The Altered Case Read online

  ‘There are two gentlemen here at the enquiry desk, sir.’ The voice of the desk constable on the other end of the phone was equally calm and assured, and yet also clearly very deferential. ‘They say that they wish to report a possible murder.’

  Webster smiled and glanced up from his August statistical returns. ‘You know, I thought it was too quiet to last.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the constable replied with a soft chuckle.

  ‘All right . . . all right.’ Webster reached for his notebook. ‘I’ll be there directly.’ He stood, uncomplaining, because in all honesty he would rather receive a report of a possible murder than spend his time placing figures in columns, and then submit the forms on time for onward conveyance to the Home Office where, he doubted, not much notice would be taken of them anyway.

  ‘Very good, sir,’ the desk officer replied and then added, ‘the two gentlemen say that there is no hurry. If there was a murder it happened a long time ago.’

  ‘Less than seventy though?’ Webster clarified.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ the desk officer answered with evident good humour, ‘going by the appearance of these two gentlemen, well within seventy years.’

  ‘For a brief moment I knew hope,’ Webster continued, smiling, ‘but yes . . . right-oh . . . I’ll be down there directly.’ He replaced the handset of the phone.

  ‘Business?’ Thomson Ventnor glanced up curiously from his own August returns.

  ‘It does seem so.’ Webster reached out and picked up a ballpoint pen which lay at the far corner of his desk and put on his loud chequered sports jacket with a flourish. He grinned at Ventnor. ‘Murder no less. It happened a few years ago . . . if it happened at all, but murder is murder. Code Four-one takes priority over pretty much all else.’ He glanced out of the office window at the view of the skyline, being in that part of York a harsh blend of old and new buildings. ‘It is brightening up nicely,’ he commented. ‘So . . . let’s see what we see.’

  Some twenty-five minutes later Webster reclined in the slightly upholstered low-slung chair in the interview suite and glanced over the notes he had taken when talking to Cyrus Middleton and Tony Allerton, both of whom now similarly reclined in identical chairs. ‘So this was thirty years ago, you say?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Middleton replied. ‘We are both forty-five years old now and the summer in question that we came across the disturbed soil made us fifteen years of age at the time. We can pin down the year in question with complete . . . total . . . one hundred per cent certainty.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Webster spoke quietly.

  ‘We can be certain of which summer it was,’ Allerton insisted, ‘because we had, just a few weeks earlier, returned from a school holiday in Scotland and we had by then just a week or so left before we returned to school for the autumn term. So it was early September. Autumn term commenced in the second week of September; it still does, in fact.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Webster repeated, ‘as I said that can, and in fact it probably will, be very useful.’ Webster looked at the notes he had taken. ‘Very useful indeed.’

  Cyrus Middleton glanced quickly around the room in which he and Tony Allerton and DC Webster sat. He had been pleasantly surprised to find that, instead of the harsh, hard, uncomfortable, unnerving interrogation room he had expected, the interview suite where non-suspects were escorted to was gently decorated with varying shades of orange, a dark, hard-wearing carpet, lighter-coloured orange chairs and walls painted with a pastel shade of the same colour. A highly polished coffee table with black metal legs and a brown surface stood on the floor between the four chairs in the room. The room had no source of natural light but was illuminated by a single light bulb within an orange-coloured shade. Middleton detected the scent of air freshener which hung delicately in the room. It was, he thought, quite sensitive and clever of the police to bring witnesses or victims of crime into a room like this, so as to put them at ease; some very distressing information often had to be coaxed from such persons.

  ‘But we emphasize . . . again . . . we emphasize,’ Allerton continued, ‘that we saw nothing which in itself was untoward, we saw only the small area of disturbed soil, close to the corner of a field which had recently been harvested of its crop. It must have been a very hot summer come to think of it . . . last week in August or first in the September . . . that’s quite an early harvest. It was only in hindsight that it became to seem suspicious, but we both very clearly remember it. Definitely remember it.’

  ‘That I can fully understand,’ Webster reassured Allerton. ‘It is quite often just the way of it, sometimes it is only in hindsight that things become significant or events are remembered years after they have happened. You know, quite a few people have sat in this room because they have recovered a memory of some violent incident which their consciousness has kept buried. They often report that for a while, a short while – as in a few days – they wonder if they are remembering a dream then realize and come to accept that it is a memory of something that did actually happen, and then they do what you two gentlemen have done. They present at the enquiry desk and give information. It happens quite a lot, quite often. It is, as I said, just the way of it.’

  Middleton sighed. ‘Well, I confess that makes me feel a little better. I was feeling guilty about the time lapse . . . thirty years . . . but I feel better in myself now.’

  ‘Me too.’ Allerton smiled gently. ‘Thank you for saying that, sir.’

  ‘Pleasure,’ Webster offered. ‘As I said, at least you came forward. It might yet be a dead dog down there but at least you came forward.’

  ‘I think we both did that,’ Cyrus Middleton continued, glancing to his left at Allerton who nodded in agreement. ‘I think we both buried it and moved on with our lives. It’s only recently that we have begun to meet up again for a beer. We were good friends at school but drifted apart and it was in February of this year as I was walking through York that I bumped into Tony here . . . after all these years . . . and we went into a pub and agreed to meet up on Friday evenings for a drink once a month.’

  ‘We each get a pass out,’ Tony Allerton joked. ‘We found out that we both had a lot in common in respect of the way our lives have evolved. For one thing, we both married strong-willed women and so the phrase “Getting a pass out” has a ring of truth to it. We’re allowed out one Friday evening a month, but that is all we need really.’

  ‘If we met more often we’d run out of conversation,’ Middleton explained.

  ‘I see.’ Webster was content to let the conversation wander, seeing it as an opportunity to further take the measure of Cyrus Middleton and Tony Allerton. He thought them probably genuine, but still only probably.

  ‘We both have daughters who have made a poor choice of boyfriend, in our opinion, and we both have sons who are doing well in life.’

  ‘Yes,’ Middleton said, ‘my daughter turned down a place at Cambridge University to go and live in a new town in Scotland with a man who once worked in a shoe shop and is now unemployed.’ He sighed and glanced up at the ceiling. ‘I mean, what can you do? What can you say? She’s an adult, and so all you can do is worry.’

  ‘And my daughter gave up her place reading medicine at Manchester University to keep house for a male nurse, nice boy in himself, but with limited prospects compared to my daughter’s prospects had she continued her studies.’

  ‘We both entered the world of finance,’ Middleton explained. ‘I am in insurance . . . a claims investigator, and Tony is an accountant.’

  ‘Very good.’ Webster inclined his head; both were professional men with much to lose should they prove to be trifling with the police. Their credibility increased in his perception of them.

  ‘Quite modest really,’ Allerton explained. ‘I am only a certified accountant, not a chartered accountant . . . that would be something to be impressed with. It’s akin to a small town solicitor and a High Court judge. They can both be described as lawyers but the difference between them is huge.’
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  ‘I take your point.’ Webster laid his notepad on the table. ‘But an accountant, with certified or chartered status is still deserving of respect.’

  ‘Our lives seem to have mirrored each other in many ways,’ Allerton continued, ‘but it was only once we started to meet for a beer that we talked about childhood days . . . what happened to mutual friends . . . not all of whom are still with us; misadventure, natural causes . . . that’s always worrying. We can cope with our old classmate Charlie Hopper getting killed in a car crash but hearing that Alex Ball, who was also in our form at Hoytown, had succumbed to cancer . . . well that made us stop talking for a few seconds.’

  ‘But it’s only latterly that we got to talk about that day.’ Middleton brought the conversation back on track. ‘It was myself who mentioned it initially but we both wanted to talk about it . . . and so we did . . . and then we both realized we had to report it, just in case it was what it appeared to be . . . even if we are thirty years late . . . and so here we are.’

  ‘And here you are,’ Webster echoed, ‘here you are, but thirty years later is still not too late and that is the main thing.’ He tapped his notepad with his ballpoint. ‘Can I ask you to wait here, please, just for a minute or two. I’ll have to go and talk to my senior officer about this.’

  ‘They are not a pair of game-playing fantasists, I hope?’ Hennessey replied after listening to what he thought was Webster’s succinct delivery. It had been, he thought, very clear, his facts were given in logical order and very precisely.

  ‘I don’t think so, sir.’ Webster sat in the chair in front of Hennessey’s desk. ‘I wondered if that might be the case, but they seem genuine. They are both professional men in their mid forties, both family men, so they claim, and in fact do have just that stamp about them, by their speech, their mannerisms and their dress. They really do seem to have too much to lose by playing silly games.’ Webster paused. ‘They’re the genuine article. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Very well, I think you had better ask them to take you there. Take two constables.’ George Hennessey ran his liver-spotted fingers through his silver hair. ‘Yes . . . two should be sufficient.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Webster stood. ‘Two constables.’

  ‘And separately,’ Hennessey added as an afterthought as Webster was leaving his office.

  ‘Sir?’ Webster turned back to face Hennessey. ‘Separately?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hennessey confirmed. ‘I mean separate the two gentlemen once you are near the location, and have each of them take you there independently, that is to say take you there in the absence of the other. It will strengthen the credibility of their story if they identify the same location.’

  ‘Yes, sir, understood.’ Webster turned and walked out of Hennessey’s office.

  Independently, and with what Webster thought to be notable precision, and clarity and confidence, both Cyrus Middleton and Tony Allerton each placed their fingertip on the same part of the Ordnance Survey Map and indicated a location which was close to the village of Catton Hill on the A19 York to Selby Road, some two miles south of the city. It was, thought Webster, just the sort of distance that two fifteen-year-old boys would wander from their homes in Fulford, that being the catchment area of Hoytown Comprehensive School, during their last summer of innocence. It would have been a walk across flat meadows by two lads who were both buoyed up by their friendship and the recent school holiday in Scotland. Following the pinpointing of the location where the disturbed soil was observed both Middleton and Allerton were driven by Webster to the village of Catton Hill. They were followed there by two constables in a marked car.

  Reginald Webster lived close to Selby and had thus often driven through Catton Hill on his way to and from Micklegate Bar police station, but he had never spared it a second glance nor even turned off the A19 to explore the village and its side streets. It had always been for him a settlement to drive through on his way to and from home and his place of employment. Upon reaching the village, he turned left and on to the road which was signposted towards Wheldrake and parked the car at the side of the kerb. Webster, glancing about him, saw that Catton Hill was a compact village with the buildings on either side of the road being conjoined. One or two of the buildings, unusually for the north of England, he noticed, had thatched roofs. It seemed to Webster to have changed little over the years and had not fully encompassed the twenty-first century. The telephone box, for example, was of the traditional red Gilbert Scott design. The shops were small and seemed to be independently owned, rather than belonging to a supermarket chain. There were two pubs which Webster could see from where he had parked the car, both almost directly opposite each other, and both had names which spoke of their rural location: one was called The Black Bull, and across the road from it, slightly further towards Wheldrake, was The Three Horseshoes. Webster turned to Tony Allerton who sat in the rear seat of the car. ‘If you could kindly remain here, please, sir.’

  ‘Inside the car?’ Tony Allerton asked with a slight note of protest distinct in his voice. ‘The car is uncomfortably warm in this weather. I mean the inside is uncomfortably warm. May I stand on the pavement?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’ Webster opened the driver’s door and stepped out of the vehicle. ‘But if you would remain close to the car with one of the constables?’

  ‘Of course.’ Allerton stepped out of the car and breathed deeply. Middleton also stepped out of the car and stood close to Allerton.

  ‘So . . .’ Webster addressed Middleton, ‘if you could accompany me and one of the constables, or rather if you could show me and the constable where the area of recently dug soil was, as best you can recall?’

  ‘That’s a better way of putting it.’ Middleton grinned. ‘Because I rather think you’ll be accompanying me.’

  ‘Yes.’ Webster returned the grin. ‘I dare say that I have just become used to asking people to accompany me.’

  ‘It’s down here.’ Middleton pointed along the road, where the pavement was dotted with villagers, adults shopping, and children running or riding bicycles. The police presence attracted a few curious glances but not any hostility that Middleton could detect. ‘I’ll do my best to get us there. It won’t be a fool’s errand but the memory does play its tricks over time, and thirty years . . . that’s nearly half a lifetime.’

  ‘We’ll allow for that, sir.’ Webster felt the warm glow of the sun upon his head and face. ‘Summer is not giving in without a struggle.’

  ‘Suits me,’ Middleton growled. ‘I care not for winter . . . those early dark nights.’

  Webster beckoned one of the constables to join him and Middleton. ‘You really did do the right thing in coming to us,’ he said as he waited for the constable to join them. ‘As I said in the police station, thirty years is not too late.’ Webster’s eye was then caught by a horse-drawn trap being driven along the road by a ruddy-faced young man with a cheery smile and large, farm-worker’s hands, who doffed his flat cap as he and the chestnut pony passed, the hooves making a measured clop, clop, clop sound which echoed in the narrow funnel of the buildings on either side of the road. It could, thought Webster, have been an image from the nineteenth or even eighteenth century.

  ‘We didn’t do it lightly.’ Middleton was also drawn to the image and sound of the horse and trap as it passed. ‘I’ll certainly show you the best I can, but I am now very pleased that we came forward, even if it does turn out that a farmer buried his dog, though if it was a dog it would have to be one of those horrible Japanese hunting dogs, the sort of dog that’s as big as a donkey.’

  ‘Well,’ Webster replied, ‘it’s always as well to be safe rather than sorry, and you and Mr Allerton are clearly very well intentioned. We won’t be prosecuting you for wasting police time even if your suspicions prove to be unfounded. Shall we go?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Middleton walked along the pavement with Webster at his side and with the younger of the two constables walking a respectable distance behind them. Midd
leton and Webster, followed by the constable, walked on in silence until they came to the outskirts of the village and began to enter open country. Soon after leaving the village, Middleton stopped walking and pointed to a pathway which led off the north side of the road at ninety degrees. ‘Down there,’ he said. The track, Webster noted, was still muddy in places from that morning’s rain, but was, he saw, mainly dry. The two officers walked behind Middleton as he and they sidestepped the occasional pool of muddy water. Cyrus Middleton followed the path until he entered a small wood and found a second pathway within the trees.

  ‘Confess I don’t remember this path,’ Cyrus Middleton commented over the bird song, ‘but it’s the right place. Yes . . . this is the wood we found . . . there is the stone gatepost.’ Middleton pointed to what could forgivably be taken for a tree stump covered in ivy had it not been for its complete uniformity of width, flat top and square shape and the two rusted hinges protruding from one side. ‘There clearly was a road or a driveway here at some point in time. I can’t remember seeing any sign of a derelict house at all, but this is the wood all right.’ He pressed forward, and still following the path, he eventually emerged into a field from which the crop had recently been harvested. There he stopped as Webster and the constable joined him. ‘It’s like going back in time –’ Cyrus Middleton brushed a fly from his face – ‘same field and the same time of year. Astounding.’

  ‘Good.’ Webster glanced to and fro across the field. It was, he saw, a wholly rural setting with another field adjoining the field in which they stood, although the steady and relentless hum of traffic on the A19 could be distinctly heard. ‘So where was the patch of soil, if you can remember?’

  ‘Over there.’ Middleton pointed to his left. He turned and walked in that direction and stopped when he was about ten feet from the corner of the field. ‘About here . . . yes, yes . . . it was about here. Me and Tony came out of the wood about here.’ He pointed to a dense stand of shrubs at the edge of the wood. ‘The path we followed just now wasn’t there when we came here that day, but I remember we left the wood about here, just where the patch of soil was and I said, “Look, someone’s been buried” and we both laughed, and then smoke from the stubble being burned in that field –’ he pointed to his right – ‘came over here and we began to choke and then we moved hurriedly in that direction –’ he pointed to his left – ‘looking for breathable air . . . but it was here . . . just about here. I’m sorry I can’t be more accurate.’