A Dreadful Past (3 page)

‘And because, like all police forces the world over, we always look at the in-laws before we look at the out-laws,' Hennessey commented, ‘I have to ask, is the son/brother, as you describe Mr Noel Middleton, free of suspicion?'

‘I would say wholly so, sir,' Ventnor replied. ‘Wholly so. He was with his friends at university when the Durham Constabulary broke the news of the murders to him; the blow, he said, being softened by the fact that he had drunk much beer in the few hours before he was notified. Also, I do think he is unlikely to have brought the vase here, to the police station, and asked quite strongly that the case be reopened if he was in anyway implicated in the offence.'

‘Good point.' Hennessey raised his index finger. ‘Yes, that is indeed a very fair point, so we can already eliminate Mr Noel Middleton from suspicion. What have we got on at the moment? Thompson?'

‘I am heading up the ongoing series of thefts of prestige motor cars from public places like hotel car parks and the like. No progress to report as yet I'm afraid but I am confident that they – the gang in question – will trip themselves up,' Thompson Ventnor advised. ‘And, of course, this time of the month we're all doing our returns, getting April's statistics drawn up for the faceless ones at Home Office to examine.'

‘All right. Carmen,' Hennessey addressed Carmen Pharoah, ‘what have you got on?'

‘I'm in the process of completing the paperwork for the Crown Prosecution Service in respect of the school dinner lady who was stealing food from the school where she worked. If you recall, sir, she was given to telling the children that they could not have second helpings and then taking the leftovers home to feed her husband with. In that way the couple ate a roast meal every school day evening. I confess that I still am unsure of the extent of the husband's knowledge of his wife's practice. He claims that his wife had always assured him that the food they ate would only have been thrown away if she hadn't “reserved” it. It was she who used the word “reserved”, not me, I hasten to add.' Carmen Pharoah spoke with a distinct London accent. ‘Anyway, when the husband found out that the children were going hungry so he could feast each evening he gave his wife quite a slap, but I have charged him with conspiracy to steal anyway and will shortly send the papers to the CPS. They can decide in their infinite wisdom after reading them whether to proceed against him or not, as well as against her.'

‘Very well. Reg?' Hennessey turned to DS Reginald Webster. ‘What have you got on your plate at the moment?'

‘I still have the team of shoplifters to apprehend, sir,' Webster replied. ‘We have some very good CCTV footage from which we have taken some equally good stills, but we have made no arrests to date. They seem to be very well organized and might already have left for pastures new. I say that because they seem to be itinerants but we don't think they have. We have reason to believe that they are still in our area, so we are still hopeful.'

‘All right, so that just leaves you, Somerled.' Hennessey smiled at his detective sergeant. ‘What is it that's keeping you busy right now?'

‘Just a suspicious death to be wrapped up, sir,' Yellich replied attentively. ‘We are still looking at the husband of the deceased as being the culprit. I think the CPS will be charging him – the case against him is very strong and, frankly, I can well see him admitting it in a day or two so as to negotiate a reduced sentence; if not murder then guilty of manslaughter. I still have the paperwork to wrap up but all the spadework has been done.'

‘So,' Hennessey leaned slowly backwards and pyramided his fingers, ‘we can call this one of our quiet periods, and we can therefore let the rekindled case of the murders of the Middleton family which took place twenty years ago take priority … at least while it remains quiet. Are we happy to do that?'

There then followed a general nodding of heads and a murmur of agreement.

‘All right.' Hennessey leaned forward and placed his meaty hands on his desk. ‘Twenty years on … a fresh look … let's make another attempt to clear this dreadful fence. So, Somerled and Reginald, I'd like you two to team up, please. I'd like you to trace the ownership of the vase in question as far back as you can.'

‘Yes, sir,' Yellich replied eagerly for both himself and Reginald Webster.

‘Thompson and Carmen, I'd like you two to team up. I'd like you to revisit Mr Middleton and interview him in as much depth as you can. You know the drill.'

‘Yes, sir.' Carmen Pharoah nodded, also with eagerness. ‘We know what to do.'

‘For myself …' Hennessey once again glanced to his left out of his office window, and on that occasion saw what appeared to be a party of pensioners walking the walls – Americans, he guessed, going by the plethora of brightly coloured clothing, ‘… I will go and pay a call on the officer who was in charge of the original investigation. What was his name, Thompson? Remind me, please.'

Thompson Ventnor consulted the original file. ‘He was, it says here, a Detective Inspector Jenny, sir,' Ventnor advised. ‘Frank Jenny.'

‘Ah, yes … Frank Jenny.' Hennessey smiled. ‘I remember that name. It rings many bells. He'll be enjoying a well-earned retirement now wherever he is. I hope for my sake – for all our sakes – he hasn't retired to Spain. I'll phone him first; if he has retired locally I'll visit him – just a gentle picking of brains. I'll be seeking any late insights and anything of significance he might have realized in the last twenty years.'

‘Pride … pride … damned pride is the answer, pride and also with a great slice of Yorkshire stubbornness thrown into the mix and then the whole lot was baked until it was as hard as reinforced concrete. That's the answer to your question, Miss Pharoah. That is the reason. Pride. It is as plain and as simple as that.'

‘Mrs' Carmen Pharoah smiled. ‘It's actually “Mrs”, but when I am on duty Detective Constable is preferred, if you don't mind, sir.'

‘I'm so very sorry,' Noel Middleton opened his left palm, ‘Detective Constable … but a mixture of pride and stubbornness is the answer to your question. It is, you might have noticed in other situations, a very dangerous combination.' Noel Middleton sat in a low but comfortable-looking armchair in front of a black wood-burning stove which, at that moment, was empty. He wore a thick yellow woollen cardigan against what Ventnor and Pharoah both thought was a mild but nonetheless quite distinct chill in the room, as though he was a man who kept a cold house out of choice so as to avoid the soporific, sleep-inducing heat of a warm house. The heavy wooden mantelpiece above the stove was lined with expensively framed photographs all showing the same woman and the same three children. The house itself was old, with low wooden beams, darkly stained, running across the ceiling.

‘You see,' Middleton continued, addressing Ventnor and Pharoah who sat in a relaxed posture side by side on a sofa which matched the chairs in the room, ‘when Sara, my sister, lost her sight, we found out that there are two types of blind person – that is to say totally blind, not just partially sighted. There are those who are born blind and there are those who lose their sight because of some misfortune or other, and the two are very easy to distinguish from each other. Very easy. The former, those who are born without sight, have little or no sense of self-image. I mean, why on earth should they? They have never seen anything and so, for example, you might note that their clothing always appears to be drab and functional, and because they “see” with their hearing, when such blind people walk their head is often turned to one side so as to give some assistance to one of their ears. Nor do such blind people appear to be self-conscious about carrying a white stick or using a guide dog.' Middleton paused. Both Ventnor and Pharoah noted that he spoke with a quiet authority, as though he was a man who was used to being listened to. ‘The latter,' he continued, ‘those who have lost their sight, by contrast, you might equally note, always appear to be very conscious of their appearance; for example, they always seem to wish to be well-dressed and will walk facing squarely ahead of themselves. Similarly they also seem to favour a folding white stick which can be easily concealed and use it only when it is needed. Such people also seem to be more resistant to using guide dogs. That, I fear, was the situation and the attitude of my sister, Sara. She lost her sight. She was in a car crash. She and her boyfriend, of whom neither my parents nor myself ever took a liking to, had been drinking and he got into a road race with another driver who was previously unknown to them, so Sara told us, and he, Sara's boyfriend, lost control of his car as he drove round a corner at great speed. His car turned over and over a number of times and the other driver drove off into the night so the police never knew his identity. Her boyfriend sustained some minor injuries in the crash and made a full recovery. He never showed the slightest remorse. He just started looking for another girlfriend, putting Sara behind him as far and as fast as he could. Sara, on the other hand, sustained head injuries which caused her to lose her sight in both eyes. We were told that the signals between her eyes and her brain could never be re-routed and so she was left as a permanently blind person. She was seventeen.'

‘That is very tragic,' Ventnor commented. ‘Really a great tragedy.'

‘As you say,' Middleton sighed, ‘perhaps especially so because she was hoping to study fine art at university. There are degrees which blind people can study for but fine art isn't one of them. You cannot write a critical essay on a Titian if you can't see the wretched painting. Her boyfriend, annoyingly for us, escaped prosecution … he claimed island amnesia for the time of the accident. He remembered picking Sara up from our house and waking up in hospital but nothing of the intervening period. Or so he claimed. I suspect he had obtained legal advice there. There were no independent witnesses and, as I said, the other driver made a clean getaway. So it was only the word of a young blind woman to say that two cars were road racing. I feel angry that he escaped justice but I can fully understand it. I am a criminal lawyer, you see. I appreciate the need for evidence and I understand the fear – nay, the terror – the criminal justice system has when it comes to the prospect of an unsafe conviction.'

‘I see, sir,' Ventnor replied, and Carmen Pharoah nodded with clear approval. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service hadn't enough there to frame charges.'

‘But Sara, my little sister …' Middleton shook his head. ‘Sara, Sara, so pig-headed, so stubborn … but also so courageous, bouncing back like she did. She was persistent in her refusal to use her white stick in the house and so we helped her by ensuring the furniture was always in the same place – I mean, fixed to the millimetre – and she would not hear of acquiring a guide dog. She was just utterly determined to be as independent as she possibly could. The dog issue, and her attitude to it, pleased Father if only because he didn't like animals. When we were children we kept requesting a dog or a cat or even a rabbit, but to no avail. It was indeed a major concession in the negotiations that he raised the number of goldfish from one to two, and we only had the fish because Mother had managed to persuade Father that it would be very good for our emotional and psychological development if we had a living thing to care for.'

Ventnor smiled. He found himself liking Noel Middleton.

‘But under the circumstances,' Middleton continued, ‘Father would have been more than happy for Sara to have a guide dog. In the event, because of his attitude to animals and because he values self-reliance and independence in people, he wasn't upset when Sara refused one. She really dug her heels in over the issue and I think that made Father very proud of her.' Middleton paused. ‘Anyway, the point of this story is that I think that what happened on the night in question was that Sara responded to the commotion she must have heard and ran into the kitchen to find out what was going on. She most probably took the felons by surprise and all they saw was a young woman who moved confidently about the house with neither a white stick nor a guide dog, who took pride in her appearance and whose eyes would have been open. Thus she appeared to be sighted and they, fearing that she would be able to identify them, on the spur of the moment attacked her and took her life. She seems to have been fated to die young. Sara survived a bad car crash only to have her skull smashed once again which, on the second occasion, did what the car crash failed to do in that it killed her. So attacking and murdering a young blind woman did happen but I don't think that it was as callous as the news reports made it out to be.'

‘That is very big-minded of you, sir.' Carmen Pharoah smiled at Noel Middleton and did so with dilated pupils.

‘Perhaps,' Middleton replied and inclined his head in response to the compliment, ‘but it helps me to make sense of it. I have to come to terms with it somehow and thinking like that has helped me quite significantly.' He paused. ‘But, you know, hardly a day goes by without me thinking about the burglary … the dreadful incident which cost my parents and sister their lives.'

‘I understand that your father's house was quite remote, sir?' Ventnor asked.

‘Yes, it was. It still is … It still stands,' Middleton replied. ‘I drive past it quite frequently. Now with new owners, of course. I dare say the present occupiers might let you look round if you asked but I can't see how that would help you.'

‘I don't think it will be necessary.' Ventnor glanced at Carmen Pharoah, who shook her head in agreement. ‘Not after this length of time.'

‘It was a farm, you see,' Middleton explained. ‘Well, a smallholding really, hardly a farm, just one hundred and fifty acres, but it was owned by the farmer and not rented. He didn't make much of a living off the land – it was too small to allow that. You need at least eight hundred acres to make a good living from a farm. When the farmer reached state retirement age he put it up for sale and Father bought it. The smallholding was to the north of York, just beyond Skelton, as you probably know, so it was quite a prestigious location. The land commanded a very high price and so the farmer and his wife had a very comfortable retirement in a bungalow on the coast after all those years of scratching pennies. Father let all the acreage return to wilderness apart from just an acre or two surrounding the house, which he had landscaped into a garden with lawns and flowerbeds, but it was that – it once being a smallholding – which made the house relatively remote.'