After the Flood Page 7

  ‘She doesn’t know what she’s missing. You do it so well; you know the value of taking your time.’

  Hennessey smiled. ‘This lot have cottoned on all right, I think this is going to be a good one.’

  ‘I think so too. Better than that awful hotel outside Manchester.’

  ‘Oh, horrible, they were brain-dead. You know, when I came up north, I was told that I’d come across the Yorkshire-Lancashire rivalry. In fact I haven’t—not as much as I thought I would—but one bloke told me that, and I quote, “All Lancashire folk are Yorkshire folk who’ve had their brains removed.”’

  Louise D’Acre smiled, but not at the joke, but because she saw warmth and happiness in George Hennessey’s eyes, where mostly she saw. only wounding and wisdom. ‘But when I think of that hotel staff, I think I know what he meant. No reaction at all. You’d think all their guests all arrived as singles and left in partnerships.’

  ‘That’s the problem with the game: we have to use a different hotel each time, we can’t find a good one and keep returning. So, your room or mine tonight?’

  ‘Lady’s choice.’

  ‘Your room then. That way I get to sleep in both rooms and you only get to sleep in the one.’

  Hennessey slid his hand across the table, took her hand and gently, lovingly, squeezed it.

  Pippa Booth drove out of Hull and across the flat landscape to Hedon. Yellich saw it to be a town with a mixture of prosperous-looking newly-built housing estates and of older terrace housing which lined the main road, complete with its white-painted telephone boxes, unique in Britain, belonging to the Hull Telecommunications Company. He was particularly taken with the Holy Trinity Church, which stood on the only elevated ground in the vicinity, so far as Yellich could tell, and which Pippa Booth informed him was known as ‘the King of Holderness’ to distinguish it from another church in the area known as ‘the Queen of Holderness’.

  Wickersley Avenue revealed itself to be a short road of council houses, one boarded up, another with a splintered front door, all with unkempt gardens.

  ‘Happy about leaving your car here?’ Yellich turned to Pippa Booth.

  ‘No…I think you’re right.’ She halted and reversed back to the main road and found a parking space amongst other cars outside a small shopping centre. An unemployed youth and several surly-looking children eyed Booth and Yellich with suspicion and dislike.

  ‘I wish we didn’t have “Police” written on our foreheads.’ Pippa Booth smiled as she locked the car and Yellich found he enjoyed her sense of humour. He enjoyed the company of DS Booth and could well understand the wedding ring on her finger.

  The two officers walked back to Wickersley Avenue and found number 57, last known address of Lepping, Sydney, onetime farm manager, last recorded as being unemployed. Number 57 merged well with the other houses in Wickersley Avenue, in Yellich’s view. The front garden was overgrown; piles of domestic refuse had been allowed to accumulate by the side of the house. Once in bin liners, as required, it was now scattered, the bin liners having doubtless been torn open by dogs or foxes. The smell from the house was overpowering.

  Inside it was worse. Much worse.

  Sydney Lepping flung open the door at Yellich’s distinct tap…tap…tap, soft but authoritative police officer’s knock. Lepping was barefoot, clad in unwashed, inexpensive denim and a vest; his hair was matted; his chin had two or three days’ growth; his eyes burned with anger. ‘What?’

  ‘Police.’ Yellich and Booth showed their IDs.

  ‘I know. I can tell coppers. I knew you were coppers when I heard your car, when you drove up the street and reversed it away again. Coppers would know what’d happen to their car if they left it in this street. Nowhere is safe round here, not for a copper’s car, not even where you left it.’

  ‘How do you know where we left it?’

  ‘You left it within two minutes’ walk. You’ll have had to leave it further away than that to have something to come back to.’ Lepping smiled. It was a sneer of joy at the thought of what would be happening to the officers’ car.

  ‘We’ll take the risk.’ Booth’s attitude was cold, distant. ‘It’s not my car anyway; any repairs won’t come out of my pocket.’

  Lepping stopped sneering.

  Yellich understood why the man’s daughter didn’t want to die at home.

  ‘So what do you want?’ He was a strongly built man; he had a farmer’s hands, large, pawlike.

  ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr Lepping.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About your wife.’

  ‘She walked out on me.’

  ‘And about a lady called Amanda Dunney.’

  ‘That cow. What about them?’

  ‘Be better inside?’

  Lepping glanced at the officers and stood his ground.

  ‘We could do it at the police station. We’ll take you there but we won’t bring you back.’

  ‘It’s a long walk from Hull, and it’s too cold for an enjoyable walk,’ Yellich added.

  Lepping continued to stand his ground. Then he suddenly withdrew, turned his back on the officers and walked into his house, leaving the door open. Yellich and Booth interpreted it as an invitation to enter, and followed him inside.

  Lepping’s manner changed. He became calm, resigned. He sank into an armchair and, far from looking aggressively at Booth and Yellich, he seemed to have a defeated look in his eyes.

  ‘I’d stand up if I were you. Most visitors do, the one or two I get each year. I never did get the hang of housework.’

  ‘We’ve been in worse.’ Yellich walked to the centre of the room; as he did so his feet stuck to the carpet and he easily imagined small things, very small things, running up his trouser-legs. Even his scalp began to feel itchy.

  ‘Nice thing about living like this is that unwelcome guests don’t stay longer than they have to.’ Lepping pulled a half-smoked cigarette out of the pile of ash in an overflowing ashtray. He lit it and tossed the match into the hearth, which had become a receptacle for any discarded item that was combustible. ‘Let the hearth build up, then I have a fire.’

  ‘I see.’ Booth spoke. ‘Mr Lepping, your wife disappeared?’

  ‘She walked out on me. Just after our Sara died. That’s her.’ He pointed to a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. Sara Lepping had in life been a slender-faced woman with short black hair, whose smile revealed perfect teeth. ‘Nobody should lose their children. Children shouldn’t die before their parents. Not natural.’

  ‘I can sympathise.’ Booth spoke softly.

  ‘You have children?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘You, sir?’

  ‘Just one,’ Yellich said. ‘A boy.’

  ‘I wanted a son, but when Sara was born I thought how could I have wanted a son? It’s true what they say: you can’t see past your daughter. She could do no wrong, not in my eyes.’

  ‘Your wife left you?’

  ‘That’s what I said. She went to pieces after Sara died. She will have walked into the Humber, just walked in and kept walking. That old river never gives up its dead, you know, just carries you out into the North Sea.’

  ‘Were things well between you and Mrs Lepping?’

  ‘We were married.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’ Pippa Booth held eye contact with Lepping. Lepping took a final long drag on the cigarette and then tossed it into the hearth, where it lay smouldering. ‘Sometimes that’s enough to start a fire.’

  ‘Answer the question.’ Yellich also looked at Lepping. ‘Please.’

  ‘You know what married life is like.’

  ‘You haven’t always lived here, have you? Our records show you as having an earlier address. Tapping Lane, was it?’

  ‘That’s up the posh end of Hedon. That’s when I was a farm manager. Had money, a position, status. I was somebody. I could go into pubs, get into a conversation, buy a round of drinks…’

  ‘Your neighbours will rememb
er you.’

  Lepping shot a glance at Yellich.

  ‘What will they tell us about your marriage?’ Booth asked.

  ‘OK.’ Lepping poked a meaty finger into the ashtray, as if searching for a cigarette that hadn’t been fully smoked. ‘Got a cigarette?’

  Booth opened her handbag and took out a packet of cigarettes. She handed them to him. ‘There’s five left. You can have them.’

  Lepping, a little wide-eyed at the clearly unexpected act of generosity, nodded his thanks. He took a cigarette and lit it, putting the packet carefully to one side. ‘We had fights,’ he said.

  ‘Actual fights, or just arguments?’

  Lepping paused. ‘Well, if she had just done what I told her to do, I wouldn’t have had to hit her. You know what marriage is like.’

  ‘Happen often?’

  ‘No…no, hardly ever, but it did happen.’

  ‘I see. Did she leave you before?’

  ‘No. She just went to pieces after Sara died, like I said…not the same woman. Came back from work one day, she just wasn’t home. She was always at home, but that day she wasn’t. I told her I wanted her to be at home when I came back each day, like it should be. She was always there with a pot of tea ready for me to drink, then that day she wasn’t. No note or anything.’ He drew on the cigarette. ‘Told the police all this at the time.’

  ‘I read your statement.’

  Pippa Booth shifted her weight from one leg to the other.

  ‘They searched my house, even had dogs sniffing in the garden. They thought I’d murdered her.’

  ‘Did you?’

  Lepping shot a glare at Yellich. Lepping may well be a broken man, Yellich thought, but he saw then that there was still a flash of temper and that ‘me, me, me’ attitude so common among murderers. A senior barrister had once told him that he had been pleading in murder trials all his working life and he had yet to meet a murderer who did not think that the sun shone just for him. And that included the so-called ‘crimes of passion’.

  ‘No,’ Lepping said at length, ‘I did not kill my wife.’

  ‘Or Amanda Dunney?’

  Lepping’s eyes narrowed. ‘Didn’t kill her either. That bitch.’

  ‘You threatened to.’

  ‘So would you if she had let your only daughter die in agony. I can’t forgive her for that.’

  ‘She disappeared at the same time as your wife.’

  ‘I wondered what happened to her.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. I couldn’t find out her address—probably a good job, or probably I would have killed her. She just didn’t like Sara being young and pretty. She was—well, the opposite: face like a bat, body like a beached whale. Wasn’t Sara’s fault. Wasn’t our Sara’s fault at all. Why bring that bag into this?’

  ‘Because her skull has been discovered.’

  Silence. Lepping glanced at Booth, then at Yellich, then at Booth again. ‘Her skull? Where’s the rest of her?’

  ‘We were hoping you could tell us that, Mr Lepping. And also help us with the identification of the female skeleton that was found with her. It’s a skeleton of a woman who was about your wife’s age when she was reported missing, by you.’

  Lepping shot to his feet. Yellich growled at him, and he sank back into the chair.

  ‘You see the reason for our interest,’ Booth offered.

  ‘Well, I didn’t do either of them. That’s a fact.’

  ‘It is, is it?’

  ‘Aye,’ Lepping snarled. It is. You’ll never prove I did either because I didn’t. Simple.’

  ‘Can you remember what you were doing on the day your wife disappeared?’

  ‘A day at the farm. Plenty of people saw me, police checked at the time.’

  ‘But you waited three days before you reported her missing?’

  ‘Thought she’d come home,’ Lepping shrugged. ‘She would’ve known she’d get a hiding, thought she was finding the courage to come home and face me.’

  ‘Did that before, did you, when she wasn’t at home?’

  ‘Couple of times.’

  ‘How long did she stay away before?’

  ‘One night, two nights…I can’t remember.’

  ‘So she did walk out on you before?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So…only a minute ago you told us she’d never walked out on you.’

  Lepping glared at Yellich. ‘Stop trying to catch me out.’

  ‘You’re tripping yourself up, Mr Lepping. This is a double murder inquiry, and you are a prime suspect.’

  ‘You going to arrest me? I mean, please do, clean sheets and free meals, that has its appeal right now, you know. I mean, look at this, look what a man lives like when there is no woman to look after him. I eat fish and chips every day except Sundays when the chippy is shut, so on Sundays I don’t eat. Tomorrow is Sunday—you arrest me, I’ll eat on Sunday for the first time in a long time.’

  ‘Not today,’ Yellich said, turning to go. Pippa Booth picked up his cue and also turned to the door. ‘But we’ll likely be back.’

  ‘Don’t go too far,’ Booth said.

  ‘Where’s there for me to go?’ Lepping reached for another cigarette.

  Walking back to the car, Yellich said, ‘Didn’t figure you for a smoker.’

  ‘I’m not, but they always come in handy, as you’ve just seen.’

  Miraculously their car had not been vandalised.

  ‘Where would you like to go now?’ Booth unlocked the driver’s door.

  ‘Tapping Lane. I’d like to talk to his neighbours, see what they recall about him at the time of his wife’s disappearance.’

  Tapping Lane proved to be located in an altogether different part of Hedon. Here was calm, self-respecting, settled prosperity, neatly tended gardens in which stood well-maintained owner-occupied houses.

  ‘Damn near killed the poor woman.’ The frail, white-haired lady leaned heavily on a stout, polished walking stick. Her body was clearly spent, but her alert eyes and speech revealed a mind that retained its youthful sharpness. ‘Constantly it was a house of shouts and screams, his shouts, her screams. That house there, across the driveway. You know the address, of course, but twenty feet separates my kitchen from hers. Farm manager! Maybe he could manage a farm but he couldn’t manage his own house. But that was him, just had to fight with someone, I bet he was a pig to work for. He could start a brawl in an empty pub. Sydney Lapping…I wasn’t sorry to see him go.’

  ‘Did his wife leave him?’

  ‘Plenty of times, but she always came back. There’s nowt so queer as folk. She’d be wearing dark glasses all the time, and heavy makeup. Didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what she was hiding.’ She stood proudly in the doorway of her house.

  ‘Indeed?’ Pippa Booth raised her eyebrows. ‘Then she disappeared?’

  ‘Aye, now that was a bad time for that family. Poor girl, I watched her grow up…she took cancer.’

  ‘So we believe.’

  ‘Wanted to die in her flat in York. I can understand that. Folk who are dying need peace and quiet, but those two wouldn’t stop arguing even if their daughter was lying on her deathbed upstairs; they’d argue and fight over the deathbed. That little flat must have been the first bit of peace Sara found.’

  ‘What was he like with Sara?’

  ‘He’d reduce her to tears, right from when she was a small girl, but he never hit her. He didn’t have to, he could do all the damage he wanted to do with his tongue, yet in a strange way I think he loved her. I even think he loved his wife. I even think she loved him. Folk are strange.’

  ‘Nowt so queer…as you said,’ Yellich smiled.

  ‘But he damaged them both, no excuse for that attitude. I’d go so far as to say he murdered his daughter.’

  ‘Murdered her?’

  ‘Aye, well, cancer’s a funny business. I lost my man and two of my sisters to it. You get to know about it. There’s a “cancer personality”, so I’ve
been told: people who are wrapped up in themselves are more prone to the disease than outgoing, volatile people, and after a childhood like she had, she must have been so wrapped up in herself, her mind must have been spinning like a top, but she had no means to express herself. I can see Sara Lepping taking cancer. I can understand it.’

  ‘I think I can too.’ Pippa Booth spoke softly.

  ‘You know, I think Mrs Lepping realised the same thing. It was after Sara died, more noise from that house, except for the first time ever I heard her yelling back, giving him as good as she got—About time too, I thought. Then it suddenly went quiet, like someone turning off a radio. A few days after that he reported her missing. I told the police at the time. I think they thought he’d done her in. Me personally, I think they were right to think that.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Oh, aye. Then he went downhill, took to drinking, heavily. Always was one for his beer, but after that row he was drinking whisky, lost his job, got arrested for the sort of things the village youths get arrested for on a Saturday night. Couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments and…I still see him in the village from time to time, a mess of a man, and I can’t help thinking he deserves what he’s become. He brought it on himself. Nice Christian family in that house now. The children bring me handmade cards each Christmas.’

  ‘What about the people on the other side of the Leppings?’

  ‘They’ve moved out now. But they weren’t at home on that last night when the rowing stopped like a radio being switched off. Only I heard that, and I’ll never forget it.’

  Driving back to Hull, Pippa Booth said, ‘You know, we have enough to arrest him on suspicion. Bet he’d crack under a quiz session. Might even be a relief to him. And it isn’t true what he said.’

  ‘About his wife not leaving him before?’

  ‘No, about folk in these part committing suicide by walking into the Humber. They don’t, they take sleeping pills, or hang themselves, or slash their wrists, like everybody else. Even the Humber Bridge hasn’t become the northern equivalent of Beachy Head, like people thought it would become.’

  Yellich glanced out of the passenger window at a group of horses galloping together in a meadow, burning off energy. ‘I’d rather leave him where he is; he’s right, he’s not going anywhere.’