All Saints, Murder on the Mersey
Mersey Murder Mysteries Book II
Brian L. Porter
Copyright (C) 2016 Brian L. Porter
Layout Copyright (C) 2016 by Creativia
Published 2016 by Creativia
eBook design by Creativia (www.creativia.org)
Cover art by http://www.thecovercollection.com/
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.
Table of Contents
Dedicated to the memory of John Gill, 1945 – 2015
Other Books by the Author
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
About the Author
Dedicated to the memory of John Gill, 1945 – 2015
Former Karting and lawn mower racing champion John Gill was the husband of a dear friend. Just two weeks before his sudden and tragic death, John wrote a glowing review of the first book in this series, A Mersey Killing. It turned out to be the last review the book received before his untimely death. With the permission of his widow, Carole, I have dedicated All Saints, Murder on the Mersey to John's memory, in the firm belief he would have enjoyed this second instalment of the Mersey Mysteries series.
John's review of A Mersey Killing:
A MERSEY KILLING IS FAB
A Mersey Killing, as well as being a great story, succeeded in taking me back to the days of my own youth. The hopes, dreams and aspirations of a generation were perfectly summed up here by young Brendan Kane who simply wanted 'something more than his Mum and Dad had, maybe one of those new colour television sets'. Few of us had them back then unless you had plenty of money. Nothing too grand in his ambitions then, and that's the great thing about the book. It recreates the sixties just as it was for those of us who lived through those heady days of The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, et al. The author's descriptions of sixties life were bang on, right down to the washing drying on the old wooden clothes horse in front of the coal fire, which had to be kept going in the summer to heat the water!
As we moved to the nineties, the investigation into the skeletal remains found in the old disused Cole Brothers wharf sets in train an investigation that leads the detectives right back to those early years of the Merseybeat, with murder, betrayal and a missing woman thrown into the equation. As D.I. Ross and Sergeant Drake delve into the past, we eventually learn the tragic secret of A Mersey Killing… simply fab!
Other Books by the Author
Dog Rescue
Sasha – A Very Special Dog Tale of a Very Special Epi-Dog
Sheba: From Hell to Happiness
Cassie's Tale
Thrillers by Brian L Porter
Mersey Murder Mysteries A Mersey Killing
All Saints, Murder on the Mersey
A Mersey Maiden
A Mersey Mariner
A Very Mersey Murder
Last Train to Lime Street
A Mersey Ferry Tale (Coming soon)
A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper
Legacy of the Ripper
Requiem for the Ripper
Pestilence
Purple Death
Behind Closed Doors
Avenue of the Dead
The Nemesis Cell
Kiss of Life
Short Story Collection
After Armageddon
Remembrance Poetry
Lest We Forget
Children's books as Harry Porter
Wolf
Alistair the Alligator, (Illustrated by Sharon Lewis) (Amazon bestseller)
Charlie the Caterpillar (Illustrated by Bonnie Pelton) (Amazon bestseller)
With Diana Rubino
Sharing Hamilton
Coming soon
Tilly's Tale
Dylan's Tale
Hazel the Honeybee, Saving the World, (Illustrated by Bonnie Pelton)
Percy the Pigeon, (Illustrated by Sharon Lewis)
As Juan Pablo Jalisco
Of Aztecs and Conquistadors (Amazon bestseller)
Acknowledgements
All Saints, Murder on the Mersey is the second book in my Mersey Mysteries series and owes its existence to a number of people who were invaluable to me in bringing the book to life.
First and foremost, my thanks must go to Miika Hannila at Creativia Publishing, whose faith in, and enthusiasm for the first book in this series, A Mersey Killing, inspired me to decide to create a series of books based on the cases of Detective Inspector Andy Ross and Sergeant Clarissa, (Izzie) Drake.
Thanks also to Debbie Poole of Liverpool, who so enjoyed A Mersey Killing that she contacted me to volunteer her services as a beta reader for All Saints. She has done a fantastic job and she has earned my gratitude for her diligence and attention to detail, not to mention the laughter we've enjoyed along the way at one or two hilarious typos she's picked up during the process, e.g. 'hysterical window,' where I of course meant 'hysterical widow'. Thank you, Debbie.
As always I have to thank my dear wife for her patience and her patient checking of each chapter as it was written, and also a big thank you to fellow author, Carole Gill, who helped me enormously during a potentially catastrophic computer breakdown, and provided her usual support at times when my muse threatened to desert me.
Finally, my thanks go to the members of my family, mostly and very sadly no longer with us, in the great city of Liverpool, upon whom many of the characters in the book are based. I should also say a thank you to the people of Liverpool, my ancestral home town. It took me many years to finally get around to setting one of my books in the city, but since writing A Mersey Killing, I've received so much wonderful feedback from the people of Liverpool by way of reviews and messages that I wish I'd done it years ago.
Introduction
All Saints, Murder on the Mersey is the second book in my Mersey Mysteries series, featuring Detective Inspector Andy Ross, Sergeant Izzie Drake and the fictional Merseyside Police Murder Investigation Team, following on from the so far successful, A Mersey Killing.
Though set in my ancestral home of the city of Liverpool, this is a work of fiction and though many of the places mentioned in the book are of necessity, real locations in the city, many of
the places are in fact fictitious, the creations of my own mind. This is particularly true of the churches mentioned in the book. Liverpool is blessed with many churches of differing faiths, but it would not have been fair or respectful to use any of them as locations for this story. The churches mentioned in All Saints, Murder on the Mersey should therefore not be assumed to bear any reference to actual churches in the city that bear the same names.
Look out for the forthcoming books in the series, A Mersey Maiden, A Mersey Mariner, and A Mersey Ferry Tale.
Prologue
Speke Hill Orphanage, Liverpool
Strictly speaking, Speke Hill Orphanage was something of a conundrum. First of all, it wasn't in Speke, the area of Liverpool that today is possibly best known as the location of Liverpool's John Lennon airport. Secondly, there wasn't a hill in sight, and in point of fact it had never been designed to be used for its current purpose. There probably wasn't a living soul who could rightly recall how or why the former Mental Asylum had been given its original name other than those who assumed it was perhaps an attempt to give the old place a touch of the grandiose with a name bearing a similarity to Speke Hall, the Tudor mansion once owned by the wealthy Norris family, and now in the care of The National Trust, a few miles away. Though, bearing in mind the 'clientele' of the old asylum, it would have been debatable whether any of the inmates would have appreciated the pleasant rural-sounding name of their place of incarceration.
For most of those held within the grim walls of the old Victorian buildings that comprised the asylum, Speke Hill would have been the last place on earth they wanted to be, and for the worst afflicted, it may also have been the last place on earth they would see, many being confined without limit of time behind the locked doors and corridors of the bleak, forbidding red-brick buildings.
Set back from Woolton Road, in its own deceptively pleasant landscaped grounds, a sweeping, curved gravel driveway, bordered by an avenue of fir trees, the asylum employed all the horrors of early Victorian psychiatric 'treatments' to those in its care, including dousing with freezing cold water from high-pressured hoses, to beatings, long periods of solitary confinement and worst of all, the enforced use of frontal lobotomy in a madly useless attempt to cure the sufferers of perceived insanity.
Thankfully, the suffering of those held behind the walls of Speke Hill ended when the asylum was closed in the 1930s, and its inhabitants transferred to other establishments, though whether their treatment improved or deteriorated in their new 'homes' was hardly a subject considered worthy of recording by the chroniclers of the time.
After standing empty for five years, it was decided that, rather than the council going to the expense of demolishing the three buildings that comprised Speke Hill, the old place could be utilised, following a cheap and cheerful programme of renovation, as an orphanage, there being an ever growing proliferation of parentless children in the city and its environs during the austere and barren industrially sterile years following the Great War of 1914-18. Often, children whose fathers were away at sea and whose mothers simply couldn't cope would be placed in orphanages. Hunger, general deprivation and homelessness had taken a bitter toll on the great port city.
The project gained more popularity with cost-conscious councillors when the local diocese of the Roman Catholic Church offered to contribute a sizeable portion of the cost of renovation, provided they were given the rights to run the orphanage, placing a strong emphasis on discipline and religious instruction, with the stated aim of turning out useful members of society by the time their charges were old enough to leave full time education, usually at the age of fifteen, which would be provided in the school which would be run in one of the three old asylum buildings. There had been some opposition in the council chamber at this development.
It was felt by some that the orphanage should be run on secular lines, as not all the children who would populate the orphanage would be of the Catholic faith, but the voices of dissent were over-ridden, probably for reasons more to do with cost than matters of faith. It was, however, written into the constitution of the new Speke Hill Orphanage that no child should be forced to follow the Catholic faith if they held strong beliefs of an opposite faith. Of course, this tended to be easier to say than to execute, as most children of tender years would find it difficult to argue such a point with those in charge of their everyday lives, and so catholic or protestant, the children who first moved into the dormitories of the newly renovated buildings found themselves being taught as though they were all of the Roman Catholic faith. Most of them, being children of the poorer inner city areas and rather wise to such things, tended to take the religious instruction with a pinch of salt, and most people thought at the time that the new orphanage was initially a great success. What many failed to realise at the time was that by allowing Speke Hill to effectively become a closed community, many of the children accommodated in the new orphanage felt as though they were in an environment that almost amounted to being incarcerated in much the same way as the previous inhabitants of the old asylum must have felt.
The well-meaning diocese of the church provided plenty of areas within the grounds for the children's recreational needs, a football pitch and netball court, two separate playground areas containing various implements of play, slides, swings, etc, and the children were allowed out of the grounds on certain days so they could interact with the local population, but those youngsters who were forced to call Speke Hill home found they would never be fully integrated or accepted by those who lived in the surrounding areas along Woolton Road.
And so, life went on at the new orphanage, the old wards gradually being modernised and the large open dormitories eventually becoming partitioned so that groups of four children could have their own shared 'rooms' and a modicum of privacy. The school, taught by well qualified Catholic priests, and at first thought of as providing nothing more than basic education to the children of Speke Hill, surprised everyone by establishing a good reputation for turning out young teenagers with a higher than average standard of education for the time, and even bred a little resentment among the children and parents of some children at other schools in the area.
With the coming of World War Two, things changed at Speke Hill, as they did almost everywhere in the country. Though those in charge attempted to carry on normally, by the time the blitz arrived, with regular bombing of the city of Liverpool, the docks being seen as a prime target by the Luftwaffe, it had become apparent that even one stray bomb, dropped on the buildings of Speke Hill, could result in devastating loss of life, and the children were added to those who would be evacuated out of the cities to temporary homes well out of reach of the Luftwaffe's bombs.
Speke Hill closed temporarily, and didn't reopen its doors, unscathed by the attentions of the Luftwaffe, until after the end of hostilities in 1946. Most of the staff who had worked hard to build the reputation of the orphanage and its school, both ecclesiastical and civilian, in its early days had moved on to other things during the war years, and indeed, many of the children who had been evacuated had reached an age where they were ready to leave school and begin their working lives, and for the most part, Speke Hill was virtually reborn in the post war years with new staff and a mostly new population of poor and needy children from the poorest housing estates of Liverpool.
* * *
The nineteen sixties arrived with little having changed in the running of Speke Hill during the post-war years, apart from the fact that the new Local Education Authority exercised more control over the educational standards required of pupils in the United Kingdom than in pre-war years. As such the school at Speke Hill was overseen in greater detail than before and the priests charged with the children's education were now all required to hold relevant teaching qualifications in the subjects they taught. For the most part the orphanage had grown to be a reasonably happy place for those living there, with educational standards once again rising, and very little trouble caused by those very children who migh
t at one time have been deemed 'troublemakers' if left to roam the streets from whence they originated.
In an effort to add a touch of 'class' to the educational side of things, the teaching staff copied the 'house' system, as used in many secondary schools at the time, to help instil a sense of pride, belonging and competition among the children, and so Molyneux, Norris, Stanley and Sefton, all names historically associated with the city, were chosen by a Diocesan committee as the names for the four Houses of the Speke Hill School.
By the time the 'Swinging Sixties' hit the United Kingdom in general and the city of Liverpool in particular, Speke Hill had expanded its sports facilities to include a second football pitch, a rugby pitch, the netball court remained of course, and the school now boasted an indoor gymnasium, with sport and recreation having been deemed as being good not only for the body, but for the soul as well, by those with responsibility for the youngsters in care in the orphanage.
As Cilla Black's You're My World became her second UK number one chart hit at the end of May, 1964, the staff and children of Speke Hill prepared for their forthcoming school sports day with all the usual enthusiasm that went hand-in-hand with a day spent out of the classrooms and buildings of the orphanage. An air of excitement spread through the halls and dorms of the orphanage, and the children felt a slight lessening in the usual strictness of the regime enforced by the priests and nuns who held control over their everyday lives. An extra hour was allowed for all the boys and girls in the communal TV room, a privilege extended to allow a similar additional allowance to radio time, for those lucky enough to possess a transistor radio and the batteries to power it. Only a few lucky children owned such treasures, saved for out of their meagre weekly allowances, pocket money that most would quickly spend in a few days at the local sweet shop or on cheap throwaway toys, perhaps from Woolworths, on rare visits to town, under supervision by an ever watchful priest and nun.
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