Hennessey reclined in his chair. ‘Booze, the demon drink,’ he sighed and raised his eyebrows. ‘Seems a likely thread, sir, a likely common denominator,’ Carmen Pharoah sipped her tea. ‘Veronica Goodwin evidently had a significant problem, so did Angela Prebble and Mr Penta was angry about being abandoned in favour of AA . . . and alcohol may also explain the unidentified victim, a woman in her sixties, I think she was.’ ‘Yes, sixty-one plus or minus twelve months,’ Hennessey glanced at the ever expanding file, ‘just the sort of elderly down-and-out, an old soak who would not be missed, who had probably wandered into a different part of the country to avoid the shame of being as she was where she was known; came to York to be an unknown in a strange town so we have no record of her on our mis per files.’ He tapped the desk top. ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the sooner we get a National Missing Person’s Database the better, and I can’t see why it should not be set up in these high-tech information technology days, seems to be the easiest thing in the world if you ask me.
