long time ago, a very long time ago.’

  ‘Well, just you remember who you are,’ the man snarled. ‘A woman has to be loyal to her husband. Loyal.’

  Edward Evans turned the pages of the photograph book, slowly, and he carefully glanced at each of the black-and-white photographs. Eventually he stopped and he tapped a particular print. ‘It could be,’ he said, ‘it could very well have been him.’ He turned to Carmen Pharoah. ‘It could . . . thirty years now . . . but it could very well have been him.’

  George Hennessey screwed on his fedora and grappled his way into his raincoat, signed out at the front desk of Micklegate Bar police station and drove home. It was for him an early finish, very early. He was taking deserved time off in lieu of overtime worked the month previously.

  He drove to Easingwold, enjoying the traffic-free journey in a light September rainfall, and once through the town and on to the Thirsk Road he slowed and turned his car into the gravel-covered drive of a detached house. He smiled as he heard a dog’s excited bark coming from within the house. He left his car and let himself into the house to be met by an excited, tail-wagging, black mongrel. In the kitchen he made himself a large pot of tea and, having poured the tea into a mug, carried the mug outside and sat on a wooden chair on the patio at the rear of his house as the sun was evaporating the moisture following the rainfall. ‘Strange old case,’ he said, addressing the garden upon which, at that moment, Oscar was criss-crossing the lawn having found an interesting scent. ‘Remains of a family and one other dug up in a field, all because a man and his mate realized the significance of an area of disturbed soil in a recently harvested field. Took them over thirty years but they were right . . . five skeletons . . . they were more right than they realized.’

  He sipped his tea and as he did so, he felt again the great sadness, the great unfairness of it all. That his new, young wife, just three months after the birth of their son, should be walking in Easingwold and then, as she was walking, just collapse. No warning. It was, as a witness said, as if her legs just gave way. People had rushed to her aid assuming nothing more serious than that she had fainted. When no pulse or sign of breathing could be found an ambulance was called and she was taken to York District Hospital only to be pronounced ‘dead on arrival’, or ‘condition purple’ in ambulance crew speak. No cause of death could be found. The best the pathologist could manage was ‘Sudden Death Syndrome’, a symptom of a condition, which was, and remains, inexplicable by medical science, that causes healthy young men and women to have their life-force suddenly taken from them, as indeed Louise D’Acre had said earlier that week.

  George Hennessey had been obliged to cremate his wife, as was her wish, and then he scattered her ashes on the garden at the rear of their house and knew again the sadness, the incongruity of a summer funeral. It seemed so wrong that death had come in the midst of so much life. Just as some twenty years previously he had watched his elder brother’s coffin being lowered into the ground as butterflies fluttered by and the distant chime of an ice-cream van playing Greensleeves echoed over the cemetery. His father, by contrast, had died during the winter months and his coffin was lowered in a scene of silence and stillness, in the midst of which occurred a brief flurry of snow. It was, he recalled, very, very poignant.

  Following his wife’s death, he had thrown himself into rearranging and rebuilding the back garden according to a design she had drawn whilst heavily pregnant with Charles. When he was working he felt her presence and had then taken to telling her of his day upon his return home, no matter what the weather. Just as that day he sat in the warmth of a mid-September afternoon, equally he had stood in pouring rain at two a.m., but it did not matter. Jennifer, beautiful, beautiful Jennifer, his wife of just two summers had to know of his day. One summer’s afternoon he had told her of a new love in his life, not a replacement, he had assured her, there could never be a replacement, but more of an adjunct, and he had then sensed a feeling of warmth about him that could not be explained by the sun’s rays alone.

  It was, he thought, as he sipped at the tea, still too warm to take Oscar, a dark dog, for a walk, despite the cooling brought by the rain, he would do that later in the evening, prior to his own walk to the Dove Inn in the village for a pint of brown and mild before last orders were called. Hennessey turned and walked back into the house . . . jobs, jobs, jobs to be done.

  It was Wednesday, 12.30 hours.

  FIVE

 
Wednesday, 14.40 hours – Thursday, 01.35 hours

  in which Webster and Yellich are obliged to extend their visit to London and are later both at home to the too kindly disposed reader, and Thomson Ventnor pays a call on a long-serving prison inmate.

  Yellich and Webster strolled slowly and casually through the streets of Camden to the chambers of Oldfield and Fairly, Solicitors and Notaries Public, having ascertained the address by consulting the Yellow Pages telephone book supplied by an accommodating publican. The streets were, both officers noted, of early Victorian, perhaps even late Georgian terraces, set back a little from the narrow streets, of four storeys with square, sash windows and flat roofs. Anyone who believes that flat roofs do not work, thought Webster as he walked beside and half a step behind Yellich, should come and visit London NW1 where the flat roofs seem to still be going strong after nearly two hundred years. At the street level there were small cafés, pubs, delicatessens, a Jewish museum and many interesting-looking restaurants. It was, thought Webster, a very pleasant pocket of the capital, with greenery in the form of Regent’s Park on its doorstep. Had he the funds, Webster believed that, despite what he had felt about London as a whole, he could settle in Camden. Had he the funds.

  The two officers located the chambers of Oldfield and Fairly and walked up the short flight of steps to the front door and turned the highly polished brass doorknob. The large, gloss-black painted door swung open silently at Yellich’s push and they entered a narrow corridor, carpeted with a dark brown carpet and with prints of sailing vessels decorating the walls. A door to the right-hand side was labelled ‘Reception’. Yellich tapped gently on the door and entered, followed by Webster. Three young women occupied the room, each sitting at a desk and working with evident concentration upon a computer. The young woman nearest the door looked up at Yellich and, smiling warmly, asked if she could help him.