girl, Moira Little, we decided to slum it and went to Augusta’s. We suddenly had the drunken notion of pulling a sugar daddy but Ronny and Liz had had enough and wanted to go home. They were both a right mess.’
‘I see. . carry on, please.’
‘Liz and Ronny left to walk to the railway station to get a taxi for Liz, who is very small and because of that very vulnerable, so Veronica was going to walk her there. She was going to see Liz safe into a taxi and then walk home. The railway station to Cemetery Road is no distance at all.’
‘Where can we find Liz Calderwood? We’ll have to speak to her.’
‘Liz. .’ Susan Boyd grimaced, ‘Liz. . poor Liz. She went off the rails big time. . I mean, big style.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, she married but did so badly, her man led her into a life of crime, she’s inside.’
‘Prison?’
‘Yes. So you’ll have all the details you need.’
‘As you say,’ Carmen Pharoah and Thomson Ventnor glanced at each other. ‘Makes things easier for us,’ she said.
‘Much,’ Thompson replied, ‘much easier.’
‘She’s in Langley Vale.’
‘Convenient.’
‘So, no one paid Veronica any attention in the nightclub, or earlier in the pub.’
‘No.’
‘And you’d know if she had any such attention?’
‘I’m sure she would have told me. She never mentioned any problem like that. She was quiet when sober but when she had a drink in her she got talkative. It’s then she’d blurt something out, as she once did. She had an abusive boyfriend once. I only found out because she told me when she’d had a few rum and cokes. He knew how to hit her so she wouldn’t show any bruising. . fist to her scalp. . he’d raise lumps on her head. I ran my fingers through her hair that night, it was like feeling a cobbled road surface, but she had such a fine head of hair that it never showed. He was clever like that.’
‘What was his name? Do you know?’
‘Piers Driver.’
Thomson Ventnor wrote the name in his notebook.
‘She was well finished with him before she went missing though.’
‘Even so, it’s a stone we’ll have to turn over. Violent men are often very possessive.’
‘OK, but in the event, it was more like he left her. He found another punchbag he liked better than Veronica.’
‘I see. That’s another feature of the possessive personality, they can discard “possessions” very quickly, especially if acquiring a replacement, but please, carry on.’
‘It seemed that the only thing that Veronica liked about Piers Driver was that he was taller than her, her one big weakness, and it made her fall for a street rat like Driver.’
‘I am beginning to understand her need,’ Carmen Pharoah glanced out of the kitchen window at a backyard and the roof tops of black terraced houses that formed the adjacent street, ‘but we’ll still have to interview him again. You see our point of view, someone who used her as a “punch bag” prior to her disappearing, he sounds interesting.’
‘Yes. I don’t know where he lives though and I don’t want to know, but you know him.’
‘Sounds like the sort of person we would know. . Piers Driver. . in his twenties?’
‘Yes. York boy.’
‘OK. Anything else you think we ought to know?’
Susan Boyd turned and also looked out of the kitchen window, then she slowly returned her gaze to Carmen Pharoah. ‘Well, I don’t know if it is relevant but Veronica had a bit of a drink problem.’
‘She did?’
‘Yes. .’
‘How big a problem?’
‘I think it was quite serious. She hid a flask in her handbag and took nips to add to the drinks she bought, or would go to the toilets and return looking a bit glazed.’
‘I see.’
‘She was worried about her job. She had had a warning from her boss at work.’
‘Really?’
‘So she once told me, but that was a blurt out assisted by alcohol, as well. She wouldn’t have told me if she was sober. It still didn’t stop her going out at night, and especially each weekend, but she didn’t stay in during the week. So it was getting hold of her but the thought of getting the chop at work was a real scare for her. I mean, she was for the shredder if she didn’t get her act to together.’
‘Interesting.’
‘You think it’s relevant?’
‘It could be, it would certainly make her vulnerable. Where did she work?’
‘Gordon and Moxon’s.’
‘The department store?’
‘Yes. Well, it’s more of a household goods store, everything for the householder. Veronica worked in the city centre branch, the main one. It’s a chain organization and has many shops in the north of England.’
‘So I believe.’
‘I don’t know any details; I mean any details about what made her fear losing her job. What happened that they felt they had to give her a warning, she didn’t tell me, but it had to have been serious, affecting her performance.’
‘How long before she disappeared did she tell you that?’
Susan Boyd sank back in the inexpensive metal chair upon which she sat and once again glanced out of the kitchen window. ‘Well, I remember light nights, we were in the pub, we had been in there all evening and the curtains were open. I remember a lovely sunset. . so summertime, it would be the summer before she disappeared.’
‘So about two years ago?’
‘Yes,’ Susan Boyd nodded gently, ‘yes, it would be about two years ago. But she kept her job so she pulled herself back from the brink.’
Somerled Yellich thought that Jeff Sparrow could best be described as sinewy. Yellich saw a man who was slender yet muscular, with a leathery, weather-beaten, tanned complexion, a man who had spent his working life outdoors. Jeff Sparrow occupied a similar house to that of Penny Merryweather, small, council owned, on a small estate of similar houses in Milking Nook. It had not the softness of Penny Merryweather’s house, but rather Yellich found it to have the harder, more functional character of a single man’s house. The mantelpiece, though, contained framed photographs of a younger Jeff Sparrow with a wife and a son, and spoke of happier, more fulfilled times. Sparrow sat in an armchair and his legs were of such a length that they inclined steeply from his waist before his calves fell vertically into the carpet slippers that encased his feet. He wore an old blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of equally aged lightweight summer trousers. The interior of the house had a slight mustiness about it, so Yellich found, and thought that should she be so inclined, Penny Merryweather could do much for Jeff Sparrow in terms of housekeeping. The small garden of the house was neatly kept as, Yellich thought, fully befitted a head gardener (retired).
‘Lonely man,’ Sparrow had a soft but distinct accent of the Yorkshire Wolds.
‘Mr Housecarl?’
‘Yes. Who else? A lonely man. Lovely man but very lonely, very on his own. I got the impression that was what he had got used to rather than how he wanted it to be. But a lovely man just the same.’
‘Yes, Mrs Merryweather told me what he did for your son.’
‘For me and my son. . but yes. . what other man would pay for his gardener to go to Australia and collect his son from an institution and bring him home? Lovely man. We. . his staff, just couldn’t do enough for him when I told them what he had done, the village too. He was worshipped in this village. If ever a position became vacant at Bromyards, in Mr Housecarl’s employment, a queue would form.’
