Free The Altered Case by Peter Turnbull

than you had to.’
    ‘Interesting.’ Hennessey nodded. ‘Very interesting and a good point you make, sir.’ He paused and then asked, ‘So who owned a mechanical digger in these parts about thirty years ago?’
    ‘No one,’ Bowler grinned, ‘no one . . . no . . . you rented them, you still do . . . you rent the things.’
    ‘Really?’ Yellich asked.
    ‘Really, chief, and they are not cheap. I can tell you no one, no tenant farmer could afford to buy one, even renting is expensive.’ Bowler re-lit his pipe.
    ‘Who would rent out in this area?’ Hennessey asked.
    ‘Marshall and Evans Plant Hire, they’re in Catton Hill village. They’re the people to talk to.’ Bowler pulled strongly on his pipe. ‘They’ve been in the plant hire business for years now. Whether they keep records going back thirty years, well, that I don’t know, but it’s a slim chance that they might.’
    Hennessey sighed. ‘Slim or not, it’s a chance we have to take. Thank you for your time, sir.’
    Carmen Pharoah carefully and methodically trawled the missing person files held at Micklegate Bar police station which were between twenty-eight and thirty-two years old. She was searching for a report of a missing family, comprising parents plus two and still possibly three daughters. She had reasoned that if such a report did exist then it would not be hard to find. Not hard at all, pretty well unique, in fact, so she had told herself. Carmen Pharoah knew that it was most often the case that missing persons turn up alive and well within twenty-four hours of being reported as missing. Very few missing persons actually remain missing, usually if the person in question is not found alive, then their body is, but for an entire family to be reported as missing and to remain missing is, she believed, most newsworthy and pretty well unheard of. The file, when she very easily found it, contained just one sheet and had been sent to the Vale of York Police for their information by the Metropolitan Police, the family having been reported as missing by the mother’s brother in London, where the family home was. The missing family was investigated because of the unusual nature of the case and because evidence indicated that the family had vanished when visiting York. One Detective Constable Clough was recorded as being the ‘interested officer’ but his investigation had come to nought and the inquiry was suspended after just ten days.
    Carmen Pharoah found herself to be more than a little disappointed that a case of a missing family was allowed to go ‘cold’ after such a remarkably short period of time. The family, she read, were given as being Gerald and Elizabeth Parr and their two daughters, Isabella and Alexandra, of the Camden area of London, and who had disappeared when visiting York on ‘business’, rather than as tourists, though the exact nature of said ‘business’ was not disclosed. Just two daughters. Carmen Pharoah sat back in her chair and glanced out of the window of her office, along the backs of the houses along Blossom Street, being a ribbon of nineteenth century terrace development. So, she thought, Dr D’Acre was correct, two daughters and a third non-related female of the age group of the daughters of Gerald and Elizabeth Parr. That meant more searching to be done. Somewhere in the pile of missing person files was a file in respect of a young woman who had been reported missing at approximately the same time as the Parrs.
    Carmen Pharoah returned her attention to her desktop and the pile of dusty manila folders. ‘So this is how it was before the days of the microchip,’ she said to herself, ‘all written up in copperplate long hand.’ It was, for her, like touching history. ‘But ten days,’ she whispered, ‘surely there must be something within those days? It’s in there somewhere, girl, it’s in there somewhere, so look for it. Then . . . then,’ she said, ‘a visit to DC Clough, if he is still with us.