File Ref - T. Snape
October 20th 1977
Cokeworth, West Yorkshire, England
09.30 GMT
Emsley drummed his loose hand on the dashboard. Everything was in focus, or rather focus was everything, yet his distractedness that gave Mr. Appleton cause to cozen him with the measuring-stick, and Miss Watts to give him a clipped ear during Biology and the Headmaster to give his parents a stern warning that "the boy will never rank higher than an underling if he fails to improve his focus", afflicted him still.
It was a wonder he had made it to plainclothes. He awoke each morning with residual shock from the sudden announcement in July by DCI Tucker. Moreover, he was to be getting a uniformed partner on certain calls. Usually delivering news of some character so awful that it was deemed necessary for someone in CID to make the call. Bobbies would deliver the road accidents and piano-crushings; he would deliver the murders.
"Most of the time, if it's a bloke been knocked off by persons unknown, his family'll be welcoming to coppers as flies to swatters." Tucker's assessment seemed prejudicial to Emsley at first; but as the months ticked by, delivering notifications of kicked-to-death and beaten-with-bricks to the aproned wives and mothers of cold slabs with a long list of previous, he began to question where he'd got his saucer-ducking abilities from.
Now he had a few bruises and a suitably worn coat to fill the part. He'd even got the right sort of car, though it didn't quite agree with him. He missed being able to use the beat car, but after the business over the riding he knew more than one of the wodentops who were shying away from going out in them alone. Now the Provos were going to turn God's Own Country into West Belfast, going out in uniform in the pandas should be getting everyone danger pay.
So pertinent, he thought, his new woodentop follow-on was a Paddy himself.
"Not that sort, and he'd probably knock flat any many who said he was. Ulsterman, son of the Order, first words as a babba were probably 'King Billy' and learned how ta' march in the Orange band before he could walk." DCI Tucker has warned Emsley when the new partnership was disclosed to him some two weeks earlier.
Perhaps they could better use the new boy over in Harrogate and Scarborough. Local knowledge of his Ulster brethren might be put to better use there. Still, a partner was a partner and Emsley would suppress his teeth-grinding scorn to be dealing with a green lad fresh out of Hendon and shunted up north where he didn't know Derwent from Derby.
He pondered this while the lad sat next to him, leafing through the local A-Z. He was fresh in the neatly-buttoned tunic and unscuffed, uncrumpled cap that was yet to come into contact with a single Leeds fan's ham fist or boots. How boorish his inductions would have to be. Yet he was being thrown in somewhere near the deep end. Did they have swimming baths in Belfast? Probably all pissed in the water every P.E. lesson to spite the schools from the other side of town.
They were on a murder inquiry. DCS Hobson had put Tucker onto chasing up loose leads for the Prostitute Murder Squad. It was a frustrating expenditure of the team's time; Tucker had remained insistent that Huddersfield had more pressing cases than adding to the bewildering number of evidence folders amassing in Leeds for one bloke with a hammer. He was a bastard, there was no disputing it - but murders happened every month, in every town, not all of them big and exciting. Alkie husband batters his wife with a spade then scarpers over the Moors, and someone had to go looking for him. Two drunks knock some poor lad over in a car and vanish into the night. Now this evil business over the Riding, two coppers murdered and nobody in the cells.
Soon, Emsley hoped, he and the Stone lad would be on the chase for someone they could call their own collar. Red meat. Today it was just birdseed. Roughhouse dad of a local weirdo who was being sought for questioning. Might be involved with the prostitute murders, might not. Tucker was more interested in getting another young one with black shoulder-length hair that said "trouble" brought in and searched. With Hobson and the Leeds CID's prerogative to go hunting for the prostitute killer, Tucker dispatched them to the address of the young man's father.
"Looks like the sort who'd do summat worth nicking him for regardless, if it isn't OAPA, it'll be speed or worse like. Get the dad first, the boy's never around the house or the district so find out where his haunts are and get onto him from there."
Stone had been fascinated with the scenery for some while as Emsley had driven them through the fading mill-town. The strikes had only piled straw on a long-stricken camel that lost its viability for steelmaking as soon as the Arabs had turned off the oil taps. Emsley imagined that Stone was from some hard-nosed Protestant dairy farm out in the cow-shite sticks of County Antrim and may not have seen a mill before. He knew though that the lad would have had run-ins with his share of hard nuts from both sides of the barricades and should be stomach enough for dealing with a local flat-cap who had long been referred to as 'former' in his old profession.
"Don't forget, I'll lead, you follow-up with questions 'bout that thing over the Riding. Don't let him lead you round the merry-go-round. This sort'll say anything to send you off in the wrong direction so watch out."
His tutelage of Stone would continue for some time, but for now they exited the car they had parked near a cobbled alleyway and low pavement kerb. Emsley half-expected some townie kids to turn up and try to scarper with the wipers or mirrors but was confident that his recently-acquired motor would be suitably in shot from the living-room he hoped their host would not have made intolerable.
They approached a wooden black door against a late-Victorian terrace. He wondered if this would ever have any value in it for letting. It was certainly, despite its discoloured exterior and the shadow cast by the mills down the century, a damn sight lot more picturesque than the stuff they were shoveling the national finances into building in the big towns. Knocking down the old slums in Sheffield over the last twenty years to make way for giant cinder blocks that made the area an even more unsightly monstrosity than the Industrial Revolution had scarred it. A child's doll-house made out of concrete.
The old Romantic buried deep in Emsley's constitution would shine through now and then. Especially when he was made to walk under grotesque, subserviced street lights, spat-out gum and graffiti on every flat surface. The town looked worse than the other mill-towns. Worse than other Labour strongholds. He'd seen the Valleys. That bloody girl from Newport had made sure of that. Yorkshire folk would be grateful for their poverty after seeing the Valleys.
This place was worse, by a good hundred miles. The town centre, the blackened backstreets, the rows and rows of terraces. The new cinder-blocks going up near the edges. Town planning done in smoke-filled committee rooms with planners, councilors, land-holders swilling the scotch and divvying up the envelopes. Socialist realism meets the modern market economy.
He loathed one particular estate they had passed before reaching Spinner's End. looked like something from behind the Curtain. The new developments were probably taken off blueprints dreamed up by some bureaucrat who liked to number the workers' towns he drew up for the Central Committee from his dacha. This one would be called Mill Town #45.
"This poxy little town was big for coke-stacks back before the war - the first one - but it's had nowt going for it since then." Emsley reminded Stone as he ratted on the drab knocker of the front door.
Stone was unaccustomed to local snobbery between the mill-towns, pit villages and incorporated cities. What he knew were the terraces chanting "up the IRA" and "up the UDA" - and that was in Salford. Ninety-nine of every hundred days he had lived were on the mainland but home always caught up with him like the plague.
His first proper case with the CID boys, now was not the time to be weighted by patriarchal memories of the walled city and the bogs. Think of something fast. Get matey, not too matey, but good matey with Emsley.
"That's a nice motor, when'd'ya get it?"
Emsley glanced over at the Granada and turned back to the door, half-glancing over at Stone.
"Bout six months ago, got it off a DCI in Salford. Here, look sharp."
Stone felt the urge to suddenly adjust one of his buttons as the door creaked open. He fixed eyes with the figure behind and immediately wished otherwise.
Rheumy iris would explain little of the shriveled and yet bloated hulk that slouched before them. It stood in a stoop that managed to obstruct the mild sunlight from without and leave the hallway behind it in darkness. Stone butted with the first query.
"Mr. Snape?"
"Aye."
The stench had followed the figure as he had opened the door, but his breath made the Bell's scotch all the more readily available to those awaiting entry to the house.
"Mr. Tobias Snape?" Emsley followed up.
"Aye."
"I'm Detective Inspector Mike Emsley, this is PC Stone, West Yorkshire Police. If you don't mind, Mr. Snape, we'd like to speak to you for a few minutes, we have some questions we'd like to ask regarding your son."
This time, the hulking scotch-cloth did not even muster a response. They stood before the door awaiting his reply.
"Have you seen your son recently, Mr. Snape?" Stone asked, causing the man's eyes to tilt towards him and downwards.
"No. A'nt seen him."
"When was the last time you saw your son, Mr. Snape?" Stone continued.
"... few year ago. Lives wi' his mam now."
"And where does his mother live now?" Emsley asked, noting down the few utterances they were receiving.
"Don't know."
The astonishing co-operation notwithstanding, the officers thought it their prerogative to gain entry to the house. Emsley led the charge, Stone taking his own notes.
"Would we be able to have a word inside, Mr. Snape? It really is quite important speak to your son soon sooner rather than later if we could."
Mr. T. Snape grunted and shifted his stare back to Emsley.
"Ah've told you. Don't know where he is, an't seen him since he went off to live wi'his mam."
They remained fixed to the front doorstep. Emsley thought it time to play up some severity in the matter.
"Mr. Stone, I'm sure you're aware of the enquiries we've been making in the local area. Your son is someone we are seeking in relation to those enquiries. If someone else gets to question him first, they'll want to know why you weren't willing to tell us where he was. We understand you've separated but it's important we know where he is, for his sake, his mother's sake, and your own sake."
Snape's eyes darted from the detective to his counterpart. They seemed to crane around into the house as he turned on his heels, leading them in.
The living room was more disheveled than its sole occupant. Several stacks of local newspapers and racing sheets from before the subscription was terminated. Years of stains and a musk of stale beer hung between the yellowed walls. Emsley feared the carpet, realised he was becoming too proud and trod upon it as it were pavement. There was certainly sufficient discarded chip paper for it to pass. He sensed that a dog or dogs must have lived here yet knew of no reason to suspect there had been.
The ardor had long departed from whatever marriage produced a lone photograph on the mantelpiece of a couple wearing best, taken at some point in an age when the curtains were kept open and the settee was free of empty bottles and papers.
He only now noticed that Snape had been wearing a flat-cap. It was difficult to mark the points between the bristles of aged black hair and the tweed of the hat. Both appeared to have flecks of blood across the surface. Perhaps it was tomato sauce. No, definitely blood. This Snape looked like he had gone without a decent meal of food for a week or so, earmarking his shrapnel for fresh rum, which Stone thought had begun to cover the scotch in the air.
"Do you follow the football, Mr. Snape?" Stone tried with his petty icebreaker to cut the tension. He pondered if Snape was even aware of the cold in the conversation, or in the apparently unheated room.
"Used'te. Played the asides when I were a lad. Don't follow it no more."
"Madness about Nottingham Forest, Clough's really proving himself again, no?" Stone continued, Emsley glancing at him to indicate advice in the ill.
Snape continued to stare with half-vacancy at both of them. Emsley started on topic again.
"Mr. Snape, as you're probably aware, several women have been murdered in the West Riding of Yorkshire and in Greater Manchester over the past two years. We're currently investigating these killings and the possibility they may be linked. Do you know what I'm referring to? Have you heard or seen anything about these murders, Mr. Snape?"
Snape seemed to chew the inside of his lip, in want of tobacco or some minor distraction. When he spoke, he had a gargling, almost Francophone guttural clutch in his voice.
"Heard about it. On'radio. Seen about it. On'television."
He nodded towards an older, mid-Sixties television set in the corner. Stone wondered if it had been ripped off from a rental shop but that concerned them not for now.
"Well as you'll know then, Mr. Snape, it's very important we follow up all possible leads. Have you ever been to Manchester, Mr. Snape?" Stone asked, Snape raising half an eyebrow at his Ulster tones before resettling his focus on Emsley.
"Used to go down there. During' war. Went wi'me mam and dad. Went t'pictures to see Humphrey Bogart. Haven't been back since."
"Has your son ever been to Manchester, Mr. Snape?" Emsley asked.
"Don't know. Don't know where that lad goes."
"Your son's last known abode on our records was at this address, do you know why this was, Mr. Snape? Can you think of any reason why your wife wouldn't want to update her address with the council or the tax office?" Emsley continued, drawing out a file from his pocket which contained a summary sheet on the Snapes.
"Don't know." Snape looked away from the officers as he grunted again.
They were getting progress equaling that of a mule on a disagreeable Monday morning. Emsley upped the ante.
"Mr. Snape, you should appreciate this is a matter of great urgency. Your son is being sought in connection with a murder enquiry, he's not a suspect yet but he is a person of interest. They've got three forces looking for people who've got anything to do with this. If you're withholding information from us, it'll look very bad when we do bring him in."
Snape seemed unfazed. He motioned his gums as if chewing his tobacco and seemed ever indifferent to the officers. Appeals to the welfare of his offspring affected little.
"Do you care much for your son, Mr. Snape?"
"Care?" Snape barely raised his intonation in the query.
"Bright young lad, isn't he? Says here he got a scholarship to a school up in Scotland. Takes after his mam, does he? But he looks like a right chip off the old block."
Emsley glanced down at the document in his hand. A Xerox copy of the younger Snape's contacts with the police included arrest photographs.
WEST YORKSHIRE POLICE. 14/02/1974. SNAPE, SEV.
At fourteen he had been pulled in by Leeds for an alleged affray. The witnesses had recanted their claims before he could appear at the Magistrates Court and was let off. Other times he'd been questioned, prodded, pulled into various stations when weird stuff happened. Neighbours' pets went missing then would reappear in the next town. A group of school-leavers who hung around the local bus shelters hard-nutting available victims wound up in the district infirmary with scalding purple burns on their face. The nurses thought they might have got radiation poisoning, but had no clue how.
The last photograph, the one Emsley had studied intently before driving himself and Stone to Spinner's End, was taken the previous year. At sixteen, the younger Snape had, according to another crop of witness statements later retracted, followed his father to a tavern before threatening him with an unidentified weapon. Police had been called to the house and found Eileen Snape in a state of distress, having sustained a number of injuries. Tobias Snape was to be prosecuted under the new Domestic Violence Act but Eileen and the boy had both disappeared as soon as the prosecution of the younger Snape was dropped.
It was remarkable how quickly the threats to his liberty seemed to drop. Emsley wondered if the lad was studying legal theory in his spare time, developing a cultivated practice of witness intimidation and the apologetics needed to persuade all the right people of the pointlessness of pursuing a case.
He knew all of this in advance of the perfunctory questions to Tobias Snape on the whereabouts of the estranged, battered spouse and the son whom DCI Tucker had more than once referred to as "another local weirdo who wants bringing in." They were testing the limits of how far the desolate man would lie to them and gauge whether any loyalty still remained to his only sprog. Apparently, despite their history, he seemed intent on remaining tight-lipped.
"'Spose he is."
The faint physical resemblance between the sunken figure in the filthy chair opposite them and the photographs was apparent but thin. Even in the inopportune photographs taken in custody areas, there glared back a youthful charm buried under a veneer of the cold. Emsley had seen them at school, there was precedent to the younger Snape's sort. Devilish entrapment of every mother's daughter just with a slightly haunted glance. The DCI was wrong to tag him as just another one of the sort that every copper in the region was pulling aside to ask about the murders.
There was method in his isolation. The boy would have kept his distance from most others out of knowledge of what he could do, but Emsley doubted he would act on it. Bouts of anger and temper going off the handle when this sulking, shrinking beast of a father provoked him. But most of the time, he could imagine this boy sitting in an alcove or a stairway writing poetry, sketching lilies or dreaming of running off to join a band.
He wasn't out murdering prozzies. But speaking to this kid would shed some light on things left in the dark.
"Are you aware of what happened over in Darlington earlier this year, sir?" Emsley led again.
"No."
"Back in April, two of our colleagues from the North Riding, Sgt. Andy Fisher and PC Mark Anderson were found shot dead in their car just outside Darlington town centre. They'd been following a motorcycle that started off in Northallerton. A young man closely fitting your son's description was seen in the area around the time of the bike's appearance in the town. Sev - it is Sev, right, we think the records might be incomplete - is being sought by officers in North Yorkshire for questioning as a potential witness."
Snape's eyes appeared to fill with some life. Suddenly, he was more aware of things.
"Of course, we're not handling that investigation, our priority is the murders of the young women." Emsley faced Stone, "North Yorks are still going ballistic about that one."
Stone went from his script, delivering like a Gielgud.
"Oh yeah, Alistair says they're arresting everyone and his granny who doesn't co-operate. Barely any witnesses so they're dragging in anybody with the most tenuous links to it."
"You wouldn't know if Sev has ever been over the Riding, has he, Mr. Snape?" Emsley had turned to face Tobias once again, his ruddy face now becoming slightly reddened and particles of sweat beginning to appear beneath his scalp and glands.
"Only it would help us and our colleagues eliminate him nice and quickly, eliminate him from the investigation that is, if you knew where he's been for the past year or so." Stone continued.
Snape's jaw, withered by the years yet stationary in place until that point, had begun to quiver slightly. It was enough. Above the stench of the drink and the fags, Emsley could smell the rat as if it had been dead for a week.
"Mr. Snape. Tell us where your son is. Tell us where he is so we don't have to bring you to the station and turn this place upside down, go through all his sock drawers and old school reports."
He seemed to choke, then laugh.
"Gheh, ye wouldn't believe yersel'if ye did."
"Is Sev with his mother, did he go with her when she left?" Stone asked.
"Either wi'her or back to that school. You won't believe me if I tell you where it is or what it is so just look for her. Didn't tell me where they'wis going, just heard things."
"Things?"
Emsley kept his eyes locked with Snape's bloodshot pair, as did Stone. Their host was beginning to feel trapped in his living room.
"Ripon. Harrogate. Towns, towns over the Riding. She were running off somewhere, tekkin', 'boy wi'her. Ah can't say no more."
Emsley leaned towards him, Stone furiously scratching into the notebook.
"But you can say more, Mr. Snape. You will do if you don't want to be sharing a cell with the lad."
Emsley could tell when a father feared his son. Years ago he might have succeeded in clipping or seeing to the lad with something blunt, now he recoiled from the thought of it. He grunted more heavily and took a deeper breath.
"He came back. One night this year. About April. Came back for his things. Took one look at me, I went upstairs till he was done. Won't like before. He's evil. He's got evil in them eyes."
"Do you think your son killed those police officers?" Stone asked him bluntly.
"Might've. Don't know."
"Do you think your son has anything to do with the murders of those women?" Emsley persisted.
"Don't know."
Emsley snapped back.
"Mr. Snape we can secure a warrant to search these premises and you can be charged as an accomplice if the lad has done something and you're covering for him!"
"Covering for him?" Snape was incredulous, "I wouldn't cover a door for that lad. He means nowt' to me. And his name isn't Sev, it's Severus. Another wretched idea of his mam's. Never seen eye to eye we never, always brooding away somewhere, scheming, plotting, never respected his father. I just don't want him back, want nowt' to do wi'him. Ye go off looking for him, you won't come back from it."
Stone looked back up from his notebook. Emsley was silent for a moment.
"What do you mean?"
Snape began to shiver, as if a blast of wind had struck him.
"Things happen around that lad. Happened. They did, while he were still here. You know all this, your lot were here every five minutes asking bloody questions about it. I don't think he killed those women. D'you know why? Cause you found 'em. If it were him, you wouldn't have found 'em. He'd just mek'em disappear. Same with those coppers. Just where it was that got me troubled like. That's where he'll be if you want him. Just don't be surprised if your search dogs start going mad or your cars get turned upside-down. Or you wake up nailed to a tree in Ireland."
Stone stood to his own defence.
"With respect, Mr. Snape, I'm not Irish."
"I don't bastard care where you're bastard from, lad, ye've not got a chance. Go home, see yer kids right, knock some discipline into 'em while they're young, mek'sure yer wife don't teach 'em any nonsense about... about anything."
There was a terse moment as Emsley couched then glanced through the files. He fixed eyes with Tobias a final time.
"Thank you for your help, Mr. Snape."
Tobias shrunk into the chair completely. His clammed skin had become colder and whiter, blotches and pimples now magnified under sweat.
"We'll see ourselves out if you don't mind."
Exiting the abode brought gasps of relief from both, now able to breathe an air unpolluted by eons of tar and spilt ales, mediated only by the exhales of the smokestacks and cooling towers in the near distance.
"D'you think it's him?" Stone asked as Emsley reached into his jacket and lit a cigarette a few paces from the front door, now free of the potential entanglement of sharing his packet with the shuffling bar mat they had just quizzed.
"Who, the dad or the lad?"
"The laddie, seems like it's a lot worse than just him being the local weirdo."
Emsley unlocked the car, ignoring some of the radio chatter to permit himself a moment's thought.
"The Snape lad couldn't have killed the prozzies. The lad's not the right fit. First killing were two year ago, so he'd have been fifteen. No way he'd have got onto it then and succeeded."
They both sat and Emsley started up, wanting to get his new Cortina far from Cokeworth in the fastest available time.
"He disappears for long lengths of time, supposedly at school in Scotland, neighbours report a violent and unsettled family, kid's got problems with his mammy and daddy and probably a grudge against women and girls - how does he not fit exactly?" Stone replied, trying to reach for a cigarette before Emsley stuffed it back into his jacket.
"Needs to be a big bloke, working man with a vehicle and local knowledge. No record of the Snape boy ever passing the driving test, let alone owning a motor. He's gangly, skinny, probably years of not being fed right, less upper body strength than the club secretary. Same thing for the coppers in Darlington. Wasn't him, I'll put the Christmas money on it." Emsley munched his words through the cigarette as the engine revved.
"XW, XW to Charlie Five, are you receiving, over?"
Stone answered, speaking with Emsley as he awaited the reply.
"Charlie Five receiving, over. So what's all this about? Why did we spend a serviceable half hour talking to that old drunk if his lad isn't the one?"
"He isn't, but he'll know something, summat going on in his little world that could lead us there. Scared runaway local weirdo gets to hear things. This one in particular, too many coincidences for him to just be wrong place wrong time sort. Most of it'll be bollocks but I'll take my winnings from betting the Christmas money and bet it that he'll give us something. If not this - well, summat else worth our time. Leeds wants us to cover their arses while the Prostitute Murder Squad goes rifling through every pervert's trousers from here to Bolton, fine. Just let us get on with catching some more dangerous sods while you're going after Jack the Ripper. And the Snape lad can lead us to them."
"XW alert to Charlie Three and Four, suspected IRA member sighted in the vicinity of Brackenhall driving black Triumph motorcycle, Charlie units currently searching between Mirfield and KIrkheaton, units to assist over."
"All received XW, we're on way from Cokeworth now, can we get suspect description, Charlie Five over." Stone replied as Emsley pulled the car into a turn and out of Spinner's End.
"XW to Charlie Five, suspect's name is Sirius Black, wanted for questioning. Suspect believed armed."
"See what I mean, lad?" Emsley said, switching on the yelper siren, "Dangerous sods to be led to."