Chapter 3

Tapper looked as if he’d been hit, and Marilyn watched him closely. He was silent, and they could see that his tear ducts still worked. He took a deep breath.

“I don’t know. It was a sudden spite. I was really upset when they told me that she was dead. I didn’t know what to say. While Alf was inside, we had an affair, which stopped when my sight was gone. Look, there was no way that I could have found her house, these days, let alone kill her. She could have slapped me down with a frying pan before I could touch her, even though that would have been the only thing I would have wanted to do.”

“Where did Esme and Alf meet?”

“It was at the Mint Warehouse, on Freedom Day in 2021. She was smitten as soon as they danced. I left early, in tears.”

“Do you have a key to your lockup?”

“There should be one on the hook, over by the cupboard.”

“Do you mind if we have a look in it?”

“Knock yourself out. You can see yourself out. Return the key whenever you want.”

They took the key and let themselves out, walking to the alley with the lockups. The key had a number tag. Ginger unlocked the padlock and rolled up the door. They stood, putting on their gloves as their eyes became used to the gloom.

“Right, Ginger, my lad. We are looking for something that Alf wanted to hide, in a place where he knew that only he had access to. There was a similar key on his house set, but it didn’t stand out. I’m guessing that it’s something small.”

It took over an hour, and they both needed a shower and a change of clothes when they did find what they were looking for under a load of oily rags in an old car sump. It was Ginger who was feeling around in the sump.

“Something here, ma-am. Feels like a beach stone.”

He pulled out what he had found. It was a black bag, with a drawstring. When they looked inside, the contents didn’t look much different from a lump of glass. Marilyn took it and wiped it over with a cleaner cloth, then spat on a flat face, wiping it with her finger.

“What is it, ma-am?”

“This, my friend, is one of the missing links. I think that we have found a piece of uncut diamond, probably worth a quarter of a million cut into a number of stones. I will need to book this in as evidence but will transfer it to the DCI in Leeds.”

“A result, then.”

“That’s for sure. We’ll lock up and keep the key. Bernard doesn’t need it. When we get back to the office, log out and go home. You’ve earned a good shower. Be prepared for a trip to Leeds in the morning.”

At the office, Shirley was given the recorder to transcribe the two interviews for the case file. Marilyn stayed long enough to call Keith, in Leeds.

“DCI Russell”

“Keith, it’s Marilyn in York. Can you please see me and my senior sergeant in the morning, say around ten. You’ll need to have someone with diamond experience.”

“Well, Inspector. You certainly know how to surprise. Give me a hint, please, or I won’t sleep.”

“OK, how about a lump of rock, rough and uncut, but shows a nice deep view when you spit on a face.”

“That sounds like one of those uncut blood stones, from back in the troubles. That wasn’t on the robbery list, though.”

“If the jeweller was going to the source, instead of buying cut stones through Antwerp, he would be silly to list it. I think that it was part of the loot that was given to Anderson, on top of his cut. There may have been a few of these that were taken but not listed.”

“All right, I’ll set up a meeting tomorrow. See you then.”

She then made a call to Jacob.

“Jacob, if I come over this afternoon with something, can you measure and weigh it, take some pictures and let me hang on to it. I’ll be taking it to DCI Russell in Leeds in the morning.”

“Can do, Marilyn. Sounds interesting.”

“So is the bag that it comes in. See you soon.”

She went out into the main office and took the rock out of its bag, holding it in a glove.

“Have a look at this, team. Ginger and I found this, this afternoon, in the lockup where Alfred Anderson kept his old bike. It doesn’t look much, but I think that it’s a lump of uncut diamond.”

Those that were there looked at it. Shirley took a picture on her phone, to show Helen. Marilyn put it back in the bag.

“I know that I look a sight, but I’m taking this to Thirsk to be logged as evidence. I’ll be in, first thing, and taking this to Leeds in the morning, with Ginger riding shotgun. We’ll have a meeting in the afternoon. Ian, one little job. Can you find out what work Bernard Tanner was doing, about 2020. Also, what you would have to do with magnesium to create a flash bright enough to lose your sight.”

She left them to it and drove to Thirsk. Jacob was amazed at what she showed him. The rock was weighed and photographed, then he filled in the log. After that, he took a thread from the bag, photographed that, and entered it in with a full description. Finally, he washed the rock with a weak mixture of vinegar and water, bringing out the same vision that Marilyn had created with her spit.

‘I’ll check that thread against the ones from the pizza bag, but, for now, they do look similar. I’ll expect a call from the Leeds DCI, then.”

“About eleven in the morning, I expect.”

She went back to her car and locked the bag in her glovebox, then drove home for a welcome shower and a quiet evening.

Next day, she picked up Tim, as usual.

“How was Youlton yesterday?”

“It was odd. Someone had obviously gone through the place, looking for something. We spoke to the neighbours. They hardly saw him, or anyone else. One woman, coming home from shopping, said that she saw a car parked outside. She wasn’t certain of the time and could only say that it was red.”

“Shirley should have a transcript of an interview that Ginger and I recorded yesterday. There was a red Astra parked outside the Anderson house. Open the glovebox and have a look at what’s in the bag.”

He took the stone out and hefted it.

“Is this what I think it is?”

“If you’re thinking about a girls’ best friend, it is. Ginger and I found it in the lockup where Anderson kept his bike. Oh! He also had a taxi, which Esme drove while he was inside. The original statements that were taken, after her body was found, have mostly turned out to be a pack of BS. Catch up with the happenings in the office. Ginger and I are taking that lump to Leeds this morning. I’ve asked Ian to find out what Tapper was doing in 2019 to 2021. He was a computer nerd. If he finds that Tapper was working for a security or a CCTV company, ring me immediately.”

In the office, she checked her computer for emails, told the team that there would be a meeting that afternoon, and left with Ginger. They didn’t talk a lot on the drive to Leeds, both working through what they now knew. At Leeds, they logged in at the desk and waited to be taken to the meeting, the rock now safe in Marilyns’ bag.

A WPC came to collect them and take them to the meeting.

“Good morning ma-am, sarge. I’m WPC Nottage, and I’ll be taking notes this morning.”

“Good morning, Constable. It should be an interesting discussion. Have you worked with DCI Russell long?”

“About six months ma-am. That man is a walking encyclopedia of the law and case history.”

“I know, I sat in several of his lectures at York Uni.”

They arrived at the meeting room. Keith Russell stood and welcomed them, introducing his two companions.

“May I introduce our section commander, Chief Superintendent Stubbs, and my Sergeant Wallace.”

“Good morning sir. I’m DI Houseman and this is DS Kidman.”

“Right, find a seat and get settled. Nottage will be recording this. If there are papers that you need afterwards, she will organise copies for you before you go. Perhaps the best way to start is to give us an outline of your case and how you drew a line between it and my cold case.”

For the next half an hour, Marilyn took them through her case, with the Stubbs looking shocked at the ferocity of the two murders. She came to the point where she remembered seeing a bag like the one in the Leeds case. At that point, Keith turned on a big screen and showed the others the picture that she had sent him, then pressed a button that showed the piece of CCTV with the boy, the bike, and the bag. Then he pressed the button again and the screen showed the enhanced still of the boy’s face, alongside the mug shot of Anderson. Stubbs spoke.

“Now, that is some feat of memory, Inspector. Have you gone any further?”

“Yes sir, we have. I won’t bother you with advances on our case, but we have found something that relates to yours. In the lockup where our victim kept his bike, we found this, hidden away.”

She pulled the bag out and placed it on the table, in front of Keith. He carefully opened the bag and pulled out the stone. Nottage quietly muttered something.

“Exactly my thought as well. Has this been logged?”

“I took it to Thirsk yesterday, where it was measured and photographed. Jacob also took a thread from the bag to match with the ones found in the pizza bag.”

Keith turned to his sergeant.

“I think that this would be a good time to get our expert in.”

The sergeant left the room and Keith smiled.

“I thought that the best person to look at this may be the one who must have lost it. He sold the business after he got the insurance payment. We managed to track him down and asked him, politely, to help us out.”

The door opened and an old man came in, although Marilyn could see that he looked older than his years. Keith had put the stone back in the bag. The man saw the bag and froze for a few seconds.

“Good of you to help us, Mister Prentice. Take a seat and have a look in the bag.”

They all watched as the man took the stone out of the bag and rubbed a wet finger on a facet, looking at it closely with a jewellers loupe.

“What do you want to know?”

Keith smiled.

“What it is. Where you bought it. How many like this was in your safe when you were robbed, and how many cut blood diamonds you had that you didn’t put on the inventory.”

Prentice went white, and WPC Nottage gave him a glass of water. He looked at Keith.

“I thought that I was free and clear. Now this has turned up. I admit that I had bought blood stones from the source. There were five like this, plus a similar bag of cut stones that I used to put into jewels. They weren’t insurable, and I had to sell the business and use most of the insurance to pay off my account with the supplier. They were patient, but unrelenting. I feared for my life for a good two years before they were off my back. Does this mean that you’re closer to solving the case. I cry each night and pray for the souls of Liz and Sarah.”

“We’re closer than we were back then. What’s that worth?”

“Cut into a number of untraceable stones, about a quarter of a million. As it is right now, it’s worthless. No legitimate jeweller will touch them. I just saw the profits and forgot my ethics.”

“Thank you, Mister Prentice. If you’ll go with my sergeant, he’ll take a statement from you, a full and frank one, this time.”

When they had left the room, the Chief Super stood.

“I’ll leave you to your meeting. That has been an impressive presentation, with a surprise ending. I’m sure that I’ll see further reports, Russell. Excellent work Houseman.”

He left the room, and everyone relaxed. Marilyn gave a little giggle.

“That was unexpected. You must have had your suspicions.”

“I’ve thought through this case for years. There had to be something off, but I couldn’t put a finger on it until Prentice looked at that stone. That’s when it all clicked. Nottage, is the urn hot?”

“As always, sir, teas or coffees.”

They all sat with cups and shared a plate of biscuits. The talk turned to what happens next. Marilyns’ mobile rang.

“Excuse me. I told the office to ring if there was news.”

She moved away from the table and answered. She listened and said, ‘Well done’, before putting the phone away.

“That was Ian, from my team. We have a man in our case who knew Alfred Anderson from school. He told us that before he lost most of his sight he was a computer nerd. The records show that in the 2019 to 2022 period, he worked for a company in Leeds, called ‘Camera Shy Installation’. I’m wondering if they were the company that did the maintenance on the diamond store. If he was the technician, he would have been let in on a Sunday. I’m sure that if the robbery was already planned, he could have added an instruction to the software, with a command to shut down on a certain date and at a certain time. He may have had a chance to take an impression of the key.”

“Prentice will still be here. Give me a few minutes and I’ll ask him who he used. What is the mans’ name?”

“Bernard Tapper. He would have been late teens at that time.”

They spent the time while Keith was away talking to WPC Nottage about her experiences as a policewoman in Leeds. She waved at the cups.

“It’s typical. Always the one to take notes, the one who has the tea and biscuit duty. I’ll also tidy up after you leave. I’ve heard about you, Inspector. Some say that you’re an ice queen with supernatural powers. I can refute that now. You’re a normal woman with a good brain who gets the best out of the ones working with her. What you brought here, today, wasn’t any more than solid investigation and hard work.”

“Thank you. I can tell you that my move into the detective business was due to the marks I got while studying at the university. York is also the training centre for North Yorkshire Police, and I had good lecturers, including DCI Russell.”

The door opened and Keith came back in.

“He remembers Tapper! Even the day that he was checking the system and adding the camera outside the rear door. He left the lad to it while he went over the road to do some shopping. All the stock was in the safe for the day. He said that they got on well, and he trusted the lad to do the right thing. The system worked perfectly after that, even if it did only show an empty shop for a few months in the first lockdown.”

“We’ll keep looking into the group that Tapper was friends with. We already know that he knew both Anderson and his wife while at school. He’s admitted to having an affair with her while her husband was serving his five years. We’re also checking her circle of relatives and friends out.”

“OK. I’ll shout you an early lunch in our canteen, then you can get back to your team. You too, Nottage. Give the recording to my secretary and meet us in the canteen.”

“Yes, sir.”

The WPC was smiling as she left. Keith looked at the bag on the table.

“Is that ours to hang on to?”

“It’s been logged by Thirsk, and I told Jacob that you may give him a call.”

Marilyn looked at her watch.

“About ten minutes ago.”

Keith laughed.

“You, Marilyn, are almost witchlike in the way you can see the future. Let’s follow my WPC to my office, and she can lead you to the canteen. I’ll call Thirsk and put this in the safe in the evidence room.”

The three of them were sitting in the canteen, waiting for Keith. WPC Nottage was still smiling at being with a woman who was rapidly becoming her idol.

“Do you have any idea of what you’re going to do now, ma-am?”

“After eating, then going back to York, my team will have a meeting where we lay out everything we’ve learned.”

Ginger leaned forward.

“And then we bring Tapper in while we get Jacob and his team to take his house apart. If he has one of those bags, it puts him in the frame for the two murders here.”

“Not quite, Ginger. I want to hold off on that until we know more about the others in the ring. If they’re keeping in touch, which I’m certain that they are after the Anderson deaths, then taking Tapper in will spook the others. Prentice said that there were five bags with an uncut diamond in. The likely situation was that there were five in the robbery. We have the one that set the timer in the cameras and took a copy of the key. We have the young Alf who took the jewels from the crime scene. I doubt that he had any idea what he was carrying, and probably handed the bag over within the hour. He would have found out about the two bodies in the news,”

Ginger nodded.

“That would have put the fear of God in him. Being part of a robbery with a good payout isn’t the same as being wanted as an accessory to murder.”

“That could be why he was willing to be part of that smash and grab. If one of those louts is a young brother of one of the original gang, then he would have a strong blackmail case to get Anderson involved.”

Keith joined them and they had the early lunch, speaking about the world in general. When they left, Keith shook hands with both of them, while Nottage gave them a smile. On the way back to York, Ginger laughed.

“That Nottage girl is a bright young thing, with the world at her feet.”

“And a bloody big mountain to climb, Ginger. Coming into the force with a secondary education and basic training to be in the uniform, she is going to have to fight for any promotion. I hope that today has shown her that the brain can be mightier than the baton.”

Back in their own office, Marilyn told the team to be ready when she got back, then went upstairs to give her superior the latest news. Back in the office, she stood in front of the ‘Rascal Wall’ and added two pictures to it. One of Prentice that Keith had given her, and one of Tapper, which she had taken while he was being interviewed and printed in her own office.

“This guy with the dark glasses is Bernard Tapper. He knew both Esme and Alfred at school in Leeds. It was his lockup that Alfred kept his bike in, and it was that same lockup where we found that uncut diamond in, which is now in safe custody in Leeds. This other guy is Harold Prentice, the owner of the shop that was robbed, the employer of the two girls that were killed, and also, by his own admittance this morning, the buyer of that diamond from the source, along with another four. They, and a bag of cut stones from the same source, weren’t listed as stock with the original inventory. They effectively doubled the value of the robbery, when turned into cut stones.”

Ian put his hand up.

“What are the numbers, ma-am?”

“When cut, the five big stones, along with the bag that contained cut stones, would add up to one and a half million. Ginger and I think that the uncut ones were given out among the gang. We know that Anderson had one, which someone has killed him and his wife while looking for it. We think that Tapper has one, as he was the guy who did work on the store cameras, eight months before the robbery. He knew computers, so could well have added a patch to turn the system off. This makes it doubly important to find the others that they knew, as there will be the original murderer among them. Shirley, what have you found out about Esme?”

“I got on to the mother. She told me the school and the name of her best friend. I called the friend, and she told me that she remembered the night that Esme and Alf danced. They all knew each other, and the two girls had been friends since primary, but Esme was a year behind. That put Annabel, the friend, in the same year as Tapper. The dance was at the Mint Warehouse, the Freedom Day celebration.”

She looked at her notes.

“Annabel says that it was like something Disney would write. Esme was decked out in her best party dress and Alf was absolutely the bees’ knees in his clobber. In fact, she said that there was a group of them that looked like they had stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. Esme told her, later, that Alf claimed that they had a syndicate, doing the pools, and had a big win in September, before the short lockdown. The other four guys were in her year, and she wondered why Alf would be mixing with them, socially. The four others were Tapper, a guy called George Hanson, who she said was unpredictable; Geoff Hunter and Martin Wolf, who she said tried to live up to his surname.”

“Very well done, Shirley. Has anybody anything to add?”

Ian sat up.

“I looked them up on the system. Hanson has form, in fact, he’s inside at the moment. He’s serving four years for assault with a deadly weapon. He’s in Armley. The weapon was a spring-loaded knife that had had bought while on a coach trip to see Europe in 2019, with his parents. His victim spent some weeks in hospital having operations. Hunter and Wolf come from large families. Both have brothers that would now be late teens or early twenties. Both families are career criminals, mainly auto theft and wrecking to sell parts. They’ve been raided a few times but are too canny to have anything left around.”

“Good work. Let’s concentrate on those three during tomorrow. Get whatever we can. That red Astra may be getting around on false plates that get changed. Write up a report for DCI Russell in Leeds. That knife should still be in his evidence archives. If it was the one used in the robbery, there may still be remains of blood down in the mechanism.”

Marilyn thought for a few moments.

“We still need the names of the louts that put Anderson inside. It looks as if it was an act of total bravado. Tim, get on to Andersons’ lawyer. Ask him if he has those names. If he has, it’s only covered by client confidentiality, not the juvenile rules. Tell him that we think it’s one of them that killed him.”

“On it, ma-am.”

“Ginger, work with the others to find the whereabouts of Hunter and Wolf. We still need to know how much equity the Andersons had in the house, and who owned Youlton.”

She went into her office and called Keith in Leeds.

“Keith, it’s Marilyn. We’ve just had a meeting and there will be a written report sent to you. I’m calling to give you a verbal heads-up.”

“OK, Marilyn. What do you have for us?”

“We have a witness, from the day that Alfred Anderson met Esme. She told us that Alfred looked like a fashion model in good gear, along with four others that he shouldn’t have known, as they were two years ahead of him.”

“When was that?”

“The Freedom day celebration in 2021.”

“That would fit. Who were the others?”

“One was Tapper, who we’ve spoken to. Two of the others were a Geoff Hunter and a Martin Wolf. The last one had been through your system recently and is in Armley doing time for assault with a deadly weapon. The weapon is a spring-loaded knife that he had brought back from a trip to Europe in 2019. His name is George Hanson, and our witness said that he was unpredictable in school. You would have more on him, as well as the knife, which should still be in your evidence store.”

“If it was the one used in the robbery, that type of knife is impossible to clean, unless it’s left in a bucket of bleach. Even then, you can never tell if you’ve got rid of all traces. We have blood samples of both girls in our store. Thank you for that. I’ll get on to our intelligence group to see if they have anything on him and the other two. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

Marianne Gregory © 2026