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.
‘Not I.’ Webster smiled. ‘We live in a small village adjacent to woodland.’
‘A home in the country.’ Parr inclined his head. ‘Very nice.’
‘Well . . . no,’ Webster explained, ‘it’s actually a new-build housing estate which has been tacked on to a village, but it is still very quiet . . . wood pigeons during the day and an owl during the night.’
‘I too live in a quiet area,’ Yellich advised.
‘I see.’ Parr reached for a bread roll. ‘But, as I said, you get used to the noise and I like living in the city, so I choose to put up with it and other things besides. So . . . my parents . . . I read about skeletons being found in a field in the York area; are you putting two and two together?’
‘Let’s just say we are moving in that direction,’ Yellich replied.
‘Well I have always thought they were murdered.’
‘That’s interesting.’ Yellich sipped his tea. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘It’s just that it is the most likely explanation, don’t you think? If indeed the only explanation? Four adults, they vanish in the middle of a city. I mean, it isn’t as though they were particularly adventurous and disappeared whilst rafting down the Blue Nile or whilst trekking in the Himalayas.’ Parr paused. ‘They were . . . we were, Camden people, well into the Camden Town lifestyle, you see; café culture and live music in bars . . . small, local restaurants, walking along the canal towpath where folk live in houseboats, and we hunted for bargains in Camden Lock Market, so misadventure is unlikely. An accident? Well, if an accident had befallen them their bodies would have been found. So foul play, it has to be a question of foul play, by process of elimination. So I have concluded that murder is the cause of death and the motive for person or persons unknown making a thorough job of hiding the bodies is also unknown. It’s really quite easy to make a human body disappear.’
‘You think?’ Webster also helped himself to a bread roll.
Parr shrugged. ‘Well I wouldn’t argue with two police officers but I do believe it isn’t difficult . . . if you have privacy and time . . . two big “ifs”. I watch crime programmes on TV, fiction and non-fiction.’
‘I see,’ Yellich growled. ‘I often think that such programmes put dangerous ideas into people’s minds.’
Webster sipped his tea. ‘In fact it is actually very difficult to get away with murder. We throw all our resources into solving that crime above all the others, and people so often trip themselves up, or are caught out by a microscopic drop of blood.’
‘Or,’ Yellich added, ‘somebody, a fellow conspirator, sees a chance for themselves and they turn Queen’s Evidence.’
‘Always a sensible thing to do,’ Webster agreed and held eye contact with Parr whilst he did so, noticing Parr to have become very serious-looking.
Yellich also noticed Parr’s sudden serious demeanour and he told himself, Look at the in-laws before you look at the outlaws, and their visit to Nigel Parr of Camden Town took on a new, unforeseen significance. Nigel Parr had suddenly become very, very interesting.
‘But, yes,’ Yellich continued, ‘you are in fact correct; we do believe that we have located your parents and sisters.’
‘Oh,’ Parr groaned.
‘Yes, as you read, a grave in a field just outside York. We learned your name from the file. Seems lucky that you did not travel north with them.’
‘Yes. I was on holiday with friends at the time on the south coast, out of touch. It was my mother’s brother who informed the police they were missing . . . collected their possessions.’
‘Mr Verity?’
‘Yes . . . Uncle George, sadly no longer with us.’
‘I see. The remains were found with the skeletal remains of a young woman who we have identified as being one Michelle Lemmon. Do you know anything about her?’
‘Oranges,’ Nigel Parr gasped, ‘oh, not Oranges as well. She was going north, returning home. She asked for a lift when she found out that the family was going north, not just north but to York, no less, which is where she came from. She asked if she could go with them. I just assumed Oranges went home and rejoined her parents.’
‘Oranges?’ Webster queried.
‘It was her nickname, from the nursery rhyme. You know the one . . . “gay go up and gay go down, to ring the bells of London town”?’
‘Of course.’ Yellich beamed. ‘“Oranges and Lemons sing the bells of St Clements”.’
‘That’s the one,’ Parr confirmed.
‘“You owe me five farthings say the bells of St Martin’s”,’ Webster enjoined, sensing the need to introduce a slight sense of jocularity into the occasion, so as to gloss over the officers’ sudden suspicion about Nigel Parr.
‘“When will you pay me? Say the bells of Old Bailey”. Yes,’ Parr continued, ‘that is the reference . . . and when she came to live with us we called her “Oranges” after her surname of Lemmon . . . spelled differently than the fruit but pronounced the same. So her nickname was an obvious choice and she didn’t mind at all. So the name stuck.’
‘I see.’ Yellich paused.
‘How did you find me anyway?’ Parr asked.
‘Telephone directory,’ Yellich explained. ‘There are not many N. Parrs in Camden. We just assumed you’d stay in the Camden area, hence my first question after I introduced myself, asking if you were related to Mr and Mrs Gerald and Elizabeth Parr of Camden.’
‘I see.’ Parr sipped his tea. ‘I did wonder, once I had put the phone down.’
‘Well,’ Yellich continued, ‘we really need your help in respect of confirmation of the identity of the deceased family . . . a sample of DNA for example.’
‘Can’t help you there I’m afraid.’ Parr shrugged.
‘Oh?’
‘Well, you will have heard about the skeletons, if not seen them?’
‘Yes, heard reports,’ Yellich replied.
‘Doubtless their stature or lack of will have been remarked upon?’
‘Short . . .’
‘Very short.’ Parr smiled. ‘And look at me, I am just shy of six feet tall . . . well, tall enough to be a police officer.’
‘Ah . . .’ Yellich sat forward.
‘Perhaps you thought some form of anomaly within the family?’ Parr relaxed in his chair. ‘I am fostered. I am not of their bloodline.’
‘Oh.’ Webster allowed his disappointment to show.
‘I was a Victorian-style foundling. I was wrapped inside a blanket and placed inside a telephone box, or so the story goes, very late one night. I was just a few days old. The person who left me there, probably my mother, just seemed to have laid me on the ground and dialled three nines and then vanished into the night. It was during the winter months, so I was told, but I was left there well wrapped up and the police responded to the emergency number very quickly.’
‘As they would,’ Yellich replied.
‘Yes.’ Parr nodded. ‘As they would.’
‘So I was found with a note pinned to my blankets.’ Parr shrugged again. ‘It was apparently written in a rounded female hand and it read, “Please look after him, I can’t”.’
‘Not a good start in life,’ Yellich observed.
‘There have been better starts but it was probably all for the best,’ Nigel Parr replied. ‘I wouldn’t have had the best of childhoods with a mother who could not care for me, no matter what reason. So I was fostered by the Parrs after a few years in an institution. They were a mad, happy, strange family. Mad, but mad in a harmless way; eccentric, a little off centre . . . just . . . just . . .’
‘Dotty?’ Webster suggested.
‘Yes.’ Parr beamed. ‘Dotty, that’s the very word to describe them. Utterly harmless, and they created a very stimulating house, if artistic expression is your thing. You know . . . children’s paintings pinned up everywhere, branches of trees steam cleaned and then varnished or painted for decoration, “art trouvé” I think it’s called . . . and a veritable zoo of pets, not just cats and dogs but hamsters and a rat.’
‘A rat!’ Yellich gasped.
‘Yes, a tame rat. Believe me.’ Parr grinned widely. ‘It had a personality. It really was a very intelligent creature. Tortoise in the garden . . . tropical fish in a heated and illuminated tank . . . horses in stables north of London. They were very warm and eccentric, and I grew up feeling fully part and parcel of the family; They never once reminded me that I was fostered. Not once.’
‘Good for them.’ Webster took another bread roll.
‘I was indeed lucky.’ Parr glanced at the floor. ‘But what a family, the girls would bring stray dogs home and the dogs would stay. All the dogs were strays in fact. And the whole family smoked cannabis.’
‘You did what!’ Yellich gasped.
‘Smoked dope,’ Parr confirmed. ‘I kid you not, as a family we smoked dope. I mean liberal minded is just not the word to describe that lifestyle. The Parrs valued education but were suspicious of formal schooling, and so they never minded much if we played truant, as we often did. They believed that the thrill of escaping and the hours of freedom were much better for our development than was sitting in a stuffy classroom and not really absorbing anything, and I have to say that they were probably correct. I was not damaged by it because I still went to college, which is where I got my real education.’
‘I have indeed heard that observation –’ Webster glanced at Yellich and then addressed Parr – ‘that what you use in your day-to-day life you had acquired by the age of eleven and from what you learned in your professional training, but you use very little of what you might have learned from the ages of twelve to sixteen.’
‘Yes, I think that applies to me.’ Parr smiled. ‘The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides; all very interesting but I never needed that knowledge to pay the gas bill. In fact all that taught me was the correct use of the words “sum” and “adjacent”. I still don’t know anything about triangles. I really was much better off truanting in Regent’s Park Zoo, or exploring London . . . right out to the East End, sometimes for nothing.’
‘How did you manage that?’ Webster was intrigued.
‘Can’t do it now because you have to pay on entry, one man operation now.’
‘Same everywhere,’ Webster replied, ‘hence the question.’
‘Yes, but the operative word is “now”,’ Parr explained. ‘Back in the day when there were conductors we’d get on a bus and run upstairs, and when the conductor came to collect the fare we asked for a destination in the opposite direction and he’d say, “You’re going the wrong way, boys”, so we’d get off at the next stop and wait for the next bus and pull the same stunt. You’d get at least one stop in the direction you wanted to go, at least one stop, sometimes two or even three depending on how crowded the bus was or how hard the bus conductor wanted to work. Very occasionally we’d get on a bus where the conductor was having a bad day or had a grudge against London Transport and who felt disinclined to take any fares at all . . . not from anyone. When that happened we rode for free without having to change buses. That was a rare occurrence, though. But I’d come home and tell my parents what I had done, and they thought I had done well and wholly approved of it. Eccentric, as I said.’ Parr fell silent. ‘There was always a lot of laughter in the house . . . a lot of care . . . a lot of acceptance, but . . .’
‘But?’ Yellich prompted.
‘But . . . but . . . when I reached my teenage years I began to feel different, especially when the growth spurt occurred. I shot up over my sisters and then my mother and then my father, and all in the space of just a few months. I enjoyed the nickname of “Rocket Man” for a while, rocketing up, you see.’
‘Yes,’ Webster replied, ‘I understand . . . we understand.’
‘So, suddenly I was the tallest person in the house. We joked about it but I began to feel different and gradually less and less part and parcel of the Parrs of Camden. I eventually left home to go to art college and managed that because of the Parrs’ influence and encouragement. I then worked as a commercial artist, which is what my father’s occupation was, painting book covers or posters for advertising products; that sort of thing. I also took the photography option with the idea of becoming a photo journalist.’
‘It must pay well,’ Yellich commented.
‘You mean that I can afford a two bedroomed conversion in Camden?’ Parr smiled. ‘These don’t come cheap.’
‘Well . . . yes . . . as you say, this house will not have come cheap.’
‘My inheritance.’ Parr smiled. ‘I couldn’t afford to buy it, not on the money I make. I am not as successful as my father was.’
‘The Parrs left something to you?’ Yellich asked.
‘No . . . no . . . they left me nothing. They used to tell me that being fostered meant nothing at all in terms of belonging to the family, but they were not wholly accurate. You see, being fostered meant that I inherited nothing by right.’ Parr raised his eyebrows. ‘I took their name by deed poll but that’s all I took.’
‘Yes.’ Yellich nodded. ‘I see.’
‘So, it was the case that when the Parr family was deemed to be deceased and their estate was wrapped up we found that they had died intestate. Then, in that case, I was not going to inherit anything.’
‘I see,’ Yellich said again with growing curiosity.
‘So their house, which was much, much larger than this, my modest little property, and all the contents therein, and all the money in the bank and all the stocks and shares went to Mr Verity.’
‘Mrs Parr’s brother?’ Yellich confirmed.
‘Yes,’ Parr replied, ‘to him, now sadly deceased. It was explained to me that the mechanism of inheritance is like a cross or like a lift in a building; it goes up and down then from side to side. So in the case of someone who dies intestate, the first beneficiaries are any issue, any children. If there is no issue it then goes up to the person’s parents. If there are no parents still alive, which, in my parents’ case, they were not, then it goes from side to side.’
‘To brothers and sisters?’ Yellich clarified.
‘Yes, to siblings. So down, then up, then from side to side and it stops at the first legal beneficiary, who in this case was Mr Verity, my maternal uncle.’
‘I see,’ Yellich replied.
‘I never really knew Uncle George,’ Nigel Parr explained, ‘not when I was growing up, but I was to find that he was of the same stuff and stock as my foster parents in that he was a very generous man, generous beyond measure.’
‘I see.’ Yellich remained intrigued.
‘So what happened,’ Parr continued, ‘was that he and I sat down about two years after my foster family had disappeared and were then presumed deceased and Uncle George said, “Look, Nigel, I know Gerald, your father, and your mother was my sister, and I know that they would have wanted you to have something, in fact they told me that they intended to include you in their will. I am a solicitor with a firm in the city and I am doing reasonably well, and I want to use the money from Gerald and Elizabeth’s house and their estate as a whole to start trust funds for my three children. I don’t want anything for myself.” So the upshot was that he sold the home and the contents therein, sold all the stocks and shares . . .’
‘He liquidated the estate,’ Yellich said.
‘Yes,’ Parr continued, ‘that’s the word, he liquidated my parents’ estate and instead of dividing the proceeds by three to start trust funds for his children, he divided it by four, giving me an equal fourth of my foster parents’ estate.’
‘That was good of him,’ Webster commented, ‘very good of him indeed.’
‘Yes, I thought so too.’ Nigel Parr paused as another red double-decker bus whirred loudly past the window, drowning any conversation. ‘Legally he was not obliged to give me anything, but what I did inherit was enough to buy this small conversion, well almost enough. I had to take out a small mortgage but that’s paid off now. So it’s mine, lock, stock and barrel, worth well over a million, being much more than what I paid for it.’
‘Dare say it would be,’ Yellich growled.
‘Well, London prices . . . I plan to retire to the country. Dorset, I think, but somewhere in the beautiful south.’
‘So,’ Yellich asked, ‘do you know why your parents went to York, taking Michelle Lemmon with them?’
‘No, in a word, I don’t . . . neither did Uncle George, but we thought it might be in connection with a property dispute, that is a dispute about the ownership of a parcel of land.’
‘I see,’ Yellich replied. ‘Do you know who their solicitors were?’
‘Oldfield and Fairly,’ Parr replied confidently. ‘They still are. Oldfield and Fairly have been the Parr family solicitors for a long time.’
‘Where are they?’
Parr paled. ‘Well, last I heard they were in the Camden area . . . but exactly where . . .’
‘We’ll find them,’ Yellich smiled.
‘Why would you want to speak to them?’ Parr seemed to the officers to have become agitated.
‘They might be able to shed light,’ Yellich explained.
‘Well, I have told you all there is to know.’
‘You’ve probably told us all you know.’ Yellich smiled. ‘They might know something else. They might be able to shed fresh light.’
Parr did not press his objection further but he could not conceal a look of worry to cross his eyes which was clearly noted and registered by both officers.
Yellich was aware of the need to keep Nigel Parr talking so as to avoid him getting too defensive. ‘So tell us, how did Michelle Lemmon arrive at the Parrs’ house?’
Parr opened his fleshy palms in a gesture of despair, though he was also evidently relieved to have to answer a non-threatening question. ‘What can I say? I don’t wish to be patronizing but Oranges was brought into the house like the dogs were brought in, like she was a stray. She came home with my sisters one afternoon who all but said, “Can we keep her? Please, please, please can we keep her?” Anyway, it turns out that Oranges had been sleeping rough in Regent’s Park which is where my sisters found her.’
‘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.