Chapter 2

When Julia and Jessica came out and shed their suits, they had the bones, or parts of bones, in bags, along with the ammunition box, as well as three different saws that they had found, one being a tree saw. A squad car had arrived, so Jackson gave them their orders, shook hands with the three of us, and went off to his office to pull out all of the case files.

I retrieved my power cable and pulled the satellite dish down into its housing, and we went back to Skegness. Jessica took the van as she was going to the station to lay the bones out on a table, while I took Julia with me. On the way, I told her what had set Jackson off and asked her what she thought. She surprised me by giving me a reasoned idea of what went down, much of it conjecture.

“I think that this body was chosen for the head. The rendering was only to allow the bones to be kept, for later disposal. Somehow, that didn’t happen. I think, that if we went through that garden with a sieve, we could find the finger and toenails in the garden beds. I expect that the body fat and fluid may have been used for fertiliser. If the teacher was involved with the earlier murders, the headmaster and the other teacher gave him a false alibi. Taking it further, there’s an outside chance that the Detective Inspector could have been involved or was just being stupid.”

“I agree. We’ll have to wait until we see all the case files and evidence, but the first thing, after that, will be to get a profile of all the victims, the teachers at that school, and the investigating officers. Jackson didn’t tell me if there had been any rape involved, just that all the bodies were dressed as females and dumped in garden areas or carparks around Grimsby.”

A couple of days later, Jackson visited us with the case files and all the evidence boxes. By that time, Jessica had laid out all the bones and declared that it was of a young man, likely still in his teens, about five foot seven (estimated as having a standard head shape) and with a slight build. While Jackson was with us, we told him that we would like to sift the garden beds for nails. He called his station and arranged for there to be two uniformed officers at the house, the next day, to help out. After he left, I took the case files into my office, and Jessica took the boxes and arranged them on her workspace, in date order.

The earliest was discovered in 2010, in the car park of the Aldi, close to the Grimsby Fish Dock. The next was in 2011 and turned up in the gardens of the Havelock Academy. The third was in front of the Grimsby and Cleethorpes Sea Cadets in 2012, while the fourth was two years later, in Cleethorpes, in the car park of KFC at the Meridian Point. The fifth was the one that involved our teacher, and was dumped in grassland next to Hewitts Circus, between the Poundstretcher and the Vauxhall dealer, in 2015. The last one was found within sight of the police station, as Jackson had said, in the carpark of the Sainsbury’s on the other side of the river. That was in 2016. If what Jackson had said was right, the bones we had would have been walking around at the beginning of 2017.

We all donned suits to look though the boxes. In every case the clothes were typical for a transgender to be wearing, a bit trashy and flirty. I had seen enough of these outfits on the runaways to know that whoever had been wearing them looked good enough to pass, the sizes, alone, being a dead giveaway. Most of them looked like they had been put together from op-shop outings, but two stood out as different. Both were store-bought, from a High Street outlet, and the shoes and handbags in the boxes were also good ones. These two had money to spend, and I expect that they had been dressing for some time, either away from their parents, or with their acceptance. These were the second one found, and the last, some five years apart.

I was looking at the last one and stopped, going back along the boxes. When I had done that, I went back up the line looking at the shoes.

“Ladies, I think we may have discovered the links between these victims. They all wear the same size clothes and shoes. What was the size of the feet on the skeleton?”

Jessica looked at her notes.

“I estimated around two hundred millimeters, give or take ten. That matches the others.

We left Jessica to her investigations of the other things in the boxes, and I went off to my office to look further into the files. Julia and Cathy had other work to be getting on with. The files gave the names of the deceased victims, the family history, and their schooling. Only one, the third, had been working. I made sure I looked at the investigating officers. The Inspector had been the lead in the first five of the cases, Jackson only coming in for the fifth and sixth, with a different Inspector for the sixth. All the lower ranks had been mixed, no doubt the officers working on the cases as they were able.

All the victims had been dumped at night, and most found the next day, being in public places. The odd one was with the teacher. I had the idea that he had dumped it somewhere where it wouldn’t be found quickly. That gelled with the notion that he had noticed that he had been spotted and needed time to torch his car. In that case, it was probable that whoever dumped the others was an exhibitionist who wanted to show off his handiwork. In all the cases, the victims had rope marks on their wrists and ankles, had been raped and strangled. The rapist had used condoms so left no residue, even though all showed signs of multiple rapes. We had the male and female names for all the victims, the investigating officers doing a good job, there.

The teacher was called Adrian Jeffries, the headmaster was Gordon Holdfast, and the other teacher was Quentin Merrilands. Jeffries had been forty-seven when interviewed, the headmaster had been sixty-eight, his wife sixty-four and the other teacher was a young man of twenty-five. I decided that I would mine the computer during the next day, while the other three went back to the house to do some gardening.

The next day, I was working through the names when Thredbolt rang me and told me that he had managed to separate the papers from the ammunition box and if I’d like to come to the station and pick them up. I locked the Annex and went over to see him. He had the papers in plastic specimen bags so that you could look at each side. There were nine cuttings, all reviews from the plays that had been put on by the school, nothing that immediately linked the bones to anyone. I thanked him, and, before I left, I had a quick word with his new assistant, who had filled Jessica’s shoes. She was almost a clone of Jessica, but I expect that when you had a female interested in criminal forensics, they came from a similar type. Only on TV do they look like film stars.

Back at the Annex, I left the bags in the forensic area and the went back to my screen watching. By the time the others had got back, I had the birth certificates of the three teachers, as well as the Inspector. There was no way I was going to rule him out. I had also gone through each of the victims and had their history and contact details. The odd bit was that with the two that had been better dressed, both had gone to the school.

I went and got the reviews and read them all, in order, and very carefully. The first thing I learned was that it was a boys-only religious school, and that any female role would be played by the boys. The earliest review, in 2007, was for ‘The Importance of Being Ernest” and the Aunt had been played by the headmaster’s wife, while the two young girls were played by our first and second victim. That had been three years before the first body.

The next review was for ‘Waiting for Godot’, riveting stuff for all and sundry with no female parts at all. The next was for ‘Romeo and Juliet’, where the headmaster’s wife played Lady Capulet and the Juliet was played by our third victim. The fourth victim played Claire in a swashbuckling stage version of ‘At Swords Point’ a Three Musketeers spin-off. The fifth and sixth had parts in a rather risqué bedroom farce called ‘A Flea in her Ear”, the headmaster’s wife not appearing in the last two.

The odd thing was that not all of the female roles were played by pupils, as some were listed as guest artists. With only our second and last victim pupils there, it meant that the rest would have been recruited by someone, from somewhere, with a promise of a stage career.

It was three years between the play and the death of number one, four years for number two, three years for number three, four years for number four, and four and five years for numbers five and six. To me, that meant just one thing. The victims were all too young at the time of their acting career but were old enough to be desired by their killer at a later date.

I read the other three reviews, from 2012, 2014 and 2015. Two were all male casts, while the third was in 2014 and a well-received rendering of ‘Twelfth Night’. I noted the names of the female leads, with a view to seeing which ones were pupils at the school. The last review in the pile was ‘Hamlet’, in 2018. The skull had a credit, as being played by ‘Jason’. I went back through the reviews and found that Olivia, in ‘Twelfth Night’ had been played by a Jason Parsons, a pupil.

We now had a definite link between the victims. It was something that the original investigators would not have picked up at the time. Only Jessica mentioning Hamlet and these reviews put the school, and the teachers, in the spotlight. I got back into my computer seat and started delving into some more records. I called the school and asked about the three that we had named, with the admin there telling me that the headmaster was a career teacher, well respected, if a little firm on wrongdoers. It was, after all, a religious school and all the pupils were expected to be good, even if they found it hard. Adrian, our dead suspect, had been popular with his pupils, a good teacher and one of the backbones of the plays as the director. He was, I was told, sorely missed.

The other teacher, Quentin, was described as a bit ‘out there’ but a good teacher, getting the pupils involved in several small plays during the year and the big one where they sold tickets. He had been the producer, putting the cast together and arranging the props and costumes. He had left the school in 2011, they told me, to go to another job overseas. Now, that was weird, the interview that Adrian had him as an alibi was in 2015, so there was no way the meal together was checked. I expect that the Inspector had spoken to the headmaster and took everything he said as gospel.

I sent an email to Inspector Jackson, informing him of this anomaly, and started to look for death certificates. I found Adrian and the headmaster, both victims of Covid in 2020, Adrian being one of the earliest deaths of many to follow. Jean Holdfast, the wife, was still alive and a check with DMV gave me her address, a cabin park in Thorpe Park that was popular with retirees.

Searching the airline lists for 2011 gave me Quentin Merrilands on a flight to Sydney, Australia. A check of the Sydney phonebooks did not give me any result, so he must be purely on mobile, a popular way to go these days, and a bane for us investigators. This meant that I had to call the N.S.W Teachers Union when they were open, to see if they had him on their books. It was going to be a very late night or a very early morning as the time difference is about eleven hours.

In the meantime, the others had worked on the few nails that they had lifted from the garden, along with a couple of rings and an earring. When they reported to me, I told them to see if any DNA they could recover was a match with a lad called Jason Parsons. Julia looked at me with wonderment in her eyes.

“Julia, it’s all down to the research. The play that they put on that needed the skull had it credited as being played by a Jason. In 2014, Jason Parsons played Olivia in Twelfth Night, it’s a reasoned guess. I may be wrong, but all the victims had been in that school’s plays. I haven’t had the chance to check the records to see if he is a missing person, yet. You can follow that up, I’m off to the station to see Dawlish,”

I had called the station and had arranged a meeting with Chief Superintendent Dawlish so didn’t have to wait long before I was ushered into his office. He asked his PA to organise tea and biscuits, and we sat while I took him through the case as it currently stood. He listened intently as I went through the timeline to where we stood now, then pondered a bit.

“Polly, this is a serious case. Stop me if I’m wrong. We have a religious school that puts on plays and all of the victims of a serial killer took part in the plays, over several years. We have a Detective Inspector who missed an important fact which allowed a suspect to go scot-free. We have the only named suspect now living in Australia and I expect that you’ll want to go and talk to him.”

“That’s right, sir. It will be about a week or more to go there and back. I’m sure that Grimsby will put in towards the costs, seeing that these are all cold cases on their books. I’ll try to track him down, tonight, and see if he’ll talk to me. He couldn’t be the murderer of most of the cases, seeing that he was out of the country, but he may be able to tell me how he recruited the actors, seeing that it was his major part in the plays.”

“All right, leave it with me. I’ll talk to Grimsby and get their answer. We’ll put you on a flight to Australia if you can find his whereabouts, I’ll make sure there are funds available. With a case this big, if we need to bring him back here, we will need you, as a Detective Inspector, on the ground to ask their police to arrest him.”

That evening I tried to stay awake through a very bad movie. It was only the adverts being louder that kept me awake. When it had finished, I picked up my phone and called the number I had found for the Teachers Union. The girl that answered was helpful, after I had explained who I was and why I was after a contact number for one of their members. The problem was that when she got back to me, she told me that they had no Quentin Merrilands on their books. They did, she told me, have a Queenie Merrilands who had signed on in early 2012. I said that it may well be the person I was trying to talk to, and she gave me a mobile number.

Looking at the clock, I deduced that it was lunchtime in Sydney and dialled the number, with it ringing a few times and then a deepish voice saying “Queenie”.

“Queenie, my name is Detective Inspector Ibbotson and I’m calling from Skegness, in England. Are you the teacher who once went under the name of Quentin and taught English Literature?”

“That was me, back then. Have I got an unpaid traffic fine, or is it about something else?”

“It’s about something else. I am part of an investigation into the deaths of some young boys, and I believe that you may have some information that can help. I’m not saying that you are part of the investigation, as deaths occurred after you left the country, but you do have links to the victims and could really help us move forward. Can I come and talk to you?”

“That’s heavy stuff. I did know the lad that was found at Havelock, back in 2011. They called him Andrew in the papers but the person I knew was Andrea and a lovely girl, such a waste. Of course, if it’s important enough that you’ll fly here to talk to little old me, I’ll be happy to see you.”

She and I made an appointment for the Saturday of the following weekend, with me meeting her at the fountain in Kings Cross. I was advised that every taxi driver in town could put me down in the right place. I gave her my email address and asked for a photo, saying I would send one of me in return.

I would need to leave in enough time to be there then, as it was half a day ahead of my local time. I got onto my laptop and saw that I could fly out on Tuesday morning from Heathrow, spend an overnight stop in Doha, and arrive in Sydney just before dinner time on Thursday. That would allow me time to check in with the local police and lose the jetlag.

Coming back, I could leave Sydney on Tuesday evening and arrive in Abu Dhabi just before breakfast on Wednesday, stop overnight and leave Thursday at around eleven in the morning, to get back to Heathrow in the middle of the afternoon. If I put my car into the carpark at Heathrow on Monday afternoon and stay in the airport hotel, I could get it out and be home again in the evening of that Thursday. It was a long way, and a long time, for a single interview, but I had the feeling that the case pivoted on what Queenie had to tell me.

I went to the station, first thing, and told Dawlish that I had an appointment and what fights I would need to be on. He took notes and told his PA to organise the flights, the hotels and to draw some cash for me to use. When I raised an eyebrow, he looked me in the eye.

“Polly, you’re one of a kind, and you’ve been working in that Annex since we opened it. You’re in line for some leave, use this trip as a way to have a little fun. If you get some good information to bring home, I know that you’ll be gnawing at this case until it’s solved. Cathy can look after the shop while you’re away, you have built a splendid squad there.”

I stopped by the Annex to tell the others that I would be away for two weeks, and then drove up to Thorpe Park to see Jean Holdfast. When she opened the door, I realised that I had been ageist, for she was a spritely and bubbly woman, happy to talk and even happier to supply me with tea and cake. We sat at her kitchen table, and I told her that I was here to ask her about her husband, and a couple of the teachers.

“What do you want to know? My husband was a well-respected man and those that worked under him were expected to be totally law abiding, it was the school’s ethos.”

“I’m particularly interested in two teachers. They were Adrian and Quentin and were involved with the school plays. Did you have any meals, with them, to discuss those plays?”

“Not that I can recall, Gordon may have had meetings with them at the school. I didn’t want him to bring his work home, that’s what leads to teacher burn-out. You need to separate the work from the family.”

“So, if I told you that your husband told the police that he was having a meal, with the two of them, and yourself, you will tell me I’m wrong?”

“When did this happen? Gordon was very protective of the school and its reputation. He held Adrian in high regard. That Quentin wasn’t so lucky, though; odd little man.”

“It was in 2015, Adrian had been identified as a person of interest in a serious case. It was around the time that his car was torched.”

“I remember that! Gordon told me all about it. The fire brigade was quick, and they stopped the gym getting more than scorch marks on the wall. It was very unusual, as the school has good walls around it and the CCTV didn’t show anyone creeping in.”

“I hate to ask this, but was your husband into anything kinky, sexwise? Bondage, perhaps?”

After a few seconds she decided that she wanted to tell me all.

“He was, I’m sorry to say, a deeply religious man. He saw himself as Jesus leading his flock, the pupils, to a better life. We has some soft sash cord, and he would get me to tie him to the bed, in the crucified position. It really excited him, and I had to ride him until he came. He was quicker if I jabbed his side with a blunt knitting needle, telling him that he was not the messiah. It satisfied him, but I can’t say that I got much enjoyment out of it. I have a much better sex life now with Joe from three cabins along. Now there’s a man with a cock to cherish. I wish that we had met years ago.”

With that off her chest, she poured another cup of tea.

“Is there anything else you want to know?”

“I would like to know about the big school plays. How they were produced and who chose the cast. I have been told that Adrian was the director, while Quentin was the producer.”

“They weren’t the only ones involved. There was a big group who helped out. Quentin picked some of the plays, his were always exciting and funny. They did a bedroom farce just before he resigned, and I loved it. Adrian was listed as the director, but the rehearsals were overseen by young Harry, usually. She ran them with a rod of iron. If we had allowed her to have a whip, I think she would have used it.”

“Young Harry? You said she?”

“Yes, although the school was for boys only, we had several female teachers. Harriet Young was the gym teacher. She was also the head coach of the soccer. She took our senior team to the inter-school finals five times and brought back the trophy on three off those times. She wasn’t the easiest person to get on with. She wasn’t a believer and resigned after Gordon retired, in 2017. The new headmaster wanted to enforce the rule that all teachers followed the school ethos and were believers. The boys gave her the nickname of Young Harry very quickly; she wasn’t a girly woman, no way! I think that she was a lesbian, but I never asked. She was a big woman with muscles that a lot of men would kill for. I think that she must have spent a lot of time lifting weights.”

Just then, there was knock on the door and a voice called out.

“I’ll be right with you, Joe. I have a visitor, a lovely young girl from the police. You’d better stay in the open air or else she may smell that weed on your breath on her way out.”

She giggled like a teenager as we rinsed out the cups.

“Thank you for talking to me, Jean. You’ve been a big help. I’m going to Australia, next week, to talk to Quentin, what you’ve told me is going to allow me to ask more questions than I thought I’d ask.”

As I went to my car, I made a great show of smelling the air, which made Jean and Joe laugh as I left them with their arms around each other, probably heading off to a book club where they were discussing the Kama Sutra.

Marianne Gregory © 2023