Finding Alfie: A Sandringham Mystery

About the Author

Andrew Ogden had a career in broadcasting before forming his own media company. He has four children, a dog called Dave, and lives in Norfolk.

Dedication

To my late grandmother, who could reach back through dementia and tell vivid stories of her childhood.

Copyright Information ©

Andrew Ogden 2024

The right of Andrew Ogden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035871094 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035871100 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781035871117 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

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Acknowledgement

Thanks to David Stilgoe for the first draft proofreading and period rural

affairs corrections.

Chapter 1

Norfolk, Present Day

When Simon Jones was killed, no one saw it happen.

It’s not as if there weren’t plenty of people around.

Dersingham may not be the busiest village in Norfolk, but it’s not the quietest either, and while just after eight in the morning could not by any stretch be described as a ‘rush’ hour, it is, perhaps, fair to describe it as a ‘bustle’ hour.

Children were being ferried to school, builders’ vans were setting off to sites along the coast, postie was on his rounds and the handful of shops along the main drag were opening up for another day’s trade.

Simon Jones had just been to one such shop. The florist. And he wasn’t happy.

He’d described in some detail the bouquet he wanted and he’d wanted it bang on opening time. He didn’t want to wait while a still morning groggy Debbie Jones painstakingly added red rose to white chrysanthemum again and again until the masterpiece was complete. Or was it?

Bit of gyp and some fern to finish it off? she asked.

Did I put that in the email? said Simon Jones.

Missing the sarcasm by some distance, she checked the printed-off email on the counter in front of her.

No, she said.

Then put a bow on it and give it to me. Humour, as in good, and humour, as in ha ha ha, were not Simon Jones’ strong suits.

Still, it wouldn’t matter much longer.

Yes, Dersingham was bustling that morning. Pavement traffic was lighter than street traffic, but still, plenty of people were on their morning manoeuvres.

Funny that not one of them saw Simon Jones killed a minute or so after leaving the florist shop.

But there again, not many people have ever seen a car crash.

They think they have.

They’ll rush home and tell mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends, barmen, shopkeepers and strangers all about it.

Sometimes for weeks afterwards.

But, in truth, not many people have actually seen a car crash.

This is a problem for all sorts of people because, when there’s a car crash, it’s important to know—exactly—what really happened.

Blue police signs advertise for people who think they’ve seen a car crash.

Fatal accident here. Did you see it? Call this number.

And plenty of people will call that number. And they will talk at length about an accident which, in reality, they didn’t actually see.

No, a car crash isn’t just a single, final, metal-bending event. That’s the interesting bit. That’s the final scene. But there’s much, much more to a car crash than just that.

The police know all about these things. They need to establish car number 1, where it came from and where it was going. They need to know who was driving and who was on board. They need to know the make, the model, the speed and the state of repair.

Car number 2 leaves from a different point, usually, is probably differently sized and powered, maybe a different colour, although grey and shades of grey seem to make up an absurdly large proportion of cars these days.

Anyway, car number 2 is likely to be a different make and model. It must be very rare indeed for two cars of exactly the same make, model, age, repair and colour to crash into each other.

So the clear differences between car number 1 and car number 2 would, you’d think, make it much easier for those people who say they’ve seen a car crash to make those differential points. For the contrast in vehicles to make it plain to all those who claim to have seen the accident and to give precise and consistent accounts.

But, in reality, they don’t.

When the police number was called and those who saw the crash gave their accounts, car number 1, let’s call this Simon Jones’ car, could have been driving anywhere between 30 and 50 miles an hour, in a straight line or weaving on the road both pre and post-impact and so much more. There could have been brakes applied, or not. Car number 2 could have been across the white lines, or not. There was a swerve to avoid a big/small brown/black dog. Or cat. Or not.

Time, so much the constant dimension, so precise a measurement, bends hopelessly. It was anywhere between five and ten past the hour. For car number 1 to enter the crash scene took anywhere between 5 seconds and half a minute, and it was anywhere between a minute and three minutes before the first help arrived, in the shape of a man, or two men, who ran out of the Caffe Nero coffee shop, Sue Ryder shop, or from round a corner.

No, not many people have actually seen a car crash.

What they can say with much more accuracy is what they themselves were doing. Where they place themselves in this scene. What part, active or passive, did they play in this event?

They were walking, with the dog, to get the morning paper. They were coming back from a visit to the doctor’s, from checking on an elderly relative, looking over the shoulder of a delivery driver. They can identify themselves in the dramatis personae. But they can’t describe the scene with any real authority or accuracy. They are players of a part in a scene which has been improvised, not rehearsed.

Feelings, well, they are very real. They can say how they feel about it. It was terrifying. It was horrific. It was such a terrible shame. It was a great pity, wasn’t it, that car number 2 didn’t see what was coming the other way.

The actual event is a mirage but the emotions are real.

One person who did, actually, see the car crash was Dr Simon Jones.

Or rather Mr Simon Jones, consultant dermatologist at West Norfolk Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, or St Margaret’s as everyone still called it.

Mr Jones had left home that morning as he always did, at 0730, just after the sports news on the Today programme on the BBC. He got into his car, a Range Rover, diesel, 4-litre turbo, 5 years old, Westminster pack, Pennine Grey. He drove steadily from Westfield Farm House along the winding county lanes of Norfolk until Heacham where he pulled into the BP garage, filled up with diesel and bought a bottle of water.

Avoiding the tailbacks of traffic on the by-pass, he made his way via roundabouts and traffic lights through to Dersingham where he stopped at exactly opening time to pick up his bouquet and then pressed on down the main street and that’s where he saw the car crash.

Coming out of a side road, between the playground and the next line of little houses and occasional shops which ran like ribbons of brick and flint along both sides of the road, came a VW Golf, GTi, Tornado Red, just about maintained, 89,000 miles, not very quickly but possibly a little too wide.

That’s when Mr Simon Jones saw his car crash.

Mark Elwin didn’t see a car crash that day.

He’d just come downstairs from the flat over his photography shop, had picked up the mail and was contemplating the brown official-looking items with indifference.

No, Mark Elwin didn’t see a car crash that day, but he heard one. A very short howl of brakes, an even shorter thump and scrape, a woman’s scream, a child crying, a shout of call an ambulance.

Simon Jones saw the crash all right. But he saw nothing after that.

Mark Elwin heard the crash and looking at the clock on his shop wall registered the time as 0811. He heard the crash and noted the exact time that Simon Jones died. He heard the very moment that Ellen Jones became a widow at the age of just 38. He heard the exact moment when 6-year-old twins Sam and Gemma Jones became fatherless.

But he didn’t see the car crash that day. Apart from Simon Jones, no one did.

Chapter 2

Norfolk, Present Day

Mark Elwin looked at the scene unravelling on the road and the pavement directly in front of him.

After looking at the clock he picked up his Canon EOS 350 DSLR camera and started firing off shots through the shop window.

It wasn’t his best camera but it was his nearest, a relatively inexpensive workhorse already laid out ready to take shot after shot after shot of pug-faced boys and girls in all classes of St Who-really-cares infant school later that day.

After a quick digital blast through the window, he took the two strides to the door, stepped outside and started taking more pictures.

First, as wide as he could, both cars.

Then still on wide, action around the Tornado Red VW, where a man in, a brown jacket, about 30, was trying to wrench open the driver’s door.

Quickly, action around the Pennine Grey Range Rover, where a woman stood, small child by her side, her hands to her mouth, her pale blue eyes wide open registering something between horror and disgust. The date and time information embedded in the camera’s SD memory card showed that this picture was taken at 0812.

The next images captured the woman turning away from the car, head and shoulders down, protecting the child from seeing anything. More accurately, she was protecting the child from seeing anything more. 0813.

From wide to medium close-ups of short tyre scorch marks on the road behind the Range Rover, the damage to the front passenger side wing where evasive action had proved too little, too late. The V-shaped caving in of the passenger side wing and door of the VW shows it sharing the road, almost head-on.

0814 and here’s a shot of the man in the brown jacket taking a metal milk bottle holder produced, from who knows where, by an elderly woman in slippers and a house coat.

He smashes the window of the Tornado Red VW, reaches inside the car, releases the door and starts to pull a woman from the car.

Close-ups now, of her face, half screaming, half crying, her legs flopping around underneath her like a badly managed marionette, the man in the brown jacket carrying her, no dragging her towards the pavement. By now a second man stops being a spectator and joins the cast, chunky knit sweater, jeans, fashionable tearing at the knees and helps the woman sit down on the pavement edge. Still only 0814.

Three steps to one side and close-ups now of Mr Simon Jones, head deep in the billowing airbag, face very slightly turned to one side.

By 0816 Mark Elwin was two steps forward, very close up. Click whirr. One eye is visible. Click whirr. One eye open. Click whirr. Dead.

The man in the brown jacket pushes him hard.

Fuck off man, what are you doing taking pictures, and, finger out, pointing straight at Mark Elwin, he takes an aggressive step forwards.

He’s dead, nothing you can do. And the man in the brown jacket looks back and his face registers the truth of what he’d just been told.

Mark Elwin then retreated, backwards, six, eight steps, to the doorway of his shop. Sirens could now be heard, police from the east from Hunstanton, ambulances from the west, from the West Norfolk Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

He fired off a few more shots but only really from some residual professional instinct to complete the narrative. By now, bystanders numbered twenty people or more and the crowd was growing all the time. Budgen’s, ‘Your Local Supermarket’ was emptying and elderly shoppers with paniers on wheeled push frames joined at the back and asked veterans of the crowd what had happened.

Mechanics from AFC Motors wandered up the lane past the allotments to see what was going on, but not wanting to get too close they were perching up on tiptoes to see as much as they could, but from a distance.

The crowd was mostly quiet. Occasionally people turned to stranger-neighbours and whispered a hushed word or two.

The police and ambulance arrived, with noise and energy and shouting directions to each other and everyone on the road.

Most of those in the crowd under 70 years old were taking footage on their iPhones, Samsungs, or whatever brand they favoured this month.

There was a time, thought Mark Elwin, that his photographs, professional photographs, by a recognised freelance news photographer, would have fetched £50 from the King’s Lynn News.

There was a time, about the time when the baby was young there was no money, that the few remaining occasional freelance shifts for the local press brought in much-needed extra funds: a charity event featuring the great and good of the county; various Royals down for Christmas at Sandringham; the first day of the partridge shooting season; morning mists sneaking over the marshes at Titchwell. Easy money.

Now everyone was a freelance photographer. Mark watched as a couple of dozen phones were held aloft.

Thanks, iPhone, he said to himself and turned into the shop. It was time for another brew.

In the road, it was a matter of official process and procedure. Fire crews arrived but by then Mr Simon Jones had been pulled out, laid out, stretchered out and was being taken away at needlessly high speed to the accompanying sound of retreating sirens and flashing lights. There was no rush really.

Minutes of action turned into minutes of procedure, the tape was reeled out, official photographs were taken, the road closed in both directions, cars parked inside the cordon ushered out, diversions put in place, and names and addresses and mobile phone numbers taken of all those who stepped forwards to say that they had, definitely, seen the car crash.

Mark Elwin closed the shop door and left the sign on the door as Sorry, closed. There’d be no passing trade for a while. He called Trish, his assistant. There’d been an accident, he said, the road was closed. She couldn’t get to work and anyway, he’d closed the shop. She might as well just meet him at the school for the pug-faced kids photo session this afternoon. He’d bring the kit. Trish had already laid it out by the back door of the shop, ready.

By noon the recovery vehicles had been, wrecked cars winched into piggyback positions and taken away to the police car pound for further forensic tests, if required.

The road was open again, a fact relayed to the waiting public of West Norfolk and Wisbech by the local radio station playing at volume four from the back of the shop.

Only fragments of glass from the smashed VW and the indicator lights of the Range Rover remained in the gutters of the road. Litter was the only evidence that a life had ended there, that day.

Apart from on the pavements in both directions, at distances of two hundred and a hundred metres or so, police signs.

Fatal accident here. Did you see it? Call this number.

Mark Elwin hadn’t seen the accident. But he had got a couple of hundred images of what happened next.

They might be useful, he thought. His lightweight aluminium flight cases were packed and loaded with lights, screens, cameras, batteries and all the kit he needed to capture the images of the pug-faced children for adoring mums and dads, aunties and uncles, nans and grandads. The more the merrier at £5 a copy.

Before loading his car, he called the number.

So you saw the fatal accident today then did you, Sir?

No, he said.

Chapter 3

Norfolk, Present Day

Emma McMillan was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was 26 and the baby wasn’t quite two.

On the scale of ‘manageable’ to ‘life-altering’, she was relieved to be reassured it was down at the ‘manageable’ end.

Her husband left her a couple of weeks later, maybe three. It was a while ago but the emotional turmoil of the diagnosis, being abandoned and having to pull herself together for the sake of Daisy meant she had put away all of the swirling emotions of that time in her life. Locked them away and hadn’t let them out since.

She was now 36 and Daisy was 12.

These were better times. Daisy was a good girl and she was doing well at school. She had asked to join the after-school reading club and she loved playing football on Saturday mornings for the Docking Devils.

Mother and Daughter had their term time routine. Every day after dropping her off at school Emma drove the short distance to her favourite sandwich shop to select a baguette for her lunch before going on to Hunstanton and the offices of Scammell and Partners, Chartered Accountants and Tax Advisors.

She was the office assistant manager.

The job was ideal. The part-time hours allowed her to take and pick up Daisy from school, there were nice colleagues, everyone was in smart office suits, the kitchen had a decent coffee machine and the money was okay. There was even ‘working from home’ if there was childhood sickness in their little cottage. The money, a little help from the government and lots of help from her mum and dad and life was very much okay. Better times indeed.

The MS did turn out to be mercifully mild. She was occasionally a little unsteady walking and the numbness and tingling down her legs could drive her insane some days. Her blurred vision was helped by some new, rather chic she thought, glasses.

On the bad days, and there were bad days, she was just very, very, very tired.

The cannabis helped.

None of that psychedelic skunk stuff. No. Just a gentle little joint of old-fashioned California grass sourced from a nice Lithuanian chap in King’s Lynn and mixed with dried purple clover from a local health shop. Emma McMillan couldn’t stand smoking. Emma McMillan couldn’t stand rudeness, swearing, poor time keeping and clothes that weren’t ironed. She was, what her father called, quite proper.

But she did smoke cannabis.

She knew she shouldn’t really drive and at first, years ago, it did bother her, guilt every trip. But that was years and years ago. Now she had convinced herself it actually made her a better driver. No wobbly legs drove very carefully and always within the speed limit.

Oh, come on Mum! was the most common start to a car-based conversation with Daisy.

There’s a backseat driver in the making, Emma thought. She will make a husband very cross one day, and the thought made her smile. Always.

It’s not funny! Daisy would say with petulance which only hinted at the potential teenage anger years looming in the near future. We’re going to be late for school/the party/ballet/anything/everything.

The speed limit is 30. I’m doing 29, Emma said. Now 28. Back to 29. So I’m what you call, Daisy McMillan, a good driver.

It didn’t look that way today.

After dropping off Daisy at the school gates with all the other school-run mums, and they were all mums, she went to get lunch. Another day, same routine. Today she had selected a brie and cranberry baguette for lunch with a small pot of olives and a bottle of SmartWater. She got into her treasured VW Golf GTI and edged out onto the main road.

Mr Simon Jones must have been very surprised indeed to see the Tornado Red VW Golf GTI present itself immediately before him, but no one would ever really know.

Emma McMillan certainly did not see a car crash that day. It appeared out of nowhere. She was sneaking a quick look the other way when boom! And for her, it was lights out.

When her head cleared a couple of moments later, she was staring at the sky.

Why?

She was aware she was moving but couldn’t feel her feet on the ground, but that was not entirely unusual.

A man in a brown jacket said It’s all right love, you’ve been in a car accident. Are you all right?

No, she thought. I’ve been in a car accident.

And