Murder at the Manchester Museum

by Jim Eldridge

  ‘I’ve tried Hulme, and no one’s seen him,’ said Merton. ‘It’s very important I get hold of him. Spread the word, Bert. There’s a good reward for anyone who tells me where I can find him.’

  ‘I’ll pass it on,’ said Peet. He reached for a bottle. ‘Beer?’

  Merton shook his head. ‘No, I’ve got to get on. Duty calls. But if you find out where Sam is …’

  ‘I promise I’ll get word to you.’

  ‘But don’t let him know I’m looking for him,’ said Merton.

  ‘Oh?’ said Peet, curious. ‘Why, what’s he done?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Merton. ‘It’s just I don’t want him to know he’s being looked for.’

  ‘So he’s in trouble?’

  ‘No,’ said Merton. ‘It’s just … something that’s confidential. I’m not allowed to say, except to Sam. But it’ll be worth his while if I can find him. He’ll benefit.’

  Merton left the pub to continue his search, feeling Peet’s suspicious gaze on his back. He’d had to tell Bert Peet that, because he knew Bert would pass on the information to Adams. It was important that if Adams was found, he didn’t do a runner. If he hadn’t done one already. It was worrying that there’d been no sign of him, which suggested he was either being hidden by someone, or he’d run off somewhere.

  Merton’s first port of call had been the small terraced house in Hulme where Adams lived with his wife, Peg, and their two kids, but he’d had no joy there. Peg Adams said her husband was out at work, but Merton knew that wasn’t true because he’d gone looking for him at Hulme police station, where Sergeant Bottomley had told him they hadn’t seen Adams since he’d been released after the business with the soldiers and those university students getting involved in a punch-up.

  ‘Try the barracks,’ Bottomley had suggested. ‘It was Sam’s brother-in-law, George Bulstrode, the RSM at the barracks, who sprung him. He might know where he is.’

  Merton had tried to barracks, but received short shrift from Bulstrode.

  ‘No, I don’t know where he is,’ the RSM had snapped at him. ‘I got him out and he went home and I haven’t seen him since. He should never have been locked up in the first place. Locking up one of your own? That’s a disgrace! That’s the difference between us in the army and you in the police: we take care of our own.’

  Merton considered going back to see Peg Adams and talking to her again, but decided it would be a waste of time, and his time was valuable right now. Peg Adams had been lying, Merton had no doubt about that. But why? Adams had been freed from custody. He was safe to walk the streets and to return to work. What would make him vanish like this? Could he be dead? Merton hoped not. His only chance of surviving this was in finding Sam Adams alive.

  Sam Adams trudged slowly and unwillingly towards the railway station. He didn’t want to go to Carlisle. He wanted to go home. He couldn’t understand why George was insisting he couldn’t. ‘We’re protecting the Old Man,’ Bulstrode had said. But against what? When he’d been in the cell with the soldiers at Hulme police station, one of the others had muttered it was to do with what had happened at Peterloo. But Peterloo was over eighty years ago. The Old Man hadn’t even been born when that happened, so there was no way he could have been caught up in it.

  It would have helped if George had told him what it was all about, but he’d insisted on maintaining secrecy. ‘The less you know, the less you can say,’ he’d said.

  ‘But I don’t know anything!’ Adams had burst out.

  ‘And that’s a good thing,’ his brother-in-law had retorted.

  No, Adams decided. I’m not going to Carlisle. Not until I’ve seen Peg and the kids. But how could he manage that? George had told him he couldn’t go home and see them.

  In that case, I’ll have to make arrangements, he decided. I’ll get hold of someone I can trust and get them to go and see Peg and tell her Sam wants to meet her. But it had to be somewhere no one might think of, because he couldn’t risk being seen. The trouble was: who could he trust? He couldn’t trust George, for example.

  He also couldn’t be seen wandering around Manchester.

  The Iron Duke, he decided. Billy Scargell had a backroom there, and Billy owed him favours. He’d get Billy to let him hide out in the backroom. George would assume he’d caught the train and gone to Carlisle, but he’d play it safe, he’d keep hidden overnight, just to make sure. Then, first thing in the morning, he’d get Billy to go and see Peg and bring her and the kids to the Iron Duke. They’d be safe there.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Abigail and Daniel were sitting in the hotel lounge, drinking coffee, when they spotted Breda coming towards them, and the excited expression on her face and the speed with which she moved suggested something had happened. But was it good or bad? They both got to their feet as she reached them.

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Abigail.

  ‘I saw him!’ said Breda.

  ‘Saw who?’ asked Abigail.

  ‘The toff. The bloke who said he was William Bickerstaff, but he wasn’t. I was in town just now and I spotted him walking, so I followed him to see where he went.’

  ‘That was very brave of you,’ said Abigail.

  ‘And dangerous,’ added Daniel.

  ‘I kept back from him,’ said Breda. ‘He went into the museum. He’s still there. So I came here to tell you.’

  ‘He might not be there any longer,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ said Breda. ‘I think he works there, because he’s behind a desk answering questions.’

  The three of them hurried to the museum, and Daniel and Abigail followed Breda up the stairs, and then into the reading room. Breda pointed to the figure of Jonty Hawkins sitting at his usual desk.

  ‘That’s him,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t have that make-up on before.’

  Hawkins looked up and smiled as he saw Abigail and Daniel, but his smile faded as he caught sight of Breda standing with them, and they saw he’d turned pale, even beneath his rouge.

  The miserable-looking Hawkins had accompanied Daniel and Abigail to Steggles’s office, where they asked the museum director if they could use his room to talk to Hawkins.

  ‘In your presence, obviously,’ said Daniel. ‘It concerns the museum and the young woman who was murdered.’

  At this, Steggles shot a look of astonishment mixed with nervousness at his reading-room receptionist, but Hawkins kept his head down, his eyes lowered.

  ‘Of course,’ said Steggles.

  Daniel gestured for Hawkins to sit in a chair, then Abigail sat while Daniel led the questioning, Steggles leant forward in his chair, his gaze resolutely fixed on Hawkins.

  ‘You went to Ancoats and told the girl you met at the house where she was staying you were William Bickerstaff,’ said Daniel. ‘You gave her a card with his name on it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hawkins.

  ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘Bickerstaff gave it to me. He asked me to get in touch with him if I ever had anything he could use in the newspaper. I put it in my desk drawer and forgot about it.’

  ‘How did you know where Kathleen was staying?’

  ‘I followed her when she left the museum that first day.’

  ‘Why? Were you planning to kill her already?’

  At this, Steggles let out a gasp and looked towards Daniel in horror.

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ said Hawkins.

  ‘You go in pursuit of her, pretending to be someone else, and the next day she’s murdered in the reading room,’ said Daniel. ‘A young woman who’s only been in the city for a couple of days. That seems too much of a coincidence.’

  ‘I did not kill her!’ repeated Hawkins.

  ‘Then why did you go in search of her? And why pretend to be William Bickerstaff?’

  ‘I wanted to have my own back.’

  ‘On a girl who’d done nothing to you!’ said Daniel angrily.

  Hawkins looked at him, pained. ‘Not on her! On Bickerstaff
.’

  Daniel and Abigail exchanged puzzled looks, then Daniel sat down, watching Hawkins intensely the whole time.

  ‘You’d better explain,’ he said.

  Hawkins fell silent, as if gathering his thoughts, then he gave a heavy sigh. ‘It all began about four months ago,’ he said. ‘A young woman started to come to the reading room. Her name was Etta Harkness. She was similar to the young woman who was killed, obviously poor, attractive, but what made her special was the fact she came to learn, to better herself. She’d taught herself to read, and now she wanted to expand her horizons in what she read. She asked me for my advice on which authors she should read. We started with popular authors, like Dickens and Eliot, and then I introduced her to poetry. The works of John Donne became her favourite, as they were for me.

  ‘We were happy, talking poetry. I looked forward to her visits here so much, and I was on the point of suggesting that we might meet somewhere else, go out to places together, when that vile snake, Bickerstaff, appeared.

  ‘I’d heard rumours about him preying on young women from poor backgrounds and taking advantage of them, but I put it down to gossip. There’s a lot of gossip about people, especially those in the public eye, and Bickerstaff made sure he was in the public eye because of his articles in the Guardian.’ His mouth twisted into an angry sneer as he said, ‘He claimed he was a writer, a proper one, because he got paid for writing. And he could be charming when he wanted, especially if he was after something. And he was.’

  ‘Etta?’ asked Daniel.

  Hawkins nodded. ‘It happened under my nose, without me noticing. When Etta and I met she started talking more and more about Bickerstaff, how clever he was, a radical writer who said he was planning to go into politics and revolutionise life for people like her, lift her out of poverty. Her face lit up when she talked about him. I tried to warn her about him, because of the gossip I’d heard, but she said people who spoke badly about him only did that because they were jealous of him, so I stopped telling her because I didn’t want her to think less of me.’

  He looked at them, and they could see the pain etched in his face.

  ‘Of course, he had no real feelings for her, despite what he claimed. You can guess what happened. He used her, and then discarded her when he got tired of her. And when she discovered she was pregnant, he denied it was anything to do with him. He told her it must have been any of the other men she’d slept with, and when she told him he’d been the only one, he became hard and cruel. Said he’d have the police on her if she spread such lies about him.’

  Hawkins lowered his head and was silent for a minute, before he said, ‘She killed herself. She couldn’t face the shame of having a baby. She’d lost everything.’ He jerked his head up and said angrily: ‘He’d taken everything from her. And he’d taken her from me, for ever. I wanted to kill him. But I didn’t know how to do it. And I didn’t want him just to die, I wanted him to suffer, as I had and Etta had. Every time he came here to do some kind of research or something, I’d look at him and rage would build up inside me so much that I thought I’d pick up the heaviest book I could find and smash it down on his head and keep hitting him until he was dead and his brains were everywhere. But I didn’t.

  ‘And then, last week when that young Irish woman came in and asked about the barracks and the army, I noticed Bickerstaff coming in. She told me she’d met him at the newspaper offices, and she felt there was something creepy about him.’

  ‘She said that to you?’ asked Abigail, surprised.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hawkins. ‘I could see from the way he watched her when he was in here that he was after her, the same way he’d been after Etta. And, although she said she felt there was something creepy about him, I knew how charming he could be, how persuasive, and I felt it was only a matter of time before he used her as he’d done Etta. And I thought, and I don’t know why, I can use this. I can expose him for the vile seducer he is. But I wasn’t sure how to go about it.

  ‘Anyway, although I didn’t have a plan worked out, or even half a plan, I decided to follow the young woman, Kathleen, as it turned out to be, when she left the museum, and I tracked her to the house in Ancoats. I didn’t talk to her that day; I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. Then I decided I’d go and see her and warn her about Bickerstaff, but then I thought that might be too direct. I’d tried to warn Etta and it hadn’t worked. In fact, it had done the opposite, it had pushed her towards him. I had to be cleverer.

  ‘I thought if I left his card for her, as she’d already said he seemed creepy to her, it might put her off him, feeling he was pursuing her. I also thought I might be able to use it later in some way, but I didn’t know how.

  ‘Next day she was back at the museum again, and it was all very businesslike, no chatting. And then she was killed.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us you knew who the young woman was and where she was living when we first talked to you?’ asked Abigail.

  Hawkins hung his head. ‘I was afraid,’ he said. ‘I could only say I knew who she was and where she came from if I said I’d followed her to her house, and that would make me a main suspect for the murders. But I didn’t! I didn’t kill either of them!’

  ‘You told me that Bickerstaff was at the museum before she died, as well as afterwards. Did you say that to implicate him?’ asked Abigail.

  ‘No, that was true,’ said Hawkins. ‘But I admit I was pleased about it, because I hoped it might mean he’d be investigated in more depth.’

  ‘Do you think he killed her?’ asked Daniel.

  Hawkins shook his head. ‘No. At least, I don’t think so. It seemed too brazen a thing for Bickerstaff to do, to kill her somewhere that public. He’s too much of a coward. But, perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps he did.’

  The questioning finished, Hawkins left the office with Steggles’s firmly delivered instruction to ‘Return to your post. I shall talk to you after I’ve decided what action to take.’

  Once the door had closed behind Hawkins, Steggles looked at Daniel and Abigail and asked, almost helplessly, ‘What can we do? Do the police need to be brought in? Do you think Hawkins killed her to implicate Bickerstaff?’

  ‘I don’t believe he killed her,’ said Daniel. ‘I feel all he’s guilty of is lying when he told Breda he was William Bickerstaff. Technically he’s not guilty of any crime. However, he hampered the investigation by not being honest about going to Ancoats and pretending to be Bickerstaff, and there has to be a question mark over him because she was killed here, and Hawkins was the one who found her.

  ‘Ordinarily, if we were in a place where I knew the local police detective division and trusted them, I’d be honour-bound to hand him in for them to question him. But from what I’ve heard of the local inspector, I believe he tends to carry out his interrogations very physically in order to extract a confession, and I have my doubts about that being either ethical or successful in this case, or any other.’

  Steggles looked doubtful. ‘I’m not convinced I can trust him,’ he said. He looked at Abigail. ‘What do you think, Miss Fenton?’

  ‘I agree with Mr Wilson,’ said Abigail. ‘I also don’t believe he killed the young woman. I share Daniel’s view that the key to her death lies somewhere with the army, and I can’t see Mr Hawkins being involved there in any way. My preference would be to wait a day or two and think about it before handing him over to the police, if that’s what we decide. After all, we go to Ireland tomorrow, and I’m hoping what we learn there might fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of the case: namely, the reason why she was killed.’

  Steggles sat and thought their words over, then finally announced, ‘Very well. I shall send him home on leave until you return from Ireland and let me know what you’ve discovered. Then we’ll make a decision.’ He lifted the internal telephone on his desk and said, ‘Mrs Wedburn, could you find Mr Hawkins in the reading room and tell him to report to my office.’

  As Daniel and Abigail descended the
stairs towards the exit, the miserable and forlorn figure of Jonty Hawkins passed them on his way to his meeting with Steggles.

  ‘Well, we’ve gained him a reprieve from the attentions of Inspector Grimley and his men,’ muttered Abigail. ‘But what if we’re wrong about him? What if it was him, and he kills again while we’re away?’

  ‘In that case, it will show us we’re not the good judges of character we think we are,’ sighed Daniel unhappily.

  ‘But if we’re wrong, someone else may die,’ said Abigail. ‘If that were to happen, I’m not sure if I could ever forgive myself.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  When Abigail and Daniel descended the stairs of the hotel that evening to make their way to the museum for Abigail’s talk, they found four tall, uniformed policemen waiting for them in the hotel lobby. The leader of the four stepped forward to greet them.

  ‘Miss Fenton?’ he asked. ‘I’m Sergeant Hudson. Inspector Grimley has sent us to escort you and Mr Wilson to the museum. We have a van outside to transport you, if you wish.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Abigail. ‘It’s not far, and I’m used to walking.’

  ‘Whichever you prefer, ma’am,’ said Hudson. He snapped out an order and the three uniformed constables assembled around Abigail and Daniel, with Sergeant Hudson completing the square of four, and they marched Abigail and Daniel through the lobby, out of the hotel and towards the museum.

  ‘This is ludicrous,’ muttered Abigail crossly. ‘We are presenting a ridiculous spectacle!’

  ‘It’s for your safety,’ said Daniel.

  ‘No one is going to try and kill me in the street,’ said Abigail firmly.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Daniel. ‘It’s easier than trying to kill you inside the museum. In an enclosed space the shooter has more problems getting away.’ He looked up at the buildings they passed. ‘Far better to take up a position in some high building. One shot, and then disappear before anyone realises where the shot’s come from.’