Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 6. Whole No. 856, December 2012

Karen Ovenhouse and the Ruin Snooper by Peter Turnbull

Since Peter Turnbull’s last appearance in EQMM, he has won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and received Barry and Macavity nominations for his EQMM story “The Man Who Took His Hat Off to the Driver of the Train.” His Hennessey and Yellich series, to which that story belongs, has a new novel, The Altered Case (Severn House/June 2012). A newer Turnbull series, set in London, has its third book (The Garden Party) out this December.

Joseph Kelly, ruin snooper, walked the walls from Baile Hill to Lendal Bridge knowing, as do all citizens of the fair and famous city, that most often the quickest way to get from one part of central York to the other is to walk the medieval battlements. When opposite the railway station, which when it was built in 1870 was the largest structure in the world, he glanced to his right and picked out the angular roof and stone-slabbed platform of the original station, a much, much smaller version, which had been built “within the walls” so that the Victorians’ steaming leviathans entered and exited the station via a small tunnel still visible underneath Queen Street. At Lendal Bridge, Joseph Kelly turned and made his way to the railway station, outside of which he would be able to get the bus he needed to catch. He was a man of middle years, rotund in most people’s view and with a faraway look in his eyes. He wore plus fours and a Norfolk jacket even on the hottest days and presented an image of a man from a different era, an image completed by a box Brownie camera on one shoulder and a canvas knapsack on the other which contained his lunch and a flask of coffee. Atop his head on this warm April day was a battered felt hat.

Joseph Kelly had supported himself throughout his life by doing odd jobs, or by sporadic work on the buses as a driver or conductor. He had once driven a taxi but had given that up when a spate of attacks on taxi drivers served to remind him that beneath the medieval facade of wynds and ghosts and cholera pits, and behind the ecclesiastical splendor of the Minster, and behind the prestigious university, was a violent little town. York has a city charter, but it has not the size nor the dynamism of a true city, so thought Joseph Kelly, but he was born in York and had always been happy to live there. It was during the winter months that he worked, in the main; the summer months he chose to devote himself to this true passion. For Joseph Kelly was a committed “ruin snooper.” The passion he felt for ruins had dominated his life to the exclusion of all else. He had snooped ruins since he was a boy when, fishing rod in hand, he had pushed open a rusty gate on which was a sign which read trespassers will be prosecuted because a sixth sense had told him that fishable water lay in the foliage he could see beyond the gate. His sixth sense had been correct, for he came across a large pond, just too small to be called a lake, in a wood, which teemed with roach and trout and perch. As he sat on the bank that summer’s day he noticed that the foliage which at first had seemed wild and random had in fact the remnants of a formality about it, and that many of the trees were “nonindigenous,” as his geography master would have said. Then he realized that he was sitting beside a man-made lake in the midst of what had once been a magnificent formal garden, probably laid out in the eighteenth century during the Augustan Age of Classicism which had given England such buildings as the Royal Mint and the Bank of England, streets like Regents Street and the Royal Crescent in Bath, and the great gardens like Castle Howard. Joseph Kelly then realized that if the place he was in was a long-abandoned garden, there may, nay must, also be a long-abandoned house. So he left the fish he had caught in the keepnet and went exploring. What he found changed his life. What he found detoured him down a path in life from which he was never to deviate. Joseph Kelly had found his first ruin.

It had been a small house as the great houses go, or went, but it was Augustan. Those columns, those grand staircases, those frescoes, by then rotten and decayed, the lawn taken over by trees, a tree which had grown in the greenhouse and had burst up out of the glass. He had entered the house, a small boy alone in the vastness, probably, he thought, the first person to do so in many, many years. He walked up one flight of a creaking staircase and down the other back, or servant, stairs, exploring, touching history, never knowing what was going to be behind each closed door. That particular house had been Wadden Hall, subsequently demolished, the garden cleared and the fishpond concreted over to make way for a housing estate. But Joseph Kelly had seen it, had wandered its echoing corridors and great halls, and had seen it in its last days of ghostly mystique, when the echoes of its days of former grandeur were faint but discernible. That day he had returned to the pond, released the fish in the keepnet, and returned to York. He sold his fishing tackle and with the proceeds bought a box Brownie and a roll of black-and-white film. Then, a day later, he returned to Wadden Hall and photographed it, inside and out. For the next thirty summers Joseph Kelly had travelled England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, but mostly England because it is in England that such abandoned magnificence is chiefly to be found. And knowing that he was visiting buildings which were fast disappearing as the English landscape changed, he set out to document each ruin he visited, using only black-and-white film, using the same box Brownie camera. He had wandered the great halls of yesteryear photographing as he went, and had found things that had been abandoned: a tray of gold and silver coins; another tray of Roman coins, neatly labelled; oil paintings, clearly valuable, which still hung on the walls; huge silver and crystal chandeliers still hanging from ornate ceilings; but if he took anything at all it was only in the form of a photograph. He came to see the houses as living things that allowed him to enter. He didn’t want to violate that trust, or his own integrity, with theft.

On that hot Tuesday in April, perspiring in his Norfolk jacket and felt hat, he boarded a bus outside York Railway Station which took him out to the village of Great Keld, from where at a half-hour’s brisk walk there stood Pately Hall, or rather the ruin of the same, which he did not know had existed until he read an article about it in the Yorkshire Post. It was a ruin to be snooped: so conveniently close to York too.

He alighted the cream Rider York double-decker at Great Keld in the square beside the war memorial and noted wryly that Great Keld had clearly not been one of the seven “lucky” villages of England that did not have to raise a stone in memory of its war dead in the years after 1918. In fact, going by the size of the stone, and the generous number of names on four sides, Great Keld appeared to have suffered particularly badly in the “war to end all wars.” He walked past a parade of buildings which he felt had a 1920s or 1930s feel to it, shops with awnings and wares placed for inspection on the pavement, and then beyond the pasty grey road, he drove out between the gently undulating green of the Yorkshire Wolds. He left the road and followed a pathway beside a pasture in which a herd of Herefords grazed contentedly, black and white on the green, under the blue. Leaving the path, he picked his way through trees and shrubs and came across Pately Hall and did so quite suddenly, the garden having been colonised by the woodland and the ancient walls covered with ivy. But it was one of the great houses of the eighteenth century, distinct Palladian style, built, thought Joseph Kelly, just prior to the French wars, when the English gentry could afford such indulgences. Later the wars would bankrupt the gentry and allow the rise of trade and manufacture as a source of wealth for the English.

He found the first body hanging in the main hall. Just hanging there on a thin nylon cord which had been threaded through a chandelier which Joseph Kelly, experienced ruin snooper, knew would have been attached to a stout beam by means of heavy-gauge bolts and chains and would be well able to support the extra weight of what was a light and small and frail-looking human of the female sex. The other end of the cord was attached to the cast-iron fireplace surround which Joseph Kelly knew was also well able to support the weight of the dead woman. The hall was huge, and the length of the cord from fireplace to narrow neck was perhaps fifty feet. A very tall pair of stepladders lay on the floor, looking old, as if they belonged to the house, but they nonetheless explained how the cord had been threaded through the chandelier. Beneath the suspended body was a small upright chair, lying on its side as if having been pulled or kicked away, which indicated the way in which the deceased had been propelled into the hereafter. The deceased herself appeared to have a parchmentlike skin, a rotting flesh; there was a carpet of dead flies beneath her. Her time had not been yesterday.

Joseph Kelly pondered the body and then took his box Brownie and photographed it. It was the manner of the man. Ruin snooping had hardened him to surprise and had hardened him to death too, because this was not the first human corpse he had found. Often he came across the decaying corpses of men or women surrounded by a few meagre but twentieth-century artifacts such as plastic food containers or bottles of still-available alcohol: down-and-outs had sought shelter and had slept their final sleep. But this was the first suicide. If it was suicide.

The age first. Difficult to tell, because she was partly skeleton, but the impression was of a young woman in her twenties; the clothing was denim, cheap, now crumbling. Her hands were dangling beside her. The noose was of a simple circle, her feet were just six inches from the floor, allowing plenty of leverage to kick the chair away. But he thought it a terrible way to go, the way you’d kill someone if they didn’t know the difference between hanging and lynching. That in hanging there is a “drop,” causing the neck to snap and death to be instantaneous. In theory. Lynching, Joseph Kelly had once read, derives its name from Dr. Lynch of the University of Cambridge who, in the fourteenth century, put a noose around his son’s neck and suspended him from his study window, in full view of the people in the street below, until he expired. It can take fifteen minutes to die when being lynched, most of the time in a state of consciousness; and the neck is stretched. Here, the neck may have been long and swanlike in life or it may have been elongated as she died, flailing her arms and legs about, her feet just six inches from the floor.

Joseph Kelly left the room and walked a long, echoing, musty corridor with a vaulted ceiling. He entered a room at the back of the house and looked out. There was a motor vehicle, an old van, a Ford Escort van, that had been able to approach the house along a track that could be made out winding among the foliage. The tires were now deflated, the doors open.

The vehicle puzzled him. Had someone driven up to the house to commit suicide? Why then go into the house at all, what with all those good stout branches in the woodland surrounding the house? He had a sense of a story unfolding: Here amongst this decaying pile of grandeur was a much more recent decay and loss.

He returned to the corridor and climbed the back stairs. The corridors upstairs were narrower than the corridors on the ground floor, as he had found was most often the case in old houses, and he also found that the rooms, as most often happens, had been well coveted by birds and bats, the long-ago broken windows allowing them easy access.

The second body was also semi-skeletal. It was in a near-sitting position, propped up against the wall beneath a window. Male, by the clothing. Heavy footwear and a male wrist watch. Joseph Kelly photographed the body. He noticed a knife on the floorboard beside it, the blade still black with congealed blood. He photographed the knife as well.

Joseph Kelly then travelled the house, opening doors and cupboards, finding, as he occasionally did, silverware, porcelain, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clothing, but he was satisfied that there were no other corpses. He went outside to the rear of the house and examined the Ford Escort van. A length of cord similar in nature to the cord which suspended the first body was coiled in the rear of the van by the spare tire. The keys were in the ignition. All very strange.

Joseph Kelly walked away from the house and back towards the road, pausing en route to admire and photograph an ancient yew, which had clearly been planted on the platform when the original garden was laid out. He strolled back to Great Keld, and from a phone box in the square he phoned the police. “There is no great hurry,” he said. “None whatsoever... They’ve both been there for at least twelve months.”

Two constables in an area car collected Joseph Kelly. He was sitting where he said he would be sitting, on a bench outside a pub he could see from the phone box. “The Green Man,” he said. “I’ll be outside the Green Man.” As the car pulled up, he drained his pint of brown and mild and slid, as invited, into the rear seat. He directed the driver to the road he had taken to walk to Pately Hall and suggested a suitable place to leave the car when they came to the path by the field of Herefords. He took the constables to the house but declined to enter. A few moments later, the constables exited the house and approached him.

“Ever hear of criminal trespass?” one said icily as his colleague radioed to the Friargate Police Station in York that the caller had been genuine and that there were indeed two bodies, repeat two, and in one case the death seemed suspicious. The other, he said, may have been a suicide.

“Oh yes,” Joseph Kelly said, glancing over the facade of the house, noting, where the ivy allowed it to do, how it still glowed becomingly in the sun.

“And you’re not worried about being prosecuted?”

“No.” Kelly smiled. “No, I’ve done my homework. Ferreting around an old ruin of disputed ownership and not doing any damage is not trespass. The only property that can be trespassed upon without damage being done is the railway, because your presence is deemed a threat to the safety of the railway users. I’ve been exploring ruins all my life. I’ve been invited to leave the premises once or twice but never even threatened with prosecution for trespass because I do not damage or steal. Done my homework, like I said.”

“Halfway home.”

“Sorry, sir?” Carmen Pharoah glanced sideways at Ken Menninot.

“Nothing, just thinking aloud. I live in Beverley, this drive is taking me halfway home. Then we’ll have to return to York, then I’ll do this drive again, only I hope to complete it this evening.”

“Much better to live over the shop, sir. My journey to work is a brief walk of a few hundred yards. Buckingham Terrace to Friargate via Lendal Bridge. Ten minutes on a good day.”

“Not the right time of life anymore, Carmen. When you get married and start your family, you’ll know the value of living off the patch.”

“Yes...” Carmen Pharoah returned her gaze to the road. At thirty-two she heard her biological clock ticking ever more loudly. D.S. Menninot’s words had reached her... and Wesley hadn’t kept his word... She’d left Stoke Newington Police Station in London, where a black face is accepted, and with the promise of marriage humming a pleasant tune in her ears, had moved to York, where a black face is still an oddity. She had bought property and then Wesley had phoned her and said he’d been thinking... He thought he ought to make his first marriage work... and she was on her own. Again. Ken Menninot parked his car behind the Land Rover he recognised as belonging to Bill Hatch, which itself was parked behind an area car. A constable stood by the roadside, ready to escort them to the old house.

Bill Hatch bumbled out of the house as Ken Menninot and Carmen Pharoah emerged from the foliage. “Dead,” he said, smiling, brushing his wild hair from his eyes. He rested his black leather bag on the ground. “Oh yes, very dead.”

“Do tell.” Menninot smiled. “I recognise the expression of an intrigued pathologist from a hundred yards.”

“Intrigue is the word. Exactly how they died I can’t tell, but I would be surprised if the initial impression is not correct. The male in the upstairs room died of a stab wound to the chest, the female in the grand hall suffered death by strangulation with a ligature. But confirmation, and in what order they died and by whose fair hand, is, as yet, to be ascertained.” He wiped his brow. He was middle-aged and a little overweight, and suffered even in the mild April heat. “They’re both young... in their twenties, possibly early twenties. They’ve been dead for at least twelve months. Both were dark-haired. He was about five ten, and she a diminutive five nothing. About. I’ll have the bodies removed as soon as Scene of Crime has finished popping their flashbulbs and have them taken to the York City. Do you know if the mortuary van has arrived?”

“Not by the time we arrived,” Menninot answered. “Just your beloved Series One and the area car.”

“So I dare say you’ll like to go and view what you must view? Who’ll be representing the police at the P.M.?”

Menninot glanced at Carmen Pharoah. “Would you like to?”

“If you wish, sir.”

“I wish, I think. I’d like to root around here for a bit.”

“It’ll be more interesting than the P.M.” Bill Hatch said, glancing at the building. “Fascinating to walk around, in other circumstances.”

“Well, that’s rank.” Menninot smiled. “It has its privileges.”

Though he did not admit it openly, Ken Menninot very rapidly came to understand Joseph Kelly’s fascination. The opening of long-closed doors, the reaching back in time, the atmosphere, the spirits still in these vast rooms and endless corridors. He went to the rear of the house and then outside to where a Scene of Crime officer was examining the van for latents. Menninot asked him if he had found anything.

“Forlorn hope after this length of time, sir.” The man stepped out of the van and stood up. “I don’t know how long it’s been here with the door open, but long enough for a layer of dust to settle and obscure everything. But I’ll carry on. There’s some nylon cord in the rear. It looks to me to be the same as the type used by the girl who hanged herself — if that’s what happened. I’ve tagged it and I’ll get it up to Wetherby for analysis.”

“Good man. Would it disturb anything if I lifted the bonnet?”

“Not a thing, sir. I’ll get the catch for you, it’s in here somewhere.”

Menninot opened the bonnet and took a note of the chassis number to put through the NVLCC computer at Swansea. Menninot was only on his second cup of coffee when the result came through by fax. The vehicle was a Ford Escort van, black, registered owner was Max Farr, twenty-three years, Ripon Road, Jesmond, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

“A little local knowledge, please.” Menninot held the phone to the side of his head.

“Anything to oblige.” The officer of the Northumberland Police had a cheery attitude.

“Farr. Max Farr, Ripon Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Do you know him?”

“I’ll see.”

Menninot heard the unmistakable sound of a computer-terminal keyboard being tapped... a moment’s pause, then, “Yes, yes, we do know him. And so do you. Don’t you do local checks? He’s a mis per.”

“Probably not anymore,” Menninot said, feeling chastened for not doing local checks before phoning another police force.

“He was a student at York University. Reported missing in the summer the year before last, about twenty months ago. His file is cross-referenced to another mis per. Trixie Ellis, also a student, believed to be his girlfriend. Have you found their bodies perchance?”

“Perchance we have.” Menninot went over the nuts and bolts of the find at Pately Hall.

“Sounds ominous enough. But at least we’ll be able to put Mr. and Mrs. Farr out of their misery, though by now they’ll have accepted the worst. Prior to that, he wasn’t known to us. No record at all, a good lad, keeping his nose in the books. Do let us know if we can be of assistance.”

“Certainly we will, though I confess on my waters I think the only thing we’ll be asking you to do is break bad, but not by now unexpected, news to Mr. Farr and his lady wife.” Menninot replaced the phone and pressed a four-figure internal number. “Collator.”

“Sir?”

“Two files, please. One on Max Farr, a mis per of about twenty months ago. It’ll be cross-referenced to another mis per of the same date, one Trixie Ellis. On my desk as soon as.” Menninot glanced at the clock. Still only five p.m. A lot seemed to have happened since he and Carmen Pharoah were asked to go to a remote part of the Wold and rendezvous with two constables in an area car and a member of the public who had reported something suspicious.

The collator brought the files to Menninot. Both were thin, “mis per” only files, a single referral sheet, then nothing. When last seen, both Trixie Ellis and Max Farr had been living at 14 Doncaster Road, York.

Menninot went there. It was a rambling mid-Victorian terraced house which smelled of damp and Menninot fancied that it would be difficult to heat during the winter months.

“We thought they’d eloped.” The young woman blinked behind thick spectacles. She was of short, spindly appearance, very bookish, not for her the cocktail circuit. “They had the front room, they shared it, they were a very together couple. Big Max and Little Trixie. Him so big and her so small.”

“She was a small woman?”

“Oh, yes. She was self-conscious about it. She used to dress cheaply because she was able to buy children’s clothes, no tax, you see, but she really yearned to be taller. The police looked round their room when we realised that they hadn’t eloped, after about a week. But everything was normal, nothing had been packed, everything was there. A lot of cash too.”

“A lot?”

“Fifty pounds. That’s a lot. It would be to Max and Trixie. If they were going away they’d take that with them. They don’t come from wealthy backgrounds. Max’s father is a bank clerk, and Trixie’s dad is a coal miner. It was after exams, but they both still had some course work to address... Really it’s a wonder we didn’t get suspicious sooner.”

“Has their room been relet?”

“Yes, it has, to another couple. And their possessions, Max and Trixie’s that is, their possessions were removed by their parents. That was some few weeks and I mean some few weeks for the course.”

“Oh?”

“Well, that was the time Karen Ovenhouse was kidnapped. You must remember that?”

“I do.”

“She’s on the same course as me, same course that Max and Trixie were on, Medieval English. . Very small course, so we know each other well. Karen doesn’t have much to do with us, holds herself aloof a bit. . but she was on the course... sits in lectures, seminars. . She was abducted just before the exams. . then Max and Trixie vanished just after the exams. Then Karen turned up safe. . Talk about topsy-turvy. I was so glad to go home. Southampton never looked more welcoming.”

“Is that your hometown?”

“For my sins.”

“I see.” Menninot paused. “So Karen Ovenhouse would have known Max and Trixie?”

“Yes... a small course... But there was a bit of a class gap between Karen and the rest of us. We’re all lower middle class or working class. Karen is practically one step down from the Royal Family. But yes, they knew each other.”

“So, a close-knit course of students. Were you upset when Trixie and Max disappeared?”

“I’ll say — people don’t just vanish. But they did. Only Karen didn’t seem upset, but that’s her class, they’re taught from a very early age to control and conceal their emotions.”

“Interesting.” Menninot nodded. “Very interesting.”

Menninot returned to Friargate Police Station. He called in at the detective constables’ room to see if Carmen Pharoah had returned from York City Hospital. She had. He found her sitting at a desk compensating for the lessening of natural light by having switched on the low-wattage anglepoise light on her desk.

“I see you’re back from the P.M.?”

“Yes, sir.” She glanced up at him. “Just writing up Bill Hatch’s findings now. He’ll be faxing his report to us as soon as possible.”

“Can you give me the gist of it?”

“The male appears to have been stabbed in the heart.”

“He can tell that from such an old corpse?”

“Apparently so. The heart muscle is still identifiable, as is the damage caused by the knife, as is the dried blood still evident on the shirt. Death would have been instantaneous. He would have slumped back against the wall.”

“The manner in which he was found, in fact.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So what have we got, a murder/suicide? She kills him then strings herself up? Not unknown.” He glanced at a picture of a black woman in a green swimsuit, standing on a pebble beach beneath palm fronds, and in the background dark clouds of an approaching storm. “Who’s that? Your sister?”

“She’d love you for saying that! No, that’s my mum, taken on a beach in St. Kitts. I was an early child. Very early.”

“I see, so...”

“Well, it may not be so simple, sir. The woman had head injuries, a fractured skull. Probably not sufficient to kill her, but sufficient to render her unconscious, semiconscious at least.”

“Therefore not able to string herself up.”

“Exactly. That’s Bill Hatch’s opinion.”

“So, we’re looking at the hand of a third person in all this.”

Later, in his office, as the sun dipped fully beneath the skyline, Menninot closed the file on Karen Ovenhouse’s kidnapping and picked up the phone on his desk and dialed the D.C.’s room extension.

“D.C. Pharoah.”

“Carmen, Ken Menninot.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Busy?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Good. Grab your coat, we’re going to Leeds.”

“Leeds?”

“Leeds.”

“Karen was always so, so expensive.” The woman in the scarlet designer dress sniffed into her gin, her feet sunk in the deep pile carpet. Oil paintings hung on panelled walls; the room smelled of wood polish. This was Leeds beyond Soldier’s Field. This was Roundhay.

“Always expensive,” the man echoed. The leather armchair in which he sat squeaked each time he moved. He stroked a Persian cat which lay curled up in his lap. “Not like you, my sweet.”

The woman scowled. “I want to be expensive. I am expensive.”

“I was talking to the cat.”

“Men wouldn’t look at me when I was carrying her.” The woman addressed Menninot and ignored Carmen Pharoah. “So we didn’t have another one. I wouldn’t.”

“Bought cats instead,” mumbled the man.

“Sent her off to school as soon as she was seven.”

“As soon as she was seven. Off she went.”

“Then to university when she was eighteen.”

“From school to university.”

“We had to pay the fees, of course. No grant for the likes of us, for the likes of her. We’re monied, you see.”

“Monied,” echoed the man.

“Then she gets herself kidnapped. Foolish girl. Paid the ransom. Police advised against it, but we paid anyway. One million pounds.”

“Solved the problem, you see,” the man said without taking his eyes off the cat. “She came back, dirty, wanting a bath and a meal. But otherwise unscathed. So our life could proceed.”

“Proceed.” This time it was the woman who echoed.

Ken Menninot and Carmen Pharoah stood and saw themselves out of the Ovenhouse residence. They doubted that their departure was noticed.

The following afternoon, when D.S. Menninot and D.C. Pharoah were once again both working the afternoon shift and so were able to pick up the case, they interviewed Karen Ovenhouse in the dean’s office, at the dean’s invitation, but in his absence.

“I felt they owed me,” Karen Ovenhouse said calmly.

“You would have got more if you had waited to inherit in the fullness of time,” Menninot replied, equally calmly. “I mean, we’ve visited your parents... what they must be worth...”

“That’s it, you see, that’s the motivation. I’m not going to inherit anything.”

“You’ve been disinherited?”

“No, there’s just nothing to inherit. There wouldn’t have been anything to inherit if I had waited until they expired of old age. Short of murdering them, that is.”

“Explain.”

“Well, the house, the contents, it’s all show. My father’s business collapsed and he sold the house and its valuable contents to a finance company on the basis that they continue to live out their lives there... so they keep the image, remain the envy of their friends... They got two million pounds for that house of theirs. Half for me is not unreasonable. They don’t want a fuss, so they paid. I knew they would.”

“Where’s the money now?”

“In my bank account. Confess the manager’s eyes opened when I paid the money in. But there had been no publicity, so no one knew that Karen Ovenhouse had been kidnapped. Better than his customers going into the red. It’s in a high-yield account.”

“So what happened in the house? I mean the ruin. Pately Hall?”

“Is that what it’s called?”

Karen Ovenhouse was a tall, slender woman; in terms of appearance she was more of a businesswoman than an undergraduate. The Cartier watch, the gold bracelet, the pinstriped suit. “Well, they got greedy, dare say, it’s the old, old story. I offered them ten thousand pounds each. For them and their background that’s very big money. They had to take zero risk, the plan couldn’t go wrong. We picked up the ransom using his van and got back to the house... When they found out how much money was involved, they wanted more. He, Big Max, came at me with the knife... I don’t know what happened... There was a struggle...”

“Very convenient,” Menninot said coldly. “In fact, the truth of it is that you got rid of them as soon as you had the ransom.”

“Believe what you want to believe. We had a fight and she hit her head. I thought she was dead so I made it look like suicide.”

“That actually killed her. At this stage, I have to caution you that if you do now mention anything...”

“No need.” Karen Ovenhouse held up her hand. “I’ll confess. I’ll confess to everything, the ransom, my own kidnapping... I’ll do ten years... half of it in an open prison. My million pounds will have nearly doubled by then and I’ll still be in my early thirties. I can cope with that.”

“You don’t keep that. The law prohibits you from profiting from a crime.”

Colour drained from Ovenhouse’s face.

“It’ll be confiscated, ‘sequestered’ is the correct term,” Menninot continued. “And it will be easy enough to trace since you told us it’s in a bank account in your name. A false name, or an overseas account, and we might have a problem.”

“I didn’t know that. I thought...”

“You’re right about the other bit, though... the ten years... And I’d say that’s minimum... And I wouldn’t bank on the open prison either.”

Joseph Kelly sat in his small flat poring over an Ordnance Survey map of South Downs. There was a ruin there, just to the north of Brighton. One day to get down there, one day snooping, one day to get back...

Copyright © 2012 by Peter Turnbull