Free The Altered Case by Peter Turnbull Page B

respectable number of arrests which led to a respectable number of convictions. I pulled my weight. I did my duty.’
    ‘Good for you, sir.’
    ‘Oh . . . don’t call me, sir. You know, I was very pleased to receive your phone call, very pleased indeed. The only calls I get these days are from my family checking up on me, which I don’t mind, or from double-glazing companies, which I do mind, so a phone call from my old station, good old Micklegate Bar nick . . . or Mickie Bar as we used to call it.’
    ‘Mickie Bar?’ Carmen Pharoah grinned. ‘I have never heard it called that before. mind you, I am fairly new.’
    ‘It used to be the nickname until a new station commander arrived and he put a stop to it. Sent an angry memo round to all hands; it was unprofessional he said, so after a while it fell into disuse. I dare say he was correct in his attitude.’
    ‘I confess I quite like the sound of it,’ Carmen Pharoah replied. ‘I think it has quite a homely ring to it. It speaks for a police station which had a good level of morale among the officers. I seem to have noticed that when a place of work is known by a nickname among the people who work there, then it has a happy working atmosphere.’
    ‘You are probably right, miss, in fact I know what you mean.’ Adrian Clough struggled with a difficult breath and then continued. ‘We used to feel that way about it, homely, as you say, but I wouldn’t reintroduce the nickname if I were you; dare say it was unprofessional, dare say we did have the wrong attitude.’
    ‘I won’t,’ Carmen Pharoah replied, ‘but I do like the name, I really do. So, the missing family?’
    ‘Yes, the Parrs, very, very strange, a real mystery, like the missing Roman legion. What was it?’
    ‘The Ninth.’ Carmen Pharoah glanced out of the window and noted a small but neatly kept garden. ‘I think it was the Ninth Legion. I read about it before I came up here.’
    ‘Yes, it was the Ninth, an entire Roman legion, some five thousand men; they just vanished without a trace. They left Eboracum, the place of yew trees, which was the name of the original settlement which became York.’
    ‘I see how you have been using your retirement, sir.’ Carmen Pharoah smiled.
    ‘Yes.’ Adrian Clough returned the smile. ‘I developed a passion for history, particularly local history. The Ninth Legion left Eboracum to go north to Caledonia . . .’
    ‘Scotland?’
    ‘Yes, now called Scotland, to quell an uprising of the Picts and just vanished . . . but that was about one hundred AD. Four people, a complete family disappearing in this day and age, well, it is probably not to the same scale but the mystery is still as powerful. Something happened to the Ninth Legion and something clearly happened to the Parr family of Camden, London. It made quite a media splash as you might well imagine.’
    ‘Yes.’ Carmen Pharoah sensed the gentle scent of air freshener in the room. ‘I saw and read the newspaper cuttings which were attached to the missing person report. Quite a splash, as you say, local, regional and national newspapers all carried the story.’
    ‘Yes, I remember.’ Adrian Clough glanced up at the ceiling of his living room. ‘And no one heard or saw anything. You know it’s that which I find the most difficult thing of all to comprehend about the whole case. The hotel the family were staying in initially reported the family as doing a runner, absconding without paying the bill, which was quite a large bill because they had been staying at the King Henry, no less.’
    ‘So . . . monied,’ Carmen Pharoah commented, ‘that’s not a cheap hotel. They were very comfortably off.’
    ‘Yes, they were no fly-by-nights.’ Adrian Clough nodded briefly in agreement. ‘Then their car was found abandoned. It was a top of the range Mercedes Benz, which then scotched any notion that they had run off without paying the hotel bill and confirmed that something untoward had happened. I mean,