Ventnor’s visit to Philippa Goodwin and added it to the ‘Bromyards Inquiry’ file, and then walked slowly home on the walls, savouring the summer weather, to her new-build flat on Bootham. She changed into casual clothes and, it being too early and too summery to remain indoors, she walked out of the city for one hour and reached the village of Shipton to which she had not travelled before. She found a small village beside the A19 surrounded by rich, flat farmland. Being disinclined to walk back to York, she returned by bus.
She showered upon returning home and ate a ready cooked meal, castigating herself for doing so, and telling herself of the importance of maintaining her cooking skills and that she should be wary of laziness, for laziness, as her grandmother in St Kitts had always told her, ‘is one of the deadly sins, chile’. Later, irritated and unable to concentrate, even on the television programmes, she retired to bed too early and thus fell asleep only to wake up at three a.m. It was then, unable to sleep, alone at night, that the demons came, flying around the inside of her head, taunting and tormenting her. She thought of her blissful marriage and the advice given to her and her husband by her father-in-law, ‘You’re black, you’ve got to be ten times better to be just as good’, and how determined they were to be ten times better, she as one of the very few black women constables in the Metropolitan Police, and he a civilian employee of the same force, as an accountant. Then the dreadful knock on her door, her own inspector, ‘It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t have known anything,’ and she was a widow after less than two years of marriage.
It was her fault. For some reason she was to blame and a penalty had to be paid, and so she applied for a transfer to the north of England where it is cold in the winter time, where the people are harder in their attitude and less giving, and are hostile to strangers . . . or so she had been told . . . and where the people can bear grudges for many, many years, and there she must live until the penalty for surviving, when her husband had not, had been paid in full.
She lay abed listening to the sounds of the night, the trains arriving and departing the railway station, the calm click, click, click of a woman’s high-heeled shoes below her window, which told her all was well, and later, the whine and rattle of the milk float which told her another day had begun.
George Hennessey similarly returned home at the end of that day. He drove to Easingwold with a sense of ‘something big’ being uncovered, that Veronica Goodwin’s and the other four skeletons were not going to be the sum. He drove through the village of Easingwold with the window of his car wound down and enjoyed the breeze playing about his face and right cheek, and as he passed the place he could not help but glance at the exact spot at which Jennifer had fallen all those years ago on a similar summer’s day. He drove out of Easingwold on the Thirsk Road and his heart leapt as he saw a silver BMW parked half-on, half-off the kerb beside his house. He turned into the driveway and heard a dog bark as the tyres of his car crunched the gravel. At the dog’s bark a man in his late twenties appeared at the bottom of the drive, behind a gate designed to keep the dog from wandering into the road. The two men grinned at each other. The younger man returned inside the house as the older man got out of his car and walked to where the first man had stood, so as to give loving attention to the brown mongrel that was turning in circles and wagging its tail.
Later, when father and son sat on the patio at the rear of Hennessey’s house, and watching Oscar crisscross the lawn, having clearly picked up an interesting scent, George Hennessey asked, ‘What are you doing . . . where?’
‘Newcastle,’ Charles Hennessey replied, ‘representing a felon who definitely did not commit a series of
She showered upon returning home and ate a ready cooked meal, castigating herself for doing so, and telling herself of the importance of maintaining her cooking skills and that she should be wary of laziness, for laziness, as her grandmother in St Kitts had always told her, ‘is one of the deadly sins, chile’. Later, irritated and unable to concentrate, even on the television programmes, she retired to bed too early and thus fell asleep only to wake up at three a.m. It was then, unable to sleep, alone at night, that the demons came, flying around the inside of her head, taunting and tormenting her. She thought of her blissful marriage and the advice given to her and her husband by her father-in-law, ‘You’re black, you’ve got to be ten times better to be just as good’, and how determined they were to be ten times better, she as one of the very few black women constables in the Metropolitan Police, and he a civilian employee of the same force, as an accountant. Then the dreadful knock on her door, her own inspector, ‘It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t have known anything,’ and she was a widow after less than two years of marriage.
It was her fault. For some reason she was to blame and a penalty had to be paid, and so she applied for a transfer to the north of England where it is cold in the winter time, where the people are harder in their attitude and less giving, and are hostile to strangers . . . or so she had been told . . . and where the people can bear grudges for many, many years, and there she must live until the penalty for surviving, when her husband had not, had been paid in full.
She lay abed listening to the sounds of the night, the trains arriving and departing the railway station, the calm click, click, click of a woman’s high-heeled shoes below her window, which told her all was well, and later, the whine and rattle of the milk float which told her another day had begun.
George Hennessey similarly returned home at the end of that day. He drove to Easingwold with a sense of ‘something big’ being uncovered, that Veronica Goodwin’s and the other four skeletons were not going to be the sum. He drove through the village of Easingwold with the window of his car wound down and enjoyed the breeze playing about his face and right cheek, and as he passed the place he could not help but glance at the exact spot at which Jennifer had fallen all those years ago on a similar summer’s day. He drove out of Easingwold on the Thirsk Road and his heart leapt as he saw a silver BMW parked half-on, half-off the kerb beside his house. He turned into the driveway and heard a dog bark as the tyres of his car crunched the gravel. At the dog’s bark a man in his late twenties appeared at the bottom of the drive, behind a gate designed to keep the dog from wandering into the road. The two men grinned at each other. The younger man returned inside the house as the older man got out of his car and walked to where the first man had stood, so as to give loving attention to the brown mongrel that was turning in circles and wagging its tail.
Later, when father and son sat on the patio at the rear of Hennessey’s house, and watching Oscar crisscross the lawn, having clearly picked up an interesting scent, George Hennessey asked, ‘What are you doing . . . where?’
‘Newcastle,’ Charles Hennessey replied, ‘representing a felon who definitely did not commit a series of
Similar Books
