‘He wears Yves St Laurent short-sleeved shirts. That must say something about him.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. You’re the detective, I’m just the office boy. What have you found out?’
‘Right,’ he replied, eagerly. ‘We’ve cracked it.’
‘Go on.’
‘Melissa went to grammar school in Beverley, didn’t she?’
‘Yep.’
‘And then on to Essex University.’
‘Mmm.’
‘So Graham has paid them a visit to have a look at her classmates there, like I did for Duncan in Leeds. And guess what?’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘There was another girl enrolled there at the same time, from the same school in Beverley. She was called Janet Wilson. She’s bound to have been in the same class as Melissa, don’t you think? She must know her.’
I let my glum look slip, but only briefly. ‘What do you mean by was called Janet Wilson?’ I asked.
‘She’s married, that’s all. She’s now called Janet Holmes, and lives at the Coppice, Bishop’s Court, York. We could be there in an hour.’
You can learn a lot about a person from the pictures they have on their wall. This one was a tinted drawing, larger than average, of a circular construction. It looked Moorish at first glance, and I expected it to be called something like In the Courtyard of the Alhambra, but when I looked closer I realised it was biological. What I’d taken as tiles or pieces of mosaic were individual cells.
‘Do you like it?’ Mrs Holmes asked as she came into the room, carrying a tray.
‘It’s not what it seems,’ I replied, ‘and that intrigues me. It’s also very attractive.’
‘Your sergeant’s call certainly intrigued me,’ she replied. ‘Please, sit down.’
‘Constable,’ Dave corrected.
There was a caption and a signature under the picture. They read: Ascaris lumbricoides and J. Holmes. I said: ‘Did you do this, Mrs Holmes?’ sounding impressed.
‘It’s what I do for a living,’ she answered. ‘I’m a technical illustrator. I took a few liberties with the colour on that one, but it’s not great art.’
‘The inspector’s into painting,’ Dave told her. ‘Went to art college. He does all our wanted posters.’
‘Really?’ she replied.
‘He jests,’ I told her. ‘So what exactly is an ascaris whatsit?’
‘It’s a nasty little parasite that lives in pigs and occasionally in humans.’
‘You mean, like a tapeworm?’
‘Very similar, but they only grow to about a foot in length.’
‘Only a foot!’ Dave exclaimed. ‘Blimey! So how long does a tapeworm grow?’
‘Oh, the common tapeworm can reach twenty feet,’ she told him.
‘Urgh!’ he responded. ‘I’ll never have another bacon sandwich.’
Mrs Holmes poured the tea and suggested we help ourselves to milk and sugar. ‘Now, what is it you want to know about Essex University in the early seventies?’ she asked. ‘I’m totally fascinated.’
She was a good-looking woman, easier to imagine addressing a class or opening a fête than looking through a microscope. I sat down and took a sip of tea from the china cup. She’d also supplied scones which looked homemade and more in character with her appearance.
‘Do you work from home?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘My husband left me two years ago, as soon as the children were off our hands. Traded me in for a younger model; and more streamlined.’ She patted her hips, which looked perfectly reasonable to me. ‘I’d always been an illustrator, which was considered something of a cop-out for someone with a degree, but now there’s a bigger than ever demand for my services. I do lots of computer animation, too, of course, but a good animator can name her own price, almost.’
It explained a lot. The house was a four-bedroomed detached on a swish estate just down-river from the bishop’s palace. We knew she’d lived there for nine years, so it must have been the marital home, but she’d managed to keep it. Working alone, in her studio, explained the hospitality, which was above that we normally received. Two handsome detectives were visiting and she probably hadn’t spoken to anyone livelier than a checkout girl all week. Get out the decent cups and some buns.
‘So,’ she said, ‘what’s this all about?’
I reached for a plate and a scone and settled back in my easy chair, gesturing towards Dave. ‘DC Sparkington will tell you,’ I said, adding: ‘The scones look good.’
‘They’re from Betty’s,’ she told me.
‘And I thought they looked homemade,’ I replied.
‘No. I’m afraid I’m the world’s worst cook.’ Ah, well, I can’t be right all the time.
Dave took a drink of tea and placed the cup and saucer back on the low table that was between us. ‘You went to the Cathedral Grammar School at Beverley, I believe, Mrs Holmes?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ She leant forward, interested, and interlinked her fingers around her knee.
‘And from there?’
‘From there I went to Essex University for four years, as you know.’
‘Reading…’
‘Biology.’
‘Was anyone else from Beverley accepted for Essex?’ Dave asked. I had to smile. A week ago he’d have said: ‘What were you taking?’ and: ‘Did anyone else go to Essex?’
‘Yes, there was one other girl,’ she replied.
‘Called…’ Dave prompted.
‘Melissa. Melissa Youngman.’
‘How well did you know her?’
‘Quite well. We weren’t friends, but we were in the same classes at Beverley for seven years, plus a year at Essex.’
‘Were you on the same course?’ Dave asked, puzzled.
‘No. Melissa read palaeontology, but some of our courses were combined for the first year. And we shared a house.’
‘You shared a house? How did that come about?’
‘Melissa’s parents bought a little semi for her, and I had a room in it. It was normal for freshers to stay in a hall of residence, so we had to have a special dispensation, but it only lasted a year. I moved out and Melissa moved on.’
‘Where to?’
‘Melissa? I don’t know.’
‘Tell me about her,’ Dave invited.
I put my empty plate back on the table and settled back to listen.
‘Tell you about Melissa?’ she queried.
‘Yes please.’
Mrs Holmes’s face looked mystified for a few seconds, then broke into a smile of realisation. ‘It’s Melissa you want to know about, isn’t it?’ she demanded, unable to contain her delight. ‘What has she done now?’
‘Her name has cropped up in an investigation,’ Dave told her. ‘We don’t know if she is involved but we’d be grateful for anything you can tell us about her.’
‘About poor Melissa? Good grief.’
‘Yes please.’
‘Well, let me see…’ Mrs Holmes hadn’t spoken to a soul for a fortnight, and now she was being given the invitation to gossip about her best schoolfriend, who she hated, by two people who were trained listeners with no intention of interrupting. It was a moment to savour. She gathered her thoughts, smoothed her flowered skirt and began.
Melissa was head girl, which we knew, and a brilliant scholar. Annoyingly, she was also good at games, and not considered a swot by anyone. She had long hair, down to her waist, and her parents doted on her. They were always in the front row at speech days and school plays, applauding their daughter long after everyone else had stopped. But something happened to her in that first week at university, and Mrs Holmes didn’t know what it was.
‘All sorts of societies organised meetings and parties for the new students, partly to entertain us and break the ice, partly to recruit new members. We went to one, I remember, about the rain forests, which weren’t quite the cause célèbre in 1969 that they are now. Oh! The high life! Tho
se were the days,’ she laughed, and I noticed that she still had a girlishly happy face. Betrayal and disappointment hadn’t left their mark. ‘On the Friday,’ she continued,’ – and this is still the first week – Melissa announced that we were going to a lecture about a man called Aleister Crowley. Have you ever heard of him?’
Dave said: ‘No,’ and I left it at that, although I had.
‘He was the self-styled wickedest man in the world, apparently, although it all sounded harmlessly bonkers to me. He was a witch, a warlock, I suppose, who climbed Everest without oxygen or warm clothing and performed other fiendish deeds like that. He probably did spells and things, but the Everest bit is all that I can remember. Melissa was fascinated. Or maybe it was the lecturer who captivated her. He was a bit of a dish, if you like that sort of thing, but far too smooth for me. Afterwards she trapped him in a corner and wouldn’t let him go. I waited for ages, sipping a half of beer and wondering why people drank the stuff,’ she laughed again, ‘until Melissa came over and told me that it was all right, Nick would see her home later.’
‘Nick?’ I asked.
‘Nick Kingston, the lecturer. Apparently he also taught psychology at the university, although we didn’t know that at the time. So I walked home all by myself and Melissa stayed out all night. I was shocked, but that was only the beginning.’
‘Why? What happened next?’
‘I didn’t see her until she came in, late Saturday afternoon. She’d had all her hair chopped off and it looked a dreadful mess. I asked her why and she just said she was sick of it. The following week she had it dyed and she had her nose pierced. She was a different person.’
‘What colour did she dye it?’ we both asked.
‘Bright red.’ Ah, well, she still had six years to go purple.
‘Was there anything else?’ I wondered.
‘Not really,’ Mrs Holmes replied. ‘We drifted apart after that. I knew I had to work hard, and I didn’t want to let my parents down. I know it’s corny, but they made sacrifices to send me to university, and I wasn’t as gifted as Melissa. I thought she wasted her talents, and to be honest, I grew to dislike her.’
‘Did she and this Kingston become a couple?’ Dave asked.
‘For a while,’ Mrs Holmes answered, ‘and then…’ She covered her face with her hands and began to laugh uncontrollably. ‘Oh my goodness!’ she exclaimed as she recovered. ‘I don’t know if I should tell you…’
Her laughter was infectious. ‘If you don’t,’ I said, smiling, ‘we’ll just have to arrest you and take you to the station to make a statement.’
She blew her nose on a tissue and concealed it somewhere in the folds of her skirt. ‘It was awful,’ she declared, but her expression said otherwise. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘We went to a party at Nick Kingston’s flat. It must have been after Christmas, because I’d taken my father’s car back down there after the holiday. It was a Morris Minor, and he said I’d have more use for it than him. After that, I was invited to a lot more parties, because I was good for a lift. I remember! It was to watch a moon landing, that was it! Apollo 13, the one that had problems. We were all interested, history was being made, but Kingston knew everything about it. He was a complete show-off. Would you like some more tea?’
We would. She refilled our cups and I invited her to continue.
‘Kingston was awful to Melissa. They’d seen a lot of each other up to then, but I could see he was deliberately ignoring her and chasing another girl. Melissa took her revenge by latching on to poor Mo.’
‘Mo?’
That smile came back, but wistful this time. ‘That’s right, short for Mobo Dlamini. He was from Swaziland, that’s in South Africa, and a lovely person. His father or grandfather was the king, and he came over here to study law.’
‘Could you spell it, please?’ Dave asked, and noted it down.
‘I went home just as it was breaking dawn,’ Mrs Holmes continued, ‘but Melissa didn’t come with me. I heard her and Mo arrive much later. Their giggles and antics woke me up. About lunchtime I had my revenge. There was a knock at the door and who should I find there but Melissa’s parents, Mr and Mrs Youngman. They pushed past me and marched up to her room. Can you imagine their reactions? Not only was their darling daughter in bed with a man, but he was a black man. It was awful. I heard most of it and Mo told me the rest. They stormed out and drove away, and I don’t think she saw them again. I gave Mo some aspirin and some breakfast and took him home.’
‘This was early 1970?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Melissa’s mother died of an overdose in August of that year,’ I said.
‘Oh no,’ Janet Holmes sighed. ‘The poor woman.’
‘Melissa sounds a right little charmer,’ Dave declared. ‘I’m not surprised you disliked her.’
‘What happened to them all?’ I asked.
She took a deep breath and thought for a few seconds. ‘That was the end of our friendship, if you could call it that. I moved out and concentrated on my studies. Melissa didn’t do the second year and I haven’t heard a whisper of her until now. Mo joined a firm of solicitors in London and married an English girl. We kept in touch until I left university, but I don’t know what happened to him.’
‘And Kingston?’ I prompted.
She hesitated before shaking her head and saying: ‘I don’t know.’
My tea was cold but I finished it off. Putting the cup down I said: ‘You wouldn’t happen to have any photographs, would you?’
Our lucky streak stayed with us. She sat upright, stretching her spine to its full extent, and said: ‘Why didn’t I think of that? Of course I have, somewhere.’
‘We’d be grateful if you could find them.’
She said it would take a few minutes, but she knew where they should be if we didn’t mind waiting. We passed the time by having another scone each and I studied the cross-section of the beastie above the fireplace. Seeing one of them down the pan would ruin your morning.
It took a little longer than we expected, and she had a smudge of dust on her nose when she returned, explaining that they were in the loft and she rarely went up there. ‘Here we are,’ she said, laying an album on the table. It said ‘Essex’ on the cover in ornate lettering.
There were only four that were relevant to our inquiry. Melissa, Mo and Mrs Holmes, or Miss Wilson as she was then, were in self-conscious poses with several other young people in the various stages of inebriation. ‘Which one is you?’ I’d asked after she’d pointed to Melissa on three of them.
‘There,’ she said, ‘and there,’ indicating a slim girl with long straight hair.
‘You look like Julie Felix,’ I said.
She blushed and said: ‘I did a reasonable impersonation of her with the guitar, when pressed.’
‘And that must be Mo.’
‘A brilliant deduction, my dear Watson,’ she replied. He was the only black person in the photographs.
‘Elementary, Holmes,’ I said, on cue, and she gave me a wistful smile, as if I’d stumbled into a private joke that she hadn’t heard for a long time.
The pictures weren’t the great breakthrough we’d hoped they might be. They were small, two and a quarter inches square at a guess, and black and white. The quality was excellent, but the poses were informal and not much use for identification purposes.
‘Can we borrow these?’ I asked.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Is Kingston in any?’ Dave wondered.
‘No. He took them, but would never let anybody else handle his precious camera. It was the same as the first men on the moon used, he claimed. Another of his boasts. He did us all a set of contact prints, but would charge us for enlargements, if we wanted them. He wasn’t famous for his generosity, just the opposite. Photography was one of his hobbies.’
‘Along with witchcraft,’ Dave suggested.
‘Yes, and keep-fit and rock climbing. He was into everything. He was an
interesting person, in a way, but weird with it. And slimy. I didn’t like him, either.’ She laughed again and said: ‘I’m awful, aren’t I?’
I assured her she wasn’t and thanked her for everything. We placed our cups on the tray and I held the door for her as we walked through into the kitchen. Outside, there was a table on the lawn, with one chair against it, and the grass had been half-cut and then abandoned. ‘Do you know where Melissa is?’ Mrs Holmes asked.
‘We believe she’s in the United States,’ I replied.
‘I’ve always thought I’d read about her one day,’ she said. ‘She was a remarkable girl, but after that episode with her parents I decided she was heartless, capable of anything. Nothing Melissa did would surprise me.’
‘You’ve dust on your nose,’ I said, smiling.
‘A talented lady,’ Dave commented as we rejoined the A1.
‘Mmm. And capable of anything, it would appear.’
‘Who?’
‘Melissa.’
‘I meant Mrs Holmes.’
‘Yes, she’s a clever woman.’
‘And nice, too.’
‘What are you getting at?’ I asked.
‘Nothing, but you could do worse.’
‘She can’t cook,’ I replied.
‘I suspect she was being modest, and that’s what takeaways are for.’
‘She’s not my type.’
‘No? I bet that when we’ve had these photos enlarged you just happen to return the originals personally.’
‘I might. The camera was a Hasselblad, by the way,’ I said.
‘I know. And the moon men left theirs at the Sea of Tranquillity. Shall we go fetch it tomorrow?’
‘Good idea.’
We went to London instead. I’d wanted Dave to have a day down there to meet Graham and the team and compare notes. Our loose agreement was that we’d concentrate on the fire and they would resurrect the files on the other deaths that had accumulated on JJ Fox’s path to fortune. When we’d arrived back at the office I’d rung the SFO and Graham had quickly discovered that Mo Dlamini lived in Southwark, south London, and had carved himself a reputation as a worker for civil liberties. Nicholas Kingston was harder to pin down. I decided we’d both go; meet them mob-handed. Dave could drive us there while I snoozed.
Some by Fire Page 16
