Part 2

I sat at my desk and pondered on what Cherry had found. Five deaths, spread over nearly forty years, was difficult to understand. The motive may be lost in time, maybe they weren’t linked at all. Maybe, the AI had just come up with gobbledegook. Maybe, no, certainly, this was going over my head this time.

I made an appointment to see Dawlish, to give him a heads-up on the case, as well as advanced notice of technology that could well change the way we worked in the future. He, like me, shook his head and wondered where this would take us. We spoke about the future, worried that we would just get AI to predict things, like marches, riots, protests, and the like. Or it could be programmed to follow cases to find links, with the idea that it could predict an upcoming robbery or murder. It was worse than the current trend of changing DNA to eliminate genetic defects. It was all leading to a grey society, led by a computer.

For the next few days, we all kept our heads down and got on with our work. I was deep into planning the floorplan of the new facility when Julia asked if we could all get together to talk about the ‘Redcoat Conundrum’. We had received the hard copy file from Rossiter, at Pontefract, as well as the two from the cold case archives in Lincoln. We already had the two local ones in our own storage.

We gathered in the lunchroom and Julia gave us a precis of what she had found.

“With the latest case, I’m not much further forward than before. The door-to-door investigations found that Robert Everard was a quiet man, who only went out to shop or visit the local pub. One person, who knew him a bit better, said that he would wear the Redcoat uniform once a year to attend a reunion in Filey. That, I’ve found out, was the last time he had been seen, some three weeks before he was found. The forensic report suggests that his bloating overcame the weight effect of the stones found in the pockets of his jacket. We can then assume that he was killed on the way home. He didn’t have a car and had arrived at Filey by bus. He may have been offered a lift and was killed by his benefactor.”

I nodded. “We need to get a list of all those that attended that reunion.”

“I’m on to that, Polly. They will get back to me with whatever they can. Now, the two found at power stations. They are a real puzzle because the way those places ran, the only way the bodies could have been placed is by someone lugging them in on the ground, or by dropping one from a plane, and the other through a heavy inspection plate. Both power stations were leaders in coal delivery, using what they called a ‘merry-go-round’ system. They both got deliveries from the Welbeck and then the Meden Vale collieries, and then from overseas when both of those were shut down. The coal arrived in railway trucks, specially made with bottom opening doors. The trains usually carried a thousand tons, in thirty-two-ton trucks. The unloading was automatic as the train passed over grids at a very slow pace, so there was no way the bodies could have arrived like that. The coal was then sent, by conveyor, to the boiler house bunkers or to the stocking area. The process was overseen by a control room, and there were cameras to detect unusual items on the conveyors. It was very slick, with the empty train leaving in an hour from arriving.”

“What about the victims?”

“That’s where it gets interesting. The first one, Edwin Duncan, was from Grimsby, and the last time he had been to a reunion was in 2022, here, in Skegness. The next one back, Jeremy Batchelor, had been to a reunion, also here, in Skegness, back in 2019. Both reports show that they were happily living out their retirement in pensioner units in Ingoldmells and were frequent visitors to the current Butlins.”

“OK, that’s a good start. What did you get from the earlier cases?”

“Walter Watson was last seen at a reunion, at Clacton, in 2003. It was a twenty-year get-together of the closing of the place. Because there was, by that time, no camp buildings left, they had got together in a new pub, built on the northern edge of what used to be the amusement park. Our latest victim, and both of the others, didn’t attend that one. Walter had stayed in Clacton, after the closing, to work as a barman in one of the hotels. He did have family in this area.”

“Right, the oldest one, then.”

“We have the facts here and it’s pretty straight-forward. Allan Stevens had started in Skegness, then went to Filey. He was there when Robert went there, and they both went to Clacton in 1980. Stevens left Butlins at the end of ’83 and came back to Skegness to get other work. He was, like his brother Harry, a good electrician. Locals who were interviewed said that he was a sad man, with a chip on his shoulder the size of a house. He was reputed to be a drinker and a worry for his older brother. A few nights before he was found in the outlet grate, he had been at his usual pub. The publican told the officers that it looked as if he had been drinking before he got there. He got into an argument with a regular, then stormed out and got on his motorcycle and roared off. The brother went to report him missing because he hadn’t turned up to work on an important job that they needed to do. After the body had been found, the brother was called to the police station to identify it, because the motorcycle, with his clothes and wallet, had been found up-river, in a secluded spot, after the body had been recovered. It had been a wet year and the Drain was flowing strongly with run-off from the fields further inland. The body was released to the brother, who had a cremation service, then proceeded to get on with his life, I suppose. I can’t see where it fits with the others, as we know all the facts and it all leads to what the coroner decided. ‘Suicide due to the mind becoming unbalanced.’

“All right, then. Put that one aside, for the moment, and see if you can find out more about the others. The reunions have to be a strong link with how they were chosen, and the fact that they were all together at Clacton means that we’re going to have to check their records, if they still exist. Cherry and Julia, when you have the time, go to Butlins, here, and see if they have any old photos of any of these guys, there are always heaps of pictures taken, especially if they were performers. See if you can find any links, they may have had overlapping acts, they may have shared a chalet. Anything that you can come back with will be good. I’ll get on to Rossiter to tell him where we stand.”

After that, I left them to it and worried about my own life changes. Over the next couple of weeks, we signed the paperwork for North Mymms, paid the deposit and was given all the keys. Bill organised a company to come in and rebuild the kitchen, bathroom and add an ensuite to the main bedroom, losing some of the spare room in the process. They would be there for about two months. Steve had arranged a refinancing of our mortgage, with the payments remaining the same, and Angela had organised her deposit for her old house.

To be as helpful as we could, we started taking things to the new house, to keep in the rooms that the workers weren’t going to touch and allowed Angela to start moving her things into the space that we had cleared. The longer I spent in North Mymms, the more I loved it.

The Redcoat case was going nowhere, Skegness had looked into their records and had confirmed that all five had worked there, at one time or another. They had come up with some photos that helped, for a while. One showed Robert Everard on stage, in a magician outfit, with a blonde girl in the Redcoat outfit; red jacket, white pleated skirt and white sneakers. Another was Duncan and Batchelor at microphones with a piano player behind them. They were dressed as Flanagan and Allen.

Filey had come up with similar pictures, along with the information that the people we were looking into were solid performers and good employees. As far as Clacton went, it was a total zero. All paperwork had gone to head office in 1983, and subsequently destroyed in 1995 when it was decided that it was no longer needed. No-one could tell us if there were any photos, or posters, and it was suggested that we tried the internet sales sites.

At the Annex, we became busy with a lot of work, tracking illegal immigrants and the ones who organised their arrivals in the country. Around October, we had a bit of a lull in the workload, and I decided that we had to be proactive regarding the Redcoats. I booked rooms at a hotel in Clacton and took Cherry for a field trip in detecting, leaving Cathy in charge.

When we got to Clacton, we checked in and drove down to where Butlins used to be. It was now a large housing estate. We stopped for lunch in the pub where the reunions once took place. On their walls were lots of photos of what used to be when the holiday camp was the place to go to. The waitress pointed out the site where the present pub is, at the end of a row of seaside shops. She told me that her mother had worked in one, selling fairy floss and toffee apples. Between the row of shops and the camp, in an aerial picture, was a large amusement park. I was able to get an idea of scale with a Martello Tower that was a little way along the coast, on the outer edge of the camp. Clacton had been one of the biggest camps, with around twelve thousand visitors a week.

Cherry and I were taking it all in, with her taking pictures on her phone to take back to the office. I asked the waitress if they still had reunions and she told me that there wasn’t many from the town that had worked at the camp as Redcoats, most of those brought in from around the country. The locals were mainly older and only did the cleaning and laundry work, so, to them it was just a job. This meant that anybody who had worked there were mostly dead, seeing that it had now been forty years since it closed, or had left the area.

“You could try Norman if he’s still around. He was the camp manager in the last few years, and he organised the few reunions that we did host. The last was about eight years ago, but I’ll get Jean, our manager, to look on the computer to see if there’s still a contact number for him.”

We sipped on our lemonades until she came back with a slip of paper. On it was the name – Norman Hurst – and a phone number.

“That’s the number for the retirement home he was living in. He might have died, last time he was here he told me that he was turning seventy.”

Outside, I rang the number and found that Norman was still in the land of the living, in good health, and would welcome visitors. They gave me directions, not that far away, on the other side of the pier in what used to be a hotel. We parked outside and went in to make ourselves known.

We were shown into a lounge area, where we were greeted with hoots and offers to marry us. I had seen something similar when I had visited my father, not long before he died, but it was a new experience for Cherry, who flushed, so adding to the ribald welcome. They all quietened down, and we sat next to Norman, in easy chairs around a small table.

He was still spritely, but in that shrinking era. He had a walking stick next to his chair. We introduced ourselves and that piqued his interest, immediately.

“What can I do for a couple of detectives. Last time I did anything wrong I was still at school. I can’t give the apples back, now, can I?’

“Not here for that, Norman. We are looking into a case where we have some old Redcoats who have turned up dead, over the last forty years. They had all been at the Clacton camp in the few years before it was closed. A lady down at the pub where you had your reunions gave us your contact number. We don’t do questions, these days. If I can record the conversation, can you tell me about yourself and how you came to be the camp manager?”

I put my recorder on the table, switched it on and sat back.

“What, no ‘tell me everything or you’ll be down the nick, sonny boy’, the way they do it on TV?”

“No, Norman, we try to be much more civilised. Were you a Clacton boy?”

“Born and bred. Local primary school, local high school. I got a summer job at the amusement park in the summer of ’64. A callow sixteen-year-old. They paid two bob an hour and all the coins you could find in the ride cars. We used to have sand in them that stopped the coins rolling around. Some of those rides could get three or four G if they were worked right. Those days, you would ride on the platforms and give the cars a bit of an extra push. There was one ride that had ups and downs, designed to spin the car once on each incline. Do it properly and you could get it spinning twice. I made about twelve quid a week in wages and about twenty quid a week with my share of the lost coins. I did a gardening job over the winter and was back on the rides as soon as they opened. That first year was so exciting, it just had to be my future. They made a film, in the camp, that year, with John Leyton and Mike Sarne. My favourite, though, was Grazina Frame. I was running the Big Wheel when they filmed a dance scene on the promenade. The director wanted the wheel to be kept going but I did have to stop it a few times, to let holidaymakers off who had been going around for a half an hour.”

“Were you interested in the film making?”

“Hell, no. I was interested in that Grazina. Not much of a voice but the biggest knockers that had graced this town. The film didn’t do much when it was released, a bit like a B version of a ‘Carry On’ picture. They called it ‘Every Day’s a Holiday’ and it was released in the US as ‘Seaside Swingers’. Nobody has even heard of it now, even though it had Freddy and the Dreamers in it.”

“Did you get to meet them?”

“No way, I couldn’t go into the camp. The amusements were run by Southern Amusements, not Butlins. I only got into the camp in winter when the Winter Club was on.”

“A Winter Club, I’ve never heard of that.”

“I don’t know if any of the other camps did it, but they opened the main building for the locals. You paid a fee for an entry badge, and it was open every day. Virtually no staff, but there was plenty to do with the heated pool, snooker, and table tennis. There were two bars that were open, as well as the dance hall right at the front. The best bit was that it was warm. I met my wife there, a few years after I had got a job in the camp as an office boy. She was a bit younger than me, and had just left school, so was looking for a job. I put in a good word for her, and she was taken on as a general cleaner in the winter, and a chalet cleaner in the summer. She was well overqualified but was happy to be working without having to go to Colchester or London.”

“She isn’t still here?”

“No, she was taken, far too early, with the big C. We had a good forty odd years, so I can’t complain. After the camp closed, I got a job as Office Manager at an electrical company in Little Clacton, until I retired. The council wanted my big house and put me in here with this lot of losers.”

“The period we’re interested in is the last few years before the close. Especially Robert Everard and his friends.”

“Robby, now there’s a card. Called himself the Great Mesisto, Illusionist Extraordinaire. He was good, especially with the kiddy shows. He was one of a group I called my Solid Six. Most of them were performers, not your Front Of House Redcoats. They didn’t live at the camp in the summer, had digs in the town. When you’ve worked until after midnight, you don’t need ‘Greensleeves’ coming over the in-chalet PA system at six in the morning.”

“Do you still have photos?”

“Do I! They take me back to fun times. Help me up and I’ll show them to you.”

We helped him stand and he turned to the others in the room.

“Just taking these nice ladies to see my etchings, if I’m not back in an hour, I’ll be in my room with a smile on my face.”

“Don’t bullshit, Norm, you haven’t cracked a fat in fifteen years!”

He, and I, were chuckling as we went to his room. Cherry was stoney faced. I don’t think that she had been around really old people before. In his room there were photos everywhere. He picked up one and showed it to us.

“That’s the group you’re talking about, in Redcoat outfits. There’s Robby, Edwin, Jeremy, Walter, and Snowflake. Robby was, as I said, an Illusionist, and Snowflake was his assistant. Edwin and Jeremy were great singers, they would do a whole range of shows. If you wanted singing cowboys, tramps, Everly Brothers, whatever, they could do it. Walter was a lovely tenor, and was lead in a lot of shows, where they did short versions of popular movies.”

“What about Allan Stevens?”

“Ah! Allan wasn’t a proper Redcoat, only on the books that way to allow him the perks of the job. He was an electrician, an expert in stage lighting. He didn’t have the temperament to be a host Redcoat, and it took a lot of work from the others to keep him out of trouble. He drank a bit too much.”

“What about Snowflake, that has to be a stage name?”

“The name, in the books, was Jeffrey Hake. He told me that his nickname, from school, had been Hake the Flake. As you can see by this picture, he made a lovely girl. He had acquired a proper Redcoat outfit to wear and even had an official badge with Snowflake on it. She was wonderful with the children, and a few of the male guests thought she was pretty good, as well.”

“So, where is she now?”

“I don’t know. It was an odd time, there in ’83, knowing that everyone would be out of a job at the end of the season. She came to see me, a few weeks before the shut-down. She wanted to resign but told me not to say anything to the others. I paid her out at the end of the week, and, on the Monday, she told the others that she wasn’t feeling too well. While they were at work, she packed her things and left, not even leaving a note. She had let on, to me, that she had a thing going with a comedian that had been playing at the camp that summer. He had finished the week before. He may have picked her up, or she may have just got on a train. Either way, the boys were mystified when they got back to their digs.”

“How did they take it?”

“From what I heard, later, Bobby made a joke about having made her disappear, once and for all, and the others said that she must have got tired of Allan. Allan went off like a rocket, I believe that for all his macho posturing, he had a soft spot for her, even while he knew that she wasn’t really she, at all.”

“So, you wouldn’t be surprised if I told you that he committed suicide a year later?”

“I sure would be surprised! That guy may have been a bit crazy and a drunkard, but he would have hit someone first, rather than end it.”

“Did you hear from her?”

“Yes, she sent me a card from Lands’ End. She said that she was enjoying her honeymoon and had arranged for some surgery. That would have been late in the year. The card was sent to the camp, she knew that I would be there for a year or more, managing the shut-down of all the facilities, and the shipping of all the furnishings to other camps.”

“How would you feel if I told you that all five guys are dead?”

“A couple were older than me, so it wouldn’t be a surprise. It has to be more than that if you came here to talk to me.”

“It is. Four of the five have been murdered and dumped in strange places. The first death was Stevens, in 1984, and the latest was this year, Robby being found in a lake in Pontefract, where he was living. The only link we have is that they were all together, with you, between ’81 and ’83, although they had all worked together, in smaller groups, at a lot of camps.”

Cherry, finally, spoke up.

“Norman, I see that all the Redcoats in these photos have badges on their jackets. What are they?”

He went to a drawer and pulled out a roll of cloth. He unrolled it on the bed.

“Every camp, every year, had a new badge. In the early days, all incoming campers were given one. It was their entry badge if they had left the camp. What you see here are all ones I picked up as I worked. There are a few odd ones, there are eight from Saltdean, that was a Butlins Hotel, which was open over winter. My wife and I had a few Christmas holidays there, getting staff discount. You didn’t have to leave the hotel and was a real rest for us.”

“So, at the reunions, anybody wearing the uniform would be wearing their badges?”

“Oh, yes. It was a matter of pride. Of course, some old Redcoats couldn’t wear them all, you’d hardly be able to stand. Someone like Robby would have had twenty or thirty.”

Cherry looked at me and I mentally agreed that we had everything we could use, so said that we would be going. He took us back up to the lounge, and we said goodbye to them all and thanked them for their happiness. On the way back to the car, I asked Cherry, “What did we take from that?”

“Pretty much what we knew before, with a little more depth to the victims, but not enough to take us towards the killer. I’ll look up Hake or Flake to see what I can find. There may be a wedding certificate, or a name change on file, somewhere.”

Marianne Gregory © 2023

Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Usually, what are you getting at?”

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

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

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

It took until the next week when she rang back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cathy got back to me a few days later.

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

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

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

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

Julia was the first.

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

“Right, get him in here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

They sat down and David cleared his throat.

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

“What about the body in the coal heap?”

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

“What about the motorcycling?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What actually happened to this Hake?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marianne Gregory © 2023