The interior of Martyn Penta’s house was, Carmen Pharoah observed, neat, and clean and tidy. ‘The maids have just been in,’ he explained.
‘The maids?’
‘A team of cleaning women, young women really, plus one man-maid, help me keep on top of the house. I could not manage it on my own, heavens no.’
Carmen Pharoah smiled. The interior of the house did indeed smell strongly of cleaning liquids and air freshener. ‘I see.’
‘Well, do take a pew.’
Carmen Pharoah settled on to the deeply upholstered and wide leather-bound settee and read affluence in the room, but this was after all Heslington, and Martyn Penta was, after all, an accountant. ‘You are not working today, Mr Penta?’
‘Yes, I am, I’m working at home. I do that usually unless I have clients to interview. I very rarely go into the office these days courtesy of IT and the web. I can do everything in my study upstairs that I can in my office in York. Any documents I need can be faxed to me and I can send by fax, but I was in a putting-off-work frame of mind today so I washed the car as an excuse not to go up to my study. . then I got your phone call about Gladys. So I carried on washing the car until you arrived. . and here you are.’
‘Yes, sir, here I am.’
‘She hated that name.’
‘Gladys?’
‘Yes, she said it made her sound Edwardian.’ Martyn Penta smiled as if recovering a pleasant memory. Carmen Pharoah observed him to be a well-set man in his middle years, clean-shaven and wearing expensive looking casual clothes, even to wash the car. ‘It made her sound as old as her great aunt after whom she was named, so she said, and did she hate it, but she wouldn’t change it out of a sense of loyalty to her parents. . So what news do you have?’
‘We believe she might have been found.’
‘Alive!’
‘Sadly, no, I do regret to say.’
‘Well, it was too much to hope but you do read of such things, someone suddenly losing their memory and is committed to an institution, and then banging their head and remembering everything.’
‘Stuff of fiction, I’m afraid.’
‘Yes, these days of records and files which follow you around, not so easy as it was for the Victorians who could stage their suicide and disappear, and reinvent themselves with a new name in another city. . usually having emptied the bank account just beforehand.’
‘You sound disappointed.’
‘That’s probably because I am disappointed, disappearing and reinventing myself somewhere else is a fantasy I have long harboured. So, tell me what you have come to tell me.’
Carmen Pharoah told Martyn Penta of the possible inclusion of his late wife’s remains among the human remains found at Bromyards. He fell silent and Carmen Pharoah allowed him a few moments of ‘space’ before she asked what he recalled about his wife’s disappearance.
‘Like it was yesterday. I was away when she vanished. I was attending a conference on the Isle of Man. She wasn’t at home when I returned from the conference but seems to have been missing for about three days, going by the accumulation of mail in the letterbox. I reported her missing the following day, after phoning all her relatives and all our friends.’
‘Did you have any idea where she might have gone?’
‘The only place she went to at all were those wretched meetings.’
‘The meetings?’
‘It was. . they were the only thing she lived for. I loved my wife, I will cherish her memory, but she was a six-cylinder, supercharged, dyed in the wool alcoholic. She was a dry alcoholic; she hadn’t touched a drink for years before she vanished but, as she was fond of saying, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. She had replaced one addiction with another, “Hello, I am Gladys and I am alcoholic”. “Hello, Gladys” they would all reply. I went to a few meetings with her you see, she became a “personality” within AA, a guest speaker at the various meetings in this region telling folk how she used to drink two bottles of gin each day. . which she did. . up at eight, already drunk by ten a.m., and now she was “free” and the meeting would applaud her, that’s when I stopped going.’
‘Oh.’
‘Attention seeking and replacing one addiction with another. She had got on top of the booze but became obsessed with AA and had little time for me or our marriage. AA was utterly central to her life and I was on the edge. I also found out that Alcoholics Anonymous has a perverted sense of snobbery. I mean, if you get up and say you used to drink beer and only beer nobody would talk to you, even though it might have cost you your job and marriage just as whisky might have, but they were interested in you if you were into spirits or the cheap wine, and they were in awe of Gladys’s two bottle a day habit but she could be knocked off her perch if a three bottles a day person joined the meeting.’
‘That’s quite illuminating.’
‘I had my eyes opened all right. . but she was never home, it was one group in the mornings, another in the afternoon and another in the evenings. I was not even second fiddle to the AA. I was in her life in name only. But I still miss her dreadfully.’
‘I’m sorry. What we really have to do is to confirm her identity. . dental records or a sample of her DNA.’
‘Yes. . she had a climbing accident when she was a young woman; the left side of her face was permanently concave. She was very self-conscious about it; it was then that she started drinking. . distinct injury to her skull. She was lucky to have survived and luckier still to have escaped serious brain damage.’
‘As you say. . that might be sufficient to confirm her identity but what you report about her drink problem might be very significant.’
‘You think so?’
‘Yes,’ Carmen Pharoah stood, ‘I think so. I really think so.’
Thomson Ventnor drove back to Micklegate Bar Police Station, signed in, and went directly to the office of DCI Hennessey. He tapped on the door frame, entered the office and sat, uninvited, in one of the chairs in front of Hennessey’s desk. ‘I am mindful of your previous admonition, boss,’ he explained smiling.
‘Oh?’ Hennessey put his pen down and reclined in his chair. ‘Which particular admonition was that?’
‘Charging off without clearing it with you, sir, even though I had my mobile phone with me,’ he tapped his jacket pocket.
‘Yes, I remember, I am so pleased that you took that issue on board, it is essential that I keep the overview and also it is essential that I know where each of my team is, at all times.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So, do I assume. . may I assume there is a development?’
‘Just another possible contact about one of the victims, Angela Prebble. . she is a Miss Prebble, not Mrs, and the man she shared her house with is her brother, not her husband.’
‘Ah. . I see.’
‘He made reference to her friends but despite that, he painted a picture of a very socially isolated pair of individuals. One friend of hers sent a Christmas card with his name and address on the reverse of the envelope. I feel that he, the friend, might be more in the loop. . in Miss Prebble’s loop than is, or was, her own brother, but I was only briefed to interview the next of kin. I am happy to go and see him alone but I thought I’d better clear it with yourself first, sir, and also do a criminal records check.’
‘Yes, thank you. I am pleased you did that, but it sounds like a two-hander.’ Hennessey reached for his phone and, lifting the receiver, he pressed a four figure internal number. ‘Criminal records?’ he asked when his call was answered. ‘Good. .’ he glanced at Ventnor questioningly.
Ventnor responded, ‘Ronald Malpass, Two Portland Street, Hutton Cranswick.’
Hennessey repeated the name and address and then looked at Ventnor a second time.
Ventnor shook his head and said, ‘No numbers, sir.’
‘No date of birth,’ Hennessey added, as he heard the sound of a computer keyboard being tapped rapidly and efficiently. Then he said, ‘All right, thank you.’ He replaced the phone gently. ‘No major crime. . just a few for drunk and disorderly, and one drunk in charge of a motor vehicle. . all dealt with by the magistrates and some time ago. . all spent convictions now, but I still think I’d like you to take someone with you.’