The man who laid a ghost to rest

This the first fiction short story I wrote back in January 2011. It was about the second ever WEA Beeston writing class I attended and we were given a sheet of paper telling us that York was 'the ghost capital of England' and our homework was to invent our own ghost. This was my contribution, about the 4th version because every time I read it I change something, but not this time!  I hope you enjoy.

The man who laid a ghost to rest

by Robert Howard

List of  characters (in order)

Bert Malton Policeman.

Detective A colleague.

Geoffrey Monroe The dead man.

Issy Bert’s wife.

Eileen O’Hara Pub landlady.

Kevin O’Hara Pub landlord.

Jenny Campbell Geoffrey Monroe’s sister.

Jock Campbell Jenny’s husband.

A death

On 3 January 1945, a young 22 year old police constable, Bert Malton, was patrolling his usual patch in the centre of York when he heard a scream, then shouting, coming from the direction of Pavement, a narrow cobbled street of ale houses and yards. After the war was over, it would be demolished for sure.

He ran towards the commotion and pushed his way through the gathering crowd, smaller than it would have been if The Golden Fleece and other nearby ale houses with even more dubious reputations had been open. He was glad that it was four o’clock, as he made a mental note of the time. What he saw wasn’t a pretty sight. It was a young airman, about twenty he guessed, lying contorted on the cobbled street. His neck was broken and his temple crushed.

Then his own eyes followed those of some in the crowd to where two faces were peering from a window two floors above him. They looked startled and when they saw him, they took their heads in, but Malton had seen enough to recognise them as the landlord and landlady of The Golden Fleece. Even though he had only been a beat bobby for six months, he had been to the inn enough times to deal with minor disturbances and drunks to know who they were.

For a few seconds, no more, blood had flowed from the injuries, but soon stopped and was already congealing around the airman’s face. He took off his cape and placed it over the top part of the body, then blew his whistle as hard as he could and asked a young lad to run to the police station on Eastgate for assistance.

PC Malton raised himself and at six foot four inches with his helmet stood over the crowd of onlookers. ‘There is nothing to see. I would like anyone who saw what happened to stay so that I can write down names and addresses. We will need to take witness statements later.’ Before he had even finished, the crowd was melting away as if it had never existed. Three people remained.

By the time a detective colleague arrived it was snowing and getting heavier by the minute. What late-afternoon light there had been, had all but gone and, without street lighting, there was little the detective could do, except ask the three witnesses to accompany him back to the Central Police Station. In the distance they could hear the bell of an ambulance. ‘It’ll be here in a minute Constable. Can you make sure that the body gets taken to the City Hospital and not the Morgue — there will have to be an examination.’ Then he added ‘Can you use a camera? We’re a bit shorthanded at the moment. There’s only me and I can’t do everything. I’d like you to take some pictures of the body before it’s moved and then go and take pictures of the room and window he fell from. Can you do that?’ 

‘Yes sir.’

Malton bent down and went through the pockets of the young airman’s uniform, the insignias of which indicated that he was a gunner with a Royal Canadian Air Force bomber squadron, which immediately suggested to Malton that the young airman was based at Pocklington, a few miles to the east of the city. From one of the airman’s pockets he pulled one pound, two shillings and thruppence in cash and a paybook, bearing the name Geoffrey Monroe. In the top pocket of the airman’s tunic jacket he found a photograph of what appeared to be a family group standing at a gate in front of a weatherboard house. They had their arms around one another and were all leaning in towards the young man at the centre of the picture, as if the person taking the photograph was telling them ‘Closer, closer, that’s it, hold it, great. Now, one more just in case.’ For a moment Malton was filled with a deep sadness for the people in the picture, who he didn’t know. It seemed like an eternity and a hundred thoughts rushed through his mind, but there was work to do.

The detective had been given Malton an upright Rolex camera, with a viewing hood and a lens you could lengthen and shorten, plus two rolls of film. Luckily for him, the young constable owned a cheaper version of the same camera and had, before the war, developed his own pictures in the bathroom at home. He also knew that he could take no more than thirty-two photographs, thirty-three if he was lucky, but he wasn’t going to take the chance. He placed a film in the camera, removed his cape from the body and took his first photograph. He also made notes of what he saw.

Then his colleague was back by his side. ‘Clean forgot about the bloody O’Haras. When you’ve finished, bring them back to the station.’ It wasn’t a question. It was an order.

‘Yes sir’ Malton said for a second time.

He took the last of eight photographs just as the ambulance arrived and again covered the top part of the body with his cape. One of the women who climbed out was his wife, Issy. It was the last thing he was expecting. ‘Hello Love, what do we have here?’ she asked.

With a nod to her colleague, Liz, who he knew as well, he turned back towards his wife, then they all looked down together at the body. ‘Fell from a window up there and broke his neck, as well as fracturing his temple. He was dead by the time I arrived. I’ve been left taking photographs, then I’ve got to go inside.’

‘Off you go then. We’ll take him to the City. Do you have a name?’

‘Yes, Geoffrey Monroe according to the paybook he had on him, Born 2 January 1925. Yesterday was his birthday. No address though, but I’d guess he’s from Pocklington, which is where the Canadian bombers are.’

With that, Issy stood on tiptoe and gave Bert a peck on his right cheek and said ‘See you later then’ and handed him his cape before turning to remove a stretcher from the ambulance. He then went into The Golden Fleece, which was actually closed. It was still only quarter to five, so fifteen minutes yet, but the door to the public bar was open and inside he found Eileen and Kevin O’Hara sitting at the bar, each with a small glass. They looked as if they were in a state of shock. Malton also saw that Mrs O’Hara had a split lip, a bruised cheek and a right-eye which was beginning to blacken up nicely.

‘How did that happen Mrs O’Hara?’

‘I fell over constable. You should know better than to ask.’

‘Right. I’m going upstairs now to take some pictures of the window the airman fell from. Can one of you show me the way, then come back down here, where I want both of you to wait for me because I have been told to accompany you both to the Central Police Station, so that you can make statements.’

‘Bloody hell. You can’t do this to us. I’ve got guests to look after and we’re about to open’ said Mrs O’Hara in a voice filled with weary resignation. 

‘Not this evening. Your staff will have to cover for you.’ He wanted to ask them questions. One of the potential witnesses in the street claimed that just before the body fell, they heard a man bellow ‘I’ll have you for this you bloody cow’ and, looking at Mrs O’Hara, he guessed that the man had been O’Hara.

He spent an hour in the bedroom and took what photographs he could. The door had been kicked in, so it couldn’t be locked. He looked at the bed linen, found a clean pillow case in a cupboard on the landing and placed the top and bottom sheets inside. He made notes as well. So many in fact that he wrote the last few pages on some Golden Fleece stationery he found in the room. There was no sign that the airman, or anyone else, was staying in the room.

By the time he went to collect the O’Haras, all three bars were well on the way to being full. It was going to be a busy night and the public bar, where he found Mr O’Hara, already had a pleasant fug — far better than the lingering smell of stale tobacco which had filled the room earlier. In front of his regulars Kevin O’Hara put on a show of bravado, which continued until Malton showed him a pair of handcuffs. 

Mrs O’Hara was in the kitchen supervising the evening meal for their overnight guests and had a right shiner, which she had made no attempt to disguise with make-up. Her normal haunt was the lounge bar, where she flirted with young servicemen and revealed as much of her bosoms as she could without breaking the law. Most came to see if they could get lucky. One usually did, but never twice.

According to the regulars, and it was a story he heard a good few times during his first few months as a rookie copper patrolling Pavement and other York city centre streets, Kevin O’Hara was usually legless by the time Eileen was getting laid, too drunk to care, but when he wasn’t, it was mayhem and Eileen locked and barred their bedroom door until he cooled down because he always forgave her.

At the station Malton’s colleague in CID was still on his own and asked him to take statements from the O’Haras, which he did, then he let them go. Eileen admitted having sex with the young airman and her husband to hitting her, even though she continued to insist that she had fallen over. As for Geoff Monroe, they both said that he climbed out the window and the next thing they heard was screaming and shouting in the street below — which is how their faces came to be at the window when PC Malton looked up.

Bert Malton wrote up his notes and arranged for the two films to be printed, then handed his file to his older detective colleague, who was impressed by what he saw and read. So much so that when Bert signed on the next day, he found that overnight he had been transferred to CID as a ‘Trainee Scene of Crime Officer.’ He wouldn’t be a detective, but he would attend crime scenes, take photographs and record all that he saw. He didn’t know it at the time, but that would be his job for the next thirty-two years, until he retired in 1977, aged fifty-five.

The ghost years

Geoff Monroe’s death did not make the front page of any York newspaper and no mention at all further afield. It was wartime and thousands of young men were dying every day, but the gossip-mongers were hard at work overnight and throughout the next day and within forty-eight hours the word on the street was that Kevin O’Hara had violently pushed the young airman out of the second floor window, then beaten Eileen O’Hara half to death.

Somehow, the case stayed on young PC Malton’s desk. He was left to establish that the airman was Canadian and based at Pocklington. A Royal Canadian Air Force Wing Commander came to the police station and took him to the airfield, where he was allowed to speak with some of Monroe’s fellow airmen, two of whom were with him on the day he ‘got lucky’ with Eileen O’Hara. They left him to it and moved onto another ale house. Monroe was a ‘regular guy’, obviously well liked by those around him, but he was gone. End of story. As one of the airmen said, ‘Far better to go after a fuck than trapped in a burning plane.’ Malton winced and tugged, involuntarily, at the cuff of his right sleeve. No one noticed, but why should they? He was wearing a glove.

On the fourth day of the investigation an inquest was opened by the York Coroner’s Office and formally adjourned. It took all of two minutes. It was also the day Kevin O’Hara went missing. One of the regulars came in the Central Police Station and told Bert, who had been the beat bobby after all, that he hadn’t seen O’Hara for two days and that Eileen was still hiding away. His detective colleague asked him to check the story out and, sure enough, he had disappeared. Eileen claimed that she had no idea where he had gone, so she was called into the police station again and asked more questions, but she stuck to her story. When the inquest was reopened two months later, the Coroner recorded an ‘open verdict’ and the case was shelved. York CID had more important things to do and PC Bert Malton was too busy becoming the city’s finest scene of crime officer to think much more about it, though, for some reason, he kept the case files in the office with him.

Within weeks of the young airman’s death, the first sightings of his ghost in Pavement, the cobbled street where he died, were being reported. Next came reports that the ghost of an airman had been seen in the, by now, infamous bedroom and that he stood over Eileen and her young lovers watching, before turning and disappearing through the window, regardless of whether it was open or closed. All these stories did was fuel the belief that Monroe had been killed by O’Hara, who then beat up his wife and would have killed her too if some of the regulars had not intervened. And so the story grew.

PC Bert Malton heard many of these stories, which he logged. Others he read in the local press. He assiduously added all the information he collected to what was still an open case, because his CID colleagues, in the absence of Kevin O’Hara, were unwillingly to rule out murder. What struck Malton as odd was that some of the accounts of Monroe’s ghost were so detailed that it was like reading his own notes. These he began to follow up, usually in his own time, as none of his colleagues in York City Police took the ghost sightings seriously.

Eileen O’Hara continued to run The Golden Fleece and became a minor celebrity of sorts, with young men queuing up for her attention. She kept herself attractive and looked a good ten years younger than she was and, as he got older, Malton liked her more, even fancied her. Like many men who knew her, he wanted to know what it was that kept the young men coming. What did she have that his own wife Issy didn’t have? He never found out.

As post-war York began to recover, the visitors came. First a few, then as more money was spent by the City Council and local businesses, the day-trippers became weekenders and tourists from overseas, and journalists began compiling guidebooks and soon there were heritage walks, some of which were sold as ‘ghost walks.’ Then someone in the city’s Tourism Office had the wonderful idea of selling York as the ‘Ghost Capital of England’ and among the pantheon of York’s ghosts was poor Geoffrey Monroe. Nameless of course, he was marketed as The Golden Fleece’s ‘Drunken Airman (who) fell from an upstairs window in the building and broke his neck on the pavement below, since when he has haunted the street and the bedroom from which he fell.’

In fact, by the time York made itself the ghost capital of England, Eileen O’Hara was more businesswoman and hotelier than a ‘landlady’ and had invented another hotel ghost: a beautiful eighteenth century courtesan who went from bedroom to bedroom in The Golden Fleece looking for her lover and when she found someone who looked like him she stayed the night with them instead. Some guests claimed that they heard the airman and courtesan making mad passionate love in the bedroom next to them, but it was much more likely to have been Eileen with one of her young beaus.

Solving the case

After ten years Bert Malton was the city’s Senior Scene of Crime Officer, but still only a police constable, albeit on a rate of pay a new inspector would be happy to receive. He was good at his job and whilst he went about his work, he was still keeping track of all the airman ghost stories and sightings he heard. In the summer of 1966 during the football world cup, crime in York dropped dramatically and Malton found that he had time on his hands, so he got out Geoffrey Monroe’s still open case file, with all his additional notes, and read through them again. This time, what jumped out was the fact that four of those who reported seeing the young airman gave descriptions which more than mirrored his own notes, nor could not have got the descriptions they gave from the record of the Inquest. The witnesses also spoke of the airman being suspended, as if he was hanging from the window before falling. ‘Why was this?’ Malton asked himself.

All the other accounts only saw the airman on the ground or in the bedroom and none gave any details as to the extent of his injuries. A good few had been drinking beforehand. Others were just seeking attention. As far as he was concerned, all these could be dismissed, but the four he had in front of him were different. No witness at the scene on 3 January 1945 was looking up. They had no reason to. The first they knew was when the airman’s body crashed onto the cobbled street beside them.

Malton then looked at the photographs he had taken and those taken later by the assistant to the pathologist who did the autopsy. The latter were much better than his own pictures. They had been taken in a well-lit room by a better camera with a flashgun, but this was 1966 and printing techniques had progressed beyond all recognition and he still had the negatives, so he sent them off to what was by now the a joint city and county forensics laboratory to see if they could produce better photographs than those his colleagues could manage in 1945. Within twenty-four hours he was looking at amazingly sharp images which revealed far more detail than even he could remember, but by this time it was one of the autopsy photographs which had caught his attention.  There, around Monroe’s right ankle was a clear ligature mark, but there was no similar mark on his left ankle, so he had not been tied up, perhaps by Eileen O’Hara if they had been playing sex games. At the time such things were  beyond the imagination of Malton and his colleagues — what they didn’t know about they couldn’t ask about — nor did the pathologist comment on the ligature mark. Afterall, it could still just be the mark of an airman’s flying boot buckle, but he didn’t think so. It wasn’t wide enough.

As Malton looked at the 1966 versions of the photographs he had taken in 1945, he was drawn to one of the photographs of the bedroom. It was if another ghost of sorts was revealing itself. No one saw it all those years ago, but it was there just the same. How many other ghosts still lurked in rooms like this he wondered to himself. There was the blackout curtain drawn back, so that daylight could enter the room, and on the floor lay a length of dark cord. It went right across the window opening. It was a common enough scene in 1945, using a cord to hold curtains open, but in this case the photographic evidence, when combined with the four descriptions of the apparition / ghost which had caught his attention, offered Malton a really tangible explanation of what had happened:

After Kevin O’Hara had kicked in the bedroom door his attention was firmly on Eileen — hence his shouting ‘I’ll have you for this you bloody cow’ and then hitting her across the face. More than once. He wasn’t interested in the young airman, not that Geoffrey Monroe knew that. All he saw was this bull of man beating the living daylights out of his wife, killing her for all he knew and he would be next, unless he got out of the bedroom fast. The door was blocked by O’Hara, so there was only one way to go — the window, then he probably intended to clamber out and onto an adjacent flat roof, but his right foot got caught in the cord, part of which was holding the blackout curtain back. He stumbled, lost his balance and fell head first out of the window. For a few seconds the cord held him suspended in mid-air, looking down, too petrified to scream or shout, then, because of his weight the cord unravelled and the young airman fell to his death.

As the O’Haras had said in their statements at the time, they only knew what had happened when they heard screaming and shouting coming up from the street — which is why when the witnesses at the time did look up they saw the faces of Kevin and Eileen O’Hara.

The next day England won the World Cup, but PC Bert Malton was on a high of his own for a very different reason. He was now 44, but inside he felt like the young 22 year old police constable he had been in 1945. It was if he was solving the case on the day it happened. As far as Malton was concerned he had a more than reasonable explanation of what had happened on the 3 January 1945 without, officially, mentioning the ‘evidence’ of the four witnesses from years after the event, all of whom told him that they had seen Geoffrey Monroe fall time and time again over the years which followed in the form of a recurring dream. From talking to them face-to-face he was in no doubt that they believed what they saw. Malton did not believe in apparitions or ghosts for one moment. He would write up his findings and present a preliminary report to his more senior colleagues in York Police and make an appointment to see Eileen O’Hara. He told her about his conclusions and what he was doing, and if she knew where Kevin O’Hara was, she could tell him that he was in the clear, but it would be a few weeks before it became official and in the public domain. He also needed to speak to Monroe’s family in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

It had been twenty-one years since Kevin O’Hara had gone to ground and Eileen volunteered ‘off the record’ that Kevin was alive and well, living in the Irish Republic under an assumed name. He had feared that, as an Irishman, he wouldn’t get a fair trial in England if charged with the murder and, given all the gossip at the time, it seemed likely. Privately Malton had to agree and did not tell his colleagues what Eileen had told him. Only Issy ever knew.

Once his colleagues had accepted his findings, the Chief Constable of York City Police got permission from the Chairman of the City Council’s Watch Committee (then the name of the committee responsible for policing in the city) for PC Bert Malton to go and see Geoffrey Monroe’s family in Nova Scotia and as his plane landed at Halifax Airport, the first snow of the winter was falling and it reminded him of that day at the beginning of 1945 when the journey he was making really begun, or so it seemed to him. He was met by a Canadian Mountie in full dress uniform and taken to his hotel, where he had a good night’s sleep, before he was collected the next morning by a middle-aged couple, Jenny Campbell and her husband Jock. She was Monroe’s sister and told him that all the family was waiting for him. He was glad that Monroe’s parents were still alive and he recognised their small weatherboard home immediately.  They all listened politely as he presented his findings and gave them a copy of his official report, which they accepted, whilst thanking him continuously for finding out what had happened the day Geoffrey died. He was introduced to a teenage boy, aged sixteen, who had been named Geoff after the uncle he never knew. He then had his photograph taken with the Monroe family standing in front of the same gate, with him in the centre — just like Geoff had been all those years ago before he left home to fight in a war not of his making. He hoped they did not notice his tears.

The press conference to announce that the Geoffrey Monroe case was closed and that his death had been a tragic accident took place on 3 January 1967 — the 22nd anniversary of Geoff Monroe’s death. Had he lived, he would have been forty-two the day before. His parents, both in their late-sixties, and his sister Jenny were present and she spoke, with a breaking voice, of what the visit to York, as the guests of the City Council, meant to them and how the dedication of PC Bert Malton was something her family would remember and treasure for ever. They had also been to see Geoff’s grave in the churchyard of Pocklington’s All Saints Parish Church, where he had been laid to rest on 23 January 1945. As she explained to her audience, it was a journey beyond the means of ‘fishing folk’ like themselves and she thanked the Canadian Veterans‘ Association and York City Council for their help in making their visit possible. They would go home with mixed feelings; sad that they were leaving Geoff behind, even though he was resting in peace with his wartime comrades, but happy they knew the truth. For everyone, it was a very emotional day.

Sitting at the back of the room, invited by Bert, were four people, all nameless onlookers who had all seen something no one else did. They had made him ask questions, he would otherwise not have known to ask. Finally, there was his colleague from Forensics who had taken his original negatives and revealed things he could not see at the time. His tenacity had been rewarded and he felt good about himself. Everyone should feel that once in a while.