Gift Wrapped (11 page)

‘The particular incident of violence we are interested in,' Yellich continued, ‘is the one which took place in a field outside York, after you found out about your wife and her lover, a man called James Wenlock. You were tipped off ... we believe ... you received a letter notifying you about the affair and containing a photograph of Mrs Bond and Mr Wenlock together in Bridlington?'

‘Yeah, never found out who did me that favour.' Bond coughed deeply. ‘So she's having fun with her fancy man in Bridlington while I'm at sea ... wearing the jacket I bought her and she swaps me for that man, a short little bloke like an office worker. So yes, I battered the information out of her. She told me his name and that he lived in Selby and drove a white Audi with tinted windows. That's all I needed. But I wasn't putting nothing on paper. What I just said – well, I didn't say it, if you see what I mean. You can't prove it and I won't sign a statement admitting it ... but I got the information I wanted.'

‘Then you went looking for him?' Yellich clarified.

‘No, though I was tempted. I've got a reputation to protect.' Shane Bond seemed surprised at Yellich's question. ‘I didn't want to be laughed at by the other trawlermen. Even though I lived in York, the Hull trawlermen would eventually have found out about my old lady playing away from home and they would have expected me to do something about it. I was going to, but decided to leave it in the end. I knew you lot would come after me if anything happened to him.'

‘But you knew enough to find him?'

‘Yes ... she told me enough,' Bond admitted. ‘She didn't want to but eventually she saw sense and she told me.'

‘So you went looking look for him?' Yellich pressed. ‘You did that.'

‘No, I just told you,' Bond insisted, but his reply seemed evasive to the officers. Too evasive; too evasive by half. He suddenly became a man with something to hide. ‘I didn't go looking for him.'

‘You had reason enough to want to harm him,' Yellich observed.

‘Maybe I did.' Bond shrugged his muscular shoulders. ‘So what?'

‘Well, motive makes us very interested,' Yellich explained, ‘and if a man has the means and the opportunity as well, then we are very, very interested.'

‘Very, very interested,' Ventnor echoed. ‘Very, very curious.'

‘Look ...' Bond edged forward in his seat, ‘he was sleeping with my wife ... so yes ... OK, I admit it ... I was angry. What man wouldn't be angry?'

‘Did you threaten him?' Yellich asked.

‘Listen ... I don't make threats, I don't threaten anyone ... I make promises. If I say I am going to work someone over, I work them over. And I do a good job as well.'

‘Yes, it seems so ... we've read your record. You're a real hard man, aren't you, Shane?' Yellich held eye contact with the man. ‘As hard as they come.'

‘You need to be if you're going to survive on the trawlers,' Shane Bond growled. ‘It's how it is.'

‘You're not working now?'

‘The work's dried up.' Shane Bond looked at the floor. ‘The Spanish, the French – they took it all. There's no cod now. It's all dried up.'

‘Unfortunate turn of phrase for a fisherman.' Yellich smiled. ‘So what do you do now?'

‘A few odd jobs,' Bond explained. ‘Just about retiring now but I couldn't ever settle on the land. I was at sea all my life. I left school when I was fifteen – I didn't wait until the end of term, I just walked out of school the day I turned fifteen and straight on to my first trawler. I went to the Icelandic waters and didn't return for two months.'

‘You just walked on to a ship? Just like that?' Yellich asked, surprised.

‘The
Holderness Princess
. It was one of the firsts in life I never forgot. No mariner ever forgets his first ship and mine was the old
Holderness Princess
. My father was on the trawlers and he got me started.' Bond paused and took a deep breath. ‘You know the
Princess
delayed sailing for two days until my fifteenth birthday – couldn't take me before then without breaking the law, though some of the old hands had gone to sea at thirteen, so they told me, but after forty years at sea I couldn't settle shore side. If nothing else, I couldn't cope with the hours. Even now I still sleep as if I was at sea. You know the watch system – four hours on, four off?'

‘All right.' Yellich held up his hand. ‘You are certain that you didn't trace your ex-wife's boyfriend?'

‘No ... I told you.'

‘You've got previous for violence,' Yellich argued. ‘A lot of it, in fact.'

‘It's a useful way of settling things,' Bond replied defensively.

‘One of your convictions interests us,' Yellich continued.

‘Oh, yes?' Bond once more became defensive. ‘Which would that be?'

‘We are particularly interested in the conviction for violence in Selby,' Yellich replied firmly. ‘For attacking a man in the car park of the Golden Fleece pub. You attacked him just as he was getting into his car.'

‘A white car with tinted windows,' Thompson Ventnor added. ‘That man, that car.'

‘So what?' Bond snarled.

‘You left your prints all over the car,' Yellich continued, ‘and all over the wooden club you used to batter him with.'

‘So?' Bond shrugged again and looked down at the carpet. ‘So ... ?'

‘But he wasn't your wife's lover. He was a gentleman called Farrell – Roy Farrell – and he ran a white BMW with tinted windows which could easily be mistaken for an Audi at night ... especially by an angry trawlerman looking for a guy in a white car with tinted windows who drinks at the Fleece in Selby. It's easy to see the reason why you thought he was your wife's lover.'

‘I never said that he was. He was just a bloke and I went inside for eighteen months for that. I served time for that.'

‘Oh, yes, we know.' Yellich smiled again. ‘Like I said, we read your list of previous convictions. And you still say you didn't go looking for your wife's lover?'

‘I forget things these days. I didn't remember that until you mentioned it,' Bond added.

‘How convenient for you,' Yellich commented as he took another quick scan of the room. It was all very functional. ‘But your victim, he'll remember it, and he'll remember you shouting that you'd kill him if he ever went near your wife again ... and the other people in the car park who witnessed it all will also remember you saying that. It puts you well in the frame, all right.'

Once again Shane Bond shrugged. ‘But I never done no murder, never did.'

‘Well, it means that you did go looking for James Wenlock, despite what you say, and shortly afterwards you found him. A week after you assaulted that gentleman in the car park of the Fleece, James Wenlock was reported to the police as a missing person.'

‘James Wenlock?' Shane Bond queried. ‘Who is that?'

‘Your ex-wife's boyfriend,' Yellich spoke angrily. ‘Come on, Shane, stop playing games ... he was your ex-wife's boyfriend. He is now deceased. His remains have been found. Get your coat. You're coming with us.'

‘You're arresting me?' Bond sounded alarmed. ‘I done nothing.'

‘Yes.' Yellich stood and stepped forward and placed his hand on Shane Bond's shoulder. ‘Shane Bond,' he said clearly, ‘I am arresting you in connection with the murder of James Wenlock. You do not have to say anything but it will harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, anything you may later rely on in court.'

Carmen Pharoah drove out of York under a vast blue sky following roads through fields of golden wheat to Roy Farrell's house in Cawood. The house, she found, was at the edge of the village with flat fields behind it and what she thought to be an interesting-looking church adjacent to it. When she arrived Roy Farrell was weeding the flower bed beside his front lawn. ‘Miss Pharoah?' he said as she approached.

‘Yes.' Pharoah showed her identity card.

Farrell stood. ‘Thank you for the phone call. I appreciated the notice.'

‘We don't like to call unannounced unless we have to arrest someone,' Carmen Pharoah explained warmly, ‘and it does save us a journey if the person in question is not at home.'

‘So, the assault.' Farrell drove the garden fork he was holding into the soil and let it remain there so as to give his undivided attention to Carmen Pharoah. He saw a slender woman, tall, in her twenties, he guessed, elegantly dressed in a three-quarter-length skirt and sensible shoes, a white blouse and a red jacket, with a cavernous handbag hanging from her right shoulder. ‘I still have a plastic plate in my skull and it'll go with me to my grave.'

‘Plastic.' Pharoah smiled. ‘I thought they used steel?'

‘They did use stainless steel at one time, so I was told, but the steel would expand and contract with the heat and the cold and cause dreadful discomfort so they switched to plastic. It's just as good and doesn't expand or contract so much.'

‘I see.' Pharoah glanced at Farrell's home – ‘inter-war', she noted. ‘So do you recall the attack?'

‘Yes, very well,' Farrell grimaced. ‘My brain function was not affected, thank goodness. No impairment there. I was very lucky.'

‘Indeed. Can you tell me what happened?'

‘I can ... all I recall, anyway, and that's pretty much all of it,' Farrell explained. ‘But why the sudden interest after all this time?'

‘It ... well ...' Pharoah hesitated. ‘All I can say is that it has come to have a bearing on another investigation.'

‘Understood. Well, the attack made me recall quite a lot of that evening, which I doubt that I would normally remember, such as the topics of conversation I had with my friends in the Fleece just before it happened, almost word for word. I recall leaving the pub at about ten p.m. and walking across the car park to my car.'

‘Being a white vehicle with tinted windows?' Pharoah clarified.

‘Yes, a BMW. Nice car. Anyway, just as I put the key in the car door I was felled by a massive blow to the back of my head. I fell, was then kicked in the face ... I was still conscious and looked up to see him standing over me holding a knife.'

‘A knife?' Pharoah queried. ‘Are you certain it was a knife?'

‘Well, it was something like a knife. If it wasn't a knife it definitely had a long blade ... not shiny, quite dull, and I knew that he was going to stab me with it.' Farrell paused. ‘Then he shouted, “I always kill people who mess with my wife”, except that, being a trawlerman, as I later found out he was, what he said was liberally sprinkled with earthy Anglo-Saxon words.'

‘I can imagine.' Carmen Pharoah smiled. ‘I have heard the like.'

‘I am sure you have in your line of work.' Farrell breathed deeply. ‘Anyway, I was saved by a group of men coming out of the Fleece before he could carry out his intention. I remember a lot of shouting, then I passed out and came to in hospital. Apparently he made a run for it and drove off in his little van and two of the guys from the group who had saved me followed him in a much faster car ... until he was forced to stop at a set of traffic lights and they took a note of the registration number of his van, then let him drive on. He was traced by the number plates. He'd put his paw prints all over my car and my blood was on the toecaps of his boots ... there were many credible witnesses. Anyway, he very sensibly pleaded to a reduced charge of assault, collected three years and came out after eighteen months. Apparently he mistook my white BMW with its tinted windows for a white Audi with tinted windows. They would, in fact, look similar at night, especially to a man who doesn't know cars. It was the old mistaken identity number. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

‘That's a very forgiving attitude.'

‘Possibly, but it helps me to understand why it happened.'

‘Can I take a statement from you please, Mr Farrell?' Pharoah asked.

‘Yes, of course.' Farrell nodded. ‘Of course. I am sure my lady wife can rustle up a tray of tea and scones for us but I very much doubt that I can add anything to the statement I gave to the police ten years ago.'

‘Possibly, but we need clarification and emphasis. The blade he was holding was dull, not shiny as a knife would probably be, and also the part where you say he said he was going to murder you because he believed that you were having an affair with his wife ... details like that,' Pharoah explained.

‘I see ... well, of course,' Farrell indicated his house and the open front door. ‘Shall we go inside ... get out of this heat?'

After tea and scones and his statement had been taken, Carmen Pharoah returned to Micklegate Bar Police Station in York and added her recording of the visit to Roy Farrell's house to the rapidly expanding file of the murder of James Wenlock, and placed Farrell's statement in the file. It was by then 5.00 p.m. She signed ‘out' and returned home to her flat in Bootham, where she showered and changed into a pair of tight, figure-hugging jeans and a blue T-shirt before setting out again. She intended to retire to bed at 10.30 p.m. that evening so as to be fully refreshed when she reported for duty at 8.30 a.m. the following day.

The city was at that moment too thronged with tourists to enable her to explore the ancient streets and the medieval passageways which was how she had come to enjoy her free time, so instead she took a bus out to the village of Sutton-on-the-Forest and walked the six miles back to York along the straight as a die B1363, enjoying the flat rural landscape of the Vale of York under a vast blue sky as she did so.

As she walked her thoughts turned invariably to the events which had brought her from London to York ... that car ... that wretched car ... the drunken man at the wheel. Her husband, an accountant, and she a detective constable, both employed by the Metropolitan Police and both having absorbed her father-in-law's advice: ‘You're black – that means you have to be ten times better just to be as good'. The knock at the door, hesitant yet at the same time insistent. She wondering why her husband hadn't used his key, her senior colleagues on the doorstep in the rain breaking the news as gently as they could. Their promises to ‘throw the book at him' meant so little, so, so little ... so meaningless. She had sold her house, which had been their home, in Leytonstone and moved north because she felt she had to pay a penalty, so north it was, where it was colder in the winter and the summers were shorter, and here she would remain until she felt she had paid her debt. In full.