The Marsh & Daughter Casebook

by Amy Myers

  ‘Will they?’ Georgia asked mildly. ‘Mike’s invited us down, has he?’

  ‘In fact, no. He was very firm about it.’

  ‘Then why were you beaming as I came in?’

  ‘Margaret had just informed me that Ted Mulworthy was born in Friday Street.’

  *

  Georgia was on the best of terms with Ted. It behoved everyone who was interested in eating well to be on good terms with the butcher – save for vegetarians, of course. Georgia, however, had moved a step beyond that stage, having helped Ted’s daughter Pat with her university modules. The timber-framed house in which Ted and his wife lived and worked had had a red-brick slaughterhouse behind it at one time, but this was now a ‘des res’ for Pat and her husband. Ted’s wife, Joan, played her part in the business, and Georgia had reason to be grateful for it. Her pies made wonderful instant suppers.

  ‘Morning, Georgia, what can I do for you?’ Ted was a gentle giant of a man, but nevertheless looked formidable, chopper in hand.

  She embarked on an innocent discussion of topside versus fore rib versus sirloin, since Luke was coming to lunch on Sunday. Once this had been settled, she turned to other matters. ‘Margaret mentioned you were from Friday Street.’ Her voice ended on a suitable note of enquiry, and the chopper paused in mid-air.

  ‘Long time since I lived there.’ Chopper laid carefully on board.

  ‘My father mentioned a barmaid had been murdered. A farmer’s daughter.’

  ‘Young Alice. I heard.’ He looked at her, his clipped tones daring her to say more.

  She decided to tread cautiously in this fencing match. Like most butchers in her experience, Ted usually took everything in his stride, but the Winters might be his best friends.

  ‘Do you know the Winters?’ she asked.

  ‘Everyone knows the Winters. Been in Friday Street for hundreds of years, built the place, some reckon – those that don’t claim to have built it themselves. Bill Winters died a year or two back. His wife Jane has the farm now, and Alice was their only child.’

  That made it even worse. Georgia was appalled. ‘What a great tragedy,’ she said sincerely, ‘not only for the Winters but for the whole village, since it’s such a small place.’ There were plenty of such small communities tucked away in Kent. Highways thundered past, leaving them slumbering. When generations of the same families had remained there undisturbed, however, such slumber could bring nightmares as well as sweetly pleasant dreams.

  Chopping resumed, with no comment.

  She persevered. ‘I gather they’ve arrested the young man who did it.’

  ‘If he did it.’ Harder chop.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  He turned round, chopper in hand this time, and his face red. ‘Nowadays you never know, do you? Take them in one day, free them the next, find them guilty, then give them a free pardon. Don’t know what they’re doing half the time.’

  ‘At least there’s no longer a gallows in the village. It’s not too late to find someone innocent.’ By the look on Ted’s face, Georgia knew she had to get off this topic quickly, and began to talk about an eighteenth-century murder by a girl lodging with her aunt. She was convicted of murdering the aunt, although she had no apparent motive, and calmly denied her guilt all the way to the scaffold. There were no Ludovic Kennedys to cry ‘Foul’ then, no investigative journalists to plead her cause.

  This didn’t fool Ted. ‘Why are you so interested in Alice Winters, Georgia? For one of them books of yours?’

  ‘We aren’t concerned with modern murders,’ she replied truthfully. Well, almost truthfully, barring a few ifs and buts. ‘That’s the police’s job.’

  ‘Keep away from Friday Street, Georgia. That’s my advice. Unlucky place and always has been. What’s more, Friday Street likes to keep itself to itself.’

  ‘Even if there’s been a miscarriage of justice?’ she asked, not knowing quite what made her persist, when even she agreed with the advisability of shutting up and scuttling away with her fore rib.

  ‘Friday Street has its own ways of dealing with that.’

  ‘Lynch law?’ she asked, startled.

  His face darkened. ‘No. The music.’

  ‘What music?’ Georgia was shaken. Ted seemed to have plucked out the core of her disquiet.

  ‘Don’t you go talking about it. I haven’t told you, see. It’s the music, the flute. Always heard in Friday Street when there’s been a miscarriage of justice. It sounded when Jake Baines was taken in, so I heard. And that’s twelve pounds twenty, if you please.’

  *

  ‘Superstition,’ Peter snorted.

  ‘Superstition has to spring from somewhere,’ she argued. Georgia knew he was as taken with the idea as she was, but someone had to argue for the other side. ‘Was any music heard?’

  ‘I doubt if it’s the kind of thing Mike would count as evidence.’ Peter must have caught sight of her face. ‘I’ll ask him, but don’t blame me if we get blasted out for damn fool questions.’

  Georgia doubted if Mike Gilroy had ever blasted anyone out. It wasn’t his style, which verged on the dogged and phlegmatic. It was Peter who specialized in blasting.

  She finished the proofs on his behalf, trying to ignore the nagging question in her mind as to what this music was. She longed to know if it was the music they’d heard at Christmas. It would explain the odd reaction in the pub. There had clearly been some special significance to it. When they’d politely asked what the tune was, they had been told it was a traditional village melody, and informed that the boy was a lazy bugger and should be giving a hand in the kitchen and not playing daft music.

  Could that have been Jake? She remembered the barmaid too, a fair-haired girl, with a pert lively face. Alice Winters? That pub must employ several girls to work as barmaids or waitresses, so she decided not to let this image of Alice take hold in her mind.

  When she next saw Peter, he had a very long face indeed. ‘Mike laughed his head off, did he?’ she asked sympathetically, somewhat guilty that she hadn’t rung him herself.

  ‘No, darling daughter, he did not. He said he had picked up a whisper of music during the investigation, but they didn’t reckon the playing of an old flute would stand up in court as proof of innocence. But he might be wrong, Mike added.’

  ‘Sarcasm will get you nowhere.’

  ‘Nor will chatting about folklore.’

  ‘It’s unlike you to take that line. What about our fingerprints from the past?’

  ‘There are more urgent matters to consider.’

  She had overlooked the gleam in Peter’s eye. He’d been holding back on her.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked sharply. ‘You think Jake Baines is innocent?’

  ‘I’ve no idea and it’s not me who’s holding back. It seems to have been your beloved butcher, Ted. Margaret was surprised Ted hadn’t mentioned it. If there’s a ghost in Friday Street, it would be a lot more modern than Lady Rosamund. I can’t think why on earth neither of us remembered it.’

  ‘What?’ Georgia cried, agog, when he paused.

  ‘There was another murder in Friday Street, well within living memory, and which caught more headlines than Lady Rosamund could have boasted, or even poor Alice. Perhaps because it was so famous a murder that one tends to forget where it happened in favour of whom it happened to. I’m amazed the national press hasn’t picked up on this Winters murder because of it, especially the tabloids. I suppose that’s the reason. They remember the names in the earlier case, but not the location, so no one thought of checking out Friday Street in the files or on the internet.’

  ‘Who was it?’ Georgia demanded again. ‘Or shall I go back to my trusty computer, which can be a lot quicker than you when telling a story?’

  ‘Speed is not my aim. Accuracy is. All right,’ Peter yielded. ‘It was in 1968. Ring any bells?’

  ‘No – yes – tell me.’

  ‘Sweet Fanny Adams. SFA or Sweet Fuck All to those who dared to speak the wo
rd in those days.’

  ‘Of course,’ Georgia breathed. How could she have forgotten? Sweet Fanny Adams was the name of a famous and controversial sixties pop group, or rather duo. Their songs were as wild as their image – ‘Down among the Dead Men’, ‘Poison Green’, ‘Allan Water’ – many of them based on old folk melodies with twisted new lyrics and rhythms. ‘Adam Jones and Fanny – what was her name?’

  ‘Star. Frances Gibb was her real name, in fact. Fanny was stabbed and Adam Jones found guilty of her murder.’

  ‘And the murder was in Friday Street?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘It was.’

  She cast her mind back. ‘Adam Jones served a life sentence, came out and drowned himself on release, didn’t he? He stabbed her after a gig.’

  ‘A gig at Friday Street.’

  ‘How could a village that small afford a gig for a duo as famous as that?’

  ‘Fanny was born there. She left for ever in 1961, but relented and came back this once, only to be murdered for her pains.’

  ‘By Adam Jones.’

  ‘So the court found.’

  A pause, then Georgia voiced what they must both be thinking. ‘I wonder if that music was heard then?’

  Chapter Two

  Born in Friday Street. For some reason Peter’s casual words haunted Georgia. She felt she was back in the Montash Arms, facing if not hostility then protective clannishness. But over what? And what was there about life in Friday Street that had turned plain Frances Gibb into Fanny Star? She suspected Peter was thinking along much the same lines, for work on their previously planned new book slowed, and there were unexplained flurries of activity on the internet, long telephone calls, and packets of documents arriving by post. All normal, she supposed, but not all at one time. Finally she could stand it no longer. One of them had to speak and it clearly wasn’t going to be Peter.

  ‘Coincidence, do you think?’ she asked cautiously, when Peter put the phone down hurriedly as she entered their office.

  Peter was good at bluffing. ‘Expand, if you please.’

  ‘Coincidence that apparently brought the relationship between Fanny and Adam to such a point that it resulted in his murdering her in the village where she’d been born. Where all her relatives and erstwhile friends would still have been living.’

  ‘Could be.’ Peter was making her work for it, damn him.

  ‘Crime passionel? Were Fanny and Adam more than working partners? They lived together, didn’t they?’

  ‘Convenience.’

  ‘Come off it. She was twenty-four and he was twenty-six.’ Georgia had been doing research of her own.

  ‘Devoted to their art.’

  ‘Quit stalling, Peter. You’re hooked on this case, aren’t you? There’s not nearly enough to go on yet, and you know it.’

  ‘Very well. I confess. I looked at The Times reports on the microfiche, then sent for copies of Crim One files on the case from National Archives. Just to have a look,’ he added plaintively.

  ‘What did you order?’ she asked, intrigued rather than annoyed.

  ‘Only witness statements.’ He looked glum. ‘I couldn’t track down any complete transcript of the trial, either shorthand or recorded. If there’d been an appeal I might have been lucky. I tried all the court transcript services in the hope of finding one still tucked away, but no joy. Too far back.’

  ‘So tell me what you do have,’ she commanded. They might as well chew this over, if only as a means of dismissing the Fanny Star case once and for all as a Marsh & Daughter investigation.

  Peter wasn’t going to let her get away with it so easily. He sighed heavily. ‘I’m stifled in here. It’s too hot. Let’s go somewhere where I can clear my mind.’

  ‘Not to Friday Street,’ she bargained.

  Until they at least partly understood the facts of a case from printed sources of research, it was a mistake to visit the place where it had happened, where local reactions and atmosphere might sway them one way or another. She would rein Peter in (or sometimes vice versa) until they reached that point, however much she might be interested herself. Particularly when, as in this case, there might be libel issues to consider, as Fanny’s contemporaries would still be reasonably hale and hearty.

  ‘Sea air?’ she suggested. ‘Whitstable?’

  ‘No point gazing out to sea when the problem lies locked in an inland village.’

  ‘How about the Devil’s Kneading Trough?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  Being a weekday, this popular spot on the Wye Downs, north-east of Ashford, was not crowded. There were only two or three other vehicles in the car park and no one to be seen on the long stretch of grass overlooking the magnificent hillside and the view beyond it, over to the Weald of Kent. Beneath them to the right were the gently curving green folds that gave the Kneading Trough its name.

  ‘Why the Devil’s?’ Georgia wondered aloud.

  ‘Where there’s a devil, you’ll find a saint,’ Peter replied, as he wheeled his chair into his favourite spot above it.

  ‘In Wye church?’ Georgia asked.

  ‘No. Interesting county, Kent,’ Peter said. ‘For centuries different civilizations have tramped all over it – the twentieth century distinguished itself by tearing it all up for roads and railways and what have you – and yet it’s still down there. Look at that view. Nature wins, okay? Devils and saints come and go, but Kent stays. And no, the saint isn’t that of Wye church. There’s a holy well over there somewhere,’ he pointed to beyond the Kneading Trough, ‘dedicated to St Eustace. It used to have healing powers, but today people prefer the surgery. And over there –’ his finger swivelled to the left – ‘the surviving place names suggest a prehistoric settlement with holy ground of its own, which in turn probably made them considered devils later. Which,’ he added, obviously seeing Georgia’s eye upon him, ‘brings us back to Friday Street.’

  ‘I don’t see how. You’re looking in the wrong direction. It’s behind us.’

  ‘The right direction. What we sensed there at Christmas was what we’re seeing here. The present as a product of the past. However much one generation tries to obliterate it, it only succeeds in adding another layer, both physically and mentally. As in Friday Street, I suspect.’

  ‘It would be a mental archaeological dig for us, then,’ Georgia said.

  ‘Exactly. At the moment we have—’

  ‘Sweet Fanny Adams,’ Georgia supplied helpfully.

  ‘And plenty more layers further down too. A mere thirty-odd years couldn’t have produced what we ran into at Christmas.’

  ‘So, back to Frances Gibb,’ Georgia said firmly.

  Peter grinned companionably. ‘Have it your way. Let’s talk shop. She left Friday Street in 1961 when she was seventeen to find fame and fortune, or so she claims in a magazine article.’

  ‘The year Epstein discovered the Beatles.’

  ‘According to the same article, our Fanny had heard the Beatles play in Hamburg before that, and was already convinced that they were the future. Amazing what hindsight can remember.’

  ‘Not to mention sheer invention. She could only have been sixteen then, if that, and Hamburg would have been an odd choice for a school trip in those days. Perhaps she had adventurous family holidays.’

  ‘Her background doesn’t sound that adventurous. Mother Doreen Gibb, father Ronald Gibb, ex-navy turned village carpenter.’

  ‘To want to be a pop star she must already have had some musical experience. What pushed her into leaving Friday Street for the big unknown world outside?’

  ‘You wouldn’t remember,’ Peter said, to her annoyance. Georgia hadn’t been born till the 1960s were over. ‘The glorious sixties and the great revolution in music didn’t just begin with a clap of thunder as Epstein walked into the Liverpool Cavern and heard the Beatles. By 1960, revolution was not only stirring, but erupting. Elvis might be king, but in the UK Tommy Steele was rivalling Bill Haley and the Comets on the rock and roll scene, and t
he fifties’ ballad singers had vanished. Lonnie Donegan had reinvented skiffle and folk music with his acoustic guitar, and every young rebel in Britain was already intent on starting his own rock band. Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” could well have inspired young Fanny to head for London’s bright lights.’

  ‘Is that where she went?’

  ‘Not known. She took her time turning into the wild thing she was by 1968, when she was killed. Her first single wasn’t released until 1965. It was a single, but then she burst upon the world in partnership with Adam, initially as Fanny and Adam and then, as the revolution really exploded, as Sweet Fanny Adams.’

  ‘So what’s known about her early life?’

  ‘Lots of stories, not many facts. Received opinion is that she must have had a hard struggle at first, then probably joined a group, got into LSD, and finally emerged as Fanny Star.’

  In the two weeks since Friday Street had re-entered their lives, Georgia had found a video with a clip of Sweet Fanny Adams, and had played it several times, struck by Fanny’s vitality, which came over as vividly as though she were still in the charts. A slight girl, not tall, but full of an energy that even on film seemed to radiate around her. The clip was black and white, but she’d found another shorter clip in colour, which had shown the full effect of the mop of wild ginger hair and the glittering green eyes. Adam was the calmer one, the dreamer of the two. He was not much taller than she was, and his long pleasant face contrasted strikingly with her sharp, freckled features. If either of them were to be a murderer, Georgia’s money would have been on Fanny, not Adam. So what had turned him into one?

  ‘You lived through the 1960s, Peter. You would have been . . .’ Georgia calculated. ‘Twenty-two when Fanny died and—’ She broke off, realizing where she was heading. Dangerous ground, to be avoided at all costs.

  ‘Courting your mother.’ Peter finished her sentence for her. ‘I was a little past teenage rapture over pop music, but I suppose I was affected by the general mood of freedom.’

  ‘The spirit of the times?’