‘I’ll bet,’ Yellich replied from the front passenger seat. ‘I’ll bet you do.’
‘Sometimes. .’ Auphan manoeuvred the car to avoid a pothole in the road surface.
‘You’re thinking of something?’ Yellich turned to Marianne Auphan, as she straightened the course of the car.
‘Yes, I am thinking of something and I am still angry, very angry about it. Last winter a sixteen-year-old girl went out dressed in a party dress, no top coat or hat, didn’t get back home by the designated hour and her father refused to let her in, wanted to teach her a lesson about timekeeping, he told us, but it was subzero. . for all the clothing she was wearing she might as well have been naked. .’
‘Oh. .’ Yellich groaned.
‘We don’t know what happened to her, not exactly, and we probably never will, but in her desperation she most likely accepted a suspect lift from a stranger, anything to get out of the cold. Her body was found thirty miles away and so the next time her parents saw her she was on a slab. Some lesson about timekeeping. I wanted to prosecute but our top floor vetoed it. Dare say they were right. This girl was their only daughter, only child in fact. He might have been a bit of a hard father but in his own way he loved her very much. His grief and guilt were genuine and his wife left him over the incident. Just packed her bags and walked out on the same day they identified her body. No purpose to be served by prosecuting, so the top floor said. Now I think that the top floor was right but then. . back then I wanted to throw the book at him.’
‘Understandable.’
‘But here,’ Marianne Auphan pointed behind her, indicating the Lecointe house, ‘here someone wanted Edith out of the way so they could use her passport. . here is deep suspicion. We need to reopen the file on Edith Lecointe’s death, already.’
Carmen Pharoah woke early. She lay in bed in her small but functional new build flat on Bootham and listened to the city slowly awakening around her, the milk float whirring in the street below her window, stopping and starting and accompanied by the ‘all’s well’ sound of the rattle of milk bottles in metal crates, of the different, deeper whirr of the high revving diesel engines of the first buses, and the distant ‘ee-aw’ sound of a passenger train leaving York Station to go north to still dark Scotland, or south to London and the home counties where the day had already dawned.
She thought, as she lay under the freshly laundered quilt, of the other life she had once had, of the other life she had felt forced out of. She and her husband, both Afro-Caribbean, both overcoming prejudice by professionalism, observing the advice her father-in-law gave her and her husband upon their engagement, ‘I am proud of both of you, very proud, but you’re black, you’ve got to be ten times better just to be equal’. And how they were ten times better! Both ten times better, both employed by the Metropolitan Police, she as a Detective Constable and he as a civilian employee, a Chartered Accountant, assisting in managing an annual budget of millions of pounds.
Then. . then. . what was it called? She turned and lay on her back looking up at the ceiling. ‘Survivor guilt’, that was it. . that is the phrase, ‘survivor guilt’. Those who survive feel guilty for having survived. The awful news was broken gently by one of her senior colleagues. Her husband could not have known anything, he had said, death must have been instantaneous and the accident wasn’t his fault. . not his fault at all, that they would be prosecuting the other motorist of course and then leaving her to face dreadful widowhood when she was still short of her thirtieth birthday.
Then she had, soon after the funeral, transferred to the north, to Yorkshire. She had chosen Yorkshire because it has a reputation of being cold and unforgiving in terms of its climate and landscape and its people are also, it is rumoured, hard and unforgiving; no one, it is said, can bear a grudge like a Yorkshire man. An ideal place for a guilt-laden survivor to live until she feels the penalty she must pay has been paid.
In full.
‘Got a hit.’ Marianne Auphan leaned on the lightweight doorframe of the office which had been designated Yellich and Ventnor’s office accommodation for the duration of their visit. She smiled a smug, self-satisfied smile and held up a sheet of paper. ‘The prints of the deceased, that is your deceased, whose name is not Edith Lecointe, she is known to us.’
Yellich sat up and smiled, ‘She is?’
‘She is.’ Marianne Auphan advanced into the cramped office which overlooked Highway 400. Ventnor also displayed a look of intrigue.
‘Yes, the latents belong to a felon called Heather Ossetti. She has previous for minor offences but it’s her all right, a regular feloness. She was convicted in Vancouver for shoplifting twenty years ago. Not known to the Barrie Police, not known to Ontario Province Police, so I went national.’
‘Good for you,’ Yellich smiled though not fully understanding the Canadian system of data filing; city, province, national. .
‘Nothing violent though. . receiving stolen goods, non-payment of a fine. . she went to jail for that. So it’s a strange pattern of previous convictions given that she is a murder suspect and not reading like the sort of person that someone would want to starve of food before murdering them. She’s just a petty crook according to this profile.’ Marianne Auphan sat in the one vacant chair in the office and as she did so she glanced out of the window at the towering grey clouds above Highway 400 and the houses glimpsed between the trees beyond the freeway. ‘Snow in the sky,’ she said, ‘that’s a snow sky.’ She turned to Yellich. ‘So how do you want to handle this?’
‘Two pronged, I think.’ Yellich turned from the window after studying a ‘snow sky’ of black mountainous clouds which seemed to be descending on the town on the bay. ‘You’ll be reopening the file in respect of the death of Edith Lecointe, I assume?’
‘Yes, already activated. The file is being sent up from archives and I have talked it over with Aiden McLeer. He fully shares my. . our concerns and suspicions.’
‘I see, well, it’s your pigeon, you are the Barrie Police and as agreed, you have tactical command but if you’ll permit, I would like to investigate the background of Edith Lecointe. She was not a criminal, is not a suspect so it would not be a criminal investigation as such. I can do that alone with your permission and approval. At some point she must have crossed paths with Heather Ossetti. . when I find that point I stop. . and consult your good self.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Perhaps you two could investigate Heather Ossetti? We both need to know who she is. . or was. . I mean that both the Barrie Police and the Vale of York Police need to know about her, so let’s use one officer from each force and at some point our inquiries will converge.’
‘Yes. Agreed.’ Marianne Auphan and Ventnor nodded to each other and then looked at Yellich. ‘Yes, that sounds neat and sensible.’
‘I’ll need a car,’ Yellich said. ‘Can you provide one for me, please?’
‘No problem. We’ll let you have one of our unmarked vehicles. Fuel up here when you need to do so. Do you want to fly solo?’
‘Yes,’ Yellich smiled. ‘I’ll squeal if I need help, but solo is preferable in the first instance. I’d be happier on my own on this one.’
Marianne Auphan took Ventnor to Hooters Bar on the shore of Kempenfelt Bay. Upon entering they were greeted by the Hooters girls in figure-hugging white vests and red shorts who cried out, ‘Hi, welcome to Hooters’ as they entered.