Passion in the Peak

by John Buxton Hilton

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  Contents

  John Buxton Hilton

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  John Buxton Hilton

  Passion in the Peak

  John Buxton Hilton

  John Buxton Hilton was born in 1921 in Buxton, Derbyshire. After his war service in the army he became an Inspector of schools, before retiring in 1970 to take up full-time writing.

  He wrote two books on language teaching as well as being a prolific crime writer – his works include the Superintendent Simon Kenworthy series and the Inspector Thomas Brunt series, as well as the Inspector Mosley series under the pseudonym John Greenwood.

  Chapter One

  A March gale funnelled up the limestone dale. Rain beat against the window. Water from a leaking gutter was pouring somewhere into a bucket. Behind the storm a more pretentious wailing persisted. Nall looked up from the sheet of lavender notepaper.

  ‘They call that bloody music?’

  ‘Prelude for reeds and synthesizer,’ Kershaw told him. ‘God made the world in six days and Szolnok’s been rehearsing the overture for five weeks.’

  ‘Sounds to me as if they’re still tuning up.’

  ‘You have an uncultivated ear, Sergeant. You’re a musical peasant. This is quarter-tone stuff. It’s a matter of tonal education.’

  ‘You’ve been here too long, Freddy. I’ll have you back in the division next week.’

  A dissonance petered out. The rain was sheeting horizontally across the Square.

  ‘They must have played a wrong note,’ Detective-Constable Kershaw said. ‘He’ll be cursing them up hill and down dale. I think he learned his English off a lavatory wall.’

  ‘I’d rather have the crap my daughter listens to.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no lack of pop. Groups in the intermissions. Choruses of Nazarenes, Galileans and proselytes.’

  ‘No need to be rude. Gadarenes—that’s more like it.’

  ‘You’re not with it, Sarge. This is the apotheosis of the arts, an amalgam of aesthetic experience.’ Kershaw was quoting from the promotional handout.

  ‘Experiment in aesthetic bastardy. What they need’s a male voice choir.’ Detective-Sergeant Nall fancied himself as a baritone. He did not lack volume.

  ‘They’ve got that, too. Prelude to Act Seven: Roman soldiers in the Praetorium.’ Kershaw went into another heavy quote. ‘Librettists and composers, choreographers and scenic artists have enshrined in the opus every form of expression to which creative man has ever aspired.’

  ‘I wonder they haven’t offered you a part.’

  ‘They have: Simon of Cyrene. Don’t you think I should take it on? You told me to work my way behind the scenes.’

  ‘You’ve been here too bloody long, Freddy. And you’re putting on weight, too. This country chuck’ll be the ruin of you. And from what I saw in the kitchen just now, grub’s not your only temptation.’

  ‘He’s wasting his time looking at her,’ Sergeant Wardle said, burly and misanthropic, half out of uniform in his own home, the nearest approach the village had to a police station. ‘She has ideas above a policeman, has that one.’

  ‘Well, maybe it’s time I did call him in then, before she breaks his heart. I’d hoick him with me here and now, if it hadn’t been for this.’

  He fingered the sheet of lavender-coloured notepaper.

  ‘You’ve been here long enough to have sneaked a look at a lot of people’s handwriting. Whose is it?’

  Kershaw read the letter, sniffed it, held it up to the light.

  ‘Same hand as the others,’ he said.

  ‘Clever bugger! You’ve been here three weeks, and the only charge you’ve turned in so far is an old age pensioner for pinching eggs. Not to speak of spending one whole day trying to nail a Peeping Tom rap on to a laddie who’s had a nervous breakdown. I’m beginning to jump out of my skin any time anyone mentions Peak Low. Before this shower descended, we didn’t hear of the place once in ten years.’

  The triplet villages of Peak Dale, Peak Forest and Peak Low lie a few miles apart in a crease of the Pennines, straddling the cleft that the Midland Railway navigators drove up Great Rocks Dale to Chapel-en-le-Frith. Of the three, Peak Low is the least heard of, the least trafficked over. Its couple of hundred or so able-bodied males mostly live by tearing rock out of quarries. A few wrest subsistence of a kind from the thin topsoil, helped by a handful of wandering sheep. One or two of the cottagers brew cups of tea for hill-walkers in season. Before the year of Furnival’s Passion, the place had known few crimes graver than unlighted bicycles and the community had been left to settle their Saturday night differences for themselves. Sergeant Wardle was in sight of retirement. He had lost such taste for trouble as he had ever had.

  Then the CID had started hearing of the place. There had been pilfering of a rather more than casual order: shovels, wheelbarrows and gumboots from the building site. A subcontractor’s shed had been broken into, then The Devonshire Arms. The Peakrels themselves had been affected. A Peeping Tom had explored the possibilities of the women’s dressing-rooms. A village youth had borrowed a lady ’cellist’s moped. Kershaw had had to pay so many visits that the DI had put him in the village on semi-permanent detachment.

  Perhaps Furnival’s title had had something to do with it. Perhaps DI Fewter felt challenged by Cantrell, Furnival’s security officer. Perhaps he even thought that these violet denunciations were worth looking into in their own right. Certainly someone seemed to have it in for Mary Magdalene.

  ‘This time we’re to stop her from going out with Larner on Saturday night. It’s Saturday today.’

  Two weeks ago the press had received a warning on anonymous mauve paper that someone was going to interfere with Mary Magdalene’s shoes. The editor had been public-spirited enough to pass it on to the County police, though that had not stopped him from squeezing the last drop of journalistic juices from the possibilities. The joke had been an old one, screwing the soles down to the dressing-room floor while she was on set. The Crazy Gang were generally credited with having originated that one. Whether or not, they’d had one of these notes in Buxton police station and the thing
had happened.

  Then there had been the bitter drink. Madge Oldroyd, who was playing the Magdalene, was suffering from a dry throat. There was a jug of barley water kept for her in the wings, and somebody had tampered with it. It was worse than nasty, it was emetic, as Miss Oldroyd had demonstrated to the assembled company. Ipecacuanha, probably—but at this stage no one thought of keeping it for analysis. The incident had, however, been forecast on lavender paper. And this time a press photographer had been waiting in the wings.

  It had to be admitted that Madge Oldroyd was different. For all the talk of aesthetic amalgam, the accent did seem to be on rock, jazz and folk. And Madge was a straight—and strait—singer. She was a contralto Yorkshire lass, had risen through provincial Festivals to concert class, and nowadays went about the North Country as a professional soloist with amateur Messiahs, Creations and Dreams of Gerontius. The similarity to Kathleen Ferrier’s early years did not need to be pointed and clearly it was uppermost in a lot of minds that the Passion would be the making of her.

  She would not have been everybody’s choice as Mary Magdalene. No one looking at her could believe very vividly in her sinful past. But she was struggling all the time to show that there was nothing toffee-nosed about her, and she seemed to get a kick out of decking herself out as a New Testament floozie. She was quite unlike the show-business folk about her, though anxious to be on equal terms with them all. But there was clearly someone with whom this did not work; someone was always hiding her properties just before she needed them on stage. Then there was the business of the flowers that had been waiting for her in the wings, after the cast had heard her sing for the first time the hit that they were hyping for her: I walked the streets.

  A massive bouquet from an unnamed admirer had been delivered by Interflora. But when she got it back into her room, the whole lot withered immediately the Cellophane was taken off—not only died, unnaturally, before her eyes, but stank abominably. That morning the writer on lavender paper had warned that something was being cooked up for her, but had not said what.

  There had been no warning about the final outrage. Somebody had somehow got at one of her dresses, unpicking stitches, undermining press-studs, hooks and eyes, so that the thing had sprung apart just as she was standing up from washing Wayne Larner’s feet. No one would have guessed that she had such a spotty, eczematous back. It was too much for Madge Oldroyd. She walked out on the Passion, and a temporary Mary Magdalene had to be found—the very girl that Nall had just been teasing Freddy Kershaw about: Joan Culver. Joan was a member of the Peak Low church choir, with a sweet but not very powerful voice, who, like many others in the village, had suddenly become besotted by the stage, and was happy to act as stand-in so that Wayne Larner could learn his cues and movements.

  Sergeant Nall yawned.

  ‘Your bit of homework, Freddy, is to find out who’s been writing these things. Me, I shall be watching Grandstand. And I’m going to have shrimps for my tea. Then I’m coming out for a night on Peak Low ale.’

  He spoke as if it were a threat.

  ‘By which time you’ll know the answer. Or I shall have to forgo my ale and take over from you. And if that happens you’ll be eating in the canteen next week.’

  Wardle cleared his vocal cords. ‘All for what? Before they’re much older they’ll wish they’d faced the facts and buggered off. Fancy putting on an Easter open air show in these parts!’

  But Kershaw continued to play at being loyal to the cause.

  ‘Easter’s only a try-out—a dress rehearsal. Then six weeks’ grafting and patching—and they speak with tongues at Pentecost.’

  ‘Furnival’s got more faith in a Derbyshire Spring than I have.’

  ‘The theatre has a sliding roof.’

  ‘It’ll only need to slide one bloody way. The man’s a nutter.’

  ‘He can afford to be.’

  A well-heeled, left of centre dilettante, Lord Furnival had conceived the notion of turning Peak Low into an evangelical Oberammergau of the Pennines. He had attracted money to the venture, had formed and headed a consortium, had even dug out a Peak Low variant of the Great Plague story—or had had one ghosted. Why should neighbouring Eyam have cornered all the germs? Hoteliers in Buxton, Bakewell and Matlock had set up a joint booking office. American agencies were fighting for seats and beds.

  ‘He stands to lose a packet.’

  ‘He’ll be satisfied if he breaks even. His loss margin is the price he’s gladly paying for doing his thing. And some people are going to make a bomb, even if the whole thing flops: coach operators, caterers. They say provisional bookings from the Mothers’ Union alone are enough to pay his clerical overheads. What he’s going to charge for car parking will keep the orchestra in bread. Recording royalties, TV rights, video—and he is providing employment for all these bloody poets, musicians, ballet dancers, Lesbians and consenting males. It’s all talent that might never have found a taker. Mediaeval patrons had the same feeling when they commissioned the odd cathedral.’

  ‘Freddy—you’ve got it as bad as Furnival has.’

  ‘You told me to get under the skin. And look what he’s done for the locals.’

  ‘Taught them that crime might possibly pay. And that’s what you’re here for—not to stuff yourself with Yorkshire pudding and besport yourself with the original Bakewell tart.’

  Crude, uncalled for: but Kershaw knew when not to rise to his Sergeant’s cloddish humours.

  ‘You’ve no creative urge, Sarge,’ was all he said.

  Hajek, the polyglot Central European co-ordinating producer, had brought in locals for the crowd scenes, some with minor speaking parts. Men at the rock face were growing apostles’ beards. Women in cottages were sewing seams to the patterns of a wardrobe mistress with an address in Paris.

  ‘There’s been more strife here about who’s going to do what than the High Peak has known since the Enclosure Acts. The record of brotherly love since Furnival cut his first sod reads like the history of Christianity in the Dark Ages. Yet Furnival insists he isn’t grinding a religious axe.’

  ‘Scrupulously undenominational: a sublimation of the ecumenical spirit of our age.’

  ‘Christ! I suppose you’ll say it’s not political, either. The man’s a Commie.’

  A Commie to Nall was anyone who believed in the welfare state. But undenominational or not, there was bland support from some churchmen and uncompromising hostility from others—including the Vicar of Peak Low, who wrote a letter to The Times in Ciceronian prose, deploring the prostitution of the scriptures. In his pulpit he was more specific.

  ‘The point about Mary Magdalene is that Jesus forgave her. Neither He nor she denied her scurrilous past. Her sins, which are many—those were His words. Yet when I came through the woods last Thursday morning, I heard a woman singing a song whose whole point was to revel in those sins. It was the sin, not the forgiveness, that interested the song-writer. In any case, there are no sound grounds for supposing that the woman who washed Christ’s feet in the seventh chapter of Luke was Mary Magdalene.’

  Other opponents of the Passion took exception to the playing of Christ by a pop star whose sins were also generally rumoured to have been well-rounded. But as a middle-of-the-road bishop pointed out on a chat show, theirs was essentially a religion of regeneration. And to void accusations of irreverence, the production was protected by a meticulous mystique. Larner was not to show his face to the audience. Parables and miracles were to be played out in tableaux and mime. Pronouncements and exhortations were to be sung with celestial overtones. The mind of the populace would be reflected in pseudo-folk stuff in the entr’actes. In this festival, the fringes had been granted the freedom of the apron stage: but they were rigorously selected fringes.

  Nall tapped the letter again.

  ‘Find out who’s writing these. Find out this afternoon. Somewhere there must be samples of most people’s writing on file. Cantrell will have access. Get it settled this afternoon, Freddy.
And when you know the answer, do sod-all about it. Just tell me her name when I come out this evening—it stands out a mile that it’s a woman. And next week I’ll have you back to an ordinary round of honest iniquity.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

  ‘And Freddy—I’ve been wondering how you’re going to tackle this.’

  ‘So have I.’

  ‘You’re going to have to beard Cantrell. That will mean watching points.’

  As professionals, they had nothing but contempt for Cantrell. It was largely by bluff that Cantrell got by, but that did not mean that he had no power: in emergencies, the Cantrells of this world can rally the forces of the Establishment.

  ‘When I think of what might happen if you put a foot wrong with Cantrell, I’m tempted to miss Grandstand and do the job myself.’

  But Kershaw knew that he wouldn’t. Nall’s idleness was as near to totality as he could get away with.

  A renewed flurry beat the window. The electronic prelude soared again.

  Chapter Two

  A gust round the corner of a stone-built cottage had Kershaw pinned for a moment against a wall. Somewhere behind the storm, the orchestra achieved a primaeval crescendo. It was typical of Szolnok to call them back without notice on a Saturday afternoon, like kids kept in at school.

  Kershaw’s gaberdine had ceased to be stormproof. As he plodded up past the pub and the school, he saw a figure crossing the storm-swept Square: a male figure, adolescent in the outgrowing-his-strength stage, round-shouldered, gangling, uncoordinated: Julian Harpur. If the afternoon had been other than it was, Kershaw might have lingered to try to find out what Harpur was doing. But who could ever answer that—least of all Julian Harpur? Kershaw had had Harpur on a short list of one at the time the Peeping Tom complaints had come in; but there had been no evidence, nothing to work on. The only thing one could do with Harpur was to make mental notes of where one saw him and what he appeared to be up to. If there was scheme and purpose in young Harpur’s life, he himself seemed the last to be aware of it.