A Dreadful Past (12 page)

‘Fair enough,' Hennessey grunted. ‘I doubt if we would connect them either, and there may be no significance to the four men outside the Middleton house and the four different types of blade used to murder the farmworker.'

‘You know,' Jenny commented, ‘you know, I think … I fear there may be more … It was a strange time … really quite a strange time.'

‘What do you mean, Frank?' Hennessey turned to Jenny. ‘There may be more? A strange time? What do you mean?'

‘Yes, you know how it is that things seem to run in a spate sometimes, like celebrities seem to die in threes or there is a succession of railway accidents or shipping disasters …' Jenny offered. ‘You have observed that sort of coincidence.'

‘Yes, I have noticed that.' Hennessey became curious. He spoke in a low tone of voice. ‘What are you going to tell me, Frank? That there were more murders around that time?'

‘Yes, that is what I am going to tell you.' Jenny looked down at his feet. ‘Sorry … I'm so sorry, George.'

Hennessey groaned.

‘It seems that there was a spate of murders at the time in and around York and then, after the Middleton family were murdered, everything went quiet again. It was as if murder was in the air.'

‘And the police didn't link them?' Hennessey queried.

‘No, no, we didn't.' Jenny put his hands to his forehead. ‘They still might not be linked. All were different MO's and different victim profiles … some took place indoors, some outdoors.'

‘Fair enough,' Hennessey repeated. ‘Fair enough. I refuse to be wise after the event so tell me about the other murders, Frank. Tell me about them.'

‘Well, as I recall – and I don't promise that these are in the correct chronological order but it will be easy for you to check. I think the first was a hit-and-run of a twelve-year-old boy on his bike, but the tyre tracks clearly suggested, if not proved, that it was a deliberate running down of the little lad. It happened on an isolated stretch of road … there were no witnesses and no other vehicles were involved. We classed it as a murder and because it only takes one person to drive a car we were not looking for a gang. We searched for and made a public request for information about any car with damage to the left-hand wing. No information was forthcoming but a car which had been stolen earlier that day was found as a burnt-out wreck the following day. It was in a remote location so a second vehicle was probably involved if only to carry the driver of the stolen vehicle back to safety.'

‘I see,' Hennessey grunted. ‘And the others …?'

‘The others are confused in my mind in respect of the time order,' Jenny admitted with a soft tone of voice. ‘But let me think … There was the murder of the frail, elderly lady who was suffocated with a plastic bag over her head. She was found inside her pensioner's flat and with signs of theft having occurred: drawers had been rifled, clothing strewn about, that sort of thing. The perpetrators were evidently forensically aware – they wore gloves, for example. That incident took place in the middle of the day. We established that her niece called her on the phone at ten a.m. that day, as was normal, and the woman was found by the warden doing his rounds at four p.m. So there was a six-hour window, and again there were no witnesses … Also again, one person could have done that murder. Then there were two more murders about the same time, and one was particularly horrible.' Jenny paused. ‘The first of those two was a young woman whose body was found in the River Ouse one winter. She still had jewellery on her person but her handbag was missing, which was not thought to be unusual. It will most likely still be at the bottom of the river somewhere. Her body was found downstream of a bridge which was quite a distance from York and well away from her usual haunts. There were no signs of violence and the death had all the hallmarks of a suicide, yet somewhat puzzlingly, one item of jewellery on her person was her engagement ring.'

‘So a young woman with everything to live for,' Hennessey commented. ‘You're right, that doesn't seem like a suicide.'

‘It seems a car was involved in the journey from York city centre to the bridge where she is believed to have entered the water,' Jenny added. ‘Someone drove her there, most probably against her will. In winter … She drowned with her death being complicated by hypothermia. That was the pathologist's findings and the coroner returned an open verdict which, as you know, always means unanswered questions … it always means a cloud of suspicion.'

‘Indeed it does,' Hennessey replied. ‘It always does mean that. So what was the final murder – the distressing one?'

‘Well … being a dog lover, you'll have to prepare yourself for this one,' Jenny warned, once again looking down at his feet.

‘Go on.' Hennessey steadied himself. ‘I've been a copper long enough … I can cope with it.'

‘It was the murder of a dog walker, a man out walking his dog. He was found strung up, lynched … hauled up on the end of a rope so that his neck was stretched. You know, Klu Klux Klan style, but his dog was attached by its lead to one of the man's ankles, so as he kicked away on the end of the rope he kept jerking his dog's collar.'

‘Good heavens!' Hennessey gasped. ‘As you say, distressing is not the word.'

‘Yes, the wretched beast was a trembling wreck when he and his owner were found. The vet decided to put him to sleep, saying that the dog would never recover from that trauma. The victim was a man in his fifties,' Jenny added. ‘Again, there were no witnesses and an outside location but it would have needed more than one man to overpower him. So you see, we had no reason to link him to the young woman who drowned, or indeed to the old lady who was suffocated in her flat, or any reason to link her to the young lad who was deliberately knocked off his bike and killed.'

‘Over what sort of period?' Hennessey asked.

‘Perhaps a year,' Jenny replied. ‘Then there was the murder of the Middletons, after which it all settled down again. Then there were no murders for a year or so and none that we didn't solve.'

‘Would you link them now,' Hennessey turned to Jenny, ‘with all the benefit of hindsight? Off the record … what are your gut feelings?'

‘Even now I'd be loath to say they were definitely linked.' Jenny raised his head and looked out of the conservatory window. ‘I would perhaps be more suspicious than I was at the time; I would be more open to the notion that perhaps they were linked, but it's still stretching credulity to say that they definitely were linked. But it's your pigeon now, George. It's over to you, and I wish you the best of luck. After all this time, I think you're going to need it.'

‘A set of chip shop Saturday evening cowboys if you ask me.' Harry Lister revealed himself to be a short of stature, cold-eyed, serious-minded individual, lacking, so far as Somerled Yellich could discern, any trace of a sense of humour. ‘Anyone who burgles a house doesn't unload their payload in the city where they did the burglary. Anyone who does that is a cowboy, a real bottom-of-the-fourth-division rank amateur.'

‘So we were advised,' Yellich replied as he cast a curious, police officer's glance around Harry Lister's sitting room. The room, he noted, was well-appointed with curios and antiques but without any particular theme that Yellich could detect. He wondered how many of said curios and antiques were in fact the proceeds of long-ago committed burglaries which had been brought over the years into Lister's shop from other, distant parts of the UK – items he took a shine to and which he kept for himself rather than sell on. ‘But we have been told that twenty years ago, if anyone wanted to unload moody goods – that is, moody antiques – then you'd be a guy to approach.'

An unexpected smile came briefly to Lister's lips. ‘Yes,' Lister replied as the unexpected smile evaporated, ‘I have a conviction or two … it would be stupid to deny it, especially to a police officer, but I am retired now and all that is behind me. A long, long way behind me.'

Lister spoke with what Yellich thought was an air of smug self-satisfaction, as if he took great pride in a lifetime of wrongdoing.

‘Yes, yes, all right, I did some things but I got away with most of what I did and I did well in life. I've got this house … and I've got a villa in Spain, on the Costa del Sol. Me and the wife go there in the winter. We're just back from there, in fact. I've got a yacht moored in the Med and a Mercedes-Benz in the garage. That's the garage here, not the garage at the villa in Spain. I don't get to use it much these days – the yacht, I mean – so I think I'll sell it when the market gets a bit more lively. Right now, you can pick up a boat for half its value if you have a fistful of cash to offer. I want more than that for my boat. She's a fifty-footer … she looks lovely on the water. I've got three sons, all good lads and all known to the police, so they're following their old man just like I followed mine and he followed his. We're a real crime dynasty, the Listers. In fact, the only “black sheep” in our family is a solicitor who lives in Scotland and he—'

‘Twenty years ago …' Yellich interrupted Lister in mid-speech and brought the conversation back on track. ‘Local felons back in the day, trying to unload stolen goods … can you recall any such person or persons?'

‘Twenty years ago!' Lister gasped and then smiled a thin, sly smile. ‘Listen, pal, you are just not on this planet if you think I can remember customers from that far back, but I can tell you that if anyone was selling locally stolen antiques also locally then they were not skilled housebreakers. Like I said, they'd be cowboys.'

‘Understood.' Yellich nodded. ‘So you would say that anyone selling locally obtained stolen items would be something else first and that stealing goods would come second, like an opportunity which dropped in their lap?'

‘Yes … I'd say so,' Lister agreed. ‘It would likely be someone who plans something other than the burglary … then gets sticky-fingered during whatever the other planned crime was.'

‘Thanks.' Yellich stood. ‘That's what we thought. We just had to confirm it – get it from the horse's mouth, as it were.'

Lister also stood. ‘Well, I never thought I'd be one to help the police. This is a real turn up for the books. I'll show you out; you won't get past the Dobermans if I don't escort you.'

‘You didn't cover your tracks, Billy,' Yellich explained. ‘That was your mistake.'

‘My tracks?' Billy Watts repeated. Yellich found Watts to be a small, slightly built man like Harry Lister whom he had just called on but, unlike Lister, Watts lived in a council flat which had bare floorboards and was without furniture in the living room except for two chairs and a low coffee table.

‘Your tracks,' Webster repeated. ‘You didn't cover them. Giving the antiques dealer the wrong address was a good try but you have to do better than that. The address number you gave in Tang Hall doesn't exist but Coniston Drive … it's obscure, only a “Tangy” would know of that street. So we asked a local bobby. We asked him if he knew a youth with gaol house tatts on his hands which read B.W. and a Staffordshire bull terrier on a chain, and the local bobby said, “Oh, that'll be young Billy Watts. He's got very recent form and his address is on file.” So here we are in Ambleside Avenue, just round the corner from the little-known Coniston Drive.'

‘You just can't beat local knowledge,' Yellich added. ‘You just can't beat it. So who is Jerome Aspall? Aspall, I – we, can understand, but “Jerome” … That's a trifle fanciful, isn't it?'

‘It's a guy I know, or knew.' Watts sat in a defeated and a despondent-looking manner in one of the chairs in his flat. His pit bull terrier sat at his feet having been quietened, but it continued to stare at Webster and Yellich, who stood facing Watts. ‘I shared a cell with him in the young offenders. He was called Jerome Parker. Aspall was the name of another geezer in there, Tony Aspall, so I sort of just cobbled their names together and came up with Jerome Aspall.'

‘I see.' Yellich sat in one of the chairs. Webster stood beside him. ‘Well, you might have got away with that, but giving an obscure Tang Hall address – that and your self-inflicted tattoos and your dog … Well, like I just explained, you were not hard to find … just a question to the right person.'

‘My dog.' Watts looked at his dog with evident fondness. ‘He won't be left alone, will he? We go everywhere together, don't we, Spike? Like everywhere, me and him.'

‘Well,' Somerled Yellich replied with clear gravity, ‘you're likely to be separated for a long time if you don't tell us where you got the vase you sold to the antiques dealer in Stonegate.'

‘I found it,' Watts claimed.

‘Rubbish!' Yellich snapped. ‘We're hungry, Billy. We're desperate for food … like we're starving and we need our raw meat!'

‘It's true …' Watts' voice rose almost to a wail. ‘I found it in a skip.'

‘At the very least we have you for handling stolen goods. Even if you did find it, that's still theft by finding, even from a skip. It still counts as theft,' Somerled Yellich explained with a menacing tone. ‘And with your track record you'll go back inside, but this time to an adult prison now that you're over twenty-one, not a young offenders institution, and there's no kennels there.'

‘I didn't know it was stolen,' Watts continued to protest. ‘Honestly … that's true, I had no idea it was moody.'

‘That is still no excuse, Billy,' Reginald Webster explained, speaking more softly than Yellich. ‘So where did you … who did you get it from?'

‘You could be looking at accessory to murder,' Yellich continued. ‘That'll get you five years. Easily five years. But the worst-case scenario for you is conspiracy to murder … that'll get you life.'