Chapter 4

We stopped talking to eat the meal that had been put in front of us. It was a seafood dish, but I couldn’t pick one of the ingredients. When I asked, Queenie told me that it was Moreton Bay Bugs and King Prawns in a Hollandaise sauce with a Greek salad and lightly toasted bread pieces. It was delicious and I told the waiter that when he came to pick up the plate. Queenie smiled.

“This is one of the things I love about living here. There are so many different styles of cooking, you could eat something different every day for a month. Now, you said that Jason had played in Twelfth Night and was Yorick in Hamlet. Yorick was just a skull.”

“That’s right, the bones were missing the head and had been rendered. I guess that his skull was the one used.”

“If it was a real skull, it will be somewhere in the school. They don’t throw anything out. I expect that you could find all the props and costumes, somewhere. What you’re suggesting, if I’ve heard you right, is that Adrian disposed of one body and murdered another boy as well. That man was afraid of his own shadow! Harry simply pushed him aside when the rehearsals started, and he was too timid to regain control. I never spoke to him, in case I outed myself, but my gaydar picked him from the first day I met him. He had all the signs; picky, petty, pretty, and placid. If you say that he was seen near Hewitts Circus, he may have been out looking for sex, that bit of grassland and the carpark was a gay beat for a while.”

“So, you’re suggesting that whoever was dumping the body saw him, then forced him to store the bones? That would mean that the murderer knew him already. I know that one of the investigating officers thought that his car being torched at the school was to hide any evidence that it had carried a body. I wonder if it was torched to make them think that. If they had looked at it, there may not have been any evidence to find.”

“Where was it parked? I know that he used to put it outside the gym and go in through the back door.”

“It was there, behind the gym. You should be a detective, Queenie, you can think outside the box. Thank you for that, I’ll follow that line to see where it leads when I get home.”

We finished our meal and I paid. Queenie told me that she couldn’t swing it as gratis, but I was given ‘mate’s rates’ which brought it down to something close to what I would have paid in London. She then hailed a cab and took me back to Kings Cross, where I spent a wonderful night, losing any inhibitions I may have had, dancing in two or three gay venues. I had heard about Sydney and the Mardi Gras, but this place was jumping every week of the year. I met every letter of the LGTBQ, and then some. It was almost dawn when I got back to my hotel and slept until after midday.

I got room service to send up a sandwich and a pot of tea, then put my buds in my ears and listened to what I had recorded on Saturday. The first bit was a bit fuzzy, so I fast forwarded to our talk over dinner. The information that Queenie had given me opened up the investigation a little more. If Harriet was the murderer, then it could have been her that just went outside and torched the car. I had been told that she was a smoker, it wouldn’t be far-fetched for her to have had a small can of lighter fuel.

I made some notes for myself. As I thought, I added the note that we should try and find out who else knew Adrian, and whether he had anyone else living with him who could have brought the ammunition box to the garden shed. It pays not to overlook any branch of a possible narrative, even one that is still invisible.

Around four, I showered, dressed, and went out for a walk to clear my head. Monday, Queenie had told me, was a public holiday, and I was going to be picked up for a day out. I hadn’t been treated like this since I had been a teenager, and it felt good. I realised that Queenie acted like a girlfriend, unlike the others in my team.

On Monday, I was surprised, and happy, to meet Richard, a charming guy with a wicked sense of humour, and Jack, another teacher who was to be my companion for the day. It was Jack’s car and I sat in the front with him, as he drove us out of the city and into a wonderland that they told me was the Blue Mountains. We had lunch overlooking a huge valley and rode the cable car with a plexiglass floor so you could look down at your feet and see nothing for hundreds of feet to the valley floor. After that we arrived at the valley floor on the steepest cliff railway I’ve ever been on. Later on, we went to a vineyard in the Hunter region and tried some wines, then having dinner. All in all, it was a lovely day, nothing said about the case, no cares in the world. When they dropped me off, I gave each one a hug and a kiss on the cheek, promising Queenie that I’d let her know how it all panned out.

My flight out, on Tuesday, was in the evening to arrive in Abu Dhabi before breakfast on Wednesday. I spent the morning, after checking out and putting my case into the store, taking a ferry ride from Circular Quay, under that magnificent bridge to Luna Park. There I just wandered, looking at the rides and thinking back to my childhood days when we used to go to Southend. Back at Circular Quay, I walked to Eastbank for lunch and then walked around the glorious gardens and looked in the Conservatory, before strolling the shops again and having a light afternoon tea. Back at the hotel, I retrieved my bag and got a taxi to the airport. I had been here just four days and was already feeling sorry to be leaving.

As I sat in the airport departure lounge, I started thing about how I felt, because I did feel different to the person who had arrived. During my time here I had acted as a woman would. I had danced, I had shopped, I had hung on to a man’s arm as we plummeted into that valley in the Blue Mountains. I had gone into the toilets with Queenie and gossiped about Jack as we did our faces. I thought of the thing she had said, at that time, before we went back to our menfolk.

“Polly, I can tell that you’ve allowed your job to get in the way to you living a full life. Take it from me, girlfriend, you have to let it slide, sooner or later. You’ll never properly feel right in your body until you give yourself to a man, to take and control you, while giving you pleasure. Keep your feelings bottled and you’ll end up a spinster, and that’s no fun.”

I then smiled as I thought of Jean, and her new man with a good cock. There was a woman who had kept things bottled, most of the time, and now regretted not breaking away. Then there was Angela, who was getting it regularly after going without when Bernice was off getting reamed. These were all things I’d never contemplated like this. I decided, that if I meet a man who floated my boat, I wouldn’t hold back.

We were boarded and I found that I had a window seat in the economy section. As I went to put my big bag into the locker, I heard a voice behind me say, “Here, let me do that for you.” I turned and a smiling man held out his hand. I gave him my bag and he heaved it up into the locker. I thanked him and sat down, to have him sit next to me.

After we had taken off, I pulled out my trusty novel and tried to get interested. It was a difficult job, as I could almost feel the body heat of this man beside me. My mind was in a whirl, with the dominant thought being that he was so good, he was probably spoken for. That was a thought that was very new to me. I got to the end of a chapter, gave a big sigh, and closed the book. He leaned towards me.

“That’s what I thought when I read that on my way to New Zealand a couple of months ago. I used to like that author, but her books have taken on a similarity that becomes boring.”

“I agree with you on that. I’m only a third of the way through, and, unless there’s a new character we haven’t met yet, the killer is the mis-understood oldest son of the gamekeeper.”

“You must be a detective; it took me most of the book to work it out. I’m Bill Henderson, by the way.”

“Polly Ibbotson, and I am a detective, working in Skegness.”

“Skegness, indeed! I’m going there to be a groomsman at my friend’s wedding, in a few weeks. I think that it’s the second marriage for both of them.”

“If your friend is Steve Parker, and he’s marrying Angela Williamson, then I’m on the list as a bridesmaid.”

“What a wonderful co-incidence! We will be able to dance all night, and then cry out for more!”

“Don’t remind me, I danced all night on Saturday, and it took me until Monday to recover.”

“So, did you have a special guy to be his dancing queen?”

“No, I was there with a teacher called Queenie, who I had come to talk to about a case I’m on. She is into dramatics and wanted me to have a good time in Kings Cross before I went home again. Not that I’m gay, but that side of town certainly know how to party. What about you?”

“What, gay or single?”

He looked me in the eyes and smiled, as I waited for his answer.

“I’m not gay, but I am single. My job takes me away from home a lot and also keeps me in rather isolated places for a lot of the time. I work with wildlife, mainly sea creatures. I’m one of the rangers at Donna Nook Reserve, and I’ve just spent three months at Kaikoura with the fur seals and whales.”

“My current case started with a pair of Common seal pups being stolen from the Natureland Sanctuary. We found them hanging in an outhouse in North Somerton, in strips.”

“North Somerton, I know it well. There’s a house I use during winter. Donna Nook is just up the road, on the mudflats, and the Grey seals arrive at the end of the year to pup. A lot of our time is spent trying to keep people out, those seals can get nasty when they’ve got young.”

We spent the rest of the trip, when we weren’t snoozing, talking about my time in Sydney, his time in New Zealand, and lots of other things. When we arrived in Abu Dhabi, we spent the day sightseeing, eating exotic foods and laughing a lot. I didn’t use the bed I should have, instead giving myself to a man for the first time in my life. It was lucky I had bought some lube in the airport chemist while he was finding our bags, or else I would have been quite sore on the first morning of my new life as a proper woman.

When we got to London, we had told each other almost everything about our lives. I held back on the fact that I spent much of mine as a guy. He had been taken to the airport, so we went and got my car out of the carpark, and we set off for Lincolnshire. We stopped at a small pub for dinner and stopped at a motel in Cambridge for the night.

Neither of us were due back at work until Monday, but I wanted to give the girls the recorder to work with. We dropped our bags at my house, and he commented that the bed looked inviting. I dragged him back out to the car and took him to the Annex, telling him that everything he might see here was not to be talked about.

The girls welcomed me back but told me that they had planned to vacuum later in the day. I told Jessica and Julia to look after Bill while I dragged Cathy into my office.

“Cathy, I’ve got a record of what I spoke about with Queenie. The first couple of hours is a bit muffled as the unit was in my bag. Most of it is just general talk, but I now remember something she said about talking to Adrian. It’s about an hour in. It didn’t stick, at the time, but there’s things that were said during a meal we had that links with it. Don’t tell me what you’ve done while I’m away, we’ll wait until Monday, and you can all give me a report. Now, let me pull Bill away from the others. Before you ask, he is a specialist in seals that I managed to talk to. Don’t give me that smirk, it’s all perfectly above board, but, yes, we did spend some time together.”

“More than just time. You’re not the woman who left her, I can see a gleam in your eye and laughter in your voice that wasn’t there, before. Welcome to true womanhood, I’m happy and proud for you.”

We found Bill at one of the workstations, looking at a picture of mudflats, while Jessica showed him how to move and zoom the camera. I had to tap him on the shoulder to get him to look up.

“Polly, this is fantastic. This is the feed from our cameras at Donna Nook. For years I’ve looked at the pictures, never realising that I can control the cameras like this. If you can log on to cameras all over the country, like this, we are safe from terrorists. I’m truly impressed.”

He thanked the girls for showing him something new and I pulled him away. We went to the Natureland Sanctuary and spoke to them. He was well known there but it was the first time for me. I let the owners know that we would try to make sure that no-one tried to steal seals and they thanked me for my part in finding the sealnappers. I talked them into improving the camera coverage, with one pointing from the back of the land, linked to a remote server so it would record anyone coming in, even if they did destroy it.

Bill directed me to his favourite mudflat. There were only a couple of seals in the distance.

“There should be a few more, the rest will be off, fishing. It’s packed at the end of the year.”

I stood and looked out towards the distant water; the vista was strangely comforting. He stood behind me and put his arms around my waist.

“This is lovely, I’ve never been here, before.”

“Nor have I, Polly. I’ve never met a girl who would even think about standing here unless they were a university student who wanted some work experience.”

“If I didn’t know that the camera, over there, had moved to watch us, I’d ask you to take me, now. Instead, don’t you have to check out your house?”

I turned to kiss him and then we went back to the car to go to the house. It was not far from the house which still had police tape across the front.

“Do you know the neighbours?”

“A bit, most of them have been here for ages but I’ve spent enough time to be on speaking terms.”

“Can we go and see them? You can tell them that you’re back but may not be here some nights. They might talk to me if I’m with you. There’s things I want to talk to them about Adrian, who lived in that house with the tape. I’ve got something niggling my brain that needs honest answers.”

“That’s all right. Can we tell them that you’re my girl? Several of them have been trying to pair me off with local girls, it would be nice for that to stop.”

“Am I your girl?”

“Yes, please. I think that I’m your man, and I also think that it’s more than sex, between us, although that part is wonderful.”

“More than just wonderful, my love. I happen to think that it’s totally glorious. Just talking about it makes me damp.”

He unlocked the house, and we went in. About an hour later, we re-emerged to say hello to the neighbours, the flush on my cheeks being a sure give-away of what we had been doing. I had noticed a few curtains moving when we had arrived. That would let them know that he was well and truly taken, now.

We started with the houses that were away from the crime scene. Three cups of tea, two biscuits and a piece of cake later, I had some of the answers I was wanting. With all the neighbours wanting to ask about that house, having already seen me outside, meant that I could tell them enough to settle their own queries, and they then were happy to talk about Adrian, remembering the time he had lived there. It turned out that he wasn’t the mousey recluse he had previously been described as.

The houses closer to the crime scene gave me more, as well as more tea and biscuits. Everyone we spoke to were happy for Bill and intrigued that he was dating a Detective Inspector. One woman asked us when we were going to start a family and Bill remarked that he would borrow a couple of seal pups for us to look after.

While we were there, he started up his Jeep, the diesel sounding a little noisy with lack of use before settling down. He then locked up and followed me back to my house. Tonight, that inviting bed was going to get a workout.

By Sunday evening, when Bill kissed me before driving back to his house, I had decided that I loved this man and how he made me feel. I had crossed that line between just acting like a woman to actually feeling like a woman. Queenie had be absolutely right, I just needed to let myself relax to be able to enjoy the rest of my life.

Monday morning, I went to the Annex to hear what my team had been up to. The first hour was taken up with me having to tell them about my time in Sydney and then how I managed to snare a hunk for myself. Then, we got on to what we now knew about Young Harry. It seemed that we didn’t know an awful lot. We had her birth, childhood, and schooling, but the five years before she resigned was very patchy. We knew which gym she attended but nobody there now had ever met her. We also knew that she did, indeed have a sister who was petite and a model. Cathy had downloaded the police report of the incident that halted her career.

That story was fairly typical, for the times. She had stayed petite with various drugs, got deeply in debt with her supplier, and had been grabbed when walking home from a party, raped and had her face slashed to the point where she would never work again. She had committed suicide in 2010. I wondered if it had been this that set Harriet off in a killing spree. That, though, was something where we had not found any actual evidence. Cathy had concluded that Harriet may have been the one to torch the car, being easy to pop outside, sprinkle some lighter fluid and toss in a match, getting back inside her office before it really took hold. She had been the one to call the fire brigade, but not before the petrol tank blew up.

We discussed the facts that we had. Then I added what I had found out from the neighbours.

“I spoke to some of the neighbours on Friday, Bill has a place just around the corner from the crime scene. I have it, on good authority from more than one, that Adrian used to have lots of visitors, with two who would stay for days at a time. The time period is between 2010 and 2016. One of those visitors just had to be Harriet, and she would stay for up to a week in the school holidays. One observant lady described Adrian looking like a ghost during those times. The other was a well-dressed man, with a flash car, one witness saying it was a Bentley, and that Adrian would look flushed in the mornings while that man was there.”

“That would fit what Queenie told you,” said Cathy. “No-one, at the time, considered Adrian to have been gay. If we take what you’ve been told to its logical conclusion, he must have been a slave to a couple of doms. I listened to all of the recording and the part where Queenie told you that she had rung Adrian to see how he was going and suggest that he emigrated because he could have a good job in Australia now looks right. What was it he said? That Adrian said that he wouldn’t be allowed to leave. When Queenie said, later, that he was a timid gay but still in the closet, it all adds up.”

“Right, and if Harriet was a dom, we may be looking at a group. Cathy, can you set me up with a talk with Inspector Jackson and somebody from his Vice Squad who had been around between 2010 and 2017. We need more answers. Now, I’d better let Dawlish know I’m back and have a talk with him, letting him know where we may be going on this one. I warned the neighbours that they may have a visit from a police artist, if we can get a likeness of this other man, we may be able to take it further. Now, just one question, Jessica, did you get any still pictures on Friday from the mudflat camera? I’d like one for my bedside table.”

When I left them, I had three pictures, all good definition, with me and Bill looking out over the flats. I knew that I should have reprimanded them for improper use of the surveillance equipment, but we all thought that they were nice pictures of the new me, and I couldn’t disagree with that.

My discussion with Dawlish was good, with him worried that we might be heading up a blind alley but letting us continue to run with it. I went to the shops to find frames for the pictures and also try to buy some sexy nightdresses, then went back to the Annex. Cathy had organised a meeting, in Grimsby, so I spent the rest of the day writing up notes for when I was there. A lot had changed since the first time I had spoken to Jackson, and I needed to make it succinct for them. Their help would be crucial in the next phase of the investigation.

I picked up some take-away on the way home, wondering how I was going to finish a non-Bill day. I showered and tried on one of my new nighties, hoping that when Bill was with me, he would like the feel of my body through it. I didn’t have to wonder for long. As, about seven, there was a rumble of a diesel motor outside, which stopped and the there was a knock. I saw that it was Bill, so I opened the door with just my nightie on.

“Can I help you, sir, you look concerned?”

“Polly, darling, you look wonderful. I was sitting in my kitchen and suddenly realised that I couldn’t spend another hour without you, in my arms.”

“Well, my love, here I am, and you know where the bedroom is. Why don’t you close that door and come – in.”

Marianne Gregory © 2023