Aftermath (20 page)

‘If the man in these photographs has himself been murdered in the same way these other victims were murdered then yes, they have stopped. This is going to make an interesting paper. I would appreciate having a look at the evidence once it is all wrapped up.'

‘I think that could be arranged.'

‘Thank you . . . and then they ratcheted things up by abducting people who would be missed and leaving them together in an overgrown kitchen garden.'

‘Taunting us?'

‘Possibly, possibly even a way of giving themselves up. I have a photograph of a crime scene in the United States of a serial killer's work . . . or activity. This man would get into the houses or apartments of women who lived alone, murder them, and then ransack the property. In the home of one of his victims he got her lipstick and on the mirror of her dressing table he wrote, “Stop me before I do this again”.'

‘Blimey.'

‘Yes, he wanted to be stopped but he couldn't just walk into a police station . . . the strange workings of the human mind, but that incident has lead to the theory that when a serial killer, or killers, appear to be getting bolder and taking valued and well integrated people as their victims, it is a way of giving themselves up . . . of stopping it all.'

‘Interesting . . . because they want the notoriety?'

‘Who knows why? It is the thrust of forensic psychology to try to get into the minds of these people, to identify some pathology which they have in common. Being unable, yet wanting to stop has been claimed by other serial killers, so it might not be about notoriety at all.'

‘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.

SIX

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.

‘
T
hat'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.'

‘That we know,' Ventnor smiled.

‘Never made no secret of it, darling.' Freda McQueen had a drawn, haggard-looking face and spoke with a harsh, rasping voice. She was in her fifties but could, thought both Ventnor and Webster, be taken for a woman in her seventies; Borstal training followed by a life on the streets does that to a woman.

From the room above came the sound of springs creaking, followed by footfall across the landing to the bathroom and the ‘click' of the lock on the bathroom door.

‘Punter?' Webster asked.

‘Boyfriend,' Freda McQueen replied proudly. ‘I'm retired, darling. I have boyfriends these days. They help me out financially but it's part of the relationship, not business. They don't hang around very long, just a few weeks at a time, but they're boyfriends.'

‘I see.'

‘So . . . Jim Post got iced did he? Little, no good, waste of space that he was. He won't be missed.'

‘We hope you can help us?'

‘Anyway I can, darlin', anyway I can.'

‘You have a helpful attitude,' Webster smiled. ‘You've changed your attitude to the police?'

‘It was like this, love, I was what I was and the coppers who collared me was what they was, we was both of us just doing our jobs. It's the way the ball bounced in those days, dare say it still is, darling, dare say it still is.'

‘Reckon it is,' Ventnor growled, ‘and I reckon it always will be.'

‘Oldest profession, darling, that's what they say and it's nothing about exploiting women. The game is the oldest two-way street in the world. The girls exploit the men just the same. Anyway the law helped me. I was being stalked and the cops put a stop to it . . . a real creepy guy, phoning me . . . the lot, so I called in at Micklegate Bar.'

‘That's where we are based.'

‘Yeah? Well they helped me; this is twenty, thirty years ago now. I didn't think they'd help a working girl but they did . . . sort of unofficial. The stalking stopped, just stopped. I found out later they . . . the police, had bundled this creepy guy into a car one rainy night and driven him ten miles out of York, dragged him into a field and gave him a slap, left him to walk home with a sore face and the suggestion that he worked a little bit on his attitude.'

Webster and Ventnor glanced at each other and raised their eyebrows.

‘That wouldn't happen nowadays.' Ventnor turned his gaze back to Freda McQueen.

‘It's the best way, if you ask me, it benefits everyone. I didn't get stalked no more, the police were not bogged down with paperwork and court appearances, and the felon avoided a criminal record. I've always said that a slap from a copper on a dark night up some snickelway is better than having to stand at the charge bar getting your record adding to, and your prints and DNA on file. I'd prefer a slap to a criminal record any day.'

‘Which is why that sort of thing doesn't happen any more,' Ventnor explained. ‘These days we like fingerprints and DNA on file. All right, it means paperwork but in the long run it makes our job a lot easier.'