Aftermath (17 page)

‘I see.'

‘I didn't mind. It enabled me to keep track of him. He was my brother . . . a complete wastrel, but my brother just the same.'

‘Was he employed?'

‘No, he virtually never worked all his life, never had a job.'

‘Never?'

‘Couldn't hold down any proper half decent job . . . tried his hand at self-employment but that was a disaster. Any jobs he did have was cash in hand labouring sort of work. He never seemed to accept adulthood, always dressing in the clothes he wore as a young man.'

‘We noticed his shoes.'

‘That's exactly what I mean. We both suffered from a lack of height. I am just five foot tall . . . both left school early but I got a job and held it down, Department of Highways, local authority, very safe, pays nothing but me and my wife could afford the rent on our house. We didn't have children.'

‘I see.'

‘But James, he just came and went, never knew what he did . . . then the drink took him.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes, he was in a bad way with the drink for about ten years. That was a bad time. He became down-and-out, begging for money, filthy clothes. I shudder to think what went down his throat in those years . . . poison soup, but that is often the way of it.'

‘Yes.'

‘In this case, he was set upon, beaten up by a gang of youths; small, smelly guy, easy target. He got one hell of a kicking but he was hospitalized, cleaned up, fed properly while the broken bones healed and he dried out. Sober for the first time in years. The hospital contacted me when he was due to be discharged . . . I never knew he had been admitted. He only gave them my address when he was about to be discharged. They had incinerated all his clothing as representing a health hazard, he needed some replacement kit so I looked out some of my old clothes and brought them to the hospital, and then dragged him to an AA meeting and sat with him throughout. To his credit he went back, and kept going back and kept dry. He even had a long term girlfriend . . . and took a council tenancy, and they had a son, but they split up after a while. Still never held down a job but he kept dry. So that was a big thing.'

‘Good for him.'

‘Yes, for him that was an achievement as I said, one man's floor being another man's ceiling. For him to stay dry was a big deal, a very big deal.'

‘Yes, I can understand that. Do you know of anyone who would want to harm him?'

‘I'm afraid I don't. I knew little of his life. I suspect it was not very . . . well . . . small guy, no employment to speak of. I suspect it was a quiet life he led. I knew of no friends and I knew of no enemies.'

‘I see.' Hennessey tapped his notepad with his ballpoint. ‘Do you know what Mr Post's last known address was?'

‘I have a note of it at home . . . but yes . . . I have a note of it.'

Carmen Pharoah and Thomson Ventnor walked up the inclined drive to the Malpass home in Hutton Cranswick. The house itself was interwar, large, two storeys, red-tiled roof, generous garden, noted Ventnor, very generous, as he pressed the doorbell. The bell rang a conventional double tone and did so loudly, so loudly that Ventnor did not think it appropriate to press the bell a second time. The door was opened, confidently so, soon upon the bell sounding, by an elegant seeming woman in her mid fifties, Pharoah estimated, who was dressed fetchingly in a yellow knee-length dress and white court shoes. She smiled warmly at the officers, ‘Mr and Mrs Blackhouse? You are a trifle early, but no matter, do come in.' She stepped to one side. Pharoah and Ventnor remained stationary and stone-faced as they showed the woman their identity cards. ‘Police,' Ventnor said flatly.

‘Oh.' The woman's face fell; her hand went up to her mouth. ‘I hope there's no trouble.'

‘Plenty,' Ventnor replaced his identity card in his wallet. ‘There's always plenty of trouble but probably not for this house.'

‘How can I help?'

‘We'd like to speak to Mr Malpass, if he is at home.'

‘Yes . . . yes he is. I am Mrs Malpass by the way. Do come in. We are waiting for a Mr and Mrs Blackhouse, they have been referred to us.'

‘Referred to you?' Carmen Pharoah stepped across the threshold of the house.

‘Yes, we offer an alcohol abuse counselling service.'

‘I see.'

‘But . . . well . . . come in. My husband is in the living room, second door on the left.'

Carmen Pharoah, followed by Thomson Ventnor walked into the living room. A tall, well-dressed man stood as they entered. Carmen Pharoah read the room; she saw it neat, tastefully furnished with dark but highly patterned carpet, furniture covered in pastel shades of blues, with blue tinted wallpaper. The bay window looked out on to an equally neatly kept garden, surrounded on all sides by a ten foot high privet.

‘The police, dear,' Mrs Malpass announced.

The man stepped forward and extended his hand. ‘Ronald Malpass. This is my wife, Sylvia. How can we help?' He was smartly dressed in white trousers, summer shoes, blue tee shirt.

‘Just a little information, please,' Ventnor replied, noting how tall Malpass was, over six feet he guessed.

‘In that case, please take a seat do.' He indicated the chairs and settee in the room as he resumed his seat in the armchair he had been occupying when the officers had entered. Pharoah and Ventnor sat side by side on the settee and Mrs Malpass sat in the vacant armchair. Carmen Pharoah thought Ronald Malpass overly confident and she also noticed a certain look of worry across Mrs Malpass's eyes.

‘We understand you know, or knew, a lady called Angela Prebble?'

‘Angie . . . Angela . . .' Ronald Malpass sat back in the armchair. ‘That's a name I have not heard for a while. She disappeared, I believe . . . some years ago.'

‘Yes, she did,' Ventnor replied. ‘She's reappeared.'

‘Oh . . .' Malpass looked alert, interested. ‘How is she?'

‘Deceased.'

Sylvia Malpass gasped. Ronald Malpass's brow knitted. He remained silent for a few moments and then asked, ‘What happened?'

‘We don't know but she has been identified as being one of the bodies found at Bromyards.'

‘Bromyards?' Malpass queried.

‘The big house,' Sylvia Malpass explained. ‘It's been on the news . . . in the papers.'

‘Ah . . . yes, of course. Oh dear, poor Angela . . . we did wonder.'

‘How did you know her?'

‘Socially . . . not really very close but we knew her.'

‘How? How did you know her?'

‘Socially. As I said.'

‘Can you be a bit more specific, please?'

‘We were in the same bunch of people, the same group.'

Carmen Pharoah sighed, ‘If you could be . . .'

‘Alcoholics Anonymous,' Sylvia Malpass explained. Then she addressed her husband. ‘It was going to come out.'

‘Thank you,' Carmen Pharoah smiled at Sylvia Malpass. ‘No shame there, alcoholism is a disease . . . no shame at all.'

‘There shouldn't be,' Ronald Malpass added, ‘but there is the stigma, it's always there. But I am dry now . . . we both are.' He held his right hand outstretched, palm down, fingers pressed together. ‘Rock steady,' he said with a note of pride in his voice. ‘I couldn't have done that at one time, I would have been shaking like a leaf. Dried out about fifteen years ago, before that there is a ten year gap in my memory, can't remember a thing I did in those ten years . . . but now . . . I still enjoy the sensation of waking up with a clear head.'

‘Good for you,' Thomson Ventnor said. ‘I know it can be quite a battle.'

‘Yes. Why? Are you . . .'

‘No,' Ventnor said. ‘I'm not.'

‘So,' Carmen Pharoah attempted to pull the conversation back to the relevancy of their visit. ‘Angela Prebble was in Alcoholics Anonymous?'

‘Yes, she was.'

‘And that was the extent of you knowing her?'

‘More or less . . . well . . . we became friends but not close friends. She was from the West Coast of Scotland and had difficulty settling in Yorkshire, though I confess you do hear Scottish accents quite a lot in Yorkshire, in the pubs and the shops.'

‘You go into pubs?'

‘Oh yes,' Malpass smiled. ‘Why not? I enjoy pubs . . . I . . . we . . . Sylvia and I, just don't touch alcohol but pubs are enjoyable places. We are aware that just one drop of alcohol and we'd both be off the wagon. We watch each other.'

‘So we met Angela at AA and then met socially outside AA meetings, a coffee and a chat, but that's all.'

‘Very well.'

‘Now we do our own thing. We offer alcohol abuse counselling, on a one-to-one, or couple-to-couple basis. Have you ever been to an AA meeting?'

‘Can't say I have,' Ventnor said.

‘Me neither.' Carmen Pharoah noticed a pleasant scent of furniture polish in the room, not too strong, not overpowering, but there, in the background.

‘Well, they are large . . . as the name implies, very anonymous and that suits many folk, but we found that others need to feel more like individuals with personalities and identities, and need one-to-one or couple-to-couple support and advice. So we thought we'd offer our experience to others. We let AA know and they refer people to us . . . in fact we are . . .'

‘Yes, Mr Malpass,' Pharoah interrupted him. ‘We'll be on our way soon. Did you see Angela Prebble at all around the time of her disappearance?'

‘I can't recall. It was a long time ago you see . . . years . . . ten years. I really don't know how long ago it was . . . I think I was sober then.'

‘You were,' Sylvia Malpass smiled warmly. ‘You had to have been, we met her in an AA meeting, you'd stopped drinking.'

‘Of course, I had gotten sober; I was a dry alky by then. We joined a drink watchers group which was a spin off from mainstream AA.'

‘Drink watchers?'

‘Yes, we didn't need the AA approach, “Hello, I'm Ronald and I'm an alcoholic”; we just needed human company to help fill up the evenings, but not necessarily talk about our battle with the bottle. So we'd meet in cafes. In the summer we'd go for walks along the river. We just helped each other get through those awful hours from five until eight p.m. We found that if we could reach eight p.m. without a drink then the desire went. It wasn't for everyone, some folk drank at home at any time of the day or night, but if you drank because you needed human company and then the drink took you, then our little group was a good place to be . . . human contact, a chat, but we kept each other off the booze.'

‘Very good.'

‘So we'd get through until eight and then disperse and meet up again a couple of evenings later.'

‘Not every evening?'

‘No, we couldn't sustain that. If one of our group could not get through the evening they could go to an AA meeting.'

‘Quite a lifeless house, I thought.' Carmen Pharoah drove slowly away from the Malpass house.

‘Sort of,' Ventnor glanced to his left at a 1930s' Rolls Royce parked sedately in the driveway of a neighbouring house. ‘Dead . . . lifeless as you say. No plants . . . no books on the shelves.'

‘And alcohol is an issue again. This entire investigation is looking like it's booze related.'

It was Saturday, 15.37 hours.

FIVE

Sunday, 14th June – 09.15 hours – 21.45 hours
in which two inquiries converge and the kind reader hears of Thomson Ventnor's private issues.

H
ennessey reclined in his chair. ‘Booze, the demon drink,' he sighed and raised his eyebrows. ‘Seems a likely thread, sir, a likely common denominator,' Carmen Pharoah sipped her tea. ‘Veronica Goodwin evidently had a significant problem, so did Angela Prebble and Mr Penta was angry about being abandoned in favour of AA . . . and alcohol may also explain the unidentified victim, a woman in her sixties, I think she was.'

‘Yes, sixty-one plus or minus twelve months,' Hennessey glanced at the ever expanding file, ‘just the sort of elderly down-and-out, an old soak who would not be missed, who had probably wandered into a different part of the country to avoid the shame of being as she was where she was known; came to York to be an unknown in a strange town so we have no record of her on our mis per files.' He tapped the desk top. ‘I've said it before and I'll say it again, the sooner we get a National Missing Person's Database the better, and I can't see why it should not be set up in these high-tech information technology days, seems to be the easiest thing in the world if you ask me. Well, enough of my ramblings for this fine, sunny Sunday morning. So it seems that we might have a breakthrough. We still have yet to notify all the next of kin and obtain confirmation of ID of all the victims. As I understand it, the families of Paula Rees, Rosemary Arkwright, Helena Tunicliffe, Roslyn Farmfield and Denise Clay have yet to be visited. We can address that now. I don't like making first contact in situations like this by phone, very insensitive, but it may be expedient.'

‘A simple phone call asking if their missing family member had a significant drink problem. We can follow up with a home visit later to explain the reason for our interest and obtain help to confirm identification,' Carmen Pharoah suggested eagerly, ‘and also ask if they had any contact with the York Chapter of AA.'

‘Good. Can you get on that?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘So what have you got on, Yellich?'

‘Working with the Crown Prosecution Service to frame the charges for the Askham Links manslaughter case but, unlike us, they don't work on Sundays, so I am at your disposal for any legwork.'

‘Good. Ventnor?'

‘Theft of prestige cars, sir.'

‘Oh, yes . . . any progress?'