they are carried on roads on low loaders which are always street legal, or are kept on farms or building sites so they don’t look out of place, or in the yard of a dodgy plant hire company . . . even less out of place. So anyway, we put a stop to that form of theft by charging a massive deposit, about twice what the vehicle would cost new, and when the word got round that we were doing that we got no more requests for cash hires.’
‘So we need to talk to Edward Evans. Where can we contact him?’ Hennessey asked. ‘I assume he hasn’t retired to Spain?’
‘No . . . no.’ Bateman smiled. ‘He retired locally. He’s a member of the York and Malton. They went early in life, just forty years old when they sold up and retired. He’s a sprightly seventy now, very sprightly. I have found that people age at different rates. Mr Evans has retained much of his youth . . . even if only in his attitude.’
‘So, still
compos mentis
?’
‘Oh yes, he still has all his marbles.’
‘So,’ Hennessey queried, ‘the York and Malton?’
‘Sounds like a building society, doesn’t it?’ Bateman mused. ‘In fact it’s a golf club . . . very upmarket, him and his 1960s’ Bentley. They are a right pair of characters, him and his old car.’
‘You sound like you belong to the same club,’ Yellich commented.
‘I do . . . my family does.’ Bateman shrugged. ‘So perhaps it’s not so posh after all.’
Carmen Pharoah walked homewards and she did so slowly. She chose not to heed her colleagues’ advice and ‘walk the walls’ as the speediest way to transit the ancient city; rather, on that warm, September afternoon, she walked the pavements. Her route when she walked the pavements took her down Micklegate, over the Ouse Bridge, into Low Ousegate and left into busy commercialized Coney Street, thence on to Blake Street with its solid Victorian buildings, into the graceful curve of St Leonard’s Place and finally to Bootham Bar and Bootham itself, perhaps a pleasant forty-five minute stroll, York being small as well as ancient. Yes . . . a car brought her North . . . not untrue, and she was pleased to have been able to explain to the warm and helpful Adrian Clough that her reply to his question was not facetious nor sarcastic. It was a car that had carried her husband’s life away one night as he was crossing the road. He was late, the night was dark, the driver was drunk. Both she and her husband had been so very proud to be Afro-Caribbean employees of the Metropolitan Police. She a Detective Constable and he an accountant, both still in their twenties and both learning the great truth of her father-in-law’s edict, ‘You’re black, that means you’ve got to be ten times better to be just as good, ten times faster to remain level with the competition, ten times more intelligent to be just as brainy. ‘It is,’ he had said, ‘just the way of it’.
It was little comfort to be told that he wouldn’t have known anything, it was instantaneous, nor was it any comfort to know that the driver was to be prosecuted, ‘We’ll throw the book at him’. It was not just that she had been robbed of the man she loved, and she knew him to be the only man she ever would love, but he had been robbed of his life . . . all that glittering future . . . his career, his fatherhood . . . all . . . all taken away so cruelly, the familial line which had come to an end, the children that will never be . . . and their children, and their children.
The guilt had come a few days later, the guilt of surviving, the sense of shame that she was alive and he was not, and with it the sense of a debt to be repaid, a penance to undertake and so she had transferred to the north, where it is cold in the winter, where the people are insular and do not like strangers. The sort of place where a stranger might get invited to take part in a game of darts, but only if they had been going to the pub every night for the last ten years. Here she had
‘So we need to talk to Edward Evans. Where can we contact him?’ Hennessey asked. ‘I assume he hasn’t retired to Spain?’
‘No . . . no.’ Bateman smiled. ‘He retired locally. He’s a member of the York and Malton. They went early in life, just forty years old when they sold up and retired. He’s a sprightly seventy now, very sprightly. I have found that people age at different rates. Mr Evans has retained much of his youth . . . even if only in his attitude.’
‘So, still
compos mentis
?’
‘Oh yes, he still has all his marbles.’
‘So,’ Hennessey queried, ‘the York and Malton?’
‘Sounds like a building society, doesn’t it?’ Bateman mused. ‘In fact it’s a golf club . . . very upmarket, him and his 1960s’ Bentley. They are a right pair of characters, him and his old car.’
‘You sound like you belong to the same club,’ Yellich commented.
‘I do . . . my family does.’ Bateman shrugged. ‘So perhaps it’s not so posh after all.’
Carmen Pharoah walked homewards and she did so slowly. She chose not to heed her colleagues’ advice and ‘walk the walls’ as the speediest way to transit the ancient city; rather, on that warm, September afternoon, she walked the pavements. Her route when she walked the pavements took her down Micklegate, over the Ouse Bridge, into Low Ousegate and left into busy commercialized Coney Street, thence on to Blake Street with its solid Victorian buildings, into the graceful curve of St Leonard’s Place and finally to Bootham Bar and Bootham itself, perhaps a pleasant forty-five minute stroll, York being small as well as ancient. Yes . . . a car brought her North . . . not untrue, and she was pleased to have been able to explain to the warm and helpful Adrian Clough that her reply to his question was not facetious nor sarcastic. It was a car that had carried her husband’s life away one night as he was crossing the road. He was late, the night was dark, the driver was drunk. Both she and her husband had been so very proud to be Afro-Caribbean employees of the Metropolitan Police. She a Detective Constable and he an accountant, both still in their twenties and both learning the great truth of her father-in-law’s edict, ‘You’re black, that means you’ve got to be ten times better to be just as good, ten times faster to remain level with the competition, ten times more intelligent to be just as brainy. ‘It is,’ he had said, ‘just the way of it’.
It was little comfort to be told that he wouldn’t have known anything, it was instantaneous, nor was it any comfort to know that the driver was to be prosecuted, ‘We’ll throw the book at him’. It was not just that she had been robbed of the man she loved, and she knew him to be the only man she ever would love, but he had been robbed of his life . . . all that glittering future . . . his career, his fatherhood . . . all . . . all taken away so cruelly, the familial line which had come to an end, the children that will never be . . . and their children, and their children.
The guilt had come a few days later, the guilt of surviving, the sense of shame that she was alive and he was not, and with it the sense of a debt to be repaid, a penance to undertake and so she had transferred to the north, where it is cold in the winter, where the people are insular and do not like strangers. The sort of place where a stranger might get invited to take part in a game of darts, but only if they had been going to the pub every night for the last ten years. Here she had
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