Peter Turnbull: Aftermath

‘What sort of person or persons are we looking for?’

Kamella Joseph PhD by the nameplate on her desk, reclined in her chair. ‘Well, apart from the usual manipulation by charm, which is common among psychopaths, I’d say you’re looking for someone. . or persons. . who could offer these victims what they seemed to want, which would appear to be acceptance. Down-and-outs are continually shunned, yet if a charming person, who is well dressed and is like the down-and-out wants to be like, offers friendship, and if that hand of alleged friendship is taken. .’

‘The trap closes.’

‘Yes,’ Kamella Joseph smiled, ‘the trap closes.’

‘And if someone is not a down-and-out but feels socially isolated. .?’

‘Same thing, the offer to meet unmet needs.’

‘Lucky Matilda Pakenham.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘A young woman who, when at a low point of her life, declined the offer of a trip to the coast with a charming couple who had befriended her.’

‘Ah. . so you have a suspect or a couple of suspects?’

‘Yes, but so far just suspects, and I don’t want to act too soon. . don’t want to put them to flight. . though I think there is little risk of that, but I don’t want to run the risk. . and I think. . I believe. . that they have taken their last victim anyway.’

‘Only ever saw him with another woman once. . just one time.’ The man sat rigidly in his chair of grey painted steel, with shallow grey upholstery, behind a metal desk of two-tone grey. ‘He didn’t notice me. I wasn’t looking for him; we just passed in the street, father and son, we just walked past each other, but he’d cleaned himself up. No longer an alcoholic, he was smart and clean and tidy.’ Kenneth Lismore was his father’s son, Webster thought, very small, slightly built, but he had benefited from his mother’s influence, because here was the same benevolent attitude, the same warmth about the eyes.

‘Go on,’ Webster prodded gently.

‘Well, we met up after that. I wanted to get to know him, now that he had sobered, and so we met for coffee from time to time. I asked him about the woman I had seen him with on Swinegate and he said it was a friend of his. He didn’t want me to meet her, he said that “we understood each other”, and added “but it’s not serious”. I took that to mean that they had both been alcoholics, and she did indeed appear to have a hardbitten and a used look about her.’

‘A lady of the streets, perhaps?’

‘Possibly, but by then helping each other to lead cleaner, more sober lives. . so good for both of them, but she still had a humourless expression and cold, angry eyes. All that I saw in an instant.’

‘A name?’

‘He did mention her name once, but you’ll know her.’

‘Oh?’

‘Most probably, she had gaol house tatts.’

‘Gaol house tatts?’

‘Just here,’ Lismore tapped the top of his left hand. ‘Girls in residential care often give themselves similar sorts of tattoos. Soak a ball of cotton wool in ink and push a pin through it, then prick, prick, prick or rather jab, jab, jab and the pin takes the ink beneath the surface of the skin and there it remains.’

‘Ah, yes, of course, I know the type. Will you look at some photographs?’

‘Yes, of course, but this was a few years ago, blonde hair stiff with peroxide. . she had a name. . what did dad call her?’ Lismore turned his head to one side and glanced out at the concrete and glass that was the Stonebow development in the centre of York. ‘What was her name? It was a racecourse name. .’

‘She had the name of a racecourse?’

‘No. . no. .’ Kenneth Lismore held up his hand, ‘part of a racecourse followed her name, like “Winning Post Mary”, but not that name. . a name like it “Starting Gate Sally”. . something like that.’

‘First bend?’ Webster suggested.

Kenneth Lismore shook his head, ‘No. .’

‘Paddock somebody?’

‘Nope, but we’re getting there, keep them coming,’ he added with a smile.

‘Starter’s orders?’

‘Nope. .’

‘Furlong?’

Kenneth Lismore smiled, ‘Furlong Freda. That’s it.’ He beamed. ‘She had “Freda” tattooed on the back of her left hand and he called her “Furlong Freda”. I don’t know how she acquired the name but that was definitely how she was known. There will only be one “Furlong Freda” in York, I’ll be bound.’

‘It sounds like somebody we’ll know, as you say,’ Webster stood, ‘most probably for petty stuff. Thank you, it’s been helpful.’

‘She acquired the name when she was a working girl; she used to work the racecourse.’ Hennessey handed the file to Webster.

‘Furlong Freda McQueen,’ Webster read. ‘Actually, just plain Queen, but calls herself McQueen. For some reason she changed her name between her last period of borstal training when she was nineteen and her first conviction for soliciting when she was twenty-two. She was a regular customer of ours until she was thirty-eight years old. She must have burnt out, as they all do, or got to be good at covering her tracks, but either way, we don’t seem to have had a whiff of her for ten years, sir.’

‘Time to pay a call on her, you and Ventnor, but it’s been a long day, we can ease up.’

‘We can, sir?’

‘Yes, there will be no more victims. I didn’t think there would be and the suspects I have in mind are not going anywhere.’

‘I see, sir.’

‘Dr Joseph at the university agrees, our suspects have “matured” as serial killers do. . or as Furlong Freda seems to have done. . they “burn out”.’

Thomson Ventnor ate a ready-made meal that he had bought from the supermarket. Just one meal, which he carried home in a plastic bag; it was the only item he purchased and simply required reheating. After the meal he took a bus out of York to the semi-rural suburbs and to a large Victorian house set in neatly tended grounds. He observed swallows and swifts darting about in the summer evening air as he walked up the winding drive to the house. He opened the door and was met by a blast of heat which he always believed could not be healthy. He signed in the visitors’ book and went up the wide, deeply carpeted staircase to a lounge area, where elderly men and women sat in high-backed armchairs, and where a television set stood in the corner. A young woman in a blue smock smiled at him. Ventnor walked across the floor to an elderly man whose face lit up with delight as he recognized Ventnor, but by the time that Ventnor had walked the few paces to where the man sat, the man had retreated into his own mind, so that all Ventnor could say was, ‘Hello, Dad,’ even though he knew he was speaking to a person who was little more than a vegetable.

Later, he returned to the city and walked the streets, and eventually fetched up in a pub he found to be pleasingly quiet. He bought a beer and stood at the bar. He thought of the issues. . the transfer to Canada. . the need to stay in York until his father had passed away. . his passion for Marianne that did not seem to be diminishing.

It was Sunday, 21.45 hours.

Monday — 11.30 hours — 14.35 hours/Tuesday 16.50 hours — 17.30 hours

in which a retired lady gives information and a decision is made.

‘That’s not the reason, darling.’ Furlong Freda smiled at the suggestion. She sat in a small chair in the corner of the cluttered living room in her council house in Chapel Fields. Outside, the garden was overgrown, as were the gardens of many of the neighbouring houses. The streets were lined with old, very old, motor cars. Unpleasant odours lingered in the air as though a gas main had been fractured, or a main drain had burst somewhere beneath the road surface, and all exacerbated by the heat. Freda Queen was dressed only in a tee shirt and shorts and inhaled deeply on an inexpensive cigarette. The ‘gaol house tatt’ described by Kenneth Lismore, ‘Freda’, was as he described, prominent upon the back of her left hand. ‘No, they wouldn’t allow working girls anywhere near the racecourse, and the punters who go to the races are not the sort of punters who are looking for a girl. A lot of them have their wives and children with them. I mean, it’s a family day out, isn’t it? And when the races are on the working girls are sleeping, getting ready for night and the trade in the night.’ She inhaled and held the smoke in her lungs before exhaling slowly through her nostrils. ‘First fag of the day,’ she smiled, ‘a lifesaver.’ She flicked the ash into the fire grate, which, like the fire grate in James Post’s house, had become a gathering place for any small inflammable item. ‘No. . that stems from when I got lifted for soliciting, years ago, darling, and the cop asked me why I was called “Furlong Freda”, so I told him it was because I worked the racecourse, but I was put out at being arrested, that’s why I said it, but the real reason is that I always gave value for money. I charged the same as the other girls but gave more. . gave better. . got a good reputation and had enough regulars not to have to take risks with strangers. I went the extra furlong. . so I was “Furlong Freda McQueen”. I called myself McQueen but my name is really just “Queen”, plain old Freda Queen.’