Peter Turnbull - Aftermath

‘New one on me, it’s usually dog walkers or courting couples.’

George Hennessey smiled gently, ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’

The middle-aged, smartly dressed man stood facing the heavy velvet curtain. He was a small man, so short in stature that Hennessey, standing beside him, felt that he was towering over the man. The room was dark, being dimly lit, heavily carpeted with darkly stained, heavily polished wood panelling on the walls. The man took a deep breath as he and Hennessey waited for the nurse.

‘It won’t be like what you. .’

‘I know,’ the man turned to Hennessey and forced a smile, ‘I have done this before.’

‘Really? I am sorry.’

‘My wife, she was knocked down and killed by a drunken driver and I had to identify the body. As you say, it’s not like it’s portrayed in the films, lifting a sheet over a body that is in a metal drawer. . more sensitive. . the last image I had of my wife was of her sleeping in space.’

At that moment, the smaller of the two doors to the room opened, silently, and a sombre looking nurse entered. She glanced at Hennessey who gave a single slight nod of his head. The nurse then pulled a cord and the velvet curtains slid open, again silently. What was revealed to Hennessey and the man was a pane of glass, and beyond the glass was the body of the man who had been found earlier that day when a householder had noticed a swarm of flies. The body was, by then, tightly swathed in clean white bandages with only the facial features showing. Nothing else could be discerned, just an endless seeming blackness. It was as the man had described, as if the person on the bed was at peace, floating in deep space.

‘Yes,’ the man spoke quietly, ‘yes, that is James, James Post, my younger brother.’

‘Thank you, and I am sorry.’ He once again nodded to the nurse who pulled another cord and shut the curtains. ‘Can you answer some questions?’

‘Here?’

‘No, we’ll go to the interview suite at the police station.’

Hennessey drove Mr Nigel Post, brother of James, to Micklegate Bar Police Station. The journey was passed in silence.

In the interview suite, Nigel Post settled into the chair and glanced round the room at the orange coloured walls and the hard-wearing carpet of similar colour, though of a darker shade of the same. ‘Not as functional as I imagined,’ he commented.

‘We have more functional rooms for interviewing suspects,’ Hennessey replied, ‘upright chairs, table, tape recorders set in the wall, but for less formal Q and As we use this room.’ He sat opposite Nigel Post and rested his notebook on his lap.

‘If you could tell me about your brother?’

Post reclined back in the chair and eyed Hennessey with a look of concern. ‘You would only bring me here and ask that question if there was some suspicion about his death. When my wife was killed by that idiot I was only asked to identify her body.’

‘Yes. .’ Hennessey avoided eye contact with Nigel Post, ‘I am afraid that this is a murder inquiry.’

Post leaned forward. ‘What happened?’

‘We don’t know. Yet. The post-mortem has still to be conducted but injuries were noticed on your brother’s body about his neck and head, and he was found in a field outside York with no identification, no wallet, but we found a library card which led us to your address.’

‘Yes,’ Nigel Post sighed, ‘James used my address as an accommodation address. It had a permanency about it, whereas he could never settle in one address, in the early days he moved from rented flat to rented flat as if he was looking for something and hoped to find it in the next flat he moved into. So it was easier to use my address for things like library membership. . and he just kept up the practice.’

‘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?’