Foul Hooked

Islay Manley

Description

The Welsh Borders in the 1950s Salmon and trout aren't the only species under threat in this tale of love, hate, murder - and fly fishing.When a local boy is found drowned in the River Tossy, most people assume it's an accident - and few tears are shed for a uniquely nasty individual.But Meg Marsden and her husband Andy, come recently to the riverbank village of Coedafon for the fishing, gradually realise that there are equally unpleasant people still alive - and one or more is a murderer. Peaceful though the village may be on the surface, it's only a matter of time before other bodies are dragged from the river.In the face of police indifference, Meg, narrowly surviving several vicious attempts on her life, finally unearths the horrifying truth - so life returns to normal. Or does it?

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 24 février 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839524394
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

First published 2022
Copyright © the estate of Islay Manley 2022
The right of Islay Manley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership Ltd, 10b Greenway Farm, Bath Rd, Wick, nr. Bath BS30 5RL
www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk

ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-438-7 ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-439-4
Cover design by Kevin Rylands Internal design by Andrew Easton
Printed and bound in the UK
This book is printed on FSC certified paper

Contents
Chapter 1 The Newt
Chapter 2 Found Drowned
Chapter 3 Inquest
Chapter 4 Mr Brown
Chapter 5 The Birthday Party
Chapter 6 The Blue Trousers
Chapter 7 Suspects
Chapter 8 Rachel
Chapter 9 Enter Poachers
Chapter 10 Apparition
Chapter 11 The Trap
Chapter 12 Divorce Proceedings
Chapter 13 Coshed
Chapter 14 Mr Bown’s Car
Chapter 15 The Boathouse
Chapter 16 Waiting with Elise
Chapter 17 Patterns in the Dust
Chapter 18 Cliff Detained
Chapter 19 Rachel’s Story
Chapter 20 Weir Cottage
Chapter 21 Confession
Chapter 22 Tidying Up

Chapter 1
THE NEWT
If Andy, my husband, were telling this tale he would do it in quite a different way. He is a tidy-minded man, and his method would be to collect all the facts, note all the events, arrange them in proper order and then write them down, one by one, just as they must have occurred – one fact arising out of another and one event following logically upon another. He would, in fact, begin at the beginning, wherever that was – perhaps at Newton’s birth – then go on to the poor boy’s death and so to the final scene last Sunday morning when the body of the third victim was pulled out of the river. That would be the proper way – the way Andy would do it. But I am afraid that, unlike Andy, I am not very methodical. I should be sure to forget the most important things and then have to put them in out of their proper order, and the result would be a pretty awful muddle. So I mean to tell you everything just as it happened to me . That way, I certainly shall not forget anything and, although, in the course of the story, you may, perhaps, be as much at sea as I was while the events were taking place, still, in the end you will understand it all, just as I did. In fact, you may even understand it long before the end, as you – whoever you are – are almost certainly much cleverer than I am. That would not be difficult, as Andy would say. Poor darling! He often makes remarks of that sort, but only since his dreadful accident. He was in a plane crash three years ago and was badly burned down his left side. He is a little deaf and quite blind on that side now, and his left leg, too, was affected, so that he walks with a pronounced limp. So you see, he has good reason to be soured and, when he is a little bit irritable and makes tart remarks, I take no notice because I love him dearly and he is fond of me, too, I know, in his undemonstrative way.
Now, just to put you in the picture, I must tell you how we came to be at Coedafon at all. After Andy’s dreadful crash and his years in hospital, he seemed to have no interest in anything and, besides that, became very sensitive about his appearance, although the plastic surgeons have made a wonderful job of him. He could not even read much – a thing he has always been very fond of – as his right eye, too, had been affected. The only thing left to him really was fishing. So, since we both luckily have a little money of our own, we decided to buy a cottage on one of the Welsh rivers where the fishing is cheap. We heard of just the thing at Coedafon. So here we are, Andy Marsden and I – my name is Margaret, but I am known as Meg – and our two dogs, Curly and Squelch. Curly, who plays quite a part in events, is an Irish water spaniel with tight, liver-coloured curls all over her body, a curly topknot and a long, whippy tail. Squelch is a fool of a black cocker spaniel. Actually, it was Curly who got us mixed up in these strange happenings in the first place, as you will see. In fact, without her it is almost certain that a murder would not only have gone unsolved, but even unsuspected.
The village of Coedafon – hardly more than a hamlet really – lies along the left bank of the River Tossy and a bridge over the river connects it with the main road to the spa and market town of Carne, ten miles away. Three miles in the other direction, upriver, the road leads to the somewhat larger village, Llantossy where there is another bridge – but this is only a footbridge. For about ten miles up and down river on the Coedafon side of the Tossy there is only one man-made road and that is the road that leads from the bridge, through the village, and then steeply uphill, past PC Jones’ modern bungalow and Ty-Mawr, the Big House, into thick forest where it meanders around for about fifteen miles or so, connecting one forest village with another until it also comes out, eventually, at Carne. So you see, we are pretty isolated. There is one other short road possible for cars and this is the lane which leads from the village to Trev Price’s farm about a mile away. At first it runs parallel with the river, past a row of cottages of which ours is the last, and then, at the doctor’s house, it trends away from the Tossy and climbs to the farm. There is a footpath on each bank of the river. The one on our bank runs from Llantossy through forest and water-meadow, past a deserted boathouse which once belonged to the owners of the Big House, past the end of the doctor’s garden, along behind our cottages, under the bridge and so to Coedafon salmon pool, where it ends. The footpath on the other bank runs all the way from beyond Llantossy to Carne. I have drawn a plan of all this so that you will not get too muddled.
Well now, there is only one more thing I must tell you before we begin, and that is that the village of Coedafon, by immemorial right – just why I do not know – owns three quarters of a mile of fishing from just above Ty-Mawr boathouse to just below the salmon pool beyond the bridge. This is really what brought us to Coedafon. The fishing is mainly for trout, of course, but the one salmon pool is quite productive and, besides this, there is a place in the river just below the doctor’s garden where a solitary salmon often lies. A small stream joins the Tossy at this point and is spanned, where the footpath crosses the stream, by a plank bridge. This is the best position from which to cover the salmon lie.
So there we are.
We had only been about a month at Coedafon when the event occurred which first involved us in this story, although we did not, of course, realise its significance at the time. It was on a Monday at the beginning of May, the month when a cooked prawn is usually the most rewarding bait for a salmon. It was a beautiful day such as you only get in early May, with leaf buds breaking on all the trees and bushes, and chaffinches in full song. No day for dark thoughts and cruel actions, one would have thought. The date, Andy says, was 3 May and I know it was a Monday because it was washing day. I shall give all the facts in detail because later they became of some importance. After lunch, at about ten minutes past two o’clock, I went out into the back garden to collect the dry clothes from the line and Curly, our Irish water spaniel, followed me out. She went snuffling off down the garden and disappeared through the hedge at the end, beyond which lies the river and the footpath along it. Suddenly I heard a yelp of pain from Curly, followed by a stream of really filthy language in a boy’s voice, and then the sound of scuffling and snarling.
I dashed down to see what all the trouble was about and, as I scrambled through the hedge, I came face to face for the first – and last – time with the boy, Newton Landon. He was standing with a salmon gaff raised above his head and a look of quite frightening malevolence on his face.
‘What are you doing to my dog?’ I shouted. ‘Stop it at once!’
‘He bit me,’ the boy said in a voice choked with rage.
‘I’m sure she never did,’ I said. But then I noticed that, indeed, one knee of his blue corduroy trousers was torn as though by a dog’s teeth.
‘He did, he did!’ shouted the boy.
‘You must have provoked her,’ I said.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ he asserted furiously. ‘He was eating my prawns.’
I saw then that the ground around the boy’s feet was littered with prawns which had obviously spilled from a jam jar with a broken string which lay on its side amongst them.
‘All the same, you shouldn’t have hit her,’ I said. ‘You did hit her, didn’t you?’
‘I wish I’d killed her,’ he said venomously.
‘Put down that gaff,’ I said, ‘and come with me. We’ll have a look at your leg and see what we can do about that tear in your trousers.’
A little to my surprise he obeyed and, shovelling the prawns back into the jar, he followed me sullenly into the house.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked, as I sat him down on a chair and started to roll up his trouser leg.
‘Newton,’ he mumbled.
‘Newton what?’ I asked.
‘Newton Landon. They call me “The Newt”. They think I don’t know – but I do. I’ll “Newt” them,’ he muttered darkly, nodding his head.
The Newt. The name suited him exactly. With his black, greasy hair, his curiously pointed head and receding chin, his small, reptilian eyes and permanently half-open mouth he did, indeed, remind one irresistibly of a newt. Even his large hands on the ends of arms too short for his body and his clumsy, gum-booted feet which called to mind the webbed paddles of a newt contributed to the lik