Chapter One – Thursday 26th March 2009
The call had come totally out of the blue. He had been in the garden tending to his vegetables, doing a bit of planting, when his wife called to him to say that there was a Detective Chief Superintendent Brooks from Humberside Police on the phone. His curiosity piqued, he had gone to find out what the Police wanted with him, ten years after his retirement from the force, with the rank of Assistant Chief Constable.
“I’m very sorry to disturb you, sir” said Brooks, the deference to a senior officer still there even though he was long retired. “I wondered if I could come round and see you and pick your brains about one of your old cases from the 1970s. We think it may have some relevance to a current murder investigation.” So reluctantly former detective and ACC Frank Fogg had agreed. He didn’t really want to get involved. He was quite happy, living in his little bungalow just outside Hull with his second wife Janice. He divided his time between growing vegetables in his back garden; walking the dog; his latest project restoring a disused railway line on the Yorkshire Wolds; and being churchwarden at his local Church of England.
However, when Brooks had mentioned the name Billy Bielby, he had instantly got Frank’s attention. The case of the murder of Billy Bielby had haunted him all his career. No detective likes an unsolved case, especially a murder case. And Frank had been convinced at the time, and still was, that there had been some kind of cover up and he had been deliberately ordered to stop the investigation. Granted, it had been going nowhere. But no unsolved murder case is ever closed. This one, however, had been put very firmly on the back burner, and Frank did not like that. In fact at the time he had thought it stank.
Now here he was being reminded of that name, Billy Bielby, coming back to haunt him. After making an appointment with Brooks and putting the phone down Frank returned thoughtfully to his garden. He remembered Billy Bielby. Billy had been a superannuated trawlerman. He had worked on the trawlers from leaving school at 14. It was a precarious existence. Not only was it very dangerous, physically demanding, work – you never knew if you would come back from a fishing trip in one piece, or at all. It was also financially precarious. As a trawlerman you were in effect casual labour. You signed up for a trip, in the old days normally about three weeks, up to Iceland or the Barents Sea. You got paid a very basic wage for the hours you worked, and a share of whatever the catch fetched when it was brought to market. If you had a good skipper who knew where to find the fish, and you arrived back at market at the right time when the price was high, you could do quite well out of it. Of course most trawlermen blew their earnings within a few days of being home. There was no sick pay, no pension, nothing like that.
Frank knew all about this because his Dad had been a trawler skipper, a very good one by all accounts. His Dad (and to a lesser extent his Mam) had always expected him to follow in Dad’s footsteps. He’d done all the right things. He’d gone to the Nautical College in Hull (Trinity House School) and done his exams. But when Frank was just 13 his Dad had been lost at sea. Nobody really knew what had happened. Dad had been on deck when a freak wave hit and that was the last anyone saw of him. When Frank left school at 16 he’d signed on for a trip on the trawlers as a “deckie learner”, as the apprentices were called. But he’d decided it wasn’t for him. The biting cold, the grindingly hard work, the long hours, the danger, and the seasickness, all put him off. Some of his mates had laughed at him and said he wasn’t hard enough. They’d soon thought twice about that when he became a copper. Although they didn’t like him for doing it (who likes a copper?) they respected the Police.
All this passed through his mind on hearing the name Billy Bielby. He supposed Billy had been one of the lucky ones in an ironic sort of way. In his 50s he had contracted emphysema, which meant he was no longer able bodied enough to work. For most trawlermen that would have been the end. But sometimes the shipowners took pity on them and offered them shore jobs. Billy had got a job as a watchman. It wasn’t much. Casual labour. But it was easy money. All you had to do was sit on the bridge of a trawler that was in dock, keep an eye out for intruders, do an occasional round to make sure nobody had got on board to pilfer anything. It was well known that the watchmen often invited their mates on board for a beer or two, maybe a game of cards, or to look at Scandinavian porn.
Like lots of his mates, Billy had been known to the Police, but not for anything serious. The occasional drunken brawl, some petty pilfering, some suspicions of importing illegal booze, fags and porn, but nothing that would bring him major attention.
Frank had taken the call at 6.30am. He remembered it to this day. He was rudely woken from his slumbers by the phone ringing by his bedside (before the days of mobiles). He’d sat up with a start, grabbed the phone to stop it ringing and turned around to make sure it hadn’t woken Sandra – and realised with a sudden sinking feeling that she wasn’t there. She’d left him about a month before and gone back to her mother’s. Looking back now he thought their marriage had been a mistake. They had both been too young. He was 22, and an ambitious young PC wanting to get into CID. That meant working long hours and showing willing with any job they threw at you. She was only 19 and her ambition was to be a housewife and a mother, like her mother before her. She could not understand his driving ambition, and she found it really hard tolerating the long hours he had to work. So in the end she had left. And no amount of pleading and cajoling on his part had brought her back.
All this had flashed through his mind as he picked up the phone on that cold, frosty, foggy November morning. He wasn’t supposed to be on duty until 8.00 so he knew something serious must be up. The uniformed Inspector, Colin Faraday, who was on night shift, informed him that they’d had a call from the British Transport Police, who policed the docks. Somebody had reported seeing a body floating in the Fish Dock. They had hauled the body out and it was confirmed dead, but they suspected foul play, so were calling in the local Police. His colleague, Jim Hendricks, who was the night duty DI that week, was busy attending another serious incident involving a stabbing. It was touch and go whether the victim would survive so that might well turn into a murder case. Hence they were ringing Frank to see if he could attend the Fish Dock, and do the preliminaries on the investigation into a suspicious death.
Dragging himself from his bed, he felt the effects of that last single malt from last night. Lagavulin, his favourite. He loved malt whiskey from the Scottish islands, and nowhere, in his opinion, did they make a finer single malt than Islay. But since Sandra left he had been imbibing too much of the stuff, drowning his sorrows, and he reminded himself that he had a job to do and he needed to be compos mentis to do it.
There was no chance of a cup of coffee, he didn’t have time. But popping an Alka-Seltzer in a glass of freezing cold water from the tap, he stood and watched it fizz and froth as he wondered what he would be walking into. He had only been a DI for a few months. Although he had assisted with murder enquiries, he had never been the lead officer. He wondered if his suspicious death was going to very quickly turn into a murder investigation. If so, would the Chief let him run with it, or would the Chief take it on himself or put someone else in charge. Naturally Frank was keen to head up a murder investigation himself, if that is what it turned out to be.
