Gallows Knot

By Giles Ekins

West Garside, Yorkshire, mid-1950's. After a young girl is abducted from a local hospital, D.I. Yarrow, still recovering from an attack in which he was severely burnt, fears for the safety of the child.

With the community in shock, everyone in town now becomes a suspect. In the most difficult and traumatic investigation of his career, Yarrow must bring all his experience and commitment to bear as senior officers, anxious for their own careers, begin to question his competence.

Can Yarrow bring this case to closure as his personal life takes a dramatic turn?

A police procedural set in mid-20th century England, GALLOWS KNOT is the third book in the Inspector Yarrow series by Giles Ekins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: May 6, 2024

Book preview

PROLOGUE

THE MOST FREQUENT CAUSE OF DEATH FOLLOWING SEVERE BURNS.

YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND. CIRCA MID-1950S.

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR CHRISTOPHER YARROW LAY DEEPLY anaesthetised as Professor Gordon Archer, senior consultant at the Burns Unit at the City General Hospital in Sheffield, continued to examine the burn damage to Yarrow’s face, head, and hands, particularly his left hand which had been the most extensively burned.

Yarrow had been doused in petrol and set alight by Sheila Anderson, a disturbed young woman with whom he had been talking on the roof of an asylum. You killed my father, she had said. Frankie Starling, my dad, you had him hanged!

His face, hands, and neck in flames, Yarrow had then fallen from the roof, injuring his shoulder, right knee, and lower back in the fall.

Sheila Anderson had then immolated herself, dying in the ambulance on the way to the same hospital. Tracked down and arrested by Yarrow, Frankie Starling had indeed died on the gallows, convicted of the murder of a wages clerk during a failed robbery.

Yarrow was hooked up to an IV with dextran, providing fluid resuscitation, minimising the effects of shock and had been given penicillin to prevent toxic shock syndrome caused by sepsis and infection, the most frequent cause of death following severe burns.

Archer was assessing the various degrees of burns, classifying them in his mind as either first degree: Erythema, which was heat, pain, and small blisters; second degree: skin inflammation with epidermal detachment; third degree: partial destruction of the papillary layer and subpapillary network of the corium; fourth degree: destruction of the skin down to the subcuticular level; and fifth degree: damage to all soft tissues down to the bone and crust formation over skin and muscle. He was also examining the depth as well as the degree of burn and quantifying the burn surface area.

It had been fortunate that Professor Archer was available that day. One of the leading experts in the treatment of burns, during the war he had worked alongside the famed Sir Archibald McIndoe at the Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead. McIndoe was a pioneer of reconstructive plastic surgery, including facial reconstruction, treating and rehabilitating British and Allied aircrew severely burnt during the war and founding the Guinea Pig Club, an exclusive club for those airmen severely burnt in combat.

Archer consulted for two days a week at the hospital, and it had been fortuitous that the day Yarrow was brought in was one of those days.

Upon learning that his patient was a former Battle of Britain fighter pilot, he decided to cancel his other engagements and concentrate his skills on treating the severe fourth and fifth degree burns to Yarrow’s face and hands.

During Yarrow’s lengthy recovery period, Archer recommended Yarrow to the Guinea Pig Club President, and because of his wartime service and public duty as a policeman in which he was severely burnt, he was made an Honorary Member. An honour he would treasure for the remainder of his life.

A less savoury distinction, coined on the streets, was the nickname, the sobriquet, of ‘Crispy Bacon.’ It did not bother him in the slightest.

CHAPTER ONE

THAT SHE DIED FROM HER INJURIES

The Garside Gazette

SENIOR DETECTIVE BADLY INJURED DURING INCIDENT AT CARNWOOD HOUSE

Detective Inspector Christopher Yarrow burned and injured in fall from hospital roof

The Gazette understands that DI Yarrow was responding to a call from the hospital where a disturbed young woman, believed to be 17 years old, Sheila Anderson, had gained access to the roof. Apparently, she demanded to speak to DI Yarrow, and when he approached, there was a brief conversation before she threw petrol over him and set him ablaze. He subsequently fell from the roof and is believed to have been injured in the fall. He was then rushed to the Burns Unit at Sheffield City Hospital. No information regarding his condition has been released by either West Garside Police or the hospital. It is understood that Anderson then doused herself in petrol, setting herself alight. Unconfirmed reports indicated that she died from her injuries en route to hospital….

CHAPTER TWO

WALKED AWAY WITH HIM INTO THE NIGHT.

SIX MONTHS LATER.

THE LITTLE GIRL CLIMBED OUT OF HER BED, took the proffered hand of the man in the white coat, and walked away with him into the night.

CHAPTER THREE

‘I DON’T LIKE THE SOUND OF THIS AT ALL.’

THE JANGLING OF THE TELEPHONE on the bedside table scorched through his deep, dream-free sleep, jarring into his brain like a brilliant spear of sound, a shock wave surging through his chest, his heart suddenly pounding. Calls in the dead of night were never good news. Groggily, he reached for the telephone, answered, Yarrow? and switched on the bedside lamp, the sudden glare making him wince.

Wedging the phone into his shoulder, he picked up his watch from the nightstand, 4:15 a.m., what on earth could be so urgent as to call him at this time of night; even more surprising, it was Superintendent Bullock calling him.

Something had to be seriously wrong to get Bullock out of his bed at night.

Chris, get yourself down to the hospital, the children’s ward, seems like a young lass has gone missing, looks like it might be an abduction.

Abduction?

"Aye, four-year-old girl…Emily Black…was in her bed in the children’s ward when the night nurse did her rounds, next time she looked, the lass were gone. First off like, the nurse thought that mebbe the little lass had gone t’toilet, so she looked in there, no little lass. Then looked all around before calling in the duty doctor in case he had taken her for some reason although he should have notified the duty nurse if’n he had. Then another look around, called out the matron and other staff, did another quick search of the nearby wards and such before calling us in. One of the other girls in the ward, barely three, all she could say it were ‘a doctor man.’

I don’t like the sound of this at all.

Me neither, they should’ve called us in sooner, the trail is already getting cold, so get on down there. I’ll get uniform set up for the search, we’ll do the hospital top to bottom, just in case she did wander off and got lost, you know what a labyrinth the old hospital is, then the grounds, then spread it out. Get the rest of your lads in.

Yes, Sir.

This has a nasty smell, Chris, a right nasty smell.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘WAS THIS WINDOW OPEN LAST NIGHT?’

It was still dark as Yarrow pulled up into the hospital grounds. Already two black Wolseley police cars were parked to the side by the main entrance, four uniformed coppers standing uneasily by their cars, waiting for instruction. Yarrow quickly posted two of them to keep all but essential visitors from entering; genuine patients and staff were of course allowed in, but no others until the scene had been secured. He then ordered the other two officers to stay with him in case he needed them to run messages or other tasks.

DS Marcus Harding was waiting for Yarrow, looking dishevelled and darkly unshaven, a weary rim of sleep about his eyes. He held a white crash helmet in his hand; having ridden to the hospital on a 1933 overhead valve 249cc BSA R33-4 motorbike that had seen extensive service during the war, racking up tens of thousands of miles and was now on its last legs – following his promotion, he could have afforded a newer motorbike but he really loved the battered but reliable BSA and was reluctant to change it.

‘A missing girl, sir?’ he asked, yawning into his hand. ‘Taken from the ward?’

‘That’s what it seems like, four-year-old Emily Black. I hope to God we are wrong, but first indications point that way.’

‘How do we go about things then, sir?’

‘I want to look at the ward from where the girl has gone missing. We need to get that secured, transfer any other patients to another ward but keep them handy in case we have to talk to them.’

‘Most of them are only young, toddlers, babies even, so I gather, and most of them can’t even talk yet.’

‘Even so, we must try; we’ll need the parents present, of course, preferably the mother when or if we do talk to them.

‘Right!’

‘We’ll talk to the night nurse who raised the alarm; uniform will do a top to bottom search of the hospital, there are all sorts of nooks and crannies where she could be hiding.’

‘Or could have been hidden if she’s come to harm.’

‘Aye, there’s always that. Then we spread out, a fingertip search of the grounds. We’ll talk to the girl’s parents. I don’t think they would have come in at night and taken her home, but we’d look right stupid if we didn’t check and she was there all the time.’ said Yarrow, taking out his cigarettes and lighting up, offering them to Harding who declined with a shake of his head. It was too early in the morning, and although he had only recently taken up smoking, he was trying to give it up. He had a new girlfriend called Janet Beaseley; she did not like the smell or taste of tobacco on his breath when he tried to kiss her.

‘Do we search the family home as well?’ he asked.

‘Yes, we must; it’s standard procedure. I know it doesn’t help distraught parents to have police poking in the attic or nosing around the garden, but it has to be done.’

‘You don’t seriously suspect the parents?’

‘No, but like I said, it must be done. Send Suzanne, Suzanne Fillmore, to sit with the mum and dad until we get there. She’s steady and sensible; they’ll need somebody calm and compassionate with them.’

A thin smear of dawn light edged its way over the brow of the encompassing hills, bleeding pale light into the morning. The birds began to wake and stir, hesitantly at first, as if not wanting to be the first ones to start singing, and then soon they were in the full throat of their dawn chorus. An ambulance pulled up alongside Yarrow and Harding, the tyres scrunching loudly on the gravel forecourt. The ambulance crew opened the back doors and helped an old lady down from inside. She was dazed and looked about her confusedly, a trickle of dried blood down her forehead.

‘The old dear fell and hit her head,’ one of the crew said, recognising the two men as police. ‘She’ll be right as rain, just needs a bit of rest and a good, strong, hot cup of tea.’

‘Could do with that myself,’ Harding yawned as Yarrow took a final drag at his cigarette, dropped it to the ground, and crushed it under his foot before walking off into the front entry of the hospital, Harding and the two uniforms trailing on behind.

Nurse Alison Worthywool was short, plump, and round, with a motherly air of comfort about her, although she was no more than 25 years old. She had a round, moon-shaped face; a face made for bright, beaming smiles, but not this day. Not this morning.

Thin runnels of tear tracks marked her cheeks, a shock of startlingly white-blonde hair had escaped out from under her cap, and she nervously kept trying to push it back in place. She looked worn, worried sick that a child had gone missing on her watch, obviously frightened that she would be held culpable, concerned for her job, but even more concerned for the whereabouts of the little girl in her charge.

The Albert Doakes Children’s Ward was housed in a new wing attached to the rear of the older Victorian hospital, stuck on with all the subtlety of an extra limb sewn onto someone’s shoulder. The yellow glazed brickwork of the extension was harshly at odds with the mellow gritstone of the main building. An apparently endless warren of corridors ran from the main entrance of the old building through to the new ward, the ever-present hospital smell of antiseptic and boiled cabbage permeating the yellow glazed tiles and light green painted plaster walls of the corridors.

Tearfully, Nurse Alison Worthywool led the two detectives and the two uniformed policemen through the maze, an equally harassed duty doctor trailing along behind them, his white coat flapping like washing on the line on a breezy day.

Nurses and orderlies, wheeling trolleys of medications or patients, flowed past in a steady stream. The disappearance of the young girl seemed not to affect the normal activities of the hospital; patients still had to be fed, cleaned, medicated, operated upon, assessed, admitted, and released; life – and death – continued apace.

Other long corridors branched off left and right at regular intervals, staircases appeared at random. Notice boards on the walls had plans of the sprawling hospital complex displayed, with arrows marking the positions of various wards and departments.

Yarrow stopped briefly to examine one, noticing that the children’s ward was at the far extremity of the hospital. ‘Nurse, we’ll need a copy of this plan, and of the other floors. Plans of the basement as well. The little girl could have wandered off down there and got lost. I know I would soon get lost here,’ Yarrow said, wondering how long it took for a new nurse or doctor to find their way around. He was told, somewhat later and tongue in cheek, ‘that new staff were given a map and compass, a packet of sandwiches, and told to find their way around.’

The nurse looked puzzled. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m not sure who’d have a plan. I’d have to ask for that.’

‘Probably the Engineering department, I should think.’ He turned to the following uniformed officers. ‘One of you go back and find out how we get these plans. We need them urgently. And more than one copy.’

‘Sir.’ A brief salute before turning on his heels and trotting off back down the corridor, the clatter of the steel cleats on his boots echoing around the walls.

Yarrow marched on to the ward from where four-year-old Emily Black had disappeared. He stood by the door of the ward, now empty, the children having been relocated to another ward which had been made free by either discharging some recovered patients earlier or transferring others to beds at the Cottage Hospital in Moorgate. Behind him, Harding, the other uniformed copper, Nurse Worthywool, and Dr Draper, the duty doctor, his white coat seeming still to flap about his legs even though he was stationary, hovered uncertainly, trying to peer around Yarrow as he stood immobile in the doorway.

Yarrow breathed in deeply, as if assimilating the atmosphere of the scene into his being. Beyond the nurses’ station, there were two rows of now empty cots, lined up along each long wall, 12 beds to each row, a small night table stood by each bed. The usual screens, trolleys, and uncomfortable-looking chairs for visitors also were in evidence.

‘Which was Emily’s bed?’ he asked over his shoulder. Alison Worthywool pushed up alongside him to point out the bed, and for a sudden moment, he felt the press of her ample breasts against his arm, sending a totally inappropriate and unexpected frisson through his body.

‘That one, sir, the end bed on the left,’ she said, pointing.

‘Thank you,’ he said, still not moving away from the doorway.

Then he squatted down on his haunches, scrutinising the barely discernible pattern of footprints in the highly polished floor that were visible from that angle. It was a tangled, multi-directional pattern, a constant flow swirling about the beds, as nurses, doctors, and the tiny patients themselves had moved about the ward and finally exited. His head jerked up; beside Emily’s bed, there was an open window, and just by the side of the bed, he could see a faint line of marks, mere smudges, in the polish seeming to lead from the bed to the window.

He quickly unfastened his shoelaces and pulled off his shoes, hoping that there were no holes in his socks. ‘Harding, take off your shoes and then follow me. Please, everyone else stay by the door. Don’t come in.’

In stockinged feet (without holes), Yarrow and Harding made their way over to the missing child’s bed, where a pale blue fluffy rabbit lay forlornly amongst the rumpled sheets and blankets.

Careful not to disturb the slight marks in the floor, Yarrow placed his own footprint close to one of the marks. ‘I thought so; these prints were made by someone in stocking feet, the same as us.’ Carefully, he made his way over to the window, motioning Harding to stay back so as not to risk damaging the prints on the floor.

‘Nurse,’ he called, ‘was this window open last night?’

‘Only very slightly, sir. All the windows were open an inch or two at the top and bottom to allow some fresh air in the room. It was so hot and stuffy in here otherwise.’

‘But not opened all the way as it is now.’

‘No, good heavens, no. We don’t want the wee ones to catch cold. I mean, poor Emily had scarlet fever and was a bit… vulnerable to colds and such and still had a sore throat. Although apart from that, she was almost better and ready to go home in a day or so, most of the desquamation…’

‘Desquamation?’

‘Sorry, skin peeling. It’s characteristic of scarlet fever during recovery.’

‘Right, desquamation. Thank you.’

Yarrow rubbed his chin, thinking, feeling, and hating the shell-like carapace of his burned face. He did not like what he was beginning to understand. Somebody, presumably the abductor, had come to Emily Black’s bed in the night in his stocking feet, seemingly opened the window, picked her up, and apparently left with her that way, through the window. Why did she not cry out?

‘Scarlet fever, you said, she still had a sore throat?’

‘Yes, it was still very sore; that’s why we were still keeping her in.’

That could explain why she did not call out, Yarrow thought, turning back to the window. Where were the abductor’s shoes, tied around his neck by the laces? Did any of the other children see him? One little girl had apparently said ‘doctor man.’

Was the abductor a doctor? If so, why go out through the window? Did anyone hear the window being raised? All these thoughts and others raced through his mind, more and more certain that Emily Black had not simply wandered off and got lost but had been taken in the night by a man in a white coat and carried out through the window.

Careful again not to disturb the stocking footprints of the assumed abductor, he leaned forward, stretched out his arms, and took his weight on his hands as he leaned against the sides of the window to look out onto the extensive grounds of the hospital behind the ward.

The original West Garside Hospital had been closer to the town centre, but it had been small and cramped with little room for expansion. As the town grew and the population increased in the 1880s, Alderman Walter Jesmond, a civic-minded landowner whose wife had died in the original cramped hospital, bequeathed three acres of land on the outskirts of town for a new hospital and left a substantial sum to start the building process. His three sons were not particularly pleased with their father’s bequest to the Hospital Trust, but there was little they could do about it.

The original hospital in town remained but now served as an annex dealing mainly with out-patients. It also housed a VD clinic, ear, nose, and throat specialists, and an administration section, while the new Jesmond bequeathed hospital had been extended on several occasions, including the Albert Doakes Children’s ward, from where Emily Black was missing.

The grounds behind the Children’s Ward sloped gently up towards a stand of trees that marked the edge of the property. There were no other buildings beyond this ward at the farthest reach of the hospital. The grounds were grass, recently cut, and Yarrow could see small mounds of hay where the gardener had not gathered up all the cuttings after mowing. A brick wall ran around the boundary edge, and he could see a double gate in the far corner, just where the wall turned back to run along the eastern periphery of the grounds.

A vehicle-wide gravel track ran down from the gate, curling around to the left of his vision to where he could see the rear walls of other hospital buildings and a row of sheds and covered parking spaces for ambulances. He surmised that the gate was a secondary access for ambulances in the event the main entrance on Selbourne Road was blocked for some reason or if traffic was too heavy.

Without turning his head, he called to the PC hovering by the doorway, ‘I want you to go and check if that gate over there can be opened. Is it unlocked? Go, quickly.’

‘Yes, sir,’ and Yarrow heard a clatter of boots receding as the copper sped down the corridor.

Away to the right ran Mitcham Street, and as Yarrow watched, a bus motored by. He followed it with his eyes as it ran from right to left across his vision, crawling slowly up the steepening hill, and he heard the crunch of gears as the driver downshifted.

His attention was drawn back as the copper he had dispatched to check on the secondary access gate came into view, half running, half in a fast-paced walk. He reached the boundary wall and gate but before trying the gate he had to bend over double to catch his breath.

‘Come on, come on, come on,’ Yarrow muttered. At last, the breathless policeman reached over and tried the gate, lifting the latch, pulling a handle inwards, and the left-hand gate swung open; swung open easily as if the hinges had been recently oiled. The copper turned and looked enquiringly at Yarrow, who signalled for him to stay put.

Kiltarn Road ran by the upper boundary, to all intents and purposes the outer limits of West Garside. There were a few large houses along Kiltarn Road, the homes of bankers and solicitors, and he could see a chimney smoking even though the day set fair to be fine and warm. Beyond the road lay the upper foothills of the Monksbane Hills; marching up to the heights of Larkspoint, Wilder Scout, and Harwent Hill. Yarrow could see one or two isolated farm buildings on the heights and the pale white dots of grazing sheep, the slopes neatly segmented into fields bounded by dry stone walls. A narrow spur crept out from the lower reaches, curling around to form a bowl on the eastern side, enclosing a wooded copse; Bolehill Copse. Wrapped inside the arms of the spur, the copse lay on private lands belonging to one of the upper farms, but a right of way footpath led alongside the copse as the trail meandered its way up to Wilder Scout. Many a young couple made their way into the copse to find a quiet spot for cuddling and kissing, and occasionally, fumbling sex. Married couples, not always married to each other, also used the copse for the consummation of their illicit affairs; climbing over the stile and along the footpath to find a well-screened area within the copse in which to have sex.

As he stared through the window, Yarrow felt a shiver of apprehension, that deep feral instinct of the experienced policeman. He knew, knew as a certainty, that whatever fate had befallen Emily Black had occurred there. In Bolehill Copse.

CHAPTER FIVE

HE HAD NOT MEANT FOR IT TO GO SO FAR.

HE HUNG HIS WHITE COAT UP IN THE WARDROBE, hiding it behind a mackintosh. He would have to wash it later, once his mother had gone out to work. Or perhaps he ought to get rid of it altogether? That would be safer. But perhaps not.

He had not meant for it to go so far, but when she started screaming!

CHAPTER SIX

‘WHERE IS SHE, EMILY, MY BABY?’

DEREK AND JENNY, EMILY BLACK’S DISTRAUGHT PARENTS, sat side by side on the settee, hands clasped together, wrapped together in tear-streaked misery and despair.

‘Where is she, where’s my baby?’ Jenny wailed again; a plea made at regular intervals between sobs. She continuously twists a tear-soaked handkerchief about her fingers, twisting clockwise and then anticlockwise about the fingers of her left hand.

Derek Black is a solid-looking man, thinks Suzanne Fillmore, as she perched on the edge of an armchair, pulled as close to the distressed couple as she could, as if her proximity might give comfort, but she knows that there is nothing she can do or say that can relieve their anxiety and despair.

Earlier, together with PCs Keith Balderstone and Alan Edgely, she had broken the news to the Blacks that their daughter had gone missing from the hospital. Then, whilst Suzanne sat with the parents, the other two coppers had carried out as discreet a search of the Black home and garden as possible. They searched the garden shed and all around the garden, looking for signs of recent digging in case the little girl had been buried; they looked in the attic, opening up two suitcases and a tea chest full of old books stored up there, under the beds, wardrobes, and cupboards, under the stairs, the coal cellar (thankfully, there was only a little coal in the cellar, so it was easy to ascertain that she had not been hidden beneath a pile of coal); they looked anywhere that a four-year-old girl, alive or dead, could have been hidden.

However, it seemed clear to Suzanne that the parents’ distress was so overwhelming it could not have been faked. Then Balderstone and Edgely left to go and join in the main search at the hospital, leaving Suzanne to comfort and reassure the Blacks that the police were doing everything possible to find their