Free The Altered Case by Peter Turnbull Page A

Human memory is often better than dry details in an old file.’
    ‘There was just nothing, nothing at all, and so nothing else I could do. I wasn’t best pleased about closing the case after just ten days but the order to do—’
    ‘Close . . . close the case?’ Carmen Pharoah questioned. ‘Close it?’
    ‘Sorry.’ Adrian Clough smiled. ‘A slip of the tongue; of course it wasn’t closed but it was left to go cold. The order to let it go cold came from the top floor, pressure of work; it was just a very busy time.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘I wasn’t happy, none of us were. With the suspicion . . . no . . . no . . . the real certainty of foul play we felt we should keep the case in the media, but with a lot of work to do . . . and . . . well, you’re a copper and you know you can’t act on just nothing, and that’s all we had . . . nothing. So I dare say the top floor was correct. They took the hard decision, and the case of the missing Parr family was consigned to the vaults, “to await developments”, was the official line.’ Ex-Detective Constable Clough, by then just plain Adrian Clough, was a gentleman in his seventies. He sat in an old, deep leather-bound armchair in the living room of his modest three bedroom, semi-detached house in Bishopsthorpe. He had, as Carmen Pharoah noted, reached the stage in life where he had begun to smell old, as some elderly people are wont to do, some earlier than others. Adrian Clough, she saw, had heavily liver spotted hands and a gaunt, drawn face as if, she sensed, he was fighting an internal growth. He also seemed to her to have some difficulties in his breathing and to have lost much weight, being in her view much too slight to be taken for the police officer he had once been. Carmen Pharoah discreetly read the room with a series of glances and saw the room was very neatly kept. She thought that she detected a woman’s touch, as in that of a dutiful daughter, or a kindly granddaughter. There certainly was no evidence of the presence of a Mrs Clough.
    ‘Is there a Mrs Clough?’ Carmen Pharoah braved to ask the question.
    ‘No . . . sadly, not any more, our Mabel went before, she’s passed on, our lass. She saw me get my promotion to Detective Sergeant and she saw me collect my pension, and we had a couple of years together in my retirement before she went in her sleep. She was still only in her fifties, no age at all. These days it’s no age at all. God rest her.’
    ‘I am so very sorry.’ Carmen Pharoah found herself beginning to warm to Adrian Clough, Detective Sergeant (retired).
    ‘Thank you, miss, but I have come to get used to being alone and I wouldn’t want to share my house . . . not now.’ Adrian Clough glanced adoringly at an alcove beside the chair in which he sat and in which were many framed photographs of many men and women and children of varying ages. ‘That’s my rogues’ gallery,’ he said proudly, ‘more in the pipeline. They keep a good eye on the old man and it helped me that I grew up in a large family, and so I learned from an early age that I am not the centre of anyone’s world and that has helped me cope with solitary living.’
    ‘Good . . . good.’ Carmen Pharoah smiled approvingly. ‘I am pleased you are coping.’
    ‘Well, you know, I had a good life. I dare say that I never amounted to much as a police officer. I got worried about my lack of advancement for a few years and eventually settled into the routine of being a low-ranking CID officer and stopped worrying about the young, thrusting high-fliers shooting past me. I just settled into my post and consolidated. I had my family and I began to look forward to my retirement. I never got to be part of the team investigating the million pound jewellery raids, or the large-scale fraud, but someone has got to look into the theft of tools from the old lady’s garden shed and the lifting of Yorkshire stone paving slabs which occurs during the hours of darkness, and I made a