Rags, Bones and Donkey Stones (Sequel)

by B A Lightfoot

  ‘But Mr Molineaux’ Pippin began. ‘We keep…’

  ‘No need for modesty, dear lady. I submit freely to your bullying and chiding because I know that you have pride in your work and therefore your demands are reasonable. It will not fade you know. This ink is made to my own secret formula. Many of the old masterpieces were penned with an ink that contained ferrous oxide which fades over the years to a tired brown. But that will not happen to a Molineaux manuscript.’

  ‘Nor a Mullins one, either,’ Amy added.

  ‘Ah, no, indeed not,’ Eppie said, frowning slightly. ‘My ink has been formulated to withstand the ravages of time. It even contains soot from my own chimney.’

  ‘Perhaps you should bottle it, Mr Molineaux’ Amy suggested. ‘You might make a lot of money with it.’

  ‘Oh, dear me, no. I sell my services as an aesthete, a man of letters and a compassionate human, not as a man of commerce. Naturally, there is always the implicit inclusion of a warrant of the long term legibility of my documents. I will not sell my soul, or my formula, for callous monetary gain.’ He pursed his mouth and ran the newly prepared quill along his lips, unwittingly leaving behind a neat black line. ‘That is a wonderfully smooth tip for the first time of using. They do improve as the goose becomes familiar with the hand of the writer, then they gradually wear as she tires. Her lines become less sharp, her curves less defined and it has to be re-cut. They become like old friends, comfortable and familiar, but without the exciting tinge of discovery that attaches to a new acquaintance. But, see, I have an interesting circle of friends.’ Reaching up, he opened the door of the cupboard standing in the corner of the room. A wide strip of dark blue velvet with a series of pouch pockets sown along it, hung inside the door. Tucked into many of the pockets were quills, mostly goose of various breeds but with a couple of swan and one glowingly colourful peacock. Some of the feathers looked dishevelled and tired, some were stained with ink and one was just the core stem with all the plumage removed. Each of the filled pockets had a name attached to it; Portia, Falstaff, Claudia, Lavinia, Ophelia, Shylock among them. One of the swan quills had been crushed and bent. The name on the label, Helena, had been scored out and replaced by the word Tamora.

  Eppie closed the cupboard door slowly and turned to the girls. ‘Doctor Johnson once wrote, That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner. You mentioned a name last week that reminded me that such an event in my life is possibly imminent and that there is a great wrong that has burdened me for so many years. Now it must be righted. I have hidden away from this whole crushing episode in my life, banished names and events from my memory. You held before me a name that glowed warmly; no pain or hurt, only guilt. Now, I must seek at least some small forgiveness before it is too late.’

  The girls exchanged brief glances but their puzzled frowns showed that neither understood the significance of his comments. ‘Well,’ Amy said eventually, ‘I’m glad that we helped in some small way.’

  Eppie dipped the pen in the ink and took an envelope. ‘The stroke must be gentle, without sharp edge. It should flow and not offend the eye.’ He wrote on the envelope, To Mrs Lilian Frobisher, Howard Street, Salford.

  ‘When you mentioned a pianist who knew my name and who claimed to have known me well, then I had to believe that you referred to that beautiful person from my younger days, Lilian Harcourt. I am searching my soul for words to compose a suitable letter. When it is finished, I shall prevail on you good ladies to deliver it for me as I don’t know the house number.’

  Chapter 28

  ‘Cup your hands together and bend down so that I can put my foot in them,’ Amy instructed. ‘And don’t be pushing up too quickly else you’ll be throwing me over the top.’

  Pulling his cap further onto his head, Billy Murphy looked fearfully up and down the dark entry where the stuttering gas lamp in the adjacent street threw flickering, impenetrable shadows. A noise across the way startled him and he jumped into the back door recess, pulling Amy into the sheltering blackness. ‘What’s that?’ he hissed. ‘Somebody’s over there. We’ve had it now.’

  ‘Will you stop quivering, you soft thing. It’s probably just a cat.’

  A gruff voice instructing ‘Get out, you little sod,’ followed by a feline yelp confirmed her interpretation. A door closed and bolts were slid into place.

  ‘This seems the maddest, stupidest idea you have ever come up with,’ Billy grumbled. ‘What if the police come down and find us? We’ll be in big trouble then.’

  ‘If a policeman appears, just start kissing me. You are quick enough to start any other time that you get the chance. We will just say that we have been to the Empire and you are giving me a quick goodnight kiss.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That will really convince him when I’m holding your leg and pushing you half way up the wall. What will the charge be? Breaking and entering into a funeral parlour where the defendant works. “And what is your explanation for this odd behaviour, Miss Benson?” the beak will ask. And what are you going to say to that? “I am sorry your honour, but I’ve got to work late because we’ve been dead busy.”’

  ‘Listen, Billy Murphy. This could help clear things up for your dad. Once we get inside the yard then we are ok. I left the window off the latch when I finished work so there will be no problem. Just bend down and put your hands together.’

  Billy bent forward, obediently cupping his hands together, and Amy placed her heel into them. ‘Right, now push me up gently,’ she instructed, grabbing hold of the top of the back door and hauling herself up.

  ‘I’m not very happy about this. It’s just not right doing this sort of thing; it’s just not showing proper respect,’ Billy complained, his voice straining with the effort of lifting whilst, at the same time, averting his head to avoid close proximity with the top of his co-conspirator’s leg.

  ‘What on earth are you complaining about now?’ she hissed from the top of the yard door.

  ‘Me holding your leg like this. You’re a girl. And your… you know… in my face like this. I mean, it’s nice enough in its way but, well, it’s not like your one of the lads. My dad wouldn’t think this is clearing anything up; he’d have a dickie fit if he knew what we were up to.’

  ‘Billy, just shut up and push,’ she urged and he groaned slightly as she thrust her free foot down into his groin. He caught a quick glimpse of her trim ankles as, in a flurry of rustling skirts and scraping shoes, she heaved herself over the pointed lintel above the door and dropped down into the yard. She withdrew the bolt, reached through the open door and dragged him in. ‘Don’t walk into the bins,’ she whispered. ‘There are three of them on the right hand side.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said, shocked. ‘What goes into the bins from a funeral director’s?’

  ‘Paper, rags, bottles. Just normal rubbish. What do you think that we put in the bins? Unclaimed bodies or something?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, do I? I’ve never even thought about it. The whole place just gives me the creeps. How can you work in a business like this?’

  ‘I enjoy it, that’s how. People need a sympathetic ear when they are bereaved. Now push the window up and you go in first seeing as you are complaining about lifting me up.’

  Billy was startled by this instruction. ‘No way. I am not going in there first. In fact, I don’t think that I should go in at all. I’ll just dog out for you out here.’

  ‘I need you in there with me. There are some heavy boxes that I need you to lift down.’ She vaguely remembered the array of storage boxes that lined the shelves in Mr Musgrave’s office from when she had come for the interview for the job, but she had been so nervous that she had hardly assimilated the detail. Now she was the junior clerk cum receptionist, with a desk near the front door, she had almost no contact with the owner. All communication with him, including the delivery of cups of tea, was through the formidable senior clerk, Mrs Balderstone, who protected and insulated her employer from the interference of the outs
ide world with a determined authority.

  When Pippin had reported the results of her research at the library, Amy had been thrilled with the revelation of the real identity of the Salford Canary but dismayed with the response of Pip’s mother. It was true; the name only filled in an empty line, it didn’t take them any nearer to explaining the presence of Billy’s father in the picture. Mrs Craigie had gone straight to the root of the mystery – why should anybody be trying to implicate Mr Murphy with a long since forgotten, albeit desperately attractive, star of the Victorian music halls. It was clearly also still bothering Mr Murphy himself. Billy had told her that the picture was now on the window ledge in the toilet and that he had heard his dad in there a few times muttering ‘bloody woman’ and ‘you’re driving me sodding daft.’ He had also told her that his father still had bad turns in a thunderstorm and that he had once found him on the cellar steps shivering violently and crying. She wanted so much to help him. As she had grown older, she had missed her own father more and more. She understood now that his drunken rages were often a cry for help, a vulnerable, sensitive man locked into a desperate, repressive regime, an unhappy struggle to meet the crushing daily needs of a family. She was certain that a valid explanation for the picture would settle Mr Murphy’s mind and, anyway, she was intrigued to know the answer herself.

  ‘Amy, the window is stuck. Are you sure that you left the catch off when you finished work?’

  ‘Yes, Billy, I am sure. Are you sure that you are pushing it up properly and not just looking for an excuse to get out of going in.’

  ‘This is a serious offence, breaking into property. There is no way that Dad would agree with you doing this for his sake. I don’t even understand what we are looking for and why can’t you just ask them?’

  ‘Because Granny’s Mr Blenkinsop just clamped up again when he realised that he had said something out of turn. There is no way that I can just walk up to Mrs Balderstone and say that I want to look at the file for Harry Grimshaw. The old bat would have palpitations.’

  The name Ellen Connolly had meant nothing to her but they remembered that Nellie Grimshaw had said that the answer might lie with the owner of the suit that the picture was found in. They presumed that it had belonged to Harry Grimshaw but he was, of course, dead. Amy had suggested that they should try and discover a bit more about him and, with that in mind, she had gone to see her Granny. Arthur Blenkinsop had walked in from the kitchen just as she was asking her granny if she remembered Harry Grimshaw. Arthur had known him well since he was a lad and ventured the opinion that there was something more than meets the eye there, that arrangement that he had with Musgrave’s Funeral Parlour, paying for the funerals of all those other people and all that. Amy had been instantly intrigued but her enthusiastic reaction was met with a mumbled rebuff from Arthur and a sheepish withdrawal to the kitchen.

  ‘There was always a bit of a rumour that Harry had some funny dealings but nobody really knew what it was all about,’ Granny whispered. ‘He always seemed straight enough to me.’ Amy was convinced that the answer to the intriguing mystery might lie in those brown boxes on the shelves in Mr Musgrave’s office and, with Mrs Balderstone’s iron grip on the office procedures, they would surely be clearly indexed.

  ‘Give the window another push, Billy. It might be a bit stiff. They don’t get opened as often as they should.’ There was a slight juddering of the lead weights in the sashes and the window rolled slowly up. Reluctantly pushing Amy up through the opening, Billy then scrambled in himself. In the grey light from the moon and the pale yellow of the gas street lamp, they could make out four coffins laid out on trestles. Standing behind Amy and holding onto the back of her jacket, Billy’s voice had diminished to an unintelligible, gasping squeak.

  ‘Billy, they’re ok. They are just customers. They won’t jump out and get you.’

  ‘Aye, that’s as maybe but you never know,’ Billy said, looking around fearfully. ‘They should have the lids screwed down and then they’d be a bit safer.’

  ‘The men are still working on them. They have to be properly prepared ready for the families to see them.’

  ‘Oh, God. Look at this one,’ Billy hissed, grabbing Amy’s arm. ‘He’s lifted his legs up.’

  ‘They found him sitting in his chair. The men will sort him out tomorrow. Now, come on, let’s find what we have come for.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem right to me. Lay in here like this. Do the neighbours know that you have dead people laid in here overnight with nobody watching them? And what’s that smell? How can you work in a place with that smell?’

  ‘It’s formaldehyde and you just get used to it. Mind you, I don’t come in here much. I’m in the front office and you don’t get it in there.’ Amy took Billy’s sweaty hand and dragged him over to the offices, giving the coffins, for the sake of her highly agitated boyfriend, as wide a berth as possible. They heard the front door rattle and the handle being turned.

  ‘What’s that,’ Billy squealed, a constriction in his throat almost suppressing his ability to speak. ‘Somebody’s coming in. We’ll have to scarper. Quick.’

  Amy stepped in front of him to prevent his early departure. ‘It will just be the police trying the door to make sure that Mr Musgrave locked it when he left.’

  ‘Then the next thing is they will come to the back checking those. They’ll find the back door open and the window and then we have really had it. Let’s go while we’ve got the chance,’ he gabbled.

  ‘I bolted the back door and closed the window. Calm down a minute and come in here with me,’ Amy said, soothing her dithering companion. She turned the handle of a door and pulled him inside. No light came through the heavily shuttered windows of Mr Musgrave’s dusty office and all they could see was the corner of a coat cupboard that was adjacent to the door. Amy searched in the leather satchel bag that she carried and brought out a candle and a small, metal holder. The wick sputtered into life and threw a flickering glow around the small, sparsely furnished room. Quickly identifying the box that she required, she signalled to Billy to lift it down, soon finding the thick sheaf of papers with the title sheet Harry Grimshaw d.22 July 1919 f.27 July 1919.

  Amy untied the string and began to search through the bills, letters, newspaper cuttings, legal documents and lists that comprised the collection. Pacing nervously about the office, Billy stopped frequently to peer through the door into the larger room where the lifeless occupants lay waiting. ‘Come on, love, hurry up,’ he urged. ‘I don’t like this; I don’t like this at all. Let’s get done and get out of here. This place is really giving me the creeps.’

  ‘Billy, I’m going as fast as I can. It is strange. He does seem to have been a bit of a benefactor. These bills are for other people that he has paid the funeral costs for. Look at this – Cecil James Higgins. That must be Granny Higgins’ husband; it’s the same address. Here’s one – Simon Henry Frobisher from Howard Street. That’s the husband of the lady that we met in the greengrocers. Oh, wow, look at this. Here is a list of the funerals that he has paid for and others that he will pay for when they die. Where is my pencil? I am going to copy these down.’

  Momentarily distracted from his agitated watch over the corpses, Billy picked up some of the papers. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘This must be where the money comes from now he is dead. This is a copy of a receipt and a letter addressed to the Salford Charter Bank.’

  ‘Let me see,’ Amy said, taking the papers from him. ‘Don’t get these out of order. The old man probably knows exactly what he has in here and in what sequence. Oh! Oh… my… God. The letter says with reference to the services rendered in respect of Mr Patrick Murphy (deceased). That is Callum’s father. And the receipt is made out to the account of Harry Grimshaw administered by Miss E Connolly.’ Amy clenched her fists and almost shrieked with excitement as she read out the name that Pippin had so recently linked with the Salford Canary.

  ‘What does that mean then?’ Billy asked, puzzled at her gleeful reaction.r />
  ‘Well, I don’t really know. But Ellen Connolly is the woman in the picture and that was found in the suit of Harry Grimshaw. I just knew there would be something there if we looked. Come on, let’s put these back where we found them. I can’t wait to tell Pip about this.’

  Relieved at the prospect of escape, Billy replaced the box on the shelf and closed the door of Mr Musgrave’s office with a great sigh of relief. In his haste to get to the window, he knocked against a coffin. Its occupant emitted a long mournful groan as gases were dislodged from its stomach. Giving a startled cry, Billy leapt through the now open window, yelping as he clattered into the bin below.

  Amy pulled the scarf tighter round her neck and checked to see that her bonnet was correctly positioned. After much hesitation, but bolstered by the surprising encouragement from her granny’s Arthur Blenkinsop, who said that it suited the shape of her face and made her look “real pretty”, she had just had her hair trimmed again to take it down to the short, bobbed hairstyle made fashionable by the younger members of the Women’s Movement. Now her hat felt loose and uncontrollable. She determined to save up some money to buy one of the cloche hats that were the definitive statement of the independently minded woman.

  Trails of vapour drifted from the window of the Chinese laundry behind them and teased the girls as they watched the queues of men filing into Central Hall across the other side of Trafford Road. It was another of the meetings where the unemployed and the disillusioned gained mutual support and reinforcement by moving motions to demand the right to work. They knew that both Pippin’s father and Mr Murphy were attending in order to show their solidarity with struggling friends and neighbours.

  ‘If he doesn’t turn up soon then I will have to move,’ Pippin grumbled. ‘This steam is going to make my hair go frizzy.’

  ‘You should have it cut short like mine, Pip, and then it wouldn’t be a problem.’