The Wickenham Murders

by Amy Myers

  THE WICKENHAM MURDERS

  Amy Myers

  © Amy Myers 2004

  Amy Myers has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2004 by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS INC.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  I would like to thank Edwin Buckhalter of Severn House and his publishing director, Amanda Stewart, for their support for this novel from its very early stages, and their equally splendid team for seeing it through so efficiently to publication – in particular Hugo Cox for his eagle editorial eye. My agent, Dorothy Lumley of Dorian Literary Agency, also has my usual gratitude for her unerring instinct in picking the wheat from the chaff in my work.

  In the path from the dawning of an idea to a novel’s completion lie many pitfalls and I am very grateful to those who have done their best to help me avoid them: in particular my thanks go to Nick Claxton, Head of Forensics at LGC, Teddington, and his colleagues; to Suzanne Smith; to Martin Kender; to Allan Jamieson, Director of The Forensic Institute, Edinburgh; to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich; to Marian Anderson, to Clifford Long and to Valerie Barnard. If I have blundered into unseen pitfalls, it is through no fault of theirs.

  A.M.

  Chapter One

  Georgia Marsh closed the front door and peered into her father’s study. Good, he was up and she could hear the familiar squeak of his wheelchair. He was not at his computer desk, though. Not so good. She entered cautiously, for she liked to know what she was in for. Now that they lived in adjoining homes instead of together, this was usually easier to gauge.

  He was still at his breakfast table (shared with a few piles of books and papers obviously brushed impatiently aside) and was bent over an open spread of the Daily Telegraph. He must have sensed her behind him.

  ‘Georgia!’ came a triumphant roar. ‘Marsh & Daughter are in business again.’

  She whipped off her coat and hurried in to find out the worst. ‘We’re never out of it, Peter.’

  It was always ‘Peter’ at work; the role of father was left behind at the office door – at his wish as well as hers. It made each other’s company more bearable outside office hours if the slanging matches that went on within them could be distanced – in theory, at least. The system worked, more or less.

  Her comment was true enough. There was always some article to write, some interesting line of inquiry to follow up, some book to finish or proof-read, some phone call to be made to DI Mike Gilroy (poor chap). Straight-faced, she’d suggested once that the Stour, Peter’s former Kent police area, should lay on a scrambler phone to his home for secure speedy access. It was sourly refused, with no sign of a grin on the DI’s face. In Peter’s endearing mind, the right to ask well-earned favours went on for ever; after all, it was only nine years since he’d had to retire because of the shooting incident that had paralysed him.

  ‘What’s set your nose twitching this time?’ She peered curiously over his shoulder but no obvious headline leapt out at her.

  ‘Fee fi fo fum, I smell the sniff of a stink here.’ He jabbed his finger down on a four-line paragraph under ‘News in Brief’. ‘Remember Wickenham? Up on the North Downs somewhere towards Gravesend. I said it was a sad sort of village, didn’t I?’

  ‘Can’t place it. Yes, I can.’ A vague memory returned. ‘Donkey’s years ago though.’

  ‘It may be donkey’s years ago – after all, these two legs were operating then,’ Peter replied without rancour, ‘but you must remember it. I’d had a case in Dartford, and you came to meet me for some reason. We stopped at Wickenham for tea.’

  The memory was becoming more vivid now. ‘A sprawling village trying not to be a dormitory town for London,’ she recalled. ‘Oh, and a funny old cream-tea place with stale cakes. What about Wickenham, anyway?’ Annoyingly Peter was now keeping his fist over the relevant paragraph.

  ‘Skeleton discovered in denehole.’

  ‘Is that all?’ The deneholes of the chalky north of Kent were a notorious danger for inquisitive boys and unwary walkers in the woodland areas. Their long vertical shafts, often with old treads in the walls for descent to the tunnels spreading out below, were an enticement for the adventurous, especially since their age was shrouded in mystery. Were they ancient mines, or hidey-holes, or more modern burrowings for the lime kilns of the nineteenth century? Whichever, the story didn’t seem to merit Peter’s excitement.

  ‘Come off it, Georgia,’ he said impatiently. ‘Not like you to be so blinkered. How can we know if that’s all? It could be the remains of a Saxon king, it could be Lord Lucan’s, it could be the door to the greatest challenge we’ve ever had. You remember I said at the time there were unanswered questions in the Wickenham air.’

  ‘Did you?’ She frowned, annoyed that still nothing much came to mind, even though a shared ‘nose’ was the very basis of their partnership.

  Research was chiefly her department, writing was chiefly his, and they divided the phoning and Internet work between them. Peter had his adapted car for transport, but his own forays into the outside world so far as business was concerned were cunningly crafted affairs in which the role of wheelchair-bound author was carefully exploited. You, Georgia, are my eyes and my legs, he would grandly declare – unless he decided to become involved himself.

  On the whole Marsh & Daughter made a good team. Most importantly, she and her father shared an instinct for unfinished business, sometimes in a story, but usually in the atmosphere of a place. This was what gripped them both. She was never sure whether this instinct was inborn or developed over the years. Perhaps it was both. In his former career Peter had always been drawn to a particular kind of case, which the then Detective Sergeant Gilroy termed as ‘having his name on it’, and it invariably turned out to hark back to the past for its resolution.

  ‘Fingerprints left on Time,’ is how Peter and she described it. Nothing harsh, nothing tangible, just the imprint of traumatic events on the places where they had happened, especially those that had had no closure. After all, he would pontificate, ghosts were thought to be a form of fingerprints on Time, as they haunted the localities where they had lived. It was an illogical contradiction that although Peter scoffed at the idea of visible ghosts, they both believed wholeheartedly in the fingerprint theory. It was no different from entering a house or pub for the first time and sensing a happy or unhappy atmosphere. It could stem from the present or from the past, but it was there. Georgia had been sceptical at first, and then once she’d visited Montségur in south-west France, site of the massacre of the Cathars in the thirteenth century. That had convinced her. The passage of thousands of tourists and pilgrims had failed to expunge the air of tragedy there.

  Wickenham might not be a Montségur, but Kent was an interesting county in which the all too evident signs of modernity, with its fast-rail Channel link and motorways cutting their scars through its middle, obscured the slumbering past, which every so often would rise up and remind the world of its presence. The recent discovery of the Bronze Age Ringlemere Cup was one such example.

  Their own village, Haden Shaw, not far from Canterbury, and, as was Wickenham, on the Kentish North Downs,
had an atmosphere about it that reminded her daily that with every step she took she was walking on the lives of the past. It was all the more annoying therefore that she couldn’t remember Wickenham more clearly. ‘So whose is the skeleton? Is that the mystery?’

  ‘Not necessarily. In fact probably not at all,’ he said complacently. ‘Remember the Ada Proctor case? It came back to me while we were there and your mother looked it up when we got back.’

  Always ‘your mother’, never Elena. It was his way of distancing her in his mind. The fact that her mother had done the looking up probably explained why Georgia had half blotted out the memory. Those had been the nightmare years, which now seemed another country, a land she and Peter did not visit any more, even though it still lay deeply buried within them. It was the tacitly acknowledged spur that drove the work of Marsh & Daughter, while Elena Marsh was now Elena Pardoe and living in France with husband number 2.

  ‘Yes,’ Georgia replied loudly.

  ‘I thought you would.’

  ‘The doctor’s daughter.’ She scrabbled in her memory. ‘Found strangled in a field early one Friday morning in the 1930s or so.’

  ‘1929, to be precise.’

  ‘Sexually assaulted.’

  ‘Wrong. Not proven. Some clothing missing, torn and disarranged, plenty of signs of a fierce struggle – possible sexual attack, but no forensic evidence to prove anything other than strangulation.’

  ‘But that was why –’ Georgia was getting involved now ‘– the prosecution argued that wasn’t important. She was a mature woman, well built, and was too strong for her attacker to succeed in his first aim. She must have fought him off, and he grabbed her from behind to stop her screaming.’

  ‘Hardly important in the middle of a lonely field at night. I remember thinking that when I first read about the case. I’ve got it here somewhere.’ Peter picked up his book claw contraption, which was always close at hand, and hoicked off the shelf, catching it in his free hand with a deftness born of long experience. ‘John Mitchison, Village Murders, 1972. It’s the only published account to my knowledge, and it stuck in my mind. Think, Georgia. You must see the glaring question.’

  ‘Why was she in a field at that time of night with anyone whose company she hadn’t carefully chosen? Didn’t they say her attacker was a slight lad, medium height?’

  ‘Yes. Young Davy Todd. Ah, Margaret –’ he turned to greet his carer-cum-housekeeper – ‘the restorative coffee and biscuits.’

  ‘No. The restorative coffee and an apple,’ she informed him tartly. Margaret was the sanest person Georgia had ever met. She had to be to cope with Peter’s moods. She had been the village doctor’s receptionist until she fell out with his computer. Fortunately for the Marshes, this had coincided with Elena’s departure, and her six hours daily kept Peter’s life in order. Or relative order.

  ‘You’d think, being a cripple, I could have something I liked,’ Peter complained bitterly.

  ‘Tell yourself you like apples.’ Margaret was clearly in no mood for negotiation and Peter had the art of judging this down to a fine art.

  ‘Davy Todd –’ Peter turned to Georgia after this ritual was concluded and Margaret retreated victorious – ‘was the Proctors’ young gardener. The evidence against him was circumstantial but strong, and Dr Proctor gave reluctant testimony that Ada was always hobnobbing with Davy. He was arrested, tried, found guilty and hanged for murder in April 1930. He was twenty years old in 1929. And she was thirty-seven.’

  Only three years older than she was, Georgia instantly thought. ‘Any doubt about the verdict, Peter?’

  ‘That, Georgia darling, is what I keep a daughter for. It seemed to me such an unlikely murder, especially since it took place on Hallowe’en, hardly a time for canoodling in the open. So it’s your job to find out if Ada Proctor and Davy Todd are still leaving fingerprints over the village.’

  ‘We don’t know anyone is,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s years since we’ve been there. Whatever it was you sensed may have disappeared ages ago.’

  ‘So what? If the ghost of Anne Boleyn stepped out from behind that fireplace, you wouldn’t say push off, you’re too late to be interesting, would you?’

  ‘I’m not sure what I’d say,’ Georgia answered fairly. ‘I might run for my life, or I might ask her whether she knows her daughter, Good Queen Bess, became a twenty-first-century media celeb. There was another historical documentary on TV last night. Did you see it?’

  ‘Don’t change the subject. Wickenham.’ Peter jabbed his finger on the paper. ‘It needs Marsh & Daughter.’

  ‘Cut the rhetoric,’ she suggested politely.

  ‘You’re unusually crochety this morning, Georgia. Where’s your sense of mystery, of endeavour, of adventure?’

  ‘Still asleep on my pillow,’ she retorted. ‘A somewhat disturbed night. Someone was playing a tape of “The Emperor” very loudly at 3 a.m. It’s all very well for you, this house is on a corner, it’s just me that suffers.’ It was the usual badinage. They both knew why he did it.

  *

  Ada Proctor had refused to go away during the two weeks that had passed since their first discussions of the case, but they were very little further forward. Before Ada had stepped into their lives, they had been working on an interesting case in East Anglia – another skeleton in fact, so why should it be Ada’s murder that persistently thrust itself before her? Probably it was because of the lack of progress, Georgia convinced herself. Peter simply cast her a look when she expressed this view to him, however, and she knew why. They both remembered that when they had met in Wickenham that day she hadn’t been alone.

  It wasn’t just Elena that had drawn a veil over Wickenham for them both. Zac had been with her. No wonder she’d done her best to forget the day – just as she had her brief (if exciting, she granted him that) marriage. Only that couldn’t be entirely forgotten since Zac, once out of prison, kept turning up like a bright new penny – usually without any of the latter. A more incompetent criminal than Zac Taylor she couldn’t imagine, save that he had succeeded in fooling her for three years.

  If Ada Proctor had been a fool in encouraging Davy Todd, Georgia was scarcely in a position to throw stones. Indeed, Marsh & Daughter wasn’t in a position to throw anything at present, owing to lack of information. She could find nothing in the local press about Davy Todd after the date of his hanging. The 1930s were before the days of pressure for investigation of doubtful verdicts – though nothing Georgia had so far read suggested this one was. There hadn’t even been an appeal.

  The greatest disappointment was that their trawl of the National Archives/Public Record Office website had revealed that the records of the trial were scanty.

  ‘No appeal, and no transcript of course so far back,’ Peter had reported gloomily. The practice of printed shorthand notes had come to an end in 1912, and there clearly hadn’t been enough public interest in the case for the Treasury Solicitors and Director of Public Prosecutions to keep full records. ‘Poor old Davy was hardly a Roger Casement treason trial,’ Peter continued. ‘There’s a listing in the Calendar of Depositions and another under Indictments, but I doubt if they would tell us anything that we don’t know already. Only jury summonses, the charges, gaol deliveries and so on, and the results of the original trial and appeals. With luck the coroner’s report inquest documents might be there.’

  ‘Any lists of exhibits attached?’

  ‘Yes, you can pop up to Kew to see what’s there. I couldn’t see anything dramatic mentioned in the Times report that needed cross-checking.’

  This was the one bright spot, since the law reports in the press were much fuller in the days of Ada Proctor than they were now, and some years ago Peter had splashed out on the microfiche of The Times for the first ninety years of the twentieth century plus the CDs for more recent years.

  Davy Todd had been charged on 1 November 1929, the inquest was on Monday the 4th, and the funeral the following day. He was committed for trial
at the Old Bailey on the 7th, and the trial was held early in February. All very quick by today’s standards but fairly normal for those days. The trial only lasted two days, but The Times provided a few paragraphs of verbatim evidence.

  ‘Here –’ Peter waved a printed sheet at her – ‘is the voice of Davy Todd, give or take an assumption that the Times reporter wouldn’t or couldn’t reproduce the Kentish dialect for his readers.’

  ‘Read it to me,’ Georgia asked. Local dialect past and present was one of Peter’s specialties and he liked nothing more than speaking it. This was his moment and he took it.

  ‘This is from his cross-examination,’ Peter began. ‘“Question: That night you’d arranged to meet Miss Proctor, hadn’t you?” “No, it were de next night,” says Davy. “We’d been going to go dat night, being All Hallow’s Eve, see, but she said she were going to Lunnon and didn’t know what time she’d be acoming back. So it were de next night we fixed on and I went to see my Mary dat night instead. I were glad o’dat. Den I did see Miss Proctor dat night walking up lane to de fields, I were surprised and I said dat to Mary, I did. I did.”’

  A chill ran through Georgia. Peter was good – too good. It might of course be a problem to listen to Davy’s words across the decades. Too much of it, without knowing the background and understanding where and how it had sprung from, could be dangerous. It could influence them too much too soon.

  Peter realized this as much as she did, for he said, ‘Just one more extract for now. Here he’s under real pressure, I’d say. Question: “You liked Miss Proctor, didn’t you?” Answer: “That I did.” Then the crown counsel pushed on: “You liked her very much, didn’t you? You wanted to touch her, kiss her.” Answer: “No, I don’t dare. She was doctor’s daughter.” Question: “Dare? So you did want to touch her.” Answer: “I never wanted to. Not never.”’

  ‘What about Ada?’ Georgia managed to say. ‘She isn’t here to speak for herself.’