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

Chapter 3

As I was close to Grimsby, I went and had a first-hand look at the dumping places. I could see similarities with them all, except that one at Hewitts Circus. If Gordon retired at seventy, that would have been 2017. The murders and dumping had stopped at that time. Perhaps we were really looking at a strong woman with a dildo, rather than a pervert with condoms.

I then started to wonder if the dumping points had meaning. They all seemed to be random, at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it looked like they may have been chosen, on purpose. The last one, I was sure, could have been just the finger gesture to the police, telling them that they had failed.

Back at the Annex, I gathered my team together in the lunchroom.

“I’m going to be away for two weeks, flying to Australia to talk to Quentin, now Queenie, Merrilands. I hope that she’ll be able to give me a clear picture on how the actors were chosen. With her own change, I think that I can guess some of it. When I spoke to her, she said that she had known the second victim and told me both the given and femme names, so it looks promising.”

“Jean Holdfast gave me another name, today. It’s Harriet Young, known at the school as Young Harry. She was the gym teacher and left when the headmaster changed, something to do with not being a true believer. I want to know her life history and where she is now. From Jean’s description of her, she would have easily carried the small bodies. I want to know what she drove during that period, and what she drives now.”

I went and tidied up my desk, taking my little recorder and a charger. I needed to shop for an adaptor so that I could keep it, and my phone, fully charged. Before I left, my team all wished me a good trip. I drove away with a feeling of being with a family, something that had eluded me since my encounter with the boxcutter.

Saturday, I went to Boston to shop. At an electronics store I bought the adaptor and then saw a special bag that would stop the wrong electronic wavelengths from wiping my phone and recorder. I went to a place where they sold luggage and got a decent sized case with four wheels on the bottom so I could wheel it easily, along with a large matching handbag that I was told was the best to have as carry-on luggage. At home I set to cleaning the place and making sure that, after Sunday, I’d have nothing that would go off in the house.

Sunday was my packing day, I packed the carry-on first, with spare underwear and all my potions and lotions, as well as a bag of cosmetics, and my case file. I had decided that I would travel as the hard-nosed PI, with the black leather jeans, a dark cherry-red blouse, and a black jacket. With new compression hose and my calf boots, I was sure that I could keep the dreaded thrombosis away. Monday, I drove down to London, finding the airport hotel by mid-afternoon. They gave me a ticket for the long-term car park and the directions for the bus to bring me back, so I parked the car and returned to the hotel for a light dinner.

Tuesday morning, I was in the terminal in good time, and getting a surprise. The PA had booked by phone, telling the airline that I was on official police business, so found myself bumped to business class. That made the trip a lot easier. After we took off, I settled back, thinking about other flights I had taken. My earliest had been a school trip to Rome, a frantic couple of weeks with all us lads taking side trips to booze outlets. I didn’t remember a lot of that one. My last flight had been a short hop to Paris with the girl of my dreams for a naughty weekend. All she wanted to do was spend hours in the Louvre and then she told me it was her time of the month.

Since my transition, I had immersed myself in the PI business, not really thinking of myself as a genuine woman, even if I had the looks and the plumbing. I can’t say that I’d even felt anything different with the guys I had met. I sighed, wondering if I was going to spend my life as neutral, and started reading the book I had picked up in the throw-out pile at the bookstore in Boston. There was no way I’d pay the full price for a book in the airport.

With meals, waiting to use the toilet and a bit of reading, I was ready to scream by the time we reached Doha. I had close to twenty-four hours here, with eight of those able to stretch out in a hotel bed. After going through immigration and getting the bus to the hotel, I was feeling a bit better so checked in and asked where I could do a little shopping. The hotel laid on a car to take me to the main shopping area, saying that all I need to do was to tell the cab driver where I was staying when I wanted to come back, with the hotel having an account with the cab companies.

The shops were like nothing I’d ever seen, all bright lights and top brands. I window shopped for a while but had to stop when I saw a peach dress that would be ideal as a bridesmaid outfit. Angela had told me that the wedding to Steve was set for July and that I should look for something in peach, seeing that I wasn’t the Maid of Honour. A lady must have been on the lookout and called me into the shop to try it on, and that she would do a special price for a pretty lady.

By the time I got back to the hotel, I had the peach dress, as well as another in ivory and the underwear to suit. All name brands and well below what I would have expected to spend. With those packed carefully, I was out early the next day to see the gold bazaar, well worth it, the hotel reception had told me. They had settled my account and my driver was told to go with me to ensure I wasn’t ripped off. When I boarded the plane for the next leg, I had a gold necklace that I loved, as well as gold studs in my freshly pierced ears, and a couple of pairs of gold hoops.

When we arrived in Sydney, it took a little while for me to go through immigration, with me being pulled aside because of the file with pictures of bodies that was in my bag. A phone call later, I was escorted through a side door to an unmarked police car. They took me to the station first where I showed them my paperwork and told them a little about the case I was on. After assuring them that I wasn’t here to actually arrest anyone, they took me to my hotel, on Darling Harbour. It was dinner time, so I ate in the hotel dining room and went to bed, to make sure that I didn’t get any jetlag.

Thursday morning, I spent some time just walking along Darling Harbour and the over the footbridge to the main shopping streets. I could not believe how similar it was to being in London, with just the dollar signs on prices instead of pounds or euros. Window shopping, I found a place that sold locally made outfits, suitable for country folk. I had to have a look and tried on a calf length skirt that was beautifully made yet sturdy. It was an ideal winter skirt and they had boots in a matching colour with trailing leather thongs on the sides. I had a light lunch in the city and then walked back to the hotel, where I laid on my bed and dozed off for a few hours. I had dinner at the hotel and retired early, once more.

Being the middle of winter, Friday was cooler, but still around the sort of weather we were more used to in autumn. I wore my new boots and skirt, with one of my own blouses, and added my leather jacket. I was ready to see a few of the sights before my meeting, tomorrow. That day I saw the Opera House, and the Taronga Zoo, taking special care at the seal pool.

On Saturday, I dressed in jeans, blouse, the leather jacket, and my new boots, took it easy in the morning exploring the length of Darling Harbour, having lunch, and then taking the light railway around to the main city. Following the street map, I had picked up at reception, I strolled to Kings Cross, finding the fountain that Queenie had described. It had to be her, sitting on a seat, looking like an actress waiting in the wings. I walked up, and she saw me, looked at the picture I had emailed, stood, and embraced me in a hug, and then stepped back.

“G’day, Detective Inspector, or can I call you Polly?”

“You can, Queenie. Although this will be an official record in a case I’m working on, it would be nice to just talk. I find that people tend to remember more when they’re at ease.”

“Right, then, did you walk all the way here?”

“Yes, I have found the place fascinating, so much like home but with lots of different languages on the shopfronts. That Hyde Park is a lovely garden. This is more like a holiday for me than a job, and I’ve already spent more money than I should have.”

“That’s what holidays are for Polly. Have you seen Bondi, yet?”

“No, I’ve just walked Darling Harbour and the city, and yesterday I saw Taronga Zoo and the Opera House.”

She waved to a taxi, in the rank nearby, and it came to stop beside us.

“Polly, this is Hassan, one of my past pupils. Hassan, Polly here needs to see Bondi and then some of the sights on the North Shore. We can’t have her going back to the Old Country without a trip across the Bridge.”

For the next few hours, I was shown Bondi Beach so I could take a few holiday snaps, and we had an ice cream from the kiosk. Then we came back up, through Darlinghurst and over the Harbour Bridge. The viewpoint of going over it in the cab showed me just how massive it was. Then we went across another bridge at The Spit, and out through Brookvale to Dee Why to see the beach there. It was, so I was told, a better place without the tourists and a favourite of both Queenie and Hassan. I had no idea how many beaches Sydney had, really only hearing about Bondi. The others we stopped at, from Dee Why, Curl Curl, and then to Manly, where we stopped for coffee and cake, were places that I agreed looked more inviting than Bondi.

All the way, we chatted, and I learned a lot about Queenie and her new teaching job. I was glad that my recorder had a long battery life, although the voices may be a bit muffled as I hadn’t taken it out of my bag. The school she now taught in was here, on the North Shore, and was where a lot of the richer merchants sent their children. I wondered how Hassan had been able to attend, as a taxi driver, and then was told that his father owned the taxi, along with about fifty others, and that Hassan only drove on weekends, the rest of his week taken up with studies at University.

We were finally dropped off at the Sydney Eye Tower, or, as my companions both called it ‘Centrepoint’. Queenie and I rode the fast elevator to the restaurant level, where we were greeted by another of her students and shown to a table with a fantastic view across the city. When we sat down, I asked the first question on my mind as I put my recorder on the table.

“Queenie, we just spent a few hours in a taxi without the meter running, and now we are sitting in what must be one of the most expensive restaurants in the country. How is it possible?”

“That one is easy, but I think that we should get to it after I tell you how I got here, it might answer some of your other questions.”

I nodded and sat back. For some reason, I was enjoying my time with Queenie, and was interested in her life.

“I started out as a child growing up in a village outside of Norwich. In High School, I befriended a boy called Richard. By that time, I knew I was gay and used to borrow my sister’s clothes. Richard was also gay but had not fully accepted it. We both gained places at Cambridge and shared a room. That’s when we began our affair. I was studying English Literature and he was doing Physics. While there, I got into the Footlight Revue and took a short course on Drama. When he graduated, Richard emigrated, and I did an extra year to graduate in Drama to add to my qualifications.”

She stopped for a sip of her wine, then carried on.

“The school at Grimsby was my first real job. I threw myself into it and was rewarded, after a few years, by being put in charge of producing their plays. Now, one thing you have to know is that the school takes in pupils from primary, through to the GSCE’s. Old Gordon had made the rule that only pupils from the age of eleven to fourteen could take part in the plays. He made sure that they spent their last two years in study for the exams. After that, the pupils would be on their own, some going to university, others going into trades and the rest working for their parents or in other jobs. It wasn’t one of those schools that sent the boys off to a seminary. That, I had been told, was something the next headmaster wanted, after Gordon retired.”

“That fits in with what I’ve been told, the new headmaster tightened up the rules to the point where only practising Christians were allowed as teachers.”

“There’s a few that I knew who would have found that difficult, I can tell you!”

“How did you get on as a gay man in a boy’s school?”

“I hid it, very carefully. I lived alone and went off to the bigger cities to get my clothes, only venturing out on weekends as Queenie. Anyway, back to the life history. My first play that I produced was ‘The Importance of being Ernest’ back in ’07. At that time, the only female leads had been played by boys who looked like drag queens, mainly for laughs. I wanted the two girls in that play to look, sound and act like girls. I had been going out to a dance on Saturday nights, in Hull, and saw Andrew, with his mate, Simon, dressed as girls with a group of others. Andrew was in his second year of high school and looked so good I decided to call him in for a private discussion. Simon was still in primary; they were neighbours and Andrew would look out for him.”

“Whereabouts was this dance?”

“It was near Dairycoates. I think they demolished the place to build a supermarket a few years later.”

“So, what happened at the meeting?”

“Andrew was happy to play one of the girls, I think that he had wanted an opportunity to come out to his parents. They were shop owners, grocers, I think. I asked him about the others in his group at the dance and he told me that most went to the public schools, and he knew that some were serious about transitioning, later in life. We made an appointment, the next Saturday night, for me to meet them all, at the dance.”

“Did you manage to get them interested?”

“Oh, yes. They were over the moon at playing a girl on stage. For a few, it was a dream come true. One of them, she called herself Melanie, was perfect for the other female lead. We had the headmaster’s wife as Lady Cracknell, and another boy, quite a chubby one, playing the nursemaid. Jean was fantastic, I couldn’t see why she stayed with Gordon, I suppose it was because of their faith.”

“I spoke to her last week; she is the sort of woman I’d like to be when I get to her age. She made me feel too ordinary for words. I’ve read the review, it went well. So why ‘Godot’ the following year?”

“That was the work of the teacher who was slated to take over from Gordon. He got the ear of the school board and complained about having girls acting in the plays. The fools never bothered to ask me, so they followed his suggestion with that lump of a play. I don’t think the reviews were bad enough, probably because the reviewer was an old boy. Anyway, I got the nod to do something different in ’09 but was told to keep it within the bounds of decency. So, I put on ‘Romeo and Juliet’, with Julia, one of the group, brought in as Juliet, and Jean playing Lady Capulet. That one was a success, so Gordon gave me the go-ahead for another in 2010. That one was one of my best. It was ‘At Sword’s Point’ a stage version of a ‘B’ movie, and a lot of fun. The boys loved playing Musketeers and the audience lapped it up.”

“That was Maria, playing Claire?”

“Yes, she was fantastic in a big skirt and falsies that nearly fell out in rehearsal. 2011 was my last show. I had received a good sum when my father died, so was ready to move when Richard called me. He told me that the school he taught at was in dire need of a good English Literature teacher with a flair for the dramatics. As you can see, that’s one thing I’m not short of. I left after that play, another film adaption called ‘A Flea in her Ear’; I’d shown the script to Jean, and she told me that, no matter what anyone else told me, she loved it. Simone, by this time, was in first year and played Lucienne, with Gloria, another of the public-school students, playing Olympe. When that school year was over, I packed up and came here.”

“I see that you didn’t start teaching until 2012?”

“You’ve done your homework, full marks. Yes, I got here and went to live with Richard, he and I are now married. The school years here start in January, so I went off to Thailand for my operation, being legally Queenie when I started work. Where did you have yours if I can be so bold to ask?”

He had been frank with me, so I felt that I should be frank with him.

“Mine wasn’t planned. It came about with an encounter with a mad woman with a box cutter. That was a few years ago. I’d never considered becoming female and it has been a steep learning curve. How did you pick me?”

“Polly, I’ve worked as a woman for some years, now, and before that I always wanted to be one. You are very good, but there are some small things that you can’t hide. The length and size of your fingers, some old gestures. I can’t believe that you looked like that without wondering.”

“The face was because of a rounders bat across the nose. I had several months of operations to rebuild it. I think the surgeons did well, and I’m proud to look like this, now, although, after it happened, I wasn’t pleased with how my life had been shattered. Now, this school of yours, and why are we sitting here, waiting for our meal?”

“Right! The school is a fee-paying one, with most of the students being children of businessmen or politicians. It’s a mixed school, so we don’t have boys in girl’s clothes, but there’s a few I see who may enjoy that. The parents come from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, with the majority being Lebanese, Greek and Italian, with about a quarter of the school being white Anglos. It’s non-denominational and we send nearly ninety percent of our kids to university, even if they do end up working within the family. Those ethnic groups are strong on family, and with Richard and I helping their children reach their potential, we are part of that family. We get invited to a lot of high-brow events and there are many who don’t mind doing me a favour, or two. Now, I’ve told you my story, can you tell me why you’re even here?”

“What I’m going to tell you has to stay between us, for the moment. I don’t want you to tell Richard what I’m going to say, promise?”

“Cross my heart, Polly. It must be serious to have brought you here.”

“Right! We have some dead boys who were found dressed as girls. The first was dumped near the Fish Dock in Grimsby. That was the one you knew as Melanie. She was murdered in 2010.”

“I didn’t see that in the papers.”

“No, it was just one body among several others. What made things different was that the second body was the one you knew as Andrea. She was found, in 2011, in the grounds of Havelock House. After you left the country, we have had five more. In 2012 we found Julia, outside the Sea Cadets clubrooms. In 2014, we had Maria in the carpark of the KFC at Meridian Point.”

“No wonder you needed to talk to me, then, this is horrendous.”

“It gets worse. In 2015, Adrian Jeffries was pulled in as a result of an Identikit picture, in relation to us finding the body of the one you knew as Gloria, at Hewitts Circus. The odd thing about that was that he had an alibi, citing a meal with Gordon and his wife, and yourself, to discuss the next play. The Inspector who was in charge of the case never bothered to follow it through, seeing that he was an old boy.”

“That’s five, you suggested six.”

“The last one was young Simone. She was dumped in the carpark of Sainsburys, across the water from the police station. That was the last, until the case that led us to look into Adrian and yourself. That was a minor case that led us to finding a box with bones in. It was in the garden shed at the house where Adrian lived. I believe it may have been the bones of a lad called Jason Parsons, who had appeared in a presentation of ‘Twelfth Night’ in 2014, and, as Yorick, in Hamlet in 2018.”

“You said ‘lived’?”

“Yes, Adrian was a victim of Covid, as was Gordon. At the moment, you’re the only living witness from those early plays, other than Jean.”

“What about Harriet Young, she was heavily involved.”

“Jean only mentioned her last week. Her name had not appeared in the reviews. She resigned in 2017 when Gordon retired, and we don’t know where she is at the moment. My team may have found her since I’ve been away.”

“I expect that Jean would mention Young Harry. They never got on, Harry being the most butch lesbian I’ve ever met. Even the ‘Dykes on Bikes’ we have here haven’t the presence that Harry put on. She had her office, in the gym, near the back door, so she could pop out for a smoke. It also stopped any students leaving that way for a cigarette, themselves. That woman could lift more weights than any guy I’ve ever met. I believe that she had a sister, totally the opposite, who was a model in London. I saw her once, a petite girl. I took posters of her into the discussions for my plays, to get my ‘girls’ fired up. They were all small, seeing that they were only just into their teens, ideal for portraying a feminine character.”

“You say ‘had a sister’, was that in past tense?”

“Yes, that was the only time I felt sorry for Harry, the sister had been at a fashion show and wasn’t far from her flat, so she decided to walk home. I don’t know the details, but she didn’t make it. I think that it would have been around ’07.”

Marianne Gregory © 2023

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

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

Chapter 6

Sunday, for me, was another new beginning. I had breakfast, my man across the table, and he knew everything but still loved me for who I am now. It was as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. The day was spent doing cleaning and laundry, kissing, and laughing. That night I got him worked up with my mouth before letting him have his way with me.

Monday, after breakfast, we kissed, and he left for his mudflats while I got my car to go to the Annex. Jackson arrived about eleven and we sat in my office to talk about the case. He had spoken to his Chief Superintendent, who wasn’t too happy with what was presented, but gave him permission to continue for only another two weeks.

“If we didn’t wrap the case by then, he told me, it will go back into the cold case files. The man’s a tyrant and determined that we keep within our budgets. No-one likes it, but what can you do, he is, after all, our boss.”

“I’m lucky that Dawlish is more appreciative of how long cases take. He did let me go to Sydney, and I found out a lot that has put us further forward. I’ll continue to mine the archives to see what comes up. How have your men done with the interviews at the dumping sites?”

“We spoke to the Sea Cadets. One of the officers did remember a big girl who wanted to join. Of course, she could do so now, but back then they didn’t have the female facilities that they do now, so they couldn’t allow her in. Havelock were good, they went back into their HR records from when they started up and found an application from her as a soccer coach. She didn’t have the CV then, that she created at the school, so she missed out there as well. It looks like you were right. Evans came by and took the details of the others, saying that he and Hannaford will look into them. He also asked if he could take the original case files, but I told him that I hadn’t finished with them, yet.”

During that week, I located some of the boys who had played other girls in the plays. Most told me that they had fun during the play, but that had been the last time they had been in a dress. They all said that Young Harry had stayed friendly but became distant once they got past sixteen. A couple, that had kept dressing, told me that once they had come out to their parents, they had stayed at home as a new daughter and that everything was good. They also said that Young Harry stayed friendly until she had been told that they now had a happy family relationship.

The witness, at Hewitts Circus, had never been listed on Tesco records. They suggested that he must have been a casual, brought in by their cleaning company. He did, however, turn up in the census records as the live-in gardener at Hawks Nest. I was certain that we could wrap this up if we were given permission to raid a few homes.

Thursday evening, Bill went off to Steve’s bucks’ night, while I attended an evening with Angela, and some of her friends, at a male review in Nottingham. She had organised a minibus, which was a good thing, because most of us were a bit squiffy by midnight.

Friday, for me, was a day off. Angela had organised a salon visit for her, her schoolfriend, and me, followed by a try on of our wedding outfits, to make sure they looked good. I was used to the salon in Boston, but the one we went to in Skegness was, as they say, a cut above. We were there for nearly five hours, and I walked out feeling more like a woman than I had ever felt, before. I thought that it was a pity I would have to tell Bill that tonight would not be the night, but I think he would be happier after the wedding.

The dress tryout was successful. I took both the peach and the ivory dresses that I had bought on the way out to Australia. Angela had decided that she would be in ivory, seeing that it was her second time at the altar, and her friend wore that colour as well. When we looked at ourselves in a mirror, the peach just didn’t work, but my ivory looked as if we were a genuine group. So, I could wear the peach for the reception, as the others would be changing, as well. When we put on the reception outfits, we didn’t clash.

On Saturday, Bill drove me to Angela and Steve’s house, where Angela was to get ready. Steve was at his Best Man’s place, and Bill would join them there. The wedding was set for three-o-clock, so we spent the morning getting ourselves tizzied up and had a sandwich lunch. At two, we went out to the two wedding cars, one for Angela and her bank manager, who was going to walk her down the aisle: the other for me and the Maid of Honour.

It was a lovely wedding, Steve, and the other men were elegant in their suits. The service was traditional, and the happy couple left the church in showers of confetti and good wishes. That was, of course, after the photographer took nearly an hour to get all the pictures he wanted. Steve had arranged for them to go to his family home to change, while the rest of us were taken to a hotel, where we had two rooms to change. My other dress, and all the accessories, was in a case in the back of the car. We girls changed in one room, helping each other with getting dressed, while the two guys changed in the other. We were told that the two rooms were booked for the night, should we want to use them.

The reception started at five and went until midnight. It was typical, bad speeches and all, but the food was interesting, and the DJ had a good playlist. Bill and I danced all night, and we did, indeed, ask for more once we were back at the hotel, using one of the rooms. We both had packed something for Sunday. At breakfast, we found the Best Man with his wife already eating, so joined them to talk about yesterday and the likely outcome of the marriage. I didn’t let on that I had been told that Angela was already pregnant.

Monday, I went to see Dawlish and spoke to him about the edict that Jackson had been given. He told me that it was all right for me to continue looking into the archives, but that without Grimsby on board, there wouldn’t be any on-the-ground policing. We agreed that, unless I could come up with something concrete that would sway their boss, we may have to let it lie.

I was working at my desk on Tuesday when I got a phone call. It was Evans, and he told me that Hannaford wanted me to meet him at a site where they had found some good evidence. He gave me the directions, to a shed north of Grimsby, off the A1173 and on to Rosper Road, then right into Station Road, until I went over the railway line, to a track on the right. I told him that I would be there in an hour, or so, then sat back.

“What’s wrong, Polly,” asked Julia, from the other desk. “You look worried.”

“That was Evans, from the Grimsby Vice Squad. He wants me to meet his Inspector at a site outside Grimsby, which, if my memory serves me well, is isolated and ideal for an abduction. I don’t trust Evans, he was around when Ramsey, one of the suspects, was at the station. He has asked for the original files and seemed to know a lot about Frawley when I went up to brief them. What I want is a tracker, for me, which is invisible.”

“Don’t fret, Polly, I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

She got up and went off, coming back about fifteen minutes later.

“This, I think, will do the trick. My boyfriend works at one of the nearby buildings, and they do electronic stuff for surveillance. He showed me this, a few weeks ago, and I refused to have it inserted, telling him that I was happier with him inside me.”

She opened a box, and I gasped, then had to throttle a laugh as I looked at what looked like a small butt-plug. Julia called through to Cathy to set the computer to track a frequency, then turned it on. Cathy called through that she had locked on to it. The other two then came through to see what we were playing with. They had a laugh, but it became serious when I told them what I was worried about. We made sure that the computer in the van could follow me and I went to the toilet to lube the plug and insert it. I walked funny when I came out but was sure that I’d get used to it if I sat on it all the way to Grimsby. We locked up the Annex and they got the van out, with one at the computer. I told them that if anything happened, they should use their mobile phones to contact back-up, because Evans would have a police radio.

They gave me a head start, then rang me on my phone to tell me that they had a good trace on both me and the car transmitter. I drove out to the rendezvous, as directed. I called them when I turned into Station Road, and they confirmed that they had my position. At the track, I turned and went along a little way until I came to a shack, with a police van standing outside, with two officers in forensic gear standing next to it. I stopped, turned off, unbuckled and was about to get my bag when the car door opened, and Evans said the words that I didn’t want to hear.

“Glad you could make it, bitch. This is where the case goes cold.”

That’s when he sprayed something in my face, and I blacked out.

I came around to find myself in a standing position, tied to an upright post, with tape across my mouth. When I could focus, I looked around. I was in a building that had the look of age, even wartime, by the colour on the walls. It was an old saw-tooth roof, and I was tied to one of the roof supports. In front of me was an open space to a set of big doors. I didn’t feel so good, it could have been the after effect of that spray.

“Make sure you don’t vomit. I would hate for you to drown in it before we’ve had our fun. Besides, you’re not a big enough rock star to go out that way.”

I turned towards the voice, to see a person wearing a robe, no, it looked more like a long evening dress. The head was that of a hawk, and the voice was electronically created.

“You’ve been a right pain in the arse, bitch. I have to say that you’re a damn good detective, but tonight that means nothing. We haven’t had one of these occasions for too many years, and we’ve been missing them. Stay where you are, and all will be easy.”

The person was marking out designs on the floor around me. When I looked down it was quite ornate, but not like the pentangle I might have expected. I stood, against my post and tried desperately not to vomit, while the second figure came in to view, in a similar outfit, and went to the doors. One by one, the door was opened and four new figures drove in and parked off to one side, next to the police van.

The last car in was a Bentley, and the person who got out looked resplendent on a shiny dress, with sparkles and gold chains. They came and stood in front of me, in a silent line, six murderers in a row. Then the resplendent one spoke.

“Polly Ibbotson, tonight you will meet your maker, but not before you hurt, a lot. With you out of the way, our little escapades will go back into the vaults. From what I’ve been told, you were three quarters of the way to solving the case. I congratulate you on your skill and commiserate you on your coming experience to the afterlife. Let the ceremony begin!”

They started with two of them making a droning sound, then the others adding a chant. All it needed was the lights to be dimmed and I would have been really scared. I wondered how long I had been unconscious because I had been standing here for quite a while. I hoped that the girls had been able to track me and call for back-up. Frawley was getting worked up and he had pulled a knife from his gown when an armoured Land Rover crashed through the doors, followed by Armed Response Police who shouted for everyone to get down or else they’d be shot. That put a damper on the party, I must say!

The six were face-down on the floor and handcuffed before the officer called “Clear” into his radio. That’s when more police and my girls came in, followed by Bill, who rushed up to me with a look of horror on his face. He put his hands either side of my face and pulled the tape away. That’s when I did the one thing I had been holding back. I vomited on him.

Julia was trying to untie me when two paramedics with a stretcher came in. One of the police undid the cuffs that held my hands behind my back, and I was finally able to move. I was given some water to rinse my mouth, then they got me on the stretcher and put an oxygen mask over my face. As they trundled me out of the place, I saw one of the Squad with a set of coveralls, waiting for Bill to rid himself of his soiled clothes. Julia came with me in the ambulance, and I asked her to remove the plug, seeing that it had done its job. She put on a glove as I rolled to one side while she pulled up the hem of my dress, pulled my pants down enough to get a grip on the item, pulled it out and put it in an evidence bag for cleaning, later.

At the hospital, they checked me over and decided that it would be good to keep me overnight. I was put into a private room, given a hospital gown to put on. Then it was a cup of tea and an injection, and I was in the land of nod.

The next morning, I had a visitor. It was Assistant Commissioner Strachan, who smiled as he sat next to the bed.

“You’ve gone and done it again, Polly. If you keep this up, we’ll have to put you in charge of the murder squad. I got a phone call, last night, from Inspector Jackson in Grimsby. What he told me was almost too much to believe. He sent me a report, which I read this morning. He was full of praise for your research and investigating, as well as for your bravery by going to a meeting that you were sure would end badly.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I’ll try not to do it, again.”

“Polly, just this once you can call me Charlie. I want you to continue to do what you do, and if it decimates my force, then they shouldn’t be doing bad things. You were about to be killed by Augustus Frawley, a councillor and the chair of the police oversight committee. With him was his gardener, who Jackson tells me is implicated in several other murders. Then, there was the Chief Superintendent of the Grimsby Station, Detective Sergeant Evans of the Grimsby Vice Squad, a retired Inspector Ramsay and, last but not least, the very religious headmaster of a boy’s school. From what Jackson and Dawlish have told me, they conspired to abduct, rape, and kill up to eight boys, as well as one of the schoolteachers. That’s quite a haul for an afternoon’s work.”

“It took more than an afternoon to get to that point, Charlie, sir. I expect that the media will have a ball when this hits the street.”

“They will, Polly, but we must rejoice in the fact that we can clear deadwood. It lets the public know that we mean business, and it lets the other members of the force know the same thing. I just want to say thank you, from me and all of the senior members, it’s good to know that the future of the force is in good hands.”

“Thank you, Charles, there are many more good men and women in our ranks than the bad ones.”

“Right, now I’d better go, so your young man can come and see you. I have a uniformed outside, holding him back. I’ll see you again, at the commendation service.”

When he left, there was a short conversation outside, before Bill came in. I held my arms out and we clung together as if our life depended on it. Maybe it did.

“Bill, darling, I’m sorry I barfed on you, I just couldn’t hold it back. It was the spray that they knocked me out with.”

“That’s perfectly all right, my love. It did have a bright side. Once I was in the police coveralls, Cathy got the guys together so I could be in the group as she took some pictures. Those guys were really jumping, especially when they took the headwear off the prisoners. There were a couple who weren’t anybody’s favourite, I can tell you.”

“How did you get to be there, anyway?”

“Jessica phoned to tell me that you could be driving into danger. They stopped to pick me up from where I had parked, and I spent the rest of the trip helping out where I could. It was more than I could bear when your tracker went off on its own. We managed to pull into a sideroad so that the police van didn’t spot us as it went past us. You were being held in an old building at the old North Killingholme air base. It took a while, with the girls on their phones, to put together the team to go in and save you. I was at my wits end. I am so in awe at how calm those girls were. They kept on telling me that it was likely that there were four or five in there, and one guy with three girls weren’t going to overcome them. When I saw you, tied to that post, my heart nearly burst. I was about to kiss you when you threw up.”

“So, what’s stopping you from kissing me, now?”

We were interrupted, a few minutes later, by a cough. It was the doctor, who took my blood pressure and temperature, then told me I was good to go. Bill went outside and came back with a small bag with clean clothes for me. He waited until I had a shower, then I dressed, and the uniformed officer accompanied us out of the hospital. He told us that he had been ordered to stay close and followed us home. He must have radioed in as Dawlish was parked outside when we arrived.

We went into the house and Bill put the kettle on as Dawlish sat at the kitchen table.

“Sorry we only have cream biscuits, sir, if I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.”

“Polly, I’d chew stones to sit here with you, alive and well and in good spirits. What happened yesterday is going to have huge ramifications. When you spoke to me, the other day, I fully expected them to hold off until the case was buried. This case was broken with the thing that broke your last murder case, the overblown ego of the main lawbreaker. If he hadn’t demanded your hide, they could have continued to live as they have been.”

“That’s just the sort of thing that alerted me to their plan, Hannaford would have just called, or emailed me, if there was something he had found. I couldn’t see him asking me to go all that way to look at something he’d found. Evans had raised my suspicions, as well, that’s why we took precautions, just in case it went pear-shaped.”

“You do realise, Polly, that there will be some changes in rank, coming from this. The AC has already put you forward for a bravery award, and there’s room for you in the Murder Squad, should you want it, possibly as Chief Inspector.”

“No, thank you, sir. This case was broken with a little bit of detecting, a lot of talking and many hours on the computer. I want to stay with my team, as they are the best around. Bill has as much respect for them as I have, now.”

“Yes, sir. I watched them, yesterday, put together a team, from scratch, without hardly breaking into a sweat. They are, I must say, almost as awesome as my fiancée, here.”

We drank the tea, ate the biscuits, and discussed the end of the case and the start of the prosecution case. When Dawlish left, we stood at the door and waved him off. The uniform gave us a wave and left, as well. I turned to Bill.

“What was that about me being your fiancée, darling. For that to happen, you should have gone down on one knee, asked me properly, and then bought me a nice ring.”

He got down on his knee, there and then, on the front step.

“Polly, my darling, will you be my wife?”

“Of course, my love, now take me to bed and then take me shopping for a ring. I don’t mind something cheaper, as long as it looks good.”

So, that’s what we did. We did need another shower before we dressed again, and the ring wasn’t too cheap, but we laughed and hugged and then went off to the Annex to see the team and flash the jewellery.

They were all pleased to see us, and more pleased to see the ring. I thanked Julia for her idea about the tracker, and she told me that her boyfriend didn’t want it back after he’d been told where it had been for several hours. She gave the box to Bill, telling him that anytime he wanted to have me tracked, to insert it and the give them a call. The girls had already seen Dawlish and were all excited about what may happen in the future. We all knew that there would be presentation to prepare, to show the prosecutors what they had to work with, and it would be a couple of weeks before that was ready. Cathy had done one before, so Jessica was nominated to do this one.

Over the next few weeks, we put together a presentation that outlined the facts, as we knew them, linked the prisoners to the timeline of the plays and the murders. We couldn’t pin the murder of Harriet Young on any of them, nor that of Jason Parsons. We were helped by Frawley and the policemen all saying that the gardener was the ringleader, then the gardener turning on his friends and pleading guilty, outlining all the events where he was present, so stitching up all of the others at different times, even Adrian Jeffries, a late comer who had been the one to cut Jason up and render his bones, being, as Inspector Jackson was told, a task that would allow him to be a member of the group.

Over the weeks we would get things told to us from other officers. Frawley was still full of himself and blamed Evans for not finding the tracker. Evans and Ramsay saw the way the wind was blowing and would plead guilty. The Chief Super was adamant that he would get off, while the headmaster spent a lot of his time on his knees, praying and confessing his sins. Unlike the confessional, the tape recorder that picked up every word was not bound to secrecy, so making any not guilty plea impossible to back up. They all ended up inside.

Bill, and I married in September, with a lovely wedding, where we were joined by a lot of well-wishers from our friends and our colleagues. The AC walked me down the aisle and we had a police guard either side of the pathway to the car when we left. Strachan was in full dress uniform, as was I, with my medal ribbon prominent. Bill had a snappy suit, as did Steve, as Best Man. My team were my bridesmaids, as they were all equal, in my eyes. In the eyes of the force, as well, with Cathy getting a commendation, Jessica going to Acting Detective Sergeant and Julia on the team as a full detective constable, in her own right. We were given a new WPC to break in.

There had been a huge shake-up in Grimsby, with both Jackson and Hannaford being upped to Chief Inspector, and a new Chief Superintendent brought in from outside, to make sure the house was truly clean.

I started helping Bill, at Donna Nook, on weekends, as the seals gathered to pup. Sometimes we’d wave to the cameras as we sealed our partnership, with a kiss.

Marianne Gregory © 2023