His family had not sold the ancestral family home. Rather, because of the growing size of their extended family, which included the wives and husband of his father’s two younger brothers and sister and their respective children as they came along, his father had accepted what he hoped would be a temporary transfer to Mid-Yorkshire CID.
The transfer was due to the nature of a protracted and numbingly frustrating case of which his father, the Chief Inspector, was in charge. Since the main body of the crime seemed to have taken place in Mid-Yorkshire, and since the Chief Inspector had been hard at it since the very beginning and understood the implications and intricacies of it like no other living human being, he had been offered the transfer to alleviate the strain on his home life. With grim reluctance, unhappy about being uprooted despite the overcrowded situation at home, he had consulted with his wife and children and the decision was made.
Not surprisingly the children had taken the move in stride. No doubt due to their mother’s influence, they were calm and easy-going for the most part, the sort of kids that made friends easily and were soon in charge of whatever they put their minds to: sports, in the boys’ case, and fashion in the girls’. In both instances glitz and glory were the least things on the Chief Inspector’s childrens’ minds. To his lasting (but uncertain) relief his kids’ interests were purely mercenary: commerce for the his oldest son and fashion merchandising for the girls; once more due, there could be no doubt, to their mother’s canny influence.