Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm

by Gil North

  Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm

  Gil North

  With an Introduction

  by Martin Edwards

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 Gil North Limited

  Introduction copyright © 2016 Martin Edwards

  Originally published in 1960 by Chapman & Hall Ltd

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  First E-book Edition 2016

  ISBN: 9781464206665 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm

  Copyright

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Introduction

  Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm launched a series featuring a Yorkshire detective which eventually ran to eleven novels. Not only did the books enjoy considerable popularity, but the eponymous sergeant also became a television detective, brought vividly to life by Leslie Sands. Despite this success, rather more than half a century after Cluff’s first appearance in print, he has become a forgotten detective. Yet as this book shows, he is a distinctive and impressive character, and the crisp, concisely written stories about him retain their power to this day.

  Cluff’s first recorded case concerns the death of a woman in her forties. Amy Wright had married late in life, to a much younger man. She was quite comfortably off, yet is found dead at her home, poisoned by gas in her own bedroom. The local coroner presides over the inquest—splendidly described—which reaches the predictable verdict that Amy has committed suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed. Modern readers may better appreciate the nuances of local reaction to Amy’s death if they bear in mind that, when this novel first appeared, suicide was still a crime in the UK; decriminalization only came with the Suicide Act 1961.

  One person is not satisfied, and that is Sergeant Caleb Cluff. Cluff lives alone in an old cottage in his native Gunnarshaw, with a dog, a cat, and an irascible cleaning lady for company. He comes from farming stock, and his brother, who farms at nearby Cluff End, plays an important part in the story. Cluff has never married, but possesses a deep understanding of human nature, born of years of observing life in a small community at close quarters; in this respect, if in no others, he resembles Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.

  Like so many fictional detectives, Cluff has a difficult relationship with those in authority, and in particular with the officious Inspector Mole, who resents feeling much less at ease with the local community than his stubborn, taciturn subordinate. At first glance, Cluff seems almost to be a caricature of the grumpy Yorkshireman, but beneath the dour, reticent exterior lurks an instinctive sympathy for the underdog, as well as a fierce contempt for arrogance and cruelty.

  He commands the respect of young Constable Barker, who is a witness when Cluff menaces Amy’s selfish and shallow husband, whom he suspects of being responsible—morally, if not legally—for Amy’s death. Barker does not, however, have the temerity to voice his private thoughts about Cluff: “... the most down-to-earth of all of us. Your feet on the ground, rooted in the soil. Everything about you—what people mean when they talk of the countryman ... Unshakable.” In this story, Cluff behaves like an avenging angel, determined to seek justice for Amy Wright, and allowing nothing and no one to stand in his way.

  It is almost a cliché to compare a strongly evoked setting for a crime novel to a character in the story, but it is undoubtedly true that the sturdy market town of Gunnarshaw, and the bleak, rain-swept moorland outside its boundaries, combine to form the perfect complement to Cluff’s dogged personality. The dead woman’s husband soon becomes overwhelmed by a claustrophobia induced partly by conscience:

  The smallness of Gunnarshaw, the knowledge of its people about each other, oppressed him. He felt suddenly that there was nowhere in Gunnarshaw he could turn, that Sergeant Cluff, if he was not around the first corner, must always be waiting round the second.

  The storyline is strong, but this is not a whodunnit; Gil North’s focus is not on mystification for the sake of game-playing, but on the human condition. His work shows the influence of Georges Simenon, and his most famous character, Inspector Jules Maigret. Nor is North unique as a British disciple of Simenon, who also inspired two other novelists working at much the same time as North. They also had their books televised, although long after Cluff reached the screens; Alan Hunter was the author of the novels adapted for the screen as Inspector George Gently, while the Cornishman W.J. Burley was the creator of Wycliffe.

  Gil North was the pen-name of Geoffrey Horne (1916–1988), who was born in Skipton, where his father was the Town Clerk. After attending the local grammar school, where he became head boy, he studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He took a double First, and also acquired a diploma in social anthropology. Joining the Colonial Service, he spent many years in Nigeria and the then British Cameroon.

  As a “bush” district officer, in charge of areas of up to 5,000 square miles in size, he found that the experience of boyhood holidays on a hill-farm in the Dales helped him to bond with the local farmers and fishermen. He described his job in Africa as that of a jack-of-all trades: “magistrate, coroner, officer-in-charge of divisional police detachments, divisional prison officer and sub-Treasurer”. He retired in the mid-fifties as the wind of change blew through Africa, and returned to Skipton—where Cluff was filmed, and on which Gunnarshaw is based—determined to pursue his interest in writing.

  At first, he wrote under his own name, producing novels such as No Escape, which drew on his knowledge of Africa; a children’s book about pirates set in the Caribbean, Quest for Gold, which he dedicated to his son Josh; and short stories. He digressed into detective fiction mainly as a means of “relaxation”, but once he found he could make crime pay, Sergeant Cluff began to monopolize his attention.

  He continued to write about Cluff long after the television series came to an end in 1965. In all there were eleven Cluff novels, all written in his characteristically staccato style, together with a handful of short stories. For a very different book, A Corpse for Kofi Katt, published in 1978, he returned to Africa for fictional inspiration. Kofi Katt, the son of a wea
lthy English father and a black mother, is a police superintendent with a social conscience who investigates the death of a nameless beggar whose body is found trapped in the mangroves. Katt may have been envisaged as an interesting new series character, but the book had no successors.

  The author’s son Josh Horne thinks it fair to say that there was a good deal of his father in Cluff. The author may have studied at Cambridge, and worked for many years in foreign parts, but he remained at heart a stolid dalesman, strongly conservative in his outlook. During the Swinging Sixties, he was content to label himself as “the squarest of squares, hotly opposed to the new permissive society [and] its lack of discipline”. Yet there is an even more striking characteristic of Sergeant Cluff that stands out, in this book, and elsewhere in the series. He is, beneath that formidable exterior, unquestionably a man of genuine compassion.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  Chapter I

  Silent in the old cottage isolated at the foot of the moors. Silent except for the crackling of the log fire in the grate, or a sudden flurry of rain beating against the windows, or a more pronounced moan from the wind hurtling over the moor tops.

  The silence shattered. The harsh ringing of a telephone, regular, unceasing.

  The dog in front of the fire stirred and rumbled in his throat. In the passage outside the living-room the telephone continued its strident summons.

  The dog was big, shaggy, of a working breed, descended from a line of collies. He climbed to his feet, his gaze shifting to his master, nodding in a large arm-chair, comfortable, at peace.

  The dog began to bark. The man in the chair jerked, coming to life. A cat, built on the same generous proportions as the dog, slept on the man’s knees. Everything alive in the cottage was huge in the dancing shadows cast by the fire and the dim light of the single oil-lamp, turned low. The long fur of the cat, grey, Persian, stood on end. The cat’s claws unsheathed and dug through the cloth of the man’s trousers, into his thigh.

  “Quiet, Clive! Quiet!” the man ordered.

  He heaved his bulk reluctantly from the chair, holding the cat. The cat protested, its protests dying as the man placed it in the warm hollow of the cushion on which he had been sitting.

  The dog’s tongue lolled from his open jaws. His flanks rose and fell. His alert eyes followed the man as the man moved slowly, deliberately, without haste, to the passage.

  “Yes?” said the man into the mouthpiece of the telephone. “Of course. Cluff speaking.”

  His words dropped like stones into a pool, broad-vowelled, well spaced, with long pauses between them.

  “What?” he said. “Where? Number thirty-three, Balaclava Street? I suppose so. Not long. Half-an-hour. No more. Less.”

  The cat did not move.

  “Stay, Clive! Sit!” Cluff said.

  The dog sank to his haunches. The dog’s ears pricked as the outer door slammed. The dog’s head inclined lower in disappointment as a car engine started with difficulty, wheezing and clanking.

  Rain plastered itself against the yellowed windscreen of the bull-nosed, two-seater Morris, defeating the efforts of the worn wipers. The ancient car travelled the dark road, freewheeling into a deep dip, labouring up the opposite hill at snail’s pace. The steering wheel twisted in Cluff’s loose grip. Cluff’s heavy tweeds were damp and redolent in the confined space under the tattered hood. His shapeless tweed hat, with the grouse feather in its band, hooded his eyes. On the seat beside him the handle of a thick, chestnut-wood walking-stick, its ferrule wedged against the gear lever, bounced with every jolt.

  The lights of houses ahead. The main road into Gunnarshaw. The car knew its own way. Down to the church. The High Street. At the bottom of the High Street, left. Past shuttered shops. The glare of a hotel. Right, into Little Crimea.

  Sevastopol Road. The car slowed. Side-streets ran away from the road, at right-angles to it, climbing a hill. Between the mouths of the streets rows of houses, opening directly on to the pavement, all alike, a door, a parlour window, the windows upstairs of a larger bedroom and a smaller one. Sometimes the glass in these smaller windows was frosted, where the room behind had been turned from its original purpose into a bathroom. The curtains in the light of the infrequent street-lamps were white, neat and clean, the doorsteps scrubbed and holystoned.

  Inkerman Street. Alma Street. Scutari Street.

  Cluff crouched forward, staring into the night. A grocer’s on one corner. A cobbler’s on the other. He swung the wheel, regardless of whether there was traffic behind him, disdaining the use of an indicator, sidling like a crab into Balaclava Street. The street was unadopted and the rear wheels of the car spun on the slope slippery with the rain, scouring the wet grass, sending mud flying. Cluff pulled on the brake. He climbed out and the car ran backwards a little, until chocked by a boulder.

  He could feel it in the blackness, a difference in atmosphere, a sense of evil, of things hidden. The doors he passed should have been locked and bolted. In the dark they appeared closed, but Cluff had an impression that they were open, just the slightest of cracks, people listening behind them in unlit hallways. Pale patches showed in the upstairs windows of the houses on the side opposite to him, disappearing when he paused to look. Eyes watched him. More than once he heard a quick intake of breath. At the top of the hill a dog escaped. Someone shouted and a short, staccato yelp of pain came to Cluff’s ears.

  Three quarters of the way up light spilled from an open door on to the flagged pavement. Heavy-shod feet clattered towards him. A uniformed constable almost knocked Cluff down.

  “There, Sergeant,” the constable said, turning to point. “Up there.”

  A smallish man, stocky, with a permanently hostile manner, dressed in Inspector’s uniform, hopped about in front of the open door.

  “At last, Sergeant,” the Inspector said. “Do we have to wait all night?”

  Cluff ignored him.

  Inspector Mole, dripping, angry to be called out on such a night, grew more irritated, conscious of Cluff’s physical mastery. Liberty of action amongst his inferiors offended him. Unorthodoxy was anathema to him. He was a natural man, suitably married, the father of a family. He conducted himself with decorum in all his actions, official and unofficial. He had a tidy mind and Caleb Cluff with his dog and his cat and his cottage two miles from town, fitted into none of his pigeon-holes. He supposed that one representative of the County Criminal Investigation Department was essential in the division. He was at a loss to understand how the Sergeant had made the plain clothes branch in the first instance.

  Behind Mole, in the doorway out of the rain, a little woman could not keep still. She was thin and angular, dried-up, with peaked features, wispy grey hair, a long nose, a receding chin. She wore cotton stockings under her crumpled skirt and her jumper was of a neutral colour. Her watery eyes stared past Mole at Cluff, through black-rimmed glasses fixed to her ears by metal sidepieces. A man without a jacket, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his collar and tie discarded, fat overlapping the belt holding his trousers up, leaned unperturbed against a passage wall.

  “Well?” asked Cluff. “Well?”

  “Next door—” Inspector Mole began.

  “It’s all nonsense,” the man interrupted. “I told her so. She’s got you out for nothing.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Sergeant,” the woman pleaded. “If the sky fell on him he wouldn’t notice. I know there’s something wrong. I know it!”

  “Tell me about it, Mrs. Toogood,” Cluff said, quietly.

  “Damn him!” Mole swore to himself. “How does he come to know everybody in Gunnarshaw? What chance have the rest of us got?”

  “I always said so,” the woman went on, in a piercing voice. “Married. At forty-five. To him. Twenty years younger, if he’s a day!”

  “Look,” said her husband. “Why don’t you come in? She�
��ll talk for hours.”

  “Amy?” Cluff asked. “Is it Amy?”

  “The milk,” Mrs. Toogood said. “It hasn’t been taken in. On the back doorstep. The paper, sticking through the front letter-box. I haven’t heard anything all day. There’s no light.”

  “Gone out,” said Mr. Toogood. “She doesn’t have to account to you for her movements.”

  Cluff moved forward. “I’ll take this way,” he said. “It’s quicker than going round the row.”

  Mole and the constable followed him through the house. Its owners tagged on to the end of the procession. Cluff led them into the backyard, out into the back-street, into the yard of the house next door.

  “You can see for yourselves,” Mrs. Toogood said. “The curtains, still over the window—”

  Chapter II

  “Thomas!” Cluff said to the police-constable. “Break it in.”

  Constable Thomas drew himself up. He spat on his hands and rubbed them together. Then he took the doorknob in his fingers and pulled and pushed without effect.

  “I don’t like it,” Inspector Mole told Cluff. “After all, there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation. The Superintendent—”

  Constable Thomas retreated as far as the yard would let him. He charged at the back door, sideways, with all the force of his sixteen stones. Something cracked and the wood of the jamb splintered.

  “Ah,” said the constable.

  He tried again and the door burst open.

  “My God!” Mole exclaimed. “My God!”

  Mrs. Toogood screamed, holding her hands to her nose.

  Sergeant Cluff looked about him. A tiny rockery occupied the corner of the yard wall and the house side. Cluff picked up one of the rocks and hurled it through the ground-floor window.

  Gas flooded out into the night.

  “Take her home,” Cluff told Mr. Toogood. “Go on. Take her home.”

  Mr. Toogood laid his hand on his wife’s arm. He led her away and she was unwilling to go.