Free A Dreadful Past by Peter Turnbull

green, piercing eyes. ‘I am sure I told the police everything I knew last time. I found the family when I called to clean that day. They were all in a heap … a bloody mess and the house was smashed up. It’s a sight I have not been able to forget. I just cannot drive it from my mind. Even with the vodka … it just stays.’
    â€˜No … no … it wouldn’t be,’ Carmen Pharoah replied sensitively and sympathetically. ‘Images like that are not easy to forget. But we heard you did well, how you kept your head, left the house as soon as you saw what had happened and ran to a nearby house and raised the alarm. So we can also say good for you.’
    Miss Graham gave a small shrug of her right shoulder in response to the compliment.
    â€˜We wondered if we could go over the events again with you, for our benefit being new to the investigation, and we also wondered if there might be anything you might now remember which you did not mention at the time,’ Ventnor added. ‘Or anything which only seems relevant with the passing of time. It has been twenty years, after all.’
    â€˜Twenty …’ Miss Graham’s voice faltered. ‘Has it really been twenty years?’
    â€˜Yes.’ Thompson Ventnor smiled. ‘Time flies, as they say.’
    â€˜I can’t think of anything I didn’t tell the police at the time but I’ll answer your questions, if you like,’ Miss Graham replied in a sudden display of meekness in her high-pitched, rasping voice. ‘You’d better come in. You’d be better inside than out here on the step. I can see a few curtains twitching already. They’re a nosey lot round here, really nosey. I mean, one life to lead is enough for me so I keep myself to myself but round here … it’s like it’s their life and everyone else’s as well. So you’d better come in.’ She turned and walked into the poorly lit hallway of her home. Carmen Pharoah stepped nimbly over the threshold and into the house. Thompson Ventnor followed her and shut the door gently behind him. Miss Graham led the officers into her back room which looked out on to a small rear garden surrounded by an evidently very recently trimmed privet hedge. The upper floor of a house in the next street could be seen beyond the garden hedge and above that was a blue sky with heavy white clouds at seven tenths in RAF speak. The room itself was quickly read by Pharoah and Thompson, who both thought its age and social status appropriate. It was, they saw, cluttered but not untidy, nor did it appear to be unclean. Artefacts which were in evidence were those to be expected for a single lady occupier in her late sixties. The curtains were kept in a half-closed position so that while there was sufficient light to see within the room, the room also had, the officers found, a soft, shadowy, almost sleep-inducing gloom about it. The house suffered from dampness and said dampness found and gripped the chests of both officers. Miss Graham sat in an armchair and invited Pharoah and Thompson to also take a seat. Carmen Pharoah sat in a second armchair which faced the chair in which Miss Graham sat, while Ventnor chose to sit on an upright chair which stood next to a small table. He took out his notebook and placed it on the table. He also took a ballpoint pen from his pocket and held it in his hand, poised, ready to write.
    â€˜We understand that you cleaned Mr and Mrs Middleton’s house out beyond Skelton way at the time that the family was murdered?’ Carmen Pharoah began. ‘We’d like to establish that fact before we go any further.’
    â€˜Yes.’ Anne Graham’s reply was short – curt, almost – so thought Ventnor, as though the previously glimpsed meekness had vanished.
    â€˜How often did you visit?’ Carmen Pharoah continued. ‘Weekly, we believe?’
    â€˜Yes, just once each week, midweek,’