Part 3

We spent the night in the hotel and went back to Skegness the next day. As Cherry drove, I looked out of the window at the passing countryside and pondered on yesterday’s interview.

It had been interesting in many ways. Norman had been good, with great memories. The new member of the group was an interesting turn of events. I had to agree with Cherry, we weren’t any further in finding a murderer.

Back at work, we all carried on with our jobs. I was still designing the new facility. Cherry took a few days, and came up with the marriage certificate, with Jeffrey Hake marrying Charles Fall. She couldn’t find an official change of name, so she may not have had that sex change operation, after all. Cherry added a note that told me that Charles Fall was once a pro-wrestler on TV, going by the name of Thunderstorm. I had to smile, stating to realise why the old people I met would shake their heads. It would have been an odd life for Thunderstorm and Snowstorm. There was a death certificate for her husband, followed by another for her, a few years ago. That was another blank wall at the end of a side road.

As the year came to an end, we moved into the new house and I was busy at work, supervising the installation of the equipment, the delivery of the furnishings, and interviewing the applicants. It was going to be a big office, Me, in my new office that didn’t even have a desk computer, Julia and Cherry with their own office, both with twin workstations so that they could train up the rest of the twelve researchers and four constables that would be our gofers. It was to be a mixed sex office and I had set it out so that there wouldn’t be any little cliques.

Julia and Cherry were sharing Cherry’s flat and that had worked out well. Bill was well into the construction stage of the new enclosure, with a grand opening set for the end of spring. I had almost completely forgotten the Redcoat case until, one Saturday evening we were cuddled up in our new lounge, on our new settee, drinking hot chocolate that I had brewed in our new kitchen. I was thinking about suggesting bed when something was said that snuck in under my defences.

It was an old rerun of a TV show, about Sherlock Holmes. It was the ‘Sign of Four’ and Ian Richardson, as Holmes, was talking to Watson. The words were something along the lines that when all the impossible things have been eliminated, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

That thought stayed with me all day, until I realised that it could be the answer, or the start to an answer. I asked Cherry if she could see what she could find out about the brother of Allan Stevens. It took about a half an hour for her to knock on my door with a print-out.

“Where are you going with this, Polly? I didn’t expect to find anything and was surprised to find that the brother was killed, in 1986, by a hit and run. The file is still open. The vehicle was a white Transit, with no plates. It happened near Grimsby, so was in their books.”

“It came to me, this morning, after I watched a Sherlock Holmes film. In it, he said that when all the impossible has been eliminated, what’s left, however improbable, must be the truth. We never followed up the first death, thinking that it was a done deal. What if it isn’t as done as we thought.”

I picked up my phone and rang the Annex. When the new WPC answered I asked to speak to Cathy.

“Cathy, it’s Polly. I’m ringing about the old Redcoat case. That first death, the suicide, what are the standard procedures when recovering a body. I expect that they took fingerprints back then?”

“Usually, what are you getting at?”

“When we got the file out of storage, there was no fingerprint card.”

“I expect that when the brother identified the body, it wasn’t considered necessary.”

“That’s my point, if the prints weren’t run, how can we be sure that the body was Stevens, it could have been anyone. Can you see if those prints are somewhere in the station, please.”

It took until the next week when she rang back.

“You’re a wonder woman, Polly. Jessica had a talk with Colin Thredbolt. He told her that the police surgeon before his predecessor was a stickler for detail and kept a copy of everything he did. They looked in the storage and found the forensic file of the Stevens death, and it included a card with the prints on it. We ran the prints and guess what we found?”

“That the body was someone else and that Stevens had engineered his suicide?”

“Got it in one, Polly. The body belonged to an itinerant labourer called Hugh Barton. He was roughly the same age as Stevens, and a similar build. The brother must have been in on it.”

“You had better run the brother. We’ve got him as killed in a hit and run near Grimsby a couple of years later. I’m wondering if Stevens may have been clearing decks, making sure that there was no-one left who knew the plan.”

“I’ll get on to it. How on earth did you think of this?”

“It’s elementary, dear Cathy, elementary.”

Cathy got back to me a few days later.

“Polly, I spoke to Dawlish, and he agrees that someone dropped the ball, back in ’84. We have looked at Hugh Barton and have his birth certificate. He was only a couple of months older than Stevens, so would be about seventy today. When we checked the records, we couldn’t find any matches for him in criminal records, other than the one time he had been in a pub fight as a teenager, so putting his fingerprints on record. His history was just a normal guy, making a quid where he could and minding his own business. A look on Ancestry gave us over four thousand Hugh Bartons in the country. You may be able to drill down further with your stuff.”

“Thank you, Cathy. I’ve got that feeling, in my bones, that we are getting closer to solving this one. I’ll get my team onto it.”

I called Cherry and Julia to come into my office and gave them what we now knew.

“Girls, do we have someone who is good at the AI searches out there?”

Julia was the first.

“I’ve got David, he is keen and has done some good work.”

“Right, get him in here.”

She led David in to join us. He looked concerned. Actually, he looked a bit like Harry Potter, with his round glasses. He sat down and I looked at him.

“David, we have a little problem. We need to find a man who, I believe, has killed six people over the last forty odd years. He may, or may not, go under the name of Hugh Barton. The first person he killed had that name and he could have taken over the identity. Julia will show you how to access the files we have on him, and the others we think he has killed. This is not a rush job; we’ve been picking at it for more than six months. Take your time, study the files, then use that computer of yours to search for someone who may fit the framework. Don’t discount any result because it looks stupid. This guy has learned how to stay below the radar and hasn’t done anything where his prints would be taken since ’84. Do you think that you can do this?”

“Yes ma-am. I’ll do everything that I can. This is great, a real job which needs the AI to do the filtering. Thank you for your confidence in me, ma-am.”

After they had left my office, I called Cathy back to let her know we were moving on the case, then called Rossiter to tell him that, finally, we may be getting close to telling him who killed Robby the Redcoat, and why. I had a sneaking feeling about the why. Things that Norman told us in Clacton kept coming back to me. I would have to dig out the transcript of that recording, but I was starting to believe that he had told us, back then, who the killer was and why they were killing.

It took two weeks before Julia knocked on my door, with David behind her.

“Polly, I think David may have found our man. I’ll let him tell you.”

They sat down and David cleared his throat.

“I had a good look at the files, as instructed, and decided that if the names didn’t count, then there must be other markers that would be helpful. I decided I would use electrician, lighting specialist, motorcyclist, and the birthdate in a range around the real births of both Stevens and Barton. Looking at the way two of the bodies were dumped, I added pilot and ultralight pilot to the mix. I found seventeen different people who matched the profile, but only one within fifty miles of Pontefract. His name is Alby Horton, a lighting specialist who used to do stage lighting for pop bands. He has even won a couple of awards for it. He lives on a property on Torne Road, on the edge of the River Torne. It’s big enough to land an ultralight and he does own both a single and a two-seater. He also has a small plane at the Yorkshire Aero Club at Sandtoft. He retired early but used to moonlight as a high-tension wire inspector. That’s done with a small plane fitted with GPS and thermal cameras. You fly along the wires until you see a hot spot. I had the thought that he would have been able to use that skill in flying over the long conveyors at the power stations. The conveyors were nearly two metres wide, so he could have dropped the body onto it, just before it went into the boiler house.”

“What about the body in the coal heap?”

“I ran some simulations with that one. I concluded that if you dropped a body on a steep incline, the force of impact would have caused a minor landslide, so covering the body, which, I believe, was found close to the base of the heap. The two power stations are both within easy range of his home.”

“What about the motorcycling?”

“He is a member of one of the restorer’s clubs, and has a small collection of classics, mainly off-road ones. He has a small circuit on his property.”

“A damn fine job, David. All we have to do now, is to work out how to trap him. He has spent forty years in hiding and did a good job with it. We can only guess how he located and killed the others, but I expect that he would attend the Redcoat reunions and met up with them there. Any luck with the white Transit?”

“I had a good look at the Google Earth pictures, and there are two or three white shapes on his land. They could be vans, caravans, or just white painted sheds. You would have to be on the ground to make sure. If he went to historic off-road bike meetings, he would be sure to have a van of some sort.”

“All right, check with DMV, they should be able to tell you what he drives now and may be able to tell you others that he had registered. That is something you can do from here, using the AI to search their digital records. You’ll have to ask them for access or else we may have a load of rozzers wanting to know why we’re hacking the system. That’s a lot more than we need to be suspicious of this man. All we need is to find something to fit him to the crimes.”

There was only one thing that I could think of. I rang Dawlish.

“Sir, I think that we may be close to solving the Redcoat case. I believe that the brother of Allan Stevens was run down to make sure he stayed quiet. Would it be possible to find out if he was cremated or buried? If he was buried, could we do an exhumation to get a DNA sample, so we can see if it’s a match with our suspect?”

“All right, Polly. I’ll talk to Thredbolt and Cathy to see if that can be done. Was it that AI or good detective work that got the break?”

“It was a lot of AI, sir, with a touch of Sherlock Holmes and his annoying wisdom.”

“Keep me in the loop, this one has taken a while and the fact that it became a case at all is down to the new technology. I can see my retirement coming early.”

I made an appointment to see Rossiter in Pontefract. It would be his case to prosecute because of the site of the dumping. I told him that the presentation of what we had would take a while, and that I would have two officers with me. He gave me an afternoon the following week, so I booked rooms at a hotel in Pontefract and told Cherry and David to pack an overnight bag to bring to work that morning.

On the day of the appointment, I had one of our PC’s drive us in an unmarked car to Pontefract. I sat in the front with David and Cherry in the back. David, and the PC, were both quiet until Cherry started pointing out odd things along the road. We had a laugh at some of the personalised number plates we saw. We made good time on the M1 and stopped at Sheffield services for early lunch. By that time, the PC was getting used to just talking to his boss and one of the sergeants. David and Cherry, being almost the same age, were in deep discussion about the merit of hip-hop against rap music. We left the M1 at Barnsley and got to the Pontefract station in good time for the meeting.

After we had been given visitors passes, the three of us were ushered into a meeting room, where we were joined by Chief Superintendent Rossiter and the Chief Inspector of his murder squad. After introduction and a WPC handing around cups of tea, he opened up the meeting.

“Now, no ranks here. I’m Bruce and this is Henry. Polly, what do you have for us.”

“All right, Bruce. As you know, you had the body of one Robert Everard floating in the lake. He was dressed in his Redcoat kit and had been killed by being hit with a taser. Like you, we found nothing until Cherry entered in the known facts on our new, AI equipped, computer that we had to trial. Cherry, if you can take over, please.”

Cherry took us through the long process that led to the two of us meeting Norman at Clacton. She then deferred back to me. I could see David slowly relaxing as the higher ranks spoke like normal people and asked questions quietly. Up until now, the only ones of similar rank that he had met had been during his training and I expected they still barked at you, like they did when I was training.

“Norman gave us a lot of information that didn’t take root until later. He told us that there was another person in the mix, a certain Jeffrey Hake, who worked as a woman Redcoat called Snowflake. She was the stage assistant to Robert Everard. She resigned in ’83 and left without saying goodbye to the others. Stevens was sure that the other four had something to do with her disappearance and was quite angry. Norman dismissed the notion that he would take his own life, telling us that he would have hit someone first. I believe that Stevens was in love with Hake, but couldn’t show it, and decided that if the others had something to do with the situation, he would get his revenge.”

“What actually happened to this Hake?”

“As Snow, she was collected from her digs by a comedian who had been working at the camp. I don’t know what happened there, but a year later, she married a wrestler in a same-sex marriage. They are now both dead of natural causes.”

“So, the others had nothing at all to do with her leaving.”

“Correct. Now, we had lots of things going on so it was put on the back burner until I was watching an old Sherlock Holmes film where he says that when the impossible has been eliminated, then what ever remains, how improbable, must be the truth. I asked for the brother of Stevens to be looked at and found that he had been killed in a hit and run, near Grimsby, a year or two after the Stevens suicide. We then instigated a search of the Skegness storage and came up with the original fingerprint card of the Stevens suicide, which told us that the body was an itinerant labourer called Hugh Barton. I believe that, because the brother had put in a missing person’s report, and the motorcycle that Stevens owned being found up stream, followed by a positive ID from the brother, it was enough for the prints to be overlooked.”

“This is getting murkier by the minute, carry on, please, I’m on the edge of my seat.”

“As you know, we have been setting up a new department to work on national searching, and we are using AI to refine the way we work. David, could you please continue.”

David explained the task he was given and why he didn’t use names, just the associated facts, to make his search. I could see our hosts starting to glaze over as the whole system that had served them well for over two hundred years was left, in shards, at their feet. When David gave them the name, and details, of our main suspect, he also handed over the file to Henry.

“We have got this far, sir, and it’s your case, now. I suggest some surveillance first before you move in. This guy has been hiding in plain sight for many years, so is likely to stay aware of danger.”

“Quite so, young man. This is a revelation, the way that this case was unravelled. What we need is something at his home to link him to the murders.”

“We thought that there may be DNA on the seat of his ultralight or in one of his vans that would show that the victims had been there. Beyond that, I can’t think of anything else that would pin it on him, without any doubts.”

“I can,” said Cherry. “I have been involved with this case for a while and have read the files more than once. When Polly and I were speaking to Norman, he showed us a roll of camp badges that he had collected. Each camp had a unique badge for each year. In all the reports, nothing has been noted about those badges, Robert was wearing his jacket, but it had no badges on it. If he had been to a reunion, surely, he would have worn them, with pride, like campaign medals. I think that if you find a large collection of Butlins badges, there could be prints on them from the other victims, all of which, I remind you, were found naked. I have to admit, that when we were talking to Norman it was like hearing a lot of nostalgia, but lately I have come to realise that he was honoured to have done what he did with his life, and the badges meant more to him than any photo, or memory, that he had.”

“Well said, young lady. If you keep learning things like that, you’ll be wearing a uniform like mine before you retire.”

I told them that we would have something from a search at DMV and that Skegness may be able to exhume the brother, if he had been buried, to get DNA for a match. We left them the paperwork before we found our PC and he drove us to the hotel. As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t our case anymore and the three of us felt a bit flat. We had dinner at the hotel, and David found out, from the barman, that there was well-known band in town, and talked Cherry into going along to see them. They went off together, which left me and the PC to talk. By the time we had a few, he was talking freely about his experiences at the Research Centre, and I was learning about some things I could change to make things better. I wasn’t about to get everyone calling me Polly, because my successor might be a stickler for procedure, and I didn’t know how long I would be there.

Over the next few weeks, we got a list of the vehicles that Horton had registered, over the years, and Skegness confirmed that an exhumation had been quietly carried out and DNA extracted before the coffin was reburied. Those reports went to Pontefract. Two weeks after that, I got a phone call to tell me that Horton had been arrested, with a careful search of his property revealing more than they had expected. A full file was coming my way.

They had arrested him after he had been for a flight in his light plane, sealing the property off while he was away. The further search found some DNA traces on the passenger seat of his twin seat ultralight, two that matched the records from the Duncan and Batchelor files, and the third matching the body of a woman who had been found in a shallow grave on one side of his little runway. She had been identified as Molly Stewart, an ex-Redcoat, with her picture looking a lot like Snowflake. This was how he had kept up with the reunions. She had died from a strong blow to the back of the head, about six months before, after he had killed his last friend. They did find her set of badges, and also another four rolls of badges in his workshop, with, as we thought, partials from the original owners on them. His DNA matched the brother, which made the case watertight.

At his trial, he tried to claim that he had been maddened by the victims taking away his true love and collapsed in the dock when the prosecution told the court the truth about Snow leaving, and the futility of his subsequent actions. He was sentenced for a period that would certainly mean life. Nothing could take away the fact that he had also killed another six innocent people, including his own brother. He still had the Transit rusting away on his property, damage to the front wing still evident.

And so, time moved on. Cherry and David both got commendations on their record, and they eventually married. We all lasted long enough to serve out our acting positions and then I started to feel stifled, after another six years as just an office manager.

I had been volunteering my time at the Animal Park on weekends and the day they asked me to take on the position of Park Security Manager, I knew that my time in the force was over. My pension, that I had won so many years before, was able to be reinstated at my current rank, so we had a party at Potters Bar where everyone was extra nice to me. I officially handed the keys of the manager’s office to Julia, gave everyone a kiss on the cheek, and left, with a sigh of relief.

My duties at the Animal Park were easy, just make sure there were no easy ways for people, especially children, to get inside the enclosures to feed the big pussy cats or stroke the reptiles. Don’t laugh, keeping them out was a full-time job.

Bill and I didn’t talk about adopting children. Instead, we adopted a couple of young seal pups under a money-raising scheme that the park organised. We didn’t take them home, so I never got around to grabbing one by the tail and hitting him with it, as I had promised.

The one thing that I was now happy about was that there was very little paperwork but lots more hands-on work. One job that I claimed for my own, that made me happy to be alive, was feeding peanuts to the parrots and trying to teach them to say, ‘Pretty Polly’.

Marianne Gregory © 2023