Recent Titles by Jane A. Adams from Severn House
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THE MURDER BOOK
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LEGACY OF LIES
SECRETS
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A MURDEROUS MIND
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CAUSE OF DEATH
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THE MURDER BOOK
A Henry Johnstone Mystery
Jane A. Adams
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First published in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.
This eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD
Copyright © 2016 by Jane A. Adams.
The right of Jane A. Adams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8655-2 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-757-9 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-819-3 (e-book)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
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PROLOGUE
Ruby was used to keeping out of the way when her mother had visitors. Sometimes she would sit on the stairs and listen to them talking in the front parlour but she was always ready to run back to her room. Her mother always told her that the visitors must not see Ruby, that she should stay quiet as a mouse and they should not hear her either. She had found that if she sat right at the top of the stairs she could not be seen but she could listen, and sometimes she could smell them too. People, in Ruby’s experience, smelt like the jobs they did. The road mender always smelt of his bitumen, the men who were building the shop next door smelt like bricks and mortar and paint, and the coal man always carried the scent of coal around with him. The men who came to see Ruby’s mother didn’t usually smell of any of those things. If there was any odour at all then it was usually of soap and polish and the grease they put on their hair to keep it smooth and dressed. They left their scent behind them in her mother’s room long after they had gone.
And they spoke quietly too, so that when Ruby tried to listen she could rarely hear the words, only the vague sound of the conversation.
These conversations never lasted for long; she would listen for the pause and then know it was time to run to her room. The downstairs of the house had gas lights and there were paraffin lamps for upstairs that they took up to bed with them. When Ruby’s mother and her visitors came out of the parlour it would be the signal for Ruby to flee silently back to her room and turn the lamp right down so that there was only a tiny glow. Her mother knew she didn’t like sleeping in the dark so she never made her put the light right out, but she did want her to turn it down so no one else could see it under the door. Ruby was good at being very quiet. At not being seen or heard.
That night a man had arrived that smelt of violets and when her mother had gone upstairs with him Ruby had lain in the dark, listening. She knew what sounds to expect and she knew that when they stopped there would be a little more conversation and then the man would leave. Usually her mother would then make tea for them both and she would sit on the end of Ruby’s bed and they would chat for a while. Even though she was only seven years old, Ruby had a fair idea of what was going on in the next room. Her grandparents were tenant farmers and she knew what happened when the ram tupped the ewe because her granddad had told her that was how they got lambs in the spring. She had sometimes wondered if her mother would have another baby but so far one had not come along. The men didn’t visit when Ruby’s father was home; she liked it when her father was home and Ruby had enough sense not to tell him about the visitors.
The man that smelt of violets was new. Her mother had regulars but this one hadn’t been to their house before though Ruby vaguely remembered him speaking to her mother in the street. He’d tapped lightly on the window, Ruby’s mother had let him in and they had gone to talk in the parlour. Only a little while later had they come upstairs and now they were in Ruby’s mother’s bedroom. Ruby closed her eyes and tried to doze but the sounds they were making were all wrong. Ruby sat up, some instinct telling her that whatever was going on in her mother’s bedroom was not the usual kind of activity.
Ruby crept out of bed and listened at the bedroom door. The sounds her mother made seemed odd, frightening, like she was gasping for breath. As silently as she could, Ruby opened the door and peered through the gap. The man was still dressed but she could see her mother’s clothes were torn. He was on top of her and his hands were around her throat.
For a few seconds Ruby stood and watched, and then she screamed.
‘Get off my mother. Get off her now!’
The man turned and looked at her, his hand still at her mother’s throat. Ruby ran at him, scratching at his face, scratching at his hands – anything to make him let go. The man hit out at her and Ruby flew across the room and crashed against the wall. Dimly, she was aware that someone else was now in the room but she was too dazed to recognize who it was. She was aware of the sounds of fighting and angry shouts, and when she did manage to open her eyes fully she saw that her mother was still lying on the bed while two men scuffled around her. And then there was silence.
Ruby struggled to get back to her feet but she felt shaky and sick. The room was moving like she was on board her father’s boat and the man was coming towards her, the one that smelt of violets, and the other man, that she now recognized as her cousin, Walter, was lying on the floor and there was blood all around him.
A second blow, this time with more than a fist. She died with the scent of violets hanging in the air.
Extract from The Murder Book, the commonplace book of Chief Inspector Henry Johnstone.
I have recently re-read my copy of Megrun’s La Faune des Cadavres. Despite its being published in Paris in 1894 I still find much to commend about the book. I’m aware that our pathologist, Sydney Smith, believes that some of Megrun’s findings are now somewhat outdated, though unfortunately none of our contemporary entomologists seem to have published anything beyond the occasional monograph and what strikes me again about this book is the care taken and the accuracy that the author was striving for. It began with the finding of a child’s body, a baby that’s been hidden away
and found some two years after death. The time of death was worked out purely on the basis of the creatures found to have been living on the little corpse. Megrun was able to establish the passing of two full years from his observations of the pupal remains left behind by the insects that have taken turns to feast there. I am relieved that my French is still just about up to the task of reading this in the original as I’m aware of no translations.
I’m often reminded of Megrun and his study; each time we are called out to a murder scene and find that some well-meaning individual has tidied and cleaned. Megrun’s little corpse had been undisturbed for something close to two years. Ideal conditions, I suppose you might say, for the insect life to go through their cycles, breeding and feeding, maturing and breeding again but with no other disturbance either from human or larger animals. Even the rats seem to have left the body alone. Each time we view a scene and examine a body, we have to ask ourselves what has been moved, what might have been disturbed, what creatures have clawed and bitten at body parts and destroyed or impugned the evidence there. I suppose, unless there comes a time when we are permitted to experiment, to leave bodies lying in the ground or in shallow scraped graves, covered in vegetation, or left in the open until nature and decomposition take their course, then much of what we do is likely to be guesswork or reliant on those chance discoveries that, while they are informative are, by their very nature, unusual and out of the normal run of events.
ONE
He decided to bury them in the yard but left it a full day before he came back. The night they had died he’d let himself out of the house and walked slowly down the street, past little terraced houses and small corner shops. There was building work going on next to the house – the woman had said the shop was being rebuilt and refurbished and that their little cottage was going to be part of the extension. He had hoped to find space, perhaps beneath the floor of the shop, that the builders had left but the doors had been padlocked and he’d been unable to get inside. He had thought of leaving the bodies lying in the bedroom – even thought of calling the police and letting the young man who’d attacked him take the blame. But that would have led to many questions and he knew he was best just keeping out of the way.
And so it was on the following night that he took a spade and a nail bar, borrowed from a gardener’s shed, went back to the little cottage and into the yard that separated the shop from the house, where he proceeded to examine the possible burial site. The yard was partly flagged and partly cobbled and there was a mass of bricks and mortar, building sand and debris from the shop next door alongside an old pram and part of a bicycle. In the end the graves were shallow, mere scrapes beneath the lifted flagstones and the displaced cobbles. He had been afraid of the noise he was making and moved as silently as he could. He placed each body on a sheet, dragged it down the stairs then tipped it into the scrape. He wasn’t even sure why he was doing this, though it seemed like the decent thing. He’d been shocked by the sight of them lying there – the woman, the young man and the child. Although he was fairly certain that the bodies would soon be discovered – after all, his grave-digging skills were constrained by the rubble in the yard, the hardness of the ground and his attempts to keep the noise as slight as possible, and he knew, anyway, that the builders would soon smell something wrong – some pricking of conscience drove him to make the effort.
Twice he thought he would be discovered. A dog barked, its owner shouted, he heard the sniffing beneath the gate and then, to his relief, the skitter of four paws as it ran back to its master. The second time two drunks, singing at the top of their voices, promenaded down the street only a few feet away from him, beyond the wall. He heard windows open, shouts and threats and drunken responses and he froze, terrified that a fight might start and that he’d be trapped in the yard. But shouting was all it came to; the drunks marched on singing and the window slammed closed.
He covered the bodies with loose earth and then the flags and cobbles and then spread the mess already in the yard across the whole area. He stepped back to inspect his handiwork and decided it would have to do, then he went back through the house, closed the front door behind him and walked away. He half expected a window to open and someone to shout at him but no one did. It was late, this was a street full of working men and women and they had gone to bed, switched out their lights and were sleeping, preparing for the next day’s early start. He quickened his pace, eager to put distance between himself and the scene and longing, now, for his bed. It had been a very long and exhausting night.
TWO
Mother Jo Cook had waited three weeks to die. She had hung on tenaciously to what was left of her life, fearful that the reaper might catch her before she could reach home.
Home, for Mother Jo, was not so much a place as it was the people gathered there, and when the wagon turned through the gateway at Roman Hole that night in late June, it was the welcome of family that told her it was now all right to die.
So she had herself placed by the fire in her old armchair with her shawl about her shoulders and her favourite rug, hand pegged from scraps, cast across her lap. And she drank the health of all who came to drink it with her.
She drank to all the bairns born in the past year and all the young folk newly wed or waiting until the harvest to jump the fire. She drank to the young men, still fast on their feet and handy with their fists, and the old ones whose strength lived on in their dreams.
As the dawn broke and pearly skies welcomed the sun, she drank to her own health one last time and died with her old face turned towards the morning light.
That night, they burned her wagon. Painted roses peeled from about her door as the fire reached out and the Worcester plates were smashed upon the steps. Her family, extended to fifty souls or more, ate the spit roast pig that farmer Hanson had gifted and drank and fought and danced and the wagon fire both lit and shadowed them.
‘Barbarians! We won’t get a stroke of work from any of them tomorrow.’
‘They’ll work. They know which side their bread’s buttered.’
Robert Hanson snorted. His father’s gift of the pig had disgusted him enough, without his father’s grudging approval being added to it.
His horse skittered sideways, disturbed by the smell of smoke rising from the valley and Robert thoughtlessly jerked on the reins. The horse was a raw-boned, black beast with a hard mouth and a will to match that of its rider, and it rankled with Robert that his father would not trust him with the finer animals in the stable. His father’s horse snorted. By contrast, this was an Arab cross, with the small head and short back of its desert mother and the stamina of its English father. A pretty thing by any reckoning, the bay was his father’s pride and Robert was allowed nowhere near it.
‘That’s Samuels’ boy,’ Hanson senior said, pointing with the handle of his crop. Samuels was his stockman, a man trusted where Robert was not. ‘If he works like his old man I’ll have no reason to complain.’
‘Works?’ Robert scowled at his father. ‘Gypos don’t work. They scrounge. Do just enough to make it look right and then cheat you blind.’
He dodged back, the riding crop having changed direction and flicked his way.
‘Samuels is a good man. Knows the beasts and works his time. You’d best remember that. You’ll remember too that your great granddad was related to Mother Jo.’
Robert said no more. He glanced contemptuously back down into the valley to where the young man his father had indicated danced with Helen Lee and he frowned all the more. Gypsies! He didn’t care what his father said about it – no way were their kind any kin of his.
She had seen him round and about the village, of course, but from the moment she saw him up close Helen knew that Ethan Samuels was no ordinary man. He had eyes as blue as summer and his dark hair, despite his youth, was already streaked with winter grey. Tall and strong, he held her firmly as they danced, his hand burning through the cotton of her dress and his body just a little too close to hers for
it to be proper.
On the edge of the circle, half hidden in the smoky shadows, Frank watched them. Helen glimpsed him as she turned in Ethan’s arms. She smiled provocatively at Frank and saw his expression harden, his jaw clenching tight.
Ethan followed her gaze.
‘Has he spoken for you then?’ he asked. He pulled her even closer. ‘If I’d spoken for you I’d let you dance with no one else. You know that?’
She pulled her gaze back, looking up at him with bright, mischievous eyes. ‘He never thought he’d have to speak,’ she said. ‘Just assumed, did our Frank.’
‘Well, he assumed wrong then, didn’t he?’
‘Did he?’ Her smile broadened. ‘What’s it to you anyway, Ethan Samuels?’
‘Don’t be chy with me, girl. I looked at you, you looked at me. Nothing more to be said, is there?’
Helen laughed. ‘Chy?’ she said. ‘I’m not being coy with you, lad. I’m dancing with you, ain’t I?’
‘That you are, Helen Lee.’ He glanced sideways at Frank Church. Frank’s hands were clenched now as well as his jaw. ‘Much of a fighter, is he?’ Ethan asked.
‘You’d bare your fists for me, would you?’
‘I’d bare more than that.’
She pulled away but only a little, just enough to let him know he’d crossed the line. ‘You’ll get me talked about,’ she said.
‘I’ll guess you’re talked about already,’ Ethan said. ‘But if he wants to fight, I’ll fight him. Like I said, he should have spoken for you and since he’s not …’
Helen allowed him to draw her close once more, catching a disapproving look from her mother as they turned again. ‘No, he’s not,’ she said. ‘And he’s not much of a fighter anyway.’
Ethan smiled at her and Helen felt her heart melt.
Robert Hanson had turned for home long before his father rode down the hill to join the wake. Elijah had come to say goodbye to his kinswoman. Old habits and old traditions were still too much a part of his being for him to let this moment pass without wishing her a good journey into the afterlife. He handed the horse’s reins to his stockman and strode into the circle where the dancers had now ceased to whirl and the fiddlers fallen silent. Someone handed him a glass and he drank deeply to the memory of a woman who had seemed old when Elijah himself had been just a boy.
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