“Always useful to confirm on ID.”
“Returning to the injury. It’s a concentrated impact point, from which the skull fractures radiate outwards, like spokes from a hub. A hammer blow, or a brick… something like that. But not a long object, like a golf club, that would have caused a linear fracture.”
Hennessey replaced the phone. He glanced out his office window at tourists walking the medieval walls beneath the vast blue sky. He glanced at the clock on the wall, above the police mutual calendar. Midday. Time for lunch. Like the citizens of York, Hennessey knew the quickest way to walk the city is to walk the walls, rather than the street-level pavements, and so he signed out and walked the wall from Micklegate Bar to Lendal Bridge, and thence to Lendal, and the fish restaurant.
The file on “the mummy” case grew. Hennessey now knew the man to have been murdered by being struck with a hammer, or similar object or instrument. He knew that in life the deceased had been wealthy, for he wore not the clothing of a poor man. He knew that the deceased probably lived alone, and most significantly he knew the deceased had been murdered shortly after six p.m. on the 15th day of January, eight years earlier. The man was clean-shaven and very short of stature. And his dentistry work was British. All added together, Hennessey knew it would be enough for the missing persons bureau to suggest a name. He picked up the phone on his desk, pressed a four-figure internal number, and when his call was answered he said, “Collator?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hennessey here.”
“Sir.”
Then Hennessey gave all the details he had on the deceased, adding, “not necessarily local.”
“I see, sir.” The collator was eager, anxious to please. “I’ll come back asap,” which the collator pronounced “aysap,” to Hennessey’s irritation, but the world was changing, he was closing down fast upon his retirement, and it was the small things which crept up on him from time to time, and reminded him he wasn’t changing with the world. In his day, he would have returned “a.s.a.p.” or “as soon as.” But “aysap”… he sighed as he put the phone down. He cared not for “aysap”, no matter how efficient was the youthful collator. He rose and went to the corner of his office and switched on the electric kettle and observed Micklegate Bar as he waited for the kettle to boil, the open-topped double-deckers, the people of the town hurrying, the tourists ambling. He returned to his desk carrying a mug of coffee.
The collator was efficient, so efficient that he returned “aysap” before Hennessey’s mug of coffee had cooled sufficiently to allow it to be consumed. Tony Watch, the collator informed him, had been reported missing by his sister on the 16th of January eight years earlier. Physical description matched; he was wealthy because of an information technology company he had formed, and was recently separated at the time he went missing. His home address was out near Selby; his sister, the reportee, lived “on the other side of the planet”, in Holgate. Hennessey thanked the collator and replaced the phone. He left his office and walked down the corridor to the office of the younger, life-all-ahead-of-him Sergeant Yellich, and tapped on the doorframe of his office doorway. “Grab your sun hat, Yellich, we’re off to sunny Holgate.”
“We are, sir?” Yellich stood.
“We are, sir.”
Holgate is that part of the Faymous and Faire Citie of Yorke ye tourists never see. It is black-terraced houses in rows, beyond the railway line, where washing hangs from lines suspended across the street. Hennessey and Yellich went to St Pancras’ Wynd, to number 57, being the given address of Mrs Torr, who eight years earlier had reported her brother to the police as a missing person.
“Never did like her.” Mrs Torr was a frail woman who looked older than her sixty-three years, as if stricken by an internal growth. “I grew up in these streets, so did Tony, well, he would – he was my little brother. Our dad worked on the railway in the steam days, you could smell the smoke from the railway station in these streets. I’d lay awake at night and listen to the chuff and clank of the steam trains. Now they whirr past on continuous rails with hardly a sound by comparison. Such a safe, solid sound the old steam trains used to make, I really miss the sound, but then I’m a lass, I never had to get up at three a.m. and fire one so it would be ready for eight a.m. That’s how long it took to fire one from cold, and that was a small one.”
“Your brother…?” Hennessey saw the old lady’s need to reminisce, especially because of her apparent medical conditions, but he had a job to do.
“Aye, Tony. He did well for himself. Those machines, I never understood them, but they came in so quickly. Ten years between me and Tony, just ten years, but I was too old for them, he was just right. Got himself out of Holgate all right. Me, I married a lad from the next street who worked on buses, and didn’t get out. But Jack was a good man. I had two children and I’ve got six grandchildren. So I had my wealth in other ways. So Tony’s body has been found, you say?”
“We think it is his body. The description fits. There’s indications that fit with the time you reported him missing.”
“I reported him murdered. Missing! I reported him murdered. But would they listen? I had to make a ‘misper’ report. That’s what they called my little brother, a ‘misper’ report, not even a ‘missing person’, but a ‘misper’.”
“Why did you believe him to have been murdered, Mrs Torr?”
“Well, that cow, that calculating cow he married of course. She was one scheming female. Still is. Still in that house, Tony’s lovely old house he worked so hard to pay for, now she’s got it. He’s dead and she’s got it. He took her off the streets, gave her a house. He was forty-four, she was twenty-five. I warned him. I could see her for what she was, a woman can see another woman for what she is, a man can’t, not always, anyway. My waters told she was bad for Tony. But would he listen? He was in his forties, born premature, and was small, never a success with the girls. He was known as Pocket Watch at school, Tony Watch the Pocket Watch… but he became a computer geek and made a fortune… and then the blond bombshell who’s young enough to be his daughter drops in his lap… he couldn’t believe his luck. ‘Worth waiting for’ was his attitude. Then just six weeks, I mean six weeks into the marriage, he came round here, devastated. Heard her on the phone… talking to a girlfriend… She said, ‘I’ve only got to stick it for six months, then I get half the house.’ What she was saying was that if she separates after six months, she’ll get half the house as part of the divorce settlement. Tony would have to sell it, give her half the proceeds.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“She didn’t know that. But the point was, Tony knew why she had married him. If it was a marriage.” Mrs Torr looked at the summer-empty hearth and then the mantelpiece on which stood a framed photograph of a young couple, arms round each other. “Not like my marriage. I had a marriage. A proper marriage. But Tony was clever, wouldn’t agree to a divorce, wouldn’t give her grounds. By then she’d seen a lawyer, I think, and the lawyer told her it doesn’t matter what her mates tell her, she wouldn’t get her hands on half the property quite so easily. It was then that she moved out, left him. But they were still married. Tony got frightened then. Feared she would ‘do something’.”
“Do something?”
“He feared for his life. Took to phoning me each day, then one day he became a ‘misper’, except I knew my little brother was dead. After two years he was presumed dead, so she, as his wife, got everything. She didn’t get half the house, she found a way of getting it all. Each Christmas she sends me a card with a smiley face on the inside.”