by David Field
‘I’m a genealogist by profession,’ Brandon replied after meticulously chewing and swallowing what he had been eating.
‘Just proves what I’ve always said,’ Alison responded gleefully. ‘Put any group of people selected at random around a dinner table, and they’ll all have something in common. I teach history, Brandon specialises in historical records, and Maggie investigates the immediately recent history of people who’ve died.’
‘But with mine, unlike Brandon’s,’ Maggie objected, ‘there’s usually still a recordable body temperature.’
‘Not sure where I fit in,’ Dave objected.
‘Criminal records, the same as Mike,’ Alison persisted. ‘And of course, Joy’s responsible for cataloguing the history of Bramptonshire.’
‘What do you do in the afternoons?’ Mike joked, earning himself a black look from Alison.
‘Actually,’ Joy countered, ‘you’d be surprised how the volume of paper has increased over the years. The stuff we archive from, say, 2010, is about seven times the amount we have for, say, 1760. In those days, the parishes kept the records to themselves, which of course spread the workload. Once they were absorbed into counties and county boroughs during the Victorian era, the paperwork went with them.’
‘Parish records are usually the final port of call in my trade,’ Brandon joined in. ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages are relatively new, in the overall history of society. If you want to find who married who, or who gave birth to who, before around 1840 or so, you have to find the appropriate parish record. And very often it’s not even on microfiche, let alone computer. Joy, I raise my glass in a salute to the unsung heroes like you, who make the work of people like me so much easier.’
‘How did you meet Maggie?’ Alison asked Brandon, before the conversation became too academic.
‘I met her brother first,’ Brandon replied. ‘He and I were at university together, and met in the rowing club. Despite what looks like my spare build now, I was once muscular enough to pull an oar with the best of them. We’ve kept in touch over the years, although he now lives in Wales. Anyway, I was attending a professional conference in Lincoln this week, and Alistair – who’s Maggie’s brother – suggested that I look her up, for old time’s sake, since Lincoln and Brampton are much closer now than they were in the days when Oliver Cromwell’s army marched backwards and forwards between the two.’
‘Strictly speaking, the distance is the same,’ Maggie corrected him with a playful grin over her spectacles. ‘It’s just that it doesn’t take so long.’
‘If you’d driven through the traffic I had to negotiate today, you wouldn’t say that so confidently,’ Brandon fired back. ‘Anyway, if I can play you at your own game, Alison, how did you and Mike meet?’
‘At university, of course, like most couples of our vintage,’ she replied. ‘Mike was a promising Law student, while I was studying History. We had a common interest in Shakespearean drama, which brought us together in the Drama Club. Mike makes a terrifying Richard III, if anyone’s interested.’
‘And Alison’s Desdemona was a show-stopper,’ Mike added. ‘We married, had two kids who’ve now flown the nest to maintain the family tradition of wasting a good education, and after over twenty-five years we’re still together.’
‘But it’ll probably end in divorce if I don’t get the souvlaki out of the oven and onto the table,’ Alison said as she rose from her seat. ‘Is everyone OK for drinks?’
By the end of the evening, only Mike and Dave were left on the front patio, into the second percolator of coffee, and more brandy and port than was good for either of them, while Alison and Joy were loading the dishwasher from the dining trolley.
‘How did you meet Dave?’ Alison asked Joy.
‘At the golf club. He helped me with my swing, we got talking, and realised that we were both divorced and lonely.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘For Dave, certainly. He’s like a puppy some times, so dependent and so eager to please. I bet those he interrogates wouldn’t believe it was the same man if they could see him at home.’
‘And for you?’
Joy paused, then went slightly pale.
‘I’m not sure how much Dave’s told Mike, but I was married before, to a man who had a serious anger management problem. I’m not sure I could ever completely trust a man again in a full-time relationship, but it’s difficult to get that across fully to Dave. I’m happy to sleep with him, and have stop-overs in each other’s places, sometimes for days at a time, but I just can’t bring myself to relax when he hints about marriage.’
‘Is there much of an age difference?’
‘I’m fifty-two next year, and he’s only forty-three, although there doesn’t feel to be any age difference – certainly not in bed – but I wonder how it would be if he finished up married to a pensioner while he’s still at the top of his professional game.’
‘There comes a point when you have to learn to trust, cross your fingers, grit your teeth and smile out at the world,’ Alison advised her. ‘Just recently, I was convinced that Mike was getting too involved with a woman our daughter Melanie shares a cottage with in Oxfordshire, but in reality she was just a suspect he was playing along. She turned out to be completely innocent, and so did Mike, but I went through a few nervous days, I can tell you. In the end, either you go in, boots and all, and hope for the best, or you don’t bother.’
Her face fell slightly as she looked at the lingering uncertainty in Joy’s face.
‘Sorry, I hope I haven’t said anything to damage your relationship with Dave. To be perfectly honest, he and Mike didn’t see eye to eye for years, but now they seem to have got a bit closer, working on this latest case.’
They were certainly getting closer to falling off their garden chairs, as the second bottle of brandy neared its use-by point. Mike waved his arm somewhere in the general direction of Dave, and insisted.
‘Thersh no bloody bay – way, shorry – that you’re driving home, mate. Thatsh what spare rooms are for. That not right, Alson?’
‘You’re both drunk.’ Alison observed haughtily as she stepped back outside with Joy. ‘You’ll no doubt be both delighted and unsurprised to learn that the Washing Up Fairy has been yet again, and that the catering staff you hired for a lifetime have cleared the dinner table while you cleaned up the liqueurs. But you’re right for once, Mike – Dave shouldn’t be driving. He seems to be nodding off in his chair.’
‘I can drive him home,’ Joy offered with a smile. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘We wouldn’t hear of it,’ Alison replied. ‘It’s the first on the right upstairs after the main bathroom, and your towels are already laid out on the bed. You haul yours up there, and I’ll see what I can do to give the kiss of life to mine.’
‘I’ve not been that pissed in years,’ Dave confessed as he conducted a psychological battle with the plate of kedgeree that Alison set down before him the following morning. ‘Sorry if I disgraced myself.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Mike confessed softly, to avoid vibrating his head any further, ‘I don’t remember anything after the Baked Alaska.’
‘It was a great evening, thanks again. Does this mean that you no longer regard me as a liability on the force?’
‘After what I saw you do to that Rasta bloke on the Carswell, I wouldn’t accuse you of anything while you’re sitting within zapping distance of me. Let’s just say that I now appreciate why you sometimes come into the office a bit late. Talking of whom, Joy hasn’t come down yet – I hope she’s OK.’
‘The last I saw of her, she was “putting her face on”, as she calls it. I believe it was the Greek actors who wore different masks for different emotions, and I think you’ll find that when she joins us, she’ll be wearing her “fit and healthy” face. If your head’s as fuzzy as mine, this is probably not the best time to advise you that she has it in mind for us all to “enjoy” a healthy country walk. She doesn’t get out to Northwood
very often, and she’s heard great things about Sunday lunches at the Black Cat.’
‘Haven’t been there since I pinched the bar manager for pinching one of the barmaids, as a prelude to raping her in the wine cellar. That’s the biggest drawback with this job – all the romance and glamour goes out of everything. Oh hello, here comes our hiking guide. Morning, Joy. Hope you slept well, and Dave tells me that we may be going fishing today.’
Chapter Six
There was no-one timing his arrival as he pushed his office door open cautiously on the Monday morning, but it didn’t take the phone long to leap into life.
‘Geoff Keating here, sir. Just thought you might like to know that we’ve got that gubbins you brought back from the Carswell working, and there’s some sort of interview on it. Do you want to wait until the DI gets in, and go through it together?’
‘No, I can’t be bothered to wait until morning tea time. Just bring it up yourself, would you?’
Two minutes later Mike had the small hand-held tape-recorder in his hand, and was examining the buttons.
‘How did you unjam it?’
‘Not me, sir – Jenny Allen. Seems there was a bit of grit holding the release mechanism down, and she prised it out with a nail file.’
‘You said it contained some sort of interview. Let’s hope it’s not someone confessing to a crime, else we’ll be accused of tampering with evidence as usual.’
He clicked the ‘re-wind’ button, and while the tape whirred back to its starting position he straightened the notepad on his desk and reached for a pen. But what they listened to was so intriguing that he finished up not writing a single word.
Interview between Jeremy Giles and Ethel Clay. March the Fourteenth 2012
First of all, Ethel, thankyou for agreeing to speak to me about your father’s death.
That’s alright, but I were only a young girl then, you understand, and I’m in my eighties now. But I can still remember it like it were yesterday – the policeman come to our house, and my Mam took proper poorly after that. She were never the same, and she died a few years later – hung herself, she did, and then it were just me and our Billy. He were workin’ by them days, and I were just twelve, so I got to keep the house tidy and cook the meals. Then he upped and married Jessie Laxton, but it weren’t much of a marriage, by all accounts, then he topped himself too, just like my Mam had done. It’s been nowt but tragedy in my life, and that’s a fact, and now here I am, living in this council flat with no family to my name, and nowt else to look forward to, since Bert died.
If I could just stop you there, Ethel, you told me that you were just a young girl when your father died in what was believed to have been a tragic accident. Were you ever given any reason to believe that it might have been more than that?
What d’you mean?
Well, for example, can you recall if he ever mentioned being frightened while at work?
My Mam always reckoned as how there were something bothering him, right enough, for the week or so before he fell. Reckoned there were somebody – or some thing – following him around while he were checkin’ the building when he were workin’ nights. She used to say that he’d managed to get himself transferred to the day shift, and how tragic it were that he only had a couple of nights to go when it happened. But it were all that many years ago, that I can’t rightly remember all the details.
And your mother took her own life a few years later, followed by your brother?
Yeah, they both hung themselves. My Mam were found in the outside lavvie, while my brother Billy hung himself from the ceiling of a place he were working in – he were a joiner by trade, and he were working in that there Scotland Lane Primary School, what got pulled down for a new supermarket a few years since.
And how long after that did you become Mrs Clay?
Oh, that were years later. Twenty-six I were, when Bert come along. We never had no kids, but it were a happy enough marriage, ’til the cancer got him. I still calls myself Clay, even though it’s been almost twenty years now since I lost him. Anyway, it’s a better name than Pockridge.
Thankyou so much for talking to me, Mrs Clay, and I’m sorry you’ve had such a tragic life
You’re right about that. It seems like everybody I got to know and love went tragic, like. My Dad, my Mam, my brother, my husband, and even my old friend Emma Price – Emma Baynton as was. Even she hanged herself, though she’d just lost her only daughter, so it’s perhaps understandable at her age. She were over eighty, you know.
Seems that death by hanging has been a constant theme in your life.
You’re right there. There were even a rope lying near where my Dad died, and some unkind souls reckoned as how he’d meant to hang himself as well, but he missed the rope and just fell down into the front entrance. Either road up, it’s all the same difference, innit?
Once again, Mrs Clay, thank you very much indeed for your time
You’re welcome, lovey.
There was a moment’s silence as Mike reached out to switch off the tape, and he and Geoff exchanged sad looks.
‘Some poor buggers get all the bad luck,’ Geoff said, as Mike raised his hand for silence, and wound back the last part of the tape that had still been running. At least ten seconds after the end of the interview, what was presumably Jeremy Giles’s voice could be heard one last time.
‘Folio P4’.
‘That mean anything to you?’ Mike asked.
‘Sounds vaguely familiar,’ Geoff advised him. ‘When we were going through all those boxes from the deceased’s apartment, I seem to recall that there was a series of manila folders full of jottings, newspaper clippings and so on. I’m pretty sure they had “folio” written on the outer covers.’
‘OK, next priority is to dig out all those folders and bring them up here,’ Mike instructed him. ‘There’s an empty outer office through the door there, and I want to set up a sort of sub-incident room out there, using the whiteboard in here as a critical path recorder. I think we may have seen the first glimpse of light down the dark tunnel in which Jeremy Giles asked one question too many. And, if I’m not very much mistaken ...’
He searched through the papers on his desk, until he found the notes he had made the previous week.
‘Here we are – just as I thought. You just heard an interview with the daughter of Harry Pockridge, who died when he fell three floors down in a building he was employed as nightwatchman in. You should remember that building well, because you were there with Van Morton – Seventeen Cavendish Square, the posh brothel.’
‘Why did they need a nightwatchman in a brothel?’
‘It wasn’t a brothel then. This was in 1938.’
‘A bit of a long way back, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘I don’t, provided that you start searching those boxes. Who’d be the best person to have working with you?’
‘Probably Cathy Norman, if she’d stop complaining about the dust and stuff.’
‘Go and get two pairs of scenes of crime jumpsuits and some rubber gloves, and bring me everything you can find with a folio number on it. Then the pair of you can transfer up here for the duration of this case.’
‘OK, sir,’ Geoff grinned enthusiastically, as he almost ran through the outer office, then stopped as something seemed to occur to him. The computer desks and chairs in the empty outer office were arranged in a star shape, with the computers on the inside, and Geoff selected the chair closest to Mike’s inner office, booted up the computer, logged in, left the screen on ‘saver’, draped his suit jacket over the chair and continued on his cheerful way to the lift.
Mike reached for the phone, deep in thought as he dialled the direct line number, then smiled as he heard the familiar voice, somewhat ‘overhung’ he thought.
‘Morning Maggie. Hope you enjoyed Saturday night.’
‘And Sunday morning,’ came back a voice that was more of a dirty chuckle. ‘Not to mention Sunday afternoon. If I were to write a r
eport on my weekend using my normal professional style, it would begin with the line “The body was that of a well-nourished male in his mid fifties.” And it was in perfect working order – and I mean all of it. Thank God I’m not of child-bearing age, that’s all I can say. And before you say “Too much information”, what can I do for you, assuming that my lascivious weekend was not the nucleus of your enquiry?’
‘Did you by any chance work on the body of Troy Lesley?’
‘The only body I’ve worked on recently was that of the sexiest genealogist you can ever imagine. Sorry, I’m probably boring you with all this. I certainly didn’t work on Troy Lesley, but somebody around here must have done, assuming that he was dead at the time. When did it come in?’
‘Probably Friday afternoon, or maybe Saturday sometime.’
‘You may recall that I took the weekend off. Charlie Wheeler would have been here instead, but I’ll bet he left it to one of the recent recruits into Corpseland. If it was done over the weekend, the report will probably still be in the out-tray, assuming that it was typed up while everyone else was at church. Hang on a sec – yes, here it is. Young male, late teens to early twenties?’
‘That sounds like him. I need to know if he was hanged.’
‘Only if his murderer was an obsessive perfectionist. “Severe blunt force trauma to the occipital lobe” is the official cause of death. “Massive smack to the back of the head”, in your language.’
‘Any suggestion of drowning?’
‘Not after a blow like that, I would have thought. No suggestion of breathing, even. But no frothy odeoma in the lungs, according to this, so no drowning.’
‘And no hanging?’
‘The body was as ripe as a gorgonzola by the time we got it, or so it would seem from this report. I’ll spare you the details, but there was no fracture of the hyoid, so no manual strangulation anyway. Can’t rule out some ritualistic thing afterwards, of course, but he was killed by being whacked on the bonce from behind.’
‘Thanks, Maggie. And I’m glad the weekend worked out so well for you.’
