September 2023

IN THE WASH . . . Between the covers

Wisbech is a town in the fenland area of Cambridgeshire, and that is where I live. At which point some unkind wag will usually comment, “Well, I suppose someone has to.” That slight is not undeserved, as much of the place is pretty grim. It has some pretty Georgian and Victorian architecture, but in recent years it has had the stuffing knocked out of it by immigration. Add to that the disease infecting so many similar places in the country, that of the shops we knew and loved (but not patronised enough, sadly) being replaced with a seemingly endless supply of charity shops, mobile phone stores, bookies, coffee shops and pound stores. The town has featured peripherally in some novels; perhaps the brewery that featured in Graham Swift’s Waterland was our our own Elgoods; the town makes a brief appearance in my favourite crime novel, Dorothy L Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, gets a passing mention in some of Jim Kelly’s novels, but now there is a novel firmly centred in the town.

The legend of King John’s lost treasure is an intriguing one, and Diane Calton Smith (left) cleverly reimagines it in her novel In The Wash. I am not normally a fan of split time narratives, but she does it beautifully here, with the events of October 1216 being mirrored perfectly by a present day story beginning, also, in October. Perhaps ‘mirror’ is not the best metaphor – the two stories are more like a melody and its counterpoint in music, each complementing the other. In 1216 we meet Rufus, a young clerk under the tutelage of Father Leofric, a priest at Wisbech Castle, and the entire establishment is waiting for the arrival of King John, who is to make a break in his journey from Bishop’s Lynn to Newark. In present day Wisbech, Monica Kerridge is the curator of The Poet’s House Museum, an establishment dedicated to the life and work of celebrated Georgian poet Joshua Ambrose.

Rufus and his fellow clerks can only watch in awe from a distance as the King and his retinue arrive. Beset by political troubles both at home and abroad, the King appears tense and distracted at the lavish feast prepared for him, but his mood worsens when he receives shocking news from one of his courtiers, freshly arrived at the castle. His baggage train, a mile long and consisting of lumbering bullock carts and hundreds of men has fallen foul of the capricious tide as they attempted to ford the river mouth where it meets The Wash – with catastrophic results. In the days that follow, Rufus is called upon to catalogue the battered remains of the king’s wagons and the scores of of corpses washed up on the sea banks.

Back in the present day, Monica and several other town worthies become involved with a new group being set up to try to get to the bottom of the enduring mystery of what actually happened on that day in October 1216 and – more importantly – establish exactly where the abortive attempt to cross from Norfolk into Lincolnshire was made.

It is an established fact that King John died not long after his fateful sojourn in Wisbech, and was succeeded – at least in name – by his nine year-old son. Rufus becomes involved in a dangerous search for one particular item of John’s lost treasure – an item so precious that powerful interests in the land think little of murder in order to gain the prize. The search by Monica and her friends is less perilous, but they uncover a mystery just as intriguing.

Diane Calton Smith lets her two narrative melodies weave their magic and cleverly keeps the two time lines running almost exactly parallel, just separated by the eight centuries. Then, to extend the musical metaphor, the two themes resolve together in an very satisfying cadence to bring the piece to an end. I loved this book. Yes, the local interest intrigued me, but this is writing of the highest quality, backed by scrupulous historical research, a genuine sense of place, and shrewdly observed characters. In The Wash is published by New Generation Publishing and is available now

September 28, 2023 1

CLASSICS REVISTED … SS-GB

I had been aware of this book for ages – it was first published in 1978 – but had never read it until now. My initial reaction was to be intrigued by Deighton’s premise. It is November 1941, the Germans have invaded and the pastiche document, headed Geheime Kommandosache at the beginning of the book tells us that Britain surrendered on 19th February. So, my first thought was “What happened?” Was there no Dunkirk, no Battle of Britain? What became of The Royal Navy? Presumably Rudolf Hess never made his bizarre flight to Scotland and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is still unbreached. What of Reinhard Heydrich? Is he just a couple of months into his new job as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia? I read on, hoping that Deighton’s rather audacious re-write of history would be plausible.

We open with what appears to be a relatively mundane murder mystery. A prominent – and successful black marketeer is found shot dead in his flat-cum-warehouse in London’s Shepherd Market, and Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer (whose boss now is Gruppenführer Fritz Kellerman) is sent to investigate. It rapidly becomes obvious that the corpse identified as one Peter Thomas is no such person, and that his death has triggered a dramatic response from Berlin, in that Standartenführer Huth, a senior SS investigator, has been sent to London to take over the case.

In fairness, a few chapters in we disciver that Churchill has been shot by a firing squad in Germany and King George VI, like the long lost princes, is imprisoned in The Tower of London. Deighton also teases us with furtive appearances from the British resistance movement, and hints that the death of ‘not Peter Thomas’ may be connected with something deeply dangerous, perhaps connected to the search to make a nuclear weapon. Huth establishes himself, at least superficially, as the very worst kind of SS officer, but around half way through the book Deighton pulls a couple of very clever rabbits out of the hat, in terms of the plot. Regarding Oskar Huth, wise readers will reserve their judgment. Archer becomes involved with Barbara Barger, an influential American war reporter and, because of his apparently willing co-operation with the German authorities, he reaches number one on the assassination hit list of the resistance movement.

We learn the answer to the Molotov-Ribbentrop conundrum when, with a wonderfully Baroque flourish, Deighton turns the story on its head by describing a heavily orchestrated ceremony to disinter the remains of Karl Marx from Highgate and move them to Moscow. It all goes spectacularly wrong, and Archer is swept along on the tide of events. The focus of the story soon becomes clear, and it is the possession of vital information that will allow those who own it to make a nuclear bomb.

Deighton’s meticulous historical research allows him to put to good use the dichotomy between the regular German army and the ‘upstart’ SS, and the deep distrust which Hitler’s inner circle felt for the Abwehr, the intelligence agency for the army. He also describes the German unease about royalty. Remember that ‘Kaiser Bill’, the last German royal ruler was, in the autumn of 1941, only a few months in his grave. Our reluctant monarch, King George VI plays a part in the denouement of this story. Already a sick man, he is used as merely a piece on the international chess board, and not a very potent one.

Going back to my initial reservations, Deighton doesn’t explain how Hitler’s forces managed to invade Britain in spite of what we know as the serious military impediments in his path. We do learn that Hitler and Stalin, at least on paper, are still best pals, but my overwhelming response to what is a fiendishly clever reworking of history is simple: thank God for Dunkirk, the RAF – and America. This edition is from Penguin Modern Classics and is available now

THE WATER DOESN’T LIE . . . Between the covers

The story begins back in the day, in grisly fashion. A lad, in the so-called ‘care’ of a Roman Catholic children’s home in Scotland has been sexually abused to the extent that his self esteem is shattered and he sees no reason to live. He hangs himself from a beam, using torn up bed-sheets. The police are eventually called, but the patriarchal attitude of the priests (and a handy golf club connection with a top copper) means that the death is just written off for what it was, a suicide, but the cause goes uninvestigated.

Cut to the present day and we are in the cathedral city of Lincoln. The location gave me a huge amount of pleasure, as one half of my ancestry is as Lincolnshire as haslet, Sincil Bank, Mablethorpe, the wonderful Wolds – and Lincoln’s imp itself. When a body is fished out of a local lake and eventually identified as a former Roman Catholic priest (and child abuser), DI Dalton and his oppo, DS Gibb, are drawn into a murder investigation that will take them away from their bailiwick to Glasgow, and the less than salubrious visitors’ rooms of HMP Barlinnie. Someone – maybe with an accomplice – scarred by their brutal days in church care has decided to take revenge, and the body count increases.

Dalton and Gibb follow one or two false trails before they are forced to face the fact that not only is their quarry extremely adept using modern technology, and suspiciously familiar with the way modern police work is done, but they are also something of a weapons expert. As a keen target shooter myself, I can vouch for the fact that a 7.62mm rifle with a decent scope is a formidable weapon in the hands of a sniper. I am not sure if KIm Booth has had the misfortune to fall foul of the deeply secretive and self-protective world of the Roman Catholic church, but the crimes he describes here sound grimly authentic.

The procedural aspects of the story are totally convincing as one might expect from a former police officer – after several jobs and a brush with the law Booth decided to join the Lincolnshire Police, where he served 35 years mainly in investigative roles. The attention to crime-scene detail, the awareness of sharp-eyed defence lawyers for any slight slip-up in the chain of evidence and the debilitating effect form-filling and box-ticking can have on investigators is described in detail. Perhaps the author (in my view) has taken something of a risk in the way he chooses to end the search for the children’s home avenger, but Dalton and Gibb have the potential to become an established CriFi partnership, and I hope that future books will let us know a little more about the men and what makes them tick as people.

Kim Booth was born in Lincolnshire. After leaving the police he worked as a Corporate Security Manager for a well know international holiday company for a number of years. Currently he has started to fulfill a long standing intention to write true crime and crime fiction books. He lives in the city of Lincoln. The Water Doesn’t Lie is available now.

September 18, 2023 1

‘A PALE FACE AMONG THE RUSHES’ . . . The death of Alfie Wright (part two)

SO FAR: August 1895. Hannah Elizabeth Wright, 23, gave birth to a little boy, Alfred Edward, in November 1893. The boy’s father has disappeared, leaving Hannah to deal with the situation. Alfie has been in the care of a Miss Flear, who lives near Newark, but Hannah can no longer afford to give Miss Flear the money she requires, and has collected the little boy, and returned to Lincoln on the evening of 26th August. The following day, having not returned to their home in Alexandra Terrace the previous evening, she tells her brother and his wife that the boy is still in Newark, and is being put up for adoption.

Foss Dyke is a canal that links Lincoln with the River Trent at Torksey. Some historians insist that it was built by the Romans, while others believe that it dates back to the 12th century. It was along the bank of this ancient waterway, between Jekyll’s Chemical chemical works and the back of the racecourse grandstand, that on the evening of Monday 26th August our story continues. A young man called James Fenton was sitting on a bench with a lady friend, when a woman passed them, walking in the direction of Pyewipe. She was carrying a bundle, but they heard a whimpering sound, and they realised that she was holding a child. It was, by this time almost dark, but when the woman passed them again, this time heading back towards the city, she was empty handed. Thinking this strange, Fenton followed the woman at a distance, but lost her somewhere in the vicinity of Alexandra Terrace. The following morning, Tuesday, a man on his way to work had an unpleasant surprise. He was later to tell the court:

James Fenton had contacted the police with his suspicions, and the discovery of the body confirmed the police’s worst fears. It is not entirely clear how the police knew exactly where to find the mystery woman, but on the Tuesday, they paid several visits to the house at 25 Alexandra Terrace. Hannah Wright, however, was nowhere to be found. She had left that morning, telling her sister-in-law that she was going to visit friends. She did not return until the Wednesday morning, by which time the police had instituted a full scale murder investigation. Hannah confessed to Jane Wright, and a neighbour, Mrs Sarah Close. It was Mrs Close who accompanied Hannah to the police station, but the girl seemed to be under the bizarre misapprehension that if she told the truth she would get away with a ‘telling off’ or, at worst, a fine. She was not to be so fortunate:

The law took its inevitable course. There was a coroner’s inquest, then a magistrate’s hearing, both of which judged that Hannah Wright had murdered her little boy. As was customary, the magistrate passed the case on to be heard at next Assizes. Meanwhile Alfie’s body was laid to rest in a lonely ceremony at Canwick Road cemetery. It is pointless speculating about Hannah’s state of mind, but it is worth reminding ourselves that Alfie had known no father and had seen very little of his mother during his brief sojourn – fewer than 300 days – on earth. If ever there were a case of ‘Suffer the little children’ this must be it.

Whatever the state of Hannah Wright’s mind when she drowned her son, and during her long months before she came to trial, when she finally appeared before Mr Justice Day at the end of November she must have had a cold awakening as to what possibly lay ahead of her. Since September, there had been various intimations in the press that Hannah was, to use the vernacular, “not quite all there” but there was no medical evidence that she was weak minded or mentally deficient. Her defence barrister made a rather odd case, as was reported in The Lincolnshire Echo on Tuesday 26th November 1895:

“The Judge pointed out that the defence was rather an unusual one, namely of a two-fold character, one contention being that the prisoner never committed the crime all, and it she did do so that her mind was unhinged at the time. As to the plea of insanity he did not see that there was the slightest evidence to show that her mind was diseased. The jury retired to consider their verdict at 5.20, and returned into Court after an absence of twenty-seven minutes. They found the prisoner guilty, with a strong recommendation mercy. Prisoner made no reply to the question put to her by the Clerk whether she wished to say anything before sentence was passed. The Judge, who appeared be deeply affected, said the jury had simply discharged their duty, painful though undoubtedly was. With regard to the recommendation to mercy his Lordship said he would wish and beg her not to place undue reliance upon that recommendation. His Lordship then passed sentence of death in the usual manner. Prisoner fainted as she was being led down the dock steps.”

The general public in Lincoln and round about had become very involved in this tragic case, and even before Hannah collapsed on the steps of the dock, a petition was created and with thousands of names on it, presented to the Home Secretary, Sir Matthew White Ridley KCB. Within days, the threat of the hangman’s noose was lifted.

Peter Spence, a distant relative of Hannah, and to whom I am indebted for sharing his research, suggests that this story has something of Thomas Hardy about it, but we would do well to remember that poor Tess (of the D’Urbervilles) is hanged for her crime. Not only did Hannah survive, but she was released from prison in Aylsbury, apparently going straight to London to work as a servant.

Strangely, that is where the story ends. Peter Spence, and that eminent compiler of Lincolnshire crime stories Mick Lake, like me, have found no trace of what became of Hannah. This is unusual, given the amount of information available on modern genealogy websites, but it it is what it is. There are a couple of inconclusive mentions in the 1939 register, but no evidence that these people are ‘our’ Hannah. There is this, but is it feasible that a servant girl could have eventually returned to Lincolnshire and died at the age of 89, leaving the sum of £2552 10s – nearly £47,000 in today’s money? Perhaps that is a mystery for another day.

I have been researching and writing about historic Lincolnshire murders for some years,and those wishing to find out more about our county’s macabre past should click this link

September 16, 2023 0

‘A PALE FACE AMONG THE RUSHES’ . . . The death of Alfie Wright (part one)

Hannah Elizabeth Wright was born on 25 August 1872 to John Wright, an agricultural labourer, and Mary Anne Key in  Kirkby la Thorpe, a tiny village a few miles east of Sleaford. The 1881 census recorded 256 souls.

Hannah was the youngest of five  children, two boys and three girls. Sadly, her mother died when she was four. Her father remarried so she  was brought up by her stepmother. There were few options for young women ‘of humble birth’ in rural communities in those days. It was either work on the land, or go into service – meaning a live-in position with some wealthy family, either as a cook or a general maid. The census in 1891 shows us that Hannah was working in The Manor House at Ewerby, less than two miles from Kirkby. Her employer was Mr William Andrews, a farmer. The Manor House (left) still stands.

By 1893, she had moved further away to the village of Weston, near Newark. It was here that she began a relationship with a local lad and became pregnant. Alfred Edward Wright was born on 3rd November 1893. He was, by all accounts, a healthy child, but his father quickly disappeared from the scene, and became engaged to another woman. This left Hannah in a dire situation. With no other means of support other than her own work, how was she going to bring up Alfie? A solution – of a kind – was found when a Weston woman called Jane Flear offered to take the boy in – for a price.

We know that by 1895 Hannah was working for a family in Branston, south of Lincoln, and had begun another relationship, with a young man called William Spurr, but she kept Alfie’s existence from him. Hannah had already fallen into arrears with her payments for Alfie, but her problems became worse when she received word from Miss Flear that the price for looking after the little boy was to be raised to three shillings and sixpence each week. Using the Bank of England inflation calculator, that would be nearly £38 In modern money, probably more than Hannah earned each week, given that her food and housing would come with the job.

Jane Flear received this letter (facsimile) from Hannah:

Having traveled to Lincoln on the afternoon of 23rd August, Hannah visited her brother and his wife at their house, 23 Alexandra Terrace. All appeared to well, and on the Sunday evening Hannah even brought her young man, William Spurr, round for tea.

Hannah Wright arrived in Weston on the afternoon of Monday 26th August to collect Alfie. Miss Flear had misgivings about handing over the little boy, and thought that Hannah was in something of a disturbed state. When she went to collect the rest of Alfie’s clothes, Hannah said she didn’t want to take them. The three of them, Jane Flear wheeling Alfie in his pram, set off to walk the two miles to Crow Park station, just outside Sutton on Trent. Hannah and Alfie caught the 6.15 train to Retford. Jane Flear never saw Alfie alive again. Hannah eventually returned to the little terraced house in Alexandra Terrace late on the Monday evening,and explained to Jane and William Wright that her little boy was still in Weston, but she had arranged for someone to adopt him permanently. Jane Wright asked her sister in law if she had discussed the situation with William Spurr, but despite Jane telling her that it was wrong to keep back something so important, Hannah was adamant that he was not to be told. They all retired to bed at 11.30 pm. The next morning, at about 9.30 am, Hannah announced that she was going to visit some friends, and would return later.

IN PART TWO

A CONFESSION
A TRIAL
THE BLACK CAP

September 14, 2023 0

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . The Mask of Dimitrios

The opening part of this book, in geo-political terms, is gloriously old fashioned. Istambul, with its reputation as being the place where east meets west, home of mysterious Levantine traders and treacherous stateless misfits has long since been pensioned off, at least in the world of crime and espionage fiction. It is worth remembering, though, that it was the starting point for Bond’s adventures in From Russia With Love when it was published in 1957, and was still thought to have a suitable ambience when the film was released in 1963.

Charles Latimer is an English academic who has found that writing thrillers is much more to his liking (and that of his bank manager) than lengthy tracts on political and economic trends in nineteenth century Europe. While in Istanbul he is invited to a house party where he meets Colonel Haki, an officer in some un-named sinister police force. Improbably, Haki is a fan of Latimer’s novels and, when they become better acquainted, Haki reveals a current real-life mystery he is investigating. The corpse of a man known only as Dimitrios – once a big player in the espionage world of the Levant and The Balkans – is fished out of the sea. Having attended the post mortem, Latimer decides to investigate just who Dimitrios was, and how he came to end up as he did.

Published on the eve of world war two, when previous atrocities would be dwarfed in scale, the novel reminds us of the horrors which took place in the region after the Armistice. The brutal civil war between Turkey and Greece, with the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, the Armenian genocide, and a succession of coups d’états in Bulgaria had left the region rife with intrigue and foreign meddling. By the late 1930s, Europe was desperately ill at ease with itself. Latimer observes:

“So many years. Europe in labour had through its pain seen for an instant a new glory, and then had collapsed to welter again in the agonies of war and fear. Governments had risen and fallen: men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had thought, had been tortured and died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom of illusion.”

As he criss-crosses Europe via Athens, Sofia, Geneva, Paris – by train, naturally – Latimer is drawn into the world of a mysterious man known only as Mr Peters, memorably described thus:

“Then Latimer saw his face and forgot about the trousers. There was the sort of sallow shapelessness about it that derives from simultaneous overeating and under sleeping. From above two heavy satchels of flesh peered a pair of blue, bloodshot eyes that seemed to the permanently weeping. The nose was rubbery and indeterminate. It was the mouth that gave the face expression. The lips were pallid and undefined, seeming thicker than they really were. Pressed together over unnaturally white and regular false teeth, they were set permanently in a saccharine smile.”

The 1944 film of the book took many liberties with the story and, bizarrely, changed the clean-living, rather prim Charles Latimer into a Dutch novelist named Cornelius Leyden, and then compounded the felony by casting Peter Lorre in the role. What they didn’t get wrong, however, was in re-imagining Mr Peters. Check the quote above, and if it isn’t Sydney Greenstreet to the proverbial ‘T’, then I will change my will and donate my worldly wealth to The Jeremy Corbyn Appreciation Society. In his travels, Latimer also meets a rather down-at-heel nightclub manager called La Prevesa:

“The mouth was firm and good-humoured in the loose, raddled flesh about it, but the eyes were humid with sleep and the carelessness of sleep. They made you think of things you had forgotten, of clumsy gilt hotel chairs strewn with discarded clothes and of grey dawn light slanting through closed shutters, of attar of roses and of the musty smell of heavy curtains on brass rings, of the sound of the warm, slow breathing of a sleeper against the ticking of a clock in the darkness”

Quite near the end of the book, Ambler drops a plot bombshell which not only damages Latimer’s own sense of being able to spot a lie when he sees one, but puts him next in line for a drug-dealer’s bullet. He is in Paris, but this is not the city as envisaged by, apparently, Victor Hugo:

“Breathe Paris in. It nourishes the soul.”

Latimer sees a rather different city:

“As his taxi crossed the bridge back to Île de la Cité, he saw for a moment a panorama of low, black clouds moving quickly in the chill, dusty wind. The long facade of the houses on the Quai de Corse was still and secretive. It was as if each window concealed a watcher. There seemed to be few people about. Paris, in the late autumn afternoon, had the macabre formality of a steel engraving.”

With this book, Ambler created the anvil on which the great spy novels of the final decades of the Twentieth Century were beaten out. As good as they were, neither Le Carré nor Deighton bettered his use of language, and in this relatively short novel, just 264 pages, Ambler set the Gold Standard. This latest edition of the novel is published by Penguin and is available now.

September 12, 2023 0

THE DEVIL STONE . . . Between the covers

Detective Inspectors – and their bosses the DCIs – are hardly a dying breed in crime fiction, so what is distinctive about Christine Caplan, the central figure in Caro Ramsay’s latest book? For starters, she has been demoted from DCI because her previous case involved some evidence mysteriously going ‘walkies’. Her run of bad continues when, after a night out the ballet in Glasgow (she used to be a dancer) she inadvertently becomes involved in a mugging, and the drug-frazzled perpetrator subsequently dies from falling from his bike. Family-wise, things are not much better. Her husband, Aklan, formerly something of a creative high flyer, has a serious case of depression and rarely leaves his bed. When he does, it’s only to stagger to the sofa where, wrapped in a blanket, he binges on daytime TV. Son Kenny is a ne’er-do-well drug user, flunking college and a bit too handy with mum’s credit card. Daughter Emma is the only glimmer of light. She seems relatively healthy, bright and has something of a future once she finishes her degree.

Things don’t improve for Caplan when she is sent off to the Scottish west coast where, near the village of Cronchie, a multiple murder has taken place. Two teenage boys – “neds”, to use the Scottish slang, have broken into Otterburn House, a mansion belonging to the McGregor family. The intruders get more than they bargained for:

“…jerking the phone, causing the beam to drop suddenly where it caught the ghostly white face staring at the ceiling with nacreous clouded eyes. Unable to stop himself, he looked along. Another face. Then another. Five of them in a row, cheek to cheek. Dried white skin clinging to thin cheekbones, mouths open, teeth bared.”

The lads – one of whom is a devotee of Satanism – have burgled the house looking for a legendary artifact known as The Devil Stone which, according to the ancient lore, is able to predict impending tragedy. They leg it away from the house as if Old Nick himself is chasing them. They are hospitalised suffering from shock, the police are summoned and a major investigation is triggered.

In charge of the investigation is Detective Chief Inspector Bob Oswald, a highly respected officer just weeks away from retirement. When he goes missing, Caplan finds herself put in charge of the case, rather to her own discomfort and the resentment of the local team. One member of the McGregor family – Adam, a New Age hippy and something of a black sheep – is missing from the gruesome line of corpses, and thus he becomes the main suspect.

When Bob Oswald is finally located dead – in mysterious circumstances – Caplan realises that whatever happened at Otterburn House is part of a much bigger conspiracy, involving the distribution of a dangerous new narcotic known as Snapdragon. While she suspects that a nearby New Age community living on the nearby island of Skone may be involved, another discomforting thought is nagging away at her, and it is the suspicion that someone in the police team is batting for the other side. How far can she trust DC Toni Mackie, a larger-than-life woman, with a slightly cartoonish air about her? And what is to be made of the bumbling DC Craigo, with his strange slow blink, and his lack of social graces?

Already facing a twin-pronged attack on her career, Caplan realises that her relentless determination to solve the Otterburn House mystery has brought her head-to-head with some people who are determined to take her life if she gets in their way.

This edition of The Devil Stone is published by Canongate and is out now.

September 5, 2023 0

RUSTED SOULS . . . Between the covers

Leeds, March 1920. Tom Harper is Chief Constable of the City force and, with just six weeks until his retirement, he is dearly hoping for a quiet ride home for the final furlong of what has been a long and distinguished career. His hopes are dashed, however, when he is summoned to the office of Alderman Ernest Thompson, the combative, blustering – but very powerful – leader of the City Council. Thompson has one last task for Harper, and it is a very delicate one. The politician has fallen a trap that is all too familiar to many elderly men of influence down the years. He has, shall we say, been indiscreet with a beautiful but much younger woman, Charlotte Radcliffe. Letters that he foolishly wrote to her have “gone missing” and now he has an anonymous note demanding money – or else his reputation will be ruined. He wants Harper to solve the case, but keep everything completely off the record. Grim-faced, Harper has little choice but to agree. It is due to Thompson’s support and encouragement that he is ending his career as Chief Constable, with a comfortable pension and an untarnished reputation. He chooses a small group of trusted colleagues, swears them to secrecy, and sets about the investigation.

He soon has other things to worry about. A quartet of young armed men robs a city centre jewellers, terrifying the staff by firing a shot into the ceiling. They strike again, but this time with fatal consequences. A bystander tries to intervene, and is shot dead for his pains. Many readers will have been following this excellent series for some time, and will know that tragedy has struck the Harper family. Tom’s wife Annabelle has what we know now as dementia, and requires constant care. Their daughter Mary is a widow. Her husband Len is one of the 72000 men who fought and died on the Somme, but have no known grave, and no memorial excep tfor a name on the Thiepval Memorial to The Missing.. Unlike many widows, however, she has been able to rebuild her life, and now runs a successful secretarial agency. Leeds, however, like so many communities, is no place fit for heroes:

“‘Times are hard.’
“I know,” Harper agreed.
It was there in the bleak faces of the men, the worn-down looks of their wives, the hunger that kept the children thin. The wounded ex-servicemen reduced to begging on the streets. Things hadn’t changed much from when he was young. Britain had won the war but forgotten its own people.”

Nickson’s descriptions of his beloved Leeds are always powerful, but here he describes a city – like many others – reeling from a double blow. As if the carnage of the Great War were not enough, the Gods had another spiteful trick up their sleeves in the shape of Spanish Influenza, which killed 228000 people across the country. Many people are still wearing gauze masks in an attempt to ward off infection.

The hunt for the jewel robbers and Ernest Jackson’s letters continues almost to the end of the book and, as ever, Nickson tells a damn good crime story; for me however, the focus had long since shifted elsewhere. This book is all about Tom and Annabelle Harper. Weather-wise, spring is definitely in the air, as bushes and trees come back to life after the bareness of winter, but there is a distinctly autumnal air about what is happening on the page. Harper is, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, not the man he was.

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.

As he tries to help at the scene of a crime, he reflects:

“There was nothing he could do to help here; he was just another old man cluttering up the pavement and stopping the inspector from doing his job.”

As for Annabelle, the lovely, brave and vibrant woman of the earlier books, little is left:

“The memories would remain. She’d have them too, but they were tucked away in pockets that were gradually being sewn up. All her past was being stolen from her. And he couldn’t stop the theft.”

This is a magnificent and poignant end to the finest series of historical crime fiction I have ever read. It is published by Severn House and will be available on 5th September. For more about the Tom Harper novels, click this link.

September 4, 2023 0

TWO FAMILIES, TWO TRAGEDIES. . . The murder of Florence Jackson (part two)

SO FAR: Grantham man Dick Rowland had seen action in the trenches from 1915 until 1918. Unlike his two brothers, he survived, but was wounded and gassed. Spring 1919 found him back in Grantham, aged 29, just another ex-soldier. He had, however, met and fallen for a Fulbeck girl, Florence Jackson. She was ten years his junior and there, I think, lay the problem. She was pretty, fun-loving and with no shortage of local suitors, not to mention dashing officer types from what was to become Royal Air Force College Cranwell. Florence’s mother thought Dick Rowland too old for her daughter, but she could never have envisaged the events of 31st May 1919. It was the day of Caythorpe Feast, an annual event always held on the last Sunday in May. Dick and Florence were there, with hundreds of other local people both young and old. Dick Rowland had become insanely jealous, and every smile or wave Florence gave to some other young man cut him to the quick. He was particularly vexed when Florence decided to share a fairground ride – the wooden swing-boats with some other chaps.

Sometime around 10.00pm, Dick and Florence decided to walk home to Fulbeck. That road, now the A607, was known as the Lincoln Road. Many other people were on that road, but they would have been spread out and it was very dark. I have no idea if there was a moon that night, but one man heard something in the darkness as he rode his bicycle up to Fulbeck. He was later to give evidence at a Coroner’s inquest. This a verbatim report from a local newspaper:

Richard James Nelson, dairyman, Welbourn, spoke of visiting Caythorpe feast on Saturday night last. He saw the deceased girl in the swing boats with a man called Edward Knights. He left the feast about 1045. When he had reached Gascoigne’s gate in the parish of Fulbeck a man called out to him:
“Chummy, stop!”
He stopped, and man who was a stranger asked him to fetch a motorcar from the top as there had been a nasty accident. Witness asked him what it was, and he said:
“A girl has tried to cut my throat and now she has cut her own.”
He noticed the man’s throat was cut and bleeding and he also saw the body of the girl lying on the ground just inside the gateway. Witness attempted to go through the gateway towards the girl. but the man pushed him away and told him to get on his bicycle and fetch a motor car. He then rode off for the police.

There is a horrible irony in that the next people to arrive at the scene were none other than Florence’s older sister and her young man.

Laura Emma Jackson, the deceased’s sister, a land worker employed at Fulbeck Heath, said on Saturday night she was at Caythorpe feast where she saw deceased with Dick Rowland who was courting her. They seemed alright together. Witness left the feast at 10:15 and walked towards home with Percy Graves, a friend. When they got to Gascoigne’s gate she saw a man standing there. He said,
“Mr, Mr, come and look what I have done.”
She told Graves not to go as the man was drunk, but the man came towards them holding out his hands and said,
“Is that Laura?”
Witness replied,
“Yes.”
And he then said,
“I am Dick – I have killed your Flo. Another man wanted her. I have tried to kill myself but could not. Go and tell them at home.”
Witness noticed that Roland had blood down the front of his clothing and was bleeding from the throat. She did not notice her sister. She went home and reported the matter to Mr Palethorpe. Rowland was not drunk but seemed to be rather excited. Witness was at the Grantham statute fair on 17th May with her sister and Rowland. Flo went to speak to some soldiers and Roland asked her to keep an eye on her and watch that she did not go with the soldiers. She told him not to be so silly and that she would not go. Rowland shook his head and remarked,
“Flo’s alright. If I don’t have her I will see no one else does.”
Flo was with the soldiers three or four minutes and then she rejoined Rowland and witness.

The Fulbeck Doctor also gave evidence at the inquest:

Dick Rowland was arrested for the murder of Florence Ann Jackson. The Coroner recommended that he be charged with murder and the case was sent to the Sleaford Magistrates who agreed, and arranged for Rowland to appear at the Summer Assizes in Lincoln. Rowland’s bizarre defence that somehow Florence had received her fatal wounds in some kind of struggle for the razor was abandoned, and his legal team asked for a postponement of the trial so that further investigations could be carried out into the man’s mental health. This delay was granted, and so it was that Dick Rowland appeared before the Lincoln jurors and judge Mr Justice Greer (left) in November 1919. He was found guilty and sentenced to death despite the jury recommending a merciful punishment. There was an immediate appeal against the death penalty, but that was thrown out, with the appeal judge famously opining that Rowland was no more mad than Othello,(the newspaper managing to mis-spell the village name, and relocate it to Essex}

So, Dick Rowland sat in his condemned cell awaiting his fate, probably unaware that he had been compared to one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragic characters. Othello, of course, racked with guilt, stabs himself, which is precisely what Rowland claimed he had tried to do on that fateful evening back in May, but he was to have better luck than the Moor.

In the event, it appears that Dick Rowland was released in April 1935. He married, and the records tell us that he died in Cleethorpes in 1954. Had he become unhinged by his wartime service, a victim of what we now call PTSD? Or had his own chilling words – ” If I don’t have her I will see no one else does.” become a dreadful deed? You must make up your own minds. Incidentally, the fatal spot where Florence died is still there for anyone wishing to stand and contemplate.

Incidentally, a local man, Jonathan Wilkinson has written a novel based on the events I have described. It is very well written, and focuses on what the author believes happened in the months and weeks leading up to Florence’s death. It is available from the Fulbeck Craft Centre (07410 968333)

I have been researching and writing about historic Lincolnshire murders for some years,and those wishing to find out more about our county’s macabre past should click this link

September 3, 2023 0