On that hot Tuesday in April, perspiring in his Norfolk jacket and felt hat, he boarded a bus outside York Railway Station which took him out to the village of Great Keld, from where at a half-hour’s brisk walk there stood Pately Hall, or rather the ruin of the same, which he did not know had existed until he read an article about it in the Yorkshire Post. It was a ruin to be snooped: so conveniently close to York too.
He alighted the cream Rider York double-decker at Great Keld in the square beside the war memorial and noted wryly that Great Keld had clearly not been one of the seven “lucky” villages of England that did not have to raise a stone in memory of its war dead in the years after 1918. In fact, going by the size of the stone, and the generous number of names on four sides, Great Keld appeared to have suffered particularly badly in the “war to end all wars.” He walked past a parade of buildings which he felt had a 1920s or 1930s feel to it, shops with awnings and wares placed for inspection on the pavement, and then beyond the pasty grey road, he drove out between the gently undulating green of the Yorkshire Wolds. He left the road and followed a pathway beside a pasture in which a herd of Herefords grazed contentedly, black and white on the green, under the blue. Leaving the path, he picked his way through trees and shrubs and came across Pately Hall and did so quite suddenly, the garden having been colonised by the woodland and the ancient walls covered with ivy. But it was one of the great houses of the eighteenth century, distinct Palladian style, built, thought Joseph Kelly, just prior to the French wars, when the English gentry could afford such indulgences. Later the wars would bankrupt the gentry and allow the rise of trade and manufacture as a source of wealth for the English.
He found the first body hanging in the main hall. Just hanging there on a thin nylon cord which had been threaded through a chandelier which Joseph Kelly, experienced ruin snooper, knew would have been attached to a stout beam by means of heavy-gauge bolts and chains and would be well able to support the extra weight of what was a light and small and frail-looking human of the female sex. The other end of the cord was attached to the cast-iron fireplace surround which Joseph Kelly knew was also well able to support the weight of the dead woman. The hall was huge, and the length of the cord from fireplace to narrow neck was perhaps fifty feet. A very tall pair of stepladders lay on the floor, looking old, as if they belonged to the house, but they nonetheless explained how the cord had been threaded through the chandelier. Beneath the suspended body was a small upright chair, lying on its side as if having been pulled or kicked away, which indicated the way in which the deceased had been propelled into the hereafter. The deceased herself appeared to have a parchmentlike skin, a rotting flesh; there was a carpet of dead flies beneath her. Her time had not been yesterday.
Joseph Kelly pondered the body and then took his box Brownie and photographed it. It was the manner of the man. Ruin snooping had hardened him to surprise and had hardened him to death too, because this was not the first human corpse he had found. Often he came across the decaying corpses of men or women surrounded by a few meagre but twentieth-century artifacts such as plastic food containers or bottles of still-available alcohoclass="underline" down-and-outs had sought shelter and had slept their final sleep. But this was the first suicide. If it was suicide.
The age first. Difficult to tell, because she was partly skeleton, but the impression was of a young woman in her twenties; the clothing was denim, cheap, now crumbling. Her hands were dangling beside her. The noose was of a simple circle, her feet were just six inches from the floor, allowing plenty of leverage to kick the chair away. But he thought it a terrible way to go, the way you’d kill someone if they didn’t know the difference between hanging and lynching. That in hanging there is a “drop,” causing the neck to snap and death to be instantaneous. In theory. Lynching, Joseph Kelly had once read, derives its name from Dr. Lynch of the University of Cambridge who, in the fourteenth century, put a noose around his son’s neck and suspended him from his study window, in full view of the people in the street below, until he expired. It can take fifteen minutes to die when being lynched, most of the time in a state of consciousness; and the neck is stretched. Here, the neck may have been long and swanlike in life or it may have been elongated as she died, flailing her arms and legs about, her feet just six inches from the floor.
Joseph Kelly left the room and walked a long, echoing, musty corridor with a vaulted ceiling. He entered a room at the back of the house and looked out. There was a motor vehicle, an old van, a Ford Escort van, that had been able to approach the house along a track that could be made out winding among the foliage. The tires were now deflated, the doors open.
The vehicle puzzled him. Had someone driven up to the house to commit suicide? Why then go into the house at all, what with all those good stout branches in the woodland surrounding the house? He had a sense of a story unfolding: Here amongst this decaying pile of grandeur was a much more recent decay and loss.
He returned to the corridor and climbed the back stairs. The corridors upstairs were narrower than the corridors on the ground floor, as he had found was most often the case in old houses, and he also found that the rooms, as most often happens, had been well coveted by birds and bats, the long-ago broken windows allowing them easy access.
The second body was also semi-skeletal. It was in a near-sitting position, propped up against the wall beneath a window. Male, by the clothing. Heavy footwear and a male wrist watch. Joseph Kelly photographed the body. He noticed a knife on the floorboard beside it, the blade still black with congealed blood. He photographed the knife as well.
Joseph Kelly then travelled the house, opening doors and cupboards, finding, as he occasionally did, silverware, porcelain, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clothing, but he was satisfied that there were no other corpses. He went outside to the rear of the house and examined the Ford Escort van. A length of cord similar in nature to the cord which suspended the first body was coiled in the rear of the van by the spare tire. The keys were in the ignition. All very strange.
Joseph Kelly walked away from the house and back towards the road, pausing en route to admire and photograph an ancient yew, which had clearly been planted on the platform when the original garden was laid out. He strolled back to Great Keld, and from a phone box in the square he phoned the police. “There is no great hurry,” he said. “None whatsoever... They’ve both been there for at least twelve months.”
Two constables in an area car collected Joseph Kelly. He was sitting where he said he would be sitting, on a bench outside a pub he could see from the phone box. “The Green Man,” he said. “I’ll be outside the Green Man.” As the car pulled up, he drained his pint of brown and mild and slid, as invited, into the rear seat. He directed the driver to the road he had taken to walk to Pately Hall and suggested a suitable place to leave the car when they came to the path by the field of Herefords. He took the constables to the house but declined to enter. A few moments later, the constables exited the house and approached him.
“Ever hear of criminal trespass?” one said icily as his colleague radioed to the Friargate Police Station in York that the caller had been genuine and that there were indeed two bodies, repeat two, and in one case the death seemed suspicious. The other, he said, may have been a suicide.
“Oh yes,” Joseph Kelly said, glancing over the facade of the house, noting, where the ivy allowed it to do, how it still glowed becomingly in the sun.