Striking Murder

by AJ Wright

  Still, the mind is a resilient and determined citadel, and gradually the shadows began to fade, the horrors of the night grew fewer and fewer. She sighed as the better memories came back, of conversations, of nights of passion, of her pregnancy and the scream of a fragile baby girl whose life had hung in the balance for weeks.

  And now Molly, that fragile baby girl, was hale and strong, her arms curled around her impish brother, and tonight she had come home with something close to a smile on her face for the first time in days.

  It’s strange, death. It changes so many things, and what seemed inevitable and cast in stone had now drifted into the air like a dandelion clock blown to the four winds.

  So, as her eyes grew heavy, Bridie allowed herself the rare luxury of a smile. If Father Higgins had been there, he’d have said she was doing it all over again: yearning for escape, yearning for peace. Only this time, she told herself with a somnolent sigh, there was no Seamus any more to turn wish into reality.

  But what had happened last Saturday night had changed things, hadn’t it? For her and for her daughter.

  She saw the dull white of the fog against her window, and the frosted swirls of ice on the glass that reminded her of madness. Then she slept.

  It was a curious thing that a thief’s breath brought him back to consciousness.

  Thinking that a barge stranded in the canal ice might yield something of interest, a wizened old felon known locally as Rat-Yed (on account of his habit of biting off the heads of live rats for an appreciative and suitably drunken audience) had crept from his lodging house in the hour before dawn and made his way to the barge. Although the fog had largely vanished, there was still a thick layer of mist clinging to the canal bank, and he had to step carefully to avoid dropping onto the ice below.

  Unfortunately, the boat contained nothing more than scattered lumps of cannel coal, too few even to gather together and sell for fuel. As he walked back in a cold and miserable mood, he saw what at first he thought was a pair of boots sticking out of the communal lavatory at the end of an entry near Caroline Street. His immediate instinct being to run off with them, he was in the process of simply lifting them and running when he dropped them. They were far too heavy for empty boots.

  On closer inspection he saw that the boots had feet inside them. On closer inspection still, he saw whom the feet belonged to.

  ‘Bloody ’ell! Micky Brennan!’

  The proximity of his face to Brennan’s had the wondrous effect normally associated with smelling salts. The prostrate detective regained consciousness momentarily with a fit of coughing and retching, and within an hour, he was lying in Wigan Infirmary, wrapped warmly in a thick layer of blankets to raise his temperature and ward off the cold that had nearly killed him. Ellen and Barry had stayed with him, Barry unable to reconcile the image of his father as a bold and daring knight with the bruised and battered figure lying on the bed before him.

  Ellen had said little. But there had been a sharp expression of dread in her eyes, a silent acknowledgement that she had nearly lost the man she loved. Accusation, too. How dare he put himself at risk.

  His family only left when he assured them both he was going to be fine.

  He slept again, and when he awoke it was to the unedifying sight of Constable Jaggery sitting at his bedside with an expression on his face that would have made the Grim Reaper seem like the Archangel Gabriel.

  ‘You look a sight, Sergeant,’ he said with a lugubrious shake of the head. ‘Seen healthier stiffs.’

  Brennan winced as he attempted to sit upright. He felt a burning along his ribs. Gingerly, he reached down and touched the swathes of bandage wrapped around him.

  ‘They reckon you’ve been lucky.’

  Brennan tried to smile, to show he could still appreciate the odd ironic jibe, but the swelling around his lips gave him second thoughts.

  ‘Who was it, Sergeant?’

  He winced when he tried to shake his head. ‘It was pitch-black. Foggy. But it had a lot to do with our little visit to Scholes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The last thing I heard before passing out was a whispered warning, hot breath on my ear, telling me to “stay well away from where I’m not welcome”.’

  ‘I’ll Scholes ’em. We’ll take the whole bloody force up there and scour the place clean!’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. Do you hear me, Constable?’ He clenched his teeth as an alternative to raising his voice, which would have caused his head to throb even more.

  ‘But if they think …’

  ‘Nothing of the sort! I have an idea who organised the attack, but there’s no way of proving it.’

  ‘Who?’

  But the sergeant had already closed his eyes, and his mind drifted back into a deep, untroubled sleep.

  During Detective Sergeant Brennan’s enforced residence in Wigan Infirmary, the borough coroner had held the inquest into Arthur Morris’s death. Captain Bell had given evidence on behalf of the police, and the inevitable verdict of ‘Wilful murder’ was returned.

  Captain Bell had also taken a more active role in his detective sergeant’s absence. Several occupants of Scholes were removed from their homes and questioned in the station cells, thus increasing the resentment towards the police. It was unfortunate, the chief constable was heard to remark within strategic earshot of the row of subterranean cells, that the previous year had seen the abolition of the cat-o’-nine-tails.

  ‘That would have given them a judicious scratching, and no mistake!’

  But there were no confessions, no sly hints of anyone being involved.

  ‘Either they’re scared beyond measure to open their mouths,’ Captain Bell was forced to conclude, ‘or there is some other explanation as yet unexplored.’

  Constable Jaggery, who was one of the recipients of this startling concession, gave a momentary smirk of satisfaction. When he duly reported back, Sergeant Brennan would have smiled too, if it hadn’t been too painful.

  For two days, Brennan remained an unhappy and impatient patient.

  His mouth still ached, but the pain had dulled now, and he was relieved to discover that his ribs had suffered terrible bruising – which in itself was painful – but there had been no extensive fractures, and he could at least walk unaided from his bed. Much against his doctor’s advice.

  ‘We might have a sightin’ of Arthur Morris, Sergeant. Last Saturday night.’

  Jaggery was helping Brennan into a hackney carriage outside the infirmary.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s a cabbie says he took a well-dressed fare from the centre of town to Scholes. Dropped him off outside the Vulcan.’

  Brennan slumped in his seat and pondered that for a while.

  The Vulcan Inn, on Hardybutts, was one of over seventy public houses in the district of Scholes. If it had been a balmy evening in summer, and all the men had been fully in work, it would have been quite a risky venture for Arthur Morris to clamber down from a carriage in full view of its clientele, many of whom would have been standing outside the bar room. It cleared up one question – how he got there. But it still didn’t answer the more fundamental one: what was he doing in Scholes in the first place?

  ‘It’s Morris’s funeral tomorrow, Sergeant.’

  Brennan’s eyes widened. ‘I see. Then we’d better get a move on, hadn’t we?’

  At that same moment, the occupants of a much more comfortable carriage were enjoying the warmth of an intimacy long denied them.

  For Molly, it felt good, his fingers through her hair.

  ‘I wish we were far away.’

  ‘Where would we go then?’

  ‘Oh, somewhere we can just, you know, be anyone. No one.’

  ‘There’ll be time for that.’

  ‘When?’ Molly lifted herself from his chest. Although there was still light outside, here, in the shadows of the carriage interior, she could hardly make out his face, let alone the expression it carried. Was he
sincere? she asked herself. After all that had happened, was he as sincere and as purposeful as she was?

  ‘Soon. I promise. And when I tell you about it, you’ll be speechless.’

  ‘Tell me now!’ she said with an urgency of tone diluted somewhat by a girlish giggle.

  ‘Absolutely not!’

  ‘“Absolutely not!”’ she echoed, mimicking his more rounded vowels. Then she snuggled back, pulling the carriage wrap tight around them both. She could feel the warmth of his body through their clothes.

  Here, atop Parbold Hill, six miles from Wigan and despite the smattering of collieries that marked the outer fringe of the south Lancashire coalfields, it did indeed seem that the town and all its miseries, all the despondency of poverty, starvation, angry and unasked-for indolence, were a thousand miles away. The view across the Douglas Valley, the broad sweep of land that still retained much of the recent snow, made the warmth she felt more perfect, heavenly. Even the bare branches of the trees, their harsh and twisted lines stark against the whiteness of the fields beyond, made her feel safe here, where nothing and no one could touch them.

  ‘If you could be somewhere, right now, where would it be?’

  Her voice was low, the tones soft and inconsequential, and the query the sort of trivia people always ask in circumstances such as this.

  Andrew Morris sighed. ‘Remember Blackpool?’

  She smiled and kissed his chest through the black of his mourning coat. ‘Aye. I do.’

  She breathed out the words, seeing the splendid expanse of sea and sand, and hearing again the cacophony of noise that had surrounded them, especially around Central Promenade, where the frenzied comings and goings of those working on the new tower were a source of ribald commentary from amused onlookers.

  There was renewed animation in her voice now. ‘I remember the waves of the sea best. The sound they made crashing onto the beach. I’d never heard anything like that before. I mean, to wake up to that sound every day of your life!’

  ‘And the wind through your hair.’

  ‘And the band on the pier!’

  ‘And the boat trip to Southport!’

  ‘And the colours of the fish in the aquarium!’

  ‘And that awful tower they’ll never finish!’

  She giggled into his chest. ‘Remember the time gun exploding!’

  Andrew gave a deep-throated chuckle as he recalled what could have been a tragedy. ‘I remember the blast, and the sight of bits of metal blowing through the air like black hail! I mean, connecting a gun to the tramway current! The wonder is it lasted so long!’

  She lowered her voice. ‘I remember best the kiss on the platform. Remember that, Andrew?’

  ‘What kiss?’ he asked playfully. ‘Oh, you mean the little peck on the cheek? I thought it was a seagull after a crumb!’

  She dug him in the ribs and he laughed.

  Yes, he remembered the kiss all right. That was when he knew. Even though they’d had to separate – he into first class, Molly into third – that journey home seemed something momentous as he reflected on that embrace. An epiphany. He had made several sketches that day, but they remained merely that, locked away in his drawer waiting for the flush of watercolour, the embellishment of his art. He could never have shown them to his father.

  His father.

  Guilt gnawed at him, and he tried to keep the pain away.

  He gazed out of the window of his carriage now, at the panorama that swept majestically down from their vantage point at the top of the hill. If only he could see some green, creeping through the grey-white of the snow.

  Wouldn’t that make a perfect background? Molly perhaps leaning against the trunk of a skeletal tree with the snow still clinging to the bare branches, but melting into ever so tiny droplets of water, symbolising a coming thaw, with the resurgent green forcing its way through the shrouding snow. She would be portrayed in all her beauty, but it would be a beauty tempered with a pre-Raphaelite clarity, a realism and a symbolism that would carry their own force. He would have a cotton mill faintly suggested in the distance, rendered dim and fading by low-lying clouds, a contrast to the raw energy of her personality. He wondered if she would agree to pose for him.

  But the wordless sigh from Molly ruined the image.

  He felt the carriage move slightly at the subtle tug of the horse. It seemed that both of them at the same time had registered once more the black of his mourning dress, and suddenly the mood grew more sombre.

  ‘The funeral tomorrow.’ She spoke softly, and looked into his eyes.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘I’ll be as well as can be expected.’

  He stroked her hair once more, realising how fragile she really was.

  The assembly room was filled with cigar smoke. In the centre of the room, the large billiard table had been covered with heavy cloth, and several of the most prominent figures in town were standing around it, some of them leaning idly against its thick wooden frame and engaging in desultory conversation, their long frock coats negligently swept open at the rear vent as they placed a hand in one pocket while smoking with the other.

  Despite the casualness of their demeanour, there was an air of expectancy in the room.

  Suddenly the double doors opened and James Cox walked in. Beside him was Ambrose Morris.

  There was a general expression of condolence, a studied wave of sympathy towards the bereaved Member of Parliament that was reinforced by a smattering of gentle applause. Ambrose raised a hand in acknowledgement and strode purposefully to the small raised dais at the front of the room, James Cox by his side. Everyone now stood erect, and, apart from the occasional chesty cough, silence filled the assembly room of the Wigan and District Conservative Club.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Ambrose began. ‘May I thank you for your very kind words and expressions of sympathy. The tragedy that has befallen my family, the dastardly violence that has taken away my dear brother’s life, has cast a shadow over our lives that will remain there for ever. But I cannot dwell on this most personal of events. Life, as they say, must go on. And although I spoke to you all several days ago before the … dreadfulness of what happened, I have expressed a desire to speak once more with you all, and to give everyone here my assurances that I will do my utmost to assist you in this most difficult of times.’

  At this point he looked at James Cox, who was staring at him intensely.

  ‘I realise that for some of you the strike – and yes, that is what it is, despite the Miners’ Federation insisting on alluding to it as a lockout, as if the fault were confined to the owners and no one else – I realise that this has caused great hardship and subsequent loss of income, with profit being consigned to fond memory. But I wish to assure you all that moves are afoot in Westminster to grab the vicious bull by the horns, so to speak. I wish to assure you all that I will do my utmost, as the one now reluctantly handed the reins by my dear departed brother, to help bring this dispute to its inevitable conclusion – before your businesses incur any greater losses. And I wish to assure you that any settlement will be a lasting tribute to the steadfastness and the humanity of a man who has created such wealth and prosperity for the people of this town – my late brother, Arthur Morris.’

  There was a loud chorus of ‘hear, hear’ and spontaneous applause. At the front of the room, James Cox stood with a suitably sombre expression on his face. But his emotions were anything but sombre.

  The interior of any church had a strange, paradoxical effect on Bridie Haggerty. Sure, she felt closer to God here. Wasn’t it His home on earth after all? But she also felt a detachment from Him, a feeling that this vaulted grandeur was far beyond her, belonged to others far more worthy. She came every Sunday, sat and knelt in the same place, bestowed upon her fellow parishioners the same benevolent smile, responded to Father Brady’s blessing ‘Dominus vobiscum’ along with the rest of the congregation, and at the end of Mass she stood outside and swapped the small
courtesies, the trite irrelevancies of gossip that only the pure of heart and soul can derive particular pleasure from.

  When Seamus and the others were buried five years ago, there had been large crowds lined up all the way to Gidlow Cemetery. The explosion in the pit had touched many families – almost everyone in the town knew at least one person affected by the tragedy, not counting those who had lost their loved ones in such a brutal and sudden way, and even those whose menfolk had been uninvolved in the disaster, working the mines in different collieries, had felt the deaths deeply, wondering if they would one day be standing in the shoes of the bereaved. And so the slow procession of hearses had a particular resonance with everyone, and everyone had turned out to demonstrate their respect and, yes, their gratitude. Bridie had recognised both emotions in their eyes as she had looked out from the family carriage.

  Now, as she sat in the pew beside the confessional, waiting for the door to open and the penitent to leave, she tried to concentrate, to dismiss thoughts of Seamus and the past from her mind, and focus on why she had come tonight.

  The candles beside the altar flickered and seemed to have a special aura around them, though she knew that was only a trick of her tired eyes. She looked to her right, gazed into the stone eyes of Saint Patrick, who appeared to be looking directly into her soul. It was the good saint’s simple description of the Holy Trinity with the help of the humble shamrock that had helped her feel there were three gods watching over her in those dark days back in Charlestown, when her da let the devil take over. He was one snake Saint Patrick hadn’t chased out of Ireland, she thought to herself. Before the sad smile could come, the penitent, a pinch-faced old crone clutching a glistening loop of rosary beads, was tapping her on the shoulder and telling her that Father Brady was ready for her now.

  ‘Thanks,’ Bridie whispered.

  She crossed herself and stood up. As she stepped into the aisle and looked at the open door, she heard the wheezing cough from the old priest and, in her mind’s eye, she could see the sliver of spittle on his chin that always followed his consumption of the communion bread and wine every Sunday.