Chapter 5

Needless to say, he liked the feel of my body through the nightie but liked it even better without the nightie in between. As we laid, entwined, we talked about whether he should just move in here. It wasn’t a long way from Donna Nook, and he didn’t own the house, it was property of the Society.

In the light of morning, he commented on the photo that now stood on the vanity. I told him that I had another for my desk at the Annex, with a third for him. He wouldn’t need it now, so we decided to put it on the mantlepiece in the lounge. I asked him, after breakfast, if he could take me to the Annex because I wanted to take one of our unmarked cars to Grimsby for a meeting.

He dropped me off and I went in to see the team before I left. While I was there, my phone rang, and it was Angela. She told me that she wanted to set up a meal, Saturday evening, at the place we had eaten in Boston. She mentioned that it would be a chance to meet my partner for the wedding, Steve had tried ringing him, last night, but he hadn’t answered. I didn’t tell her that I had heard the phone but was too close to an orgasm to worry about it, and he was at the tipping point, himself.

On my way to Grimsby, I was a little over the limit and caught up with Bill, who drove like an older guy. Dropping in behind him I gave him a short blast on the siren and put the flashing lights on. He pulled over and I got out and went to the driver’s window.

“Good morning, Sir, Are you aware that you are driving within all the road rules.”

He started laughing.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack, there, Polly. I’ve never been pulled over, before. I’ve seen it on TV, but the real thing is a shock.”

“I’ve always wanted to do that, but you usually have to be a traffic officer to play with the siren. I just stopped you to say that there’s a missed call on your phone. Steve and Angela want us to meet before the wedding, at a meal in Boston on Saturday evening. That’s all, have a nice day, sir, see you back home.”

I sat in my car, lights turned off, as he pulled out. It suddenly struck me that I was being playful. I hadn’t felt playful for so many years it didn’t matter. I looked in the mirror and pulled out to continue my way to Grimsby with a smile on my face.

At the police station in Grimsby, I was shown to a conference room where DI Jackson and his sergeant were talking to two other officers I hadn’t met before. Jackson introduced me to DI Hannaford and his sergeant, DS Evans. Hannaford told me that the two of them had been working vice since 2009. Jackson told me that he hadn’t told them much.

“Right, then. The case came about when uniformed found a box of bones at a house in North Somerton. The house was being used as a boarding house for fishermen, working at the Icelandic Factory, here in Grimsby. The house had been owned by a teacher, called Adrian Jeffries, who DI Jackson had interviewed regarding a dumped body. Jeffries was given an alibi and the Inspector told Jackson that the teacher was free and clear.”

“That was Ramsay, I think he retired a couple of years ago.”

I don’t think I’ve seen a man roll his eyes before, but that was what Hannaford did.

“Now, that body was one of six that had been dumped in various public places, between 2010 and 2016. The bones that were found had died, we think, in 2017 or 2018. I’ll get to that later. There had been no links between the bodies and no reason behind the motives for their deaths, other than they’d been raped and strangled, while dressed as women.”

“Now, I have looked at the other people that gave Jeffries his alibi. I emailed the DI to tell him that one of them, Quentin Merrilands, had emigrated to Australia two years before that alibi was put forward. The headmaster, Gordon Holdfast, had retired in 2017, at 70, and died of Covid in 2020, just a few months after Jeffries had died. I went to see Jean Holdfast, and she told me that there were no meals with the other teachers that she could remember. The two teachers were both involved in the plays that the school had become well-known for, and that there was another person I should speak to, a lady called Harriet Young, who the boys called Young Harry. She has been described a hulk of a woman, the gym teacher and was also the assistant director of the plays that the school put on. I was told that she just brushed Jeffries aside and ran the rehearsals with a rod of iron.”

“Last week I had a long conversation with Quentin Merrilands, now called Queenie after her transition. She told me that Jeffries was a timid little man, totally unlike someone who would dump one body and murder another boy. She also told me that she had spoken to Jeffries to see how he was getting on and suggested that he go to Australia, because there would be a good job for him. Jeffries, she said, had passed on the opportunity, saying that he would not be allowed to do that.”

Hannaford and Jackson looked at each other and said, in unison, “Slave.”

“Exactly what I thought. Last week I had a few talks with the neighbours close to the house at North Somerton. They told me that Jeffries used to have a lot of visitors, but two stood out. One could only be Harriet Young, and she would stay for days at a time, with Jeffries looking ‘Wrung out’ according to the neighbours. There was another visitor who also had the same effect on poor Jeffries in a single day. It was a man, described as a snappy dresser, and he drove a Bentley.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” exclaimed Jackson. “Who crossed your mind, then, Hannaford?”

“There’s only one man about this town who fits that description. He is Councillor Augustus Frawley, a businessman into development and is also the Chair of the Police Oversight Committee. Never liked the man, much too cocky for his own good. Having sat in many meetings with him, I can understand him being described as a dom. It’ll take some good evidence to nab him, though.”

‘OK, now I’ll give you the link between all of the bodies. They had all played female parts in the plays that the school put on. Three of them were pupils, and the others were from public schools and listed in the reviews as guest artists. They were all recruited, by Queenie, at a dance club in Dairycoates, now demolished.”

Evans snorted. “That was a good venue for the kids, allowed underaged in for a fun night, didn’t mind if they were dressed as girls, was soft drink only. Frawley was lead in a consortium that demolished it to build a supermarket.”

“The other thing that’s interesting is that Holdfast would only allow boys between eleven and fourteen to be in the plays, so that they concentrated on the exams in the next two years. The last one dumped was still in primary when Queenie met them in 2010. None of the victims were under sixteen when they died. It leads me to think that whoever killed them, only did so after they had left home. I’ve had a look at the dumping points, and it looks, to me, as if they all had a meaning to the dumper. I haven’t had a chance to go into that further, I’ll leave that to your boys, Jackson. I’d be looking to see if Young had a link to them. I know it’s a while ago, but you may be able to find someone who was around at that time.”

“Why are we here?” asked Evans.

“Because I was told that the place at Hewitts Circus where Jeffries was seen was a beat at that time, and that he may have been looking for sex, rather that dumping a body. I think that he had not been part of the murders until that time but was involved with the bones we found. Those bones, I think, belonged to a lad called Jason Parsons, who had played a female part in Twelfth Night, in 2014. My DS could have been right about the Hamlet link, as they put that on in 2018 and the review lists Yorick as being played by Jason. If the skull still exists, it will be in that school. We might get some DNA from the teeth to match with the Parsons family.”

Hannaford laughed. “That’ll be fun, Jackson, that new headmaster is totally against anyone belittling his school. If he gets wind of why you’re there, he’ll pull down the shutters. If I were you, I’d get a search warrant first, and threaten to swamp the place with uniformed if he doesn’t play ball.”

Jackson asked the other question. “What about the torching of the car before the body was found, that made it look as if it was deliberate to destroy evidence?”

“I think that it was Young who torched the car, probably to make it look as if Jeffries had something to hide, so giving her something to hold over him. Her office was next to the door where Jeffries parked his car. I can’t tell you why the headmaster offered the alibi, unless he wasn’t even spoken to, and your Inspector fabricated it. Did Jeffries get told who had alibied him? He would have known that Merrilands had left the country.”

“That’s putting Ramsay in the frame as one of the murder group, that will be even harder to prove than putting Frawley in the dock.”

“I never said that it would be easy. What we do have is something more to go on. If you ask at all the dump sites, someone must know someone who was around at the time. Young wanted to be a guy, perhaps the Sea Cadets knocked her back, maybe Havelock knocked her back for a gym teaching job. The possibilities are endless, but we do have possibilities. There were three supermarkets involved, maybe Frawley was upset with them and wanted to mess about with their market. I don’t know all the answers, and I doubt that I know all the questions. We have to do what we do best, investigate.”

“Thank you for coming, I think. I don’t think our Super will be happy with us going after one of our own, let alone Frawley. I’ll email you with things as they come to light, especially if we get the skull. What you’ve given us certainly hangs together.”

We shook hands when I left, and Evans looked somewhat concerned. There was one other thing that was bugging me, so I went to where Jeffries had been spotted, parked in the carpark, and walked into Tesco, I stood by the windows and looked out at the drivers of the cars. If they were going towards the dump site, you couldn’t see them easily. If they were going away from the dump site you could see enough to identify them, but only in profile. The Identikit was a good full-face likeness and there was no way the witness could give that kind of information two weeks after seeing the car go by. On top of that, there must have been lots of drivers in lots of cars if the area was a beat.

I drove back to the Annex in a whirl of conjecture. What I had proposed, this morning, was that a high elected official, and Inspector of police and a teacher were all involved with abducting trans boys and killing them. Only Young Harry would have known who they were, having directed them a few years before the abduction. Did she keep in touch? There was one way to find that out, and that was to speak to the actors who played female parts and are still around. Another thing that occurred to me, brought about by Bill’s reaction to being pulled over, this morning, was the effect that being taken in for questioning would have on Adrian.

The more I thought about it, the more the story crystalised in my mind. The killers, and I was sure that there were more than one, had seen Adrian at the carpark. I wondered if it was Young Harry, or someone else from the school. Someone else, another closet gay, would be the best bet. Then the sting was created. A ‘friend’ claims that they saw a suspicious character, describes Adrian so well that, as soon as the picture was put in the paper, he was reported as the likely person. His car had already been torched, so sowing the seeds of suspicion even deeper. The Inspector then steps in and saves the day, so creating a bond between him and Adrian, making Adrian easily pliable in the hands of the other group members. That gave me three more people to look at. The witness, the Inspector and a, yet nameless, person at that school.

Back at the Annex, I was on the computer when I got a phone call from Grimsby, it was Hannaford.

“Polly, I’ve been looking at missing persons and unidentified bodies cases since you were here. There was a body, in a weighted bag, that was found just outside the harbour, during a channel dredging operation in 2018. It was just a torso, but was of a very large, and I mean strong, woman, who had been in the water about six months. If Young left the school in 2017 and you haven’t been able to track her after that, this may be the reason. They took DNA before the torso was cremated. I’m trying to find any family to get a match. If it is her, it looks like someone was cleaning house.”

I stayed at work, looking at the school website and trying to find all I could about any of the teachers. The new headmaster was an odd one. He had turned the school from a general educator to one that was strongly faith based. The upshot of that was that pupil numbers had dropped over the years, but their success rate had risen, slightly, with more students going into religious institutions for further study. They proudly declared that they had five new members of the priesthood that had been ordained since 2018.

Looking at the headmaster, himself, showed an ordinary childhood, good public schooling, a course of teacher training, then some normal placements in other public schools before getting a place in Grimsby. It all looked blameless, and I didn’t expect a search of the police records to find anything. I was surprised, then, to see his name come up on two reports. One, when he was fifteen, was for shoplifting. The odd thing about that was that he had stolen a pack of panties from Marks and Spencer, claiming that they were for his sister. He had been let off with a caution.

The second was when he was twenty and in teacher training. He had been sharing a room with another man, and the police had been called to investigate a banging noise from his room. When they entered, they found him tied and gagged, with a bleeding anus. He had been banging his feet on a cupboard to get attention. The roommate was suspected but had an iron-clad alibi, having been at a restaurant, in the company of a man called Augustus Frawley, the son of a company owner. I emailed the reports to Jackson and Hannaford, sure that this would brighten their day. I also added the rider that the roommate had the same name as the witness who ‘saw’ Adrian Jeffries.

These search results were only because we had special access to old records, something the normal officers didn’t. There was a small office where they were going through old boxes of paper files and digitising them. Luckily, for me, they had started in East Anglia and were working across the country. The records scanned only went back to 1950, in most cases, but that was enough to find most people still alive and able to create mischief.

I was working on the records for the Inspector when Bill knocked on the door to take me home. I got the girls to give him a cup of tea while I saved my work and closed down. We went to the shops on the way home, and bought some sausages, veg and bread. He also picked his favourite jam. At home, I started to cook a meal for us, while he opened a bottle of wine. When we sat to eat, it was good to be able to gaze into his eyes as I put a pork sausage into my mouth.

“I’ve always wondered what that would be like, having a girl do that to me.”

“We can find out now if you want. It’s something I’ve not had the pleasure of myself.”

Our meal was a bit cooler when we got back to it and I had experienced the taste of man in my mouth, washed down with a sip of chardonnay. We both cleared our plates, though. I had thought of banana and custard for dessert but was happy that I had an apple I could dice to have with the custard. I think a banana might have started him off again, and I wanted him to save some of himself for tonight. He had broken through my defences, and I just wanted him, so hard it was like a drug.

I spent two whole days looking at Inspector Ramsay. The man had a chequered career, to say the least. He had been an average student, the youngest of a large family, and had gone straight from school into the police as a rookie constable. He had stayed a constable for quite a while, doing his job without complaint. Then he had a problem with some nightclub patrons, who had accused him of being heavy-handed. His boss did the easy thing and transferred him. His next posting had him in the riot squad, where being heavy-handed is not a crime. He made sergeant there and his star was starting to shoot.

He was transferred to Grimsby as a detective sergeant in 2005, and rose to inspector by 2010, mainly, from what I saw, on the back of some good detectives below him. He had been the police appointment to the Oversight Board in 2012, where he had a seat until he retired in 2020. He lived in the lovely village of Ulceby Skitter, just north of Grimsby, where it is said he was a champion rose grower. He wasn’t far from the site of the old RAF wartime airfield of North Killingholme, where Lancasters used to leave from to drop bombs on Germany. It is now a developed industrial estate.

I did a quick search for Frawley and discovered that he had sold the family estate, close to Sheffield, once he had inherited it, and now had a large house in Bonby, some way to the west of Ulceby. Hawks Nest had, so the article in Country Life pointed out, a large garage for his five cars, from his genuine 1928 Bentley, to his new one. I was still trying to go through Company Records to find out what he had done when the week came to an end with some good news from Jackson. They had found a skull, in the props room of the school, and it would be delivered to Thredbolt on Monday, by him, and then he wanted to visit me at the Annex,

Saturday, we did some shopping and tidied up the things that Bill had brought back to the house. He had certainly lived a spartan life if this lot was anything to go by. That’s when I stopped myself, realising that when I was still a man, my belongings weren’t much more than his. We had settled into a more sedate life, the urge to copulate at the drop of a hat had been sated, and, although we did have regular sex, it had become slower and more loving.

When we walked into the restaurant in Boston, the looks on both Steve and Angela’s faces made me giggle. Steve stood to shake Bill’s hand.

“I see that you’ve already met Polly. If it hadn’t been for her, I would never have made a play for my fiancée, Her tracking down Bernard’s murderers was awesome, and the arrest, in London, was something I’ll never forget.”

“Me too,” said Angela as she also rose to hug me, and air kiss my cheek. “Hello, Bill, Steve has told me lots about you, but not that you are a magician. I’ve got to know how you two met.”

It was a good meal, with a lot of talking, mainly from Bill, who put me on his personal pedestal. I had to skip the reason why I was in Sydney but didn’t mind telling them how much fun I had, when I wasn’t working. In the toilets, Angela told me that I was a different person to the one she had last spoken to. I had to tell her that Sydney had changed me, by letting me relax and enjoy my life. We went through the arrangements for the wedding, in just a week, and had group hugs and kisses when we parted, Angela telling me to be good, with Bill overhearing and telling her that I was very good.

The wedding would take place in the church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, in Ingoldmells, with the reception at a Gastropub called The Moody Cow, which Steve had made a joke about that went down like the proverbial lead balloon. It was where he had grown up, and Angela had commented that he hadn’t, actually, grown up at all.

On the way home I told Bill that I hoped that he had grown up, and he told me that he had grown up enough to not make schoolboy jokes, but that was Steve, all over. We held hands as he drove, and we went home to make mad, passionate love. We were nestled close when he made a comment that made me stiffen.

“Did you make jokes like that when you were younger, I think every schoolboy has a store of comments like that?”

“What do you mean, darling!”

“Polly, I can look up records as easily as the next man. I was out on the mudflats, with my laptop, and searched for Polly Ibbotson, to find a newspaper story that included Peter and an incident with a boxcutter. That must have hurt!”

“I don’t know, Bill, I was doped up to the eyebrows by the time I came round. Does it make a difference? You just made love to me, and it was better than before.”

“Polly, my true love, what it did was to show me how brave and how resilient you are. You have always been a woman in my eyes, and that hasn’t changed. I respect you more now, and I don’t blame you for hiding your previous life. It’s been and gone. Today you’re my darling Polly and I want you to be my wife, one day. It doesn’t matter if you can’t have children, a lot of women are in the same boat. We can adopt, or we can look after baby seals.”

“Bill, I love you and you’ve made me so happy that you didn’t leave me once you knew. I had been living in fear of what you would do when I told you. I would have told you, so that you could walk away before it was too late. It is too late for me, now. I love you and I want you in me again, please. Oh, if you do come home with a baby seal, I’ll grab it by its tail and hit you with it!”

Marianne Gregory © 2023