Striking Murder

by AJ Wright

  Brennan nodded. It wouldn’t have been wise to take a carriage through the streets of Scholes. ‘So you had arranged to meet her?’

  ‘Yes. She was waiting at the gates to Mesnes Park. Poor girl was freezing.’

  ‘And where did you go?’

  Again there was a hesitation in his voice. ‘That is of no concern. She sat inside, I held the reins. Then we sought shelter.’

  ‘Where?’ Brennan’s voice was firm, insistent.

  Finally, Andrew said, ‘The colliery.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We went to the manager’s office at the colliery. Took shelter from the snow. There’s something quite cosy about that.’

  ‘I see,’ said Brennan, who did indeed see.

  ‘My mother knows nothing of Molly. Yet.’

  ‘But your father did, didn’t he?’

  A slow nod. He turned round and faced the policeman. ‘Somehow he’d found out about us. He had always had his mind set on a union between myself and the daughter of a friend of his. Lydia Merkham. It was almost medieval and I told him so. But yes, he was against the match.’

  ‘And this was a source of friction between you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Brennan held his gaze for a while. ‘What time did you leave the colliery?’

  Andrew licked his lips. ‘I can’t recall.’

  ‘I’m sure you can.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘It must have been eleven. Eleven-thirty.’

  ‘And you took Molly all the way home?’

  ‘Yes. A risk, I know, but it was late and I didn’t want her walking those streets at that late hour. So I went to the end of her street and she alighted there.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I went home.’

  ‘And you saw nothing? No one? Your father, for instance?’

  ‘The streets were deserted. The snow was still falling. To think, even then he might have been …’ His voice faded.

  ‘I see. Have you any idea what he was doing in Scholes?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Not, for instance, paying a visit to the Haggerty home? He was found not far away from there.’

  ‘Why on earth would he want to do that?’

  ‘To put a stop to your relationship.’

  Andrew swallowed hard and turned his gaze on one of his paintings, the wintry scene, where a solitary figure sat by a stream with his hand pressed hard against its icy and unyielding surface.

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said finally. ‘He was a resolute man. Obdurate to the point of …’ He broke off and smiled. ‘If he were bound for Molly’s home, Sergeant, why did he choose that night of all nights? A companionable dinner? Heavy snow? Surely he would have the sense to choose a more convenient time to confront the girl he regarded as his enemy?’

  ‘You would have thought so, wouldn’t you?’ said Brennan, non-committally.

  ‘Now we’ll never know, will we?’

  ‘Oh, perhaps an answer will present itself, sir.’

  Andrew looked at him long and hard, as if he sensed the detective knew far more than he was willing to express. At last, he sighed and said, ‘Will that be all?’

  ‘For the moment, sir.’

  A few minutes later, as Brennan stood on the steps and gazed across to the bushes, he thought again of what Ambrose Morris had seen – a large figure skulking in the undergrowth having delivered his mysterious letter. He wondered who that had been. If, indeed, it had been the murderer, he must have moved pretty quickly to make the journey down into Wigan and then up the hill to Scholes in this inclement weather. Not an impossible task, but an awkward one, given the conditions that night.

  He sighed and glanced backwards at the closed door and the heavy brass knocker in the shape of a Davy lamp. ‘If only you could talk,’ he said, and immediately felt foolish.

  Two minutes later, he had an idea, unaware that young eyes were watching him.

  Tommy Haggerty saw it as a great adventure. Whatever the letter contained, he would never dream of opening it. Molly had made him swear on his mam’s deathbed, and there was no more sacrosanct oath than that. He had jumped on the rear bar of the tram that went as far as the Boar’s Head, then trudged his way through the snow until he came to the grand house itself. He then had to wait among the bushes until he was sure no one could see him. The presence of the policeman standing on the steps had shocked him, and for a moment he wondered how on earth he’d known Tommy was there. But then he walked off, looking deep in thought. Tommy was sure he’d heard him mutter ‘The bloody knocker!’, just before he disappeared from view. Then when the coast was clear, he rushed to the front door and posted the letter. But the most important part of the mission, Molly had told him, was to knock hard on the door to make sure someone came. That way, they would be sure that the letter would be discovered and passed on to Andrew Morris himself.

  ‘Why?’ he had asked.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why you sendin’ ’im a note?’

  ‘Ask no questions.’

  ‘You after a job there?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Just do as you’re told.’

  ‘Should I wait for an answer, Moll?’

  ‘Indeed you should not! Get out of there as soon as you’ve knocked. The note explains itself.’

  If young Tommy Haggerty was mystified by the letter his sister had written, Andrew Morris was deeply troubled. Why on earth would Frank Latchford, a member of the Miners’ Federation and a particularly eloquent and dangerous opponent of his father’s, express a desire to meet with him?

  As he travelled by carriage to the appointed destination, he reflected on its significance: surely Latchford couldn’t possibly know that only last Saturday, he and Molly had finally consummated their desires in that very place? The colliery manager’s office?

  No, he reassured himself. He’s chosen the office as a meeting place because of its symbolism. It’s where the colliers’ shift records and pay details are housed, and only a matter of a few yards away from the lamp room, where all lamps are tallied and recorded. It’s the ideal venue for those who wish to be reminded of what the coalfields are actually there for.

  Although the snow had temporarily stopped, there lay a thick layer on the roads that made progress difficult as the two horses forced their way through. It was by now late afternoon, and already the darkness had fallen. Once he had skimmed the edges of town, the street lamps glimmered feebly, irregular droplets of ice hanging from their arms and frosting the glass of the lamp housing. Few people were abroad, several shops choosing to close early in the face of precious little trade. It was beginning to seem now that the town itself was facing a deadly conspiracy of enemies – the coal dispute and the bitter, merciless cold – and the best way to fend off such a relentless onslaught was to retreat to the cold sanctuary of hearth and home.

  It took Andrew forty minutes from the moment he left the house to arrive at the colliery gates. They were hanging open – a consequence of the fury engendered in the strike’s early days by his father’s inflammatory words – and, as the carriage made its slow way along the road towards the manager’s office, he noticed how still and menacing the head frames seemed now, silhouetted against the dark sky and the mocking stars.

  When he finally reached his destination, he climbed down and stood outside the door. The small office seemed different from his last visit. Then it had been not only a refuge but also a trysting place. Now it stood there, a heavy layer of snow on its sloping roofs, still and silent in the dark yard which months ago would have been a hive of activity, of raucous shouts, obscene curses and the scene of a thousand complaints. The sinister black stillness was made all the more ghastly by the outline of the head frames fringed in white against the night sky, giant cobwebs waiting motionless for their next victim. Morbid fancies began to grip him, of pale, dead faces lying just beneath the layer of snow at his feet, all glaring in accusation. The sins of the father …

  The horses snorted, lifti
ng their heads in unison as if they both sensed that something was wrong in this dark and silent place.

  Suddenly, a lamp flared from inside the office, and a shadow was projected, large and distorted, on the thin curtains of the window.

  Then the door began to open, slowly, and not one, but two figures emerged from the gloom within.

  A bitterly cold night. The streets of the town and the outlying districts were deserted, and a disturbing stillness settled upon the thousands of houses throughout the borough. Many of their inhabitants huddled before small fires where fragments of wood, scavenged from the rear premises of shops and warehouses, helped to replenish the rapidly dwindling supplies of coal slack that had themselves been the product of nefarious raids on the many slag heaps adjoining the dormant collieries. Some of them glanced furtively at their children, looking for the signs of malnourishment and approaching starvation and exchanging fearful and unspoken glances as the wood cracked and shifted above the smoky slack.

  Yet one person that night lay unconcerned about the cold and the hunger. For him, the dispute in the colliery held no fear, no anxiety at all. For he lay on his front with his skull smashed into several pieces, and no one could possibly imagine the agony he had gone through before Death took him in his arms.

  No one, that is, except the murderer.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘It’s an evil night,’ said Herbert Lythgoe as he watched James Cox divest himself of his outer clothing.

  The Conservative Club was surprisingly three quarters full, its members preferring the subdued and smoke-filled atmosphere of the members’ lounge to anything their womenfolk could offer them at their variously grand homes.

  ‘Bloody right there,’ Cox agreed with an accompanying cough. He ordered a drink at the bar and sat beside his friend, offering the other members who had hailed him a cursory wave of the hand. In better days he could buy and sell the lot of them, they all knew that, but he wasn’t so thick-skinned that he couldn’t sense a certain benign vindictiveness lurking beneath their cigar-wreathed bonhomie.

  Herbert Lythgoe was a successful businessman too, but on a far lesser scale. His Lythgoe’s Aerated Water Company began life as a herb beer factory, but in less than ten years it had grown into a large concern producing gingerade, lemonade, horehound and soda water. Yet even he had been affected by the long dispute in the coalfields: such sweet and refreshing drinks as he bottled had been swiftly consigned to memory as purse strings tightened and families were forced to purchase what meagre supplies they could with none of the fripperies they or their children had once enjoyed.

  ‘You all right, James?’

  Cox took the drink – a large whisky and soda – from the waiter and took a sizeable sip before responding. His hand was shaking. ‘Been up yonder.’ He gave a nod in the general direction of his extensive works.

  ‘This time of night?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Yon manager of yours – what’s his name?’

  ‘Walsh.’

  ‘Aye, that’s the bugger. Shouldn’t he be doing the checking? ’Specially on a bloody awful night like this.’

  Cox took out a cigar and guillotined the head, lighting it with a match and moving it slowly round in his mouth to achieve an even burn. As the glow grew brighter, his hand trembled far less until, after a minute’s slow, warming inhalation, he was quite himself again.

  ‘I spoke to him this afternoon. I like to check things for myself, Herbert. There’s a bloody expensive locomotive up yonder just stranded on its tracks. Wouldn’t put it past some of those striking buggers to derail it and send it hurtling into the canal. Ice or no ice. And a four-coupled saddle tank doesn’t come cheap.’

  Lythgoe laughed out loud. ‘So you went up there to play bodyguard to a bloody train? In this weather?’

  ‘Locomotive, Herbert. Not a train. And we built the bugger. No. I couldn’t rest until I’d made sure she was blocked in securely.’

  ‘You’re a careful man, James Cox. I’ll grant you that.’

  ‘I am,’ he said with a long and luxurious pull on the cigar which Ambrose Morris had given him only last Saturday.

  Despite her mother’s assurances that Frank Latchford meant Andrew no harm, Molly Haggerty had a deep sense of foreboding, a hollow sensation at the pit of her stomach that had nothing to do with hunger. She had made the arrangements as Frank had told her, and the letter had been delivered, according to little Tommy. But she had spent the whole of the evening and most of the night warding off the demons that danced in the dwindling coal flames, mocking, evil little devils that hissed and spat at her every time she tried to think beyond the wintry misery of the moment.

  Her mam had told her once of a distant relative who had the rare sense. She had a way of knowing when someone was going to die, and she always lit a candle and placed it in the window as a sign to the neighbours that another one of them would soon be winging his or her way to the Great Unknown. To little Molly, the thought of seeing a candle flickering in a window had been enough to keep her awake for weeks, and she almost screamed every time an altar boy held one aloft with no trace of fear in his sparkling eyes.

  Now, as she lay in bed and listened to little Tommy wheezing and snoring beside her, his feet resting on her legs to keep warm, she felt that those tales of long ago had blended together to form a terrifying incarnation, where she was both the mystic with a sense of impending doom, and her childish self shaking with fear beneath the bedclothes.

  She had been mad to do it. To send Andrew, dear, loving Andrew, to a dark and lonely place to meet the man who once felt he owned her.

  And yet her mam had been so sure …

  She thought of last Saturday night. Andrew’s father, lying there in the alleyway with his blood draining onto the icy cobbles.

  Her brother groaned and turned over. In the shaft of moonlight that sliced through the gap in the curtains she saw the lids of his eyes flicker and a half-smile spread across his face. He was content, for a while at least.

  Michael Brennan, too, lay with disturbed thoughts. Ellen was beside him, her face calm in repose, and from Barry’s room he could hear the gentle rise and fall of his breathing. He had told him a story after Ellen had warmed the boy’s bed with a hot brick wrapped in cloths, and Barry had asked him if there really were dragons that breathed fire and chased innocent young women.

  ‘’Course not,’ he had replied, stroking his dark hair.

  ‘So where do they come from then? Dragons?’

  ‘I make them up.’

  ‘Can anyone breathe fire?’

  ‘No.’ He had thought to make a humorous reference to his superior, Captain Bell, but that might have scared the boy.

  ‘Dragons are bad, though?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Could you fight one?’

  ‘But they’re not real. I told you.’

  ‘Aye but if they were, you’d be able to fight ’em, wouldn’t you, Dad?’

  ‘’Course I would.’

  Reassured, Barry had snuggled deep into the bedclothes then, and gone instantly to sleep.

  Now, Brennan watched his own cold breath drift upwards against the dull glow of the moon.

  The Davy lamp door knocker at the Morris residence had given him an idea, that was all, but he couldn’t get it out of his head, because if he were right about that, then it would lead him down pathways that could prove hazardous indeed. But the more he thought about it, the more he felt convinced that it explained one thing, at least, and if he could follow the suggestion logically then …

  At that moment, with the greatest of ironies, there was a tremendous knocking at his front door which was below his bedroom window.

  Ellen stirred but didn’t wake immediately. He clambered out of bed, cursing beneath his breath as the bitter chill of the night assailed him.

  More knocking. Heavy. Insistent.

  Narrowly avoiding the chamber pot at the foot of the bed, he made his way to the window, where he pull
ed the curtains open and slid the catch to allow him to slide open the lower frame.

  He stuck his head out, the icy wind blasting his face and causing him to close his eyes and catch his breath for a second. Then he peered downwards and yelled, ‘Who the bloody hellfire …?’

  But he stopped when he saw Constable Jaggery standing there, hugging himself with his arms beneath the great black cape he had wrapped around his huge frame.

  ‘Constable? Do you realise …?’

  ‘Sorry, S-sergeant.’

  Even from this distance, Brennan imagined he could hear the constable’s teeth chattering.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s been another m-murder, S-sergeant.’

  ‘So? Couldn’t it wait?’

  ‘N-no, Sergeant. C-Captain B-Bell hisself sent me. S-said he’s f-fed up of dead bodies all over the p-place an’ you’d b-best put a s-stop to ’em.’

  ‘Wait there!’ he snapped, and closed the window, turning to find not only Ellen awake and sitting up in bed with a less than delighted expression on her face, but also a bedraggled-looking Barry standing in the doorway, rubbing his eyes and mumbling something about dragons.

  For once, Brennan was grateful for the weather. The ice that had trapped the canal boat had also been thick enough to prevent the body that now lay face down, a few yards from the boat’s stern on its eerie, moonlit surface, from sinking down into the murky depths. If the waters of the canal had been free-flowing, then his job would have been immeasurably harder. For one thing, a murder on board a narrowboat in normal weather conditions could have taken place anywhere along, say, a ten mile stretch of the Leeds–Liverpool Canal. Unlike a land-based murder, where the place where the body was found wasn’t under dispute, with a boat the surrounding area would most certainly be an open question. For another, the fact that the body was lying there in all the misshapen indignity of death would enable them to act much more speedily than if it had sunk into the water without trace, to resurface at sometime in the future when time of death and possibly even its cause would be a matter of considerable doubt.