Thomson Ventnor ate a ready-made meal that he had bought from the supermarket. Just one meal, which he carried home in a plastic bag; it was the only item he purchased and simply required reheating. After the meal he took a bus out of York to the semi-rural suburbs and to a large Victorian house set in neatly tended grounds. He observed swallows and swifts darting about in the summer evening air as he walked up the winding drive to the house. He opened the door and was met by a blast of heat which he always believed could not be healthy. He signed in the visitors’ book and went up the wide, deeply carpeted staircase to a lounge area, where elderly men and women sat in high-backed armchairs, and where a television set stood in the corner. A young woman in a blue smock smiled at him. Ventnor walked across the floor to an elderly man whose face lit up with delight as he recognized Ventnor, but by the time that Ventnor had walked the few paces to where the man sat, the man had retreated into his own mind, so that all Ventnor could say was, ‘Hello, Dad,’ even though he knew he was speaking to a person who was little more than a vegetable.
Later, he returned to the city and walked the streets, and eventually fetched up in a pub he found to be pleasingly quiet. He bought a beer and stood at the bar. He thought of the issues. . the transfer to Canada. . the need to stay in York until his father had passed away. . his passion for Marianne that did not seem to be diminishing.
It was Sunday, 21.45 hours.
SIX
Monday — 11.30 hours — 14.35 hours/Tuesday 16.50 hours — 17.30 hours
in which a retired lady gives information and a decision is made.
‘That’s not the reason, darling.’ Furlong Freda smiled at the suggestion. She sat in a small chair in the corner of the cluttered living room in her council house in Chapel Fields. Outside, the garden was overgrown, as were the gardens of many of the neighbouring houses. The streets were lined with old, very old, motor cars. Unpleasant odours lingered in the air as though a gas main had been fractured, or a main drain had burst somewhere beneath the road surface, and all exacerbated by the heat. Freda Queen was dressed only in a tee shirt and shorts and inhaled deeply on an inexpensive cigarette. The ‘gaol house tatt’ described by Kenneth Lismore, ‘Freda’, was as he described, prominent upon the back of her left hand. ‘No, they wouldn’t allow working girls anywhere near the racecourse, and the punters who go to the races are not the sort of punters who are looking for a girl. A lot of them have their wives and children with them. I mean, it’s a family day out, isn’t it? And when the races are on the working girls are sleeping, getting ready for night and the trade in the night.’ She inhaled and held the smoke in her lungs before exhaling slowly through her nostrils. ‘First fag of the day,’ she smiled, ‘a lifesaver.’ She flicked the ash into the fire grate, which, like the fire grate in James Post’s house, had become a gathering place for any small inflammable item. ‘No. . that stems from when I got lifted for soliciting, years ago, darling, and the cop asked me why I was called “Furlong Freda”, so I told him it was because I worked the racecourse, but I was put out at being arrested, that’s why I said it, but the real reason is that I always gave value for money. I charged the same as the other girls but gave more. . gave better. . got a good reputation and had enough regulars not to have to take risks with strangers. I went the extra furlong. . so I was “Furlong Freda McQueen”. I called myself McQueen but my name is really just “Queen”, plain old Freda Queen.’
‘That we know,’ Ventnor smiled.
‘Never made no secret of it, darling.’ Freda McQueen had a drawn, haggard-looking face and spoke with a harsh, rasping voice. She was in her fifties but could, thought both Ventnor and Webster, be taken for a woman in her seventies; Borstal training followed by a life on the streets does that to a woman.
From the room above came the sound of springs creaking, followed by footfall across the landing to the bathroom and the ‘click’ of the lock on the bathroom door.
‘Punter?’ Webster asked.
‘Boyfriend,’ Freda McQueen replied proudly. ‘I’m retired, darling. I have boyfriends these days. They help me out financially but it’s part of the relationship, not business. They don’t hang around very long, just a few weeks at a time, but they’re boyfriends.’
‘I see.’
‘So. . Jim Post got iced did he? Little, no good, waste of space that he was. He won’t be missed.’
‘We hope you can help us?’
‘Anyway I can, darlin’, anyway I can.’
‘You have a helpful attitude,’ Webster smiled. ‘You’ve changed your attitude to the police?’
‘It was like this, love, I was what I was and the coppers who collared me was what they was, we was both of us just doing our jobs. It’s the way the ball bounced in those days, dare say it still is, darling, dare say it still is.’
‘Reckon it is,’ Ventnor growled, ‘and I reckon it always will be.’
‘Oldest profession, darling, that’s what they say and it’s nothing about exploiting women. The game is the oldest two-way street in the world. The girls exploit the men just the same. Anyway the law helped me. I was being stalked and the cops put a stop to it. . a real creepy guy, phoning me. . the lot, so I called in at Micklegate Bar.’
‘That’s where we are based.’
‘Yeah? Well they helped me; this is twenty, thirty years ago now. I didn’t think they’d help a working girl but they did. . sort of unofficial. The stalking stopped, just stopped. I found out later they. . the police, had bundled this creepy guy into a car one rainy night and driven him ten miles out of York, dragged him into a field and gave him a slap, left him to walk home with a sore face and the suggestion that he worked a little bit on his attitude.’
Webster and Ventnor glanced at each other and raised their eyebrows.
‘That wouldn’t happen nowadays.’ Ventnor turned his gaze back to Freda McQueen.
‘It’s the best way, if you ask me, it benefits everyone. I didn’t get stalked no more, the police were not bogged down with paperwork and court appearances, and the felon avoided a criminal record. I’ve always said that a slap from a copper on a dark night up some snickelway is better than having to stand at the charge bar getting your record adding to, and your prints and DNA on file. I’d prefer a slap to a criminal record any day.’
‘Which is why that sort of thing doesn’t happen any more,’ Ventnor explained. ‘These days we like fingerprints and DNA on file. All right, it means paperwork but in the long run it makes our job a lot easier.’
‘I can see how that can make sense.’ Freda McQueen grappled for another cigarette and lit it with a flourish of a dull gold-plated lighter.
‘So, you’ve retired from all that anyway?’
‘Yes, old and past it and on the scrap heap with one or two boyfriends, like him upstairs,’ she pointed to the ceiling just as the toilet was heard to flush, the bathroom door unlock and a heavy footfall return to the bedroom. ‘He’s stamping his feet because he doesn’t like visitors, but it’s not his house is it and he’s not paying. Last Christmas Day my dinner was beans on toast. Well. . it was just another day wasn’t it, darling?’
‘For some. . sadly, it’s like that.’ Ventnor spoke with some finality. He wanted to get the interview back on track. ‘So, James Post?’
‘Yes. . what about him?’
‘What do you know about him?’
‘Pretty well everything there is to know. . and that isn’t much. . little man in every way. I tell you, even if they cremate him and put his ashes in an urn he’ll occupy a bigger space than he ever carved out for himself in this world. We kept each other company and yes, we knew each other in the biblical sense, didn’t mean anything to either of us. Then I realized just how low I had sunk when I woke up to the fact that I’d taken him for a partner. He lived at the bottom of the pit, right at the end of the line. . five feet nothing of me. . me. . me. . all about him and full of resentment, burning up with it and wanting victims, not just one, but more than one. It was then I thought I can’t do this, I can do better, even I can do better. I didn’t want to be seen with him. Who you are seen with is who you are, that’s why I used to work in Hull and Leeds in the main.’