Mr Campion's Fault

by Mike Ripley

  Table of Contents

  Previous Titles by Mike Ripley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Chapter One: Tremors

  Chapter Two: Situation(s) Suddenly Vacant

  Chapter Three: Great North Road

  Chapter Four: ‘no Extras, no Vacations, and Diet Unparalleled.’

  Chapter Five: Dragons’ Den

  Chapter Six: Eminently Practical

  Chapter Seven: Ghost-Hunters of the Upper IV

  Chapter Eight: Sit. Rep.

  Chapter Nine: Scraps

  Chapter Ten: Men Only

  Chapter Eleven: Platelayers’ Interlude (Off-Duty)

  Chapter Twelve: Prep

  Chapter Thirteen: Flockton Thick, Flockton Thin

  Chapter Fourteen: Man on a Mission

  Chapter Fifteen: The Feast Witch

  Chapter Sixteen: All Is Dross

  Chapter Seventeen: The Noisy Ghost

  Chapter Eighteen: Investigations

  Chapter Nineteen: Prisoner’s Friend

  Chapter Twenty: Love Lane

  Chapter Twenty-One: Pepper’s Ghost

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The High Place

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Dark Place

  Chapter Twenty-Four: A Very Important Person Travels North

  Previous Titles by Mike Ripley

  Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion

  MR CAMPION’S FAREWELL *

  MR CAMPION’S FOX *

  MR CAMPION’S FAULT *

  The Fitzroy Maclean Angel series

  LIGHTS, CAMERA, ANGEL

  ANGEL UNDERGROUND

  ANGEL ON THE INSIDE

  ANGEL IN THE HOUSE

  ANGEL’S SHARE

  ANGELS UNAWARE

  Other titles

  DOUBLE TAKE

  BOUDICA AND THE LOST ROMAN

  THE LEGEND OF HEREWARD

  Non-fiction

  SURVIVING A STROKE

  * available from Severn House

  Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion returns in

  MR CAMPION’S FAULT

  by

  Mike Ripley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2016 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Mike Ripley.

  The right of Mike Ripley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8625-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-729-6 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-790-5 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Catherine Aird, a stout supporter of the Brigantes tribe.

  Author’s Note

  Much of this novel is set in the West Riding of Yorkshire where, in 1969, I was a schoolboy.

  New Hall Prison has been a women’s prison since 1987 but back in 1969 it was a detention centre for young offenders, known locally as New Hall Camp. HMP Wakefield, now a high-security prison, still exists on Love Lane.

  My fictional mining village of Denby Ash is loosely based on the village of Flockton, where I was born and raised. There was indeed a Grange Ash colliery and it had a pyramidal muck stack which dominated the landscape, though that – along with the Yorkshire coal-mining industry – is now long gone. Ash Grange School, however, is a figment of my imagination, although Willy Elliff’s fish-and-chip shop did exist (perhaps it still does). I was there on 22 November 1963 when someone burst in and announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated. They say you can always remember where you were when Kennedy was shot, and it’s true.

  I am indebted to my friend Reg Gadney for many things, but in particular the story of his father Bernard Gadney’s exploits as England rugby captain in 1936.

  Yorkshire was certainly not a natural hunting ground for Margery Allingham and taking the Campions there may be a risk, though I am sure Albert would have risen to the challenge.

  Mike Ripley,

  Essex.

  ONE

  Tremors

  No one in Denby Ash, neighbours, relatives, the milkman, the rent man, the local priest, the ladies on the brass cleaning rota or fellow members of the Mothers’ Union would ever say that Ada Braithwaite was a woman given to hysteria, flights of fancy or deliberate attention-seeking. None of them would dare. She was, by general consent, a woman who did not make a fuss and got on with life; whatever life threw at her.

  And life had, in fact, thrown quite a lot Ada’s way.

  At the age of fourteen she had gone from school into service at Ash Grange when it was known as ‘the Big House’ and its owners were, in practice if not in title, Lords of the Manor. Ada worked honestly and hard and the lords and ladies of the Big House were grateful, for this was wartime and if good domestic staff were hard to find in 1939, by 1945, under the looming shadow of a bright new socialist age, they were an endangered species. As were – although they did not yet realize it – the owners of Ash Grange themselves, whose fortunes and standing were based not on gifts of the royal prerogative, nor on rewards for victories in battle from a grateful nation, but on the ownership of land which, by geological serendipity, floated on a black sea of coal.

  One morning, in her second year as a scullery maid there, the vicar of Denby Ash called at the Grange and informed Ada that her father had been killed on active service at a place called Tobruk, which was in North Africa, and if she was so inclined she could borrow an atlas from the vicarage to find where it was. The beefy, red-faced cook at the Grange, Mrs Stott, to whom Ada saw herself as understudy, put a comforting ham hock of an arm around her and told her she did not have to – a drop of hard work was what she needed to take her mind off things. She received the same advice from Mrs Stott a year later when she was informed, again by the vicar, that her mother had left the village – and Ada, her only child – to follow a Canadian corporal she had ‘struck up with’ who had been posted to a signals unit in Southampton. Although Ada was just as unaware of the location of Southampton as she was of Tobruk, the vicar made no offer of the loan of an atlas this time and neither did Mrs Stot
t offer a consoling embrace. The wartime death of a father was one thing, the desertion of a mother quite another and years later, when a letter arrived addressed to her, care of the vicarage and bearing a Canadian stamp, Ada flung it to the back of the fire without opening it.

  On VE Day, Ada Lumley, as she was then, plucked up her courage, handed in her notice and left Ash Grange in search of her own brave new world. She found a job in a textile mill in Huddersfield seven miles away, and discovered a world of dance halls, picture houses, trams, charabanc trips to the Dales and even – for the first time – the coast and the delights of Hornsea and Bridlington. She also discovered young men, and eligible young men discovered her. Ada never, in her mind, set a spark but where there was a flicker of a flame, if she did not exactly fan it she certainly encouraged it to come closer, out of the draught. There was a dalliance – she would put it no higher than that – with the rather fusty, bespectacled accountant of the textile mill where she worked, a man of twenty-eight in years but fifty-eight in demeanour and attitude. Then a much more passionate, even exotically fiery, relationship with a Polish Spitfire pilot who had ended the war on the side of the victors but had found his native country still occupied.

  But of all the interested young men who tempted her with port-and-lemons or half-pints of Webster’s mild served in the dimpled glasses with handles which were reserved exclusively ‘for ladies’, the one whose cap was pitched successfully at Ada was that of Colin Braithwaite, a miner at Grange Ash, one of the three collieries which encircled the village of Denby Ash like protective, outlying forts.

  And so, after five years of freedom, Ada Lumley returned to Denby Ash to become Mrs Colin Braithwaite, solemnizing the event in the village church of St James the Great under the wistful eye of the vicar who had, until that moment, been the bringer only of bad tidings.

  The Braithwaites embarked on married life by moving in to Number 11 Oaker Hill, a two-up, two-down terraced council house still known locally as one of the ‘pit houses’ which had been built in 1906 by the colliery owners who had built Ash Grange for their own accommodation, and had been rented exclusively by miners ever since. Ada kept the house warm and clean, did the washing on Mondays, scoured the back-door steps on Wednesdays, washed the windows on Thursdays, did the baking on Tuesdays and the grocery shopping at the local Co-Op on Fridays. She made sure that Colin’s snap tin and flask were full every morning before he bicycled to work at the pit at 6 a.m., and that there was hot water for a bath on his return, followed by a cooked tea on the table by 5 p.m. For his part, Colin went to work with never a day off sick, brought the coal in and laid the fires every morning, and placed his pay packet on the kitchen table every Friday. The couple visited ‘the club’ once a week, usually on bingo nights when women were welcomed rather than tolerated, but for Saturday night socializing they divided their custom fairly between the two public houses which bookended the village: the Sun Inn at the ‘Huddersfield end’ and the Green Dragon which marked the ‘Barnsley end’ of Denby Ash. They paid their dues into the village holiday club which allowed them an annual coach trip and a week’s bed-and-breakfast in Scarborough or Bridlington, or, in an adventurous year, Morecambe.

  Colin’s workmates and Ada’s neighbours – especially the neighbours – all expected the couple to plunge into parenthood and no one could explain (though many wondered) why it took Ada a further five years to fall pregnant with Roderick, their first and, as it turned out, only child.

  A healthy son was not a blessing Colin Braithwaite was to enjoy for long, for on one fine spring morning in 1960 the vicar of Denby Ash was once more recalled to mournful and tragic duty. Ada was pegging out washing on a line stretched between the back door and the coalhouse ten yards away at the end of a cinder path, to make the most of an unseasonably good drying day, when the vicar’s head appeared around a flapping white sheet and suggested that Mrs Braithwaite come inside and sit down.

  Perhaps it was because mining communities were used to sudden and shockingly violent occurrences, or perhaps it was the unexpected appearance of the vicar wading through a sea of festooned clothes’ lines, but by whatever osmosis, the news which broke over Ada Braithwaite’s bowed head spread within seconds to the women of the street. Abandoning their washing, some with wooden pegs gripped between fingers or even teeth, Ada’s neighbours drifted instinctively towards the back door of Number Eleven. Idle chatter and cheery gossip stopped as if by edict, the only sounds coming from the flapping of wet sheets and the distant hum of a coal lorry. They stood in a semicircle around the back door, a silent congregation waiting patiently for a sermon.

  The vicar of Denby Ash wisely chose the role of newsreader rather than prophet and when he emerged from Ada’s kitchen to face a dozen or more blank-faced women, he kept his bulletin to the bare essentials. Colin Braithwaite had, in the middle of that morning’s shift, been killed at the coalface when a large stone had dislodged itself from the roof of the shaft he was crawling along and crushed the life out of him.

  Obviously, in the circumstances, Ada would need all the support and comfort her neighbours could offer. There was no question it would be forthcoming; there never was in Denby Ash. It was a small community and almost eighty per cent of the population relied economically on its three collieries, as had been the case for more than a century and a half. The hewing of coal deep underground was a dangerous business and widowhood, even at a relatively young age, was accepted as a trial of life without hysteria, bitterness or appeals for compassion to an implacable God. The community of Denby Ash simply got on with it.

  The funeral expenses of Colin Braithwaite were covered by an insurance policy underwritten by the National Union of Mineworkers. Ada received modest compensation from the Coal Board and was allowed to remain in her council house as long as the rent could be paid. To that end she went back to work, not to the Huddersfield mills but to the kitchens of Ash Grange she had left as a brash teenager seeking freedom. The Big House was now a boys’ school, but boys needed feeding and Ada knew all too well the quirks of the kitchens there.

  Ada worked hard to make sure that her fatherless son, Roderick, wanted for nothing. She accepted no charity but baked cakes for several and pulled her weight in the network of good causes marshalled by the church and the Mothers’ Union with military efficiency. She was not flighty with the men and did not gossip about the women of Denby Ash. There were few – very few, but there usually is at least one – who had a bad word to say about her. She had not had an easy life, but then who in the village had? Ada was not the first mother to be widowed by the mines and would not be the last, but she had never complained of her lot.

  She was certainly the very last person anyone in the village would have expected to be visited by a ghost.

  The floor trembled, the walls shook. A china mug leapt from a shelf and smashed in the sink. In a wall cupboard, more crockery rattled and attempted to join it, lemming-like, in a suicidal plunge. Plaster dropped from the ceiling like volcanic ash; the kitchen table moved, crablike across the linoleum floor, spilling a salt pot and a sugar bowl; pipes rattled and hummed; a three-legged wooden footstool lost its battle with gravity and tipped over; an overhead bulb swung wildly from its flex, its glass shade tinkling ominously. The iron doors of the coal-fired cooking range creaked on their hinges and from the front and upstairs rooms came groans, as if the whole house was in pain.

  ‘Eight seconds,’ said the man, consulting his wristwatch with some difficulty as the woman was clinging to his arm for dear life. ‘Does it usually last that amount of time?’

  Ada Braithwaite released her grip and used her free hands to brush away plaster dust from her cardigan.

  ‘Sometimes it goes on for ages,’ she said, dry-mouthed. ‘Sometimes it comes back two or three times a night.’ Then, despairingly, she added: ‘There’s no rhyme or reason to it.’

  Bertram Browne wiped a hand across his balding head to dislodge a lozenge of flaked paint and realized he was sweating profusel
y.

  ‘Does it affect your neighbours?’

  Mrs Braithwaite shook her head. ‘Mr and Mrs Lee at Number Ten are both pensioners and go to bed early. They’d sleep through anything. They brag about it and say that not even Doodlebugs during the war could wake ’em, not that any Doodlebugs ever fell closer than Huddersfield, to the best of my knowledge.

  On t’other side’ – she bent her head towards the wall connecting them to Number Twelve – ‘Percy and Phyllis will still be at the club or at the Green Dragon if they’re flush, and they’ll be there till chuckin’ out time or later if they can manage it. She’s never noticed owt much, though she did once say an empty bottle had fallen off a windowsill and smashed. Put it down to the coal lorries thundering up the road all day. Seemed upset she wouldn’t get her fourpence deposit back.’

  ‘So the phenomenon is localized both in place and time, I think you said.’

  Mr Browne found that the best way to stop his knees knocking and his heart pounding was to imagine himself back in the classroom. There he was in command.

  ‘If you mean it only ’appens to this house and always on Thursdays, then yes, I did say that,’ Ada said carefully, worrying that Mr Browne might have judged the way she had clutched at him as a bit too forward. ‘And now you’ve seen it with your own eyes, so I’m not lying, am I?’

  ‘I never said you were, Mrs Braithwaite,’ Browne said formally, as if in court. ‘When Roderick told me how upset you were, I believed him immediately.’