Dance Floor Drowning

by Brian Sellars

  The group backed off, abandoning their leader to face the truculent stoker alone.

  'Well, if you see a boy, Daniels, let me know – eh?' said the military type, unmoved by the stoker’s comprehensive response.

  'I'll do what I can, Doctor Longden,' the stoker said. 'As I always do.'

  The doctor turned away and marched off, barging disdainfully through his cowardly entourage. The boiler man waited, showing Billy a staying hand. The unseen door opened and closed, choking off the jolly sounds of the adjoining swimming pool. As Billy waited, he noticed a couple of tightly rolled up sweet papers on the floor by his foot. He recognized the wrappers, Halls Mentholyptus sweets. He liked them too, as the stoker evidently did.

  'Tha can come out now, mi owd,' the boiler man said. He faced Billy and looked him over, grinning and chuckling to himself.

  Billy beamed at the stoker and glanced back at his hiding place. ‘Chunter pipes?’

  The man laughed. ‘Yeah we call ‘em that. It’s because you can hear the old fools chuntering in the cold room - through the duct.’ He pointed to where the pipes snaked into a neatly tiled opening in the wall. ‘Mike listens to ‘em, but I don’t. They talk rubbish, if you ask me. Mike’s off sick just now. He thought he’d got himself onto a good thing the first time he heard ‘em chuntering and whispering. It was that fool Longden telling his pal about some bloody horse, a red-hot tip. A dead cert that couldn't lose, he was saying. Poor old Mike backed it. Lost five quid. I knew he would. I warned him about Longden. He never wins owt. If I had a shilling for every quid that old fool’s lost, I’d be a rich man.’ He chuckled, looking Billy over from top to toe. 'So, what's thee name then, lad?’

  ‘Billy, sir.’

  'Well, Billy. I'm Mister Daniels, chief engineering genius in this palace of wonders, but tha can call me Stan.' He held out a massive paw to shake hands. Billy grabbed it, feeling very grown up.

  'So, what's tha done to upset Doctor Nasty?'

  Billy shrugged. 'Nasty? He looks crazy, more like. Who is he?'

  'Doctor Longden, one of our regulars, but not a very nice bloke, Billy. You want to watch out for him. One of these days, he'll come badly unstuck, especially if I get my way.' Stan's expression had darkened. He shot a threatening glance at the door through which Longden and his cronies had departed. It made Billy feel uncomfortable. Stan looked back to him and shrugged apologetically, his mood lifting instantly.' Yeah, he’s in here all the time. God knows how he gets away with it. He's the top man at the city morgue. It's a good job his patients are already deeyad, is all I can say.' He laughed at his quip and picked up a shovel. Billy watched him flick open the furnace door with it, releasing intense heat that forced him back a step. Stan seemed quite unaffected by it and bending even closer, peered inside. He began stoking the furnace with a smooth, steady rhythm. It looked effortless; though Billy was sure it could not be.

  Stan was sweating when, after a minute or two stoking, he shut the fire door and leaned his shovel beside it. He wiped his face on a sweat towel, conveniently hung on an overhead pipe. 'So, what's all this fuss and mystery abaht then?'

  Billy explained, including everything from the moment he had been knocked off his bike by the police car.

  Stan listened intently, occasionally moving off to turn a valve, read a gauge, or throw a switch. When Billy had finished, Stan shook his head, perplexed. 'Shall we have a mash up?' he asked, not waiting for an answer. Billy followed him to a sink in a corner and watched him set about the task. He was very well organized. Enamelled mugs of steaming tea quickly appeared. Stan dusted off a couple of old dining chairs, cleared a motor cycle crash helmet and goggles out of the way, and invited Billy to join him. Billy sat down at a small table bearing a bottle of milk, a paper twist of sugar and a snap tin that had once contained Thornton’s toffee. He looked around the snug little corner and realised he was being accorded full honours and hospitality. He grinned proudly and sipped the sweet, milky tea.

  'So, own up then. Did tha drown him?' Stan was eyeing Billy across his tea mug with comic sternness.

  'Drown who?

  'Don't tell me tha dunt know? Papers'll be full of it toneet. It'll definitely be in t'Star.'

  'What will?'

  'Murder! They found a dead body in the pool. The dance floor drowning,' he announced grandly. 'That's what they're gonna call it in t’paper. That bloke Clegg from the Telegraph and Star told me. He's been here all morning taking notes and asking questions. We’ve had coppers all o’er the place, poking their noses in everywhere.’ He pointed to a dusty clock on the wall. ‘They dint leave until dinnertime. There's still a couple of 'em here now, in white overalls. They’ve had us all in the office – questioning us.’ He blew his nose, sniffed experimentally a few times, unwrapped a menthol sweet and popped it in his mouth. ‘The copper in charge is that slimy toad, Flood. Ever heard of him?’

  Billy both nodded and shook his head, slightly unsure as to what he should admit to at this early stage in the conversation.

  ‘He’s a right big eeyaded bugger,’ Stan went on. ‘Chief Superintendent slimy toad they should call him. He damn near accused me of doing it.’ He laughed loudly. ‘I told ‘im straight. I said if ever I killed somebody, I’d shove 'em in that furnace. That gets hot enough to get rid of owt. They’d never find nowt left of him but his clog irons. I’d certainly not leave bodies floatin’ about in a swimming pool.’ He laughed again and wiped a tear from his eye. ‘I think that put the wind up him. He couldn’t get me out of the office quick enough.’

  Billy shuddered and stared at the furnace door. It was easy to see that Stan was even less fond of chief superintendent Flood than he was. The idea of Stan scaring him off with veiled threats of cremation struck him as most welcome. ‘So what happened then? Who got killed?’

  ‘Well, like I said, they found a body. I had to empty t’pool – every last drop. That's why I'm having to fill it up ageeyan.' He pointed to the machine behind which Billy had hidden. 'That old pump's still chugging away, burrit waint last much longer. Trouble is, they waint spend any money. Tha knows what councils are like …'

  'But the drowning …' Billy interrupted. 'What happened?'

  'Oh aghh, well I don't know really? They don’t tell us much down here. All I know is some bloke were drowned in t’big pool – mixed bathing. They found him when they were taking the dance floor up this morning. We have contractors who come in overnight to do it. Useless sods, they are.'

  Billy's eyes could not open wider. He gaped, swallowed, gasped and gulped as Stan told him the tale. When he had finished, Billy's head was so full of questions, he could neither think nor speak.

  Stan looked at the wall clock 'Ayupp! thar'd better be going home now, lad,' he said leaping up and rinsing his mug under the cold tap. 'It's nearly half past four, sithee. I knock off at five. I've been here sin’ five this morning tha knows. I've to do everything while Mike’s off sick. Thi promised me an assistant – weer izzi? Scotch mist. Will o' the whizz – that's all he is.' He dried his mug on his trouser front. Billy thought about correcting his wisps and whizzes, but Stan suddenly burst out with: 'Ayup! Weerz thi clothes?'

  'Oh no!' cried Billy, 'And my weshing. Worramma gonna do about me dad's pants?'

  Stan rocked back on his heels, his face rigid with concern. 'Reight – nah don't thee worrit thi sen. It'll be alreight. I expect thi'll all still be in t'slipper baths. I'll go and fetch ‘em for thee.'

  *

  Billy stood at the tram stop, his mother’s washing bundled inside his bath towel. Water dripped from it onto the pavement. Luckily, when a tram arrived, the conductor was collecting fares on the top deck. Billy could slip aboard without his dripping bundle drawing comment. The tram’s lower deck was almost empty. He slipped quickly into a seat by a window and slid his soggy baggage under the seat in front of him. As the tram rattled on towards Walkley, a puddle slowly formed around Billy's feet. Unaware, he gazed out of the window at the passing sights.

  A
n old man, sitting in the seat in front, was the first to notice the expanding puddle. He peered down bemused, and picked up his feet as the tram started up Barber Road, the steepest hill on the Walkley tram route. Gravity immediately took the water away from his feet, leaving him in the dry, so the old guy shrugged and put it from his mind. The conductor clattered down the steel spiral staircase just in time to see a thin ribbon of water heading towards him on the rear platform. He glared angrily along the row of seats. His fierce gaze passed over Billy and stopped at the old man, who, he thought, seemed to be directly above the source of the little stream.

  Hearing him coming, Billy held up tuppence for his fare. The conductor ignored it and stomped passed. Billy looked up and seeing that the conductor was obviously on the warpath, surreptitiously dragged his illegal bundle closer to his feet, just in case he had to make a swift getaway. Blissfully unaware, the old man in front gazed out of the window as the tram crested the brow of Barber Road and began to plunge, like a switchback, down the other side of the hill towards Springvale.

  The conductor was apoplectic. The trickle of water reversed, and surged back inside the tram, picking up dust and discarded tickets as it went. Towering over the old man, his face red with fury, the conductor glared down at him. 'What the chuffin eck?' he spluttered.

  The old man turned, looked up innocently, and gave the conductor a bewildered smile.

  'Look! What the … ?' the conductor shrieked, dismay robbing his voice of power. 'You've – you've – look what thaz done, Albert. It's only two stops afore thar gets off. Couldn't tha hold it in?'

  0o0o0

  Chapter Three

  In sheep pastures above Man’s Head Rock, Harry Clegg drove his stately Austin between dilapidated dry-stone walls. The car lurched over the rutted bumps and puddles of a narrow lane more suited to farm animals than wheeled traffic. Sheep scrutinized his arrival through gaps in the wall.

  Much loved by rock-climbers, naturalists, and hikers, Man’s Head Rock is a grim-faced colossus overlooking Sheffield’s Rivelin Valley. Beneath its craggy stare, a peaty river tumbles into the city from high on Hallam Moor in the newly created Peak National Park. Wild and beautiful as it is, Man’s Head Crag was the last place Harry wanted to be; the last story he wanted to cover. For almost a week he had revelled in reporting the "Dance Floor Drowning", and was reluctant to drop it for some grubby murder on the moors. Unfortunately, his ambitious young editor believed that coming, as it did, so soon after the so-called Dance Floor Drowning, the story was sure to make it to the front pages of the national dailies, and was insisting that Harry Clegg covered it.

  Fifty yards ahead Harry spotted several police cars parked nose to tail. He drove up behind them and switched off the engine. Gazing about miserably, he swung his feet out of the car and began swapping his highly polished brogues for Wellington boots. Apart from a solitary bird watcher, bundled up against the stiff breeze and loaded down with camera equipment, rucksack and binoculars, there was nobody about. Harry locked his car, though it hardly seemed necessary in such a remote spot. He picked his way through the ruined wall into a field of sheep, pausing briefly to scan woodland on the far side of the valley before setting off across springy turf. The sheep parted grudgingly before him as he plodded through their afternoon snack. A barbed wire fence, strung haphazardly at the edge of the field, marked the cliff top from whose craggy walls glared Man’s Head Rock.

  A stiff breeze whipped tears from his eyes and tugged at his trilby hat. Grabbing a fence post for support, he leaned out to peer over the cliff edge. Fifty feet below, a dozen policemen clambered over a rock-strewn, bracken-covered slope. They were searching an area cordoned off by sad bunting, draped between wooden stakes. From his vantage, above the ear of the colossus, the cliff looked quite unlike the grimacing giant seen from the valley below. But this was not the head Harry had come to see. It was rumoured that two hikers had seen a severed human head gaping up at them from the bracken. So far, the police had found neither head nor torso.

  *

  Later that same day twelve-year-old "Kick" Morley burst into an old greenhouse, his eyes wide with excitement. 'There's a man's eeyad at Mans eeyad,' he cried.

  'You don't say,' said Yvonne Sparkes, sniffing testily from a deckchair amid the horticultural dereliction. She was engrossed in a copy of the Girl's Crystal, and did not shift her gaze.

  'Did tha 'ear worra just said? Thiv found a bloke's eeyad. He's deeyad.'

  'Who sez?'

  'Me mam. She heard it at Lipton's butter counter. They said it were down in t'rocks, reight under t'giant's chin.'

  Kick glanced around the desiccated greenhouse as if noticing his surroundings for the first time. Its flaking woodwork and whitewashed glass panes made a bright, dry, gang den for him and his pals, Billy Perks and Yvonne Sparkes. Tucked away in half an acre of neglected garden, and screened by rampant shrubs and twelve feet high advertising hoardings, it was the perfect hideout. Seed boxes and a couple of old deckchairs provided seating. A little iron stove could be fired up for toasting pikelets. Behind the stove, in its place of honour, hung a dusty grey board about the size of a large tea tray. Smudgy chalk lines marked it out in three equal columns. This was the famous "MOM board". The three pals had used it to crack the case of the old Star Woman's murder. It had been placed in its present position by Harry Clegg, almost a year before. He had posed the trio of youngsters before it to photograph them for the front page of his newspaper. The story of their detective work had caused quite a stir. Billy Perks, the gang’s default leader, with Yvonne and Kick, the only members, had enjoyed limelight and celebrity for several days.

  'Weerz Billy?'

  Yvonne reluctantly put aside her reading. 'I'm off,' she said, flicking her dark curly hair behind her ears. It's my granny's birthday. I've gorra take her a card and have tea wi' her.'

  'I asked thee weerz Billy? Are tha deaf?'

  'I heard you. I don’t know where he is. I think he went looking for Doctor Hadfield.'

  'Does he know about the bloke's eeyad? Are we gunna be detectives again?' He turned to the MOM board and lifted it down from its hook. 'I'd better get this ready.'

  Kick's discovery that detectives often evaluate the potential guilt of suspects by listing their Motive, Opportunity, and Means, had been the inspiration behind his creation of the M.O.M. board. It was his main contribution to their famed exploits. He’d been dying to use it on another case ever since.

  *

  Doctor Hadfield, a young man of yet ill-defined ambition, lived in the single storey, octagonal gatehouse of a large Victorian villa. Barely a year to the day he had arrived in Walkley as locum for an elderly GP. His experience since medical school amounted to little more than a short stint in the Army. Initially, life in the staunchly working class suburb had been a bit of a shock for the graduate of Eton and Oxford. Things took a distinctly worse turn when, upon the death of his old employer, he found himself promoted to junior associate. This rapid elevation had thrown him into a state of bewilderment and dread.

  Worse was to come. The replacement for his late boss turned out to be a tyrannical woman who had been one of his tutors at Oxford; Clarissa Fulton-Howard. She claimed to have taken the appointment as a sort of semi-retirement post. Now in her late fifties, Miss Fulton-Howard was returning to her Sheffield roots. She had purchased an idyllic stone cottage in the Peak District, a mere fifteen minutes’ drive away, and was not pleased to find her idyll sullied by the presence of young Hadfield, a former student whom she had not only thought lazy and flippant, but one she suspected of having painted her bicycle saddle with golden syrup.

  Wearing his customary off duty cricket whites and carpet slippers, Hadfield peered at his young visitor across a marmalade-stained dining table. 'I'm twenty-eight, Billy. Not fifty,' he said, with a gesture suggestive of smoking a pipe, or perhaps imitating Popeye the sailor. Billy wasn't sure.

  A whistling kettle came to the boil on a Baby Belling hotplate. Hadfield turned
it off. He poured boiling water into a couple of enamelled mugs and dribbled a bottle-top measure of Camp Coffee essence into each, filling the room with its enigmatic aroma.

  'Have I been up the Amazon? No. Have I trekked the arctic wastes? No. Have I worked in an African field hospital, or discovered the cure for malaria? No! I've done nothing, Billy!'

  He cast around miserably, his shoulders slumping in despair. 'Even in the army I got little further than Aldershot.' He poured milk and plopped a couple of saccharin tablets into each mug before stirring them vigorously with a pencil. He offered one to Billy, and eyed him closely, hoping for a sympathetic response. Instead, he found him leafing through a medical book, occasionally turning it sideways to better appreciate its colourful images of human reproductive organs.

  'Are you listening, Billy?'

  Billy had mistakenly assumed that the young doctor was off on one of his frequent rants against society in general, or Test Match cricket in particular. He had not expected to have to vouchsafe opinions. Flummoxed, he nodded apologetically and tried to look fascinated.

  Scowling, Hadfield withdrew the proffered coffee mug and confiscated the medical book. 'All I've done is what my father wanted,' he went on. 'This is my first proper job, Billy. Can you believe that? I only took it because I thought it wouldn't last long.' He scowled at the bare walls of his tiny living room and sighed. 'I want to see the world. I don't want to be a GP in ruddy Walkley for the rest of my life. The only excitement I've had here was that bit of detective work we did last year.'

  He studied his visitor again, and sank back into a battered armchair. 'You do see my itch, don't you, old bean? I mean, I'm not just being selfish, am I? I want a bit of excitement; some adventure, some worthwhile experiences. I want to be useful in the world - and you know what they say about travel?'