Alkan Murder

Julius Falconer

Description

The wealthy and reclusive Harry Quirke, misanthropist and student of the piano works of Alkan, is stabbed to death in his country house outside Tadcaster. Only one of the obvious suspects seems to have much of a motive: his alibi is shaky, it is true, but there is no proof of his involvement. DI Moat and his assistant DS Stockwell follow one false lead after another in an exasperating investigation that seems to be getting nowhere: a gypsy caravan, an old murder in Kansas, the hurried will of a dying man, a golf-course green and an unfinished catalogue of Alkan's works - none of it seems to make sense. Finally, the murderer makes the smallest of slips, and the penny drops - but it's a close thing!Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

Informations

• Publié par: Pneuma Springs Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782282334
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Alkan Murder





Julius Falconer
Copyright
First Published in 2012 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing
The Alkan Murder Copyright © 2012 Julius Falconer
Julius Falconer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work
Pneuma Springs
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Falconer, Julius. The Alkan murder.
1. Moat, Walter (Fictitious character)--Fiction. 2. Stockwell, Detective Sergeant (Fictitious character)-- Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories. I. Title 823.9'2-dc23
Mobi eISBN: 9781782282440 ePub eISBN: 9781782282334 PDF eBook eISBN: 9781782282556 Paperback ISBN: 9781782281832
Pneuma Springs Publishing E: [e-mail] W: www.pneumasprings.co.uk
Published in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law. Contents and/or cover may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.
Dedication
I am delighted to dedicate this book
out of deep family sentiment
to my great-nieces and great–nephews
(none of whom is yet old enough to get much out of it -
but then I’m not old enough to be their great-uncle)

Piper, Riley, Carter
Nico, Matisse
Louis, Charlie
Olivia
Op. 39 No. 5, Marche funèbre (part of Douze études dans les tons mineurs and 2 nd movement of Symphonie pour piano seul ), a work in F minor, marked andantino. Composed between 1846 and 1857, published in Paris in 1857 by Simon Richault. Set out on the following pattern: abcabd, respectively 16 bars, 25 bars, interlude in F major 33 bars ( con dolore contenuto ), 16 bars, 26 bars and a coda of 9 bars. Six minutes of sombre, inward music. One of eleven marches Alkan composed for various combinations of instruments (nine for piano solo; one for four hands at one piano; one for four singers and chamber ensemble – ‘Funeral march on the death of a parrot’). It seems unlikely that Alkan was seeking to commemorate the death of an individual known to him: the march is an exercise in piano technique. It does not match either the grandeur or the complexity of other famous examples of the genre (notably Beethoven and Chopin) but has, as one may put it, its own charm and, furthermore, is accessible even to the young pianist. Level of difficulty: ¶ .


from Henry F. QUIRKE, The Complete Guide to the Piano Works of Charles-Valentin Alkan, with Biographical Notes, Chronology, Analytical Catalogue, Musical Observations and Annotated Discography (left unfinished on the author’s untimely death)
The Novel
1
As Sciascia says, only two things are certain: God and death. Both figure in the following story, each in his own way – but mainly, this being the account of a murder case conducted by DI Walter Moat of the North Yorkshire police in the summer of 2011, the latter. Death comes to all of us. In that sense, it is, of course, certain; but the manner of it and the time of it may be quite uncertain – as you shall hear in the case of Harry Quirke, late of Scarthingwell Hall in the Yorkshire hamlet of that name. Scarthingwell Hall is a country mansion set beside a small lake not far from the town of Tadcaster. It is surrounded by a large park dotted with copses, straggling hedges, ponds and enclosures and disturbed only by the gentle noises of grazing animals and wildlife going about its business. The house itself, one-time residence of the Hammond family and, through them, of Sir Edward (later Baron) Hawke (1710-1781), admiral and Member of Parliament, rests on a south-facing slope looking across the lake: a broad, squat building in a mixture of styles, with few aesthetically pleasing features. The whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts. (I speak as I find.) It is absurdly large for its single occupant, but lately Mr Quirke’s niece Brenda, orphaned at a young age and brought up by friends, had come to live there, to share the cavernous house with her wealthy and misanthropic uncle. His motive in offering shelter to his late sister’s daughter was, the carping alleged, less altruistic than self-serving, as the climax of his efforts to find a housekeeper who would cost him only board and lodging. Previous holders of the post had invariably left after a few months, or at most a year, unwilling any longer to tolerate their saturnine employer or the house’s air of gloom and decay. His hope was, the carping alleged, that, when Brenda left school, she would stay on in sole charge of the housekeeping.

Harry Quirke had made his money in rubber in foreign parts and decided to return to his native land to live out his solitary retirement. He bought the Scarthingwell estate on the death of its owner, kept on the gardener and engaged a housekeeper and withdrew into a study of the piano works of Charles-Valentin Morhange, better known to music-lovers as Alkan (his father’s first name), 1813-1888. His ambition was to produce, with a collaborator, the first comprehensive, annotated catalogue of Alkan’s works. His Wendl & Lung white grand piano was fit for the task, even though his technique was not. He stumbled through the fistfuls of chords, torrents of semi-quavers – not to mention the hemi-demi-semiquavers - crossed-hand passages and barrages of arpeggios, octaves and runs as best he could. He enjoyed himself but would not care to have been heard by others. The composer’s reclusive life-style in his later years and the brilliance of his compositions both appealed to the anti-social aesthete in Mr Quirke, and it was enough for the latter to make the composer’s partial acquaintance through his works without necessarily being able to master them at the keyboard. His interest in Alkan became his life; it also, as you shall hear, became his death.

His niece Brenda was in cheery contrast. A pretty girl of seventeen, she was in her last year at boarding school, vivacious, sociable, amiable. She was bored at Scarthingwell in the holidays, because her friends were not local, her uncle was remote, and there was no club-scene of any kind. She persuaded her uncle to buy her a horse, and her days were spent in its company in the surrounding countryside. Life on the whole, however, was dull. She knew she had no choice, but she longed to return to school at the end of the holidays. For shorter breaks – half-terms and exeats – she went as a guest to her friends’, the drawback being that she felt unable to invite them back to Scarthingwell. Not only was the house gloomy, but she felt that her uncle would disapprove. Furthermore, she did not wish to inflict on her friends the awkward meals she shared with uncle Harry in the ill-lit dining-room.

During Brenda’s absence in the Hilary term, two changes took place at Scarthingwell that altered the landscape of her Yorkshire life. The first was that the housekeeper gave in her notice (‘she was good as cooks go, and as good cooks go, she went’), and her place was taken by a Mrs Holdsworth on the understanding that her husband Stephen, although not a part of the Scarthingwell establishment, would be allowed to reside on site. Mrs Holdsworth was a rake-thin woman with a dour smile amid pinched features, opposed to extravagance of any kind, and she took inordinate pride in her work. Her husband worked as a mechanical engineer for Network Rail and was seen at Scarthingwell only in the evenings and at weekends, and not always then. The mischievous might have suggested that his wife’s company was less alluring than that of his work-mates and drinking companions. He was a fleshy individual whose face betrayed his all too effective familiarity with the fruits of the hop. The Holdsworth marriage held good because the ties that bound the partners were not restrictive and allowed a freedom of movement that suited them.

The second change was the appointment of a new gardener. Old Martin Freer had finally hung up his spade after over fifty years in the calling. As Charles Dickens noted in a speech to members of the Gardeners’ Benevolent Institution in 1852, the gardener is ‘subjected to that kind of labour which renders him peculiarly liable to infirmity’ 1 , and old Martin had his share of aches and pains. He told his employer that he could no longer derive the same satisfaction from his daily round, his movements were that stiff, and he would therefore give his notice, if Mr Quirke dint min’. He would hang on until a replacement was found – otherwise ‘thar mun do it thissen’ – but he would regard it as a favour if Mr Quirke could see his way to engaging someone ‘sharpish’. Martin having been inherited with the house, Quirke now saw his way to making a saving by offering the post to someone younger at less of a wage, and a youth from Barkston Ash secured the position. To tell the truth, the youth was not a gardener in the sense of a trained horticulturist: more of a jobbing gardener for basic work round the estate, but he expressed his willingness to try and continue with old Martin’s vegetable plot and with flowers for the borders, and Quirke took him on on the understanding that he would learn by doing.

__________
1 In her Alibi Innings , Barbara Worsley-Gough comments on one Charlie Barnes: ‘How stiff he’s got. Gardeners do, of course.’


The new gardener, whose name was Darren Wisbech, had more native wit than acquired education, but he had never found that a disadvantage in the things that really mattered to him. He was gregarious, never read a book, spent a lot of time watching professional sport on the television, drank with his friends, enjoyed a flutter and was something of a ladies’ man. As Barkston Ash is no more than a small village, clustered round