Текст книги "Fear of Drowning"

Автор книги: Peter Turnbull

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

‘Vanessa Sheringham’s a formidable woman. Have you met her?’ McCarty sat back in his chair. ‘She has some control over him, can’t work it out, but she’s the major-domo in the relationship.’

‘My sergeant’s interviewing her right now. But you know this could well clinch the case against Sheringham, he had a motive to murder them both. She was going to inform on him to his wife and he was going to inform on him to the police. What better solution than to batter the life out of the both of them?’

‘What better? Is he in custody?’

‘No. Don’t want to bring him in too early, don’t want to start the clock ticking until I’m on sure footing.’

‘And he’s not going anywhere…I can understand your caution.’

‘Have him in for another chat, though. We’ll be doing that in the light of this. What have you got on Sheringham from your perspective?’

‘Not enough. We believe that anabolic steroids have been seeping out of Sheringham’s Gym for a while now. Then one of our informers, he told us that a larger than normal amount had been shifted and the money bags was a guy called Williams. He has, or I should say, had, a reputation in the Vale for being something of a good touch for finance.’

‘He had.’

‘Anyway, all that consignment had been moved when we heard that Sheringham was twisting Williams’s arm, wanting him to fund a much larger shipment. Usual deal, Williams got his investment back plus twenty per cent once the stuff had been sold, but Williams may well be a good touch but he’s scared of the law. I got the impression that he was desperate to recover some money and was flirting with crime as a consequence, silly man. Anyway, we had him in here, a little off-the-record chat, offered him a deal, asked him to fund Sheringham, we’ll keep Sheringham under close surveillance, and when he makes the purchase we’ll pounce: we’ll get Sheringham and his supplier and the steroids, Williams gets his money back plus immunity from prosecution.’

‘Not a bad deal.’

‘That’s what we thought. He said he’d think it over. That was just last week sometime.’

Hennessey stood. ‘Well, thanks, Liam. Owe you one. Time for a second chat with Sheringham.’

Yellich found Vanessa Sheringham a very attractive woman. She would, he thought, be attractive in any man’s eyes. He thought her perhaps five foot eight or nine inches tall, angular features, high cheekbones, a mane of dark, glowing hair, blue eyes. She sat in the office of Sheringham’s Gym wearing a blue leotard with silver tights and a pair of blue and white trainers that didn’t look as’ though they were ever worn out of doors. She wore an expensive-looking wristwatch and equally expensive-looking engagement and wedding rings.

The watch and the rings were balanced by gold bracelets on the right wrist. By her smile, by the gleam in her eyes, Yellich knew that she was enjoying his eyes upon her. The woman knew she was beautiful. He disliked her intensely. It was Yellich’s experience that great beauty goes hand in hand with great cruelty and great selfishness. It had been his emotionally scarring experience to have once had an involvement with a photogenically beautiful woman, an actress, he remembered, and he had found her, and recalled her, as being self-obsessed and volatile, usually in public; making a meal out of issues other people would make light of. Yellich, looking back, if not at the time, saw her as a woman who would never know contentment, and would only approach happiness if she was on a pedestal, enjoying universal attention and approval, and getting her own way. She had been, in fact, the ugliest person to have crossed his life’s path. It had been a salutary lesson and while, since then, he had continued to enjoy the images of human female perfection, he did not yearn for any form of contact, physical or emotional, with a woman of this kind. And here in front of him was one such, enjoying his attention, and the annoying thing about it for Yellich was that she believed he was thinking exactly the opposite of what he was actually thinking.

‘So, you’ve arrested my husband?’ She smiled, but haughtily so.

‘Not yet. He is helping with enquiries.’

‘He once told me what that phrase meant. The first time he helped the police with their enquiries, he was fifteen and a policeman threatened to break his arm unless he confessed to a crime he hadn’t committed.’

‘No comment,’ Yellich said coldly. ‘So you help your husband in the gym?’

‘No.’

‘No?’ Yellich glanced to his left through the pane of glass at men and women in brightly coloured sportswear pushing weights and running on small conveyor belts, moving to music with a strong beat.

‘No. He helps me run the gym. It’s my gym. We are married but the gym is mine. It belongs to me, lock, stock and barrel. I’m a wealthy woman, I was when I married him. He was not a wealthy man, he comes from Tang Hall, he’s still there in his mind. My father’s a businessman, farming equipment, has a house in Nether Poppleton.’

‘Different side of the tracks. Literally.’

‘Yes. He’s lucky to have me, don’t you think? I am a woman with everything, looks, charm, money. He’s a nice hunk of man flesh…he at least looks the part.’

‘Appearance means a lot to you, does it?’

‘It means everything. Appearance and money. But I’m secure. If I divorce him and cast him out into the great unknown, he goes back to Tang Hall and crime. And he knows it. I can control him. If he steps out of line he’s by himself. He dare not even look at another woman. Are you married?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is your wife pretty?’

‘No.’

Vanessa Sheringham smiled.

‘She’s beautiful. She’s a very beautiful woman. In every way.’

‘I see, the old “eye of the beholder” number…’

‘We’ll keep this official if you don’t mind, Mrs Sheringham.’

‘As you wish.’ Just then the music in the gym suddenly stopped.

‘Your husband can’t be very secure in his marriage. I mean, from what you’re telling me, if you were to divorce he has no claim, even in part, on the house or the gym.’

‘He doesn’t. Both were my possession before we married and he has signed a contract that should we divorce he will not lay claim to either. He gave his name to the gym because it has a certain ring to it. Before that it was called “Vanessa’s Gym”, but Sheringham’s is a little classier sounding. Don’t you think?’

‘Perhaps.’ But privately he conceded that names of products are very, very important in terms of marketing strategy. That was why dog fish used to be sold as ‘rock salmon’. When the practice was outlawed, nobody bought dog fish, though they’d been eating the inexpensive and highly nutritious ‘rock salmon’ for generations, so Yellich had once read.

‘But yes, I suppose he is a little insecure.’ Vanessa Sheringham turned to her side and replaced another compact disc in the hi-fi machine – once again, music of a strong beat and rhythm played loudly in the gym. ‘But I like that, you know.’ She smiled as she once again turned towards Yellich. ‘It keeps him on his toes, he’s very attentive. I’m happy with the arrangement. He’s not, but that’s the way I like it. I’m not prepared to surrender the least bit of control.’

‘What I’m driving at is that your husband has a lot of motivation to keep you happy?’

‘Yes.’ Vanessa Sheringham nodded. ‘That I like…a lot of motivation to keep me happy. He’s nothing without me, and an awful lot of women would be queuing up to fill my shoes. Not only because of what nature has given me, but because I have a fit, healthy and a handsome husband who will do my least bidding because he’s terrified of our marriage ending. That’s power. Power is lovely, it’s as profound as an orgasm.’

‘That’s very interesting.’ Yellich spoke softly. ‘Very interesting indeed.’

‘Power is, I’ve always liked power.’

‘No, I meant that your husband would do much to keep his marriage alive.’

‘Oh, he would. He comes from poverty, he’s frightened of going back to it. One step out of line, as I said, and he can kiss goodbye to the good life.’

‘He must be totally faithful to you?’

‘Like I said, Mr Yellich, my husband would not even dare to look at another woman.’

‘Can you tell me how many members you have?’

‘Two hundred. About.’

‘As many as that?’

‘They don’t all come at once.’

‘So I see.’

‘Members book in for one-hour sessions. We can accommodate thirty at any one time, we’re open from eight a.m. to ten at night. So you see, we can accommodate more than twice our membership in one working day, but with about two hundred members, the gym doesn’t get crowded. They pay an annual subscription, plus an entrance fee each time they come. We also sell snacks and hot drinks and sportswear. We do all right. We…I have a nice, steady growth rate. My husband may give the impression that we’re struggling, but that’s Tang Hall man speaking. If you grow up in Tang Hall, you rapidly learn to keep quiet about your money, if you’ve got any.’

‘Can I have a look at the membership list?’

‘Do you have a warrant?’

‘No. I can get one, then we’ll search the gym, who knows what steroids we’ll find?’

‘You won’t find any.’ Vanessa Sheringham reached for a drawer in a filing cabinet. ‘But you can have a look at the list. Male or female?’

‘Male, for now.’

‘That relieves me.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes.’ Vanessa Sheringham handed Yellich a sheet of paper containing a list of names and addresses. ‘Well, if you’ve arrested my husband, or he’s at least helping you with your enquiries, and you wanted a list of my female members, then I’d start to get a little worried that I might have to divorce him. I mean, who knows what he’s been up to?’

‘Who indeed?’ Yellich scanned the list of names. ‘Or what indeed?’ He found the ‘Rs’. Michael Richardson’s name came between John Richards and Donald Rye. ‘May I keep this?’

‘Yes. We have other lists.’

‘What does your husband do in his free time?’

‘He doesn’t have any free time. The only two days of the week when he’s not here with me at the gym are Wednesdays and Sundays, they’re our ladies-only days. On those days he’s addressing a list of jobs I leave for him. I add on, he does and ticks off when done. In any order he likes, keeps him busy about the house or collecting things. That’s how we work it, that’s how I like it.’

Yellich stood and said he’d see himself out.

Louise D’Acre took the length of scaffolding and held it against the linear fracture on the top of Amanda Williams’s skull. She rotated it along its length over the skull. ‘It’s a little wide,’ she said. She wore a green smock, the laboratory smelled of formaldehyde. Behind her, the laboratory assistant, Mr Filey, dutifully arranged surgical instruments on a trolley.

‘It’s possible,’ she added. ‘It’s not impossible but I cannot say that it was this or any other length of scaffolding which killed her. I’ve a better chance of identifying the murder weapon by examining her skull than his, the single blow, you see, classic case of going out like a light, left a neat injury. His head was battered repeatedly. His death might have been prolonged.’

‘Prolonged?’ Hennessey asked.

‘By a few seconds, but a second is a long time, long enough to know what’s happening to you and if you’re conscious for four or five seconds, then it’s long enough to feel emotion.’

‘Such as fear?’

‘Such as terror, such as the certainty of death this instant…knowing you haven’t the time to prepare for it. He knew what was happening to him. She, on the other hand, either did or did not know what happened to her husband. His head was battered out of shape…there was real passion there. In fact, his skull reminded me of the Choctaw Indian skulls. They were apparently one of the east coast tribes of what is now the USA. One of the early victims of the Pilgrim Fathers either by way of execution or the measles. But they used to flatten their skulls with tight bindings, in much the same way that the Chinese used to bind the feet of their girl children. Max Williams’s skull reminded me of the Choctaw Indian skull I once saw in a museum of anthropology. It was battered out of shape, which may or may not have been instantaneous. But she, bless her, was despatched by means of a single blow. Probably with something thinner than a length of scaffolding.’

She handed the piece of metal back to Hennessey.

‘Thanks, Dr D’Acre.’ Hennessey slipped the scaffolding pipe back into the holdall he had used to carry it from his car into the hospital, to the department of pathology.

‘Why pick on a length of scaffolding as the murder weapon?’

‘Oh, just that one of our suspects was seen and heard threatening Mr Williams with just such an object.’

‘Fair enough, but the murder weapon, if you find it, will be covered with blood and hair and possibly slivers of bone from Mrs Williams. I was able to obtain some grit and oil from the back of the heads of both the Williamses.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Would have faxed you, still will, but I did note that they were laid face up on a cold surface soon after death, that accounts for the hypostasis on the posterior aspects of both bodies. If there is a garage adjoining their home, then that’s where they were laid.’

‘There is.’

‘Might be worth getting the Scene of Crime people to give it the once-over.’

‘Might well.’

‘So you’ve got a suspect already?’

‘Got two, in fact. Both have motives and Sergeant Yellich has had the inspired notion that if we can link the two together, then we can really build a case, at least we can begin to. The only problem is that they’re not going to cough and neither of them are alibi merchants. They know the value of leaving the burden of proof with the police.’

‘Hard life you have. If my customers don’t tell me what I need to know, I can always put them back on ice, and pick my colleagues’ brains, or just leave them until medical science advances and tells us…oh…I’m sorry…’

‘No problem.’ Hennessey smiled. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

Thursday afternoon

…in which Sergeant Yellich feels he travels back in time and Chief Inspector Hennessey meets a pleasantly unpleasant individual.

‘A bit like Humpty Dumpty before the fall.’ Yellich swilled his coffee around in his mug. ‘Milady’s view of the world is a little askew, as is her view of her place in it.’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘When her eyes are opened, she’ll have a great fall and she just won’t get put together again no matter how many horses and men His Highness can offer.’

‘But there’s a link between Richardson and Sheringham. Your intuition is paying off, Sergeant. It’s paying off handsomely. Handsomely.’ Hennessey leaned forwards on his desk and beamed at Yellich. ‘We’re still a tad short of evidence though. I couldn’t hold Sheringham.’

‘Not even with the fingerprint in the bathroom?’

‘Not if he had been a regular visitor to the house. His solicitor jumped on that point, pounced, fell on it like a sparrow hawk.’

‘Fair enough, I suppose.’

‘Annoying though. But onwards and upwards – we’re getting there Yellich, we’re getting there. And the motivation is strong now, very strong, especially for Sheringham: he was scared that Max Williams was going to blow the whistle on him to the Drug Squad and he was scared that Amanda Williams was going to blow the whistle on him to his old lady. Makes him something of a Taipan in my mind.’

‘A what, sir?’

‘A Taipan, it’s an Australian snake. It’s just a nugget of information I stored away. You see, snake venom falls into two distinct categories, apparently. One that paralyses the nervous system, and one that coagulates the blood preventing it being pumped round the body.’

‘Blimey.’

‘As you say. The Taipan isn’t the most venomous snake in the world in terms of the strength of its poison, but it’s the only snake in the world whose venom is double acting. It both coagulates the blood of its victim, and paralyses the central nervous system and that makes it the most deadly snake in the world. Sheringham is like that, he’s got a double motivation.’

‘And Richardson too. He wasn’t a million miles from suspicion in the Kerr case, as you’ve pointed out. A man who owed Richardson money is found in a field with his head smashed in and his brains sticking out. And now Williams owes Richardson money and his head is also smashed to a pulp. That’s too much of a coincidence, Sergeant. And both would, in a sense, be more angry with Max Williams than Amanda.’

‘That would tie in with what Dr D’Acre said. You know, Mr Williams was murdered passionately, Mrs Williams coldly. One single, neat blow to the head would enable Sheringham to sleep at night. But Richardson’s anger would make him want to repeatedly batter Max Williams, and keep battering him, long after he’s dead. Then they team up and tidy the house, sanitize the crime scene and dig the grave, easy job for men built like they’re built. Pity they’re not stupid enough to alibi each other.’

‘We’ve still got to get the Crown Prosecution Service to run with it, it’s not for nothing that the GPS is known as the Criminal Protection Society in the canteen and the Police Club.’ Hennessey paused. ‘You look worried, Yellich.’

‘I am. It’s the cleaning of the house, sir.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, it’s not actually politically correct.’

‘Cleaning a house?’

‘No…my point. It’s not politically correct.’

‘Come on, within these four walls, out with it.’

‘Well, boss, it has a woman’s touch to it.’

Hennessey paused. ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

‘I just can’t see the likes of Richardson or Sheringham being efficient with a cloth and a bottle of disinfectant.’

‘I can’t either.’

‘Mrs Richardson!’ Both men spoke at once and held eye contact as they did so.

Hennessey completed it for both of them. ‘It was her livelihood that went down the tubes as well. By the sounds of it, Mrs Sheringham would be more likely to murder her husband than either of the Williamses, nor can I see her being handy with the housework, that sort always has a “woman who does”. Is that the phrase?’

‘Mrs Richardson claims she was in Ireland over the weekend. If that alibi can be broken we’re on our way, boss.’

‘We are indeed.’

‘So what do we do now, boss, pick her up?’

‘Yes.’ Hennessey sat back in his chair. ‘Or do we? I wonder? No. Look, you seem to have a way with the ladies…’

‘I wouldn’t say that, boss.’ Yellich grinned.

‘You did well with Mrs Sheringham, you got the measure of her, all right. Go and see Mrs Richardson, take the measure of her. Me, I’m going to Selby.’

‘Selby?’

‘Selby. “Shored-up” has contacted me. Reckons he’s got information to sell. You know him and his games…but he’s come up with the goods before. And the weather’s fine, and Selby’s a pleasant little town. It’s certainly better than the last place we met. Have you ever been to Doncaster on a rainy day in January?’

‘No, can’t say I have, boss.’

‘Don’t. When you’ve seen her, visit his bank.’

Yellich had to keep reminding himself to keep an open mind.

The phrase ‘salt of the earth’ kept occurring to him when he spoke to Mrs Richardson. Yet he was all too well aware that the most unlikely people had committed desperate, terrible crimes. In his early days as a fresh-faced constable, he had allowed first impressions to cloud his judgement and let possible suspects go on their way only to find later that they had committed the crime in question and had slithered out of the arms of the law with a display of relaxed innocence. Only now, with some years’ service behind him, did he accept that everybody can commit crime, and even the most unlikely person will do so. Reluctantly, he accepted the police-canteen culture which states that, “They’re all guilty unless you know otherwise. And I mean know.”

‘There’s no point in denying it, son.’ Colleen Richardson was a tall, well-built, large-boned woman, who sat in a leather armchair in the front room of her Georgian-style house at the entrance of a new build estate on the edge of Huntingdon.

A Persian cat slunk into the room and hopped silently onto Yellich’s lap.

‘That means he likes you,’ Mrs Richardson smiled. She spoke with a strong Irish accent. ‘Not all our visitors get that treatment. I tend to let my animals do my thinking for me. I’ve found over the years that if they like someone then that person is all right, and they’ve never been proved wrong. Female intuition is nothing compared to animal instinct. But if she annoys you, lift her off.’

‘She doesn’t bother me.’ Yellich stroked the cat’s ears and back. The beast began to purr softly. He pondered that cats are nice creatures unless you happen to be a mouse. Your view depends on your standpoint. Mrs Richardson, with her pleasant manner and very well-appointed home, with framed black and white photographs of old Ireland – a man on a cycle, on an endless rural track, another which could be anywhere but was entitled ‘Phoenix Park 1912’ – may well be a nice woman, unless you were her victim. Then he said, ‘No point in denying it. What do you mean?’

Colleen Richardson reached for a cigarette from a cigarette box which was far too elaborately designed for Yellich’s taste, and lit it with a cigarette lighter of the type which, he thought, had gone out of fashion many years earlier. A huge paperweight of a contraption, conventional mechanism at the top but a body as big as an orange, and the colour of same.

‘No point in denying it. He hated Williams. I’ve never known two things about my husband. I’ve never known any reason to fear him, and I’ve never known him capable of hate. The Williamses came into our lives and I knew both. Reckon after twenty-something years of marriage, I finally knew my husband. But they say that you never really know the person you live with, either they keep changing so they’re one step ahead of you, or you keep discovering something new about them. But Michael didn’t kill them.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know what I just said, but I do know my husband well enough to know that he didn’t kill them. He’s got a terrible temper, but if he was violent I would have seen that by now, surely to God. I mean, he’s been in a few pub fights when he’s been too much in the black stuff and when he was a youth, but nothing since and nothing when he’s been sober.’

She inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. ‘To think that when I went away to Ireland I thought things couldn’t be worse. Michael’s business in the bog, us having to sell this house to pay his crew and supplies, and this, the home we’d worked so hard for…Michael built these houses, did you know?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Two streets, for young or junior professional people, he picked out a corner plot for this house. Extra bit of land, you see…so I went to see my old father in Galway, told him things couldn’t get worse and sure, when I came back he’s become a murder suspect. Just shows, when you think you’re on the bottom, when you think it can’t get any worse, you get pushed down even further…I mean, in the name of the Holy Mother, where is the justice in that? Is there justice in the world, let me ask you that?’

‘We haven’t charged your husband with anything, Mrs Richardson.’

‘Being a suspect is bad enough. Thank the Almighty our children are away so they don’t see this.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Leeds. They’re flapping their wings, their father taught them the trade, so they’ve moved away. Richardson Brothers, Builders, Leeds. Sure, I can see Michael asking them for a job. You’ll be making a case against Michael?’

‘No. That’s old-fashioned police thinking.’ Yellich continued to stroke the cat and then stopped and lifted the beast from his lap. It occurred to him that by favouring Mrs Richardson’s pet he was blurring professional boundaries. The cat arched its back in indignation and curled up on the deep pile carpet in front of the hearth into which Yellich noted that Mrs Richardson was in the habit of throwing her cigarette butts. ‘We used to do that. Identify a suspect, try to build a case against him, if we could we’d run with it. Now we tie.’

‘Tie?’

‘TIE—Trace. Interview. Eliminate. Cast a wide net, trace anybody and everybody who has some connection with the crime, interview them, and if we can’t eliminate them we…look at them a little more closely.’

‘And Michael?’

‘He hasn’t been eliminated.’

‘So he’s a suspect?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the name…he lost more fights than he won. Often he went down to men half his size. We’re ruined. Finished. Now this…’

‘So your husband’s business is finished?’

‘Aye. So he says. A couple of little jobs, but that won’t pay the bills. So the house, our home, it’ll have to be sold. We came with nothing, we’ll go with nothing.’

‘He could sell the house he built for Max Williams?’

‘Not at a profit. And anyway, the house is just too fancy, a lot of fixtures and fittings, sunken baths and gold-plated taps. It’ll not sell well in this part of England. In the south, maybe, but the north of England, those sort of knick-knacks just are not to folks’ taste. He could sell it, to be sure, but at such a loss…Michael thinks we’ll be better off selling this house, but we want this house, not Williams’s fairy-tale design. See, the upshot is that we’re finished and that’s down to Williams.’

‘It’s like your husband blundered into something.’

‘That’s putting it mildly.’ Colleen Richardson took one last deep drag on the half-smoked nail and flicked the still burning butt into the fire grate where it smouldered harmlessly into extinction. ‘See, Williams has a…had a reputation in the Vale for being a good touch.’

‘A good touch?’

‘For money.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Aye, so he was. A lot of businesses have been started up and kept going in the Vale over the last ten years or so using Williams’s money as seed money. His name is well-known by businessmen in the Vale. See, that’s why Michael went ahead and built the house, Williams’s reputation, his money supply was endless. Williams must have known what he was doing, must have to make money like he could throw it around. It was like he was making the stuff…Michael said he bought into companies when they were new, helped them off the ground, rode piggyback and then sold his share, or his shares, when they were up and running with full order books. Reckon that’s how Michael got in so deeply, based on Williams’s reputation.’

‘Reckon that’s it. Tell me, did your husband ever mention a fella by the name of Sheringham?’

‘The man at the gym? That’s the only Sheringham we know.’

‘What is your husband’s relationship with him?’

‘Tim Sheringham? Drinking partners. There’s some age gap between them. Twenty years or so. More. They met at the gym. Tim’s the owner, I think. They occasionally went for a beer after Michael had been for his workout. Michael always booked in for the last session, nine till ten, so there was an hour’s troughing time left. That’s how stupid men are. All that good done to their little bodies and then they go to the pub and undo it all. But Michael and Tim Sheringham were not in business or anything.’

‘But they knew each other in a social manner?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Do you know when they last went out together?’

‘Last week, last Thursday evening. That’s Michael’s night at the gym.’

‘You were in York then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not in Ireland?’

‘No. Left for Ireland on the Friday. Returned yesterday.’

‘Your father will vouch for that?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Colleen Richardson flushed with anger.

‘What I said. He’ll vouch for that if we contact the Gardai in Galway, ask them to call on him, he’ll tell them that you were with him?’

‘He’ll tell them nothing. They’ll need to get where he is before he’ll speak to them.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning he’s in the ground, God rest him. He died a year ago this weekend gone and I was not there, God forgive me. I went to his graveside and I told him how I was, how I was not.’

‘Who else did you speak to?’

‘Nobody. I stayed in his wee terraced house. It still belongs to us while we contact two of my brothers to sort the estate.’

‘So nobody can confirm you were in Ireland?’

‘No. You tying me now, are you?’

‘Should we?’

‘Get out!’ Colleen Richardson leapt to her feet, her fists clenched to her sides. The cat ran from the room. ‘Get out! Get out!’

‘Going to get gobbled up soon, I expect, Mr Yellich. We can’t survive, can’t compete, can’t offer the breadth of service to compete with the main high street banks. But we’re clinging on with our fingertips, proud to be the last independent bank in England. Over three hundred years of continuous trading. Still owned by the original two founding families, the Sachses and the Lindseys. Used to be called Sachs and Lindsey’s, but in a doff-the-hat to modernization, we changed our name to the Yorkshire and Lancashire Bank, and brought in those infernal machines which still make me believe all our employees spend their day watching television. Ledgers were good enough in my day. Once we had five hundred branches, now we’ve got fifty. Most on this side of the Pennines.’

Benjamin Ffoulkes, the manager of the York branch of the Yorkshire and Lancashire Bank, was a portly man with a handlebar moustache, a yellow waistcoat and a maroon coloured suit. He sat in a swivel chair in front of a huge wooden desk in an office of panelled wood, with velvet curtains, maroon to match his suit, held back from covering the sash windows with tasselled cords, yellow to match his waistcoat. A grandfather clock stood majestically in the corner of the room, ticking softly. Yellich found it had a quarter jack and so chimed every fifteen minutes.

‘We quite enjoy our quaintness, Mr Yellich. We have our computers, as I’ve mentioned, but we have retained our atmosphere. This smells and sounds and looks like a bank of yesteryear, and we have applications for positions from many youngsters who want employment with us because of it. Our cheque books used to be as big as school exercise books but we had to standardize because retailers refused to accept them. One more nail in our coffin. But we enjoy a lot of customer loyalty, this branch particularly; there’s a lot of old money in the Vale of York and that helps us to stay afloat. So a concession here and there is a price we can afford. But you’ve come to discuss the account of the late Mr Williams, of Bramley on Ouse?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Mmm…’

‘A problem?’

‘It’s one of ethics, really.’