Midsummer Murder

Clifford Witting

Description

Witting's second Inspector Charlton mystery, first published in 1937, is set in Paulsfield (clearly a fictional Petersfield in Hampshire). It is a market day and there is much noise and bustle. A bull decides it is time to liberate itself and goes on the rampage. As this is happening, a cleaner working on the statue in the middle of the square is shot dead, straight through the head. Inspector Charlton has very few leads on this case. There is no obvious motive for the cleaner's death, and when two further murders are committed within the same day, both taking place in the market square, the mystery has obviously deepened exponentially. Midsummer Murder is another Clifford Witting that will delight all his fans.

Informations

• Publié par: Galileo Publishing
• Date de parution: 18 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912916740
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Galileo Publishers
16 Woodlands Road, Great Shelford Cambridge
CB22 5LW UK
www.galileopublishing.co.uk
Distributed in the USA by SCB Distributors
15608 S. New Century Drive Gardena, CA 90248-2129, USA
Australia: Peribo Pty Limited
58 Beaumont Road
Mount Kuring-Gai, NSW 2080
Australia
ISBN 978-1-912916-733
First published 1937
This edition © 2022
All rights reserved.
The right of Clifford Witting to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed in the EU


To Marjorie Witting




Contents
I. At High Noon
II. Question Time
III. Gold-Rimmed
IV. Mrs. Archer is Helpful
V. The Photograph
VI. Somebody’s Biscuits
VII. The Sweet-Toothed Irishman
VIII. A Parabellum
IX. A Friend of Mr. Symes
X. Act Two
XI. The Literary Brother
XII. The Co-Respondent
XIII. A Case of Agoraphobia
XIV. Intermission
XV. The Girl at Normanhurst
XVI. The Leopard’s Spots
XVII. The Inspector at the Breakfast Table
XVIII. Gin for the Woodcock
XIX. A Question of Window Cleaning
XX. The Doctor’s Evidence
XXI. A Gentleman’s Strange Behaviour
XXII. Aunt Sally
XXIII. Species Four
XXIV. Martin’s Hour
XXV. Jeff


Tuesday, July 7 th
I.
At High Noon
PAULSFIELD (3,853), Downshire. (Map 33 C. 7). London 5½miles.
L.H. 10.30-2.30, 6-10 w.d.; 12.30-2.30, 7-10 S. M.Day—Alt.
Tues. E. Closing—Wed. Post—7.45 a.m., 7.15 p.m.; S. 6.30 p.m.
Littleworth 4½     Padging 6     Burgeston 2¼, Lulverton 4, South-mouth-by-the-Sea 7     Meanhurst 1½, Whitchester 8    .
(Automobile Association Handbook).
DURING the summer previous to the events recorded by John Rutherford in Murder in Blue, there took place in Paulsfield a series of happenings to which Police-sergeant Martin was afterwards to refer as “that ’orrible to-do in the Square.” It has hitherto been the author’s fixed determination to write nothing on that subject: the whole thing seemed too extravagantly silly to be believed. But since that painstaking historian, John Rutherford, saw fit to pass on a casual remark by the Sergeant, the demands to hear more about the to-do in the Square have become increasingly pressing; and, after all, for those who died in that July and for those who lived on, in fear for their lives, through those flaming days and sulky nights, and in particular for Detective-inspector Charlton, it was anything but silly.
So the story shall be set down.
It began on the first Tuesday in July, which was market-day in Paulsfield. The church clock in the Square was verging on midday and, beneath a sky as blue and cloudless as a sky can be, the tumult of the fortnightly gathering, that was so anathematized by a large proportion of the town’s inhabitants, was at its zenith. Sheep and pigs in pens and cows tethered to railings, bleated, grunted and lowed, according to their persuasion. A perspiring red-faced man stood on a box, with his bowler hat pulled down to shield his eyes from the sun, extolling in a mighty voice the wearing qualities of his lace- curtains, sheets and table-napery; and in the Poultry and Farm Produce Sale Yard, just off the Square in Heather Street, an auctioneer monotonously offered eggs for “lemarf” a dozen. Cheap-jacks were doing big business with their pretty rubbish and in front of the Horticultural Hall, in the north-west corner of the Square, a Punch-and-Judy show was in mid-act, in direct competition with an adjacent barrel-organ, from which a disconsolate man was churning out “Coal-Black Mammy.” A blackavised Latin, whose forbear may have seen Naples, but doubtless deferred his demise until he had reared a large family just off Tottenham Court Road, deftly dispensed cornets and wafers from an ice-cream barrow which had once been a riot of gaily painted vulgarity, but which was now not even vulgar.
It will be as well if local colour is not laid on too thickly at this early stage in the story, which must be got moving as soon as possible; but it is really necessary to add a word or two about the road-repairing in the High Street. The old part of this principal thoroughfare of Paulsfield ran almost due southward from the “Queen’s Head,” the only inn in Paulsfield worthy of the name. At this particular time, the portion of the High Street that bounded the eastern margin of the Square was up. Two narrow passages had been left at the north-east and south-east corners of the Square to allow traffic to pass, but half the strip of road between had been dedicated to a handful of the Council’s employees, two of whom were adding to the general hubbub with samples of that devil’s trombone, the pneumatic-drill.
It has been pointed out by a writer of great discernment (his name is not remembered, nor the exact wording of his remarks) that in photographs taken by intrepid newspaper men during civil wars, revolutions, riots and earthquakes, when it would be expected that all those present would be participating in the excitement, there is always at least one man caught by the camera in the act of lighting a cigarette, blowing his nose, tying up his shoe-lace or doing some such commonplace thing. In the same way, on this Tuesday morning in Paulsfield Square, there was one man who took no part in the market-day confusion.
In the middle of the Square was the statue of a former Lord Shawford, who, if he did not storm Quebec or snap his fingers at Napoleon, had certainly won fame for something that had seemed quite important at the time. The present holder of the title was always a little vague on the point, perhaps with reason. The figure, which faced the High Street, was mounted on a horse standing, with one foreleg raised, on a plinth, which was now shared by the man previously mentioned, who was scrubbing down the now piebald animal’s left thigh with brushes that he dipped from time to time into one or the other of the two buckets balanced by his side.
His lordship’s torso and cocked hat, which was always held in great favour by the pigeons, had been cleaned the day before and now the workman was slowly working his way round the animal, isolated from those about him by the iron railing around the base of the plinth, and completely oblivious of the noisy crowd eight feet below him.
It was at exactly one minute to twelve that a bull got loose. They often did on market-days, sending all the timorous ladies scuttling for shelter into the shops around the Square. The tradespeople made a pretty thing, though they would never admit it, out of these sudden visitors, who hardly liked to leave their sanctuaries without buying a tube of toothpaste or half-a-pound of grapes. This bull was certainly intent on its one brief hour of glorious life, for in fifteen seconds it had the whole market in an uproar. Some of the more flimsy stalls were overturned, the organ-grinder and the showman simultaneously stopped their performances, gaitered men with sticks ran here and there, women and children screamed and shopkeepers came to their doors, smiling and rubbing their hands.
And amid the chaos of it all and the fiendish din of the remorseless drills, the man who was cleaning the statue suddenly sagged, then fell between the railings and the plinth, and lay crooked and still.
* * *
The police station at Paulsfield is on the left-hand side of the High Street, going northward from the Square. Inspector Charlton of the C.I.D., attached to the Downshire County Constabulary, had driven there that morning from his base at Lulverton and was chatting to Sergeant Martin, when the uproar from the Square took him to the open door.
“Something seems to be afoot,” he said over his shoulder to Martin. “The party’s getting rough. Even those confounded drills don’t drown the shouting.”
“Them drills are worse than the Wipers salient in ’17,” said Martin, who had passed his early years in Camberwell and had never lost the accent. “P’r’aps somebody’s gone bughouse and corpsed one of the operators,” he added hopefully.
“Who’s on duty in the Square?”
“There’s a temporary man—name of Hawkins—on detachment duty from Littleworth. ’E’s controlling the one-way traffic in the High Street and Johnson’s doing ordinary market-day duty.”
“Downshire’s most handsome flattie,” smiled Charlton, “and the stealer of a thousand hearts.”
“But a good man, for all that,” said Martin stoutly; then went on carelessly, “Probably the rumpus is a bull got loose. It’s the usual thing on market Tuesdays. You’d think you was in Barcelona.”
“The Council ought to hire a few matadors,” Charlton suggested, “to deal with such emergencies.”
“The only thing you ever get out of the Council,” snorted Martin, “is a double-blank.”
Charlton looked at the Sergeant strangely.
“ Do you notice,” he asked, “how everything has gone suddenly quiet?”
Martin mopped his brow with a large handkerchief.
“Thank the Lord for mercies small,” he said piously.
“Those so-and-so’s with the drills knock off for dinner at twelve—and I hope it chokes ’em.”
“And has the whole noisy market gone to dinner, too?”
Martin drew in his breath sharply.
“Something’s happened,” he said. “Don’t say a bull...”
“I’ll go and see,” said Charlton, but as he stepped through the doorway to go down the steps, a uniformed man—the relief constable from Littleworth—who had come running from the Square, pulled up by the railings outside the police station.