Figure in the Mist

Julius Falconer

Description

When Lady Amelia Walden is murdered at Monk Fryston Hall Hotel in Yorkshire on the night of her eightieth birthday, the chief suspect is Robert Purbright, a bachelor in his fifties engaged at Farlington Hall, the ancestral Walden mansion, to catalogue her extensive collection of stamps. At his trial, the prosecution allege that he was creaming off choice specimens for himself and that his employer was beginning to have her suspicions. Exposure would have brought his career to an unpleasant end. The jury, however, find him Not Guilty. Enraged by their obtuseness, Lady Amelia's son, Toby, vows to prove them wrong.The detective inspector who had been in charge of the investigation, Walter Moat, admits to Toby Walden, in a strictly off-the-record conversation, that the police had made a poor case; but he also lays some of the blame on counsel for the prosecution for not fully exploiting the evidence. Despite his best amateur efforts, Walden does no better - until a second murder offers more promising openings. A book by Freud and an Iroquois legend conspire to raise Walden's hopes of finally getting Purbright convicted. But will raised hopes be enough?All the hall-marks of Falconer are here: velvet-smooth English, well-shaped narrative, erudite allusions, and a rich surplus of thought-provoking obiter dicta: in short, intelligent entertainment at its finest, for the connoisseur.Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Pneuma Springs Publishing
• Date de parution: 26 août 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782281665
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A Figure in the
Mist



Julius Falconer
Copyright

First Published in 2011 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing
A Figure in the Mist Copyright © 2011 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. A figure in the mist.
1. Aristocracy (Social class)--England--Yorkshire-- Fiction. 2. Murder--Investigation--England--Yorkshire-- Fiction. 3. Trials (Murder)--Fiction. 4. Judicial error-- Fiction. 5. Detective and mystery stories. I. Title 823.9'2-dc22
Mobi eISBN 9781782280033 ePub eISBN 9781782281665 PDF eISBN 9781782280873 Paperback ISBN: 9781907728235
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


To Catherine Stocker and Roger Fisher
in friendship
Acknowledgements

I should like to express my thanks to the Monk Fryston Hall Hotel, who made no objection to my locating two murders on their premises!

And to John Edwards FRPSL, of Pontefract, who provided philatelic advice and concocted the contents of the stamp-album on page 107
Part One: The Death of Lady Amelia Walden
One
Her Honour Judge Hines Q.C. looked impassive as the trial entered its second day. The preliminaries had been dealt with, and the prosecution was about to open its case. Court 12 at the Court House in Leeds on that 27 th day of July, 2010, contained as many members of the press and public, and almost as many legal staff, as it was physically possible to squeeze in, in the light of Health and Safety regulations, the requirements of good order and the rules that governed considerations of what was seemly in a court of law. The case of Regina v. Purbright had aroused much interest amongst the inhabitants of Monk Fryston village, where the murder of Amelia Walden at the Hall Hotel was the most exciting event since a lorry travelling too fast had left the road and demolished the public urinal in 1931.

Counsel for the prosecution, Leighton Penrose, stood at the judge’s bidding, straightened his gown, adjusted his spectacles, fidgeted with his papers, looked round the courtroom and launched into his presentation of the case.
‘Your honour, members of the jury, the charge against Robert Purbright is that on Christmas Eve, 2009, he killed Lady Amelia Walden unlawfully at the Monk Fryston Hall Hotel. I shall call witnesses to show that he had the motive, means and opportunity to accomplish the murder, and I am confident that you will find the prosecution’s case compelling in its clarity and comprehensiveness. I shall take you through each of these elements of the crime in turn so that you can appreciate the cumulative effect of the evidence against the defendant, but I wish first of all just to outline for you the events of that fateful night.
‘Lady Walden was determined to celebrate her eightieth birthday intimately but in style, and to this end she organised a small dinner-party at the Hall. There were drinks beforehand in the panelled lounge, and then the party moved into the ball-room - which doubles as the most gracious banqueting-room imaginable - for the meal proper. The guests at Lady Walden’s table, who numbered seven, comprised her son Tobias and his wife Brída, her friends Mr and Mrs Peregrine Dart, Sir Crispin and Lady Middleton, and the defendant, who was engaged in cataloguing her stamp-collection and who had for some time been a frequent visitor at her home, Farlington Hall, somewhat to the east of Easingwold on the edge of the Howardian Hills. The civilised discussion ranged over a variety of topics, as one would expect from such an educated and refined party, and the courses succeeded each other genteelly in a smooth and congenial atmosphere. At the conclusion of the meal, the party returned to the lounge, where coffee and liqueurs were served in front of the log-fire. Because of snow already on the ground and the forecast of a lot more to come on Christmas Eve, Lady Walden had, some days beforehand and with her guests’ agreement, booked them all in at the Hall for the night, just in case. There are worse ways of beginning Christmas Day, she told Tobias, than to wake in a stately seventeenth-century mansion and have breakfast served by courteous and experienced staff in somebody else’s dining-room, without the bother of preparation and clearing up.
‘At about eleven o’clock, the Walden party decided, by common consent prompted by a clearly observable yawn on their hostess’s part, to go up to their rooms for the night. They occupied five bedrooms on the first floor at the back and side of the main building, all giving on to a common corridor just off the galleried landing at the front of the house. They bade each other goodnight and disappeared into their rooms. Silence fell, and the hotel settled down to a snow-shrouded Christmas Eve night of untroubled sleep.
‘In the morning, Tobias Walden knocked on his mother’s door - no. 5 - to ask whether she was ready to go down for breakfast, and there was no reply. He knocked again, and a third time, this time rather loudly, despite his concern that other slumbering guests might be woken. When he still received no reply, after a moment’s hesitation he tried the door-knob, and it turned. To his consternation, his mother lay lifeless in her bed. There were no visible signs of injury, and it appeared to him at that first moment that his mother had simply passed away in her sleep. However, his alert eye focussed on two features of the scene. Firstly, the skin around his mother’s nose and mouth seemed to be unusually red; and secondly, under the bed was a yellow filament from a curtain tassel, whereas the colour-scheme of his mother’s room was red. Tobias Walden immediately contacted the hotel staff, and the police were called. Inspector Moat and his team carried out a thorough investigation, and a post mortem revealed signs of homicidal asphyxiation with the aid of the victim’s pillow. The yellow tassel, or rather thread therefrom, was found to be from the room occupied by the defendant on that Christmas Eve night. The defendant was remanded in custody, and I shall now tell you, members of the jury, why you must, in the interests of justice, find him guilty of murder.
‘First of all, the defendant had ample opportunity, but since other hotel guests were equally so placed, I shall not press the point. On the other hand, I shall produce a witness who saw him coming out of Lady Walden’s room at two o’clock in the morning - which is the time established by the pathologist for her death.
‘Similarly, the means were to hand. Forensic examination has shown traces of saliva and skin on Lady Walden’s pillow which are consistent with asphyxiation but not with the position of the victim. She was found lying on her back, with the affected pillow the uppermost of two under her head, and she clearly could not have replaced the pillow after her death. The circumstances point ineluctably to a murderer, but again, as other hotel guests had equal access to the murder “weapon”, so to speak, I shall say no more at this juncture.
‘So we come necessarily, in third place, to motive. Now I shall prove to you that the defendant was creaming off valuable stamps from his victim’s collection and selling them for personal gain. I shall bring forward evidence that Lady Walden had been indirectly alerted to this fact, and my contention is that the defendant knew that she had. To prevent a prison sentence, public shame and the end of his career, the defendant murdered his employer in cold blood and set her death up to look like a natural death: a heart attack, say. Unfortunately he was not so skilled a murderer as he thought. There were two reasons for putting his dreadful plan into operation on that particular night: it was easier to implicate other people at a neutral venue like Monk Fryston Hall than at Farlington Hall, where no convenient opportunity presented itself without his attracting undue attention to himself; and he never spent nights at Farlington Hall, where there was no call to, even though he came to regard himself, and indeed was, a close friend of Lady Walden in the final year of her life.
‘I should also tell you that the police, under the able management of Inspector Moat, naturally made extensive inquiries amongst all those present at the hotel that night, and none was found to have the slightest motive for murdering Lady Amelia. Inspector Moat also envisaged the possibility of an intruder from outside the hotel. There was no sign whatever of forced entry or indeed of any sort of entry from outside - and remember that snow lay thick on the ground.
‘Members of the jury, may I ask you finally, as we proceed, to bear in mind the words of the poet Samuel Butler - Samuel-the-author-of- Hudibras -Butler, not Samuel-the-author-of- Erewhon -Butler? He says:
For, those that fly may fight again,
Which he can never do that’s slain.
We owe the deceased justice.’

This bare statement of the prosecution case encouraged the barrister to engage in general comments on the decline of ethical standards in society, on the erosion of trust between employers and employees and on the rise of rampant materialism in twenty-first century Europe, until the judge invited him, with some asperity, to call his first witness. This proved to be the pathologist to whom it had fallen