Dance Floor Drowning

by Brian Sellars

  'You said you'd find out about the bank robbery,' Billy said with relentless determination.

  'Oh –oh yeah. Well I did an' all.' He rubbed his eyes, folded his newspaper and straightened his tunic. 'There's nowt to tell.'

  'What d'you mean?'

  'Nobody was charged. There's no proof owt was stolen, and nobody admitted to losing owt.'

  'I pretty much knew that,' grumbled Billy. 'I wanted you to tell me sommat new.'

  'There's nowt to tell. All we know is that somebody got into the bank and found three safety deposit boxes damaged and blown open. None of the undamaged ones was touched. The attending officer even said that it didn't look like any robbery he'd seen before. The owners of the three opened boxes said they had no valuables in 'em, just stuff of no commercial value. Their names weren't recorded because no charges were brought. If the police had thought it necessary they could have applied for a warrant to get the names from the bank's files, but they didn't bother. They probably felt there was no point - and, don’t forget, there was a war on.' PC Needham shrugged apologetically. 'I can't tell you owt else. Oh – except that we do know who the police sergeant in charge was…'

  'Who?'

  'An old friend of yours, a certain Sergeant Flood.'

  'Sergeant?'

  'Yeah, well he weren't born a chief superintendent, was he? He used to be just a sergeant back then.' He eyed Billy pityingly. 'Everybody was younger once, even Mister Flood.'

  Billy looked at the floor, his shoulders slumping with disappointment.

  'One more thing, I don't think it'll help you much, but we do know who one of the boxes belonged to.'

  Billy straightened up, eagerly. 'Who?'

  'The citizens of this fair city of ours; it was registered to the town council, museums and libraries department.' He dug into his tunic pocket and pulled out his notebook. 'I got the name of the bloke in charge.'

  'What did they keep in it?' Billy asked.

  'Nowt apparently.' He leafed through his notebook. 'Aah, here it is. Mister Dillon.'

  'Dillon? Where can I find him?'

  'He's retired. He could have snuffed it by now.'

  Billy sighed miserably, sagged back against the police box wall and slid down on to his haunches. 'Chuffin eck! I can't never get nowhere,' he groaned.

  PC Needham laughed softly. He scribbled on the corner of his newspaper and carefully detached it from the page. 'Luckily he's not dead. He lives at this address.'

  Billy perked up and grabbed the note. 'Linekar Road. Crikey, that's not far.'

  'I don't know what you expect to learn. I've already told you, the box was empty.'

  'Yeah, but you never know,' said Billy, trying to be positive.

  He left PC Needham to his important police work and cycled to Yvonne's house. She greeted him with an alarmed expression and pressed her fingers to her lips to silence him. Grabbing his hand, she led him on tiptoe into her mother's bedroom. There he saw Missis Sparkes feeding bits of bacon to a Little Owl, evidently nesting on top of her wardrobe.

  Like her daughter, Missis Sparkes too had dark curly hair and large brown eyes, smouldering with Latin beauty. She made Billy think of flamenco dancers. He'd often wondered if she bit roses and stamped a lot. She was loud, eccentric, and oddly haughty. She was also generous, endlessly kind, a laugh a minute and a passionate animal lover. Possibly, only her husband, who tolerated her odd behaviour without a murmur, had a bigger heart.

  After a few minutes of owl watching, Yvonne led Billy back to the kitchen. 'She found it on the path,' she explained as she filled two thick glass tumblers with Dandelion and Burdock. 'It looked dead, but now she's gorrit eating bacon. It likes Weetabix an ‘all.'

  Billy downed the Burdock in one. It was flat and warm. 'Did you get Missis Hepburn's address?'

  'I said I would, dint I?'

  'Where does she live?'

  'Ranmoor. I bet it's a big posh house.'

  'Humm, they're all posh up Ranmoor,' said Billy. 'Will thee mam gi' thee a lend of her bike?'

  Yvonne shrugged. 'If we go now she'll never know. She'll be "owling" all day. My dad'll be lucky to get fed in the next two weeks, until the novelty wears off, or the cat gets it.'

  'First we've got to see an old bloke in Linekar Road,' Billy told her. He led her outside into the Sparkes back garden, recounting what he had learned from PC Needham. Yvonne mounted her mother's bike and pushed off to follow him the short distance to Linekar Road.

  Like most streets in Walkley, Linekar Road plunged into a river valley. Mister Dillon lived in a small, plain fronted terraced house at the end of a row of identical dwellings. Ornamental iron railings had once bristled proudly along the top of its low front garden wall. Alas, these had been chopped off and taken away "to make Spitfires" in the war effort, leaving behind a sad row of rusting stumps.

  They found the old man at work in his back garden. Wrapped in concentration he was tapping earwigs into a jar from traps made of upturned plants pots stuffed with straw and hung on garden canes. 'Me and earwigs are just the same,' he said after Billy had introduced himself. 'We both love dahlias.'

  He led the pair up his garden path to where a tin of tobacco and a box of matches awaited his attention on a bench seat. As the old chap filled and lit a pipe, Billy explained his mission.

  'We never used it,' the old man said. 'The boss told me to get several boxes at different banks, but we never used any of 'em. It was a waste of money. Councils are like that. If I told you how much money they waste every day you'd never believe it.'

  'Why did they want safety deposit boxes anyway?' Yvonne asked. 'I would have thought the Town Hall's got plenty of cellars and vaults for keeping stuff safe.'

  'Oh some fool got into a bit of a panic,' he said, wafting gently at an inquisitive wasp. 'It was during the first war - 1916. The Gerries were bombing us from blimps.'

  'Blimps?'

  'Yes, those big balloons, you know – Zeppelins. They dropped bombs all over Sheffield. They killed quite a few people. The council panicked. Somebody said, what if they hit the art gallery or the museum? The council weren't bothered about people or hospitals. They just wanted to protect artworks and historical stuff. So, some bright spark came up with the idea of scattering the city's treasures all over the place in safety deposit boxes. They said that would make sure that if a bomb hit the museum we wouldn't lose everything all at once.' He drew deeply on his pipe and blew smoke at the persistent wasp, before pointing his chewed pipe stem at some invisible fact. 'That particular box was meant for the Ruskin papers. They used to be held at Ruskin's House years ago when it was a museum. There were some of his old notebooks and letters, and even some manuscripts of Keats or Byron. The ones I liked were some letters from Robert Southey to Ebenezer Elliot.'

  'Who's Ebenezer Elliot?'

  'Blimey! Don't they teach you owt at school?' Mister Dillon frowned. 'Ebenezer Elliot. Haven't you seen his statue in the park? He was a wonderful man, a poet. They called him the Corn Law Rhymer. His poems shamed Parliament into repealing the Corn Laws. Working folk were starving to death because of the Corn Laws. He helped to get rid of 'em.'

  Billy scowled impatiently. 'So, if you never used the safety deposit boxes, what did you do with the city's treasures?'

  The old man laughed soundlessly, his body shaking, his face growing red. Fearing he might choke, Yvonne ran to fetch a cup of water from his kitchen. He sipped it gratefully, spluttering between fits of laughter. After several moments of apparently not inhaling, he wiped a hand over his face and grinned brightly. 'I gave it to the greatest thief in all of English history,' he croaked.

  'Tha did what?' hooted Billy.

  'Robin Hood. You do know he was from Sheffield, don’t you?'

  Billy and Yvonne gaped blankly.

  'Aye, Loxley, just round the corner from Rivelin. I gave it all to him to sit on.' He laughed some more making Yvonne wonder if he would survive his upcoming anecdote.

  'I had everything crated up and
taken to the ganister mine in Little Matlock woods at Loxley. It's where Robin Hood and his merry men used to hang out.' The old man's eyes sparkled with pride. 'Well, the Sheriff of Nottingham never found him, nor his treasure, did he? So where better to hide our treasures? And what better thief to guard them than Sheffield's most famous son?' His silent laughter turned into a coughing fit. Yvonne ran to the kitchen again and refilled his cup with water.

  Billy frowned and waited for the old man to drink and recover his composure. When he did, he asked, 'There’s a poem about Spring Heeled Jack, did Ebenezer Elliot write that?'

  The old man eyed him contemptuously. 'You silly boy,' he growled. Then standing abruptly, stomped away leaving the pair staring after him.

  'I guess that's a no then,' said Billy.

  Yvonne patted him on his forearm. 'You said it was going to be a waste of time,' she said. 'And it was. Do you realise what that means, Billy?'

  He looked at her expectantly. 'What?'

  'It means you got sommat right for a change.' She laughed and ran to get on her bike.

  Billy shook his head dolefully and followed her. The old man was glaring rancorously from his kitchen window. Billy waved and pulled a face. 'Good luck to the earwigs.'

  Out in the street the pair looked up the impossibly steep climb facing them, and started pushing their bikes on foot.

  0o0o0

  Chapter Seventeen

  'We've still got Missis Hepburn,' Yvonne said, ever the optimist. 'Maybe she will talk to us. She might even give us a massive clue that makes everything fall into place.'

  Billy didn't think so, but Yvonne's positivity was hard to condemn. He pushed his bike the last few gruelling yards up Linaker Road onto the level of Bole Hill Road, and looked back over the lush green of Rivelin Valley behind him. Yvonne was already pedalling away. He mounted up and followed her, assuming she would be heading for Ranmoor, Sheffield's wealthiest suburb, and home to the widow of the man whose death the newspapers had called the "Dance Floor Drowning".

  Ranmoor lies to the south of Walkley on the far side of the same lumpy hill. Fringed by beautiful woodland, it looks westward to Ringinglow Moor and the Peak District. In its quiet avenues, mature trees overlook orderly stonewalls, built to defend the stately Victorian villas from the hoi polloi. Behind cast iron gates, evidently unsuitable for building Spitfires, gravelled drives sweep through large, leafy gardens. Ranmoor residences generally display fanciful names, rather than prosaic house numbers. Missis Hepburn lived in one grandly named The Manse Grange. Needless to say, it was not a Scottish vicar's house and had probably never contained more wheat or barley than could be found in a small brown Hovis.

  Billy and Yvonne cycled up and down the avenue three times before eventually spotting the house name. It was carved into stone pillars supporting a pair of ornamental iron gates. One of them stood wide open, held there by a weft of ivy around its cast iron bunches of grapes and fleur-de-lis.

  As Billy entered, he almost fell off his bike in shock at seeing Mister Flood emerge from the gates to the house next door. He had a white, excessively acrobatic miniature poodle on a leash. The animal was utterly out of control. It leapt and twirled in frenzied delight. Flood was kept so busy ensuring it didn’t hang itself that he missed seeing Billy and Yvonne pedal out of sight up the Hepburn’s drive.

  The Manse Grange, a fine Victorian villa, occupied a low rise overlooking lawns that swept away into dense shrubbery. It had enormous bay windows and a front door, glazed with stained glass of churchlike proportions. Constructed of weathered grey sandstone, beneath a Welsh slate roof, it was typical of mansions built by wealthy steel-mill owners at the end of the nineteenth century. A large black dog, barking savagely, charged at them as they approached. It jumped at Billy, knocked him to the ground and licked his face ecstatically. Yvonne cowered behind her bike. Billy wrestled with the dog and struggled to regain his feet.

  'My word, he certainly likes you,' observed an elegant, older lady, approaching sedately from the direction of the house. 'He usually bites visitor’s heads off. Such a pity. I do hope he’s not going soft.' She scrutinized the dog for a second or two. 'It’s probably alright. He's an excellent judge of character. You must be acceptable.'

  Billy managed to stand and take a firm hold on the dog's collar. He fussed the animal happily, rubbing its ears and scratching its back. The dog's enthusiasm calmed slightly and he released it to bound over to Yvonne who had secured a safer position behind a tea rose.

  'He's very choosy about the company he keeps,' said the woman.

  Billy smiled at her. He recognized her as the grand lady he had seen at Henry Darnley's funeral. It was not so much her face he remembered. Veiled and wearing a black straw hat her features had been almost invisible. It was her elegant, yet strangely unsteady walk, and the silver topped, ebony cane she so stylishly brandished.

  The dog finished with Yvonne and stalked back to Billy, its head low, ears down, tail wagging so hard that it almost flipped itself off its feet. 'What’s his name?' asked Billy

  'Rayner.'

  Billy frowned. 'Rainer?'

  The woman rolled her eyes. 'Yes, Rayner. It's supposed to be funny - a legal profession joke,' she said. 'You see, my – er - late husband was a solicitor. He disliked Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, his least favourite judge. My husband liked the idea of making him roll over and beg for titbits.' She shrugged, giving him a what-can-I-say look. 'Lawyers are not very funny people, I'm afraid.'

  'You – er – you are Missis Hepburn?' queried Billy, trying very hard to talk posh. 'Can we talk to you about your husband?'

  'Well I'm – er - not sure, dear. What's it about?'

  Billy introduced himself politely and then presented Yvonne, rather as if she were his dowager aunt. He began a long and unnecessarily convoluted explanation of their presence. Yvonne chipped in several times to straighten his meanderings.

  'Well I'm not sure, but you'd better come inside for a moment. I think Rayner wants me to talk to you. You've made an ally there, Billy Perks.' She set off towards the front door. 'I must say, you're a rather mysterious young pair. I'm quite intrigued, though frankly, I don't think there's much that I can tell you.'

  She led them through a panelled entrance hall, passed a huge grandfather clock, and into a vast, gloomy kitchen. A stern looking woman, whom Billy thought must be many years older than even Missis Hepburn, stood at a massive, scrubbed pine table. She was ironing a floral pinafore. Billy eyed her suspiciously. He remembered he had seen her with Missis Hepburn at the funeral. He felt instinctively that she would be trouble. She was short and wiry with sharp features. Her thin mouth looked as if it had not smiled in decades. On her head, a headscarf, badly arranged into a turban, threatened to fall off any second, but did not. Tangled silver hair protruded from it like barbed wire.

  'I'm not stopping ironing to make tea for no girl guides,' she muttered, her pale blue eyes ranging disapprovingly over Billy and Yvonne.

  'They're not girl guides, Bridget,' Missis Hepburn said flatly. 'This one's not even a girl. He's a boy called Billy. Rayner would like them to have ginger nuts and milk, if you please.'

  They left Bridget simmering in the steam of her ironing, and went through to a bright, opulent room that overlooked the garden. A grand piano, its lid firmly closed, stood in the bay of the huge window. Billy's astonished gaze darted over gilt framed watercolours on the walls. Family photographs and ornaments of silver and crystal covered the room's many polished surfaces.

  Rayner, his habits, preferences and idiosyncrasies, dominated the conversation as they consumed ginger nuts and milk. Missis Hepburn talked incessantly. Rayner, it transpired, had not been himself since "Jim's passing". He still waited forlornly at the foot of the stairs every evening, staring at the front door. His bowel movements too, they learned, had, to say the least, become unpredictable.

  'Why do you think he was killed?' Billy asked without preamble.

  Yvonne winced, her eyes rolli
ng up in her head.

  Following so closely on her observations about Rayner's troublesome motions, the question caught Missis Hepburn off guard. She looked flustered, and blinked away a tear. 'I'm sorry but I think you should go now. I feel a headache coming on. I need to lie down.'

  Yvonne shot Billy a murderous glance. 'We're really sorry, Missis Hepburn,' she said, reaching out to touch her arm. 'We didn't mean to upset you. You see, we want to know who killed Mister Hepburn. We think it was just awful and we're going to find the murderer.'

  Rising from her chair, Missis Hepburn nodded, unable to speak. She dabbed her eyes and pulled back her shoulders, composing herself. 'Please go now, children. I'm sure you mean well, but I really must rest my eyes.'

  Outside in the gentrified tranquillity of Ranmoor, Yvonne glared at Billy. 'Yer silly chuff!'

  Billy pushed off on his bike. He didn't need to be told how badly he'd mishandled things, but accepted that he was about to hear it anyway.

  'Haven't you got no sense? Why couldn't you just let her chatter on for a bit? She was eating out of your hand. But no – you have to go wading in like a bull in a Chinese shop.'

  'China shop,' corrected Billy.

  'If you'd just let her get happier with us in her own good time, you could've asked her owt, and she would've told you. Now we'll never know. You've ruined it.'

  'No I haven't,' said Billy. 'Tomorrow I'll go and ask her if I can take Rayner for a walk. I'll take him in Whitely Woods. I'll soon have her back on my side.'

  He pedalled to the gate where he had seen Mister Flood and stopped to peer round the edge of its tall gatepost. A house, even bigger than The Manse Grange, stood at the top of a long drive through sweeping gardens. ‘Wow, I didn’t think coppers were rich,’ he said.

  ‘It might not be his,’ said Yvonne. ‘He might be on a case or visiting somebody.’

  ‘Don’t be soft, he had a dog. And don’t tell me the police have started gerrin little white poodles for police dogs. And where worriz uniform? And another thing, if he was on a case his police car would be here, wouldn’t it?’