Free Aftermath by Peter Turnbull

they could not take a missing person report until the person concerned had been missing for twenty-four hours.’
    â€˜Yes, that’s the procedure unless it’s a child or young person under the age of sixteen.’
    â€˜They said that as well. So I went to the police station at one a.m., just after midnight, by which time she had been missing for twenty-four hours . . . gave all the details, a recent photograph and gave them Sue Kent’s name and address. They agreed to visit Susan.’
    â€˜And they did. The visit was recorded but Susan Kent didn’t, or couldn’t, tell the officer anything that she didn’t tell you . . . Veronica was last seen getting into a car, which apparently drew up at the taxi rank as though she and the driver knew each other . . . but no details . . . dark night, and the other girl Veronica was with was full of booze and couldn’t tell one car from another anyway.’
    â€˜Then nothing until now, but at least I know what happened to her. She was always so sensible, such a sober minded girl, always let me know where she was. So now I know . . .’
    â€˜Yes . . . we are very sorry. Do you know of anyone who would want to harm her?’
    â€˜I don’t, I’m sorry but Susan Kent might. She’s married now, she’s moved away from home but still in York, though.’
    â€˜We will ask her, we’ll find her easily enough.’
    â€˜Veronica didn’t seem troubled by anything or anyone, just a happy young woman in her early twenties, just watching her weight and bemoaning her height and the scarcity of tall men in York . . . that was my Veronica.’
    Carmen Pharoah recorded her and Thomson Ventnor’s visit to Philippa Goodwin and added it to the ‘Bromyards Inquiry’ file, and then walked slowly home on the walls, savouring the summer weather, to her new-build flat on Bootham. She changed into casual clothes and, it being too early and too summery to remain indoors, she walked out of the city for one hour and reached the village of Shipton to which she had not travelled before. She found a small village beside the A19 surrounded by rich, flat farmland. Being disinclined to walk back to York, she returned by bus.
    She showered upon returning home and ate a ready cooked meal, castigating herself for doing so, and telling herself of the importance of maintaining her cooking skills and that she should be wary of laziness, for laziness, as her grandmother in St Kitts had always told her, ‘is one of the deadly sins, chile’. Later, irritated and unable to concentrate, even on the television programmes, she retired to bed too early and thus fell asleep only to wake up at three a.m. It was then, unable to sleep, alone at night, that the demons came, flying around the inside of her head, taunting and tormenting her. She thought of her blissful marriage and the advice given to her and her husband by her father-in-law, ‘You’re black, you’ve got to be ten times better to be just as good’, and how determined they were to be ten times better, she as one of the very few black women constables in the Metropolitan Police, and he a civilian employee of the same force, as an accountant. Then the dreadful knock on her door, her own inspector, ‘It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t have known anything,’ and she was a widow after less than two years of marriage.
    It was her fault. For some reason she was to blame and a penalty had to be paid, and so she applied for a transfer to the north of England where it is cold in the winter time, where the people are harder in their attitude and less giving, and are hostile to strangers . . . or so she had been told . . . and where the people can bear grudges for many, many years, and there she must live until the penalty for surviving, when her husband had not, had been paid in