Troubled Waters

Julius Falconer

Description

Inspector Wickfield and Sergeant Hewitt find themselves caught up in a saga of murder, illicit money-making and racist thuggery. A young girl's body is found one morning on the banks of a canal. With help from a clairvoyant, the trail leads the investigating officers to London, and thence to Reading and Augsburg. They find themselves mixing with butchers, decorators, fashion retailers, dentists and the leisured rich, bargees, ex-cons and bilingual administrators, but the mythical and mysterious Zedler, who seems to hold all the threads in his hands, eludes them. Is he the moving force behind the British League, a right-wing political movement whose aim is to keep foreigners out of Britain? Is he the brains behind the counterfeiting operations? Is he the murderer? Wickfield finds out with a little help from his wife, who fortunately has a better insight into Robinson Crusoe than he does! As always with Julius Falconer, you, the reader, are given all the information available to the detective officers, and the vital clue is there for you to spot - if you are up to it! Take your time, enjoy the many detours and red herrings, the literary allusions, the religious and philosophical byways, the silver-smooth English - and keep your eye on the ball if you can! You are guaranteed a stimulating read.Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Pneuma Springs Publishing
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782281504
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Troubled
Waters




Julius Falconer
Copyright
First Published in 2010 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing
Troubled Waters Copyright © 2010 Julius Falconer
Mobi eISBN 9781907728785 ePub eISBN 9781782281504 PDF eISBN 9781782280620 Paperback ISBN: 9781905809899
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.
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.
Dedication

This book is dedicated to My Sisters
and their families
whose existence is a constant source
of interest, stimulation and affection
Foreword
A crime story which begins with the discovery of a woman’s body by a canal is bound to evoke in the mind of well-informed readers memories of one of Georges Simenon’s earliest Maigret novels, set on the canals to the east of Paris. Le Charretier de ‘La Providence ’ (1930) reflects Simenon’s own experiences in his first boat Ginette , 1928, and then, but to a lesser extent, in a larger barge, Ostrogoth , 1929-1931. It evokes the life of the bargees and the water-system that served them: the locks, the tow-paths, the stopping-places where they could buy food for themselves and their horses, the delays occasioned by bottle-necks at multiple locks, the rivalry between engine-powered boats and horse-drawn vessels because of the precedence given to the former, the hardships of the trade. A thread through the book is the rain, the wet, the mud. The novel has been twice translated into English, by Anthony Abbot as The Crime at Lock 14 in 1934, and by Robert Baldick as Maigret Meets a Milord in 1963 (reissued as Lock 14 in 2003). If I have chosen to begin the present book with the same scene, and with almost the same words, it is by way of tribute to the Belgian master.

The second influence on my telling of this case is a loose family connection. In 1948, Mr John Knill, as he then was, bought two working boats and set up a small haulage business on the canals of England. His previous naval experience had equipped him to deal with all the mechanical, staffing and procedural problems of this trade. He sold out in 1954 and settled down to farming pigs on the Welsh borders, at the family seat of Knill, 35 miles almost due west of Worcester (the shire border runs through the park!), but his lifelong interest in canals continued, and he was instrumental, for example, in the restoration of the Kennet and Avon Canal between its closure in 1951 and its grand reopening in 1990. In the year of his death (1998, aged 85), he published an autobiographical account of his five years on the waterways of England, John Knill’s Navy. Five Years on the Cut , which makes for extremely interesting reading. A long and adulatory obituary appeared in the Times for 28 April of that year. In 1951 he married my mother’s cousin, and in 1973 he inherited the baronetcy. I have been very pleased to be able to draw on John Knill’s book in the presentation of this case.

I mention also a circumstance which you may take in any spirit you like. I relate it to you as it happened. As I discussed this book with a friend and her husband, the friend offered to draw for me the portrait of the murdered woman that you will find on p.14. We discussed the context which, in the book’s very earliest stages, was naturally rudimentary: a woman’s body found dumped at the side of a canal in rural Worcestershire in the ’60s or ’70s. I made no further stipulation, because I had nothing else in mind: no preconceptions about age, height, social status, date (beyond the given) or personality. Twenty-four hours after our discussion, the volunteer artist had produced the drawing you see. She told me that she had prepared her mind in the usual way for a spirit-experience and had then invited any murdered woman to come forward who wished to feature in the book (which had at that stage only a provisional title). A young woman volunteered, and after the two had talked, the artist drew her, first in pencil, then in pastille. The information received appears below, in chapter 1.

Finally I confess to an anachronism. Not all the journeys in the book would have been possible by canal in 1964. Only the labours of many volunteers and professionals over recent years have enabled my characters to exploit the full network of waterways mentioned below.
The Novel
One
‘With fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed.’
Percy Bysshe SHELLEY
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty lines 51-52


Nothing was established from the early facts, although these were reconstituted in finest detail, except that the discovery made by the owners of the Hounslow Heath was difficult to explain. That Sunday – 2 August 1964 – it had started to rain heavily in the afternoon, and it was still raining. There were a number of boats in the pound above lock 38: two narrow-boats going down-stream, a cruiser and a wooden barge-cum-butty going upstream. A little after nine-thirty, as night was closing in under a leaden sky, a metal barge announced its arrival and entered the pound. The lock-keeper was none too helpful, as he had relatives visiting. With a wagging of his index-finger, he indicated that he would not open the gates. He had hardly gone back indoors when the skipper, whom he knew, knocked on his window.
‘Can we go through?’ he shouted. ‘I’m anxious to get to Worcester by tomorrow morning.’
‘You can if you like, but you’ll have to operate the gates yourself.’
The rain was getting heavier and heavier. From his window, the lock-keeper saw the skipper’s stocky silhouette as he went heavily from one gate to the other, tying a rope to the bollards and checking the water levels. The barge sank gradually below the walls. His wife was at the rudder, a large woman with bottle-blond hair and a shrill voice.
The customers in the pub were few – not surprisingly in view of the weather. The rain fell steadily, but inside was cosy enough, even without a fire. By eleven, the little settlement was quiet. The lock-keeper accompanied his relatives as far as Lower Gumbolds Lane – a matter of a few hundred yards - and saw, in so far as one could see anything in the steady rain, nothing unusual. On his way back, passing in front of the pub, he looked in through the open window and was hailed by one of the only two remaining customers.
‘Come on in: have a night-cap on us,’ the customer shouted – it was Cedric Kavanagh. ‘You’re wet through.’
He went in and accepted a rum, which he drank standing at the bar, with a nod of thanks to his benefactor. The Kavanaghs left the pub with him, not exactly tipsy but with enough drink inside them to ensure a sound sleep.
By seven in the morning, some people were already stirring. The Daisy Bell betrayed noises of life within. Then, with a spluttering of the engine, it was off. The publican was also astir, and he too heard the noises that accompanied the departure of the Daisy Bell . Not much time elapsed before the owners of the Hounslow Heath made their discovery. There, under the trees growing on the bank next to their narrow-boat, was the body of a woman.
Inspector Stan Wickfield, a large, untidy man with a big nose and an already balding pate (even though he was only in his forty-fifth year), decided that in simple logic his immediate tasks were to reconstruct the events at the lock on the previous evening, and to identify the victim. The former proved rather easier than the latter, about which you shall hear shortly.



Because the lock-keeper had had relatives in for the evening, he could not give a detailed and coherent account of all the evening’s movements, but Wickfield felt that the hours of twilight and darkness were the crucial ones: the arrival of an unsuitably dressed female, dead or alive, would surely (he reasoned) have been noticed by someone on a moderately busy August evening in the hours of daylight. His reconstruction established that, as night fell, the occupants of the pound in front of lock 38 comprised the occupants of four boats; and then there were the publican and his wife; and the lock-keeper. This was the tally. The Hounslow Heath was a narrow-boat hired by Emily and Philip Thompson for a leisurely cruise down to Tewksbury. They were a retired couple from Altrincham in Cheshire, out to stay for a few days with a niece and her husband. The Swallowtail was also a narrow-boat, hired out to a young couple with a baby taking their first holiday since their marriage four years before. Sally and Darren Palmer-Jukes were from deepest Birmingham and had hired their craft at Sherborne Wharf in that city for a week’s cruise along the Worcestershire waterways. The occupants of the Daisy Bell were a middle-aged bargee, by name Cedric Kavanagh, his wife Caroline, and tiller-man Tristram Fort. They plied their trade on the canals of central England, moving a variety of goods from Manchester down to London and (they hoped) from London back to Manchester, with diversions in between. At the moment they were making their way back home after a drop at Worcester. The final boat in the pound that night was a new wooden cruiser, the Fidget , manned by Leroy Maddox, his wife Annabel and their teenage son Ambrose, enjoying a short holiday on the waterways of the English shires. The landlord of the Boat & Railway public house was a young chap, Grant White. His wife Hermione ran the shop, and they were assisted in both tasks by a young woman called Tamsin Gibbs. Finally, the lock-keeper