Peter Turnbull - Aftermath

‘I was thinking the same thing.’

‘And if she sobered up, we’d have her back on the switchboard. . and I told her that. But it was just about then that she disappeared. She’d been in the stores for less than a month. . and the tragedy of it was that she seemed to be getting on top of her drink problem. . she was on her way back to the switchboard, so no reason to run away.’

The agent’s room in HM Prison Langley Vale was square in terms of floor area, about eight foot by eight foot, guessed Thomson Ventnor, who sat at a metal table. It smelled strongly of bleach. The walls were tiled with glazed white and blue tiles, which had been laid alternating with each other laterally, and which had been offset like bricks in a wall. A filament bulb behind a Perspex screen in the ceiling illuminated the room. An opaque glass brick at the top of the outside wall opposite the door allowed in ultraviolet light. Ventnor heard the jangling of keys and the opening and shutting of a large, heavy door, then the agent’s room door was unlocked and opened.

Liz Calderwood was dressed in a blue tee shirt, faded blue denims and white sports shoes. She grinned at Ventnor as she entered the agent’s room and, unbidden, sat down opposite him. She was small, frail, innocent-looking and, thought Ventnor, she could pass for a fourteen-year-old. He saw at once how her charm and innocent-looking appearance would help her defraud gullible people, which she had done, and for which she had collected three years’ imprisonment.

‘Yeah. . I heard,’ she replied in a soft voice after Ventnor had explained his reason for visiting. ‘We get the television news to watch and the newspapers to read and so, yeah, I heard about her being found. . one of a number of women. Nine bodies it is now. Nine. I saw the latest press release. I did wonder what she was doing. Now I know.’

‘We understand that you were the last person to see her alive?’

‘No,’ Liz Calderwood smiled and showed that her eyes had a most un-criminal like sparkle about them. ‘No, that was the person who murdered her. Point to me I think.’

‘Point to you, agreed,’ Ventnor inclined his head in acknowledgement, ‘but of her friends and acquaintances, you were the last known person to see her alive. You left the nightclub together, we understand?’

‘Yes. . that is true. . I remember it well. I didn’t drink as much as she did so I can remember things that happened and I can remember that night all right. . like it was yesterday. She was a mess. . Veronica was a mess. She was drunk and she had vomited in the washbasin in the ladies toilets, it was in her hair. . it was on her clothes. . everywhere. . her tights were torn. She was mumbling about having to get home and rinse her hair but she didn’t want her mother to see her. So we walked. Well, she stumbled and I held her up, even though she was taller than me, and we got to the railway station to try to use the toilets in there to clean her up but by then they had been locked up for the night. . so we hung around. Her old mum would go to bed at midnight she said and it was well after that by this time. So she planned to sneak in quietly, wash her hair and get some sleep. She was tired and that, plus the booze. . well you can imagine what a handful she was. . and she still kept taking nips from her flask. There were no cabs but eventually a car stopped. . I don’t know whether it was a cab or not but I got the impression the driver knew her.’

‘That could be significant.’ Ventnor leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table to. ‘Did you see the driver?’

‘No. . it was dark.’

‘Recognize the car?’

‘No. . I’m an “all-cars-look-the-same-to-me” merchant. I seem to recall that it was a dark coloured car but can’t be clearer than that. So I helped. . no, I poured her into the car and that was the last time I saw Veronica Goodwin.’

Reginald Webster sat heavily and resignedly into one of the chairs in front of George Hennessey’s desk. He held a number of manila folders in his hands.

‘You’ve had some luck, I think.’ Hennessey put his pen down.

‘Yes, sir, I believe that I have matched seven of the nine bodies now known to have been found in the kitchen garden to missing person’s reports.’

‘Good.’

‘Not a difficult job, there are not many mis per reports of females in the Vale, not of the age group we are talking about and helped in the case of Gladys Penta by a disfiguring head injury she had sustained earlier in her life. . the result of a climbing accident in fact.’

‘You look puzzled Webster.’

Webster forced a smile, ‘Does it show?’

‘It shows,’ Hennessey replied. ‘So what is it?’

‘It’s their ages, sir. . the ages of the victims.’

‘Oh?’

‘That is, if they are who I think that they are, we still have to confirm the identity in all the cases, only Veronica Goodwin is confirmed up to now.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well. . the female victims of all serial killers, which is what we seem to be looking at here. .’

‘Seems so. . agreed’

‘Well, in all documented cases the victims tend to be women in young adulthood. .’

‘Yes. . all right.’

‘Because they go out at night. . easy victims.’

‘Yes,’ Hennessey settled back in his chair, ‘and they have their youthful attraction, and you are going to say those ladies do not fit that victim profile?’

‘Yes, sir, that is what I am trying to say.’ Webster held eye contact with Hennessey and then, deferentially, looked down. ‘The first victim, or the last victim, but the first we identified, Miss Goodwin, she stands out as different from the others.’

‘An anomaly?’

‘Yes, sir, that’s the very word. An anomaly.’ He handed Hennessey a piece of paper. ‘Going by height and date of disappearance, I believe these are the names of the victims in order of their age when they disappeared.’

Hennessey took the piece of paper from Webster. He read:

Angela Prebble, 33 years

Paula Rees, 39 years

Gladys Penta, 42 years

Rosemary Arkwright, 45 years

Helena Tunnicliffe, 51 years

Roslyn Farmfield, 57 years

Denise Clay, 63 years

‘I see what you mean;’ Hennessey spoke softly, ‘the youngest is thirty-three years, the oldest sixty-three years, not at all the typical victim profile of serial killers of female victims.’

‘There is one more victim, sir.’

‘One more?’

‘Yes, I can’t fit her with any of our mis per reports but Dr D’Acre confirms she is, or was, middle-aged.’

‘So we have nine victims, these seven, Veronica Goodwin and the as yet unidentified victim?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And, as you say, Veronica Goodwin at a tender twenty-three years is a distinct anomaly. . but something will link them. They’re all from the Vale? Yes, sorry, of course they are otherwise we wouldn’t have their mis per files.’

‘Yes, sir, just the one victim who might be foreign to the Vale, she is a short-term resident who had no social network, so no one to report her missing.’

‘But eight out of the nine are definitely local to the Vale, they were left locally and in the same place. . the perpetrator is local. The kitchen garden at Bromyards speaks loudly of local knowledge, no outsider here coming to the Vale to look for his victims, he knows this area. . he’s local.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And the victims, apart from the unidentified one, are local?’

‘Furthest address from the city of York is at Shipton and that’s only five miles away, a gentle stroll for a person in reasonable health, ten minutes by car and failing either, a frequent bus service.’

‘Anything about the time sequence of their disappearances?’