Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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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
John Buxton Hilton
Gamekeeper's Gallows
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
In 1875, at the age of twenty-seven, Thomas Bramwell Brunt had not yet blossomed into that full flower of eccentricity that was to be the hall-mark of his maturity1 But already the buds of individualism were beginning to burgeon. His suit was of poor quality cloth and he wore it aggressively badly. His face had begun to sprout an asymmetrical crop of warts, pimples and sebaceous excrescences. And he had just been promoted, at a remarkably early age for the time, to the rank of sergeant in the criminal investigation division of his county force. He had also, much to his disgust, been transferred away from the congeries of mining towns in eastern Derbyshire where he was held in almost legendary awe.
Why had his inscrutable masters behind their mahogany desks decided to waste his abilities on the wild moors and empty hills, under the even wilder and emptier skies of the High Peak Hundred? He saw nothing to convince him that the open spaces were likely to be fruitful for a plainclothes policeman with his way to make. On the other hand, Tom Brunt understood a knife between the ribs after a drunken brawl in Clay Cross or Ilkeston. A skull stove in under a rhapsodically swung crow-bar on a slag-heap behind a winding-engine, and Brunt was there, slowing down emotions and events to the pace at which he could record them in his laborious note-book. And although he was not a man of physical stature, he would eventually turn up at the Station arm in arm with some black-jowled giant, at whose aspect the men in uniform stood well back behind the massive solidity of the counter in the public office.
The story – or rather the stories, for there were two of them – for which he was sent haring out into the north-west desolation of the shire, struck him essentially as the sort of drivel that was turned up when Chief Constables and their more rarefied aides started dabbling in work that would have been more safely left to their underlings. Somebody needed to point out, gently but finally, that the case of young Amy Harrington was poppycock; but that was hardly a suitable role for a detective-sergeant, especially a new one, and the Superintendent – who ought to have shown better concern for a subordinate’s time – had sat through the Chief’s rigmarole as if he thought it was inspired. Even in the office afterwards, while Brunt was desperately trying to pass on the details of half a dozen unfinished cases to overworked colleagues, the Superintendent remained apparently convinced.
‘Obviously the Turkish pedlar business won’t lead you far, Brunt – but it does give you an excuse to go there. And just you find Amy Harrington.’
A fortnight ago, Brunt might have back-answered, but his new seniority rested uneasily on him. It needed to be protected until both he and other people were used to it. Becoming a sergeant had actually made Brunt nervous.
All the same, the case of the Turkish pedlar was, believe it or not, already more than a century and a half old. Whereas if anybody really wanted to bring back Amy Harrington, there were stews and lodging-houses in Derby and Nottingham where it would be more useful to be looking than amongst the wastes and dry-stone walls.
Even Brunt’s physical journey into the remoteness of the Peak had invited catastrophe after catastrophe. Missing by a minute and a half the only useful train out of Derby Midland, he had arrived at the southern terminus of the Cromford and High Peak three-quarters of an hour after the departure of the only train of the day that accommodated passengers. But this in itself, he gathered at Cromford Wharf, need not necessarily discourage him. Even the time-table scheduled no less than five hours and twenty-five minutes for the thirty-three-mile journey to Whaley Bridge2 – and this was if all the stages in the complicated journey could be made to interlock. Conceived in the first instance, improbably, as a canal (which was why some of its stations were still called wharves) the project had become a railroad in the very earliest days. It rose to well over a thousand feet above sea-level, and at five points along the route trains had to be hauled up hair-raising gradients by stationary engines. In each case further progress depended on the next locomotive being where it ought to be to haul the wagons along the next stretch. It seldom was.
‘If it’s the Fly you’re wanting, you ought to be able to catch her up at Sheep’s Pasture Incline. They generally hang about there a bit.’
But Brunt, carrying a suitcase that had benumbed both his hands, arrived at the foot of the slope in time to see the three trucks and the single passenger coach receding over the summit in a cloud of gritty smoke. He slogged on foot up to the Ashbourne Turnpike, in time to see the Fly’s rear buffers vanish into the Parsley Hay cutting. The train was now away on a sixteen-mile stretch between inclines, and short of an actual breakdown of the locomotive, he had no chance at all of catching it. He got himself a lift on a carrier’s cart, leaving himself another nine miles or so to complete on foot.
All for Amy Harrington. Yesterday morning Brunt had called on the Harringtons: at least, here he felt on familiar ground. Brunt, who could predict the movements of Tapton to the man and to the minute, knocked on the miner’s door at the one moment of the day when he knew he would be immobilised, as nearly at a psychological disadvantage as he was ever likely to be: in his hip-bath on the hearth-rug five minutes after the last pair of clog-irons had echoed along the cobbled terrace.
Harrington looked over his shoulder as his wife said the single word Police, the whites of his eyes staring out of the coal-dust with the enquiring rage of a stalled stallion.
‘The name is Brunt: Sergeant Brunt.’
‘Tha’ll have found her, then?’
‘I’m still open to persuasion that she’s lost,’ Brunt said. ‘In any unwilling sense.’
‘She isn’t there, is she? Tha’s been to Piper’s Fold?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Brunt said, intending neither to apologise for his delay nor to explain it. ‘And how long’s she been working there?’
‘Since last back end.’
‘And she’s seventeen? So it wasn’t her first job?’
‘This was he
r third place. She went into service when she was twelve.’
There was an angry challenge in his tone, and Brunt knew all that it implied. Harrington’s wife, a lean woman in the voluminous black rags of poverty, had long since abandoned any pretence to appear feminine. She went on scrubbing her husband’s back as if they did not have a visitor.
‘Amy was always a good girl,’ Harrington said, countering an allegation that had not been made. Brunt could imagine the woman repeating, thirty times a day since the girl had disappeared, that it came as no surprise to her. She poured water down the miner’s back from a broken-handled jug, made no effort to speak for her daughter’s reputation.
‘So where did she first go to work?’
‘Old Eleanor Copley’s, over on Mellor Brow.’
‘For a year?’ A girl often did take her first position near home. It was supposed to be a tempering of the wind before she went into one of the bigger houses further afield; in hard fact, as the only pair of working hands in an impoverished establishment, it was often the worst year of her life.
‘Then she went to the Alloways at Rowsley. They own the ring-spinning mills at Ambergate. Between-maid. There three years.’
‘How often did you hear from her?’
‘Twice a month, regular. Till she went to work for this Captain Kingsey. She’d write one Sunday night, Mother the next.’
Doubtless there was some old crone in the street somewhere who would decipher the girl’s letters, and act as scribe to the mother.
‘Then it dropped to once a month, once every six weeks, two months. Mothering Sunday she didn’t come home. Other years she hadn’t missed, choose what time she’d had to take the road. And always brought a simnel cake.’
‘Piper’s Fold to Tapton’s no easy hop,’ Brunt said.
‘She could have done it if she’d wanted to.’
‘So perhaps she didn’t want.’
The woman turned for her husband’s towel, refusing to be stung into any revelation.
‘So when the letters stopped, you wrote to Captain Kingsey?’
It must have been an excogitated effort, drafted by the best brain at the pit head.
‘He wrote back and said she left them on the 23rd of April, dawn early, and took all her things with her. As well as some of his. And that’s what I know is not true. Show-piece valuables, he said. Irreplaceable things. Of course, if she ever did turn up again, there were charges that would have to be made.’
Yet Kingsey hadn’t notified her missing, had laid no information.
Harrington stood up, his broad back to Brunt, luxuriating with the fierce heat of the fire on his genitals.
‘I know what goes on at these places.’
‘Generally speaking, you mean – or do you want to lay a particular complaint against the Captain?’
Harrington hawked out a throatful of coal-streaked sputum which hung on the fire-bar until it was dried out like a twist of animal membrane. He reached up to the mantelshelf for a wad of grimy letters.
‘Read that, then.’
The one on top: immature handwriting, black thumbprints in the margin.
The Captain dressed me up like a girl in one of his old pictures and next week he is going to let me help him in his studio.
Harrington spat again: artists, studios. Useless to argue with his prejudices. He had been round to the Station and made a report to the Tapton Sergeant that had caught the fancy of the top brass. And the Chief had thought this an opportunity to show Harrington and his friends that the law could be on their side, too.
‘You must understand, Mr Harrington, if a young woman of your Amy’s age decides to up sticks …’
‘Our Amy’s a good girl, Mr Brunt. She never left a place without a character. Else Kingsey wouldn’t have taken her, would he?’
Brunt was not so sure. A girl without a character, even if it were withheld out of malice or caprice, had little to choose between poverty, dishonesty or prostitution. Sometimes she did get another place, even though it was known that her character was not all that it might be – and then the implications might be even more unhealthy. Brunt looked at Mrs Harrington.
‘And what are your thoughts about all this?’
‘She wouldn’t have taken anything that wasn’t hers.’
Whatever else she did? Those were the words that she did not add; but she knew her own daughter, and it was savage knowledge. The Harringtons had a framed text over the mantel: We are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.
The next morning. Brunt went over to see Eleanor Copley, over on Mellor Brow, a scraggy old harridan whose neck tendons stood out scrawnily under greying lace. He looked more than once at the current holder of Amy Harrington’s first job: another thirteen-year-old from one of the mining villages: white faced, hair trailing out of its clips, nostrils raw, falling over her own skirts in elastic-sided boots.
‘Amy? She was a good girl.’
She would hardly have said that if she had not intended to qualify it in the next breath.
‘But fine ideas.’
‘Such as?’
‘She spent all her time dreaming. I suppose it was ideas she had. I used to say to her, sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, but it might be as well to get your hand in with a row of blanket-stitch, first. They’re all dreamers, girls nowadays. They dream of being whisked out of the corner in a fairy coach.’
‘That can happen to some,’ Brunt said. ‘Especially if they’re prepared to keep their eyes open for their own pumpkin.’
But Eleanor Copley would not bite on that bait. She was a woman without rapport with anyone. And the visit made Brunt miss his train, still without any satisfying image of the girl he was supposed to be looking for.
He rested his suitcase and looked at the roof-line of a row of cottages, the hamlet of Old Harpur, still some two or three miles away. There he would meet up again with the Cromford and High Peak Line, and though there were no more trains today, he would at least be able to walk along the track. It was, in fact, the only way in which he could reach Piper’s Fold. There was a road of sorts by which one could come into the village from the Staffordshire side, but that would have entailed a detour of some twelve miles. From this approach, the community was accessible only to feet or hooves.
Piper’s Fold: 502 inhabitants, according to the latest count: one church; one country residence; a farm or two; a dozen or so trial lead workings, scarring the hillside, all either exhausted or abandoned; a wooden platform Halt on the Cromford and High Peak, and that a mile and a half’s walk from the first outskirt cottage. God knows why anyone decided to settle there – or how anyone had managed to subsist by remaining.
The railway line brought Brunt scant reward, its grass banks too uneven to walk in comfort, its sleepers too far apart to stride, the ballast between the rails loose and painful under his feet.
Piper’s Fold: a farm or two; a bleak gentleman’s residence that could only have appealed to a recluse beyond the perimeter of sanity. And yet the village had its piece of memorable if inglorious folk-lore.
In 1712 – a hundred and sixty-five years before the disappearance of Amy Harrington – a Turkish pedlar had come over the hills. Even the nationality of the man had been a matter of assertion rather than proof. Perhaps he had a certain Eastern Mediterranean exoticism in his looks; perhaps there was a certain Ottoman flavour about the silks and furbelows, the cameos and enamels, which spilled out when he lifted the lid of a pack almost too heavy for him to carry. There were also strange insignia – crescents and scimitars – on some of the coins in the leather bag which he wore on whip-cord round his neck.
One of these coins was at this moment lying snug in Brunt’s waistcoat pocket, a five-piastre piece, one from a collection which had recently appeared in the showcase of a man called Isaac Mosley, a dealer in curiosities in the very centre of Derby itself. It was to serve as an outward and visible sign of Brunt’s ostensible reason for coming up to Piper’s Fold at all. It
so happened that Isaac Mosley had had in his possession other property which it had been possible to identify more precisely. He was duly charged and convicted as a receiver of stolen goods, but stubbornly declined to give any account of those articles which were clearly of Balkan origin. But Brunt’s Chief Constable was an imaginative man with a penchant for picturesque old legends.
This particular tale insisted that it had been on a glorious day in mid-February, with a spell of unexpected sunshine playing on dew-ponds and shed-roofs, that the Turk had come up the shallow valley now followed by the C. and H.P. There must have been a very convincing forecast of spring in the air, for the wives and elder daughters of Piper’s Fold made some successful demands on the purses of their men-folk. The Turk’s leather bag bulged. And another man in the Fold to do well out of the visit was the landlord of the inn, The Crooked Rake, at which the Son of the Prophet spent part of the night.
But only part of it; the next morning his body was found half an hour’s walk out of the village, close to where the railway now ran, his throat gaping from the clean sweep of a knife, his leather bag hanging empty outside his shirt. His coffer, also relieved of its contents, was discovered partially hidden under loose stones, half-way between the inn and the corpse.
In the early eighteenth century, Nemesis appeared to have worked relatively slowly. But at last suspicion fell on one George Beresford, an ostler, who appeared later in the year arraigned before Queen Anne’s Justices at a court convened in The Crooked Rake itself. No watertight case was ever proven, but the story was handed down with certain strong assumptions: that the witnesses had proved impenetrably unhelpful; that there had been an understanding between the ostler and a kitchen-maid called Kitty Malkin; another between the landlord and the ostler; and yet another between the landlord and the toddy-sipping Bench. George Beresford was acquitted and the village was reluctant to discuss the matter further.
Until, that is, the first anniversary of the crime: another February day, but one truer to the Pennine seasons, with snow slashing across the fields in horizontal arrows, and more of it promised in huge banks of yellow cloud across Axe Edge. That evening, another Turk arrived: a swarthy figure with sleek hair and ebony moustaches. But he did not open his pack – in fact, the women kept to their cottages. Nor did he reveal the contents of any leather bag he might have about his person. And hardly had he sat down to his supper than his brother arrived – or, at least, a man demonstrably of the same blood – and within an hour or so, two pairs of cousins so that, by an hour before the normal bedtime of Piper’s Fold, half a dozen Turkish pedlars were monopolising the inn fire, since most of the male drinkers had, it seemed, opted to go early back to their own hearths, pleading the imminence of a fresh blizzard.
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