Longdon Murders

Julius Falconer

Description

On the night of a blizzard in January 1963, an elderly couple who live in a tiny Worcestershire village are summoned to their daughter's cottage two and a half miles away at Longdon, on urgent but unspecified business. When eventually they reach their daughter's cottage, exhausted and worried, they find it warm but empty. Unable to face the journey back home that night, they prepare a simple meal for themselves preparatory to retiring to bed in their daughter's cottage. The following morning, the concerned neighbours find the couple still sitting at table, poisoned by a bottle of contaminated wine. A student is found to have been killed by the same rare poison in his London bed-sit within days of the Longdon murders. Coincidence? Surely not! Inspector Wickfield is appointed to find out.His inquiry is hampered by the repeated appearance of the deceased couple's son who is a senior officer in the Canadian force. Weaving his way round red herrings and dead ends, Wickfield requires all his ingenuity, prompted by a random crossword clue, to uncover a devious and intricate plot instigated by a determined criminal. Julius Falconer can be relied on to provide stimulating and thought-provoking entertainment for a cosy night by the fire - but sharpen your wits first.Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Pneuma Springs Publishing
• Date de parution: 09 septembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782281412
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Longdon Murders

Another Case for Inspector Wickfield








Julius Falconer
Copyright

First Published in 2009 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing
The Longdon Murders Copyright © 2009 Julius Falconer
Mobi eISBN 9781907728693 ePub eISBN 9781782281412 PDF eISBN 9781782280538 Paperback ISBN: 9781905809707
Pneuma Springs Publishing E: [e-mail] W: www.pneumasprings.co.uk
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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


In Memory

of

Marie

(1942—2000)
The Novel
One
I hardly know where to begin with this story. One would naturally wish to begin at the beginning, but which beginning? Do you mean the very start of the affair, deep in the scheming villain’s heart, or the moment of my first involvement? The different starting-points would give you a different view of the case, and I am naturally anxious to present my best side. Let me, however, plunge medias in res without more ado, and we shall see where that leads us. By the way, my name is Wickfield, Stan Wickfield, of Worcestershire CID, and you may already be wondering why the egregious Mr Falconer is not talking to you as usual in my place. It is a melancholy fact to which I have become reconciled that Falconer does not trust me to tell a story effectively. His argument is that I am an inspector of police, not a literary sophisticate, and that my stories lack style. However, I am fortunate, because he is laid up with a bad attack of housemaid’s knee or tennis elbow or some such distemper – too much vigorous exercise, but he would not be warned - and you know the adage: While the cat’s away … (Actually, I nearly added to his problems by causing an apoplectic fit when I announced my intention to tell you the following story. He calmed down only when I promised faithfully to imitate, in so far as it was within my capabilities, his inimitable style. I am hoping you will not be able to tell the difference; and so, of course, is he.)

You will need to picture a wintry scene in rural Worcestershire in January of the year of grace 1963. I was not there, you understand, but this information came to me a few days later, and I can pass it on to you, with an imaginative surplus, as you snuggle up in your armchair at the close of a hard day’s work. The temperature hovered at freezing, and snow-flakes eddied round as the bitter wind tore and hurtled and surged round the bare trees and the broken walls and the frozen ponds. There was no life. Verdure had long disappeared under a pall of white. Birds and wee beasties hid snugly in their lairs and setts, nests and burrows – wherever they seek refuge in inhospitable times. Inanimate nature, however, was in turmoil as the blizzard raged on, sweeping over the marsh in unrelenting fury, piling snow into dangerous drifts and obscuring even the most prominent landmarks - of which, truth to tell, there were few, even in summer, on the flat acres of grass-land and field. The sky was out of sight as the evening light faded in the swirling storm. On the small road that leads out of Birtsmorton to the east and meanders towards the scarcely larger settlement of Longdon, an elderly man and his wife struggled in the teeth of the wind. They were wrapped in all the clothes their modest means allowed, but still they hunched and crouched and huddled in a bid to ward off the worst of the elements. They tottered on arm in arm, bent into the wind, slow step by slow step wrested painfully from the unforgiving weather. The impartial observer would have vigorously counselled them against venturing out on such a night, but the bitter truth is that they were anxious – mortally anxious.
Some short while before, they had received a disturbing telephone-call from some neighbours of their daughter Verena, who lived in Longdon. They apologised for disturbing them, but could they see their way to coming over as quickly as possible? A crisis had arisen with which they felt ill-equipped to cope. The neighbour said he hoped they could make it within the hour. They had tried in vain to hire a taxi: none would, even if it could, come out in such weather, and their own small car would not have coped with the weather. Their daughter had advised them more than once to move to a small town, or even a large village, where their needs could be more readily met as their age advanced, but they had been unwilling to take the plunge. They worshipped at the local fourteenth-century church, which was only a matter of fifty yards away; a neighbour ran them into Great Malvern or Tewksbury once a week for shopping; and the people at the Court were very generous with fruit and vegetables. All in all they survived in a quiet and unobtrusive way, as they had done for the previous eleven years since retirement. Any move would have confronted them with endless problems of adjustment, and they hoped, unrealistically perhaps, to continue as they were until the end.

Patience and Walter Falshaw had lived blameless lives as - in the derogatory terminology of the insensitive and arrogant - small people: unobtrusive, law-abiding, unambitious, but the salt of the earth. Walter plied his craft as a printer for a Worcester firm, while Patience was a hairdresser. Their union had been blessed with two children. While Verena had never married and still lived locally, their son Gerald had, for several reasons, including romance, joined the Canadian police and settled in Ontario. Although regretting his absence, they acknowledged that his life was his own, to do with as he pleased, and they did not begrudge him his contentment. In their working lives they had lived in the city, but on retirement they had opted, first of all for somewhere less bustling, even though their corner of it was secluded, and secondly for Patience’s home ground. In his retirement, Walter resumed his hobby of wood-carving, favouring British mammals and birds. The Falshaws would regularly drive to the Welsh or English coast for a spell of beach-combing, returning with weathered pieces of wood that would be dried, carved and polished. Patience enjoyed spinning her own wool and knitting it into garments for fêtes, bazaars and bring-and-buys. They both favoured country and western music, and so-called folk-music (which it generally is not), and both liked gardening and walking.

It is a little over two miles – let us say two and a half miles - from Birtsmorton to Longdon. Neither cyclist nor walker would notice any slope in the road, although in fact it drops twenty feet over the first mile and rises twenty feet over the second mile. Only one house, cosseted by a cluster of trees, and the driveway to another break the monotony of the largely fenceless road, until the turn at Rectory Farm, with the intriguing name of Bear Lane, to the village of Longdon. In the normal way of things, it makes a pleasant walk. As locals, the Falshaws would naturally have taken the short cut over Marsh Lane, although that was only a track for the first part of its course, but on the evening of our narrative, with the east wind blowing mercilessly into the walkers’ faces and stinging them with the icy flakes and piling snow in random drifts, the couple felt it would be safer to stick with the tarmacadamed surface. No longer in the flush of youth, Patience and Walter struggled on, with the road seemingly interminable, the familiar landmarks all but invisible, the whole of nature hostile. Patience was the younger by three years – and marginally more spritely - but it was Walter who took the lead, supporting his wife, urging her on, shielding her as best he might from the turbulent and frozen wind.

Although the road was as well known to them as their own front garden, they hardly recognised the turn at Rectory Farm when they stumbled on it, but in a few hundred yards they were in the village. Turning right at the cross-roads, towards the neat brick church of St Mary, they arrived at their daughter’s house no less than an hour and a half after their departure. They were exhausted: bitterly cold, physically tired, mentally taut. What could have occasioned their daughter’s summons on such a night as this? They knocked, out of courtesy. They could, they supposed, have walked straight in, but they had always accepted that they would knock first. For emergencies, they had a front-door key, but Walter was unsure in present conditions whether his frozen fingers would have permitted him to extract it from the depths of his clothing. The sitting-room light was on, glimmering through the drawn curtains, but there was no response to their knock. The church and the neighbours’ houses barely loomed in the darkness, except here and there by virtue of a light in the porch or a chink glimpsed through a curtain. He tried the door impatiently, and it swung open. He stood aside to allow his wife precedence of passage.

The cottage is quickly described. The front-door leads directly into the sitting-room, where there is a hearth to the right, against the outer wall. At the far side of the sitting-room, a door leads to the kitchen, while a door in the left-hand wall leads into the bedroom. The bathroom leads off the kitchen.

When the Falshaws entered, the fire was burning, the room was warm. It took them only seconds to realise and verify that the house was empty. The back-door, which led into a small garden, was locked. There was no sign of a meal in preparation. The bathroom was i