A Dreadful Past (16 page)

‘Yes, I know the type.' Carmen Pharoah once again glanced out to the fields outside Richard Bowes' house. ‘Winkle-pickers,' she repeated.

‘So … I saw then how they worked,' Richard Bowes said. ‘I could just see the two big ones putting their target on the deck and wading in with fists and feet to make sure he stayed down and then stepping back to let the girl and the third little guy get a few in. The small guy with his shoes with pointed toes, he could do a lot of damage with that sort of footwear. Even a small bloke like him, he could do some real damage.'

‘Yes,' Carmen Pharoah nodded, ‘we know the type of shoes and we have seen the damage they can do. Some real damage, as you say.'

‘So they left the pub and the loudmouthed big one said, “We'll beat someone up on the way home tonight.” The two big ones led the way out and the two little ones followed, both looking down as they walked and both looking resentful at the hand life had dealt them. It was like they were hanging on to the big ones because they wanted a victim. I just caught that image as they left the pub. That was the impression I had, but it was a very clear impression.'

‘You didn't report it to the police?' Ventnor asked as Carmen Pharoah wrote on her notepad. ‘I mean, that you saw them and recognized the girl?'

‘No, I didn't,' Bowes replied defensively. ‘To be honest with you I just felt sick, really, really sick. I waited for a few minutes then left my beer and the pub. I just wanted to get home and I knew that they hadn't left any clues about themselves on me or my taxi. But you should ask the publican of the George and Dragon. He looked youngish then, so he might still be there … He was, and maybe still is, called Frank. If he's moved on the brewery will let you know where he is, I'm sure. I remember that my daughter had just got married a month or two earlier, so it was seventeen years ago this summer that I saw them, about three years after they attacked me. But I am sure it was them … that girl and the jacket she wore … I am sure it was them.'

‘That really was a very good afternoon's work; I am well pleased.' George Hennessey glanced out of the window of the detective constables' room at the backs of the houses at the top of Blossom Street and let his eye rest on the solid nineteenth-century terraced development. ‘Well pleased.' He turned again and looked at his team, Carmen Pharoah sitting at her desk, Reginald Webster at his, Thompson Ventnor sitting half on his desktop with one foot dangling in the air and the other planted firmly on the brown hessian carpet, and Somerled Yellich smiling and looking content stood beside and a little behind Hennessey. ‘Even if we were only able to interview two of the people who were victims of the five attacks we identified, and the surviving relative of a third victim … the other two having left the area or untraceable, we have still learnt a lot. We have made significant progress. We have learned that the gang probably consisted of three men and a woman; we have learned that the two larger members were the clear leaders; the woman and the third, smaller man were both clearly hangers-on. We have also learned that the gang did not hunt for their victims; they appeared to wait in a pre-selected place and lured their victims to them. They were very calculating. They were evidently well-planned attacks, even if only an hour or two in the planning, but that is still pre-meditation. The elderly lady was lured by a girl who seemed dim-witted and lost and when, at the age of sixty-eight, she went out of her way to put the dim-witted girl on the right path to her destination, she was attacked. The taxi driver was lured to where his attackers were waiting by a young female fare, probably the same girl, and he went there quite willingly because he didn't feel in any danger. A female fare, going out to the suburbs … who would have seen danger there?' Hennessey asked. ‘The street girl was lured into her ambush by a disabled man, who again did not seem to be a likely source of danger to her.'

‘That's a link,' Yellich observed. ‘That's a consistent MO. They didn't hunt for a victim as would a marauding gang; they laid in wait and lured their victims. All the attacks are linked in that way.'

‘Like coyotes.' Reginald Webster clasped both hands behind his head. ‘Coyotes do that. Apparently. So I once read.'

‘What?' Hennessey glanced at Webster. ‘What do you mean, like coyotes?'

‘In the American Midwest,' Webster explained, ‘a female coyote on heat will walk around the streets of a small town and any dog which is not chained up or inside a house or is a stray will follow the coyote because no dog can resist a bitch on heat. When the coyote has a number of dogs following her she will lead them out of the town to where a pack of coyotes are waiting in ambush. No dog escapes. It's a very messy business … it's a totally one-sided bloodbath. So, like coyotes in the sense the gang are similar to a pack of coyotes. That's what I meant, sir.'

‘I see.' Hennessey spoke calmly and softly, yet with a serious edge to his voice. ‘Well, they're certainly a pack of animals. To continue, I was correct in my assumption: Doctor Joseph at the university indicated that if two persons like Hindley and Brady, responsible for the Moors Murders, or Duffy and Mulcahy, who did the Railway Murders, can find each other and go out together on a killing spree, then there is no reason why four people can't do the same. Doctor Joseph believes that the great likelihood is that they stopped because they matured, because they no longer felt the thrill of it. They are likely not to be in contact now; whatever was driving them suddenly left them. It left all four of them at the same time, most probably after the murders of the Middleton family. They will probably want to put their violence behind them, Doctor Joseph believes, a long way behind them, and may now be responsible citizens with productive jobs. So we're likely going to be that knock on the door they have been dreading for the last twenty years.' Hennessey paused. ‘And we might even have a name. They were heard to address the publican of the George and Dragon on Foss Islands Road by his first name, so he might also know their first names if he is still the publican there. But after twenty years, I think that can wait until tomorrow. So have a good evening. You deserve it.'

Carmen Pharoah walked slowly and calmly from Micklegate Bar Police Station to Bootham Bar, strolling along the walls, having discovered, as any native of York knows, that by far the best way to traverse the city centre is to ‘walk the walls'. She turned left upon joining the walls and walked to Lendal Bridge. She walked over the bridge and turned left up St Leonard's Place to Bootham Bar and her compact and neatly kept flat. In her flat she showered and then changed into casual clothing and went out again, this time to the bus station where she waited for and then took a cream-and-red York Rider out as far as Escrick, about, she guessed, five miles south of the city. She alighted at Escrick and began a steady walk back to York following the route the bus had taken, ensuring that she walked facing oncoming traffic. She had found that walking in this manner stilled her mind, and as she walked she enjoyed the country air, the flat landscape given over to agricultural usage with the occasional copse to break up the monotony of the land use. Above was blue sky with white clouds of early May, with the ever-present threat, or promise, of rain which did not that day materialize.

As she walked her mind turned unbidden to why she had come to York. She had been a detective constable in the Metropolitan Police, her husband had been an accountant with the police and both were from the West Indies. Her father-in-law had said to them upon their marriage, ‘You are both black. It means that you have to be ten times better just to be equal.' It had, she had found, proved to be very good advice, and she and her husband had begun to lay some very solid foundations for their future.

Then there had been that dreadful night, the knock on her door, her detective inspector standing there looking ashen-faced, the awkward mumbling of, ‘I'm sorry, Carmen, but something dreadful has happened. The driver was drunk … we'll throw the book at him. Your husband died instantly; he would have known nothing …'

She had, after the funeral, felt she had to go north for some reason she did not understand, but the north beckoned her with its harsh winters and even harsher landscape. It was as though she felt that she had to pay some penalty for being alive when her husband was not. She would return to London, to Leytonstone, at some point in the future, but not until she had felt her penalty had been paid.

The walk from Escrick took her one-and-a-half hours. She ate alone, at home, and retired early but sleep evaded her. She lay in bed listening to the sounds of the night – the rumble of heavy goods' trains passing slowly through the railway station, each one seeming endless and moving at night when passenger traffic is at its least busy. She heard the occasional two-tone siren of an emergency vehicle responding to an incident and the sounds of drunkenly joyful homeward-bound youth. It was not until close to midnight that sleep enfolded her into its arms.

Somerled Yellich drove home to his house in Huntingdon. Upon halting his car in the driveway the door of his house opened and Jeremy ran towards him with outstretched arms. The impact made Somerled Yellich gasp for breath. He and Jeremy walked into their house, whereupon Sara Yellich, in the kitchen, threw a powdery arm round her husband's neck and kissed him passionately, assuring her husband that Jeremy had been ‘a very good boy all day', causing Jeremy to beam with pride. Once he had changed into jeans and a red-and-white horizontal-striped rugby shirt, Somerled Yellich took Jeremy into Huntingdon meadows where they identified various plants and the songs of various birds. Having returned home, and before Jeremy's bedtime, Somerled Yellich sat with Jeremy, helping him with ‘time telling' by use of an artificial clock face made from cardboard. He was pleased to find that Jeremy had mastered ‘difficult times', like twenty-two minutes to eleven. Not bad for a twelve-year-old, Yellich thought.

Like all parents of special needs children, Sara and Somerled Yellich had experienced profound disappointment when told that their son had Down's Syndrome, but rapidly they found that a whole world opened up to them when they met and befriended the parents of similar children and when they experienced such joy that children like Jeremy can bring to their family. It was felt that with love, patience and stimulation Jeremy might be able to cope with semi-independent living in a hostel by the time he was twenty-one years old, and he might, with luck, live into his fifties, even into his early sixties, which the Yellichs believed was testament to the skill of the medical profession given that in the 1920s a child born with the condition was unlikely to survive to his tenth year.

That evening the Yellichs sat side by side sipping chilled white wine and listening to a compact disk of choral music. They decided to retire for the night just as the clock on Huntingdon Parish Church began to chime midnight.

In which a murder occurs, names slowly emerge, and the always too kind reader is privy to George Hennessey's other demon.

E
unice Parker enjoyed the early morning. Deeply so. She relished the newness, and the cleanliness, as she found it, in the beginning of each day. She was determined, so far as was possible, to get out of her house each day at 6.30 a.m., allowing only ill health or extreme winter conditions to confine her to her home, a modest bungalow in Sand Hutton to the north-east of York. It was her practice to walk her dog along the road westward out of the village to where a pathway ran between fields towards a wooded area. At that time of the day there were few people about and few cars on the road, and once on the pathway Eunice Parker stopped and slipped the dog off the leash, upon which the dog ran forward along the path, stopping here and there to investigate an interesting scent. Upon nearing the wood the dog wandered from the pathway and sat down in an area of grass so that only the top of its head was visible. Eunice Parker followed some fifty feet behind, focusing on the pathway more than her dog and noting the particularly wet-looking grass to avoid and also the many, many footprints in the drying mud on the pathway. She reflected that she had rarely, if ever, seen so many footprints on that pathway. She looked upwards, having decided to walk on the grass at the side of the path as it was less muddy, and saw a low cloud cover with blue sky breaking through at a few points. She thought with pleasure that a brighter day than hitherto that week was promised. Then she noticed her dog. Speaking aloud, and to herself, she said, ‘Now what have you found, dear boy? What have you come across?' Eunice Parker strode forward. An observer would note brogues on her feet, a tweed suit, a white raincoat open at the front and a brown beret, and would see her as being in her sixties and a woman who moved confidently and strongly. She walked curiously forward until she stood beside her spaniel and said, ‘Oh … I see … I see.' She bent down and clipped the lead back on to the dog's collar and gently tugged him away. She walked back to Sand Hutton where she knew there was a public phone box and calmly dialled three nines. When her call was rapidly answered she asked to be connected to the police and when she was thus connected she calmly provided her name and address as requested to do so. The police officer then asked, ‘How can we help, madam?' She told him that she had found a body. ‘Appears deceased,' she continued. ‘Utterly naked, I might add, as the day he was born. An adult male. His throat has been cut.' The police officer asked her to keep the line open, to which she replied, ‘No, I'm going back to stand by the entrance of the path otherwise you'll never find it – it's a narrow entrance, you see. You have to know it's there. Follow the road from Sand Hutton to the main York to Malton road. I'm wearing a white coat and have a springer spaniel with me.' She replaced the phone and walked back from where she had come, and stood and waited where she said she would stand and wait.