Denial of Murder

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘And now?’ Penny Yewdall asked warmly.

  ‘Pre-op transgender, pet,’ Philip Dawson replied. ‘I have been on hormone therapy for some years, oestrogen supplements and testosterone suppressants. All my male bits have shrunk to next to nothing and my female bits have budded and developed nicely. I am due for SRS in the winter, just before Christmas. It will be a lovely Christmas gift for me.’

  ‘SRS?’ Ainsclough asked. He felt fearful and fascinated at the same time.

  ‘Sexual reassignment surgery, pet,’ Dawson explained, ‘the awesome point of no return.’

  ‘Are you nervous?’ Penny Yewdall asked.

  ‘Yes … a bit, but I’m going to go through with it. No turning back now, darling. I spent my life since I was about seven or eight waking up each morning and feeling as though I was in the wrong body. I used to try on my elder sister’s clothes and play with her toys.’

  ‘That must have been difficult,’ Yewdall commented.

  ‘It was hell, believe me. I went through the usual stage of denying it and taking macho jobs: night watchman, digging holes in the roads over the years, that sort of thing. I accumulated a lovely wardrobe of skirts and dresses and heels and wigs and dressed at home, then I threw them all away in an attempt to accept my male body and instantly regretted doing so. Then I decided I couldn’t be a man if I wasn’t a man … so I applied for surgery … it takes a long time. A lot of men with inadequate personalities apply for SRS because they think all they need do is to become a girl and then find a nice boy to look after them and that will be the end of their troubles, but those sort get weeded out very early on. Then you have to live as a woman for two years, and I mean be fully accepted as one … at home, in the community, in the workplace. It used to be one year that you had to live as a woman but they extended it to two; they are really testing your resolve, you see … and the nurses at the clinic can be real cows, no acceptance from them at all. No sympathy. No welcome to the woman’s world. No warm welcome into the universal sisterhood. It’s all part of the test. Anyway, I have won through and I have an operation date now.’ Philip Dawson smiled contentedly. ‘Been there, done that and all but got the T-shirt.’

  ‘Are you employed?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘I help out in a charity shop to fill in the time, but I work as a woman though technically I’m on the dole, pet.’

  ‘How do your family feel about all this?’ Ainsclough grew more and more curious as he crossed his legs tightly.

  ‘Oh, I’m persona non grata, pet. They’re all up in Newcastle so there’s a nice and comfortable distance between us. It was all really unfortunate, they were so proud of me, the first of our family to get to university … then I did what I did – I committed an act of betrayal. I used my gift to do ill and I also betrayed my family because none of them had ever been in trouble with the police. I nose-dived. No recovery. I graduated in chemistry and got a job in a pharmaceutical company and used, or misused, my knowledge to make ecstasy tablets, initially on the side, then I gave up my job and started producing ecstasy tablets full-time. The money was the lure, you see. Me and a couple of other guys were based in a little house which we rented in Wales. A remote little farmhouse, very remote, and that was our mistake. You’ve heard the old English saying “the fields have eyes and the woods have ears”?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Ainsclough nodded. ‘I have heard that expression.’

  ‘Well, that was our undoing. We were engaged in an unlawful activity but we were not criminals, if you see what I mean. We were just not savvy enough. We were not clued up. We had no street wisdom. We should have stayed in the city and benefitted from the anonymity a city offers.’ Philip Dawson shook his head. ‘We were stupid. I mean, were we stupid or were we stupid? The local people noticed strangers in the midst, as they would do, three men in a little house, lights burning all night, and they saw all the comings and goings. So they tipped off the local police and the police put us under observation but we just kept working thinking no one was noticing us because we stayed in all the time apart from going out to buy our food. We said we’d quit when we had made a million pounds each.’

  ‘That’s seriously big money.’ Ainsclough sat back in the armchair.

  ‘Oh, yes, big enough,’ Dawson replied. ‘We were coining it in, and that helped us to be blind as to what was happening. So then, one fateful day, we got raided at seven a.m. and the jig was up. We got seven years each and all our money was confiscated under the proceeds of crime legislation.’

  ‘Yes, it would have been,’ Yewdall commented dryly. ‘All of it.’

  ‘So now I live on hormones and a little food and help out in a charity shop.’ Philip Dawson forced a smile. ‘Some success story.’ He had a thin body, a larger man’s face and wide, male hands; his voice was deep throated and would require work to develop it to enable it to pass as a woman’s voice, but Yewdall had to concede that already he would make an acceptable woman. She certainly thought that he suited the blue dress he wore. ‘So I’ll soon be Lydia Dawson. I really can’t wait. It’s been a long journey but at least it’s my choice.’

  ‘Isn’t it always?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘No … it’s a horrible story … this is a horrible story … you ought to know about it but I don’t think you can do anything.’

  ‘Oh?’ Ainsclough replied. ‘Something the police should know about?’

  ‘Yes … but what can be done?’ Dawson opened his palms.

  ‘Tell us anyway,’ Yewdall prompted. ‘Then we’ll tell you if anything can be done.’

  ‘Well, there’s a girl at the clinic … if we see each other there we go for a coffee and a natter … two girls together. Her story … she ran away from home in Scotland when she was fourteen so she told me and then lived as a rent boy in London for two years and eventually found a “guardian”.’

  ‘A “guardian”?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘It’s a term,’ Dawson explained. ‘When a boy or a girl, usually a runaway who has nowhere else to go, teams up with an older man who offers them a home he’s known as their “guardian”.’

  ‘I see,’ Yewdall commented.

  ‘So, she lived with her guardian as his boy for a while and then one day he took her to Germany. She remembers a large house and a German man in his fifties. She went to sleep. She woke up a day or two later and she’d had the operation … the whole lot … male bits removed, artificial female bits created.’

  ‘God in heaven!’ Ainsclough gasped. ‘You’re right that is something we ought to know about.’

  ‘I told her to go to the police but she says she has no information about the German geezer … but thinks he is a surgeon with his own private operating theatre in his basement … she didn’t know where in Germany … and any crime took place in Germany, so it’s a matter for the German police, not the British police.’

  ‘Dunno …’ Yewdall said coldly, ‘we’d still like to chat to this so-called “guardian” if she’d identify him … we can liaise with the German police, put them in the picture.’

  ‘I can ask her but she says she’s not too unhappy because she’s a tiny little thing, so delicate, a real waif. As a man she would have had a hard life: no qualifications, no skills. She says forty per cent of her misses being a boy but sixty per cent is pleased that she’s a girl now. Anyway, when she returned to the UK she walked out on her guardian and went to the clinic and said, “Look at what they did to me, you have to let me have hormones”, so they did, they had to. So it’s not always your decision … if you fall into the wrong hands and that’s one story of that being done, there’ll be others.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ainsclough looked at the flat, the flowers in a vase, the bowl of scented leaves, copies of Elle and Cosmopolitan on the coffee table. It was, he had to concede, a very cosy woman’s home. ‘Yes, that is true, but she can help others by coming forward. We would like to take a statement from her. It’s the sort of thing we need to know about and, as Penny has just said, we’ll share it with the G
erman police.’

  ‘All I can do is ask her next time I see her,’ Philip Dawson agreed. ‘I will volunteer to accompany her if she wishes me to do so.’

  ‘We’ll leave that to you.’ Ainsclough uncrossed his legs and sat forward. ‘So, Gordon Cogan … we are really here about him.’

  ‘Yes, enough about me – it’s Gordon that you are interested in, of course it is.’

  ‘It’s quite interesting, though.’ Penny Yewdall smiled. ‘It’s really quite illuminating. I didn’t know SRS was so complex and so long drawn out.’

  ‘It’s never-ending, pet. After the operation I’ll still need hormones until I draw my last breath … otherwise I’ll grow facial hair and chest hair to go with the girlie bits,’ Philip Dawson explained. ‘But Gordon … with Gordon it all started in the TV room in the “scrubs”. Usually all the lags wanted to watch those empty-headed comedy shows with that canned laughter but one geezer saw that there was a documentary being shown about DNA, and all the rough boys wanted to watch it – it was of real interest to them, you see, so we watched it and it was all about how flawed DNA is when used to prosecute. The study of DNA is still so new that, apparently, if what is known about DNA is represented as a golf ball, then what is likely to be still out there waiting to be discovered about it might, on the same scale, be represented as a basketball. Scientists have found out, for example, that the insect, the common name of which is the water boatman, you know, that beetle-like creature which sits on the surface tension of ponds …’

  ‘Yes,’ Penny Yewdall replied, ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘Well, it is apparently the case that that creature has a more complex DNA structure than a human being,’ Dawson advised.

  ‘That I didn’t know,’ Yewdall said patiently.

  ‘Well, yes …’ Philip Dawson continued, ‘it’s because of that discovery and other similar breakthroughs that DNA evidence alone is not sufficient to ensure a conviction in UK courts. In the UK, courts need DNA plus an additional strand of evidence to ensure a safe conviction.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ainsclough nodded, ‘that is true, though I didn’t know the reason, but yes, it is indeed the case that these days DNA alone is insufficient to secure a conviction.’

  ‘DNA really comes into its own as a tool of elimination,’ Dawson explained. ‘It’s flawed, deeply so, when used as a prosecution tool, so I have read.’

  ‘And so we have heard. All right,’ Yewdall held eye contact with Dawson, ‘so where is this leading?’

  ‘Well, where it is leading,’ Dawson explained, ‘is that the scientist who was being interviewed for the television documentary said to the interviewer, “I’ve got your DNA on my hands. I will now leave your DNA on everything I touch until I wash my hands”.’ Dawson paused. ‘Anyway, when he heard that Gordon’s head sagged forward. He didn’t say anything at the time but the following day he said, “That’s how they did it” and “That’s how they got my DNA all over Janet Frost’s body, and all over her room and inside her cupboards and drawers”. He said they must have known how easy it was to transfer someone’s DNA to a crime scene … and remember, Gordon was convicted before the change in the law. He was convicted when DNA was thought irrefutable and deemed sufficient in itself to secure a safe conviction. He also says that he had recovered the hazy memory of a black sex worker who lived in the house wiping her hands all over his body, gathering up his DNA from his sweat. He was half naked at the time, it being a hot day, and he was sleepy with alcohol excess, but he remembers enough. At the time of his trial he had no memory of it. Only in later years did patchy bits of memory emerge. He also told me that he’d spoken to her before, so he knew her name … it sounded like a soft drink … like Cherry Squash … not orange or lemon squash but Cherry Squash … something like that. I can’t be sure. Sorry.’

  ‘Cherry Quoshie?’ Yewdall said. ‘Yes, we know about her living in the house at the time of the murder. Did Gordon tell you who he believed had stitched him up?’

  ‘A geezer called Smith. Sorry, can’t be of much help to you there, given the number of geezers called Smith in London,’ Dawson looked apologetic. ‘But he reckoned this guy Smith had it in for him because of what Gordon had done to his daughter. He had taken her to Ireland when she was underage or something. So this geezer called Smith fitted Gordon up with something to make sure he went away for a long time for taking his daughter to Ireland. Me,’ Dawson smiled, ‘I could well cope with a nice geezer like Gordon taking me on holiday to Ireland, but Mr Smith didn’t like it.’

  ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ Yewdall smiled, ‘but we know Mr Smith and what you have said makes sense.’

  ‘Makes all the sense in the world,’ Ainsclough sighed. ‘I can see that happening.’

  ‘So can I,’ Yewdall replied, ‘so can I.’ She turned to Dawson. ‘So what did Gordon Cogan do then?’

  ‘Changed his plea … he dropped the IDOM stance, admitted that he was guilty and began to work for his parole. It took him five years … I was out by then, pursuing my own agenda. I got paroled after five years. All that testosterone made me convinced that I was a girl, probably just the push I needed, but Gordon’s plan was half-baked, totally half-baked.’ Dawson shook his head.

  ‘What was his plan?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘To get out, he told me, track down the girl, Quoshie, and ask her to go to the police with him and make a statement about what she had done.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ainsclough replied, ‘a bit half-baked, as you say.’

  ‘Well, that was Gordon,’ Philip Dawson shrugged, ‘not really on this planet of ours … head in the air. Even fifteen years in top security couldn’t mature him. He had this air of naivety about him even after being banged up for all that time amongst the hardest cons in London. I tried to tell him it wouldn’t be that easy. OK, he might get his conviction overturned but she’ll get a long sentence for conspiracy to murder. What is the likelihood of her, of anyone, doing that? But he was determined. He was like an overgrown schoolboy. It was like he’d get the girl Quoshie to do that and then spend the rest of the day trainspotting.’

  ‘If he had only gone to a solicitor,’ Ainsclough sighed, ‘and done it through legal channels – asked his solicitor to raise an action to have his conviction overturned. He didn’t need Cherry Quoshie …’

  ‘It might have … would have saved his life,’ Yewdall agreed. ‘A conviction based on DNA evidence alone can now be overturned.’

  ‘I think it was more than that,’ Dawson explained. ‘If you’ll pardon me, he didn’t merely want his conviction to be deemed unsafe. With that the question of his guilt still hangs in the air. He wanted complete acquittal. He wanted his innocence to be a matter of record. For that he needed the woman, Cherry Quoshie, to come forward and make a statement, admitting her part in the whole thing.’

  Ainsclough stood. ‘Well, thank you for your information, Mr Dawson … it has been illuminating.’

  ‘And thank you for visiting me. I appreciate it greatly.’ Philip Dawson also stood, as did Penny Yewdall. ‘I know that I have my operation date, but I still didn’t want to go into a police station in my summer dress and heels and say “Excuse me, my name is Philip Dawson …”’

  Back in the car, Yewdall turned to Ainsclough. ‘If Cherry came forward, that would implicate Tony Smith in the murder of Janet Frost,’ she suggested, ‘which Smith could not allow to happen. So he had them both killed, but not until after he had tortured Quoshie to determine what she had said and to whom.’

  ‘Seems so.’ Ainsclough met Penny’s gaze. ‘Now all we have to do is prove it.’

  Penny Yewdall stopped to re-tie her shoelace. It was mid-evening, the heat had largely subsided and she knew she had time to reach Greenwich Park before the gates were locked for the day. She had dressed in a blue T-shirt and baggy blue jogging bottoms, matching blue sports shoes with loud red laces, and left her small terraced house in Tusker Street. She ran along fume-filled Trafalgar Road and entered Greenwic
h Park at the Park Row entrance. She ran in front of the Maritime Museum and then put herself at the path which led up Observatory Hill to Flamsteed House. At the top of the hill she paused and turned to look at the vista of buildings that was the Square Mile of the City of London and identified the Gherkin, pondering that earlier that week she had viewed its eastern aspect from Whitechapel Road after she and Tom Ainsclough had left the Blind Beggar pub upon talking with great interest to Gordon Cogan’s brother, Derek.

  She had turned south again and jogged past Flamsteed House where she saw the usual sight of tourists photographing each other, standing astride the Prime Meridian Marker. She mused that being photographed walking across Abbey Road where the Beatles had once walked and being photographed standing astride the Prime Meridian Marker were probably the two essential photographs for any tourist visiting London to take or have taken. Yewdall ran down the straight-as-a-die stretch of road that was Blackheath Avenue, suitably tree-lined as any thoroughfare called ‘avenue’ ought to be, with a flat green sward extending at either side beyond the trees. At the bottom of the avenue she turned left by the park keeper’s house and jogged steadily beside the tall brick wall which formed the park boundary and went the length of Charlton Way. At the first junction she turned left and ran down Maze Hill, keeping up a steady pace but finding the going easier now the incline of the hill was in her favour. She eventually entered an area of prestigious suburban development to her right, while the red brick wall that formed the perimeter of Greenwich Park remained to her left. Beyond the junction with Westcombe Park, Maze Hill steepened sharply and Yewdall began, as most often when she ran this route, to find her pace increasing. The increased pace caused the lace on her left shoe to work loose and so she stopped and knelt down to re-tie it. She reached for the lace ends, lowered her head forward and then stood bolt upright in a spontaneous movement. ‘There’s more,’ she spoke aloud. ‘She didn’t tell me everything … there’s much, much more.’