Wichenford Court Murder

Julius Falconer

Description

Looking for sophisticated and stylish entertainment to stimulate jaded brain-cells? LOOK NO FURTHER! Falconer has shown yet again that he can produce a top-rate whodunnit in the finest British traditions: urbane, cultured and witty.The peaceful estate of Wichenford Court, in deepest Worcestershire, is convulsed by a bizarre murder which, it is discovered, mirrors in 1959 a murder committed on exactly the same spot in 1791. Inspector Wickfield and his new assistant, Sergeant Holbrook, undertake a baffling investigation in which the killer's tracks are covered so successfully that the case is in danger of remaining unsolved The Buckenham family, who have farmed the estate for centuries, the estate workers, and the gracious and monied Lady Hick-Stevens in the wings, provide the detectives with a spectrum of characters who might all, for one reason or another, have murder in mind. A suicide before the First World War, a university career cut short by drink and debt, a missed business opportunity, family antagonisms, a threat to jobs on the estate, all give the inspector and his sergeant food for thought - not to mention a headache - until the inspector rumbles the one tiny mistake that leads to the unmasking of the killer. A triumph of literary sophistication!Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Pneuma Springs Publishing
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782281566
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Wichenford Court Murder





Julius Falconer
Copyright
First Published in 2010 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing
The Wichenford Court Murder Copyright © 2010 Julius Falconer
Mobi eISBN 9781907728884 ePub eISBN 9781782281566 PDF eISBN 9781782280729 Paperback ISBN: 9781907728037
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

For
Sue and Adam
Lucy, Tom, Jack and Hannah
who live there
The Novel
One
The extraordinary events that took place at Wichenford Court, in the village of Wichenford, to the west of the city of Worcester, on 5 May 1959 and during the ensuing days, may now be told, since death has taken from us the person who would be most pained by their disclosure. Even without the notes which form the basis of this memoir, I should remember them well, for several reasons. First of all, the Wichenford Court murder was the first case I was instructed to undertake on assuming my appointment with the Worcestershire CID, after nearly four years with the Warwickshire force; and in the second place, rarely have I encountered such a clever and subtle plan, and such unusual means, to perpetrate a murder. It had the additional attraction, for me, of providing a rare window into an ancient Worcestershire family, through its past and present members. As you will learn, the slenderest thread separated our final victory from utter defeat; but we were successful in the end – of course!

By ‘we’, I mean Sergeant Rider Holbrook, aged thirty, married with two young children and resident in the Barbourne area of the city, and myself, Stanley Wickfield, then aged thirty-nine, and as handsome, personable and agreeable a detective inspector – ahem - as you can hope to encounter on a day’s march in any part of our noble kingdom. My wife Beth, our two teenage sons and I occupied a house in Blanquettes Avenue towards the north of the city, in the Perdiswell district. Holbrook and I were only just beginning to become acquainted. He had graduated in geography at Exeter University, spent time in the force working his way up through the system and had recently been appointed a detective sergeant. I suppose that, all things considered, he could have done worse than be attached, for one of his first cases, to Inspector Stanley Wickfield, known to his colleagues as Wacky Wickfield.

Wichenford Court, in its present form, is a gracious, early eighteenth-century mansion in red brick, with mullioned windows and stately chimneys, situated six miles, or thereby, north-west of the city. The spired church, dedicated to St Lawrence, is a few hundred yards to the north of the Court, and the village proper a few hundred yards north of that. (The reader may care to note that the nearest hostelries are the Mason’s Arms at Castle Hill, a little over a mile away to the south-west, the Admiral Rodney at Martley, two miles to the west, and the Crown at Hallow, two and a half miles, as the crow flies, to the south east. No one need go thirsty.) The area occupies the centre of a shallow valley between the low hills that hem in the rivers Teme to the west and Severn to the east, gentle, undulating countryside, a land of hamlets and worked fields, copses and quiet streams, narrow lanes and time-honoured hedges.

At the time of the events narrated in this case-history, Wichenford Court was occupied by John Buckenham and his family, gentleman farmers, of long and (more or less) respectable ancestry. A forebear had married the elder daughter of the then incumbent, John Poer (or, as the family later spelt it, Power), and so came into possession of the estate on the latter’s death in the early fifteenth century, exact date unknown. The family prospered calmly through the vicissitudes of the succeeding centuries – foreign wars, civil wars, the Reformation, rebellions, economic slumps, changes of ruling house and so forth - passing now to an eldest son, now to a grandson, now to a nephew. The coat of arms, displayed on an oak overmantle in the dining-room, is officially described as ‘Argent a fesse between six martlets gules with three cinqfoils argent on the fesse’, which in plain English might be rephrased as follows: three red swallows (or martins) above the band, three silver five-petalled flowers on the band, and three further red swallows below the band. The motto is Purificatus non consumptus : ‘Purified, not consumed’: a very fitting comment on the events I am about to relate to you.

John Buckenham was a man of seventy-four or -five, a little under average height with a high forehead, sparse white hair, stern eyebrows and a rugged glint in his eyes. (He used often to quote The Scarlet Letter : ‘The white locks of age are sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair.’) In him was concentrated the family’s age-old spirit of haughty dominance, tamed over the years only by the gentler virtues of the young women who had married into the family: Margaret Kettleby, Elizabeth Childe, Maud Woodroffe, and so forth. John’s wife was a meek woman called Alice, who had borne him three sons and a daughter. The opposing personalities of the parents had resulted in a brood of querulous siblings. The eldest was Roper, in his late forties, married to Constance. Roper and Constance lived, with their two children, in a large house (‘Court Cottage’) at the entrance to the estate, whence he managed the farm on behalf of his now retired parents. They naturally expected to move into the main house when father died, if not before. Second in line was Gibson, married to Kate. Gibson and Kate lived in Worcester, where he worked as a finance officer for the county council and she as a beautician at a salon in the city. They were childless by choice. The only Buckenham girl in John and Alice’s family was Willoughby, a tough female who exercised the profession of nutritional epidemiologist for a pharmaceutical company in Birmingham. She was married to a doctor, one Desmond Ashman, and they had a son reading history – well, more or less - at Newcastle. The youngest of Alice and John’s brood of little Buckenhams at the time of our story was Boyce, forty-two years old, who worked as a film director for a company based in Birmingham. He, a passable younger version of his father, was married to Frances, and they had produced three even littler Buckenhams, the oldest of whom had just come of age.

John and, in his wake, Alice disapproved of Desmond Ashman and had more or less forbidden him the house. Since he did not care very much for them, this was no great hardship, but it caused unhelpful ripples. For example, their son Thurston, tolerated at Wichenford only for his mother’s sake, visited rarely and so saw little of his two older cousins. Willoughby disliked her sister-in-law Constance, seeing in her a submissive and feeble member of the family. Boyce had little time for both his elder brothers, regarding them as prosaic and unimaginative plodders. A simple table will help the reader to grasp the relationships:



It would be difficult to ascribe to this family a united intention to maintain the proud traditions that had kept the Buckenhams and Wichenford together for five hundred and fifty years (except that the events of this story would later lead me to modify this assessment). Roper would naturally come into undisputed possession of the estate, which comprised the house and lands, farming implements, livestock, cottages in and around the village – everything, in short, which ensured the survival of Wichenford as a viable unit through even the toughest financial times. What, however, of the other children? Roper had made it clear, more than once, that if Gibson, Willoughby or Boyce wished to stay on at Wichenford, they would be expected to pay rent: he saw no reason why he should subsidise their life-style when it was difficult enough as it was, in modern post-war Britain, to maintain the standards expected of country gentry. In any case, he was unsure whether he liked any of them sufficiently to see them and their spouses and their children, if there were any, installed at Wichenford and in daily contact with his own fine sons, and he was intent on discouraging them. In the meantime, of course, he was powerless to prevent their visiting his parents. Thus dispossessed, in a manner of speaking, Gibson, Willoughby and Boyce necessarily saw their futures separate from Wichenford, barring the unlikely event of the deaths of Roper, Fletcher and Alvin all at once, in which case the estate would, so they were given to understand, devolve on Gibson. Of course, to be one of the Buckenhams of Wichenford, even a junior one, carried a certain cachet, but with a family to feed and advance in the world, cachet alone brought little benefit and could not figure prominently in their planning.

The family were regarded locally with respect rather than affection. They lived geographically distant from the village; their children had been educated elsewhere; their friends were chosen from their social equals. The Buckenhams had never exercised the sort of paternalism and public charity which some families felt obliged by their position to demonstrate. For example, when the church roof needed a major overhaul in the 1930s, the Buckenhams contributed, but not conspicuously. (This did not prevent their regarding the rector as a local